Rage Against the Political Machine

"I cannot accept a premise that government is going to be large and ineffective," says Dwight Carlson, founder of Perceptron Inc., which makes advanced laser-based systems for monitoring quality control in manufacturing, headquartered in suburban Detroit. "And I can't accept the other side that says we're going to cut it down and it's going to be small and ineffective. The only premise I can accept is that government's going to be lean and effective, just like the rest of us."

This argument between Cyber-Libertarians and Techno-Communitarians sounds the opening notes of the politics of the Information Age -- a dispute ultimately about the ability of American society to hold together in a world in which the gulf between rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, wired and unwired, seems to be growing as relentlessly as our capacity to squeeze more transistors onto a silicon chip.

Cyber-Libertarians

Just about everything you need to know about T.J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, is contained in this fact: on the morning I arrived to see him in his sun-splashed San Jose office, he was reviewing a letter he had just sent off advising a nun to "get down from your moral high horse." the nun, Doris Gormley, the director of Corporate Social Responsibility for the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, had written Rodgers a few days earlier, explaining that the Sisters, which hold 7,000 shares of Cypress stock, planned to cast its proxy against the company's board of directors because it didn't include any women or minorities. Rodgers responded with a six-page, single-spaced sermon in which he denounced as "immoral" not only the Sisters of St. Francis's demands for diversity but also the entire notion of corporate responsibility as measured by "self-appointed industry watchdogs," ranging from environmental groups to Democrats in Congress.

Rodgers's impassioned response to Gormley captures both his combative personality and his unswerving worldview -- one that rejects government-based social and economic control as "coercive utopianism" and that allows little room for self-doubt. "My favorite phrase," he says, "is free minds and free markets."

Over the last few years, Rodgers has become something of a cult figure in Libertarian circles. Since the late 1980s, he has regularly testified before Congress in opposition to government subsidies for technology research, which he calls "corporate techno-pork." He has crusaded against SEMATECH, the Pentagon-backed consortium of chip manufacturers, and lashed out against Patrick Buchanan's anti-immigration posturing.

In Silicon Valley, Rodgers is unusual only in the intensity of his political beliefs. Unlike Hollywood, California's other glamour spot, Silicon Valley has never been transfixed by politics. One reason is that the computer entrepreneurs have rarely felt they had much at stake in Washington deliberations. Mostly, though, Silicon Valley has stayed away from politics because it thinks so little of politicians. Hollywood celebrities view politics as a means of proving that they are serious. But as Paul Lippe, a Democratic activist and vice president of business development at Synopsys Inc., accurately observes, most people in Silicon Valley are convinced that they are engaged in more serious and important work than the politicians are.

But if Rodgers is atypical in the amount of time he spends thinking about politics, he's characteristic in his views. In Silicon Valley -- and much of the high-tech world in general -- libertarianism is the default ideology. "Libertarianism is probably the closest thing you can come to a state religion in the computer industry," says Tom Isenberg, a 33-year-old program manager for Microsoft, who ran as the Libertarian candidate for lieutenant governor in Washington four years ago. (His succinct platform was to abolish his own office. "I got a mandate from the people to continue working at Microsoft," he says, after finishing fourth, with less than 76,000 votes.)

Libertarian thought grows naturally from high-tech culture. It offers a purity, a straight-line way of looking at the world, that appeals to the orderly engineering mind. It fits the computer world's image of itself and its products as inherently antiauthority. And it taps into the widespread sense in this fluid, entrepreneurial culture that government is simply too slow, bureaucratic, and dumb. Tom Proulx, a cofounder of Intuit who was the principal engineer of its flagship product, Quicken, neatly sums up the prevailing consensus. "There is this feeling," he says, "that government is the ultimate big company."