Anthony Levandowski is a very smart man who has said and done a lot of dumb things. Once a brilliant young engineer, Levandowski established himself as a pioneer in the area of self-driving cars, long thought to be the next big thing. In the mid-2000s, he helped build a self-balancing motorcycle that could drive itself (poorly) and spent close to a decade at Google working on Street View and the self-driving-car teams.

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This is Levandowski, the poster boy of Silicon Valley hubris. In a 2018 profile, the New Yorker deemed him “an exemplar of Silicon Valley ethics,” an oxymoronic and backhanded compliment if there ever was one.

Levandowski’s creativity extended to his finances. While at Google, he licensed or used products from companies he also owned, the kind of financial subterfuge more befitting a Trump administration cabinet member than a Google engineer. He also set up a self-driving truck company called Otto, which he sold to Uber for $680 million just months after cashing out and quitting Google, even though Otto was barely a year old. Waymo, the self-driving car subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, sued Uber and Otto for stealing trade secrets. (The suit was settled in 2018 .) In August 2019, Levandowski was indicted by the federal government for that alleged theft. (He pleaded not guilty and has contended he did nothing wrong, and the case is awaiting trial.)

Never mind that Levandowski has taken shortcuts while operating experimental software on public roads that put people’s lives in danger and injured a coworker. The crash, and every other line he crossed, was just another “invaluable source of data” in his quest to change the world and handsomely profit from it.

Every profile of Levandowski produced a nearly identical quote from a former superior attesting to his brilliance. A representative one from his adviser at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, went as follows: “Anthony is probably the most creative undergraduate I’ve encountered in 20 years.”

“Tech, historically, has been deeply uninterested in looking backwards,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, a history of Silicon Valley. When tech companies do invoke history, she pointed out, it’s often closer to mythology. Consider the Tale of Two Steves of Apple in a garage. Otherwise, as she asked rhetorically in the book’s introduction, “Why care about history when you’re building the future?”

Levandowski may say it more harshly than others, but he is hardly alone in the belief that the past is irrelevant for those obsessed with the future.

“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”

About a year after Levandowski talked to Wired about WOTF, the New Yorker ran another long feature on Levandowski and his escapades at Google and Uber and the ensuing lawsuit. Levandowski told the writer Charles Duhigg not only that the future is all that matters, but that he didn’t care much for history either:

“We believe in progress,” WOTF’s official website states, noting that it wants to be on the Godhead’s good side when the technological rapture arrives. “Change is good, even if a bit scary sometimes.”

As with everything else, Levandowski doesn’t go about it half-assed. In 2015, he started a church called Way of the Future, shortened to WOTF, just one letter off from the more appropriate abbreviation. WOTF worships a divine artificial intelligence being called “the Godhead.” The idea here, as Levandowski told Wired in 2017, is to ease humanity’s transition from the smartest species on earth to mere pets of our AI overlords in a positive manner.

But that’s not the sole or even most important reason Levandowski is an emblem of the industry that made him rich. Levandowski is an avatar for the tech industry’s foibles because of his obsession with the future and disdain for the past, a consistent refrain at the center of the Valley’s beating heart. If the past has no relevance, everything is innovation.

The publication was, of course, referring to his alleged felony and financial chicanery, which left him astoundingly wealthy because his repeated duplicity was constantly excused by his superiors as a regrettable side effect of world-altering intelligence. He was another difficult man in a world of difficult men.

This anti-history bias is not merely a curious quirk of a group of people that has drastically shaped the modern world. It is a foundational principle. Like Levandowski’s church, it is the very basis for a belief system.

But O’Mara argues that this altar of progress is a distortion of what really made Silicon Valley what it is. “When you actually study history,” O’Mara said, “things get really messy really fast.” None more so than the history of the tech industry itself.

This hostility toward the past has deep roots in internet culture. In 1996, the Grateful Dead lyricist and early internet evangelist John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” The second sentence is: “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Wiping the slate clean with the digital era paved the way for the kind of ignorance techno-utopian narratives traffic in.

Whether intentional or not, reformatting the tech industry’s memory around the proliferation of the internet helped perpetuate a myth that the nascent industry sprang up from the brilliant minds of a chosen few without anyone else’s help. In turn, this story became the justification for a limited government that didn’t interfere with the independent spirit and economic structure that made the web great. Too bad it wasn’t true.

History does a lot of telling us what we don’t want to hear. It disposes of the progress myth we are taught in schools— which is also also a foundational principle of Levandowski’s AI church—that things just keep getting better, even as it feels like they are only getting worse.

To be sure, there were many brilliant minds working in tech, but they had help, and lots of it, from Uncle Sam. O’Mara painstakingly details such events in her book: Federal grants accounted for 70 percent of the money spent on academic research in computer science and electrical engineering from the mid-1970s to 1999; the fruits of that research were often spun off into some of the biggest and most influential tech companies of the day. Hell, the actual internet, at the time called ARPANET, was named after the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a government agency that provided it with about $1 million in funding. Starting in 1994, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and DARPA (the successor to ARPA, which focuses on defense projects) gave $24 million to six computer science departments to figure out the best way to index and search the internet. Two grad students at Stanford University named Sergey Brin and Larry Page substantially benefited from this program, which “supported much of Brin and Page’s work,” O’Mara writes. That work soon became Google. If DARPA were a venture capital fund, it would be one of the most successful in history.