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JOEL KOTKIN: There may be no more peace in the valley

Members of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco and other activists protest outside San Francisco City Hall in January 2014. They demanded regulation of employee shuttles for companies like Google, Facebook and Apple. Private shuttle buses have created traffic problems.

JEFF CHIU, ASSOCIATED PRESS

The rise of todays progressive-dominated Democratic Party stemmed from a brilliant melding of minorities, the poor, the intelligentsia and, quite surprising, the new ultrarich of Silicon Valley. For the past decade, this alliance has worked for both sides, giving the tech titans politically correct cover while suggesting their support for the progressives message can work with business.

Not only did tech overwhelmingly favor President Obama with campaign contributions but Obama also overwhelming won the Silicon Valley electorate, taking the once GOP-leaning Santa Clara County with 70 percent of the vote. After the 2012 election, a host of former top Obama aides including former campaign manager David Plouffe (Uber) and press spokesman Jay Carney (Amazon) have signed up to work for tech giants. Perhaps even more revealing was the politically inspired firing last year of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for contributing to Californias Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage.

Yet, despite these ties and PC eruptions, this alliance between the ideologically and the technically advanced shows signs of unraveling. This reflects, over time, what Marxists might have referred to as contradictions between two very different worldviews: the disruptive, acquisitive, aggressive spirit inherent in entrepreneurial capitalism and the increasingly egalitarian, property-controlling instincts of the progressive Left. To many progressives, the Silicon Valley elite are no longer scrappy up-and-comers, but increasingly resemble a new oligarchy.

Like the nobles of the Middle Ages or the corporate hegemons of the industrial era, Silicon Valley billionaires are increasingly asked to take responsibility for many of societys ills. These include a wide range of issues, from feminism and race to privacy and, most critically, class inequality. Supporting gay marriage or measures to fight climate change may no longer be enough to win over progressives.

Arguably the most widely acknowledged conflict at least the raciest involves sex discrimination. From its inception as a cradle of technology, the Valleys culture has been highly masculine. Indeed, roughly 26 percent of tech industry workers are women, well below their 47 percent share of the total workforce. Nor is this likely to change soon: only 18 percent of computer science graduates are women, down from 37 percent in the mid-80s. Stanford researcher Vivek Wadhwa describes the Valley as still a boys club that regarded women as less capable than men and subjected them to negative stereotypes and abuse.

This pattern of sexual discrimination and outright misogyny has been cited in a recent suit brought by Ellen Pao, a former employee, against one of the Valleys premier venture-capital firms, Kleiner Perkins, which, she alleged, maintained a workplace steeped in sexism and locker room arrogance.

The recent attack by feminists on video games is also roiling that industry, long one of techs most profitable sectors. Some industry executives, bowing to pressure from feminists, have agreed to tone down and even alter their games story lines to makes them more acceptable to womens groups. But theres also strong blowback among game designers, who feel they may be forced to toe the party line, even in their essentially frivolous industry.

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JOEL KOTKIN: There may be no more peace in the valley