Margaret O’Mara remembers working as a staff member at the Clinton White House in the early 1990s when she watched in amazement as a colleague in the Department of Health and Human Services sent an email to his son at college. It was the first time she’d seen someone send an electronic message, and it was “very uncommon, especially in D.C. political circles,” she tells OneZero.
Now a tech historian at the University of Washington — she began her academic career at Stanford in 2002, first as a fellow and then teaching — O’Mara dedicates her time to studying the intersection of tech and U.S. politics, and looking at the internet through a historical lens. Her latest book, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, re-examines the self-serving genesis tales around tech’s biggest breakthroughs, dispelling the myth that entrepreneurs alone are responsible for the great tech innovations of our time. In this wide-ranging work, O’Mara delves into the history of the Valley, from the 1930s when David Packard built the foundation for what became Hewlett-Packard (HP), to our modern, always-connected society, exploring the important figures, policies, and global events that changed the course of tech history.
OneZero spoke with O’Mara to discuss how Silicon Valley was born and why she thinks big tech companies like Facebook should be treated like the Standard Oil monopoly of the 1920s.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
OneZero: Figures like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are considered practically superhuman for their impact on the tech landscape. But your book lays out how government investment has been instrumental in driving tech innovation. So why do these founder myths persist?
Margaret O’Mara: It’s kind of the quintessential American story, right? The story of rugged individualism, the rebels and the revolutionaries who overthrew a monarch and started a whole new country. The “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” tale that has been celebrated throughout American history. We love heroes — both in Hollywood and in real life.
So in Silicon Valley, or the tech industry more broadly, you have these genius individuals who do extraordinary things. But these breakthroughs are made possible by a larger cast of thousands around them, by broader social structures, and by other things that America, writ large, makes possible — whether it be public policies or public education.
No one was sitting behind a desk in Washington saying, “Oh, this is how we’re going to build a tech industry.” But that is what happened.
The government often becomes a catalyst in ways that are perhaps not consciously intended. And that is part of the magic. Dwight Eisenhower never declared, “I shall build a science city in Northern California.” Yet the military spending and space program spending that started under Eisenhower was the launching pad for Silicon Valley’s rocket.
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