Tracing O’Reilly’s intellectual footprint is no easy task, in part because it’s so vast. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with religious zeal and enviable perseverance. Entire fields of thought-from computing to management theory to public administration-have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. That the conceptual imperialism of Silicon Valley would also pollute the rest of our vocabulary wasn’t.
That we would eventually be robbed of a meaningful language to discuss technology was entirely predictable. Today, having mastered the art of four-hour workweeks and gluten-free lunches in outdoor cafeterias, our digital ministers are beginning to preach on subjects far beyond the funky world of drones, 3-D printers, and smart toothbrushes. Silicon Valley has always had a thing for priests Steve Jobs was the cranky pope it deserved. The old language has been rendered useless our pre-Internet vocabulary, we are told, needs an upgrade. In the last decade or so, Silicon Valley has triggered its own wave of linguistic innovation, a wave so massive that a completely new way to analyze and describe the world-a silicon mentality of sorts-has emerged in its wake. But to fixate on technological innovation alone is to miss the more subtle-and more consequential-ways in which a clique of techno-entrepreneurs has hijacked our language and, with it, our reason. This is not to deny that many of our latest gadgets and apps are fantastic. Like a good priest, it’s always there to console us with the promise of a better future, a glitzier roadmap, a sleeker vocabulary. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.įortunately, Silicon Valley, that never-drying well of shoddy concepts and dubious paradigms-from wiki-everything to i-something, from e-nothing to open-anything-is ready to help. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean often, they don’t mean anything at all. While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language.