Silicon Valley Ideological Universe
v01 · A bilingual knowledge graph
1948 — present

The lineage timeline.

From the Macy Conferences to the AGI cathedral, an unbroken thread. Each entry anchors at the year the ideology first cohered as a distinct intellectual program; many descendants of any given entry appear in later decades.

1940s
1940–1949
  1. 1948The Hacker Lineage
    Cybernetics
    The first attempt to write physics for minds.
1950s
1950–1959
  1. 1959The Hacker Lineage
    Hacker Culture
    Information wants to be free — and somebody has to wire it.
1970s
1970–1979
  1. 1975The Hacker Lineage
    Personal Computing
    Power to the people — by way of the silicon shop.
  2. 1976The Venture Religion
    Founder Mythology
    The single individual as the unit of historical agency.
1980s
1980–1989
  1. 1983The Hacker Lineage
    Open Source
    The cathedral and the bazaar — and the eventual takeover of the cathedral by the bazaar.
  2. 1985Counter-Currents
    Counter-Currents
    The minority report on every ideology in this archive.
  3. 1988The Hacker Lineage
    Crypto-Anarchism
    Sovereign individuals, sovereign keys.
1990s
1990–1999
  1. 1992The Hacker Lineage
    Cypherpunks
    Privacy is the right to a self that the state cannot read.
  2. 1995Empire & Power
    Techno-Libertarianism
    Markets and protocols against the regulatory state.
2000s
2000–2009
  1. 2000AI Belief Systems
    Rationalism (LessWrong)
    Bayesian self-improvement as a religious practice.
  2. 2000AI Belief Systems
    AI Safety / Alignment
    The discipline of trying to prevent the universe's largest unintended consequence.
  3. 2003Empire & Power
    Military-Tech Alliance
    The Valley quietly returns to the Pentagon's lab budget.
  4. 2004Empire & Power
    Platform Capitalism
    Owning the layer where commerce happens, not the commerce.
  5. 2005The Venture Religion
    Startup Theology
    Y Combinator's transformation of business into vocation.
  6. 2008The Hacker Lineage
    Bitcoin & Hard-Money Maximalism
    A neutral asset built out of math, watched by miners, immune to vote.
  7. 2009AI Belief Systems
    Effective Altruism
    Utilitarianism as institutional engineering.
2010s
2010–2019
  1. 2011The Venture Religion
    Techno-Optimism
    Progress is the actual moral imperative; everything else is friction.
  2. 2015The Hacker Lineage
    Ethereum & Programmable Value
    If Bitcoin is digital gold, Ethereum is the digital legal system.
  3. 2018Empire & Power
    Chip Geopolitics
    The smallest objects on earth are now the largest political objects on earth.
  4. 2018Empire & Power
    U.S.–China AI Civilization Competition
    Two civilizations training on each other's weights.
2020s
2020–2029
  1. 2022The Hacker Lineage
    Network States
    A startup that builds a country, in reverse.
  2. 2022AI Belief Systems
    Effective Accelerationism (e/acc)
    Thermodynamics as a moral argument.
  3. 2024AI Belief Systems
    AI as Religion
    Eschatology in the form of compute.
  4. 2024AI Belief Systems
    Transhumanism
    Humanity is the larval form; engineering is the metamorphosis.