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Silicon Valley's Ambivalence Towards Trump Turns to Anger
- bencpeters 10y agoPersonally, I find this "turn to anger" a little hollow/self-serving. Nothing Trump has done so far is in any way out of line with what he was saying on the campaign trail - the only people who are surprised by his actions are the people who took a "he's not being serious, it's just talk" view when evaluating his speeches. I wish SV companies and executives could have had this "turn to anger" back when it mattered and helped avert this when it was easiest to do so - before the election.
- antidaily 10y agoHollow, maybe. Too little too late, probably. Self-serving??
- chordatum 10y agoNow they jump in and intervene to play the role of hero, begging the question: why not sooner? Rhetorically, the answer implied is that, had they made their voices and opinions known earlier, it might not have seemed as heroic as it does now. Letting circumstances become dire, when they could have been prevented altogether suggests performances are crafted and dishonest for the purpose of branding, marketing or personal fame. Sort of like if John McAfee reared his head right about now, but with greater subtlety.
- capkutay 10y agoWhat was the tech sector supposed to do? Go campaign in Wisconsin for Hillary? Tech was already shoveling tons of money into her campaign. Bezos-owned Washington Post was about as Anti-Trump as a news organization can be.
- rch 10y agoPeople in Boulder were making calls to more contested states. Historically these personal calls have had a small but measurable effect.
- paulddraper 10y agoThey should have done whatever it is that qualifies as "turning to anger" now. (Personally, I think the article is overstating the case.)
- sjg007 10y agoGoogle Facebook should support remote work from red states in republican counties.. maybe a few remote offices as well.
- rongenre 10y agoTwitter could have suspended his account.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- banku_brougham 10y agoI think they were disgusted but generally uncomfortable fighting against the power and the electorate that voted him in. Maybe the campaign was all talk like his locker room talk, who knows? And campaigns are often quite dirty affairs. But now its week one, the policies are eggregious and the implementation is incompetent, and a groundswell is building. I suppose now industry leaders dont feel like they are sticking their necks out, or at least they have a lot of company.
- avn2109 10y agoThough if we must have egregious politics, it's best if they're implemented incompetently.
- banku_brougham 10y agoI think they were disgusted but generally uncomfortable fighting against the power and the electorate that voted him in. Maybe the campaign was all talk like his locker room talk, who knows? And campaigns are often quite dirty affairs. But now its week one, the policies are eggregious and the implementation is incompetent, and a groundswell is building. I suppose now industry leaders dont feel like they are sticking their necks out, or at least they have a lot of company.
- akhilcacharya 10y agoA lot of them did. Dustin Moskovitz publicly spent millions for Hillary, and Brin did as well, secretly.
- vivekd 10y agoHaving the temporary immigration ban affect current temporary and permanent residents to the United States was pretty out of line with campaign promises. So was extending that ban if banned nations don't cooperate with United States (really Syria, Yemen and Iran are going to cooperate?) Kinda makes it a not so temporary ban.
- mc32 10y agoThe biggest problem is that the Dems could only offer a hawk who had issues getting along with Putin. I would have held my breath if she entered office while Putin was still in power. That and her globalist outlook (even if later she tried to pretend to become anti-globalist.) There was really no good choice and it became a choice of the least bad and the guy who won at least isn't afraid to say he's looking out for Americans whereas Hillary was more timid about looking out for the average Joe and Sue.
- dirkg 10y agoAll talk no action. This is the definition of 'for show'. If they wanted, the ultra rich valley billionaires and companies could affect real change by leveraging their power. But these are the same companies and people who tacitly approved of Trump and did nothing to stop his election, or even try to educate people. I'm looking at Google, who are now trying to woo Republicans !
- grzm 10y agoIt's not uncommon by any means for companies to support both parties. I haven't been reading the details on the "Google wooing Republicans" topic, though I wouldn't be surprised if Google hasn't been supporting Republican officials, at least in a quieter manner, for a long time.
- oculusthrift 10y agotwitter couldve banned trump months ago and his career would be over. but they know he brings them so much money/traffic they would never do it. as thiel said, they were working for him the entire time.
- KKKKkkkk1 10y agoI don't like Trump's policies any more than anyone else here, but I think that it's wrong for companies to play a role in politics. A company like Google was created by its shareholders with the purpose of making money by providing Internet search services. Taking political positions would subvert the goal for which Google was created. If some of Google's shareholders want to pursue political goals instead of providing search services, they can take their money out of Google shares and start a PAC. This is precisely the reason why Sergey Brin said that he does not represent Google when he was at the protest at SFO yesterday.
- kenjackson 10y agoPolitics can impact revenue. Do you not think the oil companies strongly support and play politics with Republicans?
- vacri 10y agoCompanies are political, and politics affects them (eg regulation). Any time you have two humans disagreeing about a course of action, you have politics.
- replyreply 10y agobusinesses don't operate in a vacuum.
- molecule 10y agoSo you don't think that companies like Google and Apple should oppose and speak out against unwarranted government surveillance? Their customers and shareholders think that they should.
- fezz 10y agoand employees.
- Eridrus 10y agoShareholders are not the only stakeholders in companies, employees and consumers usually have some stake in and influence over what they do.
- jpatokal 10y ago"Ambivalence?" All I've been hearing on HN for the past year plus is comparisons to fascism, the Nazis and the Anti-Christ. That said, at least Mussolini made the trains run on time and the Nazis were pretty efficient, which is more than can be said for the Trump administration's first week...
- L_Rahman 10y agoAh, but it's a mistake to think of HN as representative of the Valley in any way and even if it were it's hard to gauge whether your perception of it matches what it really is. What I've discovered (thanks to helpful nudging from /u/dang) is that this is a community with a variety of ideologies and geographies. We see in the community the things that we're primed to see. For example if you have strong feelings in either direction about the links between Trump and fascism, you're more likely to perceive that it is the dominant view even if it's only held by and discussed by a small group of people. Link to /u/dang's comment where they explained this to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13083111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13083111
- wiml 10y agoPoint of trivia: Mussolini didn't even make the trains run on time.
- gumby 10y agoActually he "did" -- in quotes because he put out alternative facts -- propaganda -- to that effect. Little known fact: the original word for the kinds of publicity companies use to grow demand for their product was "propaganda" (propagate the goods, get it?) coined by Edward L Bernays, Freud's nephew and the first formalizer of advertising.[1] After Germany appointed a minister of advertising ("Propaganda"), the industry decided it needed a new name. Now we have a journalist/propagandist on the National Security Council. Should be interesting. Did you know Alan Kay was on Reagan's? He (Alan) has some hysterical stories of his time on the NSC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)
- flukus 10y agoSilicon Valley was too busy inventing the gig economy that has people turning towards trump.
- legostormtroopr 10y agoSilicon Valley tech billionaires who will be un-impacted personally by migration, complain when they no longer have a cheap source of labour. The Valley isn't going to be hosting migrants and they aren't going to be competing against unskilled migrant labour. Why is it walls are just fine around LAs mansion estates and in closed gated communities, but as soon as the general populace wants them they become bad?
- serge2k 10y agoGoogle said this impacts ~180 employees total. is that really enough to impact salaries? Maybe, just maybe, these sons and daughters of immigrants and refugees are just as disgusted by the actions of Trump (and Bannon) as the millions of others.
- a_j_c 10y agoI'm so tired of seeing all the blog posts and comments that think our problems are due to Trump and Republicans instead of taking a look at our own "progressive" party. Sure, Trump and the GOP are fucked up, but so are the Dems and the tech community seemed perfectly fine fawning over our "tech president" when he was bailing out the billionaires, expanding state surveillance powers, and ordering the murder of thousands with drones. Whenever I mention how the corporate Dems have been selling us out for years and we need to light a fire under their ass to work for our interests, I'm immediately ostracized from my fellow "progressives."
- grzm 10y agoI can see what you're against. What are you for? What do you support? In particular now? For example, are you happy with the Executive Order regarding immigration?
- mc32 10y agoThe biggest thing against Hillary, geopolitically, was her hawkishness and the posture against a nuclear Russia. Obama-Putin was very rocky. Hillary-Putin would have been an abysmal and possibly dangerous relationship. Avoiding a hot war in Eastern Europe is worth the people affected by the new immigration bans.
- rgbmarsanon 10y agoRecent events have made me question Thiel's judgement. It is within his rights to support the candidate he wants and have the beliefs he desires, but he still helped a potential dictator get into power and angled to be his confidante. More hypocritically, Trump goes against every core libertarian value from individual freedom to limited state power. Puzzle me this, how can a libertarian support an authoritarian's ascent to power?
- EGreg 10y agoMy post is about outrage combined with navel gazing, and perpetuation of human rights issues. I have a serious question. While I am personally against a ban on immigration of the kind Trump is doing, 6 out of the 7 countries targeted - all except Somalia - have a permanent ban on Israelis. Not a 4 month ban "until they figure out" some aggressive vetting processes, and make themselves look like they kept a promise to their constituents. A permanent ban. By the logic of "this is a ban on Muslims", that is a "ban on Jews". My question is - where was the outrage all those years? Seriously think about it. Chomsky (who I have met and later email-debated with extensively) says criticizing other countries is like criticizing the 19th century, and your duty is criticizing the crimes of your own, because you can do the most there. While I agree with that duty, I think it misses one crucial piece. People from progressive and developed countries tend to "let things go" when other countries violate human rights because they are so far outside their local political reality. They end up navel gazing at their own sins, with dangerous consequences. For example, feminists today in the USA spend much more energy on making sure default social network avatars are gender-neutral than they do on stopping human trafficking, honor killings and rape culture in patriarchal tribal / caste societies in other countries. That's what I mean by navel gazing. Angel Merkel and EU bureaucrats let millions of Syrian refugees into Europe while not requiring Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states to even sign the UN convention on the rights of the refugee. These people speak Arabic but go to a country where their language and customs are out of place and retard their contributions to society. And why? Navel gazing. Similarly Jews often help exacerbate criticism of Israel by failng to require people to apply the same standards to other countries. Care about the rights of refugees? Great. Let's have a solution that all the countries of the region implement: giving citizenship to those who were born in the country. Then after couple generations Palestinian refugees etc. would have long stopped being refugees. By having Israel alone give citizenship and a right of return, you practically force eg all Lebanese of Palestinian descent to try and flood Israel. Instead, their pride in their country's achievements makes them acquiesce with those who use the words "Social Justice" to advocate a kind of double standard Marxist view that everything is a zero-sum game and there must be losers. Zionists must lose. White people must apologize and pay reparations. But these double standard Social Justice never lead to anything except perpetuation of misery for those that have to live without rights. My point here is that pride in exceptionalism leads to complacency. We should have cared when these countries (and other Islamic countries) banned Israelis from entering. But we were focused too much on our Western world.