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Well shit. A day or two before the election I wrote a post titled “How bad will it get?” with regard to the union of Elon Musk, X, Silicon Valley, and Trump, and now I guess we will find out.
I—many of us—were waiting for Musk’s social media platform to be weaponized, flooded with scaremongering, threats, AI slop, and bad information, and it was, but not at any level that could be considered abnormal by its own toxic standards. Most of the AI stuff I saw was relegated to dumb memes. And frankly, little Election Day weaponizing needed to be done. The Democrats were crushed handily as it was.
Apart from Trump himself, there are few more obvious victors than Elon Musk; for $100 million or so and a few months’ display of unrestrained fealty, he just bought himself some real estate in the inner sanctum of Trumpworld. It may be the most fruitful investment he ever made, a bargain really. Some are taking solace in the notion that given Trump’s—and Elon’s—volatility, their relationship will be headed for a spectacular implosion sooner rather than later, as so many of Trump’s previous partners did (remember Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, anyone?) but I’m not as confident. These two men are pretty in tune, and are more similar—each constantly embattled and aggrieved, insecure and never satisfied, incapable of any sustained level of happiness, constantly trying to build bigger monuments to their own egos but always doomed to come up short—than not. And their opportunities to mutually benefit are considerable.
I digress. Suffice to say that Elon Musk is the closest that a Silicon Valley tech titan has been to the White House, in a position of overt and direct power. There is of course a long lineage of the Valley linking up with Washington for defense contracts, help in avoiding regulations, and other forms of material support—see: Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto—but this is the next level. It could even, perhaps, be considered a logical culmination.
And it is not limited to Musk. Silicon Valley’s approach to Trump in general has been much more conciliatory in the run-up to the election. The CEOs of Google, Meta, and Apple all apparently called Trump in recent months, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos now-infamously spiked his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris—which, again, if you are looking at things from a perspective of cold business calculus, will likely turn out to be a materially valuable decision. Trump is famously spiteful and grudge-holding, and will remember a hedge like that—not to mention the fact that Bezos is already out the gate with a message congratulating Trump on his victory.
Four and eight years ago, the tech companies and their CEOs made a big show of promising to uphold democracy and support our civic institutions—they banned or suspended Trump when he used their platforms to help incite an insurrection at the capital, Facebook went on a mea culpa tour over Cambridge Analytica and formed internal watchdog groups, Google co-founder Sergey Brin attended a protest after Trump’s Muslim ban, Jeff Bezos and Trump were at loggerheads, and so on. The bulk of this stuff was of course superficial at best, but it’s hard, even impossible, to imagine any of those things happening again.
Part of all this is the direct result of the industry’s monopolization—eight years ago, there was at least the concern that users would abandon a platform if a company threw in with an authoritarian with views half the country found repugnant. Now, a) Trump won by a wide enough margin, and b) the companies have locked us all into their services that big tech isn’t remotely concerned about such blowback. (Worth noting, perhaps, that when the Bezos intervention came down, a lot of people were willing to cancel their Washington Post subscriptions but not Prime.)
It’s time to face facts. In Trump, Silicon Valley got what it wanted: A president that will kneecap antitrust efforts, embrace deregulation, and defang labor laws.
(Yes, I am perhaps being a little glib here—by “Silicon Valley” I mean its executives, managers, and VC class; there are many, many rank and file tech workers who I know abhor the election result.)
I am already hearing rumblings that Lina Khan, who led the FTC in an invigorated push to take big tech monopolies to task, is going to be out. The rule prohibiting NDAs is DOA. The National Labor Relations Board, more assertive under Biden than any president of the last three decades, will be quieted—tech (and all) organizing becomes again an uphill climb. Elon Musk’s Tesla is currently arguing that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional, and while that will have to go through the courts, the political climate for such a radical and once-unthinkable decision just got a lot friendlier. Any meaningful federal AI regulations are almost certainly out the window. Unless these companies personally insult Trump, it’s going to be pedal down, guardrails off for the Valley—and the dawning of a supercharged era of surveillance capitalism, attempts to automate labor with AI, and algorithmic discrimination.
And we haven’t even talked about the crypto industry, arguably the third-biggest winner of the night. Trump rebranded himself a crypto champion, of course, and Fairshake PAC, a pro-crypto lobbying firm, used tens of millions of dollars in its war chest to successfully swamp candidates in races across the country deemed unfriendly to the industry. There can be no surer prediction than Chris Gensler, the SEC chief who has successfully prosecuted the historic levels of fraud in the crypto world, will be given the boot. Bitcoin soared to an all-time high upon Trump’s election, and it looks like we’re going to do this thing all over again.
There’s something darkly fitting about these two forces, Silicon Valley and Trump, conjoining so amicably right now. The tech industry has never been bigger, or richer, or piloted by wealthier or more influential billionaires. Crypto, as close to a purely speculative instrument of capital as exists, is being hyper-charged. Trump, of course, has no regard for rules or standards; he respects only the accrual of power and wealth. The digital casino is open, there are no house rules apart from ‘don't insult the boss’, and there are certainly no guarantees. Anyone who gets screwed is either a loser or a sucker or shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Like a lot of you, I imagine, I have been thinking about how we got here. I was thinking about it late last night, where I was punishing myself by staying up until the early hours to watch North Carolina then Georgia then Pennsylvania get called for Trump, watching Trump supporters celebrate with terrible AI memes. I was thinking about Silicon Valley.
There is a lot, of course, of blame to pass around—voters were angry about inflation and the incumbent, Joe Biden and elite Dems helped tank the campaign by concealing his senility, Kamala Harris was in a difficult situation, yet chose the Cheneys over an animated progressive base, there is a lot of sexism in this country, and fascism is genuinely appealing to some percentage of voters. Other writers have made such arguments more convincingly than me. But I would add the Valley to the list of scapegoats, and not just Musk for literally buying him votes. (Many scoffed at Musk’s naked and ham-fisted effort to turn X into a propaganda platform for Trump—it’s hard to say it was not successful. I hope to see more careful inquiry into the influence of X on these fronts, and I imagine there will be. To that end, another writer pointed out that the three top podcasts hosted on Spotify—Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Tucker Carlson—all vouched for Trump.)
But no, the problem extends even beyond particular platforms and their capacity to serve as conduits for propaganda. As it stands, the vast majority of our digital infrastructure is now owned by tech billionaires, who are at least open to participating in an authoritarian project; some, of course, are enthusiastic about it.
Our public and shared spaces, online and off, have been thoroughly privatized and commodified, in ways that we are still only beginning to fully grapple with. Disaffection, alienation, and isolation are rampant, and all are byproducts of the hyper-capitalized digital world that Silicon Valley has constructed for us to inhabit. A world where we are encouraged to build community and seek engagement on social media platforms owned by billionaires, to disparage the other for clout, vie to strike it rich with the right crypto trade, or outsource our thinking and creativity to generative AI. It is a brittle, hollow world that fosters animosity and resentment, where we have long known rage is promoted above empathy, where transforming the human experience into a march through a casino is the goal. A world obsessed with score-settling, with outsourcing, with gambling. It’s no wonder, ultimately, that Trump embraced Silicon Valley, and it embraced Trump.
There is a new and ascendent nexus of power emerging to span Silicon Valley and Trumpworld—as long as I’m writing this newsletter, I will aim to keep tabs on it. If you’re interested in backing such a project, please do subscribe, and consider lending some material support if you’re in a position to do so; if I’m going to keep up this work, I’m going to need some help here.
Hang in there everyone. Spend some time with each other in offline spaces. And now more than ever, keep those hammers up.
