Opening paragraphs....................

 

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

     The initial rise of the American software industry was made possible in the first part of the twentieth century by what would seem today to be a radical and fraught partnership between emerging technological companies and the U. S. government.  Silicon Valley's earliest innovations were driven not by technical minds chasing trivial consumer products but by scientists and engineers who aspired to see the most powerful technology of the age deployed to address challenges of industrial and national significance.  Their pursuit of breakthroughs was intended not to satisfy the passing needs of the moment but rather to drive forward a much grander project, channeling the collective purpose and ambition of a nation.  This early dependence of Silicon Valley on the nation-state and indeed the U. S. military has for the most part been forgotten, written out of the region's history as an inconvenient and dissonant fact—one that clashes with the Valley's conception of itself as indebted only to is capacity to innovate.

-Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic:  Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West