Silicon Valley was supposed to be “different,” or so veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher wanted to believe. Facebook was going to bring people together, in the process strengthening our communities, our democracies, our world; Google was going to deliver the vast stores of human knowledge to our fingertips; Tesla was going to save us from fossil fuel-driven ecological collapse, etc., etc. For years, Swisher held onto a dogged faith in these companies and their “gauzy credo to change the world” for the better.
But then, in 2016, Silicon Valley “went off the rails.” Swisher dates this cataclysm to December 10, 2016, when the heads of the most powerful tech companies—including Amazon, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company—were “summoned to tromp into Manhattan’s Trump Tower and meet the man who had unexpectedly just been elected president and was the antithesis of all they supposedly represented.”