Steve Jobs, left, hands an Apple Macintosh Computer to Otto Mayr, director of the Deutsches Museum, in June, 1985.dpa/Reuters
David Temkin is a Silicon Valley technologist and entrepreneur. He is the editor-in-chief of In Formation.
It was 1992. There were no smartphones. The internet was for academics, and there was no web to browse. If you went online, you did it through your landline – the only thing known as a phone then – and a modem.
I’d recently graduated from Brown University with a computer science degree, and had landed my dream job as a software engineer at Apple Computer – “Computer,” because that’s what they made back then. Their specialty was personal computers that were “easy to use,” because computers were still hard to operate. Yet there was a sense that they’d be important, and therefore people had to be taught “computer literacy.” A computer in every classroom!
Computers at the time were mostly for productivity: word processing, spreadsheets, databases. Not the kind of thing that anyone other than a nerd would voluntarily use.
Apple had a different idea, and I bought into it, even as a natural contrarian. Their computers weren’t tools for The Man. You could draw, make a poster, compose music.
I was one of the youngest engineers on the team, and we were working on Apple’s next big thing – or next little thing. It was the company’s first hand-held device, called the Newton; you’d write on the screen with a stylus, and it would recognize your handwriting and turn it into typewritten text.
The Newton MessagePad 2000, shown in 1997.RICHARD DREW/The Associated Press
We were nerds, creating hidden features in the product involving aliens and Area 51. We rolled with it when the product flopped, though we still hoped to “change the world” in our own minor way. But we weren’t on a mission to replace all human labour with artificial thought or to create eternal life. We weren’t tech bros – that breed had yet to appear.
Those were the early days of “consumer” computing – computing for everyone. The rest of the industry was focused on “enterprise” computing, or computers for business. We were, in our own self-flattering way, industry rebels.
But in the mid-nineties, when the idea of connecting the entire world via the internet became all the rage, personal computers became yesterday’s news. I left Apple in 1997, when it looked like it was about to go out of business, and of course joined one of these internet startups, and played my part in that next wave of development … and hype.
Right then, the tone in Silicon Valley changed. Wired magazine was there to introduce us to the utopia to come. At the same time, even the most absurd internet startups were somehow worth billions. (Pets.com, anyone?)
Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco on Jan. 9, 2007.Paul Sakuma/The Associated Press
The young nerds who’d founded these companies were hard to take entirely seriously, but if one did – if one took their emerging vision of the future seriously – it looked sinister, at least if you had an inkling of how the technology actually worked. A computer in every pocket, recording your every move, all so your employer can reach you instantly at any time? Or for … advertising? Sinister, or perhaps crazy?
As the stakes rose, Silicon Valley attracted a new kind of personality: the careerist, the type of person who would previously have gone into management consulting, investment banking or the law. They were the predecessors of what are now called tech bros. They came not because they enjoyed coding or had an affinity for tech, but because they could take advantage of an environment filled with soft, naive nerds just waiting to be harnessed for outsized economic gains.
By the late 1990s, I’d become skeptical of what I was seeing around me, even while managing a team of software developers at a high-flying dot-com. And so just as the internet had emerged from its academic cocoon and was beginning to sink its teeth into society, I brought a group of fellow Silicon Valley technologists, writers and designers together to create a new print magazine called In Formation. Our tagline: “Every day, computers are making people easier to use.” It was contrarian content in a contrarian format. We published our first issue in 1998.
The dot-com hype and absurdity of that era were off the charts, and our magazine mocked it all relentlessly, as only participants really could. But we also took a serious look at what it would mean if the dream of an all-tech, all-the-time future really did come to pass. Looking back a quarter-century later, it reads as prescient (topics included browser cookies, cellphone location tracking, the cashless society, IPO scams). Some of what we then thought of as paranoid speculation now seems like a quaint relic of a more innocent time.
The true scale of the transformation brought by the internet hit me in 2020 when I joined Google to lead privacy and trust for its advertising division (really – try not to laugh!). The technical and policy decisions we made affected billions of people, attracting serious regulatory scrutiny. Hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue across the industry were at stake whenever we changed our systems.
Looking back, the revolutionaries have become the establishment, and the rebels the emperors; the charming little upstarts have calcified into monopolies. Today’s fully realized tech bros are now part of the ruling class, and have an outsized voice not just in the world of business and technology, but in how we’re governed. The integration is seamless.
ED JONES/AFP/Getty Images
After a quarter-century hiatus, we’ve revived In Formation. Why? Our technological moment feels like a replay of the dot-com boom at a vastly larger scale. The megalomaniacal pronouncements of tech founders are again ubiquitous; the products they’re promoting range from incomprehensible to laughable. Drive in or out of San Francisco, and the highway is lined with cryptic billboards aimed at the new tech set: “The API to expand your TAM.” “Self-driving accounting for startups.” “Need GPU?”
What?
Silicon Valley is once again the centre of what looks like an economic bubble, with AI leaders Anthropic and OpenAI racing to kick off a new IPO season. But unlike 25 years ago amid all the Pets.com jokes, it’s a lot harder now to avoid the world-changing implications of what’s being built.
AI is at the silicon-hearted core of this new onslaught, with trillions of dollars being invested in a technology that may fall short of expectations – or come to supersede humanity. But it’s not just AI; it’s information technology applied to every possible domain, from the commercial to the psychological to the biological.
It sounds crazy, mostly because it is crazy. But dismiss “crazy” at your own peril. Recent history shows how quickly it becomes the new normal. We’ve somehow come to accept that tech demands our attention at all times. It’s become not only a weapon of mass distraction but also one of mass deception. One thing is certain: Computers are making people easier to use. Now more than ever.
For all of the rampant boosterism and glib doomerism out there, there’s precious little in the way of knowledgeable commentary from inside the Silicon Valley machine on the one topic that really matters: What is tech doing to us?
Issues of In Formation from 1998, 2000 and 2025.Supplied by David Temkin
We didn’t revive In Formation to create a fix-it guide for what ails us technologically. We were just as interested in making you laugh at the madness of the moment while giving you a whole new raft of topics to worry about. (Is your car spying on you? Answer: probably).
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Be very careful about which products you use, and about extending trust generally. Remember that you can no longer believe what you see with your own eyes, if what you’re seeing is on a screen. Always consider the incentives of the companies that operate the media and social networks you use. The operators of these platforms – and the most popular people on them – make money when you “engage” with the content you’re being fed, and engagement follows outrage as night follows day.
If you do nothing else with AI, take the time to learn just how believable AI-created photos and videos have become. And be even more careful about interacting with people you don’t know online – who may not be people at all. Your teenager may already be talking to an AI that’s posing as a friend; the next scam e-mail you receive may be written just for you, by a machine that has scraped your social media. And you may soon find yourself on a Zoom call with someone who, it turns out, isn’t a someone.
That’s about today’s tech. What about what’s next? As I’m writing this, I’m also trying my hand at “vibe coding,” or using AI as a code-writing assistant. It is frankly incredible; what I’m now doing as a side project over the course of a few weeks would have taken a small team of software engineers the better part of a year to build. For now, it’s exhilarating and addictive. But play that out across industries and it becomes very hard to avoid apocalyptic scenarios, starting with the obliteration of millions of jobs.
At a moment when words, images and video have never been cheaper to generate – or easier to fake – the In Formation team returned to print deliberately. Analog media has a particular power in a digital age. It slows you down. It requires commitment and resists optimization. It gives you space to think, to notice, and, occasionally, to laugh. That resistance isn’t nostalgic. It’s the point.