War Bros didn’t always rule Silicon Valley
Steven Levy rejects claims that Silicon Valley was always driven by money and military contracts, arguing countercultural idealism built the modern tech industry—and that denying it lets today's defense-tech "War Bros" off the hook.
In a Backchannel newsletter for WIRED (War Bros didn’t always rule Silicon Valley / Sept. 25, 2026), Steven Levy disputes a growing claim that Silicon Valley's current embrace of military technology and political power simply reveals what the industry always was. His target is a New York Times op-ed by Sharon Weinberger, promoting her book Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War. Weinberger argues that the Valley's idealistic, countercultural image was never more than cover for profit-seeking. In her view, tech followed the money into defense decades ago, left when consumer markets paid better, and is now returning because the Pentagon is buying again.
Levy calls this reading historically wrong. He grants that the industry grew out of defense work and that Pentagon funding, especially DARPA grants, supported breakthroughs like the graphical interface, the internet, and early Google Search. But starting in the late 1970s, he argues, a new generation of builders brought real idealism, a hacker's love of making things, and contempt for corporate convention. That ethos drove the industry's growth and even changed how American business dresses and behaves.
Levy draws on several allies. John Markoff, author of What the Dormouse Said, points to three labs as the turning point: John McCarthy's Stanford AI lab, Douglas Engelbart's work at the Stanford Research Institute, and Alan Kay's Xerox PARC. Many researchers there were countercultural, and some took those jobs to avoid the Vietnam draft. Money wasn't their motive. The Homebrew Computer Club, run by radical Lee Felsenstein, then gave rise to the personal computer and Apple. Levy also notes that Apple spent years fighting the perception that its friendly machines were toys. That struggle hardly fits the idea of a company simply chasing easy revenue.
Historian Margaret O'Mara, author of The Code, backs Levy's view. She describes the move from defense to consumer tech as part of a generational political shift: the Valley voted for Reagan in the early 1980s but has leaned heavily Democratic for many cycles since. Today's pro-military "War Bros," she and Levy suggest, are a small group of very wealthy people who have hijacked the Valley's values rather than expressed them. O'Mara adds that concentrated wealth and power distort how elites see themselves.
Levy frames the piece with a 2015 anecdote in which Peter Thiel, not recognizing Alan Kay, bluntly asked who he was. For Levy, the moment captures a disconnect: today's power players benefit from an idealistic legacy they barely understand. Rewriting that history, he concludes, lets the new defense-tech builders off the hook.
Early PC pioneer Larry Samuels answers Sharon Weinberger's New York Times op-ed, arguing that Silicon Valley's founding generation were idealists chasing transformative technology, not mercenaries, and that she wasn't there to know otherwise.
Sharon Weinberger wasn't there, in Silicon Valley or a participant in the early PC industry. "PC" as in personal computer and personal computing, which was the catalyst for the explosive growth of Silicon Valley. We all chased money, bills do need to be paid. But we loved the experience of new technologies that enabled desktop publishing instead of typewriters; digital spreadsheets instead of bookkeeping ledgers; digital graphics instead of hand drawn images; digital music and video editing, creation and transmission instead of analog tapes and vinyl records; global networking and video conferencing instead of costly international long distance (or costly domestic long distance).
We definitely were drawn to wealth creation but most of us were ideologically left of center. Capitalists but idealists, which is not a contradiction. Even into the Internet generation, companies like PayPal and Facebook still were driven by personal computing. Yes, there were conservatives in the mix and certainly it can be argued that money has a tendency to impact greed. But the founders of Apple, HP, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, and countless other personal computing pioneers were moderates or liberals… so citing Peter Thiel or Anduril to make generalizations about who we were in decades prior is a specious trope. How do I know? I was there and Sharon Weinberger was not.
Sharon was five years old when the Apple II first shipped, nine years old when IBM launched the PC and turned twelve when Apple changed the world with the original Mac. Speaking for us; our ideologies, motivations and political leanings is just a justification for a writer whose entire career has been spent in the defense computing industry. Your choices and arguments do not define us Sharon, they define you.
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