One tweet recently struck my attention. “We are currently in the midst of the largest right-ward shift in Silicon Valley politics that I have seen in my 20 years here,” it went. “Some of this is on the surface, a lot is below it.”
The writer was Aditya Agrawal, a former engineer and executive at Facebook and Dropbox and currently the cofounder ofI’ve known him for a while as a smart, sensitive person and wasn’t sure if he was decrying, celebrating, or merely observing this shift. When I spoke to him about it, he confirmed he was referring to a subtle yet very real movement he considers himself a part of. It’s not about contesting the 2020 election, and certainly not cheering the demise of.
“Most of the one-on-one conversations I have with people around the industry—executives, venture capitalists, CEOs, founders—seem to be pretty dissatisfied with the left-leaning politics of Silicon Valley,” he says.” Everyone's pretty disillusioned by the extreme woke-ism, kind of within a larger political sphere, but obviously within the companies themselves.
Conservatism in Silicon Valley is nothing new. The industry’s 1950s roots are in the defense industry. Long before engineers wore hoodies and shorts, they favored white short-sleeved shirts and crewcuts. And, of course, libertarianism has always been entrepreneurial catnip. Check out the bookshelf of a founder and you’ll often find a battered paperback of an Ayn Rand novel. But the hippie-inspired personal computer movement produced a wave of liberal-minded companies, with Apple as their avatar.
In that era, being right-wing in tech was seen as a disastrous career move, unless you were so rich that no one could fire you, as Google did to James Damore when he wrote a shamefullycritiquing diversity efforts. But even billionaires got pushback. After Peter Theil funded Trump, people demanded that Facebook kick him off its board of directors.
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