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During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, I edited a newsmagazine out of San Francisco called The Industry Standard that both lived and chronicled the birth of the Internet economy. Across the city, there was an exuberance in the air, infused with an idealistic belief that the emerging Internet would empower people in untold new ways and make the world a better place.

We knew it was a bubble moment, and that the lofty ideals were weighted with contradictions that would eventually bring us back to earth. But in the magazine, and at the boozy and jam-packed Friday parties we hosted on our rooftop, we reveled in being part of the internet revolution, confident we were on the right side of history.

Today, the effervescent, counterculture-inflected techno-optimism of that era, which defined the internet industry for the better part of 30 years, is quickly fading away. It’s a victim, in part, of its own failed promises. But it’s also an unfortunate casualty of the country’s political wars.

It’s now fashionable in tech circles to dismiss the old idealism as naïve and self-indulgent. The powerful cadre of right-wing tech executives who’ve risen to power in the second Trump Administration dismiss it as something they consider even worse: a manifestation of “radical woke left” ideology, as the President put it not long ago in denouncing the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. They are championing a very different version of techno-optimism, one that dispenses with inclusive humanist values in favor of a militaristic nationalism and a harshly Darwinian view of capitalist competition.

Yet the idea that tech can help us “change the world,” as the old mantra would have it, is hardly left-wing. Internet culture, on the contrary, has always been a libertarian-infused mélange that celebrates individual liberty, social tolerance, and collective empowerment through technology and free markets. At its best, it’s a big tent of hopeful ideas about the future, and a beacon for creative thinkers of every stripe. Its better spirits are very much needed today amid the often-gloomy conversations about the impact of AI.

It’s worth remembering that the freewheeling creative culture of San Francisco in the 1990s was the petri dish for an exceptionally rich crop of innovations.

At Wired magazine, co-founder Louis Rossetto preached a libertarian gospel of tech revolution in its pages while an unlikely crew of young writers and programmers all but invented the website as we know it—including the still ubiquitous banner ad.

Craig Newmark, a socially awkward young programmer from New Jersey, found himself in the middle of an early tech party scene where people were experimenting with ideas like virtual reality, and he wanted to offer tips; he’d end up inventing a new type of community marketplace, and the idea of a “sharing economy.”

The open-source software movement, partly a political project to protect the freedom to tinker and prevent corporate oligarchies from stifling innovation, would become a cornerstone of the technology industry.

It was on the rooftop of the Industry Standard that a young techie from Nebraska named Ev Williams huddled with colleagues and decided their startup should focus on a tool they would call Blogger. It was a pre-cursor to social media, and Williams would go on to co-found Twitter.

A key tenet throughout was that New Economy entrepreneurs could do well and also do good. From its earliest days, Google’s guiding principle was “don’t be evil,” even as it built a money-spinning machine for the ages. It was the norm for startups to have a mission separate from financial success.

It wasn’t by chance that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began attending Burning Man, the famous annual happening in the Nevada desert, before their Stanford research project had even become a company.

The shared values of the internet era, brilliantly heralded by Wired, can usefully be thought of as the Burning Man Compact.

Just as the event brought together renegade dirt-campers and billionaires alike to build a utopian city in the desert, so too the internet-enabled New Economy would bring less hierarchical organizations and communities, and more innovative, satisfying, and productive ways of working.

Politically, the industry was equal parts liberal and libertarian, and was perhaps best reflected by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, created to protect the denizens of cyberspace from an overreaching government. It was a matter of liberty: “hands off our internet” was the rallying cry, echoing civil rights battles of yore.

This compact began to fray in the 2010s as the scrappy upstarts of the early days grew into globe-spanning giants with untold power and influence. Social media was tuned to reward conflict rather than community connection, and peoples’ confidence in tech eroded as the big platforms became misinformation machines and tools for political manipulation. Young employees dove into progress