Even for a deeply cynical person, it would be shocking to see Silicon Valley's most high-profile billionaire leaders sitting together ahead of President Donald Trump's second inauguration on Monday. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet (Google parent company) CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook were sworn in by Trump Pre-inauguration handshake - The first three companies each donated $1 million to his inaugural fund, and Cook personally donated another $1 million. They were joined by Trump's megadonor Elon Musk, who spent more than $250 million to return Trump to the White House and served as a close adviser during the transition and beyond.
Why are these tech giants now in sync with the MAGA movement? How Bezos takes the helm washington post Shift to Trump-friendly coverage while Musk and Zuckerberg make changes on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) to promote harassment, lies, extremist language and slurs commonly used by the far right ? Shouldn’t the Internet they helped shape become a force for social liberalization, empowerment, and progress, ushering in a hyper-connected era of pure and unbiased information?
Not at all, technology expert Mike Pepi argues in this eye-opening new book Against the Platform: Surviving Digital Utopia. With a series of articles debunking our most basic assumptions about the web (titles include “Technical Solutions Can’t Solve Social Problems,” “Computers Can’t Think,” and “Algorithms Are Made of People!”), numerous venture-funded startups The veteran (who asked not to be named) believes that deliberate ideological choices have led to the disastrous digital world we now inhabit. If you follow Pepi's counter-narrative over the past 25 years, it's no surprise that the people who now control the constellation of apps on our smartphones are Team Trump.
Trump 'just wants to win, you know?' Pepi told rolling stones. "If you think about Silicon Valley, that's their mentality as well. They just want to win. They want to exit. They want to grow."
It is this desire for growth at all costs that has shaped the architecture of Web 2.0 - a social matrix we believe will accelerate human achievement by unlocking our highest potential, Pepi writes. He says the same capitalist-libertarian philosophy now gives us an appetite for cryptocurrencies (and evangelists who zealously claim blockchain technology is the answer to any problem) and artificial intelligence (increasingly integrated into every conceivable product) created a craze. Both so-called areas of innovation will be overseen by David Sacks, a Musk ally and venture capitalist in the Trump administration, Pepi said. "The similarity is that they are basically venture capital. material". "So they almost exist as a new field of ideas that need publicity. The reason you keep hearing about them is because people are pushing them into the public domain through pseudo-intellectual venture capital," he predicts. Trump-supporting Silicon Valley oligarchs will continue to insist that our “dissatisfaction with the federal government is solely due to the lack of the Metaverse, cryptocurrency, or artificial intelligence.”
However the core point is Against the platform The thing is, none of this is really new, it started way back at the turn of the century during the dot-com bubble. It was at this time, Pepi said, that many people mistakenly believed that the Internet was "a free-floating, immaterial thing that exists in nature." But on the contrary, all these technologies we use are made by humans, and these humans have political purposes. ” author of the pro-tech manifesto (he criticized one such piece in 2023 by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley Democrat who later became a Trump supporter) Prefers to pretend that apps, websites, etc. are essentially apoliticalPepi explains that any attack on their negative impact on popular consciousness could therefore be considered Luddite fear-mongering.
Still, throughout the 2010s, Pepi said, the public became deeply aware of the "massive trade-offs" tech giants were making as they expanded and conquered. He cited whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's secret access to Google and Yahoo servers; Facebook's Cambridge Analytica data scandal; and the #DeleteUber campaign in response to a 2017 taxi driver strike to protest Trump. The ride-sharing app continues its campaign to serve John F. Kennedy International Airport during the refugee travel ban. Pepi describes this mainstream awakening as a "technological shock," although he notes that our naiveté about the hidden agendas of the investors and entrepreneurs behind these platforms remains. “There are zombies of digital utopianism lurking even in some of the solutions we propose[today],” he said.
At the same time, figures including Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos have perhaps never been more vocal about their actual values (or lack thereof) while reshaping the platforms they control to Adapt to the MAGA culture. "People who are used to relying on platforms as arbiters of truth or arbiters of political speech are now in a bad situation because they are starting to realize that that was never the point of these digital platforms." Pepi said these companies will only Be motivated to drive engagement, collect data and expand impact. He added that the flight to rival sites would lead to a "perpetual whack-a-mole situation" and that the root cause of this continued migration was actually "all of us shouting that we just need better institutions to govern ". These things”, this isn’t a seemingly better version of the last platform.
But if the tech industry effectively erodes our institutions by “disrupting” them with failed alternatives, from government to journalism to education, will the web find itself hollowed out in turn? “I think AI is probably a bridge too far in Silicon Valley,” Pepi said. "A lot of the ways in which we're now encouraging users, artists and musicians to automate creation - and in some cases, consumption - may become a historic irony that makes people realize, 'Hey, no, this is A dead net, this is a gray net.” Against the platform It was an angry reaction to Apple's dystopian 2024 ad, which showed a hydraulic press pressing instruments, books, and paint cans into the flat surface of an iPad Pro (the company apologized for the ad, saying it "missed the mark"). Recently, we've seen Facebook's plans to launch artificially intelligent character user accounts cause confusion.
Wherever these trends take us in the future, Pepi's book will be invaluable in early 2025 for its clear reconstruction of our tools to achieve this goal and for convincing us that they are fundamentally neutral False ideals. Tech enthusiasts who make fortunes in the industry, like everyone else, must be held accountable for our political climate of blatant corruption and cheap, viral reactionary hatred. As Pepi writes, these platforms’ continued service to capital has elevated “a network whose owners are outside democratic control.” That's what we should see, as they stand shoulder to shoulder behind Trump, ready to tear down the last few fragile barriers that might stand in his way.