There was a time when starting a company in San Francisco meant you believed technology could make the world less broken. Not just richer — less broken. The early internet era ran on a shared conviction that decentralized tools, open-source code, and scrappy founders could flatten hierarchies, connect communities, and hand power back to individuals. That conviction built Google, Twitter, Craigslist, the open-source movement, and an entire generation of products people actually loved.
That era is over. And what replaced it is something far uglier.
The Burning Man Compact Is Ashes
Jonathan Weber, the journalist who edited The Industry Standard during the original dot-com boom and just published a new book called City on the Edge, laid it out in a Fortune essay today: the counterculture-infused techno-optimism that defined Silicon Valley for three decades is dying. Not because the ideas were wrong, but because the people who profited most from those ideas decided the ideas were inconvenient.
Weber calls the old shared value system the “Burning Man Compact” — the idea that billionaires and dirt-campers, libertarians and progressives, could rally around a single belief: technology should empower everyone, not just the people who own the servers. Google’s founding principle was “don’t be evil.” Startups were expected to have a mission beyond revenue. The Electronic Frontier Foundation fought government overreach because individual liberty was a shared value, not a partisan weapon.
That compact didn’t die of natural causes. It was murdered by the people who benefited from it the most.
Marc Andreessen’s Manifesto Is the Obituary
The replacement ideology has a name: the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, published by Marc Andreessen in 2023. Andreessen — once a cheerful internet idealist who helped build Netscape — now runs a venture capital firm managing over $90 billion in assets. His manifesto declares that free-market techno-capitalism will solve every problem, as long as we banish what he calls “The Enemy”: things like tech ethics, trust and safety, and anyone who questions whether move-fast-and-break-things should apply to nuclear weapons and surveillance AI.
Here’s the quiet part: Andreessen Horowitz has become the biggest political donor in America during the current midterm cycle, spending more than $115 million so far — overwhelmingly to advance its crypto and AI investments. That’s not idealism. That’s not even capitalism. That’s a lobbying operation with a philosophy department attached.
Under the second Trump administration, this ideology has metastasized into something even more specific: government-backed techno-capitalism with America-first nationalism, where private cryptocurrencies and unregulated AI sit at the center of the enterprise. Tech firms raced to abandon diversity commitments, quietly dropped their defense of immigrants, and acquiesced to attacks on higher education and free trade. Military technology — long toxic in startup culture — is now the hottest VC sector outside of AI.
Follow the Money: Who Benefits From This “Optimism”?
The new techno-optimism isn’t optimistic about you. It’s optimistic about the returns on a $90 billion fund.
Consider the numbers Weber surfaces. San Francisco’s young population is barely recovering after a sharp pandemic-era decline — nothing like the flood of twenty-somethings that accompanied the dot-com and smartphone booms. AI companies are hiring, but not fast enough to offset the cuts at the internet-era giants. Most of the money pouring into the industry is buying computing power, not people. Both of San Francisco’s prestige art schools have shuttered. Fifteen theatre companies have closed.
The AI boom is producing billionaires. It is not producing a culture. And that distinction matters more than the tech elite want to admit.
Trae Stephens, co-founder of weapons startup Anduril Industries and a Peter Thiel protégé, recently gave a speech about the need for “patriotic” investment so America could build data centers and rockets fast enough to beat China. He also suggested buying Wired magazine because it had become too critical of the industry. The irony is almost too perfect: the very credibility and authenticity of Wired was forged in the idealistic era these people are trying to bury.
The Real Damage: Nobody Trusts Tech Anymore
Here’s what the flag-pin techno-optimists don’t understand: they’ve done a terrible job selling the idea that AI will be a blessing for everyone. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are among the least-liked public figures in America. Opinion polls show widespread fear about what AI will bring — even among the young people who are supposed to be the true believers.
The Trump-aligned tech elite interpret this as a messaging problem. It’s not. It’s a substance problem. When your public face is a $115 million lobbying operation, a fleet of weapons startups, and a CEO class that abandoned every stated principle the moment it became politically convenient, people notice. They’re not confused about your message. They understood it perfectly.
The old internet idealism was messy, contradictory, and frequently self-serving. The platforms it created did enormous damage alongside the good. Nobody is arguing for a naive return to rooftop parties and “don’t be evil” coffee mugs. But the belief that technology should intentionally benefit everyone — not just the investor class — isn’t what’s wrong with Silicon Valley. It’s the only thing that was ever right about it.
The Verdict
Silicon Valley’s original sin wasn’t idealism. It was hypocrisy — promising to change the world while building surveillance machines and attention-harvesting monopolies. But the new regime doesn’t even bother with the promise. It replaced “change the world” with “beat China” and “deregulate everything,” then called it progress.
The entrepreneurs Weber meets in SoMa today are younger and more money-obsessed than ever, consumed with fundraising anxiety rather than excitement about the future. Even teenagers now rank financial success as what matters most. The Burning Man Compact didn’t just die — it was replaced by a spreadsheet.
Craig Newmark built Craigslist out of genuine curiosity and community instinct. It made him a fortune anyway. That lesson — that doing right by people and building a successful business aren’t mutually exclusive — is the one Silicon Valley has chosen to forget. And everyone outside the bubble can see exactly what that forgetting looks like.
