Investment

An article on Slate talks about why Venture Capitalists own Silicon Valley.

One item for blame: Lack of government investment, compared to the 50s and 60s.That is, during the post-war First Turning, when the government does public works, infrastructure investment (following on from the previous war, usually), and exploration.

(Hearing about STEM education these days sounds a lot like the need for engineers and mathematicians after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.)

Later in that article, a Marc Andreesen tweet responds to this with the idea that there are big things happening while the media is paying attention to the consumer side. And then notes that he is one of the guys whose mid-1990s dot-com era was built on that post-war infrastructure investment.  (His particular addition, Mosiac, was part of government research at Urbana-Champaign.)

We're coming back around, of course. The article ends with the line about learning from history or repeating it - which is what these cycles of history are about, anyway. The Crisis will inspire significant investment, the High will support further research, and perhaps around 2070 we will see something that changes the world like the Web did in the 1990s.

On a side note, it probably is the case that avoiding advertising would help spur innovation.  For both Google and Facebook, it was clear that they were going to make money from advertising. Holding off while possible allowed other options to come into focus before they became ONLY about advertising. Facebook was able to leverage their user base into a platform for multi-player games. Google was able to start Android and make a difference in mobile phones. And both were able to become more about data than about advertising - Google because what people search for says who they are, and Facebook because people innocently tell them everything at the same time they tell their friends.