Silicon Valley used to be a cradle of creative mavericks. How did they become so authoritarian? My attempt at a thread.

Twitter used to declare itself "the free speech wing of the free speech party." Google's motto was "don't be evil." Such slogans have gone horribly wrong, leaving people with various theories - CCP manipulation, deep state ties, media contracts.

All of these theories have some grain of truth, but they don't arrive at the heart of the issue.
Which is that even internally, these companies have been purging their old school creative rebel workforce, and replacing them with woke children.

Why such a seemingly self-destructive policy? In tech, you need people to think creatively, to be adults, who can handle sophisticated problems.

And that is this: the tech giants are in the knowledge industry. It's an EXTREMELY LOW BARRIER TO ENTRY industry. Setting up a website takes a few minutes, and can be quickly scaled into multiple datacenters.

Even the user base can be quickly replicated by a competitor. The decentralization of media and influence continues, despite legacy media's best attempts to quash it. Such influencers can easily lead an exodus, under the right conditions.

That leaves tech giants with a major issue - if any one of their core employees leaves, they leave with all their best secrets and techniques. Non-compete and Non-disclosure agreements can only go so far to stop this.

This has led them to reform their workforce. Get rid of the workers that can cause problems. Replace them with cogs and company women and men who are easily replaced, and leave with nothing valuable.

The relationship between Walter White and Gus Fring in Breaking Bad was a great illustration of such a relationship. Gus hated having to rely on Walter, and did everything he could to make him dispensable. Walter understood this and reacted accordingly.

This can't begin and end at the company level, either. This is why tech giants have put enormous resources into changing the culture. It's why all your favorite companies went "woke" as well as your favorite cities like San Francisco.

People ask "well why can't these tech giants move out of California to another state?" It's because cities like San Francisco have the culture that lets them operate this way. If they move somewhere else, they lose this labor pool.

Risky labor pools, a competitive business climate, none of these things work in their favor. They stay here, they can keep a lock on their operations.

Of course, this is also sowing the seeds to their own destruction. Their only solution to continue this is grow into national politics. Which is why the Democrat Party has gone so ironically anti-democratic.

It's also why they're fighting so desperately. If the Republicans take over in 2020, they'll lose their political grip, and will likely lose their market share and capitalization, as competition increases nationwide.