Yeah I think Thiel's fundamental basis for his investment in FB was not that it would generate a tonne of revenues from Ads - but rather - it could become a large scale surveillance tool. Which benefits his interests (it seems).

lol, Silicon Valley has always been evil.

For certain values of "always". I feel many of the original tech startups were genuinely interested in research, pushing limits, etc. Intel/AMD weren't "evil" as far as I can tell - nor the EDA infrastructure.

The social media era (Fbook) is when it started feeling like "majority of new companies are evil". Of course, if Palantir is Sauron, Oracle is Morgoth..

/Almost/ always

I'll give you Xerox.

The rest ...

I was thinking back even farther: Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, Community Memory, etc.

Silicon valley is a place.

Government contracting is an activity.

The two should be very far apart and yet somehow they're joined at the hip.

Always have been.

In large part, government contracting is what created Silicon Valley. https://steveblank.substack.com/p/if-i-told-you-id-have-to-k...

Government contracting is the only reason silicon valley exists. It'd just be another valley.