How Silicon Valley turned off both the left and right

When left and right finally 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 19thcentury risk-takers such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. 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.

When American companies were unable to compete in the world arena, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook bulldozed their competition. They turned hightech and social media into American brands.

The left was even more enthralled. It dropped its regulatory zeal, despite Silicon Valley’s monopolizing, outsourcing, offshoring, censoring, and destroying of startup competition. Big Tech was left-wing and generous, giving hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing candidates, think tanks and causes.

Companies such as Facebook and Google were able to warp their own social media protocols and Internet searches to insidiously favor progressive agendas and messaging.

If the left feared that the tech billionaires were becoming robber barons, they also delighted in the fact that they were at least left-wing robber barons.

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. Social media, internet searches, texts, email and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech was not subject to the rules governing railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and TV and radio.

But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have changed on both 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 progressive billionaire bosses.

Local groups resent tech giants driving up housing prices and zoning out the poor from cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.

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

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

For years, high-tech grandees dressed all in hip black while prancing around the stage, enthralling stockholders as if they were rock stars performing with wireless mics. Some wore jeans, sneakers and T-shirts, making it seem like being worth $50 billion was hipster cool.

But the billionaire-as-every man shtick has lost his groove, especially when such zillionaires lavish pet political candidates with huge donations, seed lobbying groups and demand regulatory loopholes.

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

Both liberals and conservatives are just beginning to ask why internet communications cannot be subject to the same rules for radio and television.

Why can’t Silicon Valley monopolies be busted up in the same way as the Bell Telephone octopus or the old Standard Oil trust? Why are high-tech profits in offshore accounts? Why is production outsourced to impoverished countries, sometimes in workplaces that are deplorable and cruel? 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 else.