The article discusses the troubling influence of Silicon Valley on U.S. government policies, emphasizing how figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg wield undue power. It highlights the erosion of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's effectiveness following Zuckerberg's support for Trump. The piece warns that Silicon Valley's increasing dependence on government contracts and its evolving ethos threaten its foundational principles of integrity and human progress, marking a significant departure from its countercultural origins that once stood against establishment norms.
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.
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.
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 ma
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