Dear reader: I wrote this for World BEYOND War, where I’m director of technology. While this isn’t about me, it feels like one of the most personal things I’ve ever written, because I had to dig deep and work hard to try to explain my most elusive beliefs about politics and the meaning of peace – beliefs that seem enigmatic even to me sometimes. Now that the podcast is out, I’m happy to tell you that I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. – Marc Eliot Stein
It’s a funny thing about revolutions. Sometimes badly needed revolutionary change happens, but not only is it not televised, people don’t even realize what changed until a long time after, when pieces start coming together. They look back and say, wow, suddenly new things are possible, suddenly something is different and a huge problem we were worried about is suddenly resolved. The thing that changed wasn’t necessarily the thing we hoped would change. Maybe the way it was resolved wasn’t exactly how we expected it to be resolved, and maybe while it was happening we weren’t even sure if it was a good change, except it turned out to be. Revolutions are like that. Life is like that. There’s a massive amount of despair in the peace movement right now, and fear – and this is true not only of antiwar movements but of progressive moments in general. And I do think the peace movement is a progressive movement, even though I also think we’re at a moment all over the world when familiar barriers about progressive vs. conservative or left wing vs. right wing are breaking down, and completely new ways of thinking are coming to light. I have a special vantage point as the technology director of a global antiwar nonprofit to observe what people all over the world are saying. I interact with folks of all religions and all generations, and I pay close attention to how attitudes evolve. I know for sure that people are talking differently about war and peace than they were just a few years ago. Notions about what antiwar organizations are doing and what they should be doing are changing too. Welcome to episode 67 of the World Beyond War podcast. I’m Marc Eliot Stein speaking to you from the Lanape lands of Brooklyn New York, and I’ve got a whole lot to talk to you about today.
This episode is for everybody everywhere in the world who suffered through the agony of the year we just lived through, 2024, and understands how real the risk is right now that one senile white male president of one fascist country or another will start a nuclear war. We’re undeniably close to a nuclear war right now – one bad decision by one senile white male away from extinction. This nightmarish reality fills everyone in the world with rage and agony and urgency. Even the greedy war profiteers and ignorant pro-war loudmouths who make our problems worse are starting to worry that their steady supply of profitable military situations is morphing into out-of-control World War 3. Because that is what’s happening. Because the senile white billionaires who run the world are not only greedy, they also suck at their jobs, and we all know it. Even the international billionaire class that owns and operates most of the world’s governments – even they know the danger that a Biden or a Trump or a Putin or a Netanyahu will make a stupid mistake that escalates into nuclear war and kills us all.
The urgency many of us are feeling is absolutely vivid right now. People are ready to commit, to take risks, to make personal sacrifices and open their minds to vastly new ideas. That’s not all that’s changing. As governments reveal to us how nakedly corrupt and incompetent they are, and I’m talking from USA to Russia to Korea and really every large militarized government in the world – people are rethinking their own relationships to the large governments and bureaucracies and corporations that they used to implicitly trust but no longer can.
To balance this spreading sense of alienation from decaying institutions, though, a new kind of convergence has been happening all over the world at the same time. People still connect with strangers more and more every year on the Internet, even on today’s spoiled and corrupted Internet. Diverse communities are connecting and expanding, allowing strangers in different parts of the world to interact. One key difference in the last few years is that automatic translation is newly powerful, as you can see on the WorldBeyondWar.org website. The cultural impact of the Internet is growing as rapidly as it ever has.
Good things happen online even despite absurd showmen like Elon Musk who bought Twitter because he claimed he wanted it to stop using algorithms for political messages, except now Twitter/X’s censorship of antiwar voices is more heavy-handed than it was before, and now the algorithm keeps pushing Elon Musk’s own face, or even worse, JD Vance’s face, into my feed.
And of course it’s not just Elon Musk who’s busy enshittifying the Internet as fast as he can in the name of gullible sunshiny corporate Trumpism, while he’s not building repulsive cybertrucks that look horrible in peaceful neighborhoods. It’s also Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison. And of course it’s the massive bureaucratic corporations with many executive employees who work with these tech billionaires.
But let’s step back for a moment and think about the vast numbers of just regular people who thrive every day by connecting with and working with other people all over the world online. The greedy billionaire parasites who are trying to turn the Internet into a profit center do not dominate or define the experience for all of us who live some of our lives online everyday. We ignore Elon Musk and JD Vance and we talk to the people we want to talk to.
To help you ignore annoying tech giants and find good political conversations, follow World Beyond War on Threads and BlueSky and TikTok, and check out my own feed, Marc Eliot Stein, on Threads and BlueSky too.
The reason I think it’s so important that the internet is still thriving and still becoming more international and inclusive each year is that this is a place where revolutions can start. It’s a place where revolutions have already begun.
Our task as antiwar activists is to urge peaceful revolution. Emphasis on “peaceful”. Sometimes some chucklehead will say to me “there’s no such thing as a peaceful revolution”. To which I’ll cite the breakup of the Iron Curtain from 1989 to 1991 and the presidency of Nelson Mandela and many other inspiring events until they want me to shut up. Revolutions should be peaceful, and Internet culture is revolutionary culture. Even as the world of nations and banks and corporations collide and collude and risk nuclear apocalypse, people still greet each other with friendly smiles all over the world everyday. This is a ground where peace can grow.
I’m not imagining some futuristic process of mass societal change. I’m talking about a mass convergence that’s already happening. Well, the way I see it, humankind has been in a state of steadily rapid generational social change since the invention of the printing press in 1436. Mass social change is a big topic, and changes flow in many directions from many sources, so I’m gonna try hard not to over-generalize. But I do think that self-organizing open Internet communities are useful as a metaphor, a model, a symbol for how people can peacefully coexist on Planet Earth. This useful model sprung into popular use only 30 years ago, and of course we’re still figuring out what the Internet is, what it can do and how it is changing us.
Some activist friends of mine hate what they call “computers” (even though online culture moved on from computers to phones decades ago) and sure, they are able to be very effective political activists without being online. That’s their choice to make. But even those of us who don’t enjoy online culture itself should appreciate its potential for serendipity. The Internet stands as a free public space where people form intimate relationships across boundaries and borders, in communities where nationalities and economic barriers and regional prejudices vanish. Online culture has shown us the value of leaderless spaces, of decentralization, of organic collaboration where groups moderate their own problems and solve them. The Internet, owned or controlled by no central authority, is the world’s largest cooperative peer-to-peer architecture.
“Peer to peer” is a technical term to describe the way network software layers exchange information back and forth in polite packets on open channels. The Internet is about being polite, and keeping it brief, and waiting your turn between bursts of communication. This is a good practice on a networking level and on a sociopolitical level too.
Beyond its technical meaning, the phrase “peer to peer” provides a useful metaphor for fresh ideas about government, and about capitalism. Free software has long been a part of technology culture, even though free software is under new attack in recent years. One of the very best free open source software packages is WordPress, a wonderful publishing platform that powers World Beyond War and more other websites than any other content management system. WordPress has been in an unfortunate feud with a venture capital-funded supplier of WordPress hosting called WPEngine that refuses to respect the longstanding cooperative traditions of open source. Speaking for myself, I stand absolutely behind WordPress as it tries to fend off attacks and lawsuits from predatory capitalists and private equity firms who would be happy to dash the free Internet upon the rocks and erect paywalls everywhere. The way this feud has played out has been frustrating, and mostly amounts to expensive lawsuits and ad hominem attacks on the character of Matt Mullenweg, the generous and hardworking founder of WordPress, who is not a tech billionaire. World Beyond War couldn’t run our website without WordPress, and we appreciate all the free open source software that makes our publishing possible. I hope many of my tech friends who benefit from open source software are following this controversy, and are supporting WordPress in this crisis as well.
I’ve been participating in the frenetic world of open source software for more than 30 years, longer than I’ve been involved in the peace movement. In my mind both the open source movement and the peace movement are essential. I am lately obsessed with this idea that Internet communities provide a robust model of peaceful coexistence that everybody intuitively and immediately understands. The success of the Internet – the popular success, the business success, the cultural success – points to an almost metaphysical truth: it proves that lightweight bottom-up cooperative structures are better than heavyweight top-down hierarchical structures.
And you know this metaphysical truth resonates beautifully for a pacifist like me, because it’s a plain fact that militarism and imperialism and nationalism and war itself are the very epitome of heavyweight top-down hierarchical structures.
This is the big point I’m getting at: no matter how dominant dinosaurs may sometimes seem, dinosaurs do die.
Think of all the heavyweight top-down hierarchical structures we’ve seen weaken and collapse since the beginning of the Internet age 30 years ago. Hey, I worked for Time Warner in midtown Manhattan from 1995 to 1999, and I built websites for Sony Music from 1997 to 2004, so believe me, I know what it’s like to watch heavyweight top-down hierarchical structures collapse. It’s kind of exciting, actually.
How will we end war, before war ends us? In a sense, progressive politics is about imagining a better future. You can’t work towards a better future unless you can imagine it. But fear and despair can stunt our imagination, especially when we find ourselves unable to imagine common ground with people who happen to have different belief systems.
It’s a failure of our imagination if peace activists don’t provide a vision of a world beyond not only war but also beyond the ravages of institutional greed, corrupt capitalism, predatory international finance. Billionaires are strutting their stuff today, and I know many good activists just feel defeated. As if the wealthy crooks have won forever and the whole game is over. But, no. They have not won forever. We the people aren’t dead, and we don’t intend to lay down and die.
A couple of weeks ago a young person named Luigi Mangione shot the ridiculously overpaid CEO of an exploitative healthcare corporation in New York City, and became a sudden celebrity. Violent methods like assassination are never the answer, and the public’s enthusiastic support for a murder in New York City shows how much our imaginations have already failed us, if we can’t imagine a better way to end the outrage of healthcare profiteering and corrupt wealth inequality than shooting overpaid executives one by one on the streets.
Instead, let’s realize that the entire structure of rotten capitalism is more vulnerable than it looks.
The peace movement doesn’t need to alienate either left wing or right wing pacifists in order to take a strong stand against rotten capitalism, corrupt capitalism, corporations that buy entire governments. There are some pacifists who follow the ideas of the pro-capitalist philosopher Ayn Rand, who was probably the best example of the “greed is good” philosophy that is so popular with our empowered wealth class these days. I can get along with anybody who follows any political philosophy, and even though I don’t have much respect for Ayn Rand’s ideas about ethics and morality, I do think she was a fascinating writer and I do appreciate her courage in throwing Ronald Reagan’s support back in his face over his hypocritical position on women’s right to abortion, back when Reagan was our rotten president.
I think it would provide a breath of fresh air to progressive and antiwar movements right now to dive deep into philosophical debates exploring ideas that are considered relevant today. I’ll skip Ayn Rand. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung and Rene Girard are some of the philosophers who get a lot of attention in technology communities today, and maybe I’ll plan a future episode to focus on their ideas and why they’re relevant not only to technology but also to peace.
I’m sure it’s obvious, but still worth reminding ourselves, that peace movements must be able to work with all the various religious communities of the world. Many peace activists I know are devout atheists and some are traditionally religious and some mix up religious philosophies like I do. After one young friend heard on this podcast that I’m a Buddhist, she told me she thinks that’s cultural appropriation. I told her, well, I’ve been a Buddhist since I was 14 years old and that was a long time ago so at least I threw myself all the way into it. At least I committed. Truly, Buddhism has always seemed to me the smartest basic philosophy of life and certainly a philosophy of peace.
Smart so-called right-wing and left-wing people can and should unite behind a small government platform, a defund the federal government platform, a fuck the police platform. This may be the key area of agreement that conservative pacifists and progressive pacifists can agree on in 2025. Our totalitarian governments are oppressing and abusing all of us at the same time.
I’m personally not interested in right-wing politics, but I can coexist peacefully with different communities with different values, and I think people of all political persuasions would be happy to solve social issue controversies by adopting a live-and-let-live philosophy among diverse communities. A world of small societies based on voluntary membership who govern themselves and leave their neighbors alone provides one possible model for a peaceful future world. This seems like a better model than declaring that all the people born on a certain piece of land must belong to the nation that owns that land, whether they want to or not, and then letting these nations try to destroy each other with sanctions and missiles and bombs and drones.
Small government models provide a worthwhile goal for the entire world – and until we get there, local government politics can be effective places for peace activists to build bridges, such as when World Beyond War sponsors resolutions in places like Charlottesville Virginia or engages with partners working on regional problems in Montenegro or Bolivia or Okinawa.
I sometimes get a surprised reaction when I tell people I’m basically libertarian. To me libertarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes freedom. I don’t belong to any libertarian party and of course I reject any racist or white supremacist or anti-woman organizations that might have become associated with the word libertarianism. But I do read excellent articles about pacifism on antiwar.com, which has a libertarian slant. I’m a technologist, and at the risk of over-generalizing, a lot of tech people are libertarians. All this means is that we don’t have much use for large government, that we’d like to see large governments reduce their scope of power or even disappear completely in the future.
This runs counter to the idea that large governments are good because they keep us safe. Well, they certainly don’t keep us safe. One of the most hilarious excuses I’ve ever heard for large governments is that they prevent war. Oh really? Do they?
It’s bizarre that we so rarely question a system of involuntary citizenship that says I must be a citizen of the USA because I was born here, even though I despise USA’s militarism and imperialism and wish my taxes didn’t support it, while somebody else whose values might be much more aligned with other Americans can’t be a citizen. I stand by the radical idea that citizenship of any country should be voluntary. I don’t feel patriotism for the United States of America. To me, being against large powerful central governments is part of being antiwar.
I may call myself a libertarian, which will offend some people, or I can call myself an anarchopacifist, which more or less means the same thing. Either way, I’m willing to imagine a future in which we manage to completely deinstall, delete and unplug corrupt federal governments like the USA, and replace them with human-sized peer to peer self-governing communities. This means we wouldn’t have a federal department of education, and maybe this idea is frightening to education professionals who know how helpful a federal department can be. But the world is changing and we need to open our minds to new models of coexistence. Large-scale bureaucratic federalism between militarized involuntary governments as they try to wipe each other off the face of the earth is not the path to a peaceful future.
It blows my mind that anybody thinks a government like the United States of America or England or France plays a positive role, is a force for good in the world. It bowls me over when I hear a peace activist arguing that we should give the government more power to regulate. For instance, there are apparently some peace activists in the United States who read hyperbolic articles by fearmongers like the social media pundit Jonathan Haidt and decide it would be a good idea to regulate the Internet and ban TikTok. My god. I know I said I can get along with anybody but I have a really hard time understanding why any peace activist wants the USA to ban TikTok. I’d rather keep TikTok and ban the USA.
Is it really possible to unplug something as gigantic as the United States? For some reason some progressives don’t seem to think we’d be capable of building roads and running schools and hospitals and ambulance services without a monolith running everything from Washington DC. I think we’d do just fine.
As pacifists, our lifestyles should reflect our global sense. I’m so happy to see young people getting involved in veganism, ecological science, zero-waste lifestyles. These enduring trends are a great sign for the antiwar movement. For myself, the longer I’ve worked for an antiwar organization, the more conscious I’ve become of overconsumption and thoughtless consumption in my everyday life here in New York City, and I’m trying to do better. There are many different value systems all over the world in regard to how we consume, what we eat, what we own. It’s not always clear how different value systems should peacefully and ecologically co-exist. I consider it a foundational belief within the peace movement that our planet has room for us all, that we don’t need to fight wars over scarcity. Beyond basic concepts that humans should be able to peacefully coexist, there is no consensus either inside or outside the peace movement about what systems of governance are best. Peace activists should not shy away from provocative conversations about economic injustice and the need to address the corruption caused by vast wealth inequality, even when all peace activists don’t arrive at the same conclusions. Talking openly about these issues and acknowledging our different attitudes about economics and government will help strengthen our movement against war.
History tells us that peace can be achieved through diplomacy, through summits and treaties and handshakes under the leadership of world courts or world government bodies that sometimes even have the power to prevent war crimes. Organizations like the United Nations often do vital work for health and education and freedom of speech. There have been significant peace treaties via top-down diplomacy, such as the peace agreement in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, or more recently the crucially important anti-nuclear-proliferation treaty the United States and Iran managed to finalize in 2015, but this was ripped up by Trump and is now useless as nuclear escalation advances. Antiwar organizations have a long legacy of pursuing peace through diplomacy and treaties, and the language of antiwar movements often emphasizes the hope for world federation or universal world treaties of one kind or another.
But world federation movements bear a tragic face today, as international criminal courts bravely deliver indictments against vicious and sadistic genocides that are brutally ignored. USA’s mainstream mass media is trying to blank out the fact that Netanyahu has been indicted by a highly credible international court. Every person who ever believed in the potential of the United Nations must feel shattered by the recent humiliation of the UN General Assembly, which has tried so hard to pass resolutions condemning Israel’s blatant war crimes, only to be vetoed by all-powerful USA in the so-called security council.
International criminal courts do important work even when their indictments are ignored. But peace organizations find themselves in a muddle when their policies and programs for change were written many years ago and reflect a mindset that hopes either the United Nations or other top-down peace processes led by diplomats will be the avenue for world peace. In 2025, our dream of world peace does not involve Anthony Blinken or Marco Rubio shaking hands and signing a peace of paper.
In 2025, our dream of world peace involves removing corrupt puppets of war profiteers like Anthony Blinken and Marco Rubio from power. In an age of rising fascism and rising inequality, diplomacy can be reduced to a facade for police abuse and military aggression. When we hear phrases like “global security” today, we must ask – whose security is being protected, and whose isn’t?
The core issues of the peace movement are absolutely clear. We want the war machines of the global north – North America, Europe, and Asia – to stop destroying and endangering our planet for profit and greed. We are against military spending and weapons sales, we are against fossil fuel and mineral extraction that harms our environment, we want to abolish police abuse and prisons, we are horrified and shamed by the genocide in Gaza, the massacres in Sudan, the return of World War One style trench warfare to Central Europe. We the people need to stand together and make it clear that we blame our governments for all of these failures. We blame the wealthy individuals and corporations and criminal organizations that own our corrupt politicians. We know that we the people can do better, and we’re ready to take over today.
I’ve now worked at World BEYOND War for seven years. This is nearly the longest gig I’ve ever had, and definitely the longest full-time job I’ve ever had. We are only one of many peace organizations that work together around the world. We’re a focused and diverse nonprofit funded by small donors and no corporations or governments, and I think we do a great job of keeping our political alignments and partnerships fresh, and always updating our core messages to reflect the changing attitudes of the people we represent. We stay grounded because we reach out to all parts of the world, building new chapters, organizing powerful protests and conferences and events. Antiwar activists are good at working together, and that’s why we can prevail.
I wanted to devote this episode to laying out a vision of a peaceful world future – not my own vision but a vision that I think has already taken root and is already intuitively understood by young people all over the world, even if older generations like my own Generation Jones are slow to catch on. One way I stay in touch with what younger people are talking about is tech podcasts, because I’m pretty obsessed with stuff like blockchain and artificial intelligence and large learning models, and it happens that podcasts run by folks like Dwarkesh Patel, Lex Fridman or even the super-popular Joe Rogan bring on guests to have in-depth conversations about technology, war, history, finance, regulation and global politics.
One of my favorites is the Dwarkesh podcast, a really smart tech show run by an absurdly young AI researcher and influencer named Dwarkesh Patel in San Francisco. But a few months ago I became really enraged when Dwarkesh invited a right-wing guest, who was also an absurdly young and famous AI influencer named Leopold Aschenbrenner, except this guy’s specialty was advocating for increased AI spending by being avidly pro-war, pro-USA and anti-China. He was making the rounds of podcasts and magazines and talk shows spouting cliches about how American and European and so-called western civilizations need to invest more in artificial intelligence data centers and startups because otherwise China will start beating us in AI technology and will turn us all into communists.
Because I like the Dwarkesh podcast, I was offended that he gave so much attention to this ignorant whiz kid who probably knew a lot about artificial intelligence but had a very simplistic understanding of US-China relations or the history of communism. Not all young tech people are intellectually curious. Not all young tech people have good bullshit detectors.
But I noticed something as I was angrily listening to this podcast interview with Leopold Aschenbrenner. I sensed that Dwarkesh Patel, the host, wasn’t buying everything his guest was selling. At one point this kid said it would be better for the USA to control the entire world via AI than for China to control the entire world via AI, and Dwarkesh Patel simply responded that he didn’t agree. The moment passed quickly but it sure helped me breathe easier, and I realized that Dwarkesh Patel knew his job as a podcast host was not to schmooze with his guests but to question them so listeners can draw their own conclusions.
I had a similar experience not long after our last so-called presidential election when I subjected myself to the annoyance of a 3 hour episode of the very popular Joe Rogan show. He interviewed the tech billionaire Marc Andreessen, who has recently been a cheerleader for Trump, and I was curious how Andreessen would defend Trump’s policies to Joe Rogan, who whatever you think about him is not gullible. I don’t think Joe Rogan was wrong to do this show, because their confrontational conversation may be as close as Joe Rogan’s huge audience ever gets to skeptically questioning a Trump supporter, and I think the show exposed Marc Andreessen for the glib phony he is.
But even I was pushed past my limits when Lex Fridman, yet another absurdly young AI influencer who runs a hugely popular tech/culture podcast, interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu to supposedly ask some tough questions. It was more than I could endure to hear that mass murderer justify himself. It’s hard to sum up the worldview that’s being put out there by popular podcasts like Joe Rogan’s Lex Fridman’s or Dwarkesh Patel’s. I think it’s pointless to be offended by these kinds of podcasters, because what they are is journalists, doing journalism.
It’s by listening closely to these podcasts that I’ve come to understand that there’s a deathly but apparently sincere fear of totalitarianism among today’s generation of young coders and techies, and that this fear of totalitarianism can be exploited by war profiteers who want to spread cliches about communism or sell more weapons to Australia and Japan to use against China. There are many more where Leopold Aschenbrenner came from. Listening to shows like these can be enraging, but it helps me understand the kinds of problems and fears lots of people out there are thinking about, and I hope more antiwar activists will listen to shows like these.
We all have our own windows in our minds from which we see the world. My view of the world happens to be highly shaped by internet culture and tech culture. Also music culture and book culture and lots of other communities I participate in. I want to spread the news that there is massive outrage about war and nuclear escalation out there, that a new kind of peace movement is naturally growing everywhere on earth where people congregate, and that young people today are converging on a new kind of organic peace activism that is more bottom-up than top-down, that gets things done via consensus-driven leaderless self-governance, and most important is urgently unhappy with the planet’s status quo and wide open to change.
I know that the emerging peace movement I see is amorphous and indefinable, but I’m going to try to define and I even want to give it a name. I’d like to call it the Relational Model for World Peace.
The word “relational” comes from database technology. Information systems today nearly all run on relational databases, which is to say SQL databases. SQL stands for Structured Query Language and like many coders I know all about SQL, because databases underlie most software applications.
SQL databases are relational databases, but many decades ago before relational databases were invented the world ran on hierarchical databases, often on gigantic IBM mainframe computers the size of entire rooms. Hierarchical databases could be frustrating because they weren’t wide open to universal querying. Data was stored in silo structures that didn’t automatically interact, which discouraged the free flow of information. Mainframe computers weren’t meant to be accessible, because information needed to be controlled. Relational databases provided a technical revolution because instead of living on a central computer the size of a room, relational databases could go on small UNIX workstations or personal computers, and anybody who needed information could write a SQL query and run it themselves. The great innovation of relational databases was to make hierarchy vanish, to remove walls and barriers and requirements for permission. In a relational database, any piece of data can be related to any other piece of data. A relational database is an open database, a free database.
I want to use the word “relational” to describe an emerging peace movement that makes heirarchy vanish, a peace movement that removes barriers and walls and requirements for permission. I also thought of a couple of other technology metaphors I could propose as names instead. Should we talk about a decentralized model for world peace? Sure, but I just don’t think that word has much ring to it. How about a peer to peer model for world peace? Sure, though this brings back flashbacks to me of the battles between Napster and the music industry twenty years ago, and that’s not the kind of connotation I want to emphasize. So I’ve decided to propose that we call what I’m talking about a relational model for world peace. I hope I’ve managed to draw the outlines of what I think this model is and why it’s relevant for today.
I guess I’ll close with a story from more than 30 years ago, from the early 1990s before I started working on the Internet, when I was a young C++ developer who’d just had his second child and gotten hired on Wall Street. One reason I know a lot about relational databases is that I worked for one of the companies that made the relational database revolution happen, a software company called Sybase that was doing incredibly innovative and exciting stuff back in the early 1990s.
Sybase was a medium-sized company with a liberal techie culture based out of Berkeley, California. I was working for the New York consulting office, actually the most buttoned-down division of this west coast company, because our biggest clients were Wall Street banks like JP Morgan. In 1992 I arrived for my first day as a Sybase consultant on the 17th floor of JP Morgan’s office on 60 Wall Street, where I was supposed to help the bank transition its huge trading operations away from a monolithic IBM mainframe running COBOL on hierarchical databases to a series of small, lightweight Sun Microsystems servers running Unix on relational databases. I didn’t realize when I arrived on my first day that I would be facing hostility from JP Morgan’s departments full of suited-up COBOL coders and DB2 data architects. They sure didn’t like Unix or Sun Microsystems or Sybase, and they didn’t like consultants like me.
On my very first day at JP Morgan I was introduced to an IT guy named Dean Buckley who clearly didn’t want to meet anyone from Sybase. He was a big guy with a football player physique, and I remember his neck popping out of his tight white shirt collar when we were introduced. “I don’t know what they’re bringing you guys in here for,” he said to me with a dead stare. “I can move data faster than your little server box.”
I was too scared to laugh, but this struck me as hilarious at the time, because this Dean Buckley clearly believed that I was going to be as passionate in my advocacy for relational databases as he was passionate for his COBOL mainframe. In fact, this was my first day at a new job and I bet all I was really thinking about was the latest episode of Twin Peaks or what we’d be having for dinner. It struck me as hilarious that he would refer to some newly arrived computers as MY little server boxes, as if I had anything at stake here at all, and I really didn’t have much to say back to this Dean Buckley at all.
In retrospect I guess this just reminds me that there was a time when relational databases were considered absolutely revolutionary – and actually Dean Buckley was correct to foresee how much impact my little server boxes would have at JP Morgan and everywhere else in the world. His beloved old mainframe is surely unplugged by now, and all the world’s business and information and scientific systems run on relational databases today, and we can actually move data pretty fast ourselves, even though Dean Buckley didn’t think we could.
Well, there’s irony upon irony here, because even though Sybase was a wonderful company with admirable corporate ethics, we got our asses kicked in the relational database space by a larger competitor, Oracle, run by the same Larry Ellison who pals around with Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk and JD Vance today. Sybase’s SQL Server is today’s Microsoft SQL Server, which is yet another irony since Microsoft is one of the worst war profiteers in the world. This was not a happy ending for the software company founded by two hippies in Berkeley, but I’m going to have to end my own story here, hoping for a larger happy ending to come.
Even though Sybase is now a distant memory, the relational model for databases is dominant all over the world today. I hope I’m doing something good by trying to introduce a relational model for world peace – a leaderless independent peace movement that avoids hierarchies and welcomes diversity, built upon openness, trust and cooperation among equals.
The greatest honor I have on earth is to relate to my fellow human beings. These are the principles that keep the peace movements of the world alive, and moving forward to help a world that needs our help, that is asking for our help. Thanks for listening to episode 67 of the World Beyond War podcast, the last episode for 2024, and I’ll see you in 2025.
Check out the World BEYOND War podcast or my 2009 memoir Ten Years In Silicon Alley for more like this!
One Response
Sometimes it takes a long time for a needed revolution to even be recognized. Civil rights and the women’s revolution come to mind. Both not finished yet. Never mind when the opposition to revolution makes the revolution not possible. How does one carry out World Peace when both sides of an argument are against it? easily seen as to gaza with one side crossing borders and attacking civilian targets to include taking some as hostages and keeping them hostage in tunnels for over a year? And in response, the other side, bombing civilian targets, schools, health facilities, along with refugee camps where the hostages are not actually being kept. the opposing side to try to get their people back. We do need those that stand above the fray, like Gandhi, who suggest better options that cannot be carried out by the oppositions at the present time. Much like we are exposed to when we visit our religious institutions on our day of worship.