How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy

The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for the Economist, he warned of the coming “techlash,” a revolt against Silicon Valley’s rich and powerful fueled by the public’s growing realization that these “sovereigns of cyberspace” weren’t the benevolent bright-future bringers they claimed to be. 

While Wooldridge didn’t say precisely when this techlash would arrive, it’s clear today that a dramatic shift in public opinion toward Big Tech and its leaders did in fact ­happen—and is arguably still happening. Say what you will about the legions of Elon Musk acolytes on X, but if an industry and its executives can bring together the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham in shared condemnation, it’s definitely not winning many popularity contests.   

To be clear, there have always been critics of Silicon Valley’s very real excesses and abuses. But for the better part of the last two decades, many of those voices of dissent were either written off as hopeless Luddites and haters of progress or drowned out by a louder and far more numerous group of techno-optimists. Today, those same critics (along with many new ones) have entered the fray once more, rearmed with popular Substacks, media columns, and—increasingly—book deals.

Two of the more recent additions to the flourishing techlash genre—Rob Lalka’s The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power and Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley—serve as excellent reminders of why it started in the first place. Together, the books chronicle the rise of an industry that is increasingly using its unprecedented wealth and power to undermine democracy, and they outline what we can do to start taking some of that power back.

To his credit, Lalka takes this medley of tech titans and uses their origin stories and interrelationships to explain how the so-called Silicon Valley mindset (mind virus?) became not just a fixture in California’s Santa Clara County but also the preeminent way of thinking about success and innovation across America.

This approach to doing business, usually cloaked in a barrage of cringey innovation-speak—disrupt or be disrupted, move fast and break things, better to ask for forgiveness than permission—can often mask a darker, more authoritarian ethos, according to Lalka. 

One of the nine entrepreneurs in the book, Peter Thiel, has written that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and that “competition [in business] is for losers.” Many of the others think that all technological progress is inherently good and should be pursued at any cost and for its own sake. A few also believe that privacy is an antiquated concept—even an illusion—and that their companies should be free to hoard and profit off our personal data. Most of all, though, Lalka argues, these men believe that their newfound power should be unconstrained by governments, ­regulators, or anyone else who might have the gall to impose some limitations.

Where exactly did these beliefs come from? Lalka points to people like the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, who famously asserted that a company’s only social responsibility is to increase profits, as well as to Ayn Rand, the author, philosopher, and hero to misunderstood teenage boys everywhere who tried to turn selfishness into a virtue. 

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It’s a somewhat reductive and not altogether original explanation of Silicon Valley’s libertarian inclinations. What ultimately matters, though, is that many of these “values” were subsequently encoded into the DNA of the companies these men founded and funded—companies that today shape how we communicate with one another, how we share and consume news, and even how we think about our place in the world. 

The Venture Alchemists is strongest when it’s describing the early-stage antics and on-campus controversies that shaped these young entrepreneurs or, in many cases, simply reveal who they’ve always been. Lalka is a thorough and tenacious researcher, as the book’s 135 pages of endnotes suggest. And while nearly all these stories have been told before in other books and articles, he still manages to provide new perspectives and insights from sources like college newspapers and leaked documents. 

One thing the book is particularly effective at is deflating the myth that these entrepreneurs were somehow gifted seers of (and investors in) a future the rest of us simply couldn’t comprehend or predict. 

Sure, someone like Thiel made what turned out to be a savvy investment in Facebook early on, but he also made some very costly mistakes with that stake. As Lalka points out, Thiel’s Founders Fund dumped tens of millions of shares shortly after Facebook went public, and Thiel himself went from owning 2.5% of the company in 2012 to 0.000004% less than a decade later (around the same time Facebook hit its trillion-dollar valuation). Throw in his objectively terrible wagers in 2008, 2009, and beyond, when he effectively shorted what turned out to be one of the longest bull markets in world history, and you get the impression he’s less oracle and more ideologue who happened to take some big risks that paid off. 

One of Lalka’s favorite mantras throughout The Venture Alchemists is that “words matter.” Indeed, he uses a lot of these entrepreneurs’ own words to expose their hypocrisy, bullying, juvenile contrarianism, casual racism, and—yes—outright greed and self-interest. It is not a flattering picture, to say the least. 

Unfortunately, instead of simply letting those words and deeds speak for themselves, Lalka often feels the need to interject with his own, frequently enjoining readers against ­finger-pointing or judging these men too harshly even after he’s chronicled their many transgressions. Whether this is done to try to convey some sense of objectivity or simply to remind readers that these entrepreneurs are complex and complicated men making difficult decisions, it doesn’t work. At all. 

For one thing, Lalka clearly has his own strong opinions about the behavior of these entrepreneurs—opinions he doesn’t try to disguise. At one point in the book he suggests that Kalanick’s alpha-male, dominance-at-any-cost approach to running Uber is “almost, but not quite” like rape, which is maybe not the comparison you’d make if you wanted to seem like an arbiter of impartiality. And if he truly wants readers to come to a different conclusion about these men, he certainly doesn’t provide many reasons for doing so. Simply telling us to “judge less, and discern more” seems worse than a cop-out. It comes across as “almost, but not quite” like victim-blaming—as if we’re somehow just as culpable as they are for using their platforms and buying into their self-mythologizing. 

“In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be.”

Marietje Schaake

Equally frustrating is the crescendo of empty platitudes that ends the book. “The technologies of the future must be pursued thoughtfully, ethically, and cautiously,” Lalka says after spending 313 pages showing readers how these entrepreneurs have willfully ignored all three adverbs. What they’ve built instead are massive wealth-creation machines that divide, distract, and spy on us. Maybe it’s just me, but that kind of behavior seems ripe not only for judgment, but also for action.

So what exactly do you do with a group of men seemingly incapable of serious self-reflection—men who believe unequivocally in their own greatness and who are comfortable making decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people who did not elect them, and who do not necessarily share their values?

You regulate them, of course. Or at least you regulate the companies they run and fund. In Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup, readers are presented with a road map for how such regulation might take shape, along with an eye-opening account of just how much power has already been ceded to these corporations over the past 20 years.

There are companies like NSO Group, whose powerful Pegasus spyware tool has been sold to autocrats, who have in turn used it to crack down on dissent and monitor their critics. Billionaires are now effectively making national security decisions on behalf of the United States and using their social media companies to push right-wing agitprop and conspiracy theories, as Musk does with his Starlink satellites and X. Ride-sharing companies use their own apps as propaganda tools and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into ballot initiatives to undo laws they don’t like. The list goes on and on. According to Schaake, this outsize and largely unaccountable power is changing the fundamental ways that democracy works in the United States. 

“In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be: from dismissing government to literally taking on equivalent functions; from lauding freedom of speech to becoming curators and speech regulators; and from criticizing government overreach and abuse to accelerating it through spyware tools and opaque algorithms,” she writes.

Schaake, who’s a former member of the European Parliament and the current international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, is in many ways the perfect chronicler of Big Tech’s power grab. Beyond her clear expertise in the realms of governance and technology, she’s also Dutch, which makes her immune to the distinctly American disease that seems to equate extreme wealth, and the power that comes with it, with virtue and intelligence. 

This resistance to the various reality-distortion fields emanating from Silicon Valley plays a pivotal role in her ability to see through the many justifications and self-serving solutions that come from tech leaders themselves. Schaake understands, for instance, that when someone like OpenAI’s Sam Altman gets in front of Congress and begs for AI regulation, what he’s really doing is asking Congress to create a kind of regulatory moat between his company and any other startups that might threaten it, not acting out of some genuine desire for accountability or governmental guardrails. 

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Like Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Schaake believes that “the digital” should “live within democracy’s house”—that is, technologies should be developed within the framework of democracy, not the other way around. To accomplish this realignment, she offers a range of solutions, from banning what she sees as clearly antidemocratic technologies (like face-recognition software and other spyware tools) to creating independent teams of expert advisors to members of Congress (who are often clearly out of their depth when attempting to understand technologies and business models). 

Predictably, all this renewed interest in regulation has inspired its own backlash in recent years—a kind of “tech revanchism,” to borrow a phrase from the journalist James Hennessy. In addition to familiar attacks, such as trying to paint supporters of the techlash as somehow being antitechnology (they’re not), companies are also spending massive amounts of money to bolster their lobbying efforts. 

Some venture capitalists, like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who made big donations to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, wanted to evict Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, claiming that regulation is killing innovation (it isn’t) and removing the incentives to start a company (it’s not). And then of course there’s Musk, who now seems to be in a league of his own when it comes to how much influence he may exert over Donald Trump and the government that his companies have valuable contracts with.

What all these claims of victimization and subsequent efforts to buy their way out of regulatory oversight miss is that there’s actually a vast and fertile middle ground between simple techno­-optimism and techno-skepticism. As the New Yorker contributor Cal Newport and others have noted, it’s entirely possible to support innovations that can significantly improve our lives without accepting that every popular invention is good or inevitable. 

Regulating Big Tech will be a crucial part of leveling the playing field and ensuring that the basic duties of a democracy can be fulfilled. But as both Lalka and Schaake suggest, another battle may prove even more difficult and contentious. This one involves undoing the flawed logic and cynical, self-serving philosophies that have led us to the point where we are now. 

What if we admitted that constant bacchanals of disruption are in fact not all that good for our planet or our brains? What if, instead of “creative destruction,” we started fetishizing stability, and in lieu of putting “dents in the universe,” we refocused our efforts on fixing what’s already broken? What if—and hear me out—we admitted that technology might not be the solution to every problem we face as a society, and that while innovation and technological change can undoubtedly yield societal benefits, they don’t have to be the only measures of economic success and quality of life? 

When ideas like these start to sound less like radical concepts and more like common sense, we’ll know the techlash has finally achieved something truly revolutionary. 

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.