> Three weeks ago, an industry newsletter, The Information, reported that the share of Republican-aligned contributions from employees of Google, Apple, Amazon

> Three weeks ago, an industry newsletter, The Information, reported that the share of Republican-aligned contributions from employees of Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta this election cycle tripled to 15 percent in 2022 from 5 percent in 2020. > In 2017, David Broockman, Gregory Ferenstein and I conducted the first large-scale survey of the founders of technology companies. We found that they were heavily Democratic, with over 75 percent indicating that they supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Yet technology founders were unusual in that they took liberal positions on wealth redistribution but conservative positions on regulating the economy, particularly the labor market. Their basic worldview is to let the free market operate and then redistribute after the fact through taxes and transfers. > What changed? While our survey found that technology founders were extremely liberal on social issues like gay marriage, abortion and gun control, I question whether the same can be said for more recent social divides around transgender rights, racial equity and the penumbra of other issues surrounding the concept of “wokeness.” > One clear source of friction has been the growing influence of organized labor, which has proved more popular with younger workers and has a clear seat at the table in the Biden administration. > The roots of the high-tech industry are embedded in the countercultural movement of the 1960s, so it was perhaps unsurprising that technology elites viewed themselves as part of the left. Now that the left dominates major cultural institutions, some members of the tech community represent the new counterculture.