both Democrats and Republicans embrace tech as this entrepreneurial superstar.

Like, this is going to solve everything and conveniently kind of downplay the connection it has to the state. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Margaret O'Mara.

Margaret is the author of Silicon Valley and The Remaking of America, and she's also a professor at the University of Washington. This week's episode is the

first in a four episode series that I'm doing this month on the history of tech industries and

network technologies in four different countries. You know, this week with Margaret, we're looking at

Silicon Valley. Next week I'll be looking at Minitel in France with

Kevin Driscoll, the week after that at Cyberson and Chile with Eden Medina, and the following week

at the Soviet networks with Ben Peters. I'm really excited for this series, and I hope you're going to

enjoy it. So in this week's episode, I talked to Margaret about the history of Silicon Valley,

and we go all the way back to World War II and even before that, I talked to Margaret about the history of Silicon Valley, and we go all the

way back to World War II and even before that, really, to look at, you know, what the Bay Area was like

before these high technology industries, these electronics industries, these computing industries,

moved in and started to grow. And really, World War II was key to that because this was a moment when

the United States poured a ton of money into universities and private companies to get them to

develop new technologies and new arms that they could use in the war. And, you know, in the interview,

I think you're going to learn a lot about the history of this region and the importance of the role that the government played, even as Silicon Valley acts like the history of their industry is one simply of entrepreneurship and of markets.

But there are a few trends that we draw on that really come through in Margaret's book, and we only get time to discuss

some of them in the interview. But, you know, when you go back through the history of this

industry, you can really see how these ideas about technological utopianism and determinism

go all the way back to World War II or before. These are threads that you

can draw through the history of the valley. You can see this boom bus cycle as, you know,

...