There were once few more reliable allies of Silicon Valley in national politics than the Democratic Party. Now, things couldn’t look more different. gdebenedetti reports
Illustration: Ward Sutton Three summers ago, a worker stood up at “Q&A,” Facebook’s weekly all-hands, town-hall-style meeting, which is usually held on Friday afternoons in Menlo Park and livestreamed to its offices around the world — and aggressively closed to the public and press — to ask Mark Zuckerberg whether the company had a plan in case the public turned against it, like what had happened to the big banks a few years earlier.
And while it took the 2008 financial crisis — and the decade of fallout that followed — to tear Democrats from Wall Street, the onset of their breakup with Silicon Valley happened much more abruptly. Or if some hadn’t been so shameless in their courting of Trump or their ham-fisted playacting of distance from Democrats in response to Republican accusations of bias — one leading industry group presented its Internet Freedom Award to Ivanka Trump in May, for instance. Complaining about tech leaders, the chair of one state Democratic Party told me that at this point, “the only way for them to redeem themselves is to write big checks, which they’re not doing.
Not everyone in the party saw it like that. Among the 2020 candidates, none have tried having it both ways on tech more than Pete Buttigieg, the contender who could fit most seamlessly into Sand Hill Road tomorrow if he wanted to. Buttigieg was Facebook’s 287th user as an undergrad, knew Zuckerberg at Harvard, and hosted him in South Bend in 2017.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, for one, let the Democratic Establishment know he meant to innovate them into the future over the weekend of Trump’s inauguration. Hoffman — who’d advised Obama and Clinton, then finished Election Night 2016 by watching The West Wing’s pilot — stood alongside Zynga founder Mark Pincus at a secluded gathering of party donors in southern Florida and pitched them on a platform that would empower voters to pick issues to pressure Congress about.
Meanwhile, Hoffman had partnered with a Democratic operative named Dmitri Mehlhorn and formed an all-purpose political shop called Investing in US, which sent Hoffman’s considerable money to a huge range of new initiatives, including widely heralded resistance-era groups like Run for Something and Indivisible. But in Virginia, the site of the group’s first major electoral investments, party officials who had originally been thrilled with Hoffman’s efforts and involvement began to chafe.
The conversation continued, pivoting to Alabama. But first Mehlhorn wanted to know if the super-PAC had a SCIF in the office. When told no but that there was another conference room if the current one wasn’t good enough, they moved to the second space. There, he had the political team unplug all the electronics in the room, including the TV monitor, and asked his hosts to put their phones in pouches to block surveillance.
Facebook’s entry into Democratic politics was considerably more cautious but perhaps no more self-aware. Mark Zuckerberg had first tried engaging a bit with politics by funding FWD.us, an immigration group, starting in 2013, but it was Sheryl Sandberg, a Treasury Department alum, who had first pushed the company to build up its presence in Washington. No one ever thought Zuckerberg would do much lobbying; he was too busy and preferred to limit his few interactions to heads of state.
For years, one of Zuckerberg’s informal rules was that Capitol Hill testimony was beneath him, so when he arrived in Washington to speak with lawmakers in April 2018 and called social-media regulation “inevitable,” those close to him viewed it as a significant double concession.
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