A digital mosaic artwork of mine, served as the cover illustration for Kevin Mitnick's cybersecurity memoir "Ghost in the Wires'".
I have a passion for reading old tech op-eds and essays, and recently stumbled upon a piece that reads like prophecy today. In 1999, media scholar Thomas Streeter published an essay that anticipated our current moment with startling accuracy. Writing in the dial-up era, before Facebook, smartphones, or cryptocurrency existed, Streeter anticipated with uncanny accuracy how 60s counterculture would merge with libertarian economics to create the ideological foundation of modern Silicon Valley.
The California Ideology Takes Shape
Streeter's central thesis focused on figures like Stewart Brand, who transformed from editing the countercultural Whole Earth Catalog to becoming technology boosters aligned with conservative economics. This wasn't coincidence—it was the logical outcome of what Streeter called "romantic libertarianism," where countercultural values of individual freedom merged with faith in market solutions.
The essay examined pioneers like Ted Nelson, who coined "hypertext" and envisioned the Xanadu system that inspired the World Wide Web. Nelson embodied this fusion perfectly: a Woodstock attendee who believed computer technology could create perfect property systems and eliminate institutional mediation entirely. His vision promised a world where individual creativity could flourish without the "arbitrary hierarchies and messy interconnectedness" of traditional society.
Remarkably Accurate Predictions
Streeter's foresight was extraordinary. He predicted the internet's commercialization would ignore lessons from its nonprofit, university-based origins—exactly what happened as policymakers embraced "romantic marketplace entrepreneurialism" narratives over understanding government funding's crucial role.
He warned that intellectual property would become more chaotic, not cleaner, in digital spaces. Today's battles over AI training data, NFTs, and platform content ownership prove him right. He also anticipated how tech culture would create ahistorical narratives about self-made entrepreneurs, erasing the role of elite education, government research funding, and existing class privileges.
Most prescient was his insight that tech culture believes "laws work like computer code"—that elegant systems could bypass political complexity. This fantasy explains everything from cryptocurrency's "code is law" ethos to Silicon Valley's persistent belief that technological solutions can transcend social problems.
What He Missed
Streeter underestimated how digital technologies would enable genuine collaborative innovation. Wikipedia, open source software, and Creative Commons represent forms of collective creation that transcend his either/or framework of individual versus institutional control.
He also didn't foresee how completely Big Tech would dominate through network effects and data monopolization, becoming more powerful than traditional corporations. The significant backlash against tech libertarianism in the 2010s, with growing calls for regulation and antitrust action, wasn't on his radar either.
Enduring Relevance
Streeter's most valuable insight remains his diagnosis of tech culture's "fear of the political"—the desire to escape social complexity through technological solutions. He wrote that computer obsession reflects "a distorted wish to escape the unpredictability and unknowability of relations with others."
This perfectly explains today's metaverse hype, cryptocurrency utopianism and dystopian reality, and AI evangelism—persistent fantasies that technology can provide easy alternatives to messy democratic processes.
As we face artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies, Streeter's warning feels urgently relevant: romantic individualism, however appealing, ultimately serves corporate hierarchies when divorced from historical and social context. His call for a more "situated" understanding of freedom—one that embraces rather than escapes our interconnectedness—offers a crucial alternative to tech culture's escapist dreams.