Silicon Valley Is Too Politically Online
Professionally, it makes sense for Silicon Valley to be extremely online. Politically, it’s becoming disastrous.
The denizens of Silicon Valley spend an awful lot of their time online — for eminently sensible reasons. Being online is inherent to the sector: that is their market and their zeitgeist. The best digital and tech entrepreneurs are those who scan cyberspace and figure out needs going unmet by the current marketplace. Tech entrepreneurs prize the role of disruptive innovation in their field — the belief that the pathway to success cornering the market for a niche consumer group, and then having that success spill over into the entire sector. And there is no better place to find niche audiences than online.
For those and many other reasons, the plutocrats and thought leaders of Silicon Valley prize themselves on being up to date with all trends, memes, and vibe shifts. That’s great for trying to build or maintain market share — but does it work for politics?
There is a case to be made for the affirmative. In a lot of ways party primaries are all about finding and catering to the niche audiences that are motivated to vote. Silicon Valley folks were key players backing Barack Obama when he upset Hillary Clinton in 2008; some Silicon Valley folks like Peter Thiel played an equally important role in Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, in which Trump won the primary by focusing on the nativist, populist segment of the GOP base that the other sixteen candidates neglected.
That said, it is far from clear that being perpetually online is of much use in general election campaigns.1 Back in 2020 Jane Coaston wrote a great piece in Vox about how the Trump campaign suffered from being Extremely Online:
To be Extremely Online is not simply to be literally connected to the internet (as you likely are at this very moment), but to be deeply enmeshed in a world of internet culture, reshaped by internet culture, and, most importantly, to believe that the world of internet culture matters deeply offline.
Being Extremely Online is both a reformation of the delivery of ideas — shared through words and videos and memes and GIFs and copypasta — and the ideas themselves, a world in which Twitter effectiveness counts as political effectiveness despite Twitter’s comparatively small audience.
The importance of those ideas is then judged not by their real-world impact but on their corresponding popularity or infamy in the world of Online. A trending topic on Twitter becomes a critical locus of entirely online discussion, a Facebook post becomes an infamous online reference for months to come, an entire infrastructure can arise to foment the celebrity of a person you would have never heard of had you not baked in the furnace of being Extremely Online.
Being Extremely Online is a problem for Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs. Their past success, combined with their prodigious wealth, renders them impervious to critical feedback. As I noted in The Ideas Industry, if you think it’s hard to speak truth to power, try speaking truth to money.
So let me posit that the very powerful incentives that drive Silicon Valley residents into being extremely online also, in the end, badly distorts their political acumen. Tech entrepreneurs will embrace some Extremely Online views about American politics that turn out not to matter a whit in general elections. As a result, the odds are good that when it comes to tech entrepreneurs’ political instincts, the goods are odd.
Want some evidence? Let’s consider how the nascent 2024 presidential campaign is going, and who the loudest voices in the digital world are placing their bets: Ron DeSantis and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is not hard to find evidence that DeSantis and RFK Jr. are wooing Silicon Valley and that the wooing has been reciprocated. As far back as last summer DeSantis was, according to Puck, “spending some time with the Thiels and Musks of the world as the tech industry rallies around a potential new 2024 favorite.” Elon Musk friend David Sacks loves DeSantis. Politico’s Ben Schreckinger concluded back in May, “Ron DeSantis is casting in his lot with… very online, anti-’woke’ Silicon Valley moguls.”
As for RFK Jr., the Wall Street Journal’s Angel Au-Yeung and Berber Jin recently wrote about his popularity in Silicon Valley:
Silicon Valley loves a contrarian, which is why some tech luminaries threw their support to Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. This time around, Kennedy, a Democrat, is the one getting the antiestablishment buzz in the tech world.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has recently voiced support for Kennedy, who is running against President Biden for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Kennedy has been feted by a handful of other tech titans, including SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, a founding executive of PayPal and trusted ear to Elon Musk. Mark Gorton, founder of the now-closed file-sharing website LimeWire, started a PAC that supports Kennedy.
They say they like his willingness to go against the status quo.2
Obviously, not all Silicon Valley moguls are fans of these two guys, but you get the general idea.
So how is Silicon Valley’s support working out? Poorly. The very traits that drew tech moguls to DeSantis and RFK Jr. are the same factors that are submarining their candidacies with those who are not extremely online.
A big plank for both of the DeSantis and RFK Jr. campaigns is pandemic policies. Both have called into question the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic restrictions. This is appealing to tech moguls bound and determined to get their workers back into their offices. Maybe this would have had gotten even more traction in 2020.
In 2023, however, this is not a winning issue, as Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley explain:
Rage against COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates accelerated Ron DeSantis’ rise to the top of the Republican Party. It was supposed to be a key part of the governor’s plan to outflank Donald Trump in the 2024 primary.
But here’s the problem: Republican voters, at this point, largely just don’t care — at least not when they’re picking a candidate.
Six different Republican operatives, campaign officials, and pollsters described or shared with Rolling Stone internal data and surveys they’d conducted or reviewed last and this year. Some of these sources are Trump-aligned, some support DeSantis, and others back different 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls. Across the board in the surveys, Covid-related policy — including vaccines and vaccine mandates — did not rank as an item of high concern for voters. That held true even when voters were specifically given the option of Covid policy when asked about their concerns. Since the middle of last year, Covid-related policy did not show up in conservatives’ top 10, or top 15, issues in any form, leading various campaigns and consultants to declare it, for the most part, unuseful.…
“We don’t agree on much in American politics these days but there’s one thing everyone agrees on: They’re pretty much over talking about or thinking about Covid-19,” says Kristen Soltis Anderson, a longtime Republican pollster who adds that she and her firm are not affiliated with any 2024 presidential campaigns. “So much so that [my firm] barely asks questions about [it] in our research anymore trying to understand the Republican primary electorate. While we know there’s lingering frustration over things like mandates and closures, this pales in comparison to issues like immigration and the economy.”
There is a small but vocal cadre of online vaccine obsessives, but polling suggests their numbers are far too small to swing a primary — and certainly not one in which DeSantis, according to polling averages from FiveThirtyEight, trails Trump by 30 percentage points (emphasis added)….
Public polling data also reflects that Americans have mostly moved on from the once hot-button issue surrounding a virus that ravaged the nation and left more than 1 million dead in the United States alone. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that while support among Republicans for childhood vaccine mandates has dropped more than 22 percent since the Covid pandemic, 57 percent of Republicans still support them, as do 58 percent of white evangelical protestants — a key GOP primary demographic.
Railing about the pandemic will be even more of a dead-bang political loser going forward, for multiple reasons. As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted this week, the pandemic is not just politically over — it’s epidemiologically over. By three different metrics, the number of excess deaths in the United States is no longer greater than normal. Leonhardt concludes, “Almost a year ago, President Biden angered some public health experts when he declared, ‘The pandemic is over.’ He may have been premature to make that declaration. But the excess-deaths milestone suggests that it’s true now: The pandemic is finally over.” This will make it that much harder for presidential candidates to flog this issue.3
A related problem is that it is difficult for these candidates to raise valid issues about pandemic policies (say, school closures) without veering into crazy conspiracy theories about, oh, I don’t know, whether COVID-19 was designed to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.
Thankfully, anti-Semitism does not appear to be a growing trend in American politics. This might explain why Silicon Valley’s preferred candidates are flailing. DeSantis is now shedding staff and support. It’s not clear that RFK Jr. ever had much support, but what he had is shrinking.4
No doubt, ranting about pandemic stuff will continue to play well with the Extremely Online. But Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, and the failure of candidates like Blake Masters to win in the 2022 midterms, strongly suggest that Silicon Valley’s political instincts are not cutting edge. They’re just really fucking weird.
1 It might still matter a little during the 2024 GOP primary. The New Republic’s Ana Marie Cox recent warned that, “It will be the Primary of the Extremely Online. I would not be surprised if Elon Musk winds up moderating one of these at some point as well.” Still, Cox’s reporting suggests that very few of the issues animating the likes of Tucker Carlson will play all that well in a country where the odds of recession are lessening by the day.
2 Those who remember the more obscure parts of the 2004 campaign should read the whole thing to see RFK Jr. campaign manager Dennis Kucinich quoted praising the tech world for its acumen.
3 Also, as Brian Quinn notes, the lack of excess deaths falsifies the ridiculous notion that the vaccines themselves were the cause of excess deaths.
4 RFK Jr. never had a chance of winning the primary, but even the polling suggesting he had double digit support seemed based on a combination of name recognition and support from crossover Republicans.
(This post is republished from Drezner’s World.)