Silicon Valley Lost Its Nerve
There was a time when Silicon Valley believed in its own mythology.
Technology would liberate, openness would restrain power, and no company—no matter how big—would side against the public interest. In the late 2000s, you could still feel this in the YouTube lobby, where a Peabody Award honored the platform for “advancing democracy through an expanding archive of voices.” Back then, even a video of a kid coming out of dental anesthesia felt like part of something larger, freer, more optimistic.
Today, that era is gone.
YouTube is no longer the emblem of democratic empowerment. It now spends money to make politics go away—specifically, the 24.5 million dollars it paid to settle Trump’s lawsuit over his post–January 6 suspension. It’s a symbol of a much broader shift: the retreat of a once-idealistic industry into fear, risk aversion, and accommodation of power.
The revolutionaries who moved inside the castle walls
During the late 2000s and early 2010s, the tech industry did things that genuinely challenged entrenched interests.
Google pressured the FCC to attach open-access requirements to some of the most valuable wireless spectrum in the country—laying groundwork for the modern mobile internet.
Twitter sued for the right to publicly disclose government demands for user data.
Apple defied the FBI by refusing to unlock an iPhone, insisting that privacy and encryption must not be compromised.
These actions spanned Republican and Democratic administrations, and they shared one premise:
The user came before the powerful.
Tech leaders considered themselves challengers to the establishment, building products that gave ordinary people leverage they’d never had before—phones unshackled from carriers, cars liberated from gasoline, credit-card readers that enabled anyone to start a business.
Fifteen years later, those “revolutionaries” are not storming the castle.
They live comfortably inside it.
And no company illustrates this shift more starkly than Meta.
Well before Trump returned to the White House, Meta dismantled its fact-checking infrastructure, loosened hate-speech rules under the guise of encouraging “mainstream political discourse,” and paid Trump $25 million to resolve his account-suspension lawsuit—barely a week into his second presidency.
Amazon publicly denied reports that it would display Trump’s tariffs on product pages, anxious not to provoke political consequences.
Apple—once willing to challenge the government on principle—removed an app that notified users of nearby ICE activity after pressure from Pam Bondi’s office.
Tech companies, once willing to confront power, now quietly adjust themselves around it.
Why courage didn’t scale
The answer is uncomfortable but straightforward.
Tech’s courage never grew with its size. It shrank.
As Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon expanded, they became the very thing they claimed to disrupt: risk-averse institutions focused on preservation.
They worry about losing White House access, provoking regulatory retaliation, or drawing subpoenas. They avoid battles that once defined them. They now serve power first, users second.
During the financial crisis, when trust in Wall Street and government plummeted, the tech industry became a rare institution the public still believed in. Its leaders’ idealism matched the public mood. Over time, however, dominance replaced idealism. Profit displaced purpose. Products became worse.
Tech now resembles finance— powerful, opaque, insulated, and uninterested in accountability.
The cost of losing the public’s trust
The collapse of trust is not theoretical.
Americans increasingly believe AI is more likely to harm them (43%) than help (24%).
Trust in Google and Amazon is almost double trust in Meta.
Millions own Echos and Nests, but almost nobody owns the discontinued Facebook Portal.
Trust drives adoption. Adoption drives innovation. Without trust, the engine stalls.
This cynicism is reshaping the industry’s workforce as well.
Even before hiring slowed, top graduates were already turning away from Big Tech.
The number of tech companies on Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work” list fell by 25% in a single year.
For an industry that powers U.S. economic growth, this is not a small crack. It’s a structural warning.
A future without technological optimism is a darker future
Technology has always advanced fastest when people believed it could make their lives better.
When that belief dies, innovation slows, investment dries up, and the nation begins to view its own future with suspicion.
If tech leaders become villains rather than protagonists, the U.S. enters a future without a guiding force—without the confidence that things can get better.
And I still wonder about that Peabody Award I left behind when I left YouTube.
Whoever inherited it should understand what it once meant. It symbolized a moment when Silicon Valley still believed in something larger than itself—when it remembered why it started.
I hope they remember that version of YouTube, and that version of Silicon Valley.
