SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk picked his fighter in American politics, and got rewarded for it. America's most famous tech billionaire openly embraced Donald Trump, and today Trump hugged him back, promising him the helm of a new Washington efficiency commission that Musk himself proposed last month. The wider tech industry, though — a vastly profitable sector stacked with political donors -— is now more unsure about American politics than it has been in years. If anything, it appears to be fragmenting. When the biggest names in tech policy and venture capital got together Thursday at a former Army base to talk about the collision of business and politics, perhaps the only thing the group had in common was fresh concern about the outcome of a presidential election far more volatile and uncertain than any in recent memory. An industry that has long kept its nose out of politics has been dragged in, and is now assiduously laying the groundwork for its relationship with either a Kamala Harris or second Trump administration, said Adam Kovacevich, founder and CEO of the pro-tech Chamber of Progress “Many, many people, myself included, were scarred from 2016 when no one thought Trump was going to win, and no one prepared for the Trump scenario, and the day after the election, everybody was scrambling for a Trump plan,” said Kovacevich. The annual “Reboot” conference, this year celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Foundation for American Innovation, is a gathering largely comprised of right-leaning techno-futurists of the Elon Musk type, but sprinkied with plenty of California Democrats as well. Though many Silicon Valley libertarians had started to rally openly for Trump over Biden, their political world was turned upside down by the entry of Kamala Harris and now the coin-flip prospect of a Harris administration. The right, of course, still fears what Harris stands for. “Overwhelmingly the worry is about markets and growth,” said Santi Ruiz, host of the policy-focused “Statecraft” podcast for the Institute for Progress. Ruiz said in an interview that opposition to Harris among the tech right stems from a combination of traditional conservative business concerns and the culture-warring and free speech debates that have captured the political imaginations of figures like Musk. “To the extent Harris has stood for something ideological over her career, it’s been DEI regulatory moves and redistribution to Democratic interest groups,” Ruiz said. “The other concerns flow downstream from that one — that she’s a statist, that she’s uninterested in what drives economic growth, the $4 trillion ‘care economy’ push, free speech and DEI.” That blend of economic and cultural concerns reflects a new view of how technology interacts with society, one that has evolved along with Trump’s Republican Party writ large. Whereas most tech titans are eager to present their products as value-neutral enhancements to the country’s economy and civic life — “platforms” to boost and enrich the public sphere, whichever way it drifts — a new generation of innovators are eager to take a more active hand in guiding the direction of American life, imbuing it with their pro-tech, entrepreneur-friendly, futurist values. Among tech types, this kind of rhetoric is especially prone to appear in the ongoing debate around crypto, which has also taken on a more political cast in the past year or two. A movement that once stood ideologically outside of politics has now waded straight in; crypto-friendly super PACs are dumping millions into races that could swing control of Congress, mostly attacking crypto-skeptical Democrats. Jessica Anderson, president of the Heritage Action-linked Sentinel Action Fund, poured cold water on the idea that a President Harris might be more sympathetic to crypto than Joe Biden, and argued for a Republican Senate as a pro-crypto backstop given that the Senate Banking Committee is chaired by crypto foe Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “We should anticipate another four years that is very antagonistic [to crypto] and goes further,” Anderson said on a panel. One other issue fragmenting tech-world politics is antitrust — largely because of vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Though he’s a former venture capitalist himself, with a political career largely sponsored by the tech right’s patron saint Peter Thiel, Vance has taken an aggressively pro-antitrust, interventionist approach not favored by the still-robust libertarian part of the coalition — and possibly not by any traditional Republicans that might staff a Trump White House. The Institute for Progress’ Ruiz said there’s still massive uncertainty over how this debate might shake out, and that there could be a “tremendous tension” in particular around industrial policy. The Biden administration has largely co-opted many of the vanguard right’s ideas about using state capacity to boost American “national champion” companies. That infighting among conservatives might recede if Harris does occupy the White House next year, leaving the tech right out in the cold — and shifting the spotlight to the nascent tech policy debate among liberals. The Chamber of Progress’ Kovacevich suggested that a Harris administration could see a shift from the largely hostile attitude of President Joe Biden’s White House, opening the door to liberal policymakers with their own vision for how tech and society can flourish side-by-side. “I don't know that Democrats are going to ditch the anti-corporate focus from a campaign rhetoric perspective,” he said, “but the policy direction they take is up for grabs.” Amid all this uncertainty, the most definitive point of Thursday’s conference was that this idiosyncratic group of investors and thinkers doesn’t plan on receding into the background, however the election shakes out. In a panel titled “Silicon Valley's Political Débutantes,” one observer asserted that the era of tech insiders remaining silent partners in a broad center-left coalition is over. “After Trump, you’re not going to go back to talking about just normal progressive politics,”, said Samo Burja, a Slovenian political scientist and consultant. “You're going to go in a new direction. It might be a libertarian direction, it might be some new nonpartisan perspective, but I think you have severed this tie to the bored, mainstream consensus.”
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