Back in the 1960s, the phrase “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan that captured the reality of power dynamics within marriage. Today, an equally meaningful slogan might be “technology is political,” reflecting how a small number of global corporations have gained political influence within liberal democracies. If anyone doubts that, Elon Musk’s recent appearance alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania shows how technology has moved to the center stage of American politics. This provided useful support. Musk may be a boy who doesn’t like tweeting, but he also owns a company that provides internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops in the field. And his rocket was chosen by NASA to be the vehicle to land the next American on the moon.
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There was a time when the tech industry didn’t really care about politics. I didn’t have much interest in politics, so there was no need for it.
There was a time when the tech industry didn’t really care about politics. There was no need to do so because the politics of the time were not interested in it. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple have thus grown to enormous size in a surprisingly permissive political environment. When democratic governments weren’t blinded by technology, they were asleep at the wheel. And antitrust regulators are relying on the legalistic theory popularized by Robert Bork and his supporters at the University of Chicago Law School: that corporate control has little problem as long as it doesn’t harm consumers. was imprisoned. The harm test was price gouging, but where exactly was the harm since Google and Facebook’s services were “free”?Also, even though Amazon’s products were not free, the company was relentlessly undercutting its competitors’ prices and pandering to customers’ needs for next-day delivery. Again, where was the harm in that?
This regulatory logjam took an unseemly amount of time to end, but it finally came to an end on Joe Biden’s watch. U.S. regulators, led by Jonathan Canter at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), have rediscovered their mojo. And in August, the Justice Department won a dramatic victory in an antitrust case, with a judge finding that Google was in fact a “monopoly” that had taken anticompetitive measures to maintain 90% of search share. handed down a judgment. The Justice Department has now proposed “remedies” for this misconduct, including excluding Google from contracts, such as the one with Apple to make Google the default search engine on its devices. They range from the obvious to the “nuclear” option of breaking up Google. company.
The impact of this ruling on the tech industry is clear, leading some activists and campaigners in the Valley to wonder if electing Trump might not have been such a bad idea after all. Ta. While some loud voices like Marc Andreessen and, of course, Musk have declared their support for Trump, at least 14 other tech moguls have expressed more measured support. And while a significant number of technology leaders have belatedly expressed their support for Kamala Harris, some are doing so with some reservations. For example, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who donated $10 million to her campaign, has said he wants Lina Khan fired from the FTC.
But the most dramatic evidence of how Silicon Valley lost its political virginity lies in the extraordinary amounts of money that crypto companies have poured into election campaigns. The New Yorker reported that crypto companies have already poured “more than $100 million” into so-called SuperPACS, which support crypto-friendly candidates.
What’s interesting is that the purpose of this money appears to be less about influencing who wins the presidency and more about making sure the “right” people are elected to the House and Senate. This suggests a level of political nous that would have been despised by the early pioneers of the tech industry in the 1960s. Technology may not have been political back then. But that’s certainly only for now.
John Norton is Professor of Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University.
