Technology and politics: Is Silicon Valley getting too big for its boots? | The Economist

"IF YOU'RE an engineer in Silicon Valley, you have no incentive to read The Economist," an unnamed tech entrepreneur tells George Packer in this week's issue of the New Yorker. "It's not brought up at parties, your friends aren't going to talk about it, your employers don't care."

Whatever. Their parties sound lame anyway. Mr Packer might agree; his lengthy piece portrays, with much scepticism, a Silicon Valley that has constructed for itself a glassy political vision far removed from the messy but necessary scraps of city halls, state houses and Congress. It is a place where bland libertarian fantasies about technology replacing (or "disrupting") politics are welcomed, and discussions of marginal income-tax rates left to losers who spend their spare time reading text-heavy weeklies. The public services that are the normal business of government can seem distant to the new plutocrats, too: Mr Packer describes a public school catering to wealthy Valley locals where extravagant fund-raisers compensate for declines in state funding. If there is little room for politics as traditionally conceived in either your worldview or your personal life, then why bother knowing anything about it?

I haven't spent enough time in Silicon Valley to know how close this caricature comes to truth, but Mr Packer is certainly not the only one chucking it about. A new book (reviewed by my colleague here) by Evgeny Morozov, a professional tech-sceptic (and one of Mr Packer's interviewees), derides the "solutionism" of the technology world, which turns insoluble difficulties into discrete problems that may be resolved by the accumulation of enough information and the application of appropriately chosen algorithms. When this "big data" approach starts to crowd out subtler, wiser ways of thinking in fields to which it may not be suited (such as politics), reasons Mr Morozov, we risk forcing ourselves into "digital straitjackets" and undermining the assumptions that make liberal democracy work.

A third attack came from Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based demographer best known for defending medium-sized towns in unfashionable parts of America. Writing last week in the Daily Beast, Mr Kotkin ripped into "America's new oligarchs", lambasting the "shady 1-percenters" for concentrating huge amounts of wealth in their own hands while failing to provide jobs to Americans outside their own cosseted creative circles. And now, to pile audacity on to audacity, Mark Zuckerberg and his billionaire pals are doing real politics: lavishly funding a new group, FWD.us, that seeks to further the tech sector's interests by lobbying for an immigration-reform package that will allow it to recruit cheaper software engineers from abroad.

FWD.us took some heat a couple of weeks ago for funding TV ads supporting conservative pro-immigration politicians whose views on matters like the Keystone XL pipeline were not to the taste of the group's liberal backers. (Some of them quit in disgust.) Meanwhile, a good old-fashioned lobbying effort continues in Washington; the New York Timesreports a push to ease regulatory oversight of the hiring of foreigners and the firing of Americans. Interestingly, Mr Packer takes all this to be a sign that the tech industry may be showing signs of maturity. Rather than airily rise above the fray, or, worse, try to produce a technological fix to a political problem, it, or at least those elements represented by FWD.us and the grizzly political hacks it has hired, has chosen to dive deep into the political mud.

Consumer-facing technology firms do seem to enjoy a peculiarly exalted status among both citizens and politicians (though Apple took a beating over its tax affairs in Congress this week). The action plan for FWD.us written by its president, Joe Green, an old pal of Mr Zuckerberg's, says, "Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans." Many tech executives have become celebrities in their own right, as we saw with the extraordinary public reaction to the death of Steve Jobs. It's difficult to imagine Barack Obama holding a "town hall" with the CEO of an oil or car company. And so it is reasonable to be wary of an industry of rich and powerful men eliding its own interests with that of the country at large, or of claims that techniques appropriate to fix problems in one field can be applied mutatis mutandis in another.

Yet are there really many signs of that happening at national level? Among the biggest political debates this year—gun control, immigration reform, deficit reduction—I see few signs of solutionism at play. That FWD.us has had to sully itself with politics-as-usual suggests, for better or worse, that outside the gilded worlds of Palo Alto and Cupertino, politics is operating pretty much as usual. That seems an odd thing to celebrate. But it might be some consolation to the Valley-bashers.

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