Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto

For decades, “Wall Street” was America’s all-purpose byword for capitalist villainy. “Big tech” is now running it close, and for good reason. Silicon Valley has, in recent years, produced high-profile bad actors at a remarkable pace. And after at least two decades of semi-stable alignment with the Democratic Party, influential figures in tech lurched right post-pandemic, burrowing into anti-democratic and extremist political thought. Some of this has since burst into Washington: Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative owes much to the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley.