The ‘tech left’ is different this time

THE SIGHT OF the country’s most powerful technology CEOs lined up behind the president at an inauguration they helped pay for was a visual declaration that the Silicon Valley effort to resist Donald Trump was dead.

- DAVE LEE Bloomberg

As Trump took office again, gone was the anger that had emerged from Silicon Valley after the 2016 election, political action that brewed with the rank and file and extended to some of its top executives, such as Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, who protested in person against Trump’s 2017 travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. But recent events, most prominently the killing of a Minneapolis woman at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, has awoken the latent tech “left.”

“We all bear a collective responsibility to speak up and not be silent when we see things like the events of the last week,’ Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google, wrote on X. “It stirred something in me,” concurred Manu Garg, a senior research engineer at AI cloud giant Snowflake. Paul Graham, co-founder of the prominent Y Combinator startup incubator, asked simply: “How long before we say ‘Enough is enough?’” The question is what to do about it. “I don’t really have a call to action beyond this,” conceded Nikhil Thorat, who works at leading AI company Anthropic.