How Silicon Valley turned off left, right

When left and right agree on something, watch out: The unthinkable becomes normal.

So it is with changing attitudes toward Silicon Valley.

For the last two decades, Apple, Google, Amazon and other West Coast tech corporations have been untouchable icons. They piled up astronomical profits while hypnotizing both left-wing and right-wing politicians.

Conservative administrations praised them as modern versions of 19th-century risk-takers such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller. Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs and other tech giants were seen as supposedly creating national wealth in an unregulated, laissez-faire landscape that they had invented from nothing.

At a time when U.S. companies were increasingly unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble world arena, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook bulldozed their international competition. They turned high-tech and social media into American brands.

The left was even more enthralled. It dropped its customary regulatory zeal, despite Silicon Valley’s monopolizing, outsourcing, offshoring, censoring, and destroying of start-up competition. After all, Big Tech was left-wing and generous. High-tech interests gave hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing candidates, think tanks and causes.

Unlike the steel, oil and coal monopolies of the 19th century that out of grime and smoke created the sinews of a growing America, Silicon Valley gave us shiny, clean, green and fun pods, pads and phones.

As a result, social media, internet searches, texts, email and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech certainly was not subject to the rules that governed railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and television and radio.

But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have now changed on the left and right.

Liberals are under pressure from their progressive base to make Silicon Valley hire more minorities and women.

Progressives wonder why West Coast techies cannot unionize and sit down for tough bargaining with their progressive billionaire bosses.

Behind the veneer of a cool Apple logo or multicolored Google trademark are scores of multimillionaires who live 1percenter lifestyles quite at odds with the soft socialism espoused by their corporate megaphones.

Conservatives got sick of Silicon Valley too. Instead of acting like laissez-faire capitalists, the entrenched captains of high-tech industry seem more like government colluders and manipulators.

With the election of populist Donald Trump, the Republican Party seems less wedded to the doctrines of economic libertarian Milton Friedman and more to the trust-busting zeal of Teddy Roosevelt.

The public has welcomed the unregulated freedom of Silicon Valley — as long as it was free. But now computer users are discovering that social media and web searches seem highly controlled and manipulated — by the whims of billionaires rather than federal regulators.

The public faces put on by West Coast tech leaders have not helped.

Ten years ago, Mark Zuckerberg seemed cool. Now, his T-shirt get-up seems phony and incongruous with his walled estates and unregulated profiteering.

Now liberals and conservatives are beginning to ask why internet communications cannot be subject to the same rules applied to radio and television. Why can’t Silicon Valley monopolies be busted up in the same manner as the Bell Telephone octopus or the old Standard Oil trust? Why are high-tech profits hidden in offshore accounts? Why does texting while driving not earn a product liability suit?

Just because Silicon Valley is cool does not mean it could never become just another monopoly that got too greedy and turned off the left wing, the right wing and everybody in between.