Wake The Fuck Up Silicon Valley
I walked into the office the day after the election to find my team visibly distraught. As the 30 year old CEO of a technology company with team members older than myself, it was a surreal feeling trying to figure out what to say. I am not a rah-rah kind of person who makes big speeches, I prefer to lead by example and believe that people live up to the expectations that are set for them. But it was obvious that this was different, people were searching for something to grip onto.
The following is, in maybe a few more words, what I said to them. Today, as Trump makes good on abhorrent, unconstitutional, and down right stupid campaign promises, I feel even more strongly about them.
Many of us who live in metropolitan areas and work in the knowledge economy are fairly a-political. We may have a good handle of what we believe in and even comment periodically on the decisions of our government, but do not belong to a political party or get politically involved.
Many of us believe that politics is in a sense below us. That the operating system of government is old, slow, and inefficient. That we are better off working in the private sector to change the world for the better. We share a disillusionment and hopelessness in the ability for our system to work which leads to apathy.
And that apathy has lead to this.
We find ourselves staring down the very real possibility of our liberal democracy slipping into a fascist autocracy. We’ve taken for granted that the world has been (for us) peaceful and (mostly) just. While we may have no interest in politics, politics now has an interest in us that we can not escape.
But those terrible things will only happen if we refuse to engage. They will only happen if we refuse to choose the perfect over the good enough. The communities of tech, media and finance that our company is deeply embedded in have vast power and influence in this country, if we choose to use it.
Our peers in Silicon Valley specifically possess both an enormous amount of power and an extremely strong disdain for political involvement. They have the ability if they so choose to use it to positively influence the actions of our current government and future elections. And it’s time for them to wake the fuck up and realize that sitting on the sidelines is no longer an option.
They have built the “platforms” which have enabled society to cleave to such a great extent that it’s impossible to share a common set of facts. They have built the echo chambers which have exposed half of this country to an alternate reality, fear mongering and outright propaganda, and has isolated the other half from having to witness our rural peers being left behind by the meritocratic system we benefit from.
It is now incumbent upon us to apply pressure to our peers in the valley to get their heads out of the sand. We must convince them that if they do not give up the ruse that they simply run “platforms”, they will have built the tools of their own destruction. We must convince them that while we would all love to rewrite the fundamental rules of politics to be completely technocratic, they must use their leverage to reform the system we have via elections, or at the least to preserve our liberal democracy based on rule of law. The libertarian streak on the valley must recede in favor of a practical approach to leveraging these tools we’ve built to affect the way our government operates and how people vote for our representatives. We must vote with our feet and voices, and shame them if necessary into being overtly and forcefully in opposition to our government.
We must lean on our friends in the media to stiffen their spine and talk truth to power. They have to give up the belief that simply showing people the hypocrisy of our elected officials will allow them to draw meaningful conclusions, they won’t. They have to stop with the double standards and drawing false equivalencies. They must figure out that there are not two sides to every story when “the other side” espouses white nationalism, racism, misogyny, bigotry, is anti-science, shares conspiracy theories or outright lies. We must not give ANY platform to their voices, they have used you to poison the minds of people. You must deny the government a platform to distribute propaganda at will.
And we all now have to get involved politically, in whatever way we each feel will make the biggest impact. Personally I believe there is technology to be built which will help organize and energize people to vote and vote in their own interest.
And we must all wake up to the fact that reason and logic are not enough. This administration defeated reason and logic and will continue to defeat it. We must all now unfortunately be willing to get into the mud and change minds through any reasonable means necessary. We know how to influence people and systems, the educated are amongst us. We are not above this, and if we believe we are there will be no fight to wage tomorrow.
I bemoan the fact that we must get involved now. Certainly there are better things we could be doing with our lives. But if we don’t, if we hide our heads in the sand, if we require perfect at the expense of the good, we’re going to wake up and find it all gone.
And if you think it can’t happen here, think again.
