War Bros Didn’t Always Rule Silicon Valley
War Bros Didn’t Always Rule Silicon Valley
硅谷并非一直由“战争兄弟会”统治
In September 2015, the Founders Fund hosted a retreat at an eco-resort in British Columbia. Most of the attendees were VCs and people from the companies the firm was backing, but they also invited a few outsiders, including computer pioneer Alan Kay, writer Neal Stephenson, and me. 2015年9月，Founders Fund在不列颠哥伦比亚省的一家生态度假村举办了一场静修会。与会者大多是风险投资人及该基金所投公司的成员，但他们也邀请了几位外来者，包括计算机先驱艾伦·凯（Alan Kay）、作家尼尔·斯蒂芬森（Neal Stephenson）以及我本人。
One morning at breakfast I was sitting across from Kay at a long table. The man who conceived the Dynabook—basically the modern computer that we all use—was expounding on his exploits when Founders Fund leader Peter Thiel plopped down next to him. As Kay, in full raconteur mode, spun stories of optimizing the mouse and advising Steve Jobs, Thiel listened with increasingly visible incredulity. Finally, he couldn’t take it. “Who ARE you?” he demanded of Kay. 一天早上吃早餐时，我坐在长桌对面，正对着凯。这位构想出Dynabook（即我们今天所使用的现代计算机雏形）的人正在讲述他的成就，这时Founders Fund的领导者彼得·蒂尔（Peter Thiel）在他身边坐了下来。凯正兴致勃勃地讲述着他优化鼠标和为史蒂夫·乔布斯提供建议的故事，而蒂尔听着听着，脸上露出了越来越明显的怀疑神色。最后，他实在忍不住了，质问凯道：“你到底是谁？”
The mustachioed legend was stunned. He began stumbling out his bona fides, but quickly realized that for someone unacquainted with his résumé, it would have sounded ridiculously overblown. It was like asking Einstein or Mick Jagger to explain themselves. Kay stopped mid-sentence and sighed. “I’m just an old has-been,” he said and went back to his breakfast. Two worlds had collided, and failed to connect. 这位留着胡子的传奇人物惊呆了。他开始结结巴巴地列举自己的资历，但很快意识到，对于一个不了解他履历的人来说，这些话听起来会显得极其夸张。这就像是让爱因斯坦或米克·贾格尔（Mick Jagger）去自证身份一样。凯话说到一半停了下来，叹了口气说：“我只是个过气的糟老头子。”说完便继续吃他的早餐。两个世界发生了碰撞，却未能产生共鸣。
I thought back to that moment a couple of weeks ago while reading an op-ed in The New York Times headlined “Silicon Valley Was Right From the Start,” by Sharon Weinberger. The essay claimed that the portrait often painted of the Valley as driven by the counterculture and a desire to make the world better was a sham. Today’s bare-knuckled approach to accumulating massive wealth, kowtowing to an authoritarian leader, and embracing lethal military technology simply exposes the industry for what it always was. (Weinberger’s essay was promoting her new book Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War.) 几周前，在阅读莎伦·温伯格（Sharon Weinberger）发表在《纽约时报》上题为《硅谷从一开始就是对的》（Silicon Valley Was Right From the Start）的评论文章时，我想起了那一刻。该文声称，硅谷常被描绘成受反主流文化驱动、渴望让世界变得更美好的形象，这其实是一个骗局。如今硅谷在积累巨额财富时表现出的强硬手段、对威权领导者的卑躬屈膝，以及对致命军事技术的拥抱，恰恰暴露了该行业一直以来的真实面目。（温伯格的文章旨在宣传她的新书《死亡之谷：大型科技公司如何助推战争的未来》。）
“Silicon Valley’s values haven’t changed, just its customers,” she wrote, calling the industry’s current love affair with military tech “less a story of political conversion than of market adaptation.” In that reading, all that hippie stuff about free expression and democratization during the 1980s PC revolution and the 1990s Internet boom was a mirage, an opportunistic feint by Big Tech to push its wares and garner the loot. “硅谷的价值观从未改变，改变的只是客户，”她写道，并称该行业目前对军事技术的迷恋“与其说是政治立场的转变，不如说是市场适应的结果”。按照这种解读，20世纪80年代个人电脑革命和90年代互联网繁荣时期，那些关于言论自由和民主化的嬉皮士理想，不过是一场海市蜃楼，是大型科技公司为了推销产品、攫取利益而进行的投机性伪装。
I disagree. The story as I see it is that beginning in the late 1970s, a new generation of technologists, identifying with the counterculture, operated with a set of values that unleashed innovation and ironically set the stage for the industry’s current wealth. Yes, that movement carried a torch from the field’s defense industry roots. But even as DOD funding kept fueling innovations (Darpa grants provided dough for the GUI, the internet, and Google Search), that new generation was characterized by idealism, a hackerish love of building things, and disdain for conventional practices. 我并不认同。在我看来，故事的真相是：从20世纪70年代末开始，新一代技术人员认同反主流文化，他们秉持的一套价值观释放了创新活力，并讽刺地为该行业如今的财富积累奠定了基础。诚然，这场运动继承了该领域源于国防工业的火种。但即便在国防部资金持续推动创新的同时（美国国防部高级研究计划局的拨款为图形用户界面、互联网和谷歌搜索提供了资金），这一代人依然以理想主义、黑客般的热爱创造，以及对传统惯例的蔑视为特征。
That mindset changed not only the course of the computer industry, but the culture of American business. (Before Apple Computer, a CEO wouldn’t dare come to work in anything but a suit.) Denying the existence of that idealism is not only inaccurate, but it conveniently lets the new generation of defense contractors off the hook for their pivot toward deadly materiel. 这种心态不仅改变了计算机产业的进程，也改变了美国商业文化。（在苹果公司出现之前，CEO绝不敢穿着西装以外的衣服去上班。）否认这种理想主义的存在不仅是不准确的，而且还为新一代国防承包商转向致命武器装备提供了开脱的借口。
When I shared my views with Weinberger, she acknowledged that I’d probably studied tech culture more than she had from her perch in Washington, DC. Still, she gamely defended her op-ed. “We’re all products of what we grow up in,” she says. “If you were growing up in the peace-dividend era, with defense tech jobs disappearing, the money from defense was less important, and you start to have different values.” 当我与温伯格分享我的观点时，她承认，比起她身处华盛顿特区的视角，我可能对科技文化研究得更深。尽管如此，她还是勇敢地为自己的评论文章进行了辩护。“我们都是成长环境的产物，”她说，“如果你是在和平红利时代长大的，当时国防科技工作正在消失，国防资金显得不那么重要，你自然会产生不同的价值观。”
By that standard, the market shift from missile control modules to Macintoshes was driven not by values but by greed. Likewise, she says, the recent return to high-tech weaponry doesn’t represent a philosophical repositioning but a fortuitous opportunity to sell to a Pentagon eager to exploit the Valley of Death’s innovations. “It’s not like everybody in the workforce in Silicon Valley woke up and went, like, ‘Defense is cool,’” says Weinberger. That impulse to go where the money is, she argues, is the defining ethos of Silicon Valley. “Your prime directive is for your company to succeed,” she says. “Why didn’t Apple work with the military? Because they didn’t need to. They had the consumer marketplace.” 按照这个标准，从导弹控制模块到Macintosh电脑的市场转型，并非由价值观驱动，而是由贪婪驱动。同样，她认为，最近回归高科技武器领域并不代表哲学立场的重新定位，而是一个向急于利用硅谷创新的五角大楼兜售产品的绝佳机会。“并不是说硅谷的每个人一觉醒来就觉得‘国防很酷’，”温伯格说。她认为，这种“哪里有钱就去哪里”的冲动，正是硅谷的定义性精神。“你的首要任务是让公司成功，”她说，“为什么苹果公司过去不与军方合作？因为他们不需要。他们拥有消费市场。”
Actually, Apple and its cohorts invented the consumer marketplace for computers. And the shoulders that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others stood on were not those of pocket-protector-wearing nerds clocking into jobs at Lockheed, but young and freaky computer scientists. My friend John Markoff’s book What the Dormouse Said is all about how the counterculture set the tone for the Valley during its tremendous growth years. When we spoke this week, Markoff noted that the Valley’s transition point from a defense-oriented industry to one shaped by counterculture values rose from three pivotal computer labs—AI pioneer John McCarthy’s Stanford lab, the Stanford Research Institute, which hosted Douglas Engelbart’s groundbreaking GUI innovations; and Kay’s Xerox PARC, which essentially set the foundation for the computers that we all use today. 事实上，苹果及其同僚创造了计算机的消费市场。史蒂夫·乔布斯、比尔·盖茨等人所站的肩膀，并非那些在洛克希德公司打卡上班、口袋里插着保护套的书呆子，而是那些年轻且古怪的计算机科学家。我的朋友约翰·马尔科夫（John Markoff）的书《睡鼠说了什么》（What the Dormouse Said）讲述了反主流文化如何在硅谷高速增长的岁月里为其定下基调。本周我们交谈时，马尔科夫指出，硅谷从国防导向型产业向受反主流文化价值观塑造的产业转型，其转折点源于三个关键的计算机实验室：人工智能先驱约翰·麦卡锡（John McCarthy）的斯坦福实验室、道格拉斯·恩格尔巴特（Douglas Engelbart）进行开创性图形用户界面创新的斯坦福研究所，以及凯所在的施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心（Xerox PARC），后者基本上为我们今天使用的计算机奠定了基础。
These influential institutions were hippie havens. In fact, says Markoff, many of the researchers in those labs worked there in order to get draft deferments to avoid the Vietnam War. “Money was not the motivating factor for these people,” he says. “The Valley’s entrepreneurial culture emerged from a fusion of the counterculture hackers and engineers who believed that technology would change the world, and the more traditional semiconductor culture, which quickly escaped its military roots.” 这些极具影响力的机构曾是嬉皮士的避风港。马尔科夫说，事实上，这些实验室里的许多研究人员在那里工作是为了获得征兵延期，从而逃避越南战争。“金钱并不是这些人的驱动力，”他说，“硅谷的创业文化源于两者的融合：一是相信技术将改变世界的反主流文化黑客和工程师，二是迅速摆脱了军事根源、更传统的半导体文化。”
While those labs were thriving, a ragtag group of engineers met at the Homebrew Computer Club, hosted by a political radical named Lee Felsenstein. That was the bunch that invented the personal computer industry, notably Apple. When I first became exposed to the computer world in the early 1980s, the countercultural nature of the enterprise blew my mind. 当这些实验室蓬勃发展时，一群乌合之众般的工程师在“自制计算机俱乐部”（Homebrew Computer Club）聚会，该俱乐部由一位名叫李·费尔森斯坦（Lee Felsenstein）的政治激进分子主持。正是这群人发明了个人电脑产业，其中最著名的就是苹果公司。当我20世纪80年代初第一次接触计算机世界时，这种企业所具有的反主流文化特质令我大开眼界。