The events of Tuesday have forced me to change my views about history, my country, and mankind’s future. It’s better to be honest than to pass around fairy stories. This is my effort, at the end of my career, to adjust you to reality.
The greatest mistake I’ve made in my career has been misreading the popularity of the Tech Economy.
Because technology rides on brains, I assumed people would support mass public education to ensure a growing supply. Because technology provides enormous society benefits, and has gotten us through the pandemic, I figured people would support the politics of technology leaders.
But it turns out the tech economy is not very different from the industrial economy. There’s a tiny class of leaders built by what I call the Great Game, ruthless competition driven by constant investment, where change is constantly accelerating so that no one’s rule is safe.
Below are technicians who do the work of accelerating change while looking for a way to place themselves among the elite. In my life I was fortunate to marry such an engineer. We have raised children whose lives will be spent on the leading edge of the next generation’s technology. Our lives have been a great success.
Trump opposes what reporters call “big tech,” companies I call Cloud Czars because their success is based on building and running hyper-scaled cloud data centers. Trump opposes programs like immigration and education that feed the Czars’ power and wealth. Look which party runs tech’s capitals – California, Massachusetts, New York, and northern Virginia. Tech’s leaders are Democrats.
Reporters act like today’s Cloud Czars are eternal. None of the five companies now ruling our world are as much as 50 years old. Their control of the global economy is barely a half-decade old. Even now, people are building new technologies to threaten that control. By 2030, a completely new set of corporate actors may bestride the stage, just as 10 years ago we saw the reigns of Intel and IBM as eternal.
Trump’s loyalists come from the chum of change, those who have inherited privileges from previous economic eras and whose children now do jobs without any protection, gigs that could end at any moment. Just a year ago, driving cabs was the gig. Now it’s working in a warehouse or delivering packages. What might it be next year? It will certainly be different because technology is already replacing warehouse workers and drivers with robots. Trumpistanis, both inside and outside the tech industry, think Trump can protect them from this. He can’t.
In the name of comfort, Trumpistanis blame the technology leaders who maintain their comfort for their kids’ plight and buy the con that someone can stop progress and maintain their advantages. Even after two elections, and an unending series of horrors that will only get worse, they still believe it. America will go down as a result.
Technology won’t. It will simply move to wherever it gets a better welcome. The tech business is global. Google can move Indians to Canada or just leave them in India. Instead of running Google or Microsoft, today’s hot Indian engineers will create businesses that destroy them. This is already happening.
Working class people broke democracy in the name of trying to slow change that gave them what comforts they have. They have been conned into thinking Trump can create a state-controlled economy dedicated to their comfort and privileges.
He can’t. He can only throw the Great Game of Nations to China.
