Silicon Valley is moving sharply and openly to the right. In a presidential inauguration where the best seats were essentially sold at auction, tech billionaires and CEOs from Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta paid premiums to sit close to Donald Trump. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk — once a darling of those hoping for a greener capitalism — even managed a fascist salute.
What a stark change from the 2016 election. Then Facebook’s (now Meta) Mark Zuckerberg felt the need to publicly affirm that he “care[s] deeply about the democratic process,” and that he wants to “make sure that Facebook is a force for good in democracy.” Now he’s going on Joe Rogan’s podcast, worrying, “I do think a lot of our society has become very, like, I don’t know, I don’t even know the right word for it, but it’s, like, kinda like neutered or, like, emasculated.” The corporate world, he goes on, needs more “masculine energy” — energy that is perhaps best exemplified by Facebook’s recent rule changes that now explicitly allow posts that dehumanize LGTBQ people. After Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, changed their slogan to “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In this election cycle, Bezos personally blocked the newspaper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris.
There has long been a part of Silicon Valley that was, to put it mildly, fascism-adjacent. But until quite recently, most of Big Tech (Musk included) was aligned with the neoliberal centrists of the Democratic Party, a bond that was perhaps strongest during the Obama years. But today, Trump can proudly proclaim that “they did desert [Biden]. They were all with him, every one of them, and now they are all with me.”
There are many reasons for Big Tech to cuddle up to the far right, from hopes for more protectionism — whether it concerns Chinese competition like TikTok, or regulatory issues related to the…
Auteur: Hagen Blix
