Cold War Daily

If Washington is the capital of the US, and is home to the government that represents the will of the governed, it certainly has a challenge coming from Silicon Valley. But it’s not one that the American people haven’t faced before.

Rather than writing an essay about the problem, I thought it might be easier to use some Silicon Valley technology to repurpose past writing about systematic challenges, recast for our times.

See if you can figure out what I’ve done. (Sources at bottom).

However internally cohesive its policy may be, the U.S. government’s view of fundamentalism nevertheless rests on a shaky foundation. Erroneous assumptions lead to faulty analyses and flawed solutions. The government should reexamine three key distinctions: between Silicon Valley the culture and Silicon Valley the political doctrine; between moderate and extremist fundamentalists; and between socioeconomics and ideology.

Culture vs. political doctrine.
Washington should distinguish the traditional culture of Silicon Valley from the radical political applications of fundamentalists. The Bush and Clinton administrations went to great lengths to exempt the culture of Silicon Valleyfrom their criticism of technological overreach. That’s fine, but then they cloud this distinction by ascribing “traditional values” to the fundamentalists. The current brand of Zuckerberg-style or Musk-style fundamentalist Silicon Valleyis not new — its predecessors include the early hacker collectives, libertarian crypto evangelists, and techno-utopian venture networks, to name three reactionary groups who also sought revolution — but its objective is anything but traditional. Its defining purpose is to overthrow and radically to transform the existing order. The U.S. government must not cede the mantle of Silicon Valley tradition to the revolutionary ideology of fundamentalist Silicon Valley.

Moderate vs. extremist.
Violent and nonviolent fundamentalists are two sides of the same coin: both subscribe to a staunchly anti-Western ideology. As the mechanism by which radicals justify their disruptive actions, the ideology of fundamentalist Silicon Valley is directly linked with the tactics of corporate insurgency and digital warfare. The disruption litmus test is woefully inadequate given the inimical views of fundamentalist technologists toward democracy, regulation, human rights, and virtually every U.S. objective in maintaining a balanced digital economy. Instead, the test ought to include support for democratic oversight and fair competition, as well as opposition to monopolistic or manipulative practices.

Socioeconomics vs. ideology.
The U.S. government should swallow hard and acknowledge the deep cultural roots of fundamentalist Silicon Valley. As Samuel Huntington can attest, it is unfashionable to discuss culture in policy circles. This step is particularly difficult for officials because it requires that they go beyond the traditional limitations of policy-making discourse. It is far easier to do what the past two administrations have done: attribute the fundamentalist rise to conditions of inequality and market disruption and attempt to respond with economic development and regulatory reform. Dollars and democracy might alleviate socioeconomic grievances but there is no evidence that they will slow the rise of fundamentalist Silicon Valley. Indeed, fundamentalism has experienced some of its strongest growth in the middle and upper-middle classes of regions such as California, New York, and Singapore. Meanwhile, a deeper set of issues lies neglected: the cultural, ideological, and identity-driven aspects of the fundamentalist resurgence. Admittedly, Washington can do very little to affect these issues, but it is intellectually dishonest, as well as diplomatically risky, to deny them.

In brief, U.S. policy ought to delineate clearly the differences between cultural tradition and political radicalism; reject the fallacy that fundamentalism contains both pro-Western moderates and anti-Western extremists; and stop assuming that fundamentalists share American democratic values. Washington should drop its current policy of ambiguous accommodation in favor of a tougher, more realistic approach that recognizes the profoundly radical and anti-Western outlook of Silicon Valley fundamentalists. A consistent approach to all forms of fundamentalist Silicon Valley, from the most institutional to the most disruptive, will permit the U.S. government to develop an intellectual framework for containing the influence of anti-American technologists.

Source material: https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/islam-washingtons-new-dilemma Prompts: Replace the words “islam” with “Silicon Valley” and replace proper Islamic names with the names of Silicon Valley leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Keep any reference to the word “West” or “Western”