There’s currently a debate online about whether social media owners were always secretly or latently right wing or whether “progressives” took a business constituency that was a reliably friendly and financially generous ally and turned it into an enemy through relentless attacks. Needless to say, there are a lot of jangling threads to this story, details that are hard to wrestle into an overarching theory. There are Silicon Valley titans like Peter Thiel who have always been not simply right-wingers but advocates of weird, tech-infused neo-monarchism. There have also been various left-aligned campaigns that must have rankled various tech titans. And finally, it’s very important to remember that it’s not at all clear that Silicon Valley as a whole is moving right. Management is. But the real and big story is simpler and more structural. The major technology platforms became mature businesses at vast scales; in so doing they butted up against the regulatory purview of the national government; and with the former leading to the latter they shifted toward a more conventionally anti-regulatory politics. A lot of it is really that simple.
There’s an important additional, related point which is that on becoming mature businesses they began looking toward the federal government more and more to protect their business positions from new entrants or other threats.
Now, these are a lot of big generalities I’m throwing around here. So there’s a small bit of history I wanted to share which, I think, provides a good entry point into understanding the progression. Back in 2012, there was a big DC fight over something called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. The precise details needn’t concern us here. It was a pretty heavy-handed piece of legislation backed and created by the Motion Picture Association of America and other entertainment industry rights-holder groups. It would have made it pretty simple to go into court and get an overseas pirating website blocked in the United States. I discussed it in more detail both at the time and in this post back in 2017. All the groundwork had been laid for passage through conventional lobbying and the legislation had broad bipartisan support.
And then on a dime everything changed.
The big companies from Silicon Valley weighed in in opposition. They also set up a series of websites and groups to mobilize opposition, arguing that SOPA was a threat to online free speech. That argument kicked off an avalanche of opposition which was more or less genuinely grassroots in nature. And when I say grassroots I mean that once the message got out and the argument was made in opposition to SOPA and the big tech companies made clear they thought it was a bad idea, millions of ordinary people signed petitions and called representatives and the whole SOPA effort collapsed in a smoldering heap. Those on Capitol Hill who hadn’t paid much attention came out against it. And finally even its key backers came out against it.
Groups like the MPAA were trying to get the state to throw random people in jail for watching pirated movies. Meanwhile, Big Tech was the future. It wasn’t even close. I should say here that SOPA was a bad piece of legislation. And while the big tech companies had obvious business interests in opposing it, there’s little question it also simply offended the industry’s basic assumptions and values. It wasn’t entirely self-interested.
What was clear to anyone who was watching was that big tech had finally arrived as a player in Washington, DC. Of course, the tech industry had been around for two or four or five decades by that point. So it wasn’t like they’d never shown their face in policy discussions in the capital. But it’s difficult to overstate how small a presence tech had up until this point, how few lobbyists they employed, how limited their corporate political giving was. The exception was Microsoft. But of course they were a much more mature company and they’d tangled with the federal government over anti-trust in the 90s. What we’re talking about here is the modern tech industry, mostly based in Silicon Valley. The reigning idea there was that the federal government was a sclerotic, pre-tech-boom thing which they mostly didn’t care about. They weren’t worried about getting it off their backs because it couldn’t catch up with them. They were creating the future. They didn’t need subsidies or help. To a significant degree the people who ran Washington, DC agreed. The tech folks were building the future. They worked on things that existed in a virtual world that didn’t have a lot of sharp edges and mostly it was all super cool anyway.
This was part of the attraction for Democrats in raising money from the tech world — which was mainly individual rather than corporate, a key detail. They’re super rich, throw great parties and you don’t have to feel bad because there’s no labor unrest and they’re not dumping any toxic chemicals and they support gay rights and other good things.
You could of course find exceptions to this — legislation tech pushed for, candidates who were supported. But big picture this was undeniably true. In the cases where major legislation impacted tech — stuff like the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — the guiding strategy was to impact the booming tech industry as little as possible. Get out of the way while they’re building the future.
The point of the whole SOPA saga was that it showed big tech’s vast latent power. Big Tech’s credibility with the public was almost limitless. And it’s scale of wealth, if it chose to use it in the political arena, could overwhelm that of most other industries. And over the last dozen years that’s just what happened. Big Tech firms, including especially Facebook and Google, but many others at smaller scales, became big, big players not only in conventional lobbying but also in reputational advertising. This was because a lot of the secondary effects of the rise of the social platforms were beginning to crystallize in the public mind.
This was a period in which the focus on wealth inequality and the light tax touch applied to Big Tech became a big deal; people became more aware of the role of devices creating a generation of device addicts; then there was online privacy; then there was the 2016 election and scrutiny of the way social platforms were vehicles for foreign and domestic election subversion. And then there was anti-trust, a genuine existential threat to the whole word of Silicon Valley or at least the big companies which dominated it. I guess you could say well, Democrats shouldn’t have been so focused on antitrust, wealth inequality, foreign subversion campaigns targeting their candidates or online hate groups — but somehow that doesn’t seem terribly realistic to me.
I could list off a dozen more lines of scrutiny into the big platforms. But you could summarize all of them by noting that the big companies became super big, holders of an unimaginable amount of wealth, and because of their dominating bigness created what economists call “externalities” which affected society in what many found to be negative ways. That’s why lobbying and influence spending in DC began to grow so rapidly. Public scrutiny and criticism drives government scrutiny and regulation. And those are a problem for any industry.
And there was a key additional factor. Just as these companies were coming under greater scrutiny they were also becoming mature businesses. Which is to say that they were no longer growing at phenomenal pace every year. Growth was increasingly coming not from growing user bases or starting entirely new business lines but by tightening their dominant position in and extracting more profits from existing ones. That brings us back to wealth inequality, anti-trust and a bunch else.
There’s probably some role here played by the post-#MeToo/BLM world of online activism, some of which degenerates into a kind of online language policing — a significant chunk of which actually plays out in Silicon Valley as a battle between management and employees. But big picture it was inevitable that Silicon Valley would get a lot more involved in Washington, DC and just about as inevitable that Silicon Valley’s corporate power would align more and more with Republicans, or at least in ways that were less and less distinct from other industries.
There’s an argument that Democrats, with such a strong position in the world of Big Tech, should have been more strategic in not letting its policy agenda spoil that relationship. On the margins that may be right. And my point here isn’t even to dig into the question of who is at fault, Big Tech or annoying libs? It’s entirely common for political parties to look out for the interests of major constituencies. Perhaps Democrats could have done that better in some cases. My point is more that you can’t even meaningfully ask those questions in any realistic way without first recognizing the evolving political and business context of the last dozen years. That’s the big story, and it’s one of a pretty organic and likely unavoidable progression as Big Tech was increasingly dominated by only a small handful of major players. Once you get that broader progression you can make arguments about this or that event or decision along the way. But not before.