Bob Tacto's columns

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The Lost Civilization of the Modem: What the BBS Era Taught Us About the Internet We Lost

The Lost Civilization of the Modem: What the BBS Era Taught Us About the Internet We Lost There is a persistent, almost comforting myth in the tech world that progress is linear—that every new iteration of software is objectively better than the last, and that the digital ecosystems we inhabit today are the inevitable, polished evolution of a crude past. We look back at the Bulletin Board System (BBS) era of the 1980s and early 1990s with a kind of condescending nostalgia. We picture flickering green phosphorous screens, the screeching handshake of a 2400 baud modem, and clunky text-based menus. It is viewed as the digital equivalent of the Stone Age: fascinating, but primitive. But this framing is a dangerous fallacy. The BBS was not a rough draft of the internet; it was an entirely different philosophy of connectivity. It was a decentralized, human-curated, intimacy-driven network that, in many ways, offered a more authentic and healthy social contract than the hyper-scal...

The Last Homepage: A Web 1.0 Kid Reflects on Angelfire, Tripod, and the Internet We Lost

When Lycos switched off the servers for Angelfire and Tripod on April 24, 2026, I felt a quiet, personal grief. I had not visited those sites in years, but I had grown up there. I was a teenager in the late 1990s and a college student in the early 2000s, and back then the web was not something you scrolled—it was something you built. If you wanted to be seen, you had to be both a coder and an artist. The most popular pages on GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod were not just functional HTML; they were digital canvases where visual flair and technical skill competed for attention. I remember my first homepage. It was on GeoCities, in one of those themed neighborhoods that made the early web feel like a digital suburb. I chose a username, opened a blank HTML file, and stared at a screen full of possibilities. I learned <body bgcolor>, <table>, <font face>, and the strange art of making images line up correctly. But the real work was the design. I needed a tiled...

The Emperor’s New Clothes: How the Cult of the CEO Created Luigi Mangione

The Emperor’s New Clothes: How the Cult of the CEO Created Luigi Mangione The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2024 sparked a deeply unsettling public reaction. Amidst the standard condemnations of violence was a disturbing, swelling chorus of online mockery, deflection, and even outright sympathy for the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione. In the fractured landscape of modern American discourse, Mangione was not universally viewed as a murderer, but by many as a vigilante—a populist avenger striking a blow against a corrupt system. For those of us who study corporate governance, this reaction was as predictable as it was horrifying. It is the logical, bloody culmination of a dangerous illusion that has been carefully cultivated for decades by politicians, media figures, and business magnates themselves: the myth of the CEO as an absolute dictator. In the public imagination, the chief executive officer has been transforme...

California Isn’t Dead. But It Has to Fight for Its Economic Future.

innovative, productive, and culturally influential places on earth. But it has lost its monopoly on the future. Other states are no longer just cheaper alternatives. They are building complete ecosystems—housing, schools, production facilities, transit, and cultural amenities—designed to make California transplants feel at home. Paramount’s threat to leave is a warning, not a death sentence. The supercommuters of the Altamont Pass are a sign of dysfunction, not an unavoidable cost of success. The real estate pipelines from San Jose to Austin and from Los Angeles to Nashville are evidence that California’s biggest exports are sometimes its own workers. California can adapt. It has done so before. But adaptation requires honesty: the state must build, not just dream. It must decentralize opportunity, not just celebrate its coastal enclaves. It must compete for jobs, not assume they will always come back. And it must accept that the next reinvention may happen in Fresno, Baker...

California Isn't Dead. But It Needs to Start Acting Like It's in a Fight

Earth, research universities that still out-produce their rivals, a climate that remains genuinely unmatched, and decades of accumulated specialized expertise that doesn't relocate as easily as an office lease. Companies aren't leaving California because the state has stopped being valuable. They're leaving, or threatening to leave, because other states have made it cheap and easy to capture a slice of that value without paying California's price of admission. That's actually the more useful way to think about the state's predicament. This isn't a story about decline; it's a story about mispricing. California has been charging monopoly rents—in housing, in permitting delays, in regulatory friction—on the assumption that its advantages were durable enough to absorb the cost indefinitely. Other states have correctly identified that assumption as a vulnerability and are pricing accordingly. So what does genuine adaptation look like, as opposed t...

The Ownership Alternative

Why Worker Cooperatives and ESOP's are the antidote to VC's Inequality machine The Ownership Alternative: Why Worker Cooperatives and ESOPs Are the Antidote to Venture Capital's Inequality Machine Every year, billions of dollars flow into venture capital funds clustered along the US-101 corridor between San Francisco and San Jose. This capital chases the next unicorn, generating eye-popping returns for a tiny sliver of investors while leaving most workers with nothing more than a paycheck. Meanwhile, a quieter revolution is unfolding in places like Oakland, Boston, and Minneapolis—one that puts ownership directly into the hands of the people who do the work. Worker cooperatives and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) represent the most promising, yet chronically underfunded, solution to America's staggering income inequality. It is time we paid them the attention they deserve. The scale of America's wealth gap is almost incomprehensible. In the United...

The System That Made William Shockley Still Run Venture Capital

William Shockley is remembered in Silicon Valley as a contradiction: a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who co-invented the transistor, and a vicious racist who spent his final decades campaigning for eugenics. The standard story treats him as an embarrassing footnote—a brilliant man who lost his way, a toxic founder whose own employees fled. But that story is too comfortable. It lets the tech industry distance itself from the man while quietly preserving the system that made him. The truth is more disturbing. Shockley was not an aberration. The values, assumptions, and management instincts he embodied were not discarded when his “Traitorous Eight” walked out the door in 1957. They were carried into Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and eventually into the venture capital firms that financed Silicon Valley. The system that produced William Shockley—a system that fused eugenic pseudoscience, authoritarian management, and a narrow definition of merit—did not die. It scaled. If we ...