Alex Pretti Is a Patriot. Tim Cook Is a Quisling.
Enough.
America grieves. Tech CEOs cower and party with Trump.
On Saturday, a bunch of Trump’s immigration officers pepper sprayed a man who was recording their violent campaign of Blue-state repression on his phone. We can all see the video of masked agents pinning down ICU nurse Alex Pretti after he tried to help a woman they had attacked, and then shooting him in the back many times as he lay on the ground.
Trump officials have labeled Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” It’s a foul defamation of a man who was simply exercising the constitutional rights that are foundational to this country.
Thank god we have video. People will still see what they want to see and cast him as a troublemaker if it fits their priors and reinforces their worldview. By any fair reading, though — and especially considering the killing of Renee Good just two weeks earlier — Pretti is an American hero, bearing witness and protecting his fellow citizens from the masked thugs of the state.
Meanwhile, that very evening Tim Cook and Andy Jassy joined the Trumps at the White House for a private screening of the $40 million Amazon-funded “documentary” Melania. Cook previously handed Trump a chunk of 24-karat gold, literally. This from the CEO of one of the few companies on the planet that has the power to weather an attack from Trump.
When I’ve written about “politics” in the past I’ve sometimes taken an apologetic tone — this is a newsletter about the business of startups and venture capital, please pardon the interruption. But what we are witnessing on the streets of Minnesota is simply unAmerican and undemocratic. I’m not sorry for saying that we can’t look away.
It is time for tech executives to find their backbone.
Kudos to Jeff Dean, Reid Hoffman, Paul Graham, Katie Stanton, Dave McClure, Meredith Whittaker, Yann LeCun, Vineeta Agarwala, Vinod Khosla, Ethan Choi, Seth Bannon, John O’Farrell, Antonio Bustamante, Chris Olah, Josh Miller, James Dyett, David Lieb, Dario Amodei, Eric Horvitz, Yoni Rechtman, and some others for speaking out.
At the same time, we’ve had pablum from the once high-minded Garry Tan and silence from please-send-the-National-Guard-to-San-Francisco Marc Benioff. None of the big tech CEOs have said a word publicly.
Keith Rabois wrote, “no law enforcement has shot an innocent person.”
Pretti and Good, it’s important to remember, are certainly not the only victims, with rampant violence and deaths happening off-camera in ICE detention centers. Remember Alligator Alcatraz, the detention camp with the cute nickname where people can be dumped without due process, beaten, and then deported to who-knows-where? It’s still going on. And don’t forget the immigrants who are being targeted without compassion are often the most hard-working among us, proactively taking the kind of risks Silicon Valley is supposed to celebrate to make a better life for themselves and their families.
The tech right spent years calling for “free speech” and demanding that we replace institutional media with “citizen journalists.” Now, with Pretti, we have a man exercising his First Amendment rights to witness and record government action on public streets and he’s shot dead. (That he had a holstered weapon doesn’t undermine any of that in the gun-loving United States of America.) What the free speech tech crowd really wanted, it seems, was the ability for themselves, personally, to say whatever they wanted without fear of criticism, and to eliminate independent watchdogs who might highlight facts rather than reinforce their self-glorifying alternate reality.
I have to ask, for the Silicon Valley set most concerned about the anti-capitalist impulses in the Democratic Party, how is falling in line with the Trump regime helping you? What’s the long game? You are ceding reality to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. Plenty of moderates are going to conclude that they can stomach a little reckless redistribution if it means nurses aren’t getting shot by federal authorities and then having their names dragged through the mud on television by the very people responsible for the violence.
By failing to act like leaders, the CEOs of America’s largest companies are only underlining that wealth is not some well-earned moral desert.
It’s long since time that tech companies stopped working with ICE.
Last week, before Pretti’s killing, I sat down with Tony Fadell for an upcoming Newcomer podcast episode. I asked him about moral leadership in tech.
“I ask myself all the time how would Steve Jobs fare in this environment,” Fadell said. I asked whether Fadell thought Jobs, like Cook, would be cozying up to the White House. He wasn’t totally sure, but offered, “Knowing what I know and working alongside him for a decade, I don’t think he would have played along.”
As his retirement looms ever closer, Cook risks cementing his legacy as someone who looked the other way for the sake of profits. It would be a sad denouement for a company, and a leader, who have so often stressed their principled positions on privacy, and whose marketing from day one has been about having the courage to break from the herd. There’s still time.
The same goes for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and all the other tech executives who believe their companies are a force for good, but have aligned themselves with bad actors. Some on the tech right, notably Peter Thiel, are openly skeptical of democracy itself. For the rest of us, or at least those of us who believe that America’s democratic constitutional heritage and commitment to the rule of law are the very basis of our republic, this is a moment for a reckoning.