Comment by electricwater

Wasnt' Silicon Valley born as a military R&D cluster? DARPA, Cold War defense contracts, and space race funding built the region. To me, the consumer internet phase from the late 1990s to early 2000s was actually the anomaly. The so called pacifist tech culture was a product of “peak liberalism” roughly 1991–2001 (fall of the soviet union to 9/11), the unipolar moment after the Cold War but before 9/11. US tech companies operated in a geopolitical environment without military rivals, so they could afford to frame themselves as apolitical, globalist, and focused on connecting the world. That cultural posture began to collapse after 9/11, and it has been eroding ever since under the pressures of great-power competition, terrorism, and the realization that software/chips are strategic assets. The pendulum is swinging... We aren't at McCarthyism yet but we are on a path to it.