Why Big Tech Turned Against Democrats — and Democracy

Trump’s America is turning its back on the future — with Big Tech’s help

In just 6 short months under Donald Trump, federal funding for science has been slashed and there are clear attempts to censor research. Our great research universities are under assault, and foreign scholars are being denied visas. Many are foregoing coming to America for fear they may be deported or even arrested. We have a health secretary who isn’t just anti-vaccine — he reportedly doesn’t accept the germ theory of disease, preferring the “miasma theory” that was discredited by Louis Pasteur in the 19^th century. The acting head of FEMA said he wasn’t aware that the US had a hurricane season.

One of the ironies of this great leap backward is that it was made possible in part by a hard turn toward Trump among technology billionaires — men who surely imagine that they are leading us into a glorious future, not into a latter-day Dark Age.

Silicon Valley used to support Democrats. For one thing, people in tech tend to be socially liberal. And at least some recognize that the modern Republican Party is hostile to science and education, the pillars on which the tech industry rests.

So what explains the turn away from Democrats and, given Trump’s obvious authoritarianism, democracy?

A major factor may have been a shift in attitude and policy on the part of Democrats, especially Biden administration officials, who moved away from uncritical tech boosterism and toward increased regulation.

This change in attitude didn’t come out of nowhere. There is growing evidence that social media can do real harm, especially to children. There were, as I’ll explain, good reasons to worry that the benefits of technology were no longer flowing to consumers and business as a whole. And the Biden administration was also reflecting a broader change in perceptions: Many Americans have turned sour on the tech sector and tech leaders. In fact, the industry’s fall from grace has been little short of spectacular.

It’s hard to believe now, but for a time some tech leaders approached folk-hero status. Mark Zuckerberg was the subject of a biopic, The Social Network, that wasn’t entirely positive but certainly fed perceptions that he was a great innovator. Elon Musk was reportedly a partial inspiration for Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, the Marvel character.

More significantly, social media was widely given partial credit for the “Arab Spring” of 2010-2012. And in 2011 Americans were three times as likely to consider technology companies more trustworthy than average as they were to consider them less trustworthy.

But that was then. These days Americans don’t consider technology an especially trustworthy industry. They rank it above health insurance and pharma, but that’s a pretty low bar.

Another survey, by researchers at the Brookings Institution, found widespread loss of faith in institutions, but some lost more ground than others. In particular,

we discovered a marked decrease in the confidence Americans profess for technology and, specifically, tech companies—greater and more widespread than for any other type of institution.

What’s behind this “precipitous loss of faith”?

Back in January Ross Douthat of the New York Times interviewed the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, who declared that he and his friends have turned right because America’s elite universities are “politically radical institutions” that teach their students “how to be America-hating communists.”

Am I allowed to say that this is completely crazy?

If you look at the Brookings report, it shows that the backlash against Big Tech is by no means confined to members of the elite who were radicalized at university. On the contrary,

every sociodemographic category we examined—and we examined variation by age, race, gender, education, and partisanship—saw its mean confidence in the three tech companies collapse

And while there has, as I said, been a decline in confidence in many institutions, that decline has been especially, indeed uniquely severe for tech companies.

The “techlash” may in part reflect concerns about just how much wealth and power tech barons have accumulated. Sunday’s primer was about the extraordinary accumulation of wealth at the very top of the distribution since the 1980s. As I tried to document, this accumulation was initially driven mainly by financial wheeler-dealers, especially hedge funds. But since the early 2010s it has largely reflected the soaring value of technology companies that have achieved quasi-monopoly status through network effects: everyone uses their products — everyone feels they have to use their products — because everyone else uses their products. That is, the Masters of the Universe have been overtaken by the Tech Lords.

The public might not care about the wealth of our new oligarchs if people felt that the tech lords were earning their vast fortunes by providing ever better products. But many people, myself included, feel if anything that what Big Tech offers is getting worse, not better, as companies shift their focus from creating new and useful tools to exploiting their market position. On Sunday I quoted Cory Doctorow on “enshittification,” but for those who missed it, I think his model — because that’s what it is! — is worth quoting again:

First, com­panies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.

And let’s not forget that Mark Zuckerberg, by appealing to Republicans, successfully blocked bipartisan legislation that would, for the first time, have imposed regulations to protect children from the damage social media can cause.

How should policymakers deal with the tech industry’s flaws? The Biden administration turned to regulation. Lina Khan, at the Federal Trade Commission, sought to treat enshittification as a modern version of traditional antitrust concerns. Gary Gensler, at the Securities and Exchange Commission, was skeptical about the value of cryptocurrency and worried about its risks — a view regular readers know I share — and sought to rein it in. Various Biden officials — perhaps aware that social media, once viewed as universally good, has turned out to have serious downsides — sought to regulate and limit the spread of AI.

One way to look at all this is to say that the Biden administration was trying to treat technology as an ordinary industry that should be subject to normal oversight and regulation. But tech leaders, who still see themselves as special because they’re leading us to a glorious future, were outraged, sufficiently so in many cases that they backed Trump.

Now, maybe Biden’s people could have handled this better. But my prediction is that tech types who backed Trump will soon be very, very sorry.

MUSICAL CODA