Reid Hoffman: Silicon Valley can't be neutral any longer

In today’s world, Autocracy is not possible without Tech. Tech firms enable it with anything from surveillance, to mass propaganda by anyone willing to pay, to enabling things as private data collectors for law enforcement that law enforcement would legally not be allowed to do on its own.

The even bigger approach now is the denial of service attack on the judicial system coming from AI-enabled infractions that are too new to the system. To deny enforcement in an area that helps authocrats - an AI tool can enable anyone to create problems on that area automatically and easily, and now the pipeline for getting justice in that area becomes clogged. It doesn’t even need to be intentional - it can be automatic.

The zero sum game of tech firms competing for the same fluid investors in the stock market means the control of government becomes guaranteed - because if a single one is singled out the money flows out of its equities and into their competitors. It’s blood supply to vital organs. The CEOs have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders above all else. They cannot do anything that will damage the stock price without being sued to oblivion and that would attack their personal assets as well.

Reid Hoffman seems to be one of the few SV founders with a spine. The rest are content to do business with authoritarian regimes as long as profits keep flowing.

Why is this article flagged? It's directly relevant to the readers of HN.

Since the article mentions deaths due to ICE custody -

There's a headline today (I think it was CNN) about a disabled kid who died because his dad was in ICE custody. Came over as an unofficial refugee from Kuwait, had a kid, and was selected for deportation 20y ago. Deportation was stayed due to his kid's condition (dad was his caregiver), so long as he registered with ICE (né INS) every year.

He went in for his annual meeting this winter and never came back out. His kid's health cratered and the kid died. Dad wasn't allowed to the funeral.

I know the news isn't neutral either - the people who wrote that article want you to think everything that ICE is doing is fucked up. Also, everything ICE is doing is fucked up.

I am a good hacker, and I find this interesting. This is on topic and should not be flagged. When an influential tech leader says "Silicon Valley can’t be neutral any longer", I want to hear what they have to say. I want to hear what the HN community has to say about it.

From the article:

> Whichever candidates you may have supported in the past — or even if (like many of my friends in Silicon Valley) you don’t usually do politics — you almost surely did not want this.

No Reid. They did want this. They still want it.

To those responding to the headline, the article seems to use the word neutral in an odd way. They aren't saying that SV is neutral, they're defining neutrality as 'working with who is in power, regardless of who is in power'. That definition may or may not be correct, but discuss the article in that context.

This is an important message.

Lately I've been just sickened by Apple, and particularly Tim Cook. The guy is revealing himself to be completely amoral.

Perhaps it was naive to assume otherwise, but celebrate at the "Melania" screening with the same people that labeled Alex Pretti as a "domestic terrorist", on the night of his murder? WTAF.

Apple employees - what are you doing to push back on this? Staying silent?

Most of Silicon Valley isn't neutral. A lot of them are aligned with the rising authoritarianism.

Thiel has been anti-democracy for a long time; Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook, Andreessen and many others have also shown their true colors.

Turns out the oligarchs are pro-oligarchy. Who could've guessed.

I wonder who can recall a time when Silicon Valley was politically neutral?

Tim Cook just created a new form of enshittyfication, not by making the product worse after completely locking their users in, but by making it impossible for many of their loyal customers to identify with the values of the company behind the product anymore, knowing very well they can not leave easily.