Some of Silicon Valley’s top figures have recently declared their support for Donald Trump. The failed attempt on Trump’s life offered congenial timing for this kind of announcement, and these men are professional opportunity-noticers, after all. But their changed allegiance seems to have been brewing for a while. It’s interesting to consider the reasons for it.
This is in part because Donald Trump provides such a starkly ridiculous apparatus for thought experiments. A mercurial and easily-corrupted fool, there can be no serious argument that he’s anything less than a harbinger of the end of America’s tenure as global paragon. If they were able to separate themselves from what must be an overwhelming emotional tide, it would be obvious to all but the most dull-witted businessmen that Trump’s elevation is not in their interest. I suppose we can grant special dispensation to the crypto hucksters, neo-reactionary dum-dums, and in-the-closet kompromat victims. But that still leaves a chunky remainder of guys in embroidered vests.
What are they thinking, then? A compelling explanation emerged this week, nicely summarized by Ben Thompson but first captured by Kelsey Piper after having listened to an illuminating Andreesen/Horowitz podcast where the dynamic was discussed frankly.
Thompson notes that this goes back even further, connecting it to election-related criticism of Facebook and their resulting investment in remedies that seemed to just make people madder:
In short, you have an industry that has been endlessly vilified in the press, bent over backwards to do what the press demanded, but instead of receiving credit for those efforts, has only seen itself even more isolated and under siege.
This change has been real–here’s Piper again, noting a strikingly antagonistic editorial policy toward the tech industry from the very top of Mt. Dispassionate Journalism:
(Matt deletes his tweets, so it’s not easy to see the full context, sorry)
This change was probably inevitable. Journalists are told to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They’re not alone. Everyone likes an underdog: American (and consequently global) culture is overwhelmingly supportive of directing skepticism toward concentrations of power. That tech’s economic and cultural ascendance came at the direct expense of the journalism industry doubtless helped lessen the friction of any editorial handwringing about an unabashedly antagonistic approach to coverage.
Still, it took a moment for everyone to align against our new villains. The Obama administration was full of tech industry veterans, binding their products’ novelty into the same moment of optimism and enthusiasm that accompanied his historic election. And while vague anti-bigness animus and specific injuries to disrupted industries are easy to understand, it took some time and experimentation to construct a more practical critique of tech out of arguments about inequality (old news), privacy harms (vague), and various ideas that were in tension with the media’s historically fervent embrace of the First Amendment.
When the shift finally took hold it must have felt sudden to its targets. That’s reflected in the “broken deal” narrative above. These guys thought they could become rich and powerful and remain beloved. Weren’t they the good ones? Here’s the key podcast section that Thompson cites:
MA: I actually endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 publicly for what I thought were a variety of good reasons. And the way I would describe it is, I’m Gen X, I kind of came of age in the 90s as an entrepreneur. Almost everybody I knew, including myself, just took it for granted, which is like, of course, you’re a Democrat. Of course, you support the Democratic president. And the answer is the formula resolves to an easy answer, which is the Democrats in those days, you know, presidential level were pro-business, they were pro-tech, they were pro-startup. They were pro-America winning in tech markets. They were pro-entrepreneurship. And so you could start a company. They were pro-business. You could be in business. You could be successful in business. You could make a lot of money. And then you give the money away in philanthropy and you get enormous credit for that. And, you know, it absolves you of whatever.
BH: Yeah, well, I was going to say, like, it’s obvious you’re to be a Democrat because you have to be to be a good person. That’s kind of the underlying thing.MA: But specifically successful business people could then basically become successful philanthropists. This is the path that Gates and many others kind of carved out. And then you could be progressive on social issues, and you could be on the right side of all these sort of societal changes that people were kind of focused on at the time. And the whole thing just seemed completely obvious and completely easy. So I was kind of on that path, frankly, quite strongly through at least 2016.
In retrospect, it’s like there were glimmers of, I’d say, growing anti-tech, I would say animus, probably in the early 2010s. And there were growing kind of anti-business sentiments. And then by the way, something that really disturbed me a while back is sort of growing anti-philanthropy sentiments, which we probably won’t discuss it like today.
BH: Oh, well, yeah. Well, with people who made a lot of money, who gave money away, got criticized for giving money away to charitable causes as opposed to paying more taxes. Kind of a funny life jealousy taken to the extreme, yeah.
MA: A specific moment that happened to me to make me realize the landscape was shifting was when Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan set up the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative where they literally committed to 99 of their assets going to the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, there was a political faction that basically heavily criticized them, and the theory, number one is to your point, the theory was that they should they should pay it in taxes and the government should distribute the money, they shouldn’t have any control over where it goes, but the other was oh they’re only doing it for a tax break.
BH: Yeah, which wasn’t true.
MA: Well, it can be. It can’t be true because you’re giving away 99% of your assets to get a tax break. Like it literally doesn’t make sense.
BH: It’s like people bad at math and jealous.MA: Exactly. And so like basically like that formula started to break down. And so, you know, I think like a lot of us in tech, it’s been a much more difficult puzzle to try to figure this all out over the over the last eight years and then particularly over the last four years.
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/new-podcast-little-tech-agenda-the
I think that most people want to feel that they are good. They work to reconcile that need against their own desires. It is frustrating when the rules that define what counts as being good are changed, particularly when you’ve already made big investments in a lifelong project that was built upon those rules. There’s a very strong temptation to discount the new rules as arbitrary–a product of bad faith, ignorance, false consciousness, whatever. If you do this, the project of reconciling your own desires against the rules suddenly looks very different.
The accompanying mood is a mix of frustration, nihilism, resignation, and rebelliousness. I think the best word for it is petulance. And to me it feels like the defining emotion of our political age.
VCs and reddit blackpillers are one thing. America’s police officers are another. There’s consensus that America experienced a significant pull-back by police in recent years. Scholars are still debating how much of this should be attributed to the pandemic versus the defunding rhetoric that reached a national crescendo in the wake of George Floyd’s death. I’ve seen enough unhinged tweets from police union officials to believe I understand the psychology of the latter, even if its causal significance could use another regression or two.
In the last two decades, perceptions of cops have swung from a 9/11 apotheosis as heroic first responders to an ACAB consensus among the cultural vanguard that cops must surely feel is implicit in every blue-jurisdiction yard sign they pass. The rules changed, and they don’t like it.
I say all of this with some sympathy. I have felt petulant as the world changed around me. I put it into words here.
Petulance is never an admirable reaction, even if the new rules really are under-justified. But I do think it’s a reaction that we would all do better to expect, plan for, and understand. That doesn’t mean that we can’t change the rules. Many of the rules should be changed! But when we change them, we will be wise to allow the dislocated to embrace the new rules. This will frequently be annoying. I think I understand why it’s satisfying and fun to respond with exasperated derision when some guy prefaces his stab at allyship with a proof-of-daughters statement. But where does that leave him? If he isn’t permitted to come along, where will he go instead?
I have written before about the overwhelming power I see in the human impulse to organize ourselves in hierarchies. Who’s up, who’s down; who’s good, who’s bad. It’s perfectly natural, and usually satisfying. But it’s not always necessary. Often–especially in politics–it might be better to limit ourselves to declaiming what is good, rather than who.
None of this excuses petulance. It’s a childish emotion that should be recognized and controlled. Allowing it to drive you into a public tantrum is embarrassing. Allowing it to drive you toward a figure like Donald Trump should be profoundly chastening. I wonder how these guys think they will be understood a decade from now. Have thought about it at all? To embrace petulance is to let go of dissonance. Not having to think quite so hard is part of the appeal.
When the time comes, I suspect they will feel pretty mortified about this period. Then again, who won’t?
For now, the petulant impulse is real, and–for whatever reason–has recently become of outsize importance. Most people need a way to feel that they are good. When we can, we should make sure they have one.
