Margaret O'Mara

Extremely hardcore

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 18:21:50 -0800

No social network lasts forever, but even I didn't think Twitter could go down quite this quickly. It's been a wild and even more irresistably addictive couple of weeks on there, ever since Elon entered the building with his sink and proceeded to make that metaphor into action-verb reality.

Perhaps the bird site will pull through. In the meantime, this space is my backup plan. It's been more than two years since my last post (thank you faithful subscribers who most likely forgot you subscribed) and I've been meaning to come back to it (so thank you Iron Man for being a forcing function, I guess).

Follow here for short but slightly more than 240-character posts, links to recent writing, interviews, events, plus recommendations of things I'm reading, watching, listening to, etc.

Hit the green button at the bottom of this page if you'd like copies in your inbox. Post with lots of good stuff coming soon. This publication will continue to be irregular, but I promise it'll always be free, include quality Zuka content, and no sinks.

Future Shock, a treatise on life in the new Information Age that became one of 1970's biggest bestsellers. The book, along with Toffler's later works, earned him the admiration of tech leaders like AOL's Steve Case and politicians like Al Gore and Newt Gingrich. (Toffler's wife Heidi was his close collaborator and co-author of some if not all this work, although she did not get public credit for most of it.)

Toffler's prose was florid (one reviewer of Future Shock called it "a high school term paper gone berserk") and some of his predictions were over the top. But others were eerily prescient, especially his declaration in 1970 that computers and other electronic media were driving the modern world into a state of “information overload,” leaving human brains scrambling to keep up.

That catchphrase never seemed truer now, in early October 2020. It is impossible to keep up nor fully process the relentless battering of news: the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, the revelation of Trump's long-hidden tax returns, the chaotic first presidential debate, the escalating invective and endorsement of hate by a sitting president, the challenges to the electoral process, and then--like a cherry on top of the sundae--the news that the President and First Lady tested positive for Covid-19. As I...Read More

The remaking of America

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 12:02:47 -0700

What will we one day make of 2020? What can we make of it now?

Attempts to provide on-the-spot historical analysis to inform this moment--something I and so many other historians now do on the regular--both feel urgently needed and hopelessly inadequate. Historians have stepped into the arena to contextualize this season of pandemic and protest, polarization and disinformation, courage and hope. Yet historical comparisons can only go so far. Even history's common patterns and rhymes have been disrupted by the extraordinary swiftness of today's news cycle, a disruptive presidency, and a dizzying confluence of heartbreaking, enraging, inspiring, eye-opening events.

The revolution will not be televised, it will be on a smartphone: small, swift, potent, making a 17-year-old girl on a Minneapolis street corner as powerful a messenger as any network news president. It will grab the attention of millions of lockdown-weary people already glued to their phones, hitting at a moment of common realization of how deeply unequal, how unfair, how infuriatingly preventable this American pandemic's destruction has been. As with other seemingly come-out-of-nowhere disruptionsWillis Avenue Bridge leading out of Manhattan.

But as they reach the other side there is—or at least was in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, when my husband and I were running the race—a man sitting on a folding chair, with a static-ridden megaphone, shouting over and over, in the finest of New York accents, “Welcome to the Bronx! Welcome to the Bronx!”

My life feels a lot like a marathon these days. I run, eat pasta, hydrate, then do it all over again. My mood vacillates between giddiness and despair. There’s lots of self-talk, of anxiously watching the pace of others, of realizing that the road is hillier than expected.

I’m ready to be welcomed to the Bronx. Yet the Covid-19 marathon, at least the way America is running it, has no mile markers. We don’t know if we are on mile 3, mile 7, or mile 20.

The Bronx now is no longer only the fifth borough in the marathon. It is the hardest-hit borough of the American city hardest-hit by this pandemic. The curve mercifully is trending downward in New York City now, but it is spiking elsewhere, including states that are opening back up after weeks of shutdown.

Even here in Washington State, early to the pandemic and early to respond, we are restless, itching for normalcy, frustrated with not knowing when and how this will end. “Will we be stuck at home for a year?” our 11-year-old asks at dinner. We tell her no, of course not, but we really don’t know. We have flyovers...Read More

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 18:30:23 -0700

It is April 19, six weeks into life, upended. In the last few years I often longed for a pause button on the world: a moment when everything would slow down and I could catch up, finish that piece of writing, read that book, get more sleep. Now I have that gotten that world on hold, and for awful reasons. It is an unquiet pause.

In plague times of old, writers produced page after riveting page: diaries, novels, great plays. Since neither Shakespeare nor Samuel Pepys had to worry about Zoom meetings, frenetic household disinfection, nor the distractions of MSNBC and Twitter, I’m taking myself off the hook for another King Lear. The furthest I’ve gotten in my “book of Covid-19 times” is thinking about its table of contents, every week a chapter.

Chapter One: In-between Days, balanced uneasily between life as normal and life quite different, when much of my worry focused on how to react. Take that trip? Teach that class? Send my kids to school? Will this be a sprint or a marathon? My dispatch from that week appeared in the newspaper in early March. It seems like forever.

Decisions by others resolved those questions in Chapter Two: Preparations. The university closed, the schools closed, large gatherings were cancelled. That was the week of trundling giant carts brimming with groceries down every aisle, anxiously scanning the shelves for things not on the list that I might suddenly realize we needed. The gym was still open. I went, diligently wiping down equipment. How cautious it seemed then, and how reckless it seems now.

I finished my Winter Quarter class online and the upending of student life trickled into my inbox: students scrambling to catch that last plane home across continents and oceans, apologies appended to final exams. “It’s not my best work,” they told me. How could it be?

Then came Chapter Three: The Upside-Down....Read More

To-do list, revised

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 21:36:50 -0700

A little more than a week ago, my spring to-do list was a long one.

I was supposed to be in New York this past Monday. Back to Seattle. Then to Austin. The following week to Cleveland. Then DC. Then Little Rock. I was prepping my final class lectures for Winter Quarter, then was going to use UW's spring break to work on all the things scheduled for March and April.

No longer.

"I was supposed to" is a common refrain this week, especially in Seattle, a place utterly transformed by the arrival and escalation of the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19. It was strange enough a week ago, when I wrote this dispatch from America's coronavirus capital for The New York Times. It's even stranger now.

All of the above items on my to-do list are marked "done," because they've been cancelled or postponed into an indefinite future. No more hopping on planes. No more in-person teaching; classes at the UW now have gone online through the end of March, at the very least. My children went to school today for the last time before it closes; the governor has Read More

The next Silicon Valley

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 15:19:19 -0800

“Silicon Valley is the only place on Earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley.” That's how Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe put it in the late 1990s, around the time I started tracing this long, strange trip myself. It's a quest full of great moments, from Charles de Gaulle's pilgrimage to the research parks and shopping centers of Palo Alto in 1960 to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev touring Twitter and Apple in 2010. (Ashton Kutcher even makes a guest appearance.)

But it's also a tale of seven decades of economic dreams unfulfilled, with most efforts falling short of their original intentions. Beautiful research parks and generous tax breaks attracted outposts of multinational companies, but fostering a lively startup community proved elusive. Replicating the distinctive mix that had evolved in the Bay Area and Seattle was near-impossible.

My message, for a long time, was a pessimistic one. Watch out, silicon hopefuls; it's a lot harder than you think.

French President Charles de Gaulle discovers the T&C, 1960. Courtesy Palo Alto Historical Association.

Well, times change.

That's what I realized during my travels and interviews last fall, which took me to both coasts and Europe and included lots of interesting conversations with journalists from around the Read More

When worlds collide

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 10:28:59 -0700

When I set out to write a history of Silicon Valley that brought politics and policy back into the story, I had little idea of how much tech policy would be in the headlines by the time I published it. When I designed a course on the U.S. presidency a few years back, little did I realize that I'd be teaching it amid particularly, um...eventful times in presidential history. But here we are, in early October 2019, with history in the making on both fronts, not knowing yet how the story will end.

As I spend this fast-moving fall pinging back and forth between giving book talks and giving course lectures on the history of the presidency, I'm reminded how much these two worlds have in common, especially now.

Both are undergoing crises of executive power, institutional stress tests that result from scope and scale of influence becoming far greater than the builders of these institutions imagined. We have presidential impeachment, fired CEOs and imploding IPOs, academic stars taken down by scandal. All of these crises have their particulars and different degrees of seriousness; a presidency in peril is a far bigger deal than the free-fall of WeWork. Yet all are manifestations of particularly American affection toward the self-made man, the maverick who comes out of nowhere to take on the Establishment, who promises that they alone can fix it.

The ideologies and histories that connect tech and politics also were the topic of my most recent op-ed in The New York Times, my first since being named a contributing opinion writer. Not only thrilled that the piece made it in despite the avalanche of impeachment news, but also that it was paired with this brilliant illustration by Read More

Back to school

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 09:14:34 -0700

There are few things better than autumn on a college campus. Leaves are turning, backpacks sharp and textbooks new, students eager, excited, and (mostly) keeping up with the reading. Along with teaching on my own beautiful campus, I'll be visiting a few more campuses--as well as other kinds of venues--this fall, talking about The Code. Here's a schedule of events.. Best of all, for most of them, you don't need a backpack or textbook (or even be a student) to register and attend. Click on the links for more event details. And if you want to hear me without ever having to get up from your couch, scroll down further to find more of my recent media appearances for the book.

Upcoming events

WASHINGTON DC: Georgetown University - US History Workshop, Tue Sept 17 @ 12:30PM

WASHINGTON DC: American University - Washington College of Law, Tue Sept 17 @ 6PM

CHARLOTTESVILLE VA: University of Virginia - GAGE Seminar, Mon Sept 23 @ 3:30PM

SEATTLE: Read More

Is there a pause button on this thing?

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 07:34:53 -0700

Now is the time of year that Seattleites live for: blue skies, warm sun, water and mountains, no bugs or humidity (sorry, East Coasters). Very kindly, the publishing gods timed The Code's release so that I could wrap up book tour just as summer hits the Pacific Northwest with full force.

While you'll mostly find me in coming weeks on my lounge chair and working through my fiction-to-read pile, I'll also be spending some time on new(ish) writing projects and research exploration. (Hints at bottom.)

Meanwhile, links to some of the book-related pieces that appeared in the last week:

Silicon Magic: an excerpt of The Code discussing the rise of Facebook and the early intersections between politics and social media appears in the print and online editions of Newsweek (July 26 issue), as well as a Q & A with me.

Silicon Valley’s Geeks Can Still Beat China’s: my appearance on Bloomberg Opinion's weekend podcast for the weekend of July 26.

You Butt-Dialed your Mom with this Supercomputer: my favorite headline of the tour comes from KUOW, which recorded and aired my July 15 University Book Store talk as part of its Speaker's Forum series.

How Stanford, science, and war made tech history: part one of my web...Read More