My own thoughts on Trump are not safe to write down....
An Inconvenient Truth About Silicon Valley and Donald Trump
The President-elect’s disruptive platform sounds awfully familiar to the valley’s leaders
I’ve come to believe that Donald Trump makes Silicon Valley’s founders
uncomfortable precisely because they all have so much in common. Hear me
out. They consider themselves the ultimate disruptors. Trump won the
presidency (if not the popular vote) on the promise of being
anti-establishment, and changing everything. This ethos has long defined
the valley; it’s the idea from which tech’s founders take their sense
of identity — and one that still reverberates through garages, startup
accelerators, and shared office spaces from Palo Alto to San Francisco.
Everything can always be reimagined so that it’s better than it is right
now, and the best way to do it is to ignore the current constraints and
systems and dream up new ones.
The
problem, however, is that many of the valley’s most disruptive ideas
have transformed into massive companies that have established themselves
in our culture and economy as mainstream. Techies may think of
themselves as disruptors, but they’ve emerged as the titans of
industry — the kind of established power brokers that don’t take well to
the chaos that comes with new disruption. And Trump? He is disruption
embodied. Trump reminds them of the gap between their roots, and their
current status. (Check out today’s piece on Uber in a Trump era.)
Often,
when people set out to take down the establishment, they succeed in
creating a more elite and calcified version of it. It’s classic. Earlier
this week, I published a story about Peter Thiel’s eponymous fellowship program,
which pays young people to forego college in favor of entrepreneurship.
Intended to be a meritocratic way to help smart teens learn about
entrepreneurship without going into debt, the Thiel Fellowship has
become a prestigious entitlement bestowed on already successful young
men (and just a few women), many of whom look and sound remarkably
similar to Thiel himself. He set out to take down higher education— to
prove that a pedigree didn’t have to matter. Instead, he just created an
even more elite pedigree, bestowed to an even narrower cast of already
established entrepreneurs.
In
many ways, the fellowship’s trajectory reflects the recent history of
Silicon Valley. Its charter members were renegades and
contrarians — people who took issue with the status quo, and who had
radical ideas about how to change the future. But their success in
pushing those ideas forward came with a price: Those ideas moved the
founders who had them from fringe to mainstream. In the United States
and the beyond, everyone got a personal computer. Then an AOL account.
Then Facebook. Then a smartphone, and on and on. And as technology
crossed from nerdland to the center of our economy, the companies that
introduced it grew from innovative tiny startups to the titans that now
threaten nearly every industry.
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and
Google are five of the seven largest companies in the world. (Berkshire
Hathaway and ExxonMobil are the other two.) In other words, the
disruptors have become the establishment.
Which
brings me back to Peter Thiel. He has become the de facto ambassador to
the valley. He has grown up to become a member of the new
establishment, without abandoning his roots. He is a self-made
billionaire, having benefitted from the valley’s rise; he wrote Mark
Zuckerberg his very first check for Facebook. But he’s also the kind of
freethinking contrarian who positions himself as antiestablishment.
He
is always willing to bet against the status quo, to take a swing at the
institution. I wrote about the fellowship in part because I wanted to
understand Thiel better by learning about the people with whom he
surrounds himself. In doing so, I re-read Zero to One,
the best-selling book he wrote with Blake Masters on building startups.
Even those people who take issue with Peter personally will often step
back and acknowledge that it’s a very smart look at what makes valley
companies successful.
My favorite thought that he introduces is one that
embraces the power of humans. He writes:
“Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like dams or honeycombs, but we are the only ones that can invest in new things and better ways of making them.”
In
classic Silicon Valley fashion, Thiel made a contrarian bet that the
ideas Trump espoused — primarily, that many Americans weren’t being
served by the current establishment, and a massive disruption could
unleash the change they needed — would be embraced.
He was right. The
danger is that Thiel’s stab at remaking the administration under Trump
will turn out as misguided as his attempt to build a program to replace
college — instead of introducing the change that will make all of American
great again, it will simply make a lot of rich white men (and a few
women) even richer and more entrenched than they already are.
VERY VERY WISE WORDS INDEED.
And sadly probably what's going to happen. The rich will get very quickly richer.
And for a more balanced and even clevererererer view - which is still kinda surprisingly pro trump - check this out.
And for a more balanced and even clevererererer view - which is still kinda surprisingly pro trump - check this out.
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