As Margaret O’Mara documents in her book The Code, Silicon Valley’s origins lay in military funding for advanced communication technologies during the Korean War. A parallel infusion of funding was reshaping psychiatry and pharmacology at the same time and place. Cross-pollinations between these two worlds were frequent. Gregory Bateson—whose home sat less than a thousand feet from the garage that would become the first headquarters of Google—thus found himself not just witnessing but shaping the place that would become known as Silicon Valley in the years of its birth.
