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America s tech tycoons are seeking to hack politics
FROM their corporate campuses on the west coast, America s technology
entrepreneurs used to ignore faraway Washington, DC or mention the place only
to chastise it for holding back innovation with excessive regulation. They
have, at times, invested in the low politics of self-interested lobbying from
chipmakers campaigning for protection from Japanese rivals in the 1980s to
Twitter this month reportedly creating a political action committee to pursue
its interests on Capitol Hill. Yet unlike Wall Street, which has long mixed
that sort of lobbying with supplying leaders to some of the highest offices in
the land and feeding in policy advice, tech tycoons have remained largely aloof
from the broader affairs of the nation s capital.
Steve Jobs was a classic example of this disdain. When, late in his life, his
wife persuaded him to talk to Barack Obama, he icily told the president he was
headed for a one-term presidency because of his hostility to business. Later,
as Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Jobs, the Apple founder hosted
a dinner with Mr Obama and a handful of tech tycoons, after which he recalled
that The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why
things can t get done. It infuriates me.
Now come the first signs that the frustration of tech titans with politics is
spurring them to action. One is that a tech tycoon from the other Washington
has bought the capital city s local newspaper. Although no one, perhaps not
even the founder of Amazon himself, is sure why Jeff Bezos paid $250m for the
Washington Post, he does not seem to have done so just to pursue his industry s
narrow interests: he has pledged to uphold the paper s tradition of fearless
journalism. Another big statement of political intent was the launch in April
of FWD.us, a campaign for immigration reform. Convened by Mark Zuckerberg, the
founder of Facebook, its supporters are a who s who of tech, including Reid
Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn; Marissa Mayer, the boss of Yahoo; Eric
Schmidt, the chairman of Google; and the most successful techie of them all,
Bill Gates. Despite some early rows over tactics, the group has survived and is
spending heavily in the hope of pulling off an improbable victory.
The few tech bosses with open party-political affiliations span pretty much the
entire spectrum. Peter Thiel, a billionaire co-founder of PayPal and early
investor in Facebook, is an outspoken libertarian who supported Ron Paul s
presidential campaign. In contrast, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook s chief operating
officer, is a longtime Democrat who once worked in the Clinton Treasury
Department; she is now being tipped, albeit as a long-shot, as the first techie
president in the White House. But what these people have in common is more
important than their differences. Most are likely to be socially liberal and
economically pro-market, even if they have differing ideas on the right size
for government. And, as people who have thrived on disruptive change, they are
more likely than many other industrial leaders to be focused on the future and
its challenges.
Some Silicon Valley-watchers are urging its tycoons to steer clear of politics,
for fear of attracting unwelcome regulatory attention. They repeat Milton
Friedman s warning to a group of tech leaders in 1999, that they would rue the
day when you called in the government to curb Microsoft. A bigger risk is that
Messrs Bezos, Zuckerberg et al merely follow the same well-worn path as
previous generations of successful business bosses, from maverick entrepreneur
to establishment power-broker, with a personal agenda that may or may not
coincide with the good of the country. As yet the tech tycoons have produced no
common manifesto for fixing Washington s many ills. But they share a pragmatic,
can-do mentality that the capital desperately needs more of. They are widely
admired for having made their fortunes through their creativity and hard work,
which means that when they back a policy to fix, say, America s crippling
health-care costs or its underperforming public schools, people will pay
attention.
Politics 2.0
FWD.us promises to be a force for creative disruption. It is bringing to
politics the hacker mentality of tech entrepreneurs move fast, try to find new
and innovative solutions to old problems, says Joe Green, who is running the
campaign. Controversially, this has included a deal with Republicans: support
immigration reform, which may be unpopular with your voters, and FWD.us will
pay for television ads in your constituency to remind them of your positions on
other issues, which they do like. This has been dismissed as the worst kind of
old-style Washington politics by some other tech leaders, including Elon Musk,
the green-minded founder of SpaceX and co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors.
He quit FWD.us when he heard his money was being used to buy advertisements
promoting Republican support for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline. The
debate rages on, but the immigration bill passed the Senate in June, and if it
passes the House later this year the hacker tycoons will feel vindicated.
FWD.us s backers seem to have learned from the failure of their earlier efforts
to lobby for a narrow immigration reform that would have simply let in more of
the skilled foreign workers their companies need. Now, by campaigning for a
larger reform that includes a path to citizenship for those working in America
without permission, they have been able to broaden their support base; and the
scent, albeit faint, of a possible victory is in the air.
If so, what next? Might the tech tycoons then apply this lesson to their future
political activism, and seek to push politics forwards in a range of areas that
need urgent attention, from education reform to trade liberalisation? It is too
early to be sure, but if their first taste of life at Washington s top tables
proves rewarding, the tech titans may not want to stop.