Why Did Silicon Valley Go Unwoke?
Because all the hissy fits were getting in the way of getting stuff done?
From the New York Times opinion section:
The Real Reason Silicon Valley Won’t Stand Up to Trump
Feb. 2, 2026
By Aaron Zamost
Mr. Zamost is a tech communications consultant and former head of communications, policy and people at Square.
… There are many theories about Silicon Valley’s swift, and very conspicuous, rightward turn. Tech leaders course-corrected from an overly permissive era. The Trump administration demands fealty in exchange for critical regulatory favors. Mr. Trump’s re-election reshaped the national climate and reoriented the values of tech leadership.
Each of these explanations is convenient, but none are correct. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years, across both Big Tech and venture-backed start-ups, and I can tell you the truth is much more mundane. Silicon Valley’s chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It’s not personal — it’s strictly business.
What has happened in tech is a market correction, not a cultural one — a transfer of power from labor back to management. To attribute this change to a “vibe shift” among tech leaders may flatter political actors, but it’s beside the point. The real danger is mistaking a change in leverage for something permanent, or confusing business incentives with values. The idea of “woke corporations” was always flawed — conflating business strategy with political belief distorts not just how we understand the tech industry, but also how we interpret corporate power in American life more broadly.
Here’s how Silicon Valley actually works. Big tech companies and growing start-ups are in constant, vicious competition with one another to hire and retain the best employees, especially in product and engineering roles. When these companies are in hypergrowth mode, and particularly when the job market is tight, hiring top talent can be nothing short of a matter of survival. And they are fishing in a largely progressive pond: Political donation data shows tech employees are predominantly Democratic-leaning.
The late 2010s and early 2020s were a particularly intense period in the industry’s war for talent. Hiring exploded. Meta nearly doubled to 86,000 employees in 2022 from approximately 45,000 three years earlier. Amazon added over 400,000 employees in 2020 alone. As Silicon Valley recruiting teams relentlessly poached one another’s people, tech labor had infinite choices and all the leverage.
To be more precise, Silicon Valley was hiring more mediocrities a decade ago than today, when it’s offering billion dollar packages to top AI talent. The mediocrities tended to be Woker than the geniuses, for obvious reasons of self-interest.
So what did companies do when a generous compensation package was no longer enough to win over candidates? They instead sold a sense of belonging. Amid fierce competition, many companies realized that encouraging workers to bring their perspectives and passions to the office could increase their loyalty and their willingness to work hard. That, in turn, served the real financial objective: higher job acceptance rates, lower employee attrition and faster growth. …
Tech didn’t embrace these policies out of moral enlightenment. It did it because replacing a top engineer could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, institutional knowledge, recruiter time and onboarding. When attrition costs are existential, empathy becomes a strategy.
Empathy for engineers (e.g., James Damore) was not a major feature of the Great Awokening, to say the least, not unless the engineers changed their names, put on a frock and a simple chain of pearls, and insisted on new pronouns.
A new economic reality following the height of the pandemic — evident in Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, a “crypto winter” of plummeting currency prices and a significant slowdown in the tech sector’s growth — ultimately pushed companies from Amazon to Microsoft to rein in spending on hiring, and the incentive structure flipped. …
In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would donate $10 million to groups working on racial justice. Last year he rolled back Meta’s D.E.I. programs. Did his values change? Or did the power dynamics?
How did …
Paywall here.
