Not to pick on it explicitly, but this piece is a good example of the failure to consider that there are a set of fully understandable shared experiences that explain why a large portion of the tech ecosystem moved substantially to the right over the course of the Biden administration. To use Marc as an example, this is a guy who was on Facebook’s board during COVID. Just try and imagine for a second what that experience was like. You wake up in the morning. You go to a board meeting. You either are briefed about, or receive calls direct from government officials (and/or aligned NGOs), insisting that further action to clamp down on posts about *likely* one of either the actual pandemic or the “pandemic of racism”. Insinuations are made that a failure to comply with any requests, or so much as question them, makes you personally responsible for the continuation of these phenomenon and their consequences, up to and including any violence and deaths that may occur. Insinuations are also made that it would be best for the health of the business that you have a fiduciary responsibility to for you not push back on such requests, even for issues that you think are completely reasonable to discuss (e.g. whether Covid originated in a lab, a topic that was banned on Facebook for several months in 2021). Now you are being forced by your own government (or effective representatives thereof) to choose between muzzling your fellow citizens or putting the company that you have been a part of building for 20 years at risk. Perhaps you could swallow this if it were a one time request, but there is no final penance. There is no way to fully expurgate your sins and prove to those making these requests that you are a “good person”. You must be always on your toes. One wrong move and you will be surreptitiously called into a meeting where it has been determined beforehand that your public (or private!) political statements—almost exclusively any that espouse even conservative leanings—do not “reflect well” on the company, and it would be best for you to part ways. To hell with your twenty year track record. Such occurrences have already happened to friends. Now, is the piece below arguing this didn’t happen? No, not explicitly. But leaving it out completely changes the tenor of the story and makes the actions of those that became known as the “tech right” seem to be the consequence of inexplicable character quirks. Which is a weird theory of the case given that it happened to so many folks across such a concentrated area at almost exactly the same time. If your theory is that a massive portion of the most powerful tech execs in the country endogenously flipped their political beliefs on a dime at the same time, candidly, you should get a better theory. The better theory is that the experience I describe above was experienced as a shared social phenomenon, over and over, all across the Valley, until, as happens with unsustainable social phenomena, the dam broke, and a substantial portion of those being critiqued and threatened for actions they themselves did not engage in decided they were no longer going to support those doing the critiquing and threatening. For lack of a better phrase, the tech right did not fall out of a coconut tree.