Anil Dash recently shared this N.Y. Times piece about the negative reaction within Silicon Valley to a number of CEOs attending the screening of an Amazon-produced documentary about Melania Trump.  Dash has been consistent for many years in encouraging people in tech to vocally oppose things that are wrong and uses this story for the same purpose.  The piece links to an open letter calling for ICE to leave our cities.  But I’m unimpressed by this latest crisis of conscience in tech because of their lack of introspection regarding how their treatment of women and underrepresented minorities over many years contributed to our current environment.

I fully understand the shock and anger over our government’s murder of Alex Pretti.  But I can’t help but contrast that to the lack of reaction to Andreesen Horowitz hiring Daniel Penny as a deal partner, soon after his acquittal for strangling Jordan Neely to death on the NYC subway.  Venture capital as an industry has funded startups with black founders at a rate of just 0.4%. The same Jeff Dean quoted in the N.Y. Times piece saying “Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this,” also fired Timnit Gebru under questionable circumstances in 2020.  Google would go on to fire Margaret Mitchell, co-founder of their AI ethics unit early in 2021.  Both Meta and Amazon embarked very quickly on a full-scale retreat from their DEI initiatives in the wake of Trump’s re-election in 2024.  In this respect, they followed the lead of Elon Musk, the founders of Basecamp, and the CEO of Coinbase in becoming “anti-woke”.

The tech industry consistently fails to see the connection between how the way they devalue their employees enables the ways Trump’s regime devalues everyone.  We are living through every warning about AI that the women researchers followed and interviewed in the documentary Coded Bias gave us 6 years ago.  This morning’s news brings word that Amazon is cutting another 16,000 jobs, supposedly because of AI improvements.  Meanwhile, some of the most prominent usages of GenAI include generating CSAM and the Trump administration altering photos in support of their mass deportation agenda.  The data center that powers Grok has been poisoning the air in a predominantly black community in Memphis for some time now.  GenAI as an industry is built on industrial-scale theft of copyrighted works—unfortunately aided and abetted by at least one federal court ruling so far.  Without exception, the CEO of Anthropic argues against regulation of GenAI even as he warns of it stealing jobs, all while raising billions of dollars.

Criticism of an out-of-control and unaccountable federal government is good and necessary as far as it goes.  But absent the industry doing some serious introspection and taking action to undo the broader harms to people they are enabling and actively engaged in, it looks like virtue signaling on the way back to business as usual.