Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but complete
bloodinthemachine.com

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92 points

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FromTheArchives

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a day ago

44 comments

jschveibinz ・ 19 hours ago

This is focused on California politics. But even so, energy, utilities, real estate, entertainment, agriculture, and healthcare have a lot of influence on California politics. Tech is most likely not the biggest if you look at lobbying data.

  • pyuser583 ・ 19 hours ago

    Not to mention the movie industry.

    • Cheer2171 ・ 11 hours ago

      You mean the industry that has practically relocated to Vancouver, Toronto, and Georgia due to the aggressive tax breaks those governments give, which the governors and legislature have been refusing to do for a decade?

      Almost nothing is filmed in LA county anymore.

nickff ・ a day ago

As the governments have grown more powerful and intrusive (in terms of introducing policies which only affect narrow groups), lobbying has grown in importance. I am not sure why anyone is surprised.

  • psadauskas ・ a day ago

    A weaker government would not be able to prevent corporations from doing whatever they want. A strong government makes for a richer target for corporations to lobby to allow them to do whatever they want.

    It doesn't matter what size government we have, we need one that's just slightly larger than the corporations and is geared towards preventing the corporations becoming to powerful. We _need_ regulations and antitrust, but I don't know how we maintain that. An educated populace would help, but how to prevent the corporations from propagandizing that populace into weakening the government in the corporations interests? This is the situation we've been in the last 50 years.

    • energy123 ・ 18 hours ago

      The weak/strong distinction is quite bad. There's weak governments that are subject to cartels/gangs/militias like in Lebanon, or strong autocracies like Russia, and they are both terrible governments to live under.

      I would instead optimize for properties that are not conceptually tied to 'weak' or 'strong'.

      Have effective state capacity. Have independent corruption bodies. Enshrine the separation of powers and rule of law. Have a monopoly on force. Have an independent bureaucracy. Prioritize both efficiency and effectiveness without seeing them as trade-offs. Create more good regulations and repeal or reform more bad regulations. Separate military from civilian police.

      Getting it right is about lots and lots of small details, quality institutions and cultural norms that we need to build over centuries of effort. It's less about a simple patch.

      • tgma ・ 17 hours ago

        True. Plus strong/weak axis as in having teeth is a separate dimension than scope being large or small.

  • harimau777 ・ a day ago

    How would a weaker government help? However imperfect, governments are the closest thing that regular people have to a protector. At the very least people need a powerful government to play against powerful corporations in the hope that they weaken each other enough to minimize their ability to prey upon the rest of society.

    How are you envisioning people protecting themselves against corportations?

    • arealaccount ・ a day ago

      If you see government as a vehicle for corruption then you can say a weaker government is better than a more powerful government

      • harimau777 ・ 21 hours ago
        ・ 6 more

        Definitely, but I don't see how that's any different from a corporation doing evil things.

        • tgma ・ 17 hours ago
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          A corporation, without government, cannot imprison you or conduct violence so it is infinitely better in that scenario.

          If it’s not obvious to you, you have been extremely privileged to be part of the a few percentage who haven’t had to live under horrible governments and their worst experience is having to deal with Comcast.

          • TFYS ・ 9 hours ago
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            A corporation in the absence of a strong government absolutely can imprison you and use violence, because nobody would be there to stop them. The richest corporations would be the ones who could afford the most weapons, and they would therefore be able to do whatever they want. Even if you imagine this weak government to still somehow maintain a monopoly on violence, a small weak government would be easily corrupted by the richer corporations.

            • tgma ・ 8 hours ago

              A big government can also be corrupted by big corporations bigly too. Not at all clear there's a correlation there or which way there is. In fact there's more incentive and larger attack vector to corrupt a big and powerful government. It appears that is a separate matter entirely.

              There is a big difference still. For a corporation to become rich and powerful in an anarchical environment as you describe, they have to provide good and services that people voluntarily choose to pay for, so they have to appease the people, or at least a large subset of them, directly to retain the power. For a big evil government that is not the case at all. Look at all the Communist/Socialist/Islamist disasters. They are impossible to vote out.

          • locopati ・ 13 hours ago
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            Right, a corporation becomes a contractor to government and _then_ they imprison you, cut corners on the contract, and pocket the difference. If it's unclear what I mean, look up the prison-industrial complex.

            • tgma ・ 9 hours ago

              That's still the government doing its work and limited to the power of your government. Not the same thing at all.

  • Teever ・ a day ago

    Is the issue really lobbying or inordinate control over the government by big tech?

    And if that's the case how would a less powerful government resist the power of big tech as you seem to be implying?

jeisc ・ 17 hours ago

We have become intoxicated by our devices and AI will make it even more so. Our future politicians will be launched using AI for a party platform and campaign strategy.

grafmax ・ a day ago

I think Silicon Valley is losing its edge (as evidenced by the widespread enshittification) so it needs to combine with the government to support its rent extraction (available to it as it has amassed so much money).

iancmceachern ・ a day ago

It's good to be on "the list" with you all

bigyabai ・ a day ago

If you think that it's Silicon Valley capturing the government and not the other way around, you must have missed your Political Science 101 course. They both sing the same tune because it's the feds writing the script, not Sam Altman and Tim Cook conspiring with Thiel.

All the seed funding in the world won't disrupt the monopoly on violence. We're here because some dolts actually believed the lie that Silicon Valley was on "our side" of the fight.

  • chaps ・ a day ago

    Why does it have to be either-or? It's more of a revolving door.

    One of the clearer modes of how this all looks can be seen when using public records laws to request information that was created through a government contract. On one side, trade secrecy is a legit thing. On the other hand, it's abused to the Nth degree such that just about anything is "trade secret". Government agencies will literally just ask the company's counsel if records in a records request can be released and they'll copy/paste the answer.

    For example: I took an uber from an East Chicago, IN restaurant to a Chicago, IL planned parenthood and then FOIA'd for the GPS records that the city legally requires Uber to provide for every trip [1]. In the request I included the trip identifier that I found on the city's open data portal [2]. For months and months they denied, denied, denied, even after a request for emails gave me the exact SQL query they wrote to identify my trip.

    Eventually when I narrowed the request down to the exact fields, they finally agreed that they have the records, but argued that the data (edit: just lat/lng of the start/end locations) showing me going to a planned parenthood was a trade secret. It would be trivial for Chicago's counsel to push back on that, but they seemed to have zero interest in reflecting on the risks of holding this category of data.

    [1] https://chicago.github.io/tnp-reporting-manual/trip/ [2] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Transportation/Transportation...

  • paxys ・ a day ago

    Exactly. Silicon valley is bending the knee to political institutions, not taking them over.

    • heroprotagonist ・ a day ago

      More like, several wealthy people from Silicon Valley funded campaigns to put a government in place which is now encouraging Silicon Valley and other business to bend the knee to the political institutions.

      It's not always simple to be precise..

    • watwut ・ a day ago

      Silicon valley is not bending the knee. For quite a few of these people, this is the government they wanted and worked hard to get.

      • SpicyLemonZest ・ a day ago
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        I just don't think that's true. Silicon Valley moguls vary in just how vehemently they endorse skilled immigration, but none of them wanted or suggested an illegal $100,000 H1B application fee. A couple did get tricked by promises that the Trump regime would be more favorable to tech than it's turned out to be.

        • hippo22 ・ 19 hours ago

          Really? I think Silicon Valley _loves_ the H1B fee. Prior to the fee, everything was purely a lottery. There was no pay-to-win. Now there is. Silicon Valley has the most money to spend here, so they get the most talent.

        • convolvatron ・ a day ago

          as has been pointed out here, there is some subtlety. surely the cost of $100,000 a head is more significant to some businesses than others. and don't forget that the administration made it clear that they can make an exception to certain employers or sectors for whatever reason

        • harimau777 ・ a day ago

          I don't think that the government doing a handful of things that Silicon Valley dislikes necessarily means that overall the corpos don't support MAGA. That could just be the cost of doing business.

    • dangus ・ a day ago

      [flagged]

  • pessimizer ・ a day ago

    I wish all the Political Science 101, Civics 101, and Economics 101 people would take another class. First of all, the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, that's silly; the government has a monopoly on legitimate violence. Second of all, the wrestling valet and game show host and his array of dimwits aren't in control of anything, the people who pay them are. The people who pay them are also the people who run silicon valley.

    If you hear that the government is coming down on somebody in silicon valley, it's because everybody else in silicon valley wanted him gone.

    "The Feds" are people with no interests, no money and no power. They are where they are to execute for American business (and as we've sold off America, that just means any rich guy), and it's literally all they've been doing since WWII.

  • cyanydeez ・ a day ago

    eh, weird way to describe fascism.

    • mindslight ・ 21 hours ago

      Hey now, you can't just call it "fascism" like that. It doesn't come from the Fascia region of Italy, and plus that word hurts people's feelings. Maybe try "sparkling autocratic authoritarianism" instead.

      • nomdep ・ 19 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Fascism comes from “fascio” (not from the small town of Fascia) that means “bundle”.

        The idea is that, like rods are fragile by themselves but strong as a bundle, an individual is either with the group (making it stronger) or an enemy of it. No room for discussion or disagreement

        • cyanydeez ・ 13 hours ago
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          The idea is the fascists dont want to be called fascist because fascists are losers and _this_ time surely they will win.

          • _phnd_ ・ 6 hours ago

            it's corporatism, ref Mussolini

jimt1234 ・ a day ago

I'm old enough to remember when Silicon Valley and politics were, for the most part, two separate worlds. The only thing I remember back in the 90's were the arguments about encryption strengths and export controls.

  • janice1999 ・ a day ago

    I think that's an anachronistic view of things - politics and Silicon Valley have always been linked in some way. In-Q-Tel has been funding startups since 1999. Other government programs also helped fund Google. Those political decisions to invest in mapping, data processing and surveillance technology etc helped create the Silicon Valley giants we have today. It also worked the other way, with the USA v Microsoft antitrust kicking off in the late 90s.

    • TheOtherHobbes ・ a day ago

      Evgeny Morozov's books are the go-to on this. He's been warning about digital totalitarianism since 2011.

      The NSA has been trying - successfully, it seems - to put backdoors inside encryption since the mid-90s.

  • nradov ・ a day ago

    Silicon Valley first became a technology center from the military-industrial complex that grew out of WWII.

throw-10-13 ・ 20 hours ago

Authoritarian tech ceo’s and the literal fascists running things in Washington have a lot in common.