More broadly, Barlow was arguing that nothing from the offline world—traditional rules, institutions, and codes of behavior, even history itself—carried any weight in cyberspace, which was “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Having ditched America’s living history of racism in less than a sentence, and ignored the misogyny outright, Barlow was then free to demand the familiar absolutist line about online speech. “Anyone, anywhere,” he wrote, “may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” The declaration is a political statement about as nuanced and considered as the hand-scrawled “Keep Out” sign that a teenager tapes on his door. Nonetheless, it accurately describes much of the Web today—the hostility to authority and rules or regulations of any kind; the privileging of freedom over empathy; the fantasy that the Internet is immune to the pull of history.

In fact, McCarthy and the other early hackers were critical of those who saw the computer revolution as a path to personal wealth or its close cousin, personal power. Even Lou Montulli recalls being taken aback by the promise of a quick fortune from Jim Clark. “He filled our heads with giant numbers of how we were going to make riches and be the most important people on the planet,” Montulli recalled, which conflicted with his own “sort of Marxist” belief that “you couldn’t make more than a million dollars honestly.”

In another Twitter essay, Andreessen argued that technological progress has benefited the poor much more than the rich—an observation he insists “flows from basic economics.” Therefore, he writes, “Opposing tech innovation is punishing the poor by slowing the process by which they get things previously only affordable to the rich.” To recommend patience in implementing technical changes is simply immoral. What’s the difference? Well, one difference is the power relationship. In the case of the disruptive democratic politics that Andreessen appears leery of, members of the public are being given greater control over their lives at the expense of an elite; in the case of disruptive technologies, an elite is driving the change.

“The idea,” which Shaw says occurred to him and Bezos, “was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is, ‘Who will get to be that middleman?’”

Upon achieving that $ 100 billion milestone, Bezos was prompted to look back twenty years to when he was “driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift.”

Had all gone according to plan, the two young academics would have created their uncannily accurate search engine, published the results in an important academic paper, earned their PhDs, and become professors. At the same time, the search engine they developed—at first called BackRub and later Google, in reference to the absurdly large number called a googol—would remain noncommercial and freely available to the public through Stanford.

The ethical obligation to run a Web search engine without advertising reflected an academic’s belief in the importance of public access to information, which could be a matter of life and death. In a remarkable appendix to that 1998 paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Brin and Page offered an example of the danger to the public from search results that were tainted by advertising. As a test, they typed in the query “cellular phone” at all the prominent search sites. Only the Google prototype, they reported, returned a top result that was critical of cell phones, specifically a cautionary study about speaking on the phone while driving. PageRank didn’t return the link in order to do the right thing, the two explained; it was simply conveying to its users what the Web thought were the most relevant links to someone interested in cell phones. The better question to ask was, Why didn’t the other sites link to that study? Page and Brin’s answer: “It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers.”

Brin and Page had put their finger on the Catch-22 of the search business: if results improved so much that they became uncannily accurate and precise—like a chess computer arriving at the single best move for a certain position—then advertising will have lost much of its purpose. You would be shown where to go based on the consensus “best result,” and thus should have little interest in hearing what an advertiser wanted to tell you. OK, there might be a few ads to introduce a new product, or to try to persuade you to switch between brands, but this wasn’t the basis of growing business. A search engine needed to sell something valuable—like reaching customers in a way competitors couldn’t—if it wanted to make a lot of money. The bad incentives were clear: search companies would stop trying to improve their services for business reasons, which is why Page and Brin toward the end of their paper made the following assertion: “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

All of which raises some intriguing alternative history: Would Brin and Page have remained true to noncommercial search had they met at a top-class school with a less go-go culture, like, say, MIT? Could they and we have avoided this reimagining of Google’s relationship with its users? Or would we instead be talking about a different pair of brilliant Stanford graduate students who researched how to improve Web search and inevitably found their way to Sand Hill Road, while our alternative-universe Brin and Page would be obscure but distinguished computer science professors?

After some fumbling with other ideas, Thiel and Levchin came up with PayPal, which would create “a new Internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” Thiel pitched the idea as fulfilling his anti-government dream of a global market that protects the welfare of the public by empowering them as consumers: “What we’re calling ‘convenient’ for American users will be revolutionary for the developing world. Many of these countries’ governments play fast and loose with their currencies. . . . Most of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like U.S. dollars.” But there was that other thing, too, the chance to make a fortune. If you happened to create and own a new digital currency, you could collect a cut from each online transaction. You would become the middleman of e-commerce, commerce, as David Shaw and Jeff Bezos had sketched out, without incurring a retailer’s burden of keeping track of orders, maintaining warehouses, and making deliveries.