Fearless genius: the digital revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000
Doug Menuez
Getty Images / Stanford University Libraries
For fifteen years, I documented the efforts of a secretive tribe of engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley as they created technology that would change our culture and behavior, and challenge what it means to be human.
My project began in 1985 when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple and began his quest for redemption by attempting to build a super-computer for education. Steve represented the freewheeling sensibility of the times, combining his idealistic, hippie vision and design aesthetic with the space-race ambitions of the prior generation. I wanted to understand his process of innovation and believed that by photographing Steve I could also gain insights into the larger subject of Silicon Valley itself.
I requested special access to shadow Steve and his team, and he immediately agreed. After three years, I expanded my project, gaining the trust and private access to every major innovator and over seventy companies, often for years at a time. I continued shooting through the rise of the internet and dot-com boom of the 1990s, generating 250 000 negatives over the life of the project. Stanford University Library is now working to research and preserve this material for study.
During this era, the accelerating pace of innovation was affecting the very nature of work, the structure of corporations and the global business environment as countries began manufacturing new technology. A digital revolution was under way that would create more jobs and more wealth than at any time in human history.
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Throughout the project I photographed with several concerns in mind. Primarily, I needed to understand how Silicon Valley innovators fit into the context of my work which explores the human experience of individuals as they attempt to achieve the impossible, overcoming fear and limitations. I am curious about what motivates some people to rise against insurmountable obstacles and find meaning in their lives, while others simply cannot engage. Steve Jobs was again attempting to change the world with his team - to achieve the impossible - by fitting the power of a mainframe into a one-foot cube. Steve told me he hoped a kid at Stanford could use it to cure cancer in his dorm room. Because he believed this was possible, his team also believed, and his pursuit became a noble mission.
I began to see that technologists were like any other human beings working to overcome adversity. Except if they succeeded, all humanity might benefit. I want to foster dialogue around what lessons can be learned from the era which I documented. Since 2000, there has not been a single technology innovation in the United States that has scaled up to create millions of jobs as personal computers did. Facebook, Twitter, Google and others combined have added only 50 000 jobs and are basically software iterations built on work done in the digital revolution. Creating jobs is a global issue. But in the US the economy is hollowed out, and our educational system seems broken. We have graduated fewer Doctorates in Computer Science this year than in 1970. We have also cut visas for foreign workers and students, further limiting our ability to innovate. Kids today cannot imagine a world without texting, email or life online. They embrace all the newest digital technology but do not understand where it came from. How can we inspire the next generation of engineers and inventors? Who will be the next Steve Jobs? Is she in China or India? Brazil?
Beneath the vast enterprise and all the PR hype, I saw through my project, I discovered the joyful, primal urge to invent tools that has driven human progress for millennia. I saw something uncontrollable, hungry and wild - something human - that yet remains in Silicon Valley, with hope for a new technology revolution that can fulfill the promises of the last one.
Doug Menuez
