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If you do not recognize that mass destruction of fundamental concepts of democracy and the US Constitution happening right now, you are either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. I can't put it any clearer than that. This isn't about politics — it's about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible. For those in the tech industry who supported this administration thinking it would mean less regulation or more "business friendly" policies: you've catastrophically misread the situation (which many people tried to warn you about). While overregulation (which, let's face it, we didn't really have) can be bad, it's nothing compared to the destruction of the stable institutional framework that allowed American innovation to thrive in the first place. There's something important to understand about innovation. It doesn't actually happen in a vacuum. The reason Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley wasn't because a bunch of genius inventors happened to like California weather. It was because of a complex web of institutions that made innovation possible: courts that would enforce contracts (but not non-competes, allowing ideas to spread quickly and freely across industries), universities that shared research, a financial system that could fund new ideas, and laws that let people actually try those ideas out. And surrounding it all: a fairly stable economy, stability in global markets and (more recently) a strong

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If you do not recognize that mass destruction of fundamental concepts of democracy and the US Constitution happening right now, you are either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. I can't put it any clearer than that. This isn't about politics — it's about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible. For those in the tech industry who supported this administration thinking it would mean less regulation or more "business friendly" policies: you've catastrophically misread the situation (which many people tried to warn you about). While overregulation (which, let's face it, we didn't really have) can be bad, it's nothing compared to the destruction of the stable institutional framework that allowed American innovation to thrive in the first place. There's something important to understand about innovation. It doesn't actually happen in a vacuum. The reason Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley wasn't because a bunch of genius inventors happened to like California weather. It was because of a complex web of institutions that made innovation possible: courts that would enforce contracts (but not non-competes, allowing ideas to spread quickly and freely across industries), universities that shared research, a financial system that could fund new ideas, and laws that let people actually try those ideas out. And surrounding it all: a fairly stable economy, stability in global markets and (more recently) a strong
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Kat O’Brien (obrien_kat@mastodon.world)'s status on Monday, 10-Mar-2025 06:45:31 JST Kat O’Brien
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The U.S. is becoming a place without freedom of speech, freedom of press, rule of law or allies. A few of the many cited include work by Karen Attiah, Anne Applebaum, Masha Gessen, Timothy Snyder, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat. And one particularly salient piece I quote was by @mmasnick, who calls what’s happening “the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible.
#journalism #freespeech #uspol

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