The Great Capitulation? No! The Grand Negotiation: The Dance between Big Tech & Donald Trump

John Kenneth Galbraith defined the conventional wisdom as “ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability. Unlike wisdom, the conventional wisdom is not based on knowledge, experience, and rumination, but what our brains and emotions feel as comfortable and safe, two things that make it difficult to reject when it is confront with facts.

We get a lot of the conventional wisdom with Donald Trump. During his first term as president, the conventional wisdom was that Trump was a communications savant, a combination of Edward Bernays and Rasputin. No matter that Trump’s “genius” was easily contextualized and debunked, pundits afforded the man the superpowers gaslighting and brainwashing. Politicians clinging to American Exceptionalism denied Trump’s followers’ racist, sexist, and xenophobic beliefs, emphatically chanting “This is not who we are,” despite ample historical evidence that many if not most Americans throughout history have supported White supremacy, patriarchy, and bigoted isolationism.

Blowing off the conventional wisdom about Trump was not some stable genius move. His past provides much evidence that he is a dull-witted, lazy, entitled bully who has cruised through life cushioned by the money gifted him by his father. His desperation for attention and utter uselessness as a businessman are clear. His strategies of denial and delay are transparent. And, as much as he lies, he also is very upfront about his desires and plans. Donald Trump is a very obvious man.

But no one had to look at the past to piss on the conventional wisdom. Just watching Trump try to perform as president day-to-day was enough to gas his “genius.” I mean, this is a man who literally stared at the sun, something most of not all of us were taught not to do before we turned five. Trump’s dullness instinctively led him to use a sledgehammer to nail tacks, a trait that led to disasters (for the victims and his administration) in Trump’s immigration fight. His wall was and is a joke. By the time we hit 2020, the Pandemic, and economic skids, the conventional wisdom about Trump should have been dead. Instead, it went into hibernation.

Our understanding of Tech – especially Big Tech – is also dictated by the conventional wisdom - that Tech is a progressive force for good in society and that Big Tech’s leaders are first of all Great Men of Insight and Compassion Who are Intent to Do No Evil while Making the World a Better Place for All. Spelled out and in hindsight, the sentence above reads absurd, but during the Dot.Com boom of the 1990s, it was impossible to escape Tech Utopianism and the lionization of Tech’s leaders.

Sincere or cynical, Silicon Valley pontificators and an entranced media championed hyper-monopolists like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as humanitarian futurists working hard to enrich humanity with creativity, freedom, and egalitarianism, this when workers making their products in Chinese factories were killing themselves over working conditions. The humanitarian bullshit was so firmly accepted that obvious vultures like Oracle’s Larry Ellison were able to promote themselves as civic leaders, while they shook down governments to subsidize their boat races.

During the boom, the Pay Pal Mafia – from which came Peter Thiel and Elon Musk – “revolutionized” online commerce through their payment system and became incredibly wealthy. In 2005, they started to exert their influence through the Founder’s Fund, a venture capitalist firm that was one of Facebook’s early investors. Before investigative reporters started digging into Thiel’s political and philosophical beliefs, he was generally received as an unconventional force for good – drop out of college to follow your dream and you can become rich enough to save the world. The same grace was given to apartheid-child Elon Musk, who through a deft public relations strategy, kept the “progressive ruse” going for quite a long time, while distracting people with funny dances and stupid gags.

Remember the Arab Spring, that brief moment in 2011, when Arab dictators were being brought down by the people? Recall all the credit – and I do mean all – that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg took for the uprisings? The media uncritically told us that without social media and its social networks, the Arab Spring would not have happened, an idea promoted widely by social media companies, repeated by the press, and accepted by regular people. Problem is that the idea is only partially true, if not mostly a lie.

Protesters’ social media/network use in the Arab Spring was not universal, as social media access in Arab countries was not universal. Where social media was actively used – Egypt, for example – the internet was controlled and policed by government officials, who shut it down when protests started, pushing people from screens to the street, where they could communicate face-to-face, and where most of the “revolution” happened. Yet, knowing what we know right now, the Arab Spring myth, which Twitter and Facebook exploited, lives as does the conventional wisdom that Tech is a force for good and that Big Tech’s leaders are essentially good, decent, well-meaning men.

Of course, the conventional wisdom about Tech and its leaders is bullshit. We have seen and experienced plenty to debunk any notion that Tech is beholden to dictates like “Do No Evil” and that its leaders are a cyborg combo platter of Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller, and R2D2. Both Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison are longtime Trump supporters and have been open about it. Elon Musk has never treated his workers with dignity or respect – quite the opposite. He professes libertarianism but shakes down taxpayers for money. Whatever his pretensions, Mark Zuckerberg lords over a toxic waste site or two and lives in a Hawaiian compound built on stolen land. Jeff Bezos gleefully destroyed thousands of small businesses to build his empire.

We shouldn’t need obvious villains like Elizabeth Holmes, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and WeWork’s Adam Neumann to scotch the conventional wisdom. We have all the proof we need in Big Tech and its leaders’ everyday activities, but we must look beyond the propaganda to see it. We know that the leaders of Big Tech are incredibly wealthy and that they didn’t get to be so by being “nice guys.” They are ruthless economic libertarians who want absolutely no one – especially the public – telling them what to do. They break laws they don’t like, while shaking down governments for tax breaks and subsidies. They have spent billions on public relations campaigns, lobbying, and contributions to politicians, furthering the corruption of our politics. They are constantly fighting legal accusations of spreading disinformation to enabling child abuse to restricting competition to poisoning the environment.

The conventional wisdom about Big Tech and its leaders should be dead, and yet, as with the Donald Trump con, it is so prevalent and deep-seated that I felt compelled to spend 1,000 words building an argument to support one simple observation:

No matter what the media says, Big Tech’s leaders meeting with Donald Trump does not mean that they “declaring fealty to Trump” and “kissing the ring.” When Zuckerberg meets with and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff predicts good things under Trump, its not the “Great Capitulation.” What we are seeing is the Grand Negotiation.

As noted above, Peter Thiel has been a Trump supporter since 2016. Same with Larry Ellison, a Tech heavyweight. J.D. Vance – Trump’s soon-to-be Vice President – was mentored and molded by Thiel. He is Big Tech man in the White House. Elon Musk’s politics have been pretty obvious to anyone who bothered to look at his labor practices and background. As also noted, Mark Zuckerberg lives in a fucking guarded compound and has expressed great love – leading to a bad haircut – for the Roman Empire, in its dictatorial stage. His concern over the toxicity of his platforms is a PR problem and nothing else. All these guys love money - a thing that they have plenty of - which to them is power - something that they cannot get enough of. They are very much willing to negotiate with their money for more power, which will bring them more money.

Donald Trump is one of the greediest men in the history of the world. He measures his self-worth by how much money and things he has. If guaranteed the title of “Wealthiest Man in the World,” he would kill his family. He holds no belief that cannot be negotiated away. We know this because unlike his alleged mastery of 3-D Chess, we’ve seen Trump in action. Trump is now again in a position of power - power that he has plenty of – which is to Trump simply a tool to make more money. He is willing to negotiate with his power for more money, which will bring him more power.

What Big Tech has what Trump wants is simple. Big Tech has money and influence. Its leaders are some of the wealthiest men in the world. Combined they are worth more financially than most of us combined and even most countries on Earth. They also control very influential media and social media companies, ways to get Trump’s message and their support for Trump out, not only openly, but covertly through the use of algorithms. They own data on all of us, and a hell of a lot of it. They have a lot of what Trump wants.

What Trump has what Big Tech wants are:

· Control over immigration policy,

· The nuances of tariffs and how they are applied,

· Regulating Wall Street and financial markets,

· Regulating crypto,

· Enforcing laws on monopolies and trusts,

· Control over energy policy (important for power-hungry AI),

· Regulating AI,

· Regulating data,

· Regulating social media and the internet.

While the press has been fluttering about the battle between Stephen Miller and Elon Musk over immigration, there’s no reason for Trump not to listen to Big Tech and their “need” for H1B visa immigrant labor, especially in return for something Trump wants.

On tariffs, in Trump’s more relaxed interviews, he’s exposed his “ignorance” about tariffs as a lie. He knows how they work. He knows that he can structure them anyway he wants to. Trump has been very clear that he sees tariffs as a tool, a threat to punish countries he doesn’t like over things he can’t stand and a reward – in how they are structured – for those who he likes or buys him off. Do not think for a second that tariffs impacting anything Big Tech wants can’t be structured to their liking for a price.

And so it goes, with everything else on Big Tech’s agenda, and, yet, what we are hearing and reading in the media is more of Trump the Ginormous Mind-control Monster and the Doe-Eyed Sensitive Innocents of Big Tech – a con so obvious that I am pissed off that I feel compelled to explain this shit.