These tech leaders were usually very liberal and sided with Democrats. But several major tech CEOs, including Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late 2024 and early 2025 as he prepared for his second term as U.S. president. They were trying to align themselves with Trump’s anticipated pro-business agenda, which includes maintaining low corporate tax rates and deregulation. For instance, TikTok’s CEO sought to address the looming U.S. ban on the app (which was “saved” by Trump), while others like Microsoft and Meta were concerned about AI development regulations and antitrust issues.
They were essentially there to kiss the ring. Biden was pretty critical of big tech, and they saw an opportunity to shift the relationship between Big Tech and Trump. A relationship with Trump means securing government contracts, reducing scrutiny, and influencing policy decisions. They made significant financial contributions to Trump’s inauguration fund and have been implementing more conservative policies in their companies.
Was big tech conservative all along, and their liberal stances were a lie to pander to, say, the left-leaning political climate of San Francisco or New York? Or are they still liberal and jumping on the conservative bandwagon for their company? Or maybe they’re apolitical and just care about what’s best for them and will flip-flop with whatever best suits them.
In January 2025, the start-up Socrates and godfather, Paul Graham, posted one of his famous essays, titled The Origins of Wokeness. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the founder of Y Combinator, probably the most popular incubator in the world, which was then led by the now OpenAI CEO and always-worried-looking Sam Altman. Paul Graham, or PG, is a bit of a legendary figure in the startup world, and it’s interesting that he wrote an essay that, oh, seems a bit right-leaning.
He starts his essay by equating “wokeness” with virtue signaling, which he calls “prigs” and contends that every society had them. He’s asking why wokeness is so prevalent now. He acknowledges that wokeness and political correctness are pejorative terms referring to “an aggressively performative focus on social justice.” So far, not super nuanced, but it’s an essay written by a programmer—let’s cut him some slack.
He admits racism is a problem, but it’s a bit overblown by the “wokes.” He writes, “Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.” Quibbling about semantics might be a waste of time, but it’s important not to be quiet about the marginalized that are suffering and are actively being hurt because that’s how you get the message out to society. Actions are good, but you don’t change the status quo by being quiet.
He goes on and attributes political correctness to universities, specifically “humanities and social sciences.” Guilty as charged. He believes that the radical student protestors of the 1960s became professors, got into positions of power, and started making universities more politically correct. This gave rise to what he equates to a Maoist cultural revolution by professors unleashing their students onto other professors. He writes, “Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase ‘people of color’ is considered particularly enlightened, but saying ‘colored people’ gets you fired… [problematic example] There are no underlying principles. You’d just have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.”
He really goes off the rails here. It’s not just memorizing a long list of rules—there’s a social and historical context. The reason “colored people” is offensive is because of its colonial roots, especially in Jim Crow-era U.S., where “colored” was used to designate separate facilities and thus became emblematic of the systemic racism of this era. “People of color” gained new usage to separate it from this history—it has a new cultural meaning reflecting solidarity among racial groups and centers on the person first. You could tell the well-meaning visitor from another planet that the underlying principle is to treat others with dignity, which can include linguistic changes to reflect a socio-political history.
Look, I’m not here to bash PG. I’m here to use this as an example of how tech bros, who are seemingly nice and progressive, become more and more conservative and almost red-pilled when left to their own devices—especially in a conservative political climate.
He then goes on a bit of a convoluted tangent on the evolution of the social morality of political correctness. In defense of PG, if you read between the lines, it really sounds like he wants to be a nice guy and some woke mob accused him of some moral failing, and he’s lashing out at their impossible standards. Totally fair… Leftist communities are so toxic because they’re filled with hurt people who demand nothing less than moral perfection and critique others rather than just being a nice person doing nice things. And PG is the nice old man that hasn’t kept up with all the new leftist discourse and is being bashed for it.
PG continues and dives into the idea that “women seem more attracted than men to the idea of being moral enforcers,” which he attributes to expanding the definitions of sexual harassment, and he starts getting into, oh, somewhere between insensitive and misogynistic. Again, a lot of half-baked ideas that a basic humanities education would dispel. Hell, just type “why is X hypothesis a weak theory and potentially sexist” into ChatGPT, and you’ll see the basic points. This is why tech nerds, with their brilliant minds developing in higher education exposed to only STEM courses, need an education in the humanities.
He then goes into the second wave of political correctness, which he argues started with social media. He actually makes some interesting points here. He says that cancel culture arose from social media because social media is designed to spark outrage. Outrage attracted views, sold papers, and it’s how a lot of companies made a lot of money. He attributes this commercialization of political correctness as the reason for the morality of political correctness being corrupt. It’s superficial, performative, driven by some corporate scheme. And it’s made its way into hiring practices, politics, and everywhere he goes. Again, nice old man stuck in a world where norms have changed: what are these pronouns, why is everybody saying I’m sexist, why is doing what I always did considered racist?
The fact that people are profiting off moral progress doesn’t mean that moral progress is a bad thing. If some evil corporation wants to improve their PR by hiring more disabled Asian actors, or if a board of directors wants to get more varied perspectives by hiring gay women, and they profit off this, it doesn’t mean that the moral progress of having more representation and less racism is the product of some capitalist manipulation. It’s actually the other way around: we have moral progress, and capitalism wants to manipulate that for its own ends.
I see a man who’s scared of being left behind and trying to find a problem with progress. And there’s always going to be problems with progress. TV will make all our kids dumb, AI will take all our jobs, or cancel culture will condemn people that are actually good. If you’re not keeping up with moral progress, of course you’re going to commit some faux pas—like the old lady from the nursing home that calls me a handsome oriental boy. You can say these things, in the same way you can say that you like kicking dogs or making fun of poor people, but it doesn’t mean you’re free from social censure. And a part of moral progress is going to be limiting: acknowledging animal rights means you can’t kick dogs anymore.
Are these woke people like religious extremists in calling for the cancellation of even the most innocent mistakes by well-meaning people? Some of them, yeah—sorry, Paul, just get off Twitter. But most of the traits of wokeness—the consciousness of systemic inequities affecting the marginalized and vulnerable—are positive instances of moral progress and bring us closer to the values of liberal democracies.
These powerful figures in tech are taking steps toward the conservative, right-wing pipeline. And these tech companies are making so much money and influencing every part of our lives with their algorithms, AI, and whatever they come up with next. It’s dangerous.
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