Way back in the 1960s “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan capturing the reality of power dynamics within marriages. Today, an equally meaningful slogan might be that “the technological is political”, to reflect the way that a small number of global corporations have acquired political clout within liberal democracies. If anyone doubted that, then the recent appearance of Elon Musk alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania provided useful confirmation of how technology has moved centre-stage in American politics. Musk may be a manchild with a bad tweeting habit, but he also owns the company that is providing internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield; and his rocket has been chosen by Nasa to be the vehicle to land the next Americans on the moon.
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There was a time when the tech industry wasn’t much interested in politics. It didn’t need to be because politics at the time wasn’t interested in it. Accordingly, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple grew to their gargantuan proportions in a remarkably permissive political environment. When democratic governments were not being dazzled by the technology, they were asleep at the wheel; and antitrust regulators had been captured by the legalistic doctrine peddled by Robert Bork and his enablers in the University of Chicago Law School – the doctrine that there was little wrong with corporate dominance unless it was harming consumers. The test for harm was price-gouging, and since Google’s and Facebook’s services were “free”, where was the harm, exactly? And though Amazon’s products weren’t free, the company was ruthlessly undercutting competitors’ prices and pandering to customers’ need for next-day delivery. Again: where was the harm in that?
It took an unconscionable time for this regulatory slumber to end, but end it finally did on Joe Biden’s watch. US regulators, led by Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice (DOJ), and Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), rediscovered their mojo. And then in August the DoJ dramatically won an antitrust lawsuit in which the judge ruled that Google was indeed a “monopolist” which had taken anticompetitive steps to preserve its 90% share of search. The DOJ is now proposing “remedies” for this abusive behaviour, ranging from obvious ones like barring Google from contracts such as the one it has with Apple to make it the default search engine on its devices to the “nuclear” option of breaking up the company.
The shock of this verdict to the tech industry has been palpable, and has led some movers and shakers in the Valley to think that maybe electing Trump might not be such a bad idea after all. Some of the loudmouths like Marc Andreessen – and, of course, Musk – have explicitly come out for Trump, but at least 14 other tech moguls are providing more discreet support. And although quite a few tech leaders have – belatedly – come out for Kamala Harris, some are doing so with some reservations. Reid Hoffmann, the founder of LinkedIn, for example, donated $10m to her campaign, but says he wants her to fire Lina Khan from the FTC.
The most dramatic evidence of how Silicon Valley lost its political virginity, though, comes from the extraordinary amounts of money that cryptocurrency companies have been putting into the election campaign. The New Yorker reports that crypto companies have already sunk “more than a hundred million dollars” into so-called SuperPACS supporting crypto-friendly candidates.
The interesting thing is that this money seems to be aimed not so much at influencing who wins the presidency as at ensuring that the “right” people get elected to the House and the Senate. This suggests a level of political nous that would have been disdained by the early pioneers of the tech industry in the 1960s. Technology might not have been political then; but it sure is just now.
John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University