the dream machine
some of you know the reference from the naming of this newsletter, but for anyone who doesn’t, m. mitchell waldrop’s the dream machine is the story of how personal computing came to be. it’s an epic for the ages, featuring j.c.r. licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist from mit, and a group of a few academics across the country who created the vision for personal computers and, eventually, the internet.
fast-forward thirty years. like most kids born in the nineties, i was a child of the internet. it—and the people i met through it—formed who i was, as much as my family, my friends, and the people who occupied the physical space around me did. by middle school, i was on xanga, blogger, myspace. facebook launched when i was nine, and i created an account (under false pretenses) at ten. when tumblr emerged, i started posting there, where i made friends with kids around the world—some anonymous, whose real first names i would never know, and some who added me on facebook and later met with me in real life.
in high school, when i started shooting photography, it felt natural and obvious to share that on flickr. as i encountered more and more people online who were in their teens and creating great art, i decided to create a magazine. the purported reason was that no serious platform existed for young artists to showcase their work. but the real reason was that i could, that it was possible, that it was, in fact, so easy, given all of the tools that other people had created. at fifteen, i reached millions of people who found my magazine across social media platforms. sometimes i would get emails from people who wanted to apply for a job with the magazine’s “editorial staff.” i had to tell them that i was the whole staff, and i was a sophomore in high school, emailing artists and designing layouts from my parents’ house in houston.
none of that is to illustrate that I was special. to the contrary, countless people (tavi gevinson, michelle phan, chiara ferragni, to name a few) did far more. that period, in particular, was a coming-of-age for the individual on the internet, after all of the groundwork had been laid. blogger, tumblr, flickr, youtube, twitter—none of them were huge technical advances, but they made it increasingly simple for people to create and then share. and they launched stars: fashion bloggers who now sit front row at new york fashion week, photographers who are now some of the most sought-after people in the industry, vloggers who are now headlining tv shows.
the tweens of today get that. they’re on musical.ly (where the top musers are twelve-year-olds who’ve gathered followings of millions of other twelve-year-olds) or younow (where kids livestream themselves talking or eating or even sleeping). and we can argue about the negatives of that mentality toward sharing, virality, and the accessibility of fame, but it’s led to a proliferation of creativity and thought like nothing else in history.
most people don’t understand the underlying technology behind how all of it works. i know i didn’t and still often don’t. but i understood the implications it had, at least for me. i can’t remember a time that i didn’t feel like virtually anything could be built or achieved with the internet, if only given the time and resources. no one’s really ever asked me what i love about tech—why the first part of my morning is reading tech news, why I download so many apps and try so many services, why I moved to san francisco at all when I spent my whole life wanting to live in new york. but that’s why. as my friend freia said, “because of what can be—and how what can be has time and again become what is and what was.”
there’s an excerpt of joan didion’s “goodbye to all that” that’s always resonated with me:
I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.
for me, silicon valley evoked that feeling—that nostalgia for an idea that couldn’t possibly adequately represent a real place and real people with all of their imperfections. “software” and “innovation” and “venture capitalists” were the stuff of modern-day fairy tales. the first time I came, april of my first year of college, i remember riding in a caltrain car through suburban south bay—the most mundane of places, filled with office parks and safeways—and feeling inexplicably overcome with emotion. it was like the air was electric, just waiting for the right spark to catch fire. glossy glass buildings sat under the relentless, sterile sunshine, with misleadingly quiet exteriors hiding what i knew were thousands of engineers and designers and salespeople within them. in an uber, i told my friends that i couldn’t believe how many ideas and companies that had changed the world once and again had been born and died in this little patch of land in northern california. the driver laughed at me. “they’re just people,” he said.
and i knew that. but that was part of it! the myth, juxtaposed against the reality. it was a world where the vast majority of startups failed and failed hard, destroying value and lives. a world where white men who studied at stanford and harvard and mit could get a few million dollars in funding with nothing more than a starry-eyed pitch and a handshake. a world where people were expected to eat ramen and skip sleep and work weekends in search of The Next Big Thing™. a world where money flowed like water and people worked in playgrounds of free food and massages. a world where kids who had just stumbled out of lecture halls could be a few thousand lines of code away from touching millions of peoples’ lives. a world where the underdogs won, again and again, against incumbents decades old by building better products faster and with fewer resources.
it can be wonderful, terrible, and awe-inspiring, all in turn. sometimes i wonder if the way i feel about it will change, fade over time as the extreme highs and lows become part of everyday life. but for now, i’m looking to the magic.
note: this newsletter originally started on tinyletter in 2016, and it moved to substack in 2020. none of the other posts have migrated with it, but i decided to include this genesis story, to better articulate (in my own words, from back then) my own vantage point and how it’s evolved.
if you’ve read my more recent writing, you probably know that i would write this post quite differently today, but it feels salient to have this remnant from a remarkable moment in time, an encapsulation of the fervor that tech can elicit. 2016 was my first year living and working in san francisco—what we might now see as one of the last years of the golden age of the tech industry.
for what it’s worth, i still believe in the dream machine, though the dreams it dreams these days grow stranger and stranger yet.