A Parallel Upbringing

Bill Shireman's Reflections on Growing Up in Silicon Valley

Like the PayPal Mafia, I grew up in Silicon Valley too–in Sunnyvale, across the street from NASA scientists, a mile from Steve Jobs in Cupertino, a short bike trip from the garage where David Packard and Bill Hewlett formed their namesake company in Palo Alto, a few miles south of Peter Thiel’s place in Foster City, down from Marc Andreeson and Ben Horowitz in Atherton, and a quick drive across the Bay from Elon Musk’s Tesla factory in Fremont.

Back when we were all growing up here, ignorant of one another but experiencing the very same orchards that stretched for miles around us—apricots, cherries, peaches, and apples were everywhere. Especially Apples. Steve Jobs lived a mile away; we might’ve crossed paths at Homestead High’s Earth Day in 1970.

To many who grew up here, the Valley was a pacifying paradise, but to me and likely them, it felt artificial, like a stage set for returning WWII “Greatest Generation” vets like my dad, a Purdue engineer who flew planes and commanded ships. Our neighborhood and almost every newly developed community from San Jose up through the peninsula and to the border of San Francisco was a Pleasantville: manicured lawns, tract homes, moms in aprons, shiny appliances, dads in cubicles at Lockheed or HP.

The orchards quickly vanished, replaced by labs and weapons factories, fueled by Cold War defense dollars. We were beating the Soviets to the moon, sure, but also building bombs to outmuscle them. Yet it felt detached and artificial, like I imagined a retirement home might be, engineered for comfort, conformity, and relative unconsciousness, a way station on the road from infancy to affluence to infirmity.

I breathed in the Valley’s sweet entrepreneurial breeze as well, but applied it differently. My first enterprises were tiny and mom-and-pop-ish - a retail candy and refreshment shop that for a decade was the go-to hang for kids from four local schools, then a political products maker called Liberty Badge that designed and sold badges, stickers, and supplies to campaigns and collectors nationally. These made me the richest kid in the block - I had no eventual tech billionaires to compete with - and more than paid my way through college, while also delivering a profit that funded my modest philanthropic goals.

But midlife crises struck early and often for me. From before the age of 10 I felt a deep drive to do something meaningful with my life. Starting in my early teens I birthed and grew a sequence of mostly non-profit government and non-governmental organizations, each filling a specific niche aimed at remedying the “externalities” that my little companies and thousands of big ones were imposing on the global commons - polluted air and water, damaged forests and oceans, wasted energy and resources, and so on.

I was among many citizens who fought back against the most obvious blight in the Valley itself: the destruction of open space to make way for strip malls, housing developments, and corporate campuses. I joined the Organization of Responsible Citizens for Halting Reckless Development in Sunnyvale (ORCHARDS), and organized parents, students, hikers, cyclists, and wealthy homeowners for open-space protections. We toppled the developers who had controlled local city councils and boards of supervisors, unpaving the way for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District’s establishment in 1972, and pressed for the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) through the legislature in 1970.

Many of us joined the campaign of a young Republican lawyer, conservationist, and war hero, Pete McCloskey, who scored a surprise upset over former child actress and ambassador Shirley Temple Black when he was elected to Congress, to the dismay of the establishment that had groomed Black for the job. McCloskey was a rebel who could not be contained, but he epitomized the perfect Republican to me: a balance of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. A courageous war hero who opposed the Vietnam War. A genuine patriot willing to sacrifice his political career to advance a higher cause, and hold his party’s president accountable for the crimes of Watergate, even if it meant electoral defeat.

In the 1970s and ’80s, my activist colleagues and I adopted Saul Alinsky’s rules for radicals, and used them to name, blame, and shame corporations through protests, press releases, boycotts, and millions of direct mail fundraising appeals. We got noticed, not just by our donors, but especially by the mostly corporate entities we targeted. In an infamous 1971 memo to the CEOs of many of these companies, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell warned how my mentor and friend Ralph Nader was threatening capitalism, and challenged corporations to fight back with PR and lobbying.

But neither Nader nor most of his supporters, me included, were opponents of capitalism. I loved free enterprise. I profited from free enterprise. I felt guilty that I was making money, in part, from pollution and waste. But I knew smart policies could change this. The business leader I most admired then was David Packard. I agreed with him that a responsible business looks squarely at the perverse incentives in its business model, and works to change the policies and practices so the interests of companies and communities are aligned. We were citizens first, capitalists second. Our citizen selves worked hard to save us all from our capitalist selves.

Most of my friends did not see business in this light. Demonizing corporations was an easy sell to the media and crusading activists. It felt virtuous to be a David fighting a Goliath. But it led to thin, shallow money pitches, not thoughtful policies that solved problems systemically, at their root. It also failed to win legislative change. From a strategic perspective, the fatal flaw was that, once we cast the whole of American business, even capitalism itself, as our enemy, they stepped up to play the role, allocating millions of dollars to beat the crap out of us. This guaranteed that we faced strident sustained opposition by powerful adversaries who felt not just threatened but deeply insulted by our accusations. Naturally, they demonized us in return. Their PR firms even created slide decks that cast me as an evil force, someone worth a monthly retainer to keep tabs on.

We did secure some breakthrough federal policy wins in the 1970s - the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts among them. But after a decade or so, the wins stopped coming. Instead, we got gridlock. Lawyers had guaranteed lifetime employment squeezing every gain they could in the courts. But affordable, effective laws were “dead on arrival” in Congress and many state legislatures.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but a major reason was that cheap, smart laws are much harder to pass than bad, expensive ones. Simply taxing pollution rather than payroll, for example, is the most powerful way to drive waste toward zero. And it’s revenue-neutral - government revenues stay the same. Pollution cuts are nearly free. That’s why cost-effective policies don’t become law. They don’t collect piles of new money from taxpayers, and distribute it to vested interests. So there’s no revenue to pay the campaign contributions and contracts that grease the wheels and get bills through committees and Congress.

That is why, from the 1980s to 2010, we missed three opportunities to prevent the climate crisis at a net benefit to the economy, but failed because the solutions were just too cheap. Billions in new revenues weren’t extracted to pay the power brokers and interest groups standing at the toll gates. There was no money to pay the tolls charged at every step in the legislative process.

But for some of my allies, it felt better to lose to an evil enemy, than win a solution that doesn’t punish them severely for being profit-chasing scoundrels. When we won, our donors would invariably shift their dollars elsewhere. When we lost, we could secure more grants, generate more media, and enjoy more veneration. Few of us acknowledged these less-than-courageous motivations. Denial is hard to recognize when you’re jacked up on testosterone, cortisol, and caffeine for years on end. But it was disturbingly common to sacrifice legislative success to avoid the embarrassing realization that your adversary was not, in fact, the devil himself. (The surest antidote is to simply introduce the ostensible demons on both sides to each other at moments they aren’t at war, but that’s a story for later, when we get to solutions.)

Over time, as it became evident that we were not only losing our war to save the planet, but hurting innocent people along the way, some of us grew wary of the destroy-the-demon formula for funding activism, and wondered if there was a better way. But by then it was too late. Responding to grassroots environmental and social crusades on the center and left, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, and organized evangelical voters around abortion and school prayer, forging the template for single-issue mobilization on the right. Now the nation was being divided more evenly, with roughly equivalent armies of social conservatives and liberals at war.

There were many issues we could have fought over. But six “wedge” issues proved to be sustainable wellsprings of unending political slugfests and cultural carnage: abortion, guns, immigration, gay marriage, race, and climate. Red and blue Americans could battle over them for years, decades, even generations, and while people and the planet might suffer, they would always be reliable profit drivers for the Duopoly.

What is the Duopoly? Stay tuned for the next installment of DARK MAGA RISING.