Is the tech industry taking a Trumpian turn?
As might be expected, well-heeled tech industry types are primarily interested in their enrichment rather than the betterment of all mankind
My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now.
JFK, 1962
Those on the Right point out that tech industry types tend to be socially hyperliberal and inclined towards censoring – sometimes subtly, sometimes not – heterodox ideas.
(Given the Woke Left long ago seized the cultural means of production, any observation edgier than “Diversity is our strength!” is frequently enough to get one banned from a social media platform.)
Those on the Left don’t usually deny tech industry wage slaves – often well-remunerated wage slaves, but employees nonetheless – are socially hyperliberal. (Often to a ludicrous extent.) Nor do they deny that Silicon Valley denizens, both owners and employees, have historically donated far more to Democrats than Republicans.
But they note that the tech industry titans behave much like businessmen – and they are almost exclusively men – have always behaved. They do everything imaginable to avoid paying any tax. They often treat their employees, especially the lower-level ones, callously. They ruthlessly crush (or simply buy up) their competition wherever possible. And they don’t really give a rat’s arse about any negative externalities of their products.
I’ve now spent the best part of a decade working in or around the tech industry, so I believe I’m well-positioned to opine on this matter. My impression is that both tech industry workers and bosses are temperamentally inclined towards libertarianism, meaning they are up for grabs by both the Left and the Right.
More on that shortly, but first a potted history of the US tech industry.
Phase one: the Republican years
I suspect most laypeople are unaware that what’s now called the tech industry – and many forms of technology, notably the Internet – were an outgrowth of what Eisenhower christened the military-industrial complex.
A business like Boeing isn’t typically described as a tech company, but that’s what it is. It even began as a start-up back when aeroplanes were still an emerging technology.
William Boeing, Boeing’s founder, wasn’t progressive. Extremely few (proto) tech company founder in mid-20th century America were. As his Wikipedia page notes, when attempting to develop some land – in Seattle, no less – he “placed racially restrictive covenants on their land to enforce segregation, forbidding properties from being ‘sold, conveyed, rented, or leased in whole or in part to any person not of the White or Caucasian race.’ Non-whites could occupy a property on the land only if they were employed as a domestic servant by a person of the White or Caucasian race.”
To be fair, racially segregated housing was the norm at the time, so Boeing wasn’t doing anything particularly out of the ordinary. But that’s the point – in mid-20th century America, tech company owners were unabashedly and straightforwardly right-wing (rather than well to the cultural left of the average voter).
Phase two: the Democrat years
What we now think of as the tech industry was founded by hippies, or at least open-minded individuals deeply influenced by California’s hippy subculture.
In terms of his views about how economies should function, Jobs probably wasn’t a million miles removed from his predecessor William Boeing. Teachers’ unions seemed to especially enrage him. He was also infamously involved in wage-suppressing ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with other tech company founders. After returning to Apple in 1997, he ended all of Apple’s corporate philanthropy. Granted, the company was not financially stable at the time. However, Jobs reportedly never reversed course, even as Apple rebounded to become one of the world’s largest and most profitable companies.
Then again, Jobs was also a hippy. A sociopathic hippy, but a hippy by any measure nonetheless. He grew up in San Francisco in the 1960s. He famously took a ‘pointless’ course in calligraphy when he enrolled in university (the inciting incident of the gazillion typefaces now available on your computer).
Jobs dropped out of university in 1972, mainly to achieve enlightenment, it would seem. After leaving uni, he travelled through India and then embraced Zen Buddhism. He also dropped acid, lived on an Oregon commune and dated Joan Baez (given the current obsession with age gaps, it’s worth noting she was 14 years his senior). He gave a much-viewed commencement speech where he urged Stanford students to be non-conformists and to pursue their passions. Towards the end of his life, Jobs faffed around with alternative medicine before seeking conventional treatments. Copies of Autobiography of a Yogi were given to guests at his funeral.
Jobs wouldn’t have been Jobs and Apple wouldn’t have been Apple without both sides of his character.
As far as I can determine, Jobs saw himself as a libertarian-leaning Democrat. He supported Clinton and Obama but, as flagged, was not a typical Democrat voter.
For reasons there isn’t space to go into here, both Leftist politics and the tech industry attract a lot of high-IQ, highly educated individuals. (Not always wise or far-sighted individuals, but academically clever ones.) I presume that’s why the cognitively elite individuals who create successful tech companies like to hang around with politicians such as Clinton and Obama rather than ones like John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Well-heeled tech types can get on board with the Left’s social liberalism. And for the last four decades, they haven’t had to worry about nominally left-wing politicians raising any awkward conversations about their reluctance to pay tax or the treatment of their minions.
Of course, the unfolding political realignment has impacted the tech sector along with everything else. Though it didn’t get much attention outside of tech-industry circles, Biden came to power promising to rein in the power, and perhaps even redistribute some of the wealth, of our Silicon Valley overlords.
To quote a recent article about Biden’s lack of popularity, even among one-time Democrat donors:
Biden has never been the tech industry’s favorite politician, and the three-plus years of his presidency thus far have been rocky in large part because of his stances on regulation. He has pushed an aggressive antitrust agenda including against Big Tech, signed a law to potentially ban TikTok and sided with unionized autoworkers over Musk, alienating the Tesla chief and some of Musk’s friends.
So, to recap:
*Biden, in contrast to his two predecessors, isn’t an impressive individual in the eyes of most tech-industry bosses (and workers, for that matter)
*Four months is an extremely long time in politics but Trump appears to be the favourite for the upcoming election. It’s always inconvenient to back the wrong horse in a critical election, and it may prove ruinous if it’s a vengeful Trump you’ve displeased
*While Trump is a populist, he hasn’t shown much interest in prioritising “common prosperity” over the interests of tech industry billionaires.
Given all of the above, it’s in the interests of tech-industry bosses – and arguably even tech-industry workers – that Trump be re-elected. On November 5, many in the tech industry will do what Democrats have long pleaded with non-billionaires to do – vote in their economic interests.
The tech industry’s Trumpian turn
Given all of the above, it’s perhaps not surprising that two digital-age robber barons put on a fundraising dinner for Trump a couple of weeks ago. David Sacks has long been an outspoken Republican, but up until about five minutes ago, Chamath Palihapitiya was a vocal Democrat.
While the amount Sacks and Palihapitiya raised ($12 million, seats started at $300,000 a pop) was trivial in the context of a US election campaign, I suspect the highly-publicised event will give many San Francisco voters with doubts about Biden permission to donate to and vote for Trump.
Political operatives, especially in recent years, have spent much time obsessing about ‘permission structures’. Put simply, voters need a solid reason to support a candidate/party they wouldn’t normally support. For instance, Red Wall voters in the UK permitted themselves to vote Tory for the first, and possibly the last, time in 2019 because of extraordinary events. To wit, the Tories having a faux-populist leader promising to get Brexit done, and Labour having a leader of little appeal to anyone other than blue-haired uni students.
For ‘Nixon in China’ reasons, I presume Palihapitiya – a Sri Lankan-born Canadian-American who was once a big Democrat backer – has credibility with the tech world’s left-leaning and liberal voters. He’s now going around explaining why he was misguided and why those like him should reconsider their Trump Derangement Syndrome. Here’s how Palihapitiya recently described his first audience with the Republican presidential candidate to his fellow alpha tech bros on their All In podcast:
I’ll give you two observations. The first is that I think there is a huge gap between how the media tries to portray Donald Trump and what he’s like when you meet him in person. And that gap is really wide. So, I would say, specifically to Democrats and independents, you really do need to sit in the room and feel what it’s like [my emphasis]. David is right. He is charismatic, he’s intellectually sharp, and he’s funny. When you put that together, he can engage an audience for a long time and be totally extemporaneous.
The other thing I would say is that he is very polite and he’s kind in a way that was disarming and was not what I expected. I felt that I had misjudged him for many years in the past. I was very glad that I had an opportunity to sit beside him and to actually interact with him one-on-one. It was really engaging. That’s more about the style. Then about the substance, what I would say is that it was not just a pro-American agenda, but it’s very clear that he was pro-innovation. He was really supportive of AI in the details that he talked about.”
As I keep saying, 2024 is the year the political-realignment rubber is really going to start hitting the road.