Bix dot Blog

Saying Silicon Valley doesn’t have a political ideology — which in America is a bit like saying Silicon Valley hasn’t nailed its flag to either the blue party or the red party — is so demonstrably false. Thompson acknowledges that the Valley has a “strain of libertarianism and optimism”, as if Wired doesn’t have a history of supporting Barlow’s manifesto and declaration of independence for Cyberspace. I mean, is a manifesto not a political ideology? The Valley - that amorphous, stereotypical collection of companies largely funded by venture capital and now capable of buying entire supply chains out and behaving as if they’d like to remake the financial markets in their own image - demonstrably does have a political ideology and it’s clearly one that’s quite tied to “making lots of money” and things like believing in meritocracies and technocracies. A political ideology is not whether you say you support the blue party or the red party, it is something that can be discerned, at the very least, from both the daily actions and the actions in aggregate of any particular actor.

—Dan Hon, in “s07e19: Snow Crash Ch13, Part 2; Everything Is Political”