Peter Thiel, the most notorious venture capitalist in the United States, angered many of his peers in the tech sector last year with his open support for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Speaking at the Republican National Convention, Thiel identified Trump as a fellow “builder” who wasn't afraid to tell the truth about a broken American economy. Later, in the week before the election, he told journalists at the National Press Club what was already obvious to most people in the country: that Silicon Valley was a bubble. While Thiel's colleagues believed, “We're doing well, therefore our whole civilization is doing well,” he said, “the truth has been more one of specific success but more general failure.” To hear Thiel—an avowed enemy of democracy who hopes someday to receive blood transfusions from teenagers so he can live forever—characterize anyone as out of touch boggles the mind. But Trump's victory in November has recast Thiel as a dark prophet of the Valley, where conventional wisdom is so often repackaged as sagacious contrarianism.
In the months since the end of the Obama presidency, an era of unsurpassed political influence for the Northern California establishment, tech leaders have repeatedly spoken of the need to empathize with the losers of the postindustrial meritocracy. Concomitant with this empathetic mood are plans for expanding the role of Silicon Valley in American politics. Meanwhile, in the face of unprecedented unrest among the tech industry rank-and-file over Trump's immigration and climate change policies, Silicon Valley executives and financiers have engaged in a rapprochement with the new administration. Trump's abandonment of economic positions that threatened the dominant portions of American business—anti-monopoly, protectionism, a crackdown on tax havens—has led to a sense of relief in the upper echelons of the Valley. The barons on the Pacific want to remain in the good graces of both their liberal employees and brutish Republican politicians. For the time being, that balancing act is working. Whether people are still interested in their vision for the future is another question.
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