I live and work in the San Francisco Bay area, and I do not know anyone who says he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020. I know, on the other hand, quite a lot that voted for him in 2024, and Fow Plume Diy Dy Dy Diy Crippleing folables, Corruption, Penchant for destroying the global economy, etc.
They are not just my professional networks. While technology usually has very liberal legs in their support and political donations, recent years have the appearance of a real and influential technological right.
Elon Musk, or course, is, with much, the most famous, but he made technology for himself. And although his break with Trump, which Musk now seems to be in decline, could have changed his role within technological law, I don’t think this change ends with him.
The emergence of the correct technology
The technological scene of the Bay area has always understood itself better as liberal liberal-social left, but suspicious of a great government and is excited about new things, from cryptocurrency to the cities charter and genetica and genetica. That series of attitudes sometimes disagrees with governments (and much of the public, which tends to be very cozy of the new technology).
The technological world values the founders and those who everyone knows two or three stories about a company that only happened to many founders are immigrants; The lots are LGBTQ+. For a long time, this set of commitments firmly placed the tech on the political left, and in fact, technology employees vote and donate excessively to the Democratic Party.
But in the last 10 years, I think three things changed.
The first was what Vox at that time called The Great Awoing: a radical adoption of what a leg of a lot of liberal social justice of niche had, from a wide acceptance of trans people to suspicion of any sex or race harness at work.
Much of this change in technology companies was promoted by employees; Again, technology employees are mainly left. And part of that was good! But part of this was illiberal, rejecting the idea that we can and should work with people with whom we do not agree, and identity, since it focused more on which demographic categories we belonged to than our points in common. Now we are in a violent reaction, which I think is even more intense in technology because the original Woke movement was even more intense in technology.
The second thing that changed was the macroconomic environment. When I joined a technology company in 2017, interest rates were low and risk capital financing was incredible to obtain. Startups were everywhere, and the companions competed desperately to hire employees. As a result, employees had a lot of power; CEO often were afraid.
Things begin to change when interest rates increased and work dried (relatively speaking). That deeply changed the dynamics in companies, and I have the suspicion that it made many people represented immigration levels with which they are well when they also had no problem being hired. And in recent years, the technological world has been convinced that AI is happening very, very soon, and is the greatest economic history of our lives. If you want to prevent the regulation of AI, Silicon Valley reasoned, you must vote for the Republican.
The third was a deliberate effort of many liberals to go after a technological scene that they saw as their enemy. The Biden administration ended up attending many ideological people committed to the vision of Senator Elizabeth Warren of the world, where Big Tech was the enemy of liberal democracy and antimonopoly tools should be used to break it. The Federal Commission of Commerce of Lina Khan acted on these sentences, chasing large technological companies such as Amazon. If you think this was the correct call in economic terms, I mainly believe it was not, it was decidedly self -destructive in political terms.
Then, in 2024, part of technology (it is not yet a majority, but a smaller minority than in the last two Trump elections) went well. The technological world observed with breathing with the body while Musk announced Doge: would the administration cause deregulation, tax cuts and the list of anti-dissepted desires that believed that only the administration could?
… and immediate failure
The answer so far has been the number (many people in technological law are even more optimistic than me, and point to a small handful of victories, but my evaluation is that they carry pink glasses to the point of absolute blindness).
Doge was a complete failure when cutting the expense. The administration did not break Khan’s populist approach to the FTC. He fed the basic investigation of biosciencies, and is scaring or deporting directly to the best international talent, which is very necessary for the AI in prulfular.
He is killing nuclear energy (which is also important for AI reinforcements) and killing an exciting next generation vaccine research. Musk is out, it is also his choice to direct NASA. It is widely rumored that Stephen Miller is executing things in the White House, and his only agenda seems to be turning all the federal capacity towards deportations at the expense of each government priority.
Some deregulation have happened, but any beneficial effect that it had on the investment had a leg more than canceled by the catastrophic effects of tariffs on the capacity of companies to plan the future. At least they obtained the reduction of taxes for the rich, if the “Great, beautiful and beautiful, Pass” pass, but that is all they obtained, and the Ultra Rico will be a pore this year anyway thanks to the unstable stock market.
The Republicans, when they were out of power, had a criticism of the Democrats who spoke with technological law, populist law, white supremacists and moderate black and Latin voters alike. But it is a lot to complain about the Democrats in a way that all these disparate interest groups find convincing that Goern in a way that keeps everyone happy.
Once the Trump administration real had to choose, he basically chose none of the priorities of technological law. They took a bad bet, and I think it would bet on the Democrats think, like the fractures of the Trump coalition, on which of those voters can be recovered.
A version of this story originally appeared in the future perfect bulletin. Register here!
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