Back in the 1960s, “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan that captured the reality of the power dynamics within marriages. Today, an equally meaningful motto might be that “technological is political,” to reflect the way a small number of global corporations have acquired political influence within liberal democracies. If anyone doubted that, then the recent appearance The image of Elon Musk alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania provided useful confirmation of how technology has taken center stage in American politics. Musk may be a manchild with a bad tweeting habit, but he also owns the company that provides Internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield; and your rocket has been chosen by Nhandle be the vehicle to take the next Americans to the moon.
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There was a time when the tech industry wasn’t very interested in politics. It didn’t have to be that way because the politics of the time were not interested. Consequently, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple grew to gargantuan proportions in a remarkably permissive political environment. When democratic governments were not dazzled by technology, they slept at the wheel; and antitrust regulators had been captured by the legalistic doctrine preached by Robert Bork and its enablers at the University of Chicago Law School: the doctrine that there was little wrong with corporate dominance unless it harmed consumers. The proof of the damage was the price gouging, and given that Google and Facebook services were “free,” where exactly was the damage? And while Amazon’s products weren’t free, the company was ruthlessly undercutting its competitors’ prices and pandering to customers’ need for next-day delivery. Again: where was the harm in that?
It took an inconceivable amount of time for this regulatory lethargy to end, but it finally ended under President Joe Biden. American regulators, led by Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), rediscovered its magic. And then in August, the Justice Department dramatically won an antitrust lawsuit in which the judge ruled that Google was in fact a “monopolist” that it had taken anti-competitive measures to preserve its 90% share of searches. The Department of Justice is now proposing “remedies” for this abusive behavior, ranging from obvious remedies such as excluding Google from contracts like the one it has with Apple to make it the default search engine on its devices, to the “nuclear” option of split the company.
The impact of this verdict for the tech industry has been palpable and has led some leaders and agitators in the Valley to think that perhaps electing Trump isn’t such a bad idea after all. Some of the loudmouths like Marc Andreessen – and, of course, Musk – have come out explicitly in favor of Trump, but at least 14 other tech moguls are providing more quiet support. And while quite a few tech leaders have (belatedly) come out in favor of Kamala Harris, some do so with some reservations. Reid Hoffmann, the founder of LinkedIn, for example, donated $10 million to his campaign, but says he wants me to fire Lina Khan from the FTC.
However, the most dramatic evidence of how Silicon Valley lost its political virginity comes from the extraordinary amounts of money that cryptocurrency companies have been investing in the election campaign. He New Yorker information that crypto companies have already invested “more than a hundred million dollars” in the so-called SuperPACS supporting cryptocurrency-friendly candidates.
The interesting thing is that this money seems to be intended not so much to influence who wins the presidency like ensuring the “right” people are elected to the House and Senate. This suggests a level of policy cacumen that would have been disdained by the technology industry’s early pioneers in the 1960s. Technology may not have been political then; but it sure is now.
John Naughton is Professor of Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University.