Tech & Trump

America's tech elite is embracing Trump en masse. Why?

After Elon Musk blazed the trail it has now become standard operating procedure to limit the amount of moderation a social media can have. There are some reasonable discussions to be had over the extent to which private individuals owning social medias should be able to set the de facto rules on how a society is able to conduct its public conversations. I do think there are valid concerns about overly aggressive moderation, but the reverse is also concerning. What bothers me most however, is how central the political winds have become to corporate governance and strategy in the US.

Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk have been strong supporters of what is broadly thought of as left-wing progressive ideas such as being pro-abortion, pro-immigration, and pro-multiculturalism. Ten years ago the stereotypical Silicon Valley programmer was solidly Democratic with left wing views, but now the tech moguls are tripping over themselves to please president Trump and the MAGA crowd. Some may see this as a long con where corporate leaders have finally found themselves in a political climate where the can remove their progressive mask without fear. But I think there reality is that their views have changed over time, in no small part because of their material success.

The tech world seems insular to an outsider like myself. It does not surprise me that any fealty to ideals was fleeting when there arose a parliamentary consensus on the tech world’s inadequacies. Given how the tech elite has roots in certain parts of California specifically, rather than the broader US or any other part of the world, it becomes acutely vulnerable to political shifts. And when you encounter tech bro-dom talking to itself you get a sense of just how much groupthink it can generate. Ideas like the metaverse and crypto being the future of money does not hold up to scrutiny in the real world, but are or at least have been the Next Big Thing in the Valley. If a new administration were to crack down on venture capital, social media, or put a tax on technology podcasts what would be lost is not just a product or a company, but the economic niche which forms the backdrop and foundation to tech bro culture.

You can build a company anywhere in the world, but you could only build a company like Theranos or FTX in the cultural context of California’s tech industry. You can start a club anywhere in the world, but you could only start the Bored Ape Yacht Club in Silicon Valley.

The emphatic embrace of Trump then, is not just selling out, but also a strategy to preserve a way of life. There is no room for front end developers, product managers, and venture capitalists in JD Vance’s ideal America of industry and family values. The centre of the world would move from San Francisco to Detroit. So if you can’t beat them, join them.

This is not to excuse Meta’s actions, or the actions of any of the other tech tycoons or their firms. Meta’s decision to fire content moderators is blatantly cynical, and becomes gross when you realise that much of the money saved by not having to pay that staff will end up directly in Zuckerberg’s pocket. It is also a worrying development to see big business march to the beat of the current administration’s drum. It is forming a corporatocracy from the bottom up rather than the top down, and amassing even more power in the hands of leaders like Trump and Biden is a self-evidently bad idea.

Being a good corporate leader is about more than high P/E multiples. It is about making decisions that are in the best interest of the firm and the society in which the firm lives. Just as no man is an island, entire of itself, every company is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And it was precisely the short-sighted, share-price-first approach to content moderation, and the societal harms that caused which created the adverse conditions facing Silicon Valley in the first place. Instead, as always, Zuckerberg and company take a shortcut towards wealth without thinking of the ramifications farther out than next quarter. A genuinely pro-social institution would not have to worry nearly as much as Meta will have to. Just consider how much Trump railed against established media and how well those companies were able to weather the storm without rolling over to show their bellies.

A more deeply polarised society with more and more radical rhetoric is the likely outcome of Meta’s decision. That is not an environment favourable to businesses, tech or otherwise. It will not endear the tech bros to the left, nor to the centre. It will in short, make Meta ever more exposed to risk form the way the political winds blow.

If you liked this post you can read a previous post about Greenland and NATO here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!

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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.

Written by Karl Johansson

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Cover photo by ??? from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson