Raise your hand if you hate traffic

Forbes , May 21, 1999

THE 360.ALPHA SUMMIT was a big, flashy conference featuring the cream of the Austin, Tex. high-tech community—several hundred top executives and venture capitalists. Dedicated to the broad topic of improving Austin for technology business, the January gathering was well financed, well attended, and well intentioned.

The summiteers stood up and told high-tech Austin that it's virtuous to be civically involved. America Online cofounder Marc Seriff, now an investor in local startups, said to the Austin American-Statesman: "That's a new message that has just begun to spread in the past 12 months."

Indeed it has—not only in Austin, but throughout the high-tech world. The Silicon Valley-based Technology Network, a political action group, has grown from 12 founding members to more than 100. Last year these executives held 90 meetings with officeholders and candidates, including 35 fundraisers. Politics has become cool among high-tech leaders.

The trend is encouraging to politicians and policy wonks. High-tech endorsements offer clean money and cutting-edge cachet. If the technology community supports a proposal or candidate, the reasoning goes, that proposal or person must be good for the economy and just plain smart. After all, those high-tech people are millionaire brainiacs.

Unfortunately, earnest technologists can easily be manipulated.

They're suckers for the myth of neutral technocracy—think of Ross Perot's "best experts"—that promises solutions with no messy conflicts of interest or values. Eager to seem civic-minded, they often don't ask tough questions or challenge policy proposals couched in positive rhetoric.

These traits were on display in Austin. I spoke at the conference but felt out of place—a rude messenger from the land where political ideas clash, buzzwords have concrete legal meanings and economic policy entails tradeoffs. The conference, by contrast, assumed that smart, well-meaning people will agree on the right set of policies.

"Quality of life" is a prime concern in Austin, since local high-tech leaders know they're not going to lure employees from Silicon Valley with better weather. To protect quality of life, environmentalist Robin Rather told attendees, Austin must contain "sprawl." She rallied them to endorse "transportation and mobility measures that reduce sprawl," a sentiment that won 89% support in an instant poll.

Rather did not specify what measures she had in mind. She was thus able to smuggle a lengthy policy agenda into some well-chosen vague language.

Vice President Gore, who has made opposition to sprawl a defining issue of his nascent presidential campaign, defines the problem as building "flat not tall"—letting houses and office parks spread into the countryside. Sprawl means spacious houses with yards and flexible drives to work. Sprawl is, in other words, exactly the sort of suburban life that attracts families to Austin. Rather's "transportation and mobility measures" would increase housing density and traffic congestion. Her agenda is controversial, not simply a matter of good intentions and smart planning.

The vague polls didn't fool everyone. "They asked these questions and took great joy in the answers of the audience, but the questions were terrible," says former Microsoft applications honcho Mike Maples, who has retired to a ranch outside Austin. "You didn't have to do any thinking. It was, 'Do you like motherhood?'. . . I didn't think they learned anything."

But you don't ask questions like those to learn anything. You do it to get the high-tech community's imprimatur on policy proposals. Whether they know it or not, Austin's high-tech leaders have gone on record: They're against new roads, suburban housing and office parks, and for mass transit, mandatory carpooling and high-density apartments and condos.

There are genuine arguments for those proposals, which reflect a particular vision of community life. That vision is too static and intolerant in my view, but it deserves debate—the sort of examination the Austin summit was too friendly to conduct. Like financial capital, political capital is a precious commodity.

Investing it wisely requires not just good intentions, but due diligence.