When Silicon Valley heavyweights were sworn into privileged positions by President Trump, it was an unprecedented display of wealth and power.
“Going back to the Gilded Age, we could have the same concentration of capital and power. You know, Rockefeller and Carnegie,” says historian Margaret O’Mara, the two richest people on earth ever. He said this while quoting people. “But they weren’t on the dais at the inauguration.”
This moment could be interpreted in many ways. Was it Trump, the most status-conscious of the alpha males, who brought with him such formidable figures as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg? Or were the billionaire moguls in the Capitol Rotunda sitting in front of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees asserting their social, economic, and cultural supremacy?
Probably both.
In any case, Silicon Valley and its technology have made a remarkable leap in one generation from a bunch of apathetic and often politically naive entrepreneurs to near-powerful rulers making kings of the political world. I can’t deny it.
Only America.
And yes, that’s the irony you sensed.
The explanation for their similarities does not lie in the creation of some dizzying, life-changing, paradigm-upsetting consumer product, or in some brilliant virtue or particularly rich spirit that graces the fruitful plains of Silicon Valley. do not have.
“This is one of the oldest truisms in politics,” said Larry Gerston, a professor emeritus of political science at San Jose State who has had a front-row seat to the tech industry for decades. “Money buys access.”
Bezos’ Amazon and Zuckerberg’s Meta are among the tech companies that each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Mr. Musk invested more than $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump.
Considering that they are like conjoined twins to the 47th president, it seems like the money was well spent.
Let’s go back to July 1997. That’s when some of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs and executives announced with great fanfare the creation of a venture called Technology Network. Based in Palo Alto, it was founded as a one-stop shop to advance political causes, lobby on issues and support preferred candidates. The organization’s founding and seeding with $2 million in change was a notable departure for an industry that had previously only been involved in campaigns and elections on a temporary and peripheral basis.
As Garston said at the time, “They don’t know politics. Their mentality has always been to put all the money they have into research, development, and product.”
That closed-minded thinking began to change with the realization that issues such as taxes, tariffs, foreign trade, and legal liability were critical to the prosperity and long-term future of high-tech industries. Industry leaders have become more involved in local issues, focusing on topics such as permitting and transportation. At the state level, it spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat a 1996 California ballot measure that would have made it easier to bring security fraud lawsuits. (High-tech companies have been particular targets of such shareholder lawsuits because of their volatile stock prices.)
In Washington, President Clinton and his high-tech vice president, Al Gore, broke ground by lobbying the industry eagerly to associate itself with the industry’s cool and cutting-edge reputation.
At the time, the Internet was in its infancy, and Silicon Valley startups were seen as startups that needed to be nurtured and protected in the face of Goliaths like software giant Microsoft. One of the results was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which to this day still protects social media from liability for content posted by users, even if it is inflammatory or inappropriate. is spared. (Back then, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc. didn’t exist. Zuckerberg was 12 years old.)
“Even though the Internet was commercialized and everyone was excited about the World Wide Web, it was still something that sat on a desk and left behind,” said John, a professor at the University of Washington and author of The Code: O’Mara, author of The Code. Silicon Valley and the remaking of America. ”
“The software, platforms, and tools that these companies produced that were disrupting all kinds of industries, from taxis to hotels to politics, didn’t exist,” O’Mara said.
As the industry grew massively and exponentially, and technology became integrated into every part of daily life, attention from Washington became increasingly intense and less favorable. Concerns about personal privacy, election interference, exploitative labor practices, and the harmful effects of social media have taken much of the luster away from the tech industry and its shiny gadgets, especially among Democrats.
Republicans had their own grievances. In his first turn in the White House, President Trump accused Google, Facebook and other social media companies of censorship and anti-conservative bias.
Apathy was long gone. Tech leaders and venture capitalists are doing what railroads, steel, oil and gas, and many other industries have done before them, hiring armies of lobbyists and playing politics and politics to protect and preserve their interests. We invested a lot of money in politicians.
“People who wanted to be alone and stay away from politics realized their only chance of survival was to participate in the policy-making process,” Garston said.
It’s just business sense.
But there’s something dingy and disgusting about the overwhelming influence of Trump’s inner circle and their rocky relationship with a president clearly obsessed with money and flattery. There is something. Mr. Zuckerberg has eliminated third-party fact-checking on Facebook to avoid contradicting Mr. Trump’s untrue statements. Amazon paid $40 million to license Melania Trump’s documentary.
To make matters worse, there is the unholy economic influence of the big names in the technology industry. With Midas-sized donations and a Supreme Court that equates political contributions with free speech, they can scream, but most of the rest can only whisper.
Then again, it may prove money well spent.
Mr. Trump will have significant influence over the coming years on antitrust policy, the development and use of artificial intelligence, and the growth and adoption of cryptocurrencies, to name just a few of the pay-related issues of critical importance to the technology industry. It will be. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is currently pursuing a lawsuit seeking to end Google’s search supremacy and Apple’s practices that make it difficult for consumers to switch software and hardware.
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, chief executives of Apple and Google, respectively, were among the tech moguls who paid tribute to Trump. Whatever their taste in art, they certainly weren’t there to admire the statues and oil paintings that line the gilded Capitol Rotunda.
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