We should have seen this coming. At Platformer, Casey Newton reports that Meta has discussed pulling funding for the Oversight Board after 2028 after already reducing it “significantly” this year. Who needs fripperies like independent governance after reporting billions of losses in its Reality Labs unit, the bit responsible for the seemingly now-abandoned metaverse, the smartglasses, and, of course, AI? Per Newton, there are ongoing discussions about continuing the Oversight Board somehow, perhaps by opening it up to adjudicate for other platforms.
The reality is the Oversight Board’s moment has probably passed. In 2018, creating it was an effective public relations response to a series of scandalous revelations, beginning in 2017 with Carole Cadwalladr‘s work exposing Cambridge Analytica‘s use of Facebook to collect personal data to target political advertising. Its biggest moment was probably in January 2021, when the Oversight Board backed Facebook‘s decision to ban then-“former guy” Donald Trump for two years following the January 6 insurrection. Twitter banned him, too, and there was a brief crackdown on postings calling for violence. Much public criticism followed from whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn Williams (2025), and the Netflix documentary The Great Hack..
Today, though,the big technology companies seem not to care. Maybe they will again if usage shrinks enough – the BBC reports an Ofcom study showing that UK adults are actively posting 61% less than last year. But defunding the Oversight Board seems consistent with the general decline of content moderation on Facebook and elsewhere. Neither fines, nor spreading age verification laws, nor other constraints can be remedied by funding an Oversight Board that is already rarely mentioned.
Besides, the years since 2018 have seen the “billionaire class” take a hard turn to the libertarian right; they show little inclination to be constrained personally or corporately by national laws or governments.
In a January 2025 interview, Netscape creator and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen provided this explanation: US Democrats “broke the deal”. That is, Silicon Valley supported Democrats as long as they left technology companies free of regulation. (Democrats might reply that they were responding on behalf of the public to changes in Silicon Valley companies’ behavior.)
In addition, Connie Loizos reports at TechCrunch that the billionaires who signed Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge would now like it forgotten. At Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson fears most Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey’s enthusiasm for incorporating AI and robotics into more and bigger weapons. Anduril was founding in 2017, the year before Google employees petitioned the company to exit its contract with Project Maven, the Pentagon’s effort to harness machine learning and automatic targeting. By 2021, Tom Simonite was reporting at Wired that Google was bidding on military contracts. A few weeks back, at the Financial Times, Jemima Kelly called Silicon Valley billionaires “enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb”, citing a recent podcast interview in which Andreessen said he never engages in introspection.
Available to link all this together is Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Musk is not the sole focus of Silverman’s “guided tour through America’s self-designated innovator class” and its resentment of government and power to change it. Much of the book, which Silverman began researching in 2023, focuses on other high-dollar funders such as David Sacks and DOGE co-mastermind Vivek Ramaraswamy (whom Silverman introduces as the boss who fired him from an early job), as well as members of the “Paypal Mafia” including Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Silverman also includes chapters on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Saudi Arabia’s growing connections to Silicon Valley, the cryptocurrency boom, the fight over TikTok’s US presence, a so-far failed plan to take over California’s Solano County, Sam Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall, and the choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. The book ends with the donors’ success – that is, Trump’s election in 2024.
With Gilded Rage, Silverman revives a formerly niche publishing subgenre , which documented the beginnings of this shift. First on the scene in the US, to the best of my knowledge, was northern California native Paulina Borsook with a 1996 essay for Mother Jones, Cyberselfish. In it, and in the subsequent 2000 book, she laid out Silicon Valley’s refusal to recognize the government assistance and military funding that enabled its wealth and growth. To Borsook, who described herself in the 1998 book Wired Women as the “token hippie feminist writing for Wired“, Silicon Valley’s turn to the right and distaste for government were already visible even then. In November, David Streitfeld profiled Borsook at the New York Times and noted the price she paid for her contrarian view.
In a 1995 essay The Californian Ideology, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron pushed Europe to take a different path.
Silverman’s most recent predecessor is Douglas Rushkoff’s 2022 skewing of “The Mindset” in Survival of the Richest. In Rushkoff’s telling, these high-wealth individuals are planning their safety and/or escape during and after “the incident” – that is, whatever catastrophe is going to wipe us all out.
So Silverman is less documenting a shift than he is describing an outcome: a political wave whose emergence into the mainstream only seems sudden.
Illustrations: Political cartoon from 1904, showing Standard Oil’s stranglehold on US industry (via Wikimedia).
Also this week:
At Plutopia, we interview Paulina Borsook.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
