There was a time during the height of the dot-com boom when executives in Silicon Valley believed that Washington, DC was irrelevant. As two generations of entrepreneurs strived to build The New Economy, it was laughable to think that the ancient dunderheads back in our nation’s capital had any notion about – or right to tamper with – what was going on in the tech world.
This was the era of the Clinton Administration, a time when the President himself had declared that “the era of big government is over.” Defend the shores, deliver the mail, and otherwise stay the hell out of the way – this was the thinking in the tech world during the bubble.
Clinton’s years were peaceful from the perspective of people living in the US. A few targeted attacks here and there, with even the major, US-backed military action by NATO in Serbia having little effect in day-to-day American lives. The Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia convinced most Americans that we wanted little or nothing to do with foreign military misadventure. The idea of nation building was not popular, and indeed was rejected by both Al Gore and George W. Bush during the 2000 Presidential campaign.
Keep Out
Domestically, the mindset was also to keep the government from meddling. We were running federal surpluses for the first time in most people’s memory, the economy was booming, and we were all discovering the personal liberation of being able to hang out on the Worldwide Web.
With 9/11 the US entered a different reality, one in which the federal government became more important, and dominant, than ever. The whole dot-com castles-in-the-sand economy had washed away by then; that dreadful day assured that it wouldn’t come back.
But the federal government has proven in the past decade to be a poor driver of the innovation found in Silicon Valley, despite having invented the Internet a generation ago.
We are now in a new innovative era, characterized by massive social media, massively Big Data, and emerging back-end behemoths that keep everything running through increasing amounts of virtualization and cloud computing. The US government has committed itself to a Cloud First strategy, perhaps, but what true technology leadership and vision can we expect from Washington?
A Nuanced Reading
George W. Bush reads lots of books. He mentioned to author Robert Draper, for the book Dead Certain, that he was on his 87th book midway through one of his years in the White House. He reads nonfiction about U.S. Presidents and other historical political leaders.
But yet in Dead Certain, which is neither hagiography nor an anti-Bush polemic, he seems strangely unaffected by all that he reads, other than his rock-ribbed belief that he must be strong and unflinching in his decisions. He doesn’t do nuance, it’s said.
Nuance quickly becomes casuistry and sophistry, or endless parsing – think Bill Clinton. It can be the biggest obstacle to decisiveness and direction. But a little nuance here and there is not necessarily a bad thing. Diplomatic success is based on it. More to the point of our industry, a nuanced understanding of other nations – and how the people in them conduct their lives and business – is essential if American technology is expected to succeed globally.
It was horrifying to read in Dead Certain how uncertain – or perhaps obtuse – our federal government was, at its highest levels, when it came to understanding the world and the consequences that US actions bring. There was nary a word of how the spread of technology might improve the state of the world.
Dead Certain also recounts how a top Bush aid got a job as an Undersecretary of State, in which she traveled internationally with the goal of improving the perception of the United States. The passages in Dead Certain about this escapade are painful to read. They describe a high-level government official with neither an iota self-awareness nor a scintilla of knowledge about how people think in the countries she visits.
And Today?
Other than reading about the Cloud First strategy, I have no idea of how well the current administration understands the power of global IT and its ability to improve economies and the lives of people. My guess is that glib talk of the Twitter Revolution may be as deep a dive as these folks can make. The sad irony is that Washington doesn’t get technology but does matter.
All this brings me to the upcoming Cloud Expo in New York, where a substantially international crowd will gather to discuss the latest developments, successes, advances, and well, nuances of cloud computing.
I hope that during the millions of individual discussions that will happen in New York, some people will discuss the idea that Silicon Valley needs to do more than the two things it does well politically: oppose onerous legislation (like SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA) after it’s introduced act as an ATM for favored presidential candidates after they’re well established.
Somehow, Silicon Valley must learn to matter as much in Washington as Washington matters to Silicon Valley.