If you’re a subscriber to Wired.com I want to suggest that you read this piece: Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump.
It’s interesting enough that I’d suggest it would be worth whatever one month free or first month for a buck offers they might have to sign up. (Of course, I’m all for subscribing to every publication. Some of you will decide to keep it long term.) And if you can’t, it’s actually an excerpt from a book which, I think, is out today, titled: Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry.
The piece published in Wired doesn’t cover any terribly surprising new ground for people who’ve followed this story closely. But it does add new layers of detail and a more coherent narrative. In so many words the pandemic created a situation in which both the Democrats and Big Tech’s own employees turned against the owner founders. And that sent the owner founders running toward the right and Donald Trump. For a variety of reasons the tech giants went on a hiring spree during the pandemic — cheap money, Zoom life, work from home, everything bought online and delivered to your home. But then they got spooked and the markets didn’t like it. They’d overextended themselves and they decided that the problem was that they weren’t efficient enough and that their employees were lazy. The authors note a key point that layoffs went differently in tech than in traditional manufacturing, where layoffs have a direct impact on revenues, even if they may make good profit and loss sense. In tech, a lot of your value is already banked in the code. Layoffs probably won’t catch up with you for a while.
Of course this wasn’t just what had happened during the pandemic — high salaries and a fairly accommodating work culture had always been part of Silicon Valley. But the big companies decided it was their workers fault that they’d made shortsighted decisions in 2020. Democrats had their own reasons for turning against the tech giants — disinformation and societal damage caused by social media, wealth inequality, anti-trust, et al. In any case, the article is an interesting look at how these two drivers came together and got us to today.
There are two other factors that aren’t clearly addressed in this excerpt that I’d like to add. And I’m not saying the authors missed them. I suspect they’re discussed in the rest of the book. You can only get so much into an excerpt.
In many ways, the pivot around the pandemic was built into the growing monopoly dominance of the tech giants. Democrats didn’t turn against tech out of the blue. Their growing monopoly power and the things that monopoly power caused were critical drivers. But that had a big impact on the employee culture of Silicon Valley as well. I was kind of turned on to this a few years ago by a friend who focused my attention on it, and it was born out by a lot of subsequent reading and reporting I did. For a long time in Silicon Valley, it was easy for programmers who might make three or four hundred thousand a year to think they were only a few years away for getting in early on the next big start up that could catapult them up into net worths of tens of millions, if not hundreds, or even billions of dollars. And there was significant reality behind expectations. But a big part of the growing monopoly power which was kicking in by the mid-teens meant those aspirations were increasingly unrealistic. There weren’t as many IPOs. It didn’t work that way anymore.
It can sound kind of funny and it is a little funny to think about the class consciousness of people who might be making upwards of half a million a year. But funny things can be real. Leading into the pandemic was a growing realization that there were the billionaires and there was the workforce of Silicon Valley. And the odds of anyone jumping from one group to the other had gone down a lot. That, in turn, spurred all the predictable looking upwards thoughts on, ‘Why exactly do you have quite so much money?’ and looking downwards, ‘I don’t like hearing your lip.’
In a way, a simpler version of this is simply to say that tech became a mature industry and the owners of big entrenched corporations are definitionally conservative. They were also entrenched monopolies. And monopolies need protection from the government. They may need to control the government.
In any case, this is a complicated story we’ve talked about before. This article I found as an interesting addition to that literature. It’s important and worth understanding because the power of Big Tech fundamentally shapes the world we live in today and the political options available to us.
