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Chuck Darwin

As Silicon Valley eyes US election, Elon Musk is not the only tech bro to worry about

There was a time when the tech industry wasn’t much interested in politics. -- It didn’t need to be because politics at the time wasn’t interested in it.

Accordingly, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple grew to their gargantuan proportions in a remarkably permissive political environment.

When democratic governments were not being dazzled by the technology, they were asleep at the wheel:

💥Antitrust regulators had been captured by the legalistic doctrine peddled by #Robert #Bork and his enablers in the University of Chicago Law School
❌ the doctrine that there was little wrong with corporate dominance unless it was harming consumers.

The test for harm was price-gouging,
and since Google’s and Facebook’s services were “free”, ❓where was the harm, exactly❓

And though Amazon’s products weren’t free, the company was ruthlessly undercutting competitors’ prices and pandering to customers’ need for next-day delivery.

Again: ❓where was the harm in that❓

It took an unconscionable time for this regulatory slumber to end,
but end it finally did on Joe Biden’s watch.

❇️ US regulators, led by #Jonathan #Kanter at the Department of Justice (DOJ), and #Lina #Khan at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC),
rediscovered their mojo.

⭐️And then in August the DoJ dramatically won an antitrust lawsuit
in which the judge ruled that Google was indeed a “monopolist”
which had taken anticompetitive steps to preserve its 90% share of search.

🔥The DOJ is now proposing “remedies” for this abusive behaviour,
ranging from obvious ones like barring Google from contracts such as the one it has with Apple to make it the default search engine on its devices
to the “nuclear” option of 🧨 breaking up the company.

The shock of this verdict to the tech industry has been palpable,
🆘 and has led some movers and shakers in the Valley to think that maybe electing Trump might not be such a bad idea after all.

Some of the loudmouths like Marc #Andreessen
– and, of course, #Musk
– have explicitly come out for Trump,
but at least 14 other tech moguls are providing more discreet support.

And although quite a few tech leaders have – belatedly – come out for Kamala Harris,
some are doing so with some reservations.
Reid #Hoffmann, the founder of LinkedIn, for example, donated $10m to her campaign, but says he wants her to fire Lina Khan from the FTC.

The most dramatic evidence of how Silicon Valley lost its political virginity, though,
comes from the extraordinary amounts of money that #cryptocurrency companies have been putting into the election campaign.
The New Yorker reports that crypto companies have already sunk
“more than a hundred million dollars”
into so-called SuperPACS supporting crypto-friendly candidates.

The interesting thing is that this money seems to be aimed not so much at influencing who wins the presidency
as at ensuring that the “right” people get elected to the House and the Senate.
This suggests a level of political nous that would have been disdained by the early pioneers of the tech industry in the 1960s.

Technology might not have been political then; but it sure is just now.
theguardian.com/technology/202

The Guardian · As Silicon Valley eyes US election, Elon Musk is not the only tech bro to worry aboutBy John Naughton
Public *
Chuck Darwin

#Leonard #Leo was born on Long Island in the mid-sixties.
When he was only a toddler, he lost his father — a pastry chef — to cancer.
At the age of five, his mother remarried, and the Leos moved to New Jersey, where he attended Monroe Township High School.
Leo was chosen as the “Most Likely to Succeed”
a distinction he shared with classmate #Sally #Schroeder, his future wife.
In the yearbook, the two were shown sitting next to each other, holding wads of cash and with dollar signs painted on their glasses.
He was so effective at raising money for his senior prom that his classmates nicknamed him the “Moneybags Kid.” 
Throughout his life, he remained steeped in the deep Catholicism of his grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager;
his grandparents attended Mass daily, and encouraged the young Leonard to follow their lead.
After high school, Leo went to Cornell University, studying under a group of conservative academics in the university’s department of government
and with the wider national backdrop of iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s #Robert #Bork and the University of Chicago’s #Antonin #Scalia, who were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as #originalism.
He got a series of internships in Washington, D.C., during the final years of the Reagan administration,
then returned to Cornell to join the law school, where in 1989 he founded the local chapter of a student organization called the #Federalist #Society.
That group had been set up by three conservative-leaning students from Yale, Harvard, and Chicago seven years earlier as a way of challenging what they saw as the dominance of liberal ideology at the country’s law schools. 

After graduating, Leo married Sally, who had been raised as a Protestant but who used to go to Catholic Mass five times every weekend because she played the organ.

She decided to convert not long before her marriage.

The couple moved back to Washington, where Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit
— a man from Georgia called #Clarence #Thomas,
who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest.

Despite being ten years older and from much more humble origins,
Thomas shared Leo’s conservative outlook, and the two soon developed a deep friendship that would endure for many years.

During this period, Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee
— although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court.

Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin.

It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.
rollingstone.com/politics/poli

Rolling Stone · Opus Dei and the Moneybags KidBy Gareth Gore
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