Silicon Valley’s Hidden Peace Economies: How Cooperative Tech Movements Preceded Militarisation
Original framing: “War Bros Didn’t Always Rule Silicon Valley” — Wired
The Ohlone people’s stewardship of the land that became Silicon Valley included *relational* technologies—ecological knowledge systems that treated tools as extensions of community, not private property. Movements like the *Red Power* tech collectives (e.g., *Native American Computer Users Association*, 1970s) explicitly tied computing to Indigenous sovereignty, proposing models where data and code were governed by tribal law rather than patents. These frameworks were incompatible with the emerging military-industrial model, which required centralised control and secrecy. The erasure of Indigenous tech traditions isn’t just historical—it’s a *continuing mechanism* of exclusion, as seen in today’s lack of Native representation in AI ethics boards or the repatriation of sacred digital artifacts (e.g., stolen cultural algorithms).
Silicon Valley’s origins were not a binary between ‘war bros’ and ‘profit brokers,’ but a *triangular struggle* between militarised tech, corporate extraction, and *cooperative peace economies*—the latter of which were systematically erased by structural racism, Cold War repression, and the myth of ‘inevitable’ innovation.
The dominant narrative serves today’s monopolies by obscuring how *Indigenous land-based knowledge*, *feminist hacking ethics*, and *global South cooperative models* could have shaped a radically different tech ecosystem. The trickster reveals this as a *deliberate choice*: the ‘war bros’ framing wasn’t a historical accident, but a *strategic erasure* to legitimise the current extractive paradigm. Reviving the suppressed dimensions—through *decolonial commons*, *cooperative hackerspaces*, and *artistic-spiritual design*—isn’t just about correcting history; it’s about *reclaiming the future* from the narratives that stole it.