I can understand why. In the 50s-60s, tech was highly military, or corporate. The NASA people came from building ICBMs to the space program and joined a similarly staid, regimented culture. The IBM guys were notoriously square. Silicon valley was also started and funded by these types (e.g. Shockley from Bell Labs), but then at the same time there was the LSD-influenced counter-culture developing around Stanford and Berkeley. Eventually these people, with desires of consciousness-expanding, world-changing, even revolutionary outcomes, started to populate the labs and develop new companies. Apple wasn't alone among companies that thought they were doing something with counter-cultural and utopian ideas. "Digital Research" of CP/M fame was originally called "Intergalactic Digital Research". Many of these types were highly influenced by science fiction and probably had a little adjacent experience with the hippies.
Many people envisioned a future where there wasn't a phone company intermediating a long-distance call, where you could participate in a virtual economy without government interference, and where many more products were not much affected by capital and scarcity. After all, once you have the computer, the software possibilities are unlimited, even if the hardware might not be ready yet. People could extrapolate from dial-up modems to neural linkages and participation in a virtual or holographic universe which was free from physical constraints.
What we have in the 2010s and beyond is people coming to terms with the reality that what they developed is actually a more effective straight-jacket than the previous constraints of physicality, and at the same time it is hollowing out traditional human relationships and social constructs. The fact that things like MAGA, Qanon, Ziz, and 764 are transnational and transcultural now is bizarre. These are all disappointing developments from the dystopian side of 70s-80s science fiction, not what people thought they were building when they were creating the first addictive smartphone apps.
Many people envisioned a future where there wasn't a phone company intermediating a long-distance call, where you could participate in a virtual economy without government interference, and where many more products were not much affected by capital and scarcity. After all, once you have the computer, the software possibilities are unlimited, even if the hardware might not be ready yet. People could extrapolate from dial-up modems to neural linkages and participation in a virtual or holographic universe which was free from physical constraints.
What we have in the 2010s and beyond is people coming to terms with the reality that what they developed is actually a more effective straight-jacket than the previous constraints of physicality, and at the same time it is hollowing out traditional human relationships and social constructs. The fact that things like MAGA, Qanon, Ziz, and 764 are transnational and transcultural now is bizarre. These are all disappointing developments from the dystopian side of 70s-80s science fiction, not what people thought they were building when they were creating the first addictive smartphone apps.