What is so alarming now isn’t that an authoritarian president and a small cadre of right-wing tech executives want to take over. It’s hardly surprising that centi-billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk would shift the messages in their social media empires to cater to Mr. Trump. What is truly surprising is that everyone else — the same people who once believed in the power of technology to strengthen our society and our democracy — is allowing them to get away with it. The same Silicon Valley leaders who used to trumpet their anti-authoritarian leadership style have gone ominously quiet.
Stop expecting capitalists to stand up for anything. They only want money. They only care that money keeps moving. There’s a reason Trump gave only the 1% what they wanted with the BBB. They’re content through all this. They can live quite comfortably in authoritarianism. They see it as another money making opportunity and a means of further consolidating power. And when Trump doesn’t need them anymore, it’ll be too late for them to do anything other than fall out of a 30 story window.
Before Trump was elected the first time I worked at a place that had no problem shutting down accounts linked to nazis.
Then Trump got elected and it was all “well that’s free speech” and “we can’t police all the content, we’re neutral”.
Silicon Valley leadership are all spineless sycophants. They’re all about principles and saving the world until standing up might cost them something.
Big tech has a cancer festering inside and it’s at the malignant tumour stage where there’s no cure anymore. Nothing can fix American tech.
I’d love to see the receipts on that.
Not that I don’t doubt the occasional “we had to shut down your Venmo with $120 in it for spamming random people with swastika emojis”. But who were the big ticket players getting their plugs pulled? Thiel and the Mercers have been outspokenly fascist for ages and they only ever seem to get more business from Dems and Repubs alike.
Over the last ten years, the mission of Silicon Valley has been “how many people can we replace with computers, in order to keep wages down?” One could argue its been going on a lot longer than that, even. Everyone from Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos has been on a mission to turn human workers into robots for a long, long time.
Well, racing to replace humans with compliant robots/AI was only a natural progression from the people that were first to abuse the H-1B program, and have been doing for more than 30 fucking years:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-h-1b-visas-have-been-abused-since-the-beginning/