Big Tech ought to eye reparation with the President-elect
DECEMBER 12TH, 2016 — POST 335
The Valley in the Big City. Uptown Upload. Silicon and Gold. These are just some of the titles that are already adorning spec screenplays that are being written about the upcoming meeting between the titans of tech and President-elect Donald Trump this week. As Kara Swisher of Recode reports today after the site broke the news of those that are expected to be in attendance at the meeting this Wednesday, notable Silicon Valley Trump supporter Peter Thiel has corralled the leaders of the largest and most influential companies in the world. Forget the G20 Summit or any such political meeting: these guys are building the hardware, shipping the software, and crafting the services so many the world over engage with everyday.
Even if as of now Elon Musk (CEO Tesla, SpaceX) is yet to confirm his attendance, and Travis Kalanick (CEO Uber) and Brian Chesky (CEO Airbnb) won’t be able to make it, the meeting will bring together Tim Cook (CEO Apple), Satya Nadella (CEO Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (COO Facebook), Larry Page (CEO Alphabet, formerly Google), and perhaps Jeff Besos (CEO Amazon) all into the same room as Donald Trump. It is easy to be cynical of the possibility for consequential outcomes from a meeting such as this. However, it is also reasonable to expect that many of these titans will have a bone (or two or three) to pick with Trump.
Thiel the go-between is certainly an outlier in the Valley in his support for Trump. The Valley is generally understood to be buoyed by the optimism of tech-powered progressivism. And for Big Tech, this isn’t only about the headiness of this ideology. Offshore manufacturing is integral to the delivery of the iPhone as we know it today, for example. Immigrants make up a large part of the U.S.-based workforce at a lot of these companies, often right to the C-suite in the case of Nadella and Sundar Pichai of Google. Ideologically, Big Tech sits opposite to Trump and has a real interest in negotiating moderation on the more extreme positions he expressed during his campaign. Moreover, unlike the advice of President Obama, or the criticism from journalists, or the outcry from protesters on Trump Tower doorstep, Trump has to listen to them: they’re all simply too big, too significant, frankly too economically potent to ignore.
For those of us (and given the now-well-acknowledged filter bubble, I feel confident in the use of “us”) who still sit slack-jawed before the New York Times and Washington Post homepages everyday, at every horrifically revelatory piece of news, this group of people might be our last hope of tempering Trump’s immoral positions. And it is somewhat fitting that it should fall to them: there’s a case to be made that at least some of them have a fair bit to do with his victory. From fake news left unchecked by Facebook and Google to the more chronic problem of the filter bubble upon which some of the more influential tech products are based, the omnipotence of Big Tech has rightfully been called into question in the month since the election.
If Big Tech is our last line of defense, I don’t have much hope that certain issues will be raised. It wouldn’t seem to effect the bottomline of these companies that the election could have been influenced by Russia or that Trump has conflicts of interest too numerous to name. But there is reason to hope that the views held by Trump and his party around non-majority groups inside the U.S. (views that could compromise personal safety) and climate change action (a hope that will be strengthened if Musk is in attendance) could be challenged and hopefully moderated. So even though I’ve spent the last month or so wishing a lot of tech would just go away, I’m glad they’re showing up in New York this week.
If you enjoyed this, please take the time to recommend, respond, and share this piece wherever you think people will enjoy it. All of these actions not only help this piece to be read but also let me know what kinds of things to focus on in my daily writing.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
