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.
Everyone else? Buddy, Silicon Valley has been a den of cons, neonazis, and rationalist trash for at least the last 15 years.
Literally all lined up to shake his hand and jerk one another off.
Absolutely crazy to see people ask Larry Ellison and Bill Gates to stand up to fascism. Might as well ask Heinrich Himmler to stand up to the Nazis.
People just dont want to come to the obvious conclusions; We The People are on our own. No government institution or powerful figure is going to smash the glass as it were and end this like some climax on an action movie. And when its all said and dome if Citizens United isnt repealed and money capped at 1k donations per individual (entities such as corps are barred) this whole thing will just happen again in another fifty years.
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.
Before Trump was elected the first time I worked at a place that had no problem shutting down accounts linked to nazis.
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.
Big tech has a cancer festering inside and it’s at the malignant tumour stage where there’s no cure anymore.
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/
They are cowards who would rather grovel at the feet of a mad king than grow a pair of tits and challenge the status quo the one time it really matters.
Capitalism and fascism go hand in hand
Like all Trump supporters, they each think they are the one he isn’t going to screw over.
Why? They want this to happen
Our silence will not protect us.
I’m not sure why a man who wrote an essay about how silence (and later emigrating) did protect people in Russia would end that essay with this line. As for why people in Silicon Valley might have the attitude he criticizes - maybe they feel the way that I do? After Trump was elected the first time, I thought the country had made a terrible mistake. After Trump was elected the second time, I think the country knowingly voted for what it wanted - democracy in action. There is still a large minority of Americans who do not deserve what is going to happen, and fighting on their behalf is commendable but I wouldn’t say that it is morally obligatory or a good idea in practice.
After Trump was elected the second time, I think the country knowingly voted for what it wanted - democracy in action.
A lot of the Obama / Trump / Biden / Trump swing has been propelled by the news cycle and the right-wing consolidation of media institutions. I see a panel full of CIA assets on MSNBC blabbering on about how Zohran Mamdani is going to persecute NYC Jews, and I’m told that this is the left-wing cable news channel of record? I get so many MAGAts blabbering on CNN round tables and popping up on NPR interviews that I’m left to wonder what corner of terrestrial news is safe anymore. WaPo is full of Ross Douthat clones. CBS is getting Bari Weiss as its Editor-in-Chief.
You’re dealing with a population that’s drowning in fascist propaganda. “Those stupid voters asked for this” is far too naive an assumption. People genuinely don’t know who they’re supposed to support. You’ll get folks insisting that Trump is “anti-war” and “pro-Palestine”, simply because that’s what Candice Owens told them. You’ll get folks insisting Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign, and it was the insidious transgender voters who stabbed her in the back, because that’s what some corporate DNC flaks decided to tell one another on an episode of The View.
/r/The_Donald absolutely dominated Reddit in 2016. Four years later, it was wall-to-wall screaming at Bernie Bros for being misogynistic against Elizabeth Warren and “if you don’t vote for Joe Biden you are a fake black person”. Four years after that, it was GamerGate all over again, with the Conservative subs breaching containment and flooding the site with garbage.
Elon Musk straight up bought Twitter in the middle of all this and made a very bad site orders of magnitude worse.
How do you escape this suffocating miasma of reactionary ideology? Even Lemmy is full of people who are screaming “Tankie” at anyone who suggests The United Fruit Company and Coca-Cola might be run by some bad dudes.
If Democrats ever regain power, it needs to be scorched earth with regard to breaking up media monopolies. That would be a good start.
I wouldn’t say that it is morally obligatory or a good idea in practice.
Then you are just another one of the millions that chose to let evil happen. With all due respect, fuck off.
