Recent evolution of the tech industry's politics

"Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Facebook are currently the five largest corporations in the world by market capitalization," writes Nick Serpe in Trump Disrupts the Valley Dissent Fall 2017 (accessed 10/03/2017).

It's a reminder that the tech industry aren't upstarts crashing the gates of American business now. They are very much part of the business establishment. Serpe talks about how in the past, tech companies nurtured a "libertarian ethic" that often overlapped with Democratic Party liberal policies, in the American sense of "liberal." But one that has been very much "financially underwritten by the state."

High-tech companies have long received massive federal subsidies for research, development, and production from various arms of the Department of Defense — subsidies that had strong bipartisan support, especially during the Cold War. At the local and state level, politicians eagerly competed, usually unsuccessfully, to attract tech investment through tax breaks and other incentives.

It's important to remember that the tech boom was one that involved a great deal of innovation and public financial support by the people's governments at the state and national level.

And the leaders of the maturing tech industry are also finding even Trumpian Republicanism more attractive:

In the months since the end of the Obama presidency, an era of unsurpassed political influence for the Northern California establishment, tech leaders have repeatedly spoken of the need to empathize with the losers of the postindustrial meritocracy. Concomitant with this empathetic mood are plans for expanding the role of Silicon Valley in American politics. Meanwhile, in the face of unprecedented unrest among the tech industry rank-and-file over Trump’s immigration and climate change policies, Silicon Valley executives and financiers have engaged in a rapprochement with the new administration. Trump’s abandonment of economic positions that threatened the dominant portions of American business — anti-monopoly, protectionism, a crackdown on tax havens — has led to a sense of relief in the upper echelons of the Valley. The barons on the Pacific want to remain in the good graces of both their liberal employees and brutish Republican politicians. For the time being, that balancing act is working. Whether people are still interested in their vision for the future is another question. [my emphasis]

And they are using some very conventional methods of influence:

Libertarianism is alive and well in the Valley, but most tech elites have opted for more traditional means of corporate influence. Companies like Google, which once prided itself on how little energy it expended on lobbying, have become sophisticated practitioners of the political tactics that other Fortune 500 companies have been developing since the 1970s. In 2005 Google had one lobbyist in Washington. By 2014, the Washington Post reported, Google was one of the biggest lobbying spenders in D.C., all while “financing sympathetic research at universities and think tanks, investing in nonprofit advocacy groups across the political spectrum and funding pro-business coalitions cast as public-interest projects.”

Serpe's article makes it clear that not all tech bigwigs have abandoned the Democratic Party. Like leaders in other business sectors, they would like to spread their influence into both parties. And their interests don't always coincide with those of workers and the labor movement.