The past several years have made me aware of the vulnerability of overreliance on consolidated powers. Silicon Valley has too much influence on the world. Most

The past several years have made me aware of the vulnerability of overreliance on consolidated powers. Silicon Valley has too much influence on the world. Most of the world’s tech resides within it. The ideology of the region is vastly different than large swaths of the country. The nuance goes far beyond simply Democrats versus Republicans. California, solidly a blue state that overwhelmingly voted for Biden, voted very differently internally when it came to November’s ballots. Just a few counties away, we came to find that the rest of the state believes in fundamentally different values than the Bay Area. For example, the majority of residents within the Bay Area were in favor of Prop 16 while the rest of Californians were not. What this means is that even Democrats themselves cannot agree amongst each other on fundamental values. This should be concerning even to Democrats because one faction of their party has overt influence and control on the flow of the world’s information. This week’s events made it evidently clear that one’s presence on the web is dependent on the wills of those from a very small concentrated region. A region in which people outside struggle to even make their why into it, physically, because of prohibitive cost of living and limited housing. Are we going to live in a future in which all of those who do not bow to the Bay Area’s ideology will have the digital rug pulled under them? Hopefully not, but the point isn’t wether they will or not, but rather can they do it. We shouldn’t make ourselves so vulnerable.