Silicon Valley’s next struggle is going to be political. President Biden and many Democrats have to respond to the fact that Silicon Valley is very unpopular. People will see how the US government bailed out Silicon Valley Bank, supposedly because it had all these important companies attached to it. Would the government have done the same for a midsize bank in Oklahoma, which has oil and agriculture and main-street businesses as its clients? Are they not important? Shouldn’t they be protected? Everyone can see that the Democrats are playing favourites with Silicon Valley.
At the same time, in their unbelievable arrogance, Silicon Valley elites decided to become the main funder of the Democratic Party and to identify with every ‘progressive’ cause. And then they wonder why Republicans, who usually slobber after anyone with money, are saying that they have nothing to gain from supporting Big Tech. If I’m a conservative, I have nothing to gain from Meta, from Google, from Apple, from Microsoft, from Amazon. I’m their enemy, they’re trying to squash me or they don’t want to do anything that would help my constituents. So you’ve got this coalition of right-wing populists and left-wing populists. If they could ever come together, I think Silicon Valley will have some serious problems.
Flashback: Silicon Valley Has Gone From Liberating To Creepy. “Where, a decade or so ago, the tech world’s products served to liberate us from the control of big institutions — I wrote a book on that! — now they seem designed to keep us under the thumb of big institutions. People used to start blogs to express themselves. Now they communicate via giant quasi-monopoly ‘social media’ sites that mute and ban users over their politics. Your computer and phone used to be ways for you to learn more about the world than had ever been possible before in human history; now your devices have turned into tools for governments and corporations to keep tabs on you in ways that have never been possible before in human history.”