The valley vission [Summer of Love Silicon Valley]

SUCCESS HAS MANY parents. The eastcoast dominated military-industrial complex and international capitalism could vie with Bay Area hippie counterculture and collectivist ideals of the University of California at Berkeley for custody. All have good claims for laying foundations for today's Silicon Valley. It's little wonder that Silicon Valley ideology seems so confused. At one end we have the libertarian ideals espoused by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, born in the year of the Summer of Love in Germany and educated at Stanford University in Mountain View, who argues democracy is at odds with the freedom to be an individual. He wants the freedom to be able to drive technology to the point that we could cheat death.