The headlines learn, “How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms” and “Tech kisses the ring at Trump’s inauguration.” However that’s a mirage. The actual Silicon Valley, though self-interested as ever, stays liberal to the core, a actuality emphatically bolstered by the 2024 November elections.
Silicon Valley, the casual area on the south finish of the San Francisco Bay, is acknowledged universally because the preeminent middle of technological innovation and revenue. The silicon appellation comes from the Seventies rise of silicon-based semiconductor manufacturing, and the “valley” — stretching south to Santa Cruz and north to San Francisco — stays the worldwide chief in chip design, social media, web and digital monetary providers, smartphones and now, synthetic intelligence.
Silicon Valley’s tech ecosystem brings collectively a whole lot of hundreds of scientists and engineers, startup-backing enterprise capitalists, attorneys specializing in mental property and a bunch of different providers that make it doable for anybody with a good suggestion, and plenty of with much less profitable ones, to start out a tech firm and maybe strike it wealthy.
Silicon Valley billionaires and CEOs had been in attendance at President Trump’s inauguration in particular person and as million-dollar donors, however the individuals who make Silicon Valley profitable are extra various and far more progressive. In a New York Instances interview this month, enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen tried to painting the tech trade as embracing Donald Trump.
The fact couldn’t be farther from the reality.
Actually, Silicon Valley stays progressive on local weather change and the surroundings, immigration, human rights, reproductive rights and social fairness, and its residents vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
In his interview, Andreessen appears to acknowledge that younger tech professionals — the workhorses of Silicon Valley — reject Trump and the political inclinations of his billionaire supporters. He blames elite universities for “radicalizing” the workforce into “America-hating communists,” when in actual fact he’s simply complaining in regards to the valley’s widespread assist for considerate authorities regulation and equitable taxation.
In seven of essentially the most prosperous Silicon Valley cities — Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Portola Valley, Woodside and Atherton — mixed, Kamala Harris received 76.2% of the vote, in contrast with 20.1% for Trump
Certainly, Atherton, thought of the wealthiest metropolis within the U.S., voted for Harris 71% to Trump 27%. Atherton is the place Andreessen listed his mansion in March for $33 million as he abandoned Northern California for Malibu.
Most elected officers in Silicon Valley are Democrats. The area’s congressional delegation contains progressive champions Ro Khanna and Zoe Lofgren, who has pushed to tie CHIPS Act funding to labor and environmental requirements.
When tech titans Andreessen, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg align themselves with Trump’s imaginative and prescient, it reveals at the least as a lot about defending their fortunes because it does any actual political evolution within the Bay Space
At a Stanford College convention final fall, Andreessen attacked the regulation of synthetic intelligence. AI, the gathering of applied sciences made well-known by language fashions like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, represents each immense alternative and threat. But right here was a billionaire investor, with huge stakes in additional than 100 AI corporations, smugly declaring that considerate oversight would “kill innovation.” On the identical time, as evidenced by union statements, office “belief and security” stories and surveys of AI researchers, hundreds of valley professionals assist the moral growth of AI.
Equally, Andreessen attacked the Biden administration’s half-hearted makes an attempt to manage cryptocurrency hypothesis, charging that the Democrats had been out to kill a strong — however typically rife with fraud — new trade supported by Trump. On the identical time, his agency, Andreessen Horowitz, has greater than 150 cryptocurrency-related corporations in its portfolio. When he rails towards “debanking” of crypto founders, isn’t he actually complaining about primary client safety measures which may have an effect on his portfolio’s worth?
Andreessen appears to be like again fondly to the Nineteen Nineties and Democratic assist in funding of the early growth of the web, from which he benefited personally and considerably. Actually, Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial capitalism wouldn’t have been doable with out federal analysis cash, product acquisition and antitrust enforcement. The transistor itself, invented at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and primary to the tech revolution, was solely accessible to Silicon Valley startups due to a 1956 antitrust consent decree between the federal authorities and AT&T. Now, nevertheless, tech oligarchs akin to Andreessen anticipate Trump to free them from federal regulation, oversight and taxes.
Andreessen is only one of a handful of tech leaders who’ve made a present of aligning themselves with Trump.
Whereas Elon Musk’s DOGE makes an attempt to regulate federal businesses at the moment are entrance and middle, he has constantly opposed federal laws that price his companies. For instance, in November, after the Wall Avenue Journal documented regulation-defying air pollution from Tesla’s crops in Texas and California, Musk co-authored an op-ed article within the newspaper proposing, amongst different issues, that the federal government cease imposing environmental guidelines.
Zuckerberg has typically spoken about Fb’s mission to attach folks and construct group. Nevertheless, his choice to bow to Trump and exchange fact-checking — censorship, Meta’s leaders, now name it — with crowdsourced moderation will seemingly amplify Fb’s function in spreading misinformation, hate speech and different divisive content material. Most researchers have discovered that utilizing crowdsourcing to police falsehoods has combined results at finest.
Regardless of reported opposition from staff, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief govt, has additionally veered his firm abruptly to the appropriate in current weeks by dropping its variety targets and its 2018 pledge towards making use of AI applied sciences to weapons growth or to make use of in surveillance.
Tech CEOs and cash males cozying as much as the Trump administration haven’t any disgrace in regards to the the 180-degree contortions they need to carry out to guard their investments. When Andreessen talks in regards to the far-left “radicalizing” Silicon Valley’s college-educated staff and blocking startups with security laws, he’s actually speaking about his personal far-right radicalization, and his resistance to the official want of tech staff and society at massive to make sure that highly effective new applied sciences serve the general public good.
Democrats haven’t deserted Silicon Valley, and the valley hasn’t deserted the Democrats: Tech oligarchs’ Faustian cut price with Trump attracts headlines at the moment, however they’re more likely to study that Trump has his personal agenda. Quickly sufficient they might discover that Trump’s insurance policies — on immigration, commerce and tariffs, local weather, human rights and extra — will undermine the financial surroundings that has allowed them to flourish.
John Markoff coated Silicon Valley for the New York Instances for 29 years. Lenny Siegel is former mayor of Mountain View, the birthplace of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor trade.
