25 July 2024

The Inevitability of Big Tech Backing Trump

JASON PARHAM

IT IS TRUE just about everywhere, but especially in America: Real power is having control over the flow of resources. Property. Money. Information. If you command the levers of production—who gets what, when, and how—you dictate what the future holds and who gets a say in it. Or in this case, you get to decide the future of the United States. On the verge of another presidential election, no one knows that better than Silicon Valley CEOs and investors, some of whom publicly announced their support for Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, this week.

Behind the calculated loyalties of Big Tech, says Jared Clemons, a political science professor at Temple University, we can begin to understand what is happening in the moment before us. “I try to not be hysterical about politics. I know that's really hard because you turn on the TV and it seems like the world is always falling apart,” he tells me. “But none of this started happening overnight.”

Clemons identifies as socialist but “not in like a crazy, conspiratorial way,” he jokes. He believes the best path forward is a collective future where we let go of the vestiges of a capitalist past, which Republicans and Democrats refuse to relinquish. He wants people to understand that the old ways of bureaucratic governance no longer serve us. (Clemons routinely unpacks complex issues like this on his YouTube series, #Poli-Side-Eye.)


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