Silicon Valley Has Gone From ‘Think Different' to ‘Yes, Sir'

New York Times

21-03-2025

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.
Today this set of values is being overtly challenged. The first important Silicon Valley figure to proudly depart from the industry ethos was Mr. Thiel, the billionaire investor who helped found PayPal and who has always preferred the Übermensch to the underdog. 'Zero to One,' a book on start-ups that he published in 2014, called on every company to seek a monopoly to call its own, insisting that 'competition is for losers.' He co-founded a data-analytics company, Palantir, whose main customers have been the National Security Agency, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. He was the first high-profile tech mogul to endorse Mr. Trump for president, which he did in 2016 — and presumably the first to openly question the merits of democracy, which he did in an essay in 2009.
But it is Mr. Musk who is now the definitive counter-icon to Mr. Jobs. Mr. Musk is a tech founder who courts government power and money while attacking countercultural causes. Standards erode when they are violated without consequence, and this is how Mr. Musk is destroying the Silicon Valley spirit. He has not been punished for his departure from it but rewarded with wealth, power and status.
By contrast, companies like Facebook and Google, despite purporting to pursue lofty ideals ('Don't be evil'), have been publicly vilified and legally challenged over the past decade as they've grown larger and more powerful. That lesson — play nice but get shamed anyhow — seems to have convinced figures like Mr. Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos of Amazon that the old Silicon Valley ideals were for suckers, the sort of virtues that Nietzsche belittled as a 'slave mentality.' If everyone is going to think you are big and evil anyhow, you might as well ditch the noblesse oblige and embrace being big and evil.
This shift in Silicon Valley's attitude is most pronounced in its sudden fondness for military money. Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel are military contractors, with Mr. Musk and his companies having received approximately $38 billion in public funds. Palantir also earns most of its income from government: Its $200 billion valuation on a mere $3 billion in revenue reflects a widespread impression that Mr. Thiel is a government favorite.
Silicon Valley venture capital has also become interested in military money, and here it is Mr. Andreessen who serves as a bellwether of change. He began his career in the 1990s as an underdog founder whose company, Netscape, was crushed by the mighty Microsoft, and he spent most of his career investing in idiosyncratic start-ups. But in recent years his investment company has poured money into military technology. At the same time, Mr. Andreessen — who supported Mr. Trump for president in 2024 after years of supporting Democrats — has become the evangelist of techno-optimism, a philosophy described by the Wired columnist Steve Levy as 'an over-the-top declaration of humanity's destiny as a tech-empowered superspecies.'
Like characters in an Ayn Rand novel, Mr. Musk, Mr. Thiel and Mr. Andreessen may believe that they have torn off the blinders of convention to seize the greatness they deserve. But their approach may actually weaken Silicon Valley in the long term. The industry's embrace of government power and money threatens what has made it an engine of innovation and a magnet for creative talent. Most government-funded monopolies grow fat and lazy; today's dynamic aerospace company becomes tomorrow's Boeing. A culture of risk taking and innovative product design is less valuable than knowing where to donate money when it comes to landing large government contracts. You don't need the best and brightest coders to do that; if anything, you are likely to alienate them.
If there is any reason for hope, it is that the current transformation in Silicon Valley has been largely top down, driven by a handful of powerful executives. I suspect that most employees in the tech industry remain interested in building good products, not in overthrowing democracy or achieving a dark enlightenment. A bottom-up resistance would come from engineers and founders who dislike politics and want to get back to building tools that help people.
We should also keep in mind that most people who enter Mr. Trump's orbit are hurled out at some point, damaged or destroyed. Mr. Musk is running hot; his car company, Tesla, has lost more than $700 billion since December; he seems destined to crash and burn. If he does, it will offer Silicon Valley a lesson in the wisdom of its older ways.