[HN Gopher] Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutio...
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Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but
complete
Author : FromTheArchives
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-10-16 20:52 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloodinthemachine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloodinthemachine.com)
| bigyabai wrote:
| If you think that it's Silicon Valley capturing the government
| and not the other way around, you must have missed your Political
| Science 101 course. They both sing the same tune because it's the
| feds writing the script, not Sam Altman and Tim Cook conspiring
| with Thiel.
|
| All the seed funding in the world won't disrupt the monopoly on
| violence. We're here because some dolts actually believed the lie
| that Silicon Valley was on "our side" of the fight.
| paxys wrote:
| Exactly. Silicon valley is bending the knee to political
| institutions, not taking them over.
| heroprotagonist wrote:
| More like, several wealthy people from Silicon Valley funded
| campaigns to put a government in place which is now
| encouraging Silicon Valley and other business to bend the
| knee to the political institutions.
|
| It's not always simple to be precise..
| watwut wrote:
| Silicon valley is not bending the knee. For quite a few of
| these people, this is the government they wanted and worked
| hard to get.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I just don't think that's true. Silicon Valley moguls vary
| in just how vehemently they endorse skilled immigration,
| but none of them wanted or suggested an illegal $100,000
| H1B application fee. A couple did get tricked by promises
| that the Trump regime would be more favorable to tech than
| it's turned out to be.
| convolvatron wrote:
| as has been pointed out here, there is some subtlety.
| surely the cost of $100,000 a head is more significant to
| some businesses than others. and don't forget that the
| administration made it clear that they can make an
| exception to certain employers or sectors for whatever
| reason
| pessimizer wrote:
| I wish all the Political Science 101, Civics 101, and Economics
| 101 people would take another class. First of all, the
| government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, that's silly;
| the government has a monopoly on _legitimate_ violence. Second
| of all, the wrestling valet and game show host and his array of
| dimwits aren 't in control of anything, the people who pay them
| are. The people who pay them are also the people who run
| silicon valley.
|
| If you hear that the government is coming down on somebody in
| silicon valley, it's because everybody else in silicon valley
| wanted him gone.
|
| "The Feds" are people with no interests, no money and no power.
| They are where they are to execute for American business (and
| as we've sold off America, that just means any rich guy), and
| it's literally all they've been doing since WWII.
| chaps wrote:
| Why does it have to be either-or? It's more of a revolving
| door.
|
| One of the clearer modes of how this all looks can be seen when
| using public records laws to request information that was
| created through a government contract. On one side, trade
| secrecy is a legit thing. On the other hand, it's abused to the
| Nth degree such that just about anything is "trade secret".
| Government agencies will literally just ask the company's
| counsel if records in a records request can be released and
| they'll copy/paste the answer.
|
| For example: I took an uber from an East Chicago, IN restaurant
| to a Chicago, IL planned parenthood and then FOIA'd for the GPS
| records that the city legally requires Uber to provide for
| every trip [1]. In the request I included the trip identifier
| that I found on the city's open data portal [2]. For months and
| months they denied, denied, denied, even after a request for
| emails gave me the _exact SQL query they wrote_ to identify my
| trip.
|
| Eventually when I narrowed the request down to the exact
| fields, they finally agreed that they have the records, but
| argued that the data (edit: just lat/lng of the start/end
| locations) showing me going to a planned parenthood was a
| _trade secret_. It would be trivial for Chicago 's counsel to
| push back on that, but they seemed to have zero interest in
| reflecting on the risks of holding this category of data.
|
| [1] https://chicago.github.io/tnp-reporting-manual/trip/ [2]
| https://data.cityofchicago.org/Transportation/Transportation...
| cyanydeez wrote:
| eh, weird way to describe fascism.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when Silicon Valley and politics were,
| for the most part, two separate worlds. The only thing I remember
| back in the 90's were the arguments about encryption strengths
| and export controls.
| janice1999 wrote:
| I think that's an anachronistic view of things - politics and
| Silicon Valley have always been linked in some way. In-Q-Tel
| has been funding startups since 1999. Other government programs
| also helped fund Google. Those political decisions to invest in
| mapping, data processing and surveillance technology etc helped
| create the Silicon Valley giants we have today. It also worked
| the other way, with the USA v Microsoft antitrust kicking off
| in the late 90s.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Damocles
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(page generated 2025-10-16 23:01 UTC)