The Creatures of the Internet
It's not just extremist politicians. Our own platforms may have mutated in bad ways.
In the US, the current Administration seems devoted to disruption and value extraction, two ideas popularized by Silicon Valley business practices and culture over the past two decades.
The politics of Big Tech have shed any pretense of liberal norms and democratic principles to reveal an underbelly of cyberlibertarianism, what one source calls “necro-futurism” — the belief that the dead past is where the future belongs — and an antipathy to established elites in an obvious effort to supplant them with techno-elites of their own making.
Kara Swisher caught this early, writing in 2016 about leaders in Big Tech:
And here’s what the election of Donald Trump in 2016 said about Silicon Valley: They hate us. They really, really hate us.
It’s on full display today.
And now they have cave trolls.
The underlying antipathy was captured in Marc Andreesen’s unhinged rant of 2023, where he failed to note he might have been describing he and his “bro”-thren:
. . . indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
From defunding well-run, government-funded journals to canceling journal subscriptions to accelerating a public access policy that will actually cost the government more than rejecting it, there is no rhyme or reason, just instability and a desire to disrupt institutions and hassle potential cultural competitors so that the ground is soft enough for the new overlords to plant their flags.
Silicon Valley has been a major player in both Trump election victories. The first Trump election in 2016 was powered by Twitter and Facebook (and related activities). The 2024 victory came about because of TikTok, podcasts, and Facebook.
It was unclear at the Inauguration if Trump was showing off his prize Big Tech CEOs, or if they were there to reinforce his fealty to them.
A coterie of what I like to refer to as “creatures of the Internet” — people who gained his attention and some legitimacy by using modern media in a purposeful, political, and performative way — have gained control of various parts of the US government now, from the FBI to National Intelligence to the DOJ (well, that one needed a do-over).
Their ascendancy in science and academia is what concerns us, so let’s go for a trip to the cyberzoo . . .