{"id":877263,"date":"2025-10-13T00:20:35","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T05:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/13\/mag-i-thought-i-knew-silicon-valley-i-was-wrong\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T00:20:35","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T05:20:35","slug":"mag-i-thought-i-knew-silicon-valley-i-was-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/13\/mag-i-thought-i-knew-silicon-valley-i-was-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"MAG: I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For decades, Mark<\/span> Lemley\u2019s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He\u2019s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon<\/a>, Google<\/a>, and Meta<\/a>. \u201cI always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,\u201d Lemley tells me. What\u2019s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him.<\/p>\n

But in January, Lemley made a radical move. \u201cI have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> and Facebook\u2019s descent into toxic masculinity<\/a> and Neo-Nazi madness,\u201d he posted on LinkedIn. \u201cI have fired Meta as a client.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the Silicon Valley of 2025. Zuckerberg, now 41, had turned into a MAGA-friendly mixed martial arts fan who didn\u2019t worry so much<\/a> about hate speech on his platforms and complained that corporate America wasn\u2019t masculine enough. He stopped fact-checking and started hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. And it wasn\u2019t only Zuckerberg. A whole cohort of billionaires seemed to place their companies\u2019 fortunes over the well-being of society.<\/p>\n

When I meet Lemley at his office at Stanford this July, he is looking vacation-ready in a Hawaiian shirt. In the half year since he fired Meta, very few powerful people have followed his lead. Privately, they tell him, you go! Publicly, they\u2019re gone. Lemley has even considered how he might be gone if things get bad for anti-Trumpers. \u201cEverybody I\u2019ve talked to has a potential exit strategy,\u201d he says. \u201cCould I get citizenship here or there?\u201d<\/p>\n

It should be the best of times for the tech world, supercharged by a boom in artificial intelligence. But a shadow has fallen over Silicon Valley. The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump\u2019s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech\u2019s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone in the business world fears repercussions, because this administration is vindictive,\u201d says venture capitalist David Hornik, one of the few outspoken voices of resistance. So Silicon Valley\u2019s elite are engaged in a dangerous dance with a capricious administration\u2014or as Michael Moritz, one of the Valley\u2019s iconic VCs, put it to me, \u201cThey\u2019re doing their best to avoid being held up in a protection racket.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just ask Tim Cook<\/a>. In May, Apple<\/a>\u2019s CEO took a pass on an 8,000-mile journey to join a presidential entourage in the Middle East. Trump noticed. In Qatar, the president said he had \u201ca little problem\u201d with Cook and the following day threatened a 25 percent tariff on iPhones<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Not surprisingly, when I offered some of the Valley\u2019s top executives the opportunity to vent this summer, few took the bait. Vacations seemed unusually long. Calendars were so packed that not a single slot was available for the next three weeks, four weeks, six weeks \u2026 when did you say your deadline was?<\/em> One CEO notorious for logorrheic gabbing to reporters told me he was trying to \u201cdecompress\u201d on politics. \u201cBut any time you want to talk AI or AI agents, please let me know!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

It used to be that when tech\u2019s leaders fell short of their lofty values, employees kept them honest. Google workers famously pressured their executives to fight for diversity and avoid military contracts. Implicit was the threat that the activists could easily find jobs elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Then Elon Musk<\/a> came along and fired 80 percent of X\u2019s employees, and the app didn\u2019t collapse. Across the industry, diversity efforts are down and military contracts are up. In an April 2024 note to Google<\/a> employees, CEO Sundar Pichai<\/a> told employees not to \u201cuse the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.\u201d Free expression is also out of favor inside Meta, where an employee says the environment feels like the \u201990s: \u201cWhen you went to work, you didn\u2019t bring your politics to the office, and you may not like the boss\u2014but you do the job so you get paid,\u201d they tell me. \u201cGood luck finding a company that isn\u2019t like that now.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s happened to Silicon Valley? Why did the Ayn Rand\u2013loving heroes of tech become Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s bootlickers? How did one of the supposedly smartest VCs wind up posting a manifesto that declared war on \u201ctrust and safety,\u201d \u201ctech ethics,\u201d and \u201csocial responsibility\u201d? What was the point of Jeff Bezos<\/a> buying The Washington Post for civic benefit, as he claimed, and then right before the 2024 election, killing its Kamala Harris endorsement and changing its opinion section to editorials on \u201cpersonal liberties and free markets\u201d? And speaking of Cook, how is it that the most effective political tactic for the head of a $3.4 trillion company is to march into the Oval Office and solemnly present to Trump a glass-and-gold tchotchke?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is Apple! Who knows what Cook\u2014a man who has more in common with Martians than MAGA\u2014was thinking as he stood before Trump and unboxed the most dubious, most obsequious product in the company\u2019s near-half-century. Would Steve Jobs have done that? My guess: He\u2019d have told his team to send over a gold-plated iPod. Collect on Delivery.<\/p>\n

Ever since Jobs began selling the first sleek Apple II\u2019s, digital technology has been touted as America\u2019s pride and future. In its own geeky way, tech spoke truth to power. But now, says Stanford professor of social ethics of science and technology Rob Reich, \u201can extraordinarily tiny number of billionaires who control the information ecosystem have made allyship with the most consequential and fearsome political power in the world. There\u2019s never been a time in history when those things have been combined.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a perverse sense this is good news for me\u2014I cover that ecosystem and its oligarchs, so how great is it to be reporting on history? But in every other sense it\u2019s wildly disturbing. Obviously, my stories evolved with the industry. But here\u2019s something that took me by surprise: how quickly and decisively the visionaries I chronicled aligned themselves with Trump, a man whose values violently clashed with the egalitarian impulses of the digital revolution. How did I miss that? I revisited my familiar turf\u2014which in this era seems suddenly unfamiliar\u2014to find out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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ILLUSTRATION: COLD WAR STEVE; GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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For the first<\/span> 30 years of my life, I did not touch a computer. I viewed those machines\u2014for much of that time, mainframes clacking in rooms I never saw\u2014as a dehumanizing force. I associated them with the war machine in Vietnam and the monotony of corporate life. That all changed in the early 1980s when I took an assignment to write about hackers for Rolling Stone.<\/p>\n

To my shock and delight, I learned that the burgeoning PC industry was a nerdy successor to the political and cultural activism of the late 1960s. Some of the first computer startups sprang from the Homebrew Computer Club, organized by an antiwar activist. The club\u2019s moderator had led the technology wing of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Even Bill Gates started out as a dope-toking rebel of sorts; his partner Paul Allen was a music freak who loved Jimi Hendrix. Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had barely grown out of their shaggy-haired days selling the \u201cblue boxes\u201d that allowed people to make illegal calls. Screw the Phone Company!<\/p>\n

I began a love affair with Silicon Valley. The wizards I met were changing the world with tools designed to uplift us\u2014to give the common person the power of an expert. The electronic spreadsheet was sold as a business tool, but it was ultimately an antiestablishment weapon, because anyone with a low-cost PC could challenge the calculations of the executive suite. When Mitch Kapor, a former teacher of transcendental meditation, founded Lotus Development Corporation, which popularized the spreadsheet in the 1980s, he told his money guy that he valued people more than profits, and wanted to invest in his employees. \u201cI was prepared for him to say no,\u201d says Kapor. Fortunately for Kapor, the guy said yes.<\/p>\n

In the famous \u201c1984\u201d Apple commercial for the Macintosh, an athlete flings a hammer at a Big Brother figure\u2014she was out to pulverize authority. The headline of my Rolling Stone story about the Mac said it all: \u201cThe Whiz Kids Meet Darth Vader.\u201d (Meaning IBM. Haha.) This was a righteous battle!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, Silicon Valley was never all flowers and psychedelics. \u201cFor all that it might flatter itself with counterculture roots, making money and accumulating power has always been in the mainstream,\u201d says Kapor. And of course, the Valley\u2019s politics always accommodated a strong libertarian strain.<\/p>\n

But even venture capitalists seemed to vibe with the feeling of revolution\u2014as if the Weathermen switched from making bombs to doing IPO road shows. When the internet arrived like a thunderclap, the ideological soundtrack became ear-splitting. In his celebrated 1996 \u201cDeclaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,\u201d my friend John Perry Barlow argued that the internet transcended earthbound laws and borders. \u201cYour legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Oh my God, did we post our hopes on the internet. When I first met them, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were wide-eyed idealists. Jeff Bezos came on like a buddy, eager to point out that Amazon employees, himself included, set up their computers on repurposed wooden doors instead of pricey desks. After my first conversation with Zuckerberg, he went home to a tiny apartment with no furniture.<\/p>\n

And then the giants of the internet scaled up their companies to impose their own concepts of expression, identity, and context. Those once humble leaders reaped unimaginable rewards. Now they can\u2019t flaunt their riches enough\u2014multiple homes, yachts, planes.<\/p>\n

On a typically pleasant July day, I met up with Russell Hancock, who runs a think tank called Joint Venture Silicon Valley, in the living room of his Palo Alto home. He nabbed it during the 2000 tech crash; now you can\u2019t buy a shack in Paly without near-generational wealth. Page and Zuckerberg, unsatisfied with a single homestead, have scooped up nearby properties, transforming once idyllic streets into supervillain compounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people that are doing fabulously well, they\u2019re really having a terrific time,\u201d Hancock says. For everyone else in Silicon Valley, the wealth gap is getting more punishing, more absurd. When Apple had its IPO in 1980, Steve Jobs\u2019 net worth topped an almost-unheard-of $100 million. Now Zuckerberg is reportedly offering AI researchers that much moolah for a single year\u2019s labor. Hancock brings up the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality that\u2019s popular among the World Bank crowd. Since the \u201990s, \u201cwe went from 30 on the Gini to 83,\u201d he says. \u201cThose are the conditions for the French Revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Another big change was unfolding. For the longest time, notes Chris Lehane, a former Bill Clinton staffer who has worked for companies like Airbnb and OpenAI, software \u201cwas almost like a fourth dimension.\u201d Tech leaders could afford to stay out west and avoid politics. But then software products started to break down entire sectors of business. \u201cThese products were physically manifesting themselves in taxis, short-term rentals, and food delivery,\u201d Lehane says, \u201cbumping up against existing political systems, beliefs, laws.\u201d Sometimes people died from that incursion. Old, beloved businesses closed. Local politicians got mad. To game the system, Silicon Valley jumped to the swamp. As one technologist in the current administration tells me, \u201cThe Valley now realizes it can\u2019t ignore politics, because politics won\u2019t ignore you.\u201d<\/p>\n

No wonder the public took a jaundiced view of the apps they couldn\u2019t stop using. By the mid-2010s, people were attacking the big buses that transported tech workers to and from San Francisco, Mountain View, and Menlo Park, where employees pulled lattes in micro-kitchens, enjoyed midday massages, and discussed provocative left-wing politics.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the wizards of the PC and internet age were too<\/em> successful. \u201cWe overdid it,\u201d says Andy Hertzfeld, a programming legend who helped build the original Macintosh. \u201cWe were so idealistic in thinking everyone should use a computer and that we should make them lovable and fun.\u201d The result, he laments, is a dystopia of phone-addicted teens and even the death of the homework essay.<\/p>\n

Essentially, the big tech companies became The Phone Company\u2014pernicious behemoths who enshittify their products to extract more profits. You can\u2019t even get a human customer-service person on the phone. In a 2024 survey of Silicon Valley residents, three-quarters of respondents felt tech companies have too much power; nearly as many believe they have lost their moral compass.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s why, even before Citizen Trump entered the White House in 2017, I found that the narrative in my stories had changed. I used to draw on the tale of David versus Goliath. Now I was writing the Icarus legend. I kept seeing that figure\u2019s hubris in the tech elite. And it led them to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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ILLUSTRATION: COLD WAR STEVE; GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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History might remember<\/span> Joseph R. Biden as the doddering figure in his last presidential debate. But a shockingly wide range of people in Silicon Valley view him as a progress-hating despot. I was taken aback at the fervor of their antipathy toward Uncle Joe.<\/p>\n

Lehane, the former Clinton spokesperson, says that the administration and its agencies neither understood tech nor took much interest in it, \u201cother than potentially trying to stop the technology from being developed.\u201d Chief villains of the Biden era included Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and Department of Justice antitrust head Jonathan Kanter. They methodically filed suits against Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Khan blocked even modest mergers, threatening the entire ecosystem of smaller startups that now found it harder to negotiate profitable exits.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s people make reasonable defenses\u2014those companies do seem to have monopolies, after all. And look what happened to the design company Figma after Khan\u2019s FTC scrutinized its potential merger with Adobe. Two years later it had a spectacular IPO.<\/p>\n

But one of Biden\u2019s biggest, most avoidable errors may have been his failure to invite Elon Musk to a 2021 event for electric vehicle manufacturers. The apparent reason was to keep the United Auto Workers happy, though the White House later claimed it was a fight over electric vehicle provisions that cost him his seat at the table. Even Reid Hoffman, one of the few tech billionaires who\u2019s speaking out against Trump, thinks that was crazy. \u201cYou should invite the electric vehicle leader to the electric vehicle summit!\u201d he says. \u201cThat was part of the radicalization of Elon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, at least, part of the public narrative about why Musk, who had previously donated to Democratic candidates, went full MAGA. Other theories include radicalization during Covid, after the government stopped work at his California plant; radicalization by way of Twitter and too many sycophantic posts; or just that he was nuts. In any event, he got busy boosting right-wing content on X (especially his own posts), loudly supporting Trump, and of course donating almost $300 million to the Trump campaign. It used to be that \u201cif you were Republican, or you said you were anti-tax, you had to go into hiding,\u201d says Ryan Petersen, CEO of the logistics company Flexport. \u201cElon made it safe for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another Biden blunder, in the eyes of the tech elite, was his administration\u2019s hostility to crypto. According to one top crypto executive I spoke with, the trouble started when one of the Dems\u2019 biggest funders, crypto billionaire Samuel Bankman-Fried, was exposed as a massive fraudster. \u201cIt was an enormous embarrassment for the Democrats,\u201d the executive told me. \u201cSo what do you do when you\u2019re humiliated? You overreact.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Before the scandal, companies had engaged in a constructive debate over regulation. But the SBF affair fortified the hard line that the head of the SEC, Gary Gensler, decided to take. (Gensler declined to be interviewed, though he did urge me to \u201ckeep up the good work at WIRED!\u201d) Crypto people also blame Senator Elizabeth Warren, who many saw as Gensler\u2019s supporter.<\/p>\n

The crypto industry funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump\u2019s campaign. \u201cWe were always focused exclusively on what is good for crypto,\u201d says Coinbase\u2019s general counsel and former federal judge Paul Grewal. By midsummer 2024, Trump, who had earlier called cryptocurrencies a fraud, was appearing at a Bitcoin conference, promising to fire Gensler and make the US \u201cthe crypto capital of the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even Biden\u2019s AI policy turned out to be radicalizing. The field\u2019s key figures had seemed happy enough as they too debated regulation. But then AI went red-hot, and those companies needed massive investments in infrastructure\u2014and a less restrictive set of rules. Guess who was ready to deliver. \u201cIn terms of him as a human being or a visionary, nobody\u2019s a big Trump fan,\u201d says Peter Leyden, an author (and former WIRED editor) writing a book on \u201cthe Great Progression\u201d of technology. \u201cBut then AI hits\u2014it\u2019s game time. So they decided, \u2018Fuck it, we\u2019re gonna hook our tree to this crazy-ass Trump.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In his podcasts, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen complained bitterly about Biden\u2019s policies on antitrust, AI, and diversity, and he expressed outrage that Biden would not meet with him personally. In his view, Biden\u2014and indeed the general public\u2014had not kept its part in what Andreessen called The Deal.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how he described it to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: An entrepreneur starts a company, makes a lot of money, and the world benefits from the new technology. \u201cThen in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you\u2019re a Democrat, you\u2019re pro\u2013gay rights, you\u2019re pro-abortion, you\u2019re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time \u2026 This is the Deal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By daring to challenge the tech industry, Biden threatened the moguls\u2019 business plans. Even worse, he hurt their feelings<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to exaggerate how offended they were,\u201d says Nick Clegg, who was Meta\u2019s president of global affairs until early this year. In July 2024, Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz announced that they would be donating their dollars to Trump.<\/p>\n

Some of Andreessen\u2019s gripes were over the top\u2014no Marc, not all young employees lean Marxist\u2014but he wasn\u2019t the only one raging over diversity programs and political correctness. Across the Valley, it seemed, the Deal was off. \u201cThere\u2019s a general sense in tech, even in the center left, that identity politics have gone too far,\u201d says Leyden. Trae Stephens, the Founders Fund VC and Anduril cofounder, has seen it too. \u201cMy friends who are Democrats are not switching parties,\u201d he tells me. \u201cThey\u2019re just really tired of the Democrats.\u201d Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, had been happily affiliated with the left. Earlier this year, he said on social media that politically he\u2019s \u201chomeless.\u201d Though he seems to spend a lot of time with Trump.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Zuckerberg. I interviewed him frequently during Trump\u2019s first term and was convinced he had genuine compassion for immigrants. I can\u2019t recall him saying a nice thing about Trump. Sometime in the past year or so, positive words began spilling out. When Trump literally dodged a bullet on the campaign trail last summer and pumped his fist in the air, Zuckerberg called him a \u201cbadass.\u201d Then came visits to the Joe Rogan podcast, where he griped that corporations were insufficiently manly, and Mar-a-Lago, where he reportedly blamed his former COO Sheryl Sandberg\u2014the company\u2019s champion of diversity\u2014for all that unnecessary policing of toxic content and misinformation (a criticism he later denied). Now, Zuckerberg is not so much about immigrants. He and his wife, Priscilla, had funded a school in East Palo Alto, a low-income enclave. They are shutting it down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI see Mark as a political shape-shifter whose number one goal is the survival and thriving of the company,\u201d a Meta executive tells me. \u201cTrump is so transactional that you can fight him and get fucked, or you can try to work with him and get a percentage of what you want.\u201d<\/p>\n

To tech\u2019s power elite, Trump\u2019s tit-for-tat nature is not a bug but a feature. \u201cA lot of these guys find Trump very familiar,\u201d says Clegg. \u201cYou go down to Mar-a-Lago, and he goes, \u2018Let\u2019s do a deal.\u2019 That charm of Trump is incredibly intoxicating to Silicon Valley tech bros.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was Biden really<\/em> so bad for tech? Democrats I spoke to who were in the White House or in Congress in those years say they were simply holding an overreaching industry to account\u2014for its own good. \u201cI don\u2019t think we screwed up on policy,\u201d says Tim Wu, who was Biden\u2019s special assistant for tech and competition. \u201cOur goal was to keep the tech industry healthy by forcing it to continue to innovate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The strategy doesn\u2019t seem to have worked. In the first months of 2025, the Trump administration lifted regulations that irritated the tech industry. \u201cAmerica\u2019s AI Action Plan\u201d focuses on establishing US dominance. So long, regulation! The crypto bros saw not only the departure of the hated SEC chair Gensler but the passage of a bill that legitimized their industry. And Trump appointees recently overruled the Justice Department\u2019s antitrust division to allow a major tech merger to go through.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s tariffs, of course, present big problems for business. But it turns out that you can run pretty well on a bended knee. Take Jensen Huang, who heads Nvidia. The administration was expected to take a hard line on selling chips to China. Huang unleashed a full-throttled lobbying effort that took him from Mar-a-Lago to Saudi Arabia. He pledged $500 billion in US investments. He bad-mouthed Biden to a congressional committee. By the time Huang was done, Trump was calling him a friend and easing export controls on his chips. When Trump spoke at an AI Summit in July, Huang was there to celebrate\u2014and wisely not taking credit. When it was Huang\u2019s turn on stage, he got straight to the point. \u201cAmerica\u2019s unique advantage that no other country could possibly have,\u201d he said, \u201cis President Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Later, Huang learned that the administration would help itself to a 15 percent cut of gross sales to China. Not long afterward, Trump grabbed 10 percent of Intel. It seems that America\u2019s \u201cunique advantage\u201d is relentless in grabbing power for himself, even from those who debase themselves before him. In the long run, these deluded CEOs may realize this isn\u2019t realpolitik. It\u2019s a suicide pact.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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ILLUSTRATION: COLD WAR STEVE; GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Bradley Tusk is<\/span> a political consultant for tech companies. Uber and FanDuel have enjoyed his services as they rewrote the rules of their industries, and he\u2019s used to political rough and tumble. As he sees it, Trump\u2019s tactics are the government<\/em> moving fast and breaking things.<\/p>\n

When we talk, Tusk rattles off what he views as the components of US tech exceptionalism\u2014independent markets and institutions, freedom of speech, intellectual property protections, strong educational institutions, decent immigration policy. Then his voice gets hard. \u201cTrump is doing the opposite of every single one of those things,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is definitely potential that he will destroy everything that makes the US economy unique and successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Start with immigration. Perhaps no group of techies has ridden Trump\u2019s coattails more than the four chatty investor-bros who host the All In<\/em> podcast. Three of the \u201cbesties,\u201d as they call themselves, were born overseas. During the election season, two besties, venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, threw a fundraiser at Sacks\u2019 house with tickets as high as $300,000. Soon after, Trump rewarded them by going on their podcast. (Sacks is now Trump\u2019s AI and crypto czar.) Some of the questions were big fat softballs like, \u201cI never understood why the [border] wall was controversial.\u201d But even they couldn\u2019t get behind his immigration policy. Didn\u2019t Trump recognize that the tech world thrives on foreign-born wizards?<\/p>\n

To their astonishment, he not only agreed but promised that in his administration, any foreign student who completes a degree would get a green card. The besties were giddy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It was too good to be true. Hours later, the MAGA base aflame, the Trump campaign issued a statement negating what he\u2019d said. Now that he\u2019s back in the White House, he and his vice president have remained two-faced\u2014assuring tech audiences that they want the best foreign students while making it harder for companies to hire and retain that talent. At one point Trump moved to block any<\/em> foreigner from enrolling in America\u2019s oldest university. That hasn\u2019t happened yet, but this summer the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new regulation that limits foreign student visas to four years\u2014not enough to get a PhD or, for many, even an undergraduate degree. The number of students coming from overseas has tanked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re definitely seeing the chilling effect,\u201d says Harj Taggar, a managing partner at Y Combinator. While YC\u2019s international founders have so far managed to enter the country, applicants with student visas are more reluctant to leave school to join the program. He\u2019s seeing foreign students consider going to London to work or start companies. \u201cThey feel it\u2019s maybe not as safe to be here,\u201d he says. \u201cThat makes me really sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got a few more reasons for Taggar to feel really sad: the mass cancellation of science and research funding, for one. Goodbye, next generation of engineers and computer scientists. \u201cIn the name of punishing woke-ism, we\u2019re going to absolutely hobble the innovation engine that has created the economic gains of the last 50 years,\u201d says Hornik, the venture capitalist.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the mounting effect of Trump\u2019s favor-collecting and favoritism\u2014buying that chunk of Intel, claiming that slice of Nvidia\u2019s sales. In corruption-riddled countries, winners aren\u2019t chosen by merit but by apparatchiks and strongmen. Those nations are doomed to second- or third-tier status. In his preelection appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, Zuckerberg said as much himself. \u201cAt least the US has the rule of law,\u201d he remarked. \u201cIf other governments decide that they\u2019re going to go after you, you don\u2019t always get a clear shake at defending yourself on the rules.\u201d Guess what\u2014now we\u2019re like those other governments! Zuckerberg, no dummy, has probably figured this out, but now he\u2019s locked into Trumpland, outplayed in a real-life game of Risk.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many of the people I spoke with for this story are centrist liberals. They are a disheartened bunch, and talking to them was hazardous to my own heart. In interview after interview, I asked them what, if anything, might force the industry to confront its dim longer-term prospects. Their answers were vague. The midterm election? An economic collapse? One Silicon Valley figure suggested, \u201cIt could be as simple as 10 Republican senators discovering they actually have backbones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or 10 big-time CEOs, I might add. They can unbend their knees and perhaps revive some of the Valley\u2019s soul. Or at least stop ripping it apart. And while they\u2019re at it, stop making it so easy for the government to usher in an AI-powered surveillance state.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s the thing I got most wrong about Silicon Valley. Those Davids I wrote about seemed fearless and full of verve as they challenged what was possible and rode the power of the chip and the net. I mistook this for character. They may believe, as Moritz told me, that submitting to Trump\u2019s protection racket protects their shareholders. But tech giants are certainly capable of standing up for the long-term viability of their industry. And for democracy. So far they are doing the opposite. \u201cI think they have made a bad deal,\u201d says Tim Wu. \u201cEveryone who thought they could work some deal with Trump ends up getting burned, if not imprisoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

There will probably be no reckoning. Tech leaders, like all rich people, always have alternatives to life in a declining country. Reid Hoffman has his, as he put it, \u201ccontingency plans.\u201d Another source for this story let drop that he\u2019s getting Portuguese citizenship. Lovely country. But it\u2019s hard to imagine myself as a young reporter, roaming the streets of Lisbon and finding the excitement and promise I discovered in California. It\u2019s even harder to imagine a young reporter finding that spirit in the industry as it stands today. The way I now feel in Silicon Valley is how Sam Altman described himself politically: homeless.<\/p>\n

\n

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at<\/em> ma**<\/span>@***<\/span>ed.com<\/span><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Camellia Mote
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For decades, Mark Lemley\u2019s life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He\u2019s a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. \u201cI always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical,\u201d Lemley tells me. What\u2019s more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":877264,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[393,231],"tags":[8524,10016],"class_list":{"0":"post-877263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-silicon","8":"category-thought","9":"tag-silicon","10":"tag-thought"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/877264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}