34 new york | september 16–29, 2019

HREESUMMERSAGO, a worker stood up at “Q&A,” Facebook’s weekly

all-hands, town-hall-style meeting, which is usually held on Friday after-

noons in Menlo Park and livestreamed to its oces around the world—

and aggressively closed to the public and press—to ask Mark Zuckerberg

whether the company had a plan in case the public turned against it, like

what had happened to the big banks a few years earlier. ¶ Zuckerberg

didn’t even know how to answer the question. That backlash won’t hap-

pen, he said, as long as the company keeps shipping products people like.

Some conservative commentators had been accusing Facebook, with little

evidence, of censoring their voices, but the company remained popular.

Hillary Clinton, sure to be the next president, was shaping up to be a great

friend of Facebook’s and of tech titans in general. In fact, there were few more reliable allies of Silicon

Valley in national politics than the Democratic Party. Democrats and many of Silicon Valley’s leaders

were partners on everything from campaign funding to voter-data programs. Sheryl Sandberg, of

Lean In fame, had traveled to Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters to talk about gender equality with

the candidate and her sta almost as soon as the campaign launched in 2015. The following August,

Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, held an intimate din-

ner for Clinton and about 20 industry leaders, each of whom

paid $200,000 to be there. Around that time, Sandberg was

widely considered a contender to be Clinton’s Treasury secre-

tary, and other Silicon Valley bigwigs, such as Google CFO

Ruth Porat, were the subjects of Cabinet talk too. That spring,

Apple CEO Tim Cook found himself on Clinton’s initial list of

potential running mates, and on Election Night, Google chair-

man Eric Schmidt—who’d played an important role in guiding

the party’s data operations since 2008—walked around the

Javits Center wearing a sta credential. ¶ Three years later,

things couldn’t look more dierent. Leaders of Silicon Valley

and the Democratic Party are, if not exactly at war, in some

ugly early stage of a protracted, high-powered, acrimonious

divorce. A new phase of regulatory crackdown has delivered

fines, like $5 billion for Facebook’s mishandling of user infor-

mation (a slap on the wrist that caused genuine panic among

other tech companies that can’t aord the same fate). This

month, members of the House demanded personal emails

from executives at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. But

the split has also exposed the underlying marriage of party and

industry as more a union of convenience than either side

thought back in the Obama era, when liberals saw in the Bay

Area a natural ally of technocratic progress. Perhaps no one

had bothered to discuss the ideological details.

Illustrations by Ward Sutton

T

INSIDE THE

DIVORCE

RATTLING

SILICON

VALLEY

AND DEMOCRATIC

POLITICS

GABRIEL

DEBENEDETTI

BY