Silicon Valley, the new lobbying monster
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
But they ended up exactly the same. Helping the worst regimes, all-in in military complex, taking advantage of screen addiction and teen insecurities.
But hey at least they don’t wear white collars like the old bad guys.
This implies all. I then said I don’t doubt their impact.
They’re not all like this is my point.
I admit that's a large ask for a consumer, to keep track of a larger organizations abusing you.
I would hope a YCombinator news site of all places would see that.
And its a grey business so to say, you can see various justifications for it also here since many folks here work for them, its not some Zyklon-B factory. At the end, everybody under certain circumstances has a price, and kids tend to blur this even more for many.
It’s not surprising, but it is kind of disappointing.
When I was young, I was convinced that all the bad in the world, was the fault of evil, greedy old men. If young folks ran things, we’d be empathetic, kind, ethical, and positive.
As SV is basically completely run by young folks, of various races, genders, and backgrounds , I have to admit that it is actually worse, than the evil old men.
I think OP meant the opposite -- that when people have children in the Bay Area and want to support them, they'll make moral compromises to do so, given the cost.
The very young may not grasp what they are doing, and they may be easily "boiled as frogs", but I think they are more likely to believe that they are not making moral compromises.
They started with the same values: make as much money as possible, even if it destroys the world. Any entreaties to the contrary were a smokescreen to deflect criticism until they could shore up their position. This is the natural end-state of incentivizing profit maximization.
Today Silicon Valley is the establishment. It seems less like the nerd mecca it used to be (remember Weird Stuff?) and is now a place that is much more obsessed with money. When a basic 1960s suburban tract house within a reasonable commute from work costs more than $2 million, it’s hard not to be obsessed with money. There are still good people and awesome technologies in Silicon Valley, which is one of the main reasons I’ve decided to stay in the Bay Area, but it seems like some companies in Silicon Valley have gone absolutely mercenary, and they have eroded the goodwill the area had as recently as a decade ago.
But I think this is part of the natural evolution of industry. The same could be said about the history of the railroad and car industries in America. Think of how essential telecommunications and electricity are to modern society, yet I’ve yet to meet a person who loves Comcast and PG&E.
Hell I’m guilty of some myself. I was surprised early in my career when I found out that most of my peers did not have a computer and internet access as children in the early 90s
I checked Ritchie, Thompson, McCarthy, Sussman, Wirth… none had blue name parents.
Edit: you’ve got luminaries like Stallman too, who didn’t have the rich family but did get the university they worked at to cover their living expenses. An uncomfortable amount of leaders in the Free Software and Open Source communities openly advocate for people to give away their time and effort for free, while living on the largesse of others
What I was critiquing was the fact that a seemingly inordinate number of people who advocate that your work in software should be free for anyone else to take without payment, also happen to not ever need to consider how they put food on the table due to wealth they inherited or were given due to their celebrity status
This reminds me of the tycoon's thunderously semi-religious speech from The Network [0], which has aged pretty well for a movie 50 years old.
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
Turns out this is bullshit.
It's fine I bought into it too. But it's a pretty unbroken path from today back through the history of business in Silicon Valley. It's always been a smokescreen.
I recommend this book, it's highly illuminating and specific: https://www.amazon.com/Palo-Alto-History-California-Capitali...
To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing feats of science and engineering to power the new industrial economy. The defense companies made remarkable technological advances to help deter Soviet aggression and win the space race. And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost, as well as possibly helping them stay thin.
However:
Amidst all the talk about the causes of obesity, surely "not smoking anymore" is in there somewhere?
There's a large subset of people, the majority in my opinion, who are somewhat prone to addiction. Most are just a wee bit prone. They certainly won't peruse the streets for drugs. But, if something is readily available and socially accepted, they'll do it.
Before this was smoking, now its ultra-processed foods. Fast food, junk food, sweets type stuff.
It's probably still a boon, I'd say. I mean, I think being obese is probably healthier than smoking. But we didn't really "solve" anything, we just moved the problem.
It's heart and lung damage. Congestive heart failure, heart attacks, COPD, etc. A lot of these are slow, painful, and terminal.
Smokers used to claim that it suppressed their appetites. Not being a smoker, or obese, I wouldn't know. But it seems plausible as a (partial) cause.
But when people are dying slowly, and painfully, by their own hand and they can't stop, I personally consider that an addiction. In addition, we know ultra-processed foods are designed to invoke as much pleasure in the user as possible. In many ways, they suffer the same hyper-optimization that modern cigarettes do.
There's also some* evidence that part of the Tobacco industry shifted to food as Tobacco in the US died off. This is more circumstantial evidence. I think the "hard" evidence is that everyone smoked and was thin, now nobody smokes, and everyone is obese.
Regardless, I think we need harder and more proven solutions to the obesity epidemic. I think "willpower!" isn't working out for us, on a large scale. I'm rooting for Ozempic. And, fun fact, Ozempic also curbs nicotine and alcohol addiction.
No, but you're being purposefully hyper-sensitive.
If you're replying to someone higher, you should hit Reply on that comment. Not on someone lower down.
Now you can just buy nicotine products for that boost with a substantially reduced risk profile (it's not a carcinogen). Some writeup on it: https://gwern.net/nicotine
Does nicotine give a cognitive boost, or does it return one to their pre-addiction baseline?
I'm curious what definition of "addiction" you're using to arrive at the conclusion that caffeine isn't addictive.
There's no one standard definition of "addiction", and most concise definitions (one or two lines) are extremely fragile and break down when you try to apply them in any meaningful context.
By this definition you're putting forth, caffeine certainly could be addictive, as could any substance - and in fact, nearly any behavior, which is why professionals generally frown upon using this measure definitionally, because it leads to pseudoscientific terms like "X addiction", for absurd values of X.
You may also be interested in studies on caffeine dependence, like: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777290/
> Numerous controlled laboratory investigations reviewed in this article show that caffeine produces behavioral and physiological effects similar to other drugs of dependence. Moreover, several recent clinical studies indicate that caffeine dependence is a clinically meaningful disorder that affects a nontrivial proportion of caffeine users.
This is an exception and other common drugs like caffeine that do not have any positive effects at all. Or any other drug for that matter.
Theatre at its finest. But this shan't ever be discussed.
Anyone care to suggest what money "wants" or where it wants to go?
I know it's a flawed question, because money is in many ways inert, but we have similar caveats around genes and evolution. Non-sentient things can still create persistent structures that we can label with our human values. Or something :)
The modern wrinkle is that our effects on the world are more significant. This design has side effects (re: the climate, to name just one). These are side effects which we may not be able to tolerate forever. I think that money, being a status-quo preserver, "wants" us to ignore them for as long as possible, but since they're cumulative, that's going to be tougher sell as time goes on.
Also, It's an information technology. As the makers of such things I think it's up to us to figure out what the next version should look like.
The only way to interfere with it is by using other unrelated forces, like kindness, just like we can move masses around with electromagnetism.
People want food, housing, entertainment, and many more things so there is money to be made providing them.
Sometimes people do a bad job at picking what they want.
Sometimes people dont like what other people want, and when other people get it.
--Charlie Munger
Nothing ever has changed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...
Now asset owners have the whole thing comfortably under their thumb, every large tech co has MBAs throughout and schools have been pumping out engineers for 20 years so workers have no leverage. It has become the same as every other large industry.
Man with wide eyes and stock photos and nordvpn sponsorship on set with full makeup and steampunk costume rambles through various headlines, not forgetting to show you how to (mis)interpret facts, and how to manifest life as a rabid political fanatic, ready to ruin any dialog you come across with barking and screeching and red eyes.
There is nothing in that video that even resembles thought or rationality, it is just classic mainstream media non-sequitur that adorns the regalia of knowledge and batters the viewer with meaningless "facts" and "figures" until they are in a state of ready-to-be-filled aporia.
In your estimation, what’s an example of a fact that Boyle misinterprets in this video?
But, neither of those is thinking. I mean that, the problem is not that the ambiguity of the situation provides for two or more interpretations, which it seems to me that it does, but that this mode of investigation, which outwardly accounts for itself like "Each side go to your corner and gather as many facts as you can, then we'll gather in the middle and compare, whoever has the more and heavier facts shall be found truthful!", but is really more like, "Let's all divide ourselves in two, randomly, and amass as many facts as we can that back up our point-of-view, while dismissing any that support the other, and just for fun let's add in hating the other corner too, because it makes all of this more exciting."
If you hang your thinking on the results of some surveys, and one account of what happened in some particular historical event, plus some truistic phrase like "All's well that end's well" and a couple of well-timed stock photo gags to pull it all together, you will find yourself 1. impermeable to any ideas that don't fit in the point-of-view or framing of the question you already have and 2. completely and willfully uncurious about the world and questions you aren't already asking about the things you don't already have preconceived notions of.
It's always admitting that the thing you want to do is bad, but wanting to do it anyways. And more often than not, it relies on a mischaracterization of the supposed bogeyman: "the democrats eat babies and wouldn't hesitate to do X, so that justifies us sinking lower unless we want baby eaters to win."
Or maybe it's just inevitable that anything structurally resembling a race to the bottom ends up with everybody on the bottom.
It started off that way—remember people buying pizzas and domain names with bitcoin? That is the sort of thing that people do with dollars.
But it became quickly apparent that cryptocurrencies suck as currency because they are so strongly deflationary. However, that makes them work great as commodity financial instruments.
So viewing crypto as a financial market (not a currency), it benefits the U.S. to have as much of the market transacting within the jurisdiction as possible. Then you get the tax benefits, and ancillary benefits (e.g. rich crypto owners buying things).
US has enough cultural and institutional flexibility to accommodate dissent. First amendment protects almost any speech against the government, including insulting the president.
Compare that against China, who simply cannot tolerate citizens having any freedom of expression beyond what the party allows. See "tanks of tiananmen" smart contract[1] or "winnie the pooh" NFTs [2] - the only thing CCP can do at that point is to ban the entire blockchain ecosystem. But if blockchains are a big success in the rest of the world, CCP also has to cater to it just to keep pace with the West's tech progress.
[1] https://bscscan.com/token/0xb79c9c73e8c7b4be7244e697e6bdb9f5...
As an aside, one could easily replace 'crypto-currency' with 'fascism' in your comment to accurately describe why Republicans are following a similar tact in spite of the benefits of a democracy
The best coup would be Bitcoin as a gold that backs USD. This would force the price up well above a million. It might also make the world dark. $1 per kwh. $10 per kwh and so on.
Other coups would be lebanon style power interruptions while energy is diverted to mining with various subsidies.
They’ve been this way for decades. The whole “don’t be evil” facade slipped away once the money started flowing
Schiff is an undefeated 12-term House Democratic mainstay with a reputation as one of the savvier players in the party.
Cryptocurrency lobbyists didn't tank Porter's primary campaign. Schiff beat her 2:1, as observers expected. Just compare the endorsements. California has a jungle primary, so you can end up with two Democratic candidates after a primary, but Garvey beat her 2:1 as well, and you don't swing from a Republican MLB first baseman to Katie Porter based on an independent ad campaign.
Before the trial Bill Gates though spending money on lobbying was a waste and its a widely held belief that their anti trust trial wouldn't have happened if they had spent on lobbiest like healthcare, finance, and anything military do.
Post 2000, silicon valley learned this lesson and became one of the biggest lobbyers of the government. To the point where they eclipsed the oil and farm lobbies.
She was running against Adam Schiff, who had much broader name recognition. It also didn't help that she's overweight and "Porker" became her nasty nickname.
This is a shoddy piece of reporting. Tech lobbying didn't start with Chris Lehane, Uber, Lyft, or crypto. Anytime government is capable of helping or hurting an industry, they form a lobbying group. The more money involved, the bigger the lobbying effort.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-06/californ...
Goes to show that most political op-eds are just entertainment.
A while ago software companies where taking every kind of abuse from the US government, coming from well represented entertainment, finance, and all kinds of other industries. This suddenly stopped when they started to lobby.
As you pointed out, this is nothing new. When companies or entire industries feel threatened, they ramp up lobbying – even Huawei hired Tony Podesta to advocate for them.
Hillary Clinton's call to repeal Section 230 for stricter social media regulation will likely prompt tech companies to boost their lobbying efforts.
Sooner or later, companies in emerging industries will start lobbying to protect their interests or advance their agendas.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/23/huawei-hires-tony-p...
Ain't no point adding morality to lobbying - it's just what it is.
The Citizens United decision will be a cancer in American politics and a boon for the ultra-wealthy for generations.
The vast majority (97% ?) of voters are low-information voters. 1 such vote is equal to 1 high information vote (3% ?), those who research, read bills, etc.
So the process is already not maximally equitable - in fact, the system severely punishes high information voters via opportunity cost.
At that point dollars positively affect your outcome because with paid mediums , low information voters can now get more information, despite being unwilling to inform themselves via hard work. So that's a benefit. That information flow is subject to competition, so the best ideas (and information) will win out. That's another plus. Money competes for eyeballs, and your dollars are just as good as mine. If you have more $$, i can pool my friends and beat you. There's nothing more equitable than that we have discovered so far.
Now, enter someone with a ton of money, Musk. You could argue that he would tilt the game. But we then observe the opposite: Billionaires are also subject to the law of diminishing returns. 'Donations' will only buy so much favor, and then they become a losing proposition. So, do you want a billionaire burning his cash in the political process? The answer is absolutely: it signals a level of credibility and conviction, when business opportunity is already a loser.
So in short, you want people to risk all their chips in something they believe, instead of limiting their bets and just get rich off the house, playing the long game .
Perhaps we start from the other side of the table. Maybe money is not the problem. Perhaps it is the power concentrated in too few individuals ? How about cutting off power from those that are selling favors to the highest bidders ?
Our constitution does not begin, "We, the highly-informed people..."
Anything else, and you are no longer talking democracy.
I don't believe in this rosy view of the "marketplace of ideas", fear wins out, populism wins out, not the best ideas. The best ideas have nuance, they demand to be understood in context, they aren't catchphrases nor explore scapegoats for societal problems. All of that demands a high-information voter to parse through and judge what's the "best idea" within their context, environment, community, etc.
No, I do not believe that allowing ideas to fight it out inevitably leads to the best ideas raising to the top, people don't vote intellectually, they vote emotionally and the person who tries to fight strong emotions (such as fear) with ideas will lose out.
Did you miss all of COVID era on social media?
I didn't make a claim on how long conflict would last, but money is not infinite.
Noise is part of the system, and the system is not perfect, but that's a reflection of our imperfections, vs anything wrong with the final outcome.
Add to that the fact that bullshit is cheaper to produce than truth. Sprinkle in the notion also that bullshit is likely more profitable too. Consider what might happen if the bullshitters control orders of magnitude more money in the first place, and then filter through Brandolini's Law:
Add to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Democracy is too sacred to be left to the loudest.
To even get power you now need to nod to crypto, nod to a certain middle eastern country and so on. Eventually politicians will be entirely impotent suits. Look at the current "choice" the electorate has.
I joke, but the current system is so much more vastly corrupt than this imagined scenario where small potatoes money gets handed out equally to all candidates in a race, that I just can't really imagine what your actual nightmare scenario might be.
If corrupt incumbent politicians have complete control of the finances of an election, how could they be held accountable? Anyone wanting to run against them on this issue would simply be denied the money to do so.
The exact same way any relief is sought against the government: the court system.
But what you are proposing is a different government, one in which leaders could operate without the primary accountability that they face now: that anyone can organize a campaign against them.
In fact, this money would be available to anyone who met whatever threshold was legally enshrined, a far better alternative than having to kiss the ring of an oligarch, as you propose.
I will be waiting for the American exceptionalism arguments on why a thing that well functioning democracies/countries do wouldn't work in the USA.
The only candidate in American politics that lives up to your idealised, independent politician of the people, is Bernie Sanders. And guess what? He strongly opposes billionaires buying themselves a government.
You can also establish campaign spending limits without it being funded by taxes. In other words anyone can raise money for their campaign but only up to X amount (and no PACs).
What's not limited is independent expenditures. You can, for example, organize rallies or put up billboards advocating more serious efforts to combat climate change without limit.
Really? Because there are many countries with far stricter regulations on campaign financing than the US had pre-Citizens United, that also have much more working class representation in their politics than the US.[0]
If you read my comment as a response to the parent, I believe it will make more sense.
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CU opened the floodgates of anonymous, unlimited political contributions to "independent", but not really independent, organizations which can campaign on behalf of candidates.
The goal was/is to replace our democratic republic with an oligarchy. And we're now in the end game.
Wrong, if the candidates are directing or otherwise leading ostensibly-independent donations this is illegal. Independent donations are exactly that: independent of a candidate's campaign. If they're carried out on behalf of a candidate, they're not independent donations.
You can put up billboards saying, "X candidate's record is the best on climate change, tax policy, etc.". Your spending in this manner is not subject to limits. If the candidate calls you up and says "It'd be really good if you put up billboards saying X, Y, and Z" then that's breaking election laws.
Citizens United is not even remotely close to replacing our republic with an oligarchy. You can't buy elections, no matter how much people try to say so. Clintion received about twice as many donations as Trump in 2016, but still lost the election.
A lot of people have a, let's say filtered understanding of the decision, which has become a sort of shibboleth rather than a direct reference to the Supreme Court's ruling.
I encourage reading up on the ruling itself, at least the Wikipedia summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Or should you prefer primary sources (as ideally you should) just read the ruling https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
The canonical source, just for completeness. Justia has the same text https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
They like to get puff pieces in the news with their analysis on legislation and most people have the same misconception as a result
Gensler, Warren and Khan have been exceptionally anti-tech. Nice of this article to notice there is a growing number of techies putting their money where their mouth is in response.
When tech was scrappy and didnt have billions at stake, its products seemed to benefit humanity. Now it is (the most powerful?) part of the oppresive regime.
Most were libertarian and continue to be libertarian.
The minor shift is from being left libertarian to more right libertarian, though that's mostly due to the political landscape where there isn't much room for contrarian leftists.
What has changed is that the proportion of people who wind up in tech primarily due to passion has drastically dropped as it became more prestigious. I'll paraphrase something I read elsewhere that rang true to me. In the 80s and 90s, amoral,greed-is-good, get-rich-by-any-means people got into banking and finance because it paid well. Now they go into tech.
However the kind of moralization, where the industry has suddenly become amoral greedy monsters is imo wrong.
Tech has alway been ruthless. It's always been a cutthroat business. We even valorize that kind of character as the founder. That hasn't changed.
What has changed is the political opportunity. SV can now influence and leverage real political power. That political opportunity is why so many are switching away from being Left leaning Libertarians (with even re-distributive ideas like UBI), to more Right leaning libertarians.
And this is all because the incumbents on the Left aren't willing to make room for the new players in Tech. So path of least resistance is to move Right.
This realignment has happening for a decade plus now.
Too many years in a bubble of undeserved wealth where people suck up to him constantly.
YC helped fund/promote Palantir, the dystopian surveillance company.
The Iraq war defense contractor boom pumped tons of money into pro-war entities and this is just the result of that capital finding its way into new ventures. Ideology comes along for the ride. It's the very definition of dystopian, government propaganda and big-lie-driven malinvesment and (in hindsight) massive financial fraud on taxpayers.
I'm personally shocked that PG touches any of this dirty money. When is enough enough?
But they didn’t fund Palantir or Anduril or any of the companies that blew up during the Border Panics of 2016-2020.
Unless you’re playing guilty by association games in which case ..carry on.
With respect to the ares industries, YC buys into the neocon view strongly enough that it wants to help create the next wave of military tech. The only reason anyone perceives these "threats" and perceives the US to be "woefully unprepared" because of the marketing budget the defense industry has after profiting handsomely from the Iraq wars, etc.
The US is not in danger and does not need new and state of the art weapons systems. We are not losing in Ukraine because we don't have adequate weapons but because we are playing a very stupid and risky strategy. See the comments of Jeffrey Sachs on all of this.
Try reading this letter and see if you still believe him. Note the number of signatures at the bottom.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230806172854/https://news.berk...
The aggressive aspect of NATO is also minimized, which I think is naive.
I was in Ukraine in 2016 and saw the US fighter jets flying formations on Russia's doorstep. Calling that "defensive" is absurd. We now know that since the 1990s there has been a US goal to aggressively expand NATO mainly to suppress Russia.
The problem with this strategy is that it does not care at all about Ukrainian lives. As someone with family in Ukraine, I do not want my country (the US) wreaking havoc in the region. Thousands of Ukrainians are dying every single day right now, all because the US doesn't want to respect Russia's security zone. Mearshimer calls this the US nostalgia over the "uni-polar moment" when the US was briefly the only superpower.
Too much of the modern notions of American exceptionalism rely upon biases from that brief moment in history, to everyone's peril.
Until then, a multi-polar world among authoritarian aristocracies is a pipe-dream. Everyone hates American hegemony until you ask them what other hegemony they would like.
So missiles we must make, and make them cheaper we can.
[1] https://www.voanews.com/amp/new-poll-reveals-how-ukrainians-...
Tax cutoffs have this habit of drifting downward over time (the whole, "eventually you run out of other people's money" thing). See the original revenue act of 1913 (modern US income tax). At first it was 1% starting at today's equivalent of $93K and didn't go any higher until you made the equivalent of about $500K. And today, well, it's a little different.
New taxes are always pitched this way -- "oh it'll never affect you, just those rich people, what's your problem?"
I just don't see this as "SO much better."
This dude is a certified ghoul.
In May 2017, Wyden co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Senate Bill 720, which made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment,[88] for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government. The bill would make it legal for U.S. states to refuse to do business with contractors that engage in boycotts against Israel.[89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden#Israel
Here are his accomplishments: https://www.congress.gov/member/bernard-sanders/S000033?q=%7...
If you look at co-sponsored, its more of the same fluff. I'd say he's pretty ineffective.
"According to The New York Times, "Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate ... Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others."[146] During his time in the Senate, he had lower legislative effectiveness than the average senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made.[147] Nevertheless, he has sponsored over 500 amendments to bills,[148] many of which became law."
I don't want to ban you because you clearly know a lot of things and have posted quite a few good things over the years. But your comments include so much name-calling, swipes, snark, and nastiness that you're not leaving much choice.
Here's one of many examples, on an unrelated topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630774. That's a great comment, ruined by name-calling and personal attack. On the subject of cartoons of all things! There's no need to treat other people this way, or use the comment section to vent bile like that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
There's no way the situation can stay like that forever. There will be regulation like there's regulation of TV, radio, press, etc.
Without regulation you don't get a libertarian utopia - you just get oligarchy.
Most libertarians aren't rational egoists, they are just naive losers oligarchs take advantage of to get more power.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/05/28/what-is-s...
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know
I'm curious as to why you conclude that Democrats are better than Republicans in terms of IT liberty. Trump ended operation choke point, a program of essentially harassing banks into dropping certain customers [1]. De-banking is, in my opinion, one of the most important threats to "cyber liberties" since it's absolutely crucial for any business to survive. Individuals who are de-banked also find it incredibly difficult to survive: Plenty of services, including apartments and HOAs, do not accept non-electronic payments.
The censorship of "misinformation" (much of which later turned out to be true) also grew considerably under the 2020 administration, which did in fact reach out to social media companies to try and influence their decision making. One of the more salient examples was covered by HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868 To be clear, I'm not concerned about private companies autonomously deciding what to host. I take issue with the government coercing companies into making moderation decisions. This has huge potential for abuse, such as forcing the takedown of politically disadvantageous material.
Both Republicans and Democrats are in favor of getting rid of Section 230, but for essentially totally different reasons: Republicans seem to want to return to the precedence set by Cubby Inc. vs. CompuServe [2]. Democrats seem to want to narrowly repeal Section 230 to empower the government to dictate the contents of social media. Both are negative in my opinion, but the patter seems more insidious and prone to long term harm.
And to be clear, these issues are far, far from enough to get me to vote for Trump. I'm interested in hearing the counter-claim, that the Democrat party is better in terms of cyber liberties.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
Do you understand how you are the problem here?
Silicon Valley didn't care about politics until politicians started getting involved and attempting to impose censorship regimes, aggressive unrealized gains taxation, and killing crypto assets. Tech startups were find being ignored.
But as you illustrate, you can't ignore DC if it chooses not to ignore you. If people like you want to use the power of the state to "shatter" anyone you politically disagree with, well, of course the tech companies will hit back.