The first thing I thought when I saw Alex Pretti was “He had a kind face”.
The second thing I thought was “He was shot down in the street for helping a woman as a medic”. (My father-in-law was a corpsman in WWII.)
The third thing I thought was “So many videos. Everyone can see it for what it is – a cold-blooded execution of a US citizen”.
The fourth thing I thought was “Silicon Valley is silent and complicit”.
Let me tell you how I got there.
William and I had a singular goal in launching open source Berkeley Unix in 1990 — to allow people to not only deploy servers under their control, but also to control the source code on which they ran.
This meant no company, no government, no billionaire, could sabotage, interdict, or otherwise censor the people or keep them from exercising their Constitutional rights.
When we released 386BSD 0.0 in 1994, I heard from people all over the world. Universities and colleges, NGOs, entrepreneurs. You name it. Most of these folks could never afford to host their own server, much less own one themselves. It was liberating and spawned universal access to the Internet.
But the tides of capitalism are brutal. Over time, monopolies grew to control great swathes of our global intellectual capital.
Let me be clear. A free society cannot exist when it is captive to the whims of a handful of billionaires and criminals. Nor can it endure the unfettered unhinged hate propaganda on social media secretly fomented by foreign enemies like Russia (yes, Russia is an avowed enemy I’m sorry to say) which we damn well can track and eliminate but won’t for a few cents more profit!
Who controls the press and social media? Silicon Valley billionaires.
Who controls the government? Silicon Valley billionaires.
Who is steadfastly feeding Americans a diet of lies and deceit? Silicon Valley billionaires.
These are very same people who made their success off Silicon Valley’s free exchange of ideas and technical works. But now for narrow and parochial reasons, the truth is blurred and waved away.
Tim Cook watches a ICU RN assisting an injured woman gunned down in the streets and then parties with Trump and Melania.
Elon Musk’s DOGE tech goons steal the social security data of US citizens and face no Republican censure.
Jeff Bezo’s Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home is raided in a ginned up fishing expedition and he shrugs it off.
Just to name a few. There’s plenty more right here in Silicon Valley.
There is this simple-minded belief that Silicon Valley is above all this. That we are a noble meritocracy. That we need not concern ourselves with the nation.
But we cannot be silent. We are complicit. Without us, these criminals would be knuckle-dragging in parochial ponds.
We provide the infrastructure for their hate.
We provide the support for their organization.
We provide the technical expertise for their exploitation.
And we are wrong. Silence and complaisance goes against everything Silicon Valley has stood for.
Silicon Valley is a success precisely because we do not suppress knowledge. We run by rule of law and not rule of brutality. We openly discuss and engage in new ideas. We thrive because of democracy. No other country holds our record for innovation and success. It is the core of our being.
Silicon Valley is the Golden Goose of America.
And now a handful of people who have made fortunes here in our community are intent on destroying that Golden Goose, for no particular reason I can discern other than that they’re bored. As the old saying goes, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”.
So do we stay silent and complicit while masked goons kill poets and nurses?
Do we turn away when the truth is strangled?
Do we turn off our minds as our freedoms are tossed away?
Or do we speak out and firmly remind our colleagues in Silicon Valley that they will be on the wrong side of history, morality, and ultimately, truth if they do not act in support of democracy, rule of law, and freedom of thought?
250 years. That’s how long we’ve lived in a democracy. 250 hard fought years.
I’d hate to see Silicon Valley destroy it. We’re far better than that.