"I suspect that most employees in the tech industry remain interested in building good products, not in overthrowing democracy or achieving a dark enlightenment. A bottom-up resistance would come from engineers and founders who dislike politics and want to get back to building tools that help people."
https://archive.ph/aud3o
24 Comments
The problem, as always, seems to be billionaires, the business people, and the belief that growth is infinite.
“This might be a problem”, said the frog that was already boiling in water.
The time to be concerned was before the election, now the options are severely limited to nonexistent.
The influence is already massive… It is clear that tech studies massively neglected to also teach ethics…
Submission Statement: Mr. Andreessen has become the evangelist of techno-optimism, a philosophy [described](https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-marc-andreessen-techno-billionaire-wrong-techno-optimism/) by the Wired columnist Steve Levy as “an over-the-top declaration of humanity’s destiny as a tech-empowered superspecies.” Like characters in an Ayn Rand novel, Mr. Musk, Mr. Thiel and Mr. Andreessen may believe that they have torn off the blinders of convention to seize the greatness they deserve. But their approach may actually weaken Silicon Valley in the long term. The industry’s embrace of government power and money threatens what has made it an engine of innovation and a magnet for creative talent.
You act like they weren’t there already… politics had been caught red handed manipulating social media for a long time as admitted by Zuckerberg. Now you just don’t like the politics of who’s running the show.
Kinda late to the party. Tech companies from Silicon Valley are influencing everything from genocides to squashing union organizing- around the world, not just the US.
Actually, it appears to me that the SV Muskrats have abandoned libertarianism for the corporate-welfare state:
* Propping up weak cryptocurrencies
* free sales events at the White House
*, closing public services that ‘compete’ with their government-subsidized operations (like SpaceX).
We all know that unchecked power will be abused. This is a fact of human nature that our entire system of government is explicitly structured around preventing. So isn’t it strange that the entire liberal political class, media, intellectuals — well meaning, otherwise intelligent — seem to simply forget this when it comes to private individuals or corporations? This is the power of capital to command people’s minds.
What?? The influence hasn’t really grown; it’s just become more visible. The only difference now is that you’re seeing it more clearly. Let’s not pretend that both parties haven’t massively benefited from the deep pockets of the tech bros. The Democratic Party has taken more money over the years; it’s just that the tech bros now see it’s more financially beneficial to align themselves with the Republicans. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that this is somehow a Republican thing. They bet on both horses, and sometimes, they favor one horse more than the other.
The amount of money poured into campaigns and PACs by corporations:
[https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/all-profiles](https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/all-profiles)
This might explain why Boeing (despite their current track record) was granted the F47 contract over long-standing contender Lockheed Martin:
[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/boeing-keeps-giving-big-money-to-lawmakers-who-voted-to-overturn-the-election-after-amazon-microsoft-stopped/](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/boeing-keeps-giving-big-money-to-lawmakers-who-voted-to-overturn-the-election-after-amazon-microsoft-stopped/)
[https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/11/02/largest-defense-firms-donate-millions-to-election-denying-lawmakers/](https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/11/02/largest-defense-firms-donate-millions-to-election-denying-lawmakers/)
If not Silicon Valley then whom would you rather have influence (health care, casinos, energy….)? With USA allowing political lobbying some business group with money will have most influence.
I would argue that the time to be merely concerned is long past.
Used to be real estate, steel, oil, railroads
More things change.
>It is painfully obvious that we should be concerned about Silicon Valley’s growing influence over the United States government.
You should be!?
I think it is to late for that? Maybe in 2010 douring obvious monopoling od search engines and social media consolidation or even earlier during dot.com double when stock manipulation was as obvious as now.
Nah, that ship has sailed, they made their capital and than consolidated thir position throug media and monopoly, what you see is not a warning but end game, like Pompei residents deciding to leave on August 24th…
Reading assignment – the Book Palo Alto.
Hint: The missile, chip and bomb makers and the high IQ individuals churned out by Stanford, etc. have always been in control to some degree.
Even hear of the Hoover Institute? This dude is from the WWI Era and set the basic pace for lots of what we see today. The Institute is still there….in Silicon Valley.
Folks seem to think this is something new which can be reversed. Nope…the entire USA and, to some extent, the entire world is based on it.
And there seems to be an effort to make this worse not better.
The “PayPal Mafia” is real and PT is pulling the strings. Most of Tesla stock is locked up by institutions that were started, currently led or influenced by members of the PayPal Mafia.
Says a lot about these guys’ confidence in their products when it’s apparently more sustainably profitable to support a regime change in the most powerful nation in the world instead of… you know, innovating.
“Growing influence?” They have already seized power!
Anything that has that big a sway on the national economy is going to be a priority for a government aligned with business interests.
The easiest way to sever the connection is to demolish the companies through boycott. Zuck has no influence if people stop using Instagram and WhatsApp. People need to pledge a ***No Musk, No Bezo, No Zuck, No Brin*** boycott until we, well, destroy the monopolisitc American tech economy and replace it with something decentralized and more responsive to the needs of users over shareholders. Something something Jaron Lanier.
It’s a bit late, honestly. Social media went from being a fun little way to stay connected with people to being one of the worst things to ever happen to humanity, partially because of the bottomless greed of the people at the top and partially because it allowed the dumbest people on the planet to find each other and gain strength in numbers and start spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Remember when the US oil industry had us blow up Iraq? Good times.
“We should be concerned”
These headlines are weak language. It’s literally a subject that’s already in crisis mode.
The world is watching the US collapse, and we look forward to US self-destruction.