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By Tim Wu
Mr. Wu is a contributing Opinion writer and a law professor at Columbia who writes often about technology.
It is painfully obvious that we should be concerned about Silicon Valley’s growing influence over the United States government.
It is not normal to have a business owner like Elon Musk, whose financial interests are closely entwined with government policies, ordering around cabinet officials, securing access to sensitive databases and using the Oval Office as a pulpit like General Zod in “Superman II.” It is alarming when the administration weakens the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is investigating Meta, not long after Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, publicly curried favor with President Trump.
But there is another, less obvious concern with the increasingly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the government: the corrupting effect on Silicon Valley itself. Silicon Valley is hardly a paragon of corporate integrity, and it has its origins in the Cold War defense industry. But its new relationship with government, marked by a thirst for political power and fat government contracts, is a major departure. Silicon Valley once prided itself, often with justification, on its libertarian, countercultural, do-gooder ethos. Thanks to figures such as Mr. Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, the industry is now on a trajectory to become all the things it once claimed to hate: too big and too dependent on government largess — and a threat to human liberty.
One can romanticize the California computing culture of the 1960s and ’70s, but it was a significant shift from the stodgy, establishment world of companies like IBM and AT&T. As promulgated by counterculture mavericks like Stewart Brand, the original Silicon Valley ideology sought to combine the business of computing with the enlightened pursuit of human progress. As Fred Turner, a historian of the movement, characterized its aspiration, “What the communes failed to accomplish, the computers would complete.”
Those ideals were never fully realized (and too often were betrayed), but they still managed to influence how Silicon Valley did business. In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the most successful companies tended to be founded by rebellious outsiders: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, Mitch Kapor of Lotus, everyone at Sun Microsystems, Craig Newmark of Craigslist. These people had quit larger companies to “think different,” questioning conventional wisdom and embracing the risk of failure. Yes, there was a taste for wealth, but building great stuff was a higher value. Few of the internet’s inventors cashed in.
It makes sense, given the industry’s aversion to rules and conformity, that Silicon Valley long kept a distance from Washington. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit founded to defend the tech industry’s ideals, deliberately avoided having a Washington headquarters. People with government experience have always found work in the tech sector, and vice versa, but as an industry, Silicon Valley had its focus elsewhere. It was more interested in sponsoring the Sundance Film Festival than shelling out for a seat at the inauguration of a U.S. president.
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