Silicon Valley’s dangerous plan for a second Trump term
The Little Tech Agenda was crafted to defend the power of tech billionaires
For the better part of a year, prominent tech figures cycled through potential presidential contenders they hoped would defeat Joe Biden, finally reaching the inevitable embrace of Donald Trump. Elon Musk met with him back in March, David Sacks recently held a major fundraiser for him in San Francisco, and far more have been quietly backing and donating to his campaign. But that support became much more public after the assassination attempt against the former president on July 13.
Despite previously saying he wouldn’t be donating to any candidate this cycle, Musk publicly endorsed Trump after the shooting and has pledged $45 million a month to a pro-Trump Super PAC. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have informed their staff they’ll be making donations to help elect the Republican candidate. Among Trump’s other supporters are Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, and the Winklevoss twins. They all have deep pockets that will help fuel a Trump candidacy which already has momentum heading into the fall.
The ties between Trump and the tech industry further strengthened on Monday when Trump announced he’d picked J.D. Vance to be his running mate. Vance is best known to the public as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, but his relationship with Peter Thiel goes back over a decade. He joined Thiel’s Mithril Capital the same year his book came out and he even credits the tech billionaire with his conversion to Christianity. In 2020, Thiel and his network put $100 million into Vance’s venture capital firm Narya Capital, which has a Tolkien-inspired name as a nod to his benefactor. The following year, Thiel put up another $15 million to fund Vance’s successful campaign to join the US Senate. Now he could be bringing Thiel’s influence more firmly inside the White House than ever before.
The Little Tech deception
If you’ve seen commentary about Vance’s stance on tech since his nomination as Republican vice presidential candidate, it’s probably boiled down to something like this: he’s a supporter of smaller tech companies, but has been critical of Big Tech. That might sound somewhat appealing, but it’s a misleading way to frame his politics. It’s more accurate to say he’s a big supporter of the scam-ladden crypto industry and will use his bully pulpit to try to get large social media platforms to suppress the posts of progressive and left-wing users, while loosening moderation on right-wing incitement to violence and hate speech. He’s not going to challenge the tech industry’s power. If anything, he’ll expand it.
For the past few years, tech billionaires have been lashing out against their critics and targeting the government as they’ve felt their immense power and wealth in the crosshairs. The industry has openly embraced the political right as it seeks to avoid regulatory scrutiny, legal accountability, and the possibility of antitrust action, while paving the way for a further expansion of their influence in government and industries that have so far been resistant to tech “disruption.” Few people have outlined that perspective more thoroughly than Andreessen.
Paris Marx
Earlier this month, the venture capitalist followed up last year’s techno-optimist manifesto with a more direct statement of intent that was supposedly written with Horowitz. The “Little Tech Agenda” is a clear demonstration of how Silicon Valley plans to use US fears about the country’s place in the world and fading geopolitical clout to serve its own interests. It even presents the outline of a policy program that will surely shape the sector’s key demands in the event of Trump’s return to the presidency.
There are a lot of laughable assertions in the essay, but the biggest is that Andreessen and Horowitz are opponents of Big Tech and are using their clout to promote Little Tech, or tech startups. Little Tech, they say, plays a “critical role” in ensuring the continuation of US technological supremacy and their firm does not “engage in political fights outside of issues directly relevant to Little Tech.” That might be news to some who’ve watched Andreessen and seen him directly oppose housing development in Atherton, California or use his firm to advocate for loose regulation of cryptocurrencies so it could profit off crypto scams. But, like with Vance, crypto — or “Blockchain,” as they now refer to it — is supposedly part of Little Tech.
The Little Tech Agenda pretends to be a bipartisan document. Startups supposedly “run independent of our politics” and the venture capitalists “support or oppose politicians regardless of party,” but they know which side of the political aisle will be most open to their deregulatory agenda. That becomes even clearer when they lay out their political gripes and policy ambitions.
A deregulatory agenda for tech
“The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” or at least that’s Andreessen and Horowitz want us to believe. They’re furious that regulatory agencies cracked down on fraudulent crypto companies in recent years and that the Federal Trade Commission jumped into action to try to put a check on the speculative bubble fueled by artificial intelligence hype. But most of all, they’re livid that the government is proposing a tax on unrealized capital gains that will “absolutely kill both startups and the venture capital industry that funds them” — or just make them pay a more reasonable tax rate.
That’s not the only one of their complaints that doesn’t seem to have much to do with startups. They’re mad that regulators are intervening more often in mergers and acquisitions, which is “punitively blocking startups from being acquired” by the dominant tech companies, and they claim the federal government is preferencing large incumbents in defense procurement, even though that’s already changing. SpaceX, for example, was hardly an incumbent when it started to get major contracts, nor was Blue Origin. As the US military seeks to bolster its tech capabilities to ensure it isn’t falling behind China, it’s working with many smaller defense tech firms.
Paris Marx
Despite the claims of bipartisanship, those gripes show it’s clearly the Democratic Party that Andreessen and Horowitz have a problem with, while their donation to support Trump shows where they feel their opportunity lies. Their policy agenda makes that quite clear: they want deregulation in health care, education, and housing “to strip incumbents of their current regulatory capture.” That means gutting rules that protect the public and workers so speculative tech firms can move in with big promises that will never be realized. They also claim a major focus on “automation and AI” will create millions of middle class jobs, even though the history of the tech industry’s impact on labor is algorithmic management, precarity, and new forms of union busting.
The pair want a further US push on defense spending focused on the tech industry, so their investments in defense tech firms can yield greater returns, and “environmental reform” that they claim will advance nuclear power but will surely also be about escaping environmental regulations in many other ways. Finally, they advocate greater “high-skilled immigration” and “a whole-of-government program to drive the success of US technology companies globally.” For the past several decades, Silicon Valley has been able to dominate the internet sector across much of the world, but as US geopolitical hegemony wanes, the industry is seeing intense competition from “a hostile China” and new pressures from “a regulation-crazed EU” that wants to stake their own tech claims. Andreessen and Horowitz, echoing the larger US tech industry, will have none of it.
Tech will make America great again
The United States’ campaign against China — and specifically Chinese tech companies like Huawei and TikTok — was pushed by the juggernauts of Silicon Valley to complicate the regulatory pressure they were starting to face. In their agenda, Andreessen and Horowitz put Silicon Valley at the center of the US effort to defend its geopolitical position in the face of a growing multipolar world order. They write that the US dominated the twentieth century because of its technological supremacy, economic dynamism, and military strength — and that they must all be preserved to ensure the twenty-first century is the “Second American Century.”
Paris Marx
“American technology is the global standard,” they write, and it’s clear they don’t want that to change even as many countries around the world decide they want to take back some of their own technological sovereignty. But that isn’t in Silicon Valley’s commercial interest. Even though they acknowledge that “long term government investment in scientific research” was key to the technological leadership the United States developed in the twentieth century, Andreessen and Horowitz make it seem like startups exist outside of politics and that anything other than deregulation only hinders them. “From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage,” they declare, as if many of those companies hadn’t been deeply reliant on government support and contracts.
Despite claiming to be an agenda for the little guy, a section decrying the “regulatory capture” of dominant companies makes it even more clear their anger isn’t really at Big Tech, but established companies in other industries that Silicon Valley hasn’t yet been able to crack for “disruption.” They claim that “government-enforced monopolies and cartels” have created “a wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions,” effectively limiting the ability of startups to enter. The complaint sounds a lot like what Uber used to say about taxis, before it swept in and destroyed what little power taxi drivers still had over their industry.
The Little Tech Agenda isn’t a program that has anything to offer workers or the broader public who face growing difficulty in their lives. Instead, it’s more of an a16z agenda, crafted by two wealthy venture capitalists who want to defend their influence and riches as more of society turns against them and their industry. They’re trying once again to recast Silicon Valley as a land of startups instead of the home of some of the largest monopolists in the world. But more than that, they want government — and particularly a future Trump administration — to see the tech industry as integral to making America great again.
