What We Lost as a Nation: Tech & Science
The Cost of Choosing "Whiteness" (and Oligarchy) Over Solidarity
"We were promised The Jetsons — George Jetson worked 4 hours a week while robots did the rest. Instead we got the gig economy: Victorian-era work conditions with an app." — The Empire Ends With Us, "Deconstructing Silicon Valley"
"Every technology in your iPhone was publicly funded. Apple's contribution was design, marketing, and assembly in a Chinese factory with suicide nets." — Adapted from Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State
A Note on the Audience
This section is addressed to white Americans — and also, frankly, to the Asian-American communities (particularly East and South Asian tech professionals) who have been recruited into the Silicon Valley hierarchy as a buffer class.
The "model minority" myth doesn't just harm Asian Americans by erasing their diversity and struggles — it also provides cover for a system that uses Asian technical labor to generate wealth that flows overwhelmingly to white executives, white VCs, and white shareholders.
Silicon Valley's racial hierarchy has two tiers of complicity: the white men who built the ideology and the Asian-American professionals who were told they'd earned their place in it. Neither group should be comfortable with what that system has produced.
How We Got Here: A Primer
1940s–1960s: The Government Built Everything, Then Gave It Away.
Every foundational technology of the "digital revolution" was publicly funded.
The internet (ARPANET, 1969 — DARPA). GPS (Department of Defense NAVSTAR). Touchscreens (NSF and CIA-funded research). Voice recognition (DARPA's SRI International). Lithium-ion batteries (Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory). Semiconductors (decades of university research funded by the NSF and the DOD). The computer itself (wartime government projects at UPenn, MIT, and Los Alamos). Even the algorithm behind Google Search was developed under an NSF grant at Stanford.
Taxpayers funded the research. Then the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 allowed universities and corporations to patent publicly funded discoveries.
The public paid for the innovation and then got charged rent to use it.
1970s–1990s: Silicon Valley Finds Its Ideology.
The Bay Area's counterculture and the libertarian right fused into something toxic: the belief that technology entrepreneurs are Randian heroes who owe nothing to the society that funded their work.
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged became Silicon Valley's bible. Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick (Uber), Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk all cited her influence.
The ideology: regulation is tyranny, taxation is theft, labor protections are obstacles, and the "builders" (tech founders) are morally superior to the "takers" (everyone else). This philosophy was born from Cold War anti-communism and white male entitlement, and became the operating system of the most powerful industry on Earth.
1990s–2000s: The VC Scam Scales Up.
Venture capital (VC) became the engine of wealth extraction.
98% of VC money goes to men. 77% goes to all-white teams. 85% goes to Stanford/Harvard/MIT graduates. The "pattern matching" that VCs use to identify founders is a euphemism for funding people who look like themselves: white men from elite universities.
The VC model works like this: subsidize the destruction (Uber loses billions undercutting taxis), kill the competition, achieve a monopoly, jack up the prices, cash out via IPO, and leave society with worse service at higher prices and a destroyed industry.
Call it "disruption" or whatever you want. It's enclosure of the commons.
2000s–2010s: Surveillance Capitalism and the Gig Economy.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon all discovered that the real product is you. Your data, your attention, and your behavior can all be sold to advertisers and weaponized for manipulation.
The "gig economy" (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and others) reinvented Victorian-era piecework/workhouse labor with an app and called it "flexibility."
Meanwhile, tech companies busted unions (Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks), misclassified workers as "independent contractors," and lobbied against every labor protection.
2010s–Present: The Dark Enlightenment Goes Mainstream.
Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), the "house philosopher" of Silicon Valley's reactionary wing, openly advocates replacing democracy with CEO-monarchs. He was a guest at Trump's 2025 inauguration.
Peter Thiel, Yarvin's patron, has said "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Elon Musk has become an open propagandist for far-right ideology while running companies built on government contracts and subsidies. Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" (2023) explicitly rejected concern for inequality, the environment, or social responsibility.
Palantir (co-founded by Thiel) runs AI targeting systems for the military ("Lavender," "Gospel," and "Where's Daddy") and received a $13 billion Maven contract while its stock rose 200%.
Silicon Valley isn't just building bad products. It's building the infrastructure of authoritarianism.
The Ties to Education
Silicon Valley's problems are education's problems — and vice versa.
The same educational apartheid documented in the Education section produced the tech workforce we have. When 20–25 million children were denied equal education from 1877–1954, and schools resegregated after 1988, the pipeline into science and technology was artificially narrowed to a demographic that represents neither the country nor the world.
Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Caltech (Silicon Valley's feeder schools) remain overwhelmingly white and wealthy despite decades of diversity initiatives. The universities train the ideology: computer science departments are funded by defense contracts and tech corporations who teach students to code. They're not taught to question who benefits from their code, who is harmed by it, or who was excluded from the room where it was designed.
The Result: technology is designed by and for a narrow demographic, solving problems only wealthy white men experience while ignoring or exacerbating problems that everyone else faces.
When 98% of VC money goes to men and 77% goes to all-white teams, the pipeline failure isn't a mystery. It's the system working as designed.
link to Abolish Silicon Valley Policy
The Totals
Lives Lost and Ruined
| Category | Impact |
|---|---|
| Gig workers denied labor protections | 55+ million Americans in "gig" or "independent contractor" work — no minimum wage guarantee, no health insurance, no sick leave, and no workers' comp. Algorithmic wage theft costs gig workers billions/year. |
| Tech workers burned out and exploited | "Crunch culture" in gaming and tech causes documented mental health crises. H-1B visa system creates a captive workforce that can't change employers without risking deportation. Contractor systems (Google has more contractors than employees) deny benefits to people doing the same work. |
| Surveillance capitalism victims | 3+ billion people's data is harvested, sold, and weaponized — contributing to political manipulation (Cambridge Analytica/2016), mental health crises (Instagram's own research showed harm to teen girls), genocide facilitation (Facebook in Myanmar), and the erosion of privacy as a human right. |
| Communities destroyed by "disruption" | Taxi drivers (Uber destroyed their livelihoods, then raised prices), local retail (Amazon, then raised prices), local journalism (Google/Facebook devoured ad revenue, then amplified misinformation), hotel workers (Airbnb). Each "disruption" eliminated middle-class jobs and replaced them with precarious labor. |
| AI and automation displacement | Millions of jobs eliminated or degraded. Productivity gains captured entirely by capital, and worker wages are stagnated while tech billionaires became the richest humans in history. |
| Military-tech victims | Palantir's targeting AI used in Gaza, Yemen, and the Iran War. Drone warfare systems built by tech companies. Surveillance technology sold to authoritarian governments. Tech workers who built these systems were told it was "defense." |
| Climate destruction from AI | AI's projected energy consumption: 945 TWh by 2030 (more than most countries). 182 million tons CO₂. 560 billion liters of water for cooling data centers. 56% powered by fossil fuels. The "AI revolution" is accelerating climate catastrophe. |
Money Stolen by the Oligarchs
| Category | Amount |
|---|---|
| Publicly funded research privatized (cumulative) | Hundreds of billions — Internet (DARPA), GPS (DoD), touchscreens (NSF), mRNA vaccines (NIH), batteries (DOE), semiconductors (university research). Taxpayers funded it. Corporations own it. |
| VC extraction model (annual) | $300+ billion/year flows into VC-funded companies. Returns flow to a tiny number of already-wealthy investors. 90% of VC goes to white men. |
| Big Tech monopoly profits (annual) | Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta — combined annual revenue: $1.5+ trillion. Built on public infrastructure, public research, and labor exploitation. |
| Pharmaceutical profiteering from public research | 90%+ of basic drug research is NIH-funded. Companies patent publicly funded discoveries and charge 100–1,000x markup. Insulin: discovered 1921, patent sold for $1 to be accessible. Now it's $300/vial. |
| Gig economy wage theft (annual) | Billions — algorithmic pay manipulation, misclassification, and denial of benefits. Uber and Lyft have never been profitable. Their business model is subsidized labor exploitation. |
| Pentagon R&D diverted from civilian use | $106 billion/year on military R&D (12x the NSF budget). 1.2 million scientists and engineers work in defense. Talent that could be curing cancer, solving climate change, or building spectacular public infrastructure. |
| Total annual extraction by the tech-military-industrial complex | $2+ trillion/year in monopoly profits, privatized public research, military R&D diversion, and labor exploitation |
Lost Potential (Innovation That Never Happened)
| Category | Estimated Loss |
|---|---|
| Innovators denied education (see Education section) | $425–667 trillion in cumulative lost potential across nine demographic groups. Every scientist, inventor, and engineer who was never educated because of racial exclusion represents innovations that would have produced further innovations. |
| BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women innovators erased or stolen from | Incalculable. Lewis Latimer (lightbulb filament, credited to Edison). Katherine Johnson (NASA trajectories, hidden for decades). Rosalind Franklin (DNA structure, credit stolen by Watson & Crick). Henrietta Lacks (HeLa cells, family never compensated). Chien-Shiung Wu (parity violation experiment, Nobel given to male collaborators). Lynn Conway (VLSI chip design, fired by IBM for being trans, contributions were hidden for 30 years). Katalin Karikó (mRNA technology, demoted and denied tenure for decades before COVID vaccines made her work famous). Thousands more. |
| Women innovators excluded | Estimated $500+ billion in stolen value from documented cases alone. Lise Meitner (nuclear fission, Otto Hahn got the Nobel). Women "computers" at NASA, Bletchley Park, and ENIAC erased until recent decades. |
| Innovation killed by patent monopoly | Patents block follow-on research. Pharmaceutical patents prevent generic drugs. Tech patents create thickets that strangle small innovators. The patent system, designed to encourage innovation, and has become a tool for corporations to prevent it. |
| Innovation killed by VC profit motive | VCs fund what generates returns, not what solves problems. Clean energy, public health, accessible technology, and worker-empowering tools are systematically underfunded because they don't produce the 100x returns VCs demand. |
| Innovation lost to military R&D | $106 billion/year spent on weapons research. The F-35 program alone ($1.7 trillion lifetime cost) could have funded the complete renewable energy transition. Every missile engineer is a climate scientist who doesn't exist. |
| Innovation lost to brain drain from public sector | Government labs, public universities, and NASA have lost top talent to Big Tech's salary wars. A Stanford AI researcher can earn $1 million/year at Google or $120,000 at a national lab. Public innovation capacity has been hollowed out. |
How "WHITENESS" (And Its Allies) Shaped Silicon Valley's Philosophy
Silicon Valley's ideology didn't emerge from nowhere. It's the logical endpoint of several threads of American white supremacy and class warfare:
Ayn Rand's Objectivism
The idea that selfishness is a virtue, altruism is a disease, and the "productive" elite owe nothing to the masses was popularized in mid-century America as an anti-communist, anti-New Deal philosophy. It appealed to wealthy white men who wanted a moral justification for their wealth.
Silicon Valley adopted it wholesale.
When Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) said his favorite book was The Fountainhead, he was telling you who he was. When Peter Thiel said democracy and freedom are incompatible, he meant that poor people voting threatens rich people's power.
The "Meritocracy" Myth
Silicon Valley claims to be a meritocracy where the best ideas win.
In reality, 98% of VC money goes to men, 77% to all-white teams, 85% to three universities. "Merit" means knowing the right people, coming from the right background, and looking like what investors expect a founder to look like.
This is the same "meritocracy" that claimed slavery was a natural hierarchy, that Jim Crow reflected natural ability, and that the wealth gap is about work ethic rather than centuries of theft.
The "Model Minority" Buffer
Asian Americans, particularly East and South Asian tech professionals, were recruited into Silicon Valley's hierarchy to prove it wasn't racist.
"See, Asians succeed! which means the system is fair, and Black and Latino failure is their own fault."
This is a con. Asian-American tech workers face a "bamboo ceiling" — overrepresented in technical roles, vastly underrepresented in executive and founder positions. They do the work; white men hold the equity.
The "model minority" myth harms Asian Americans (erasing their diversity, pressuring conformity, and dismissing their experiences of discrimination) while also being weaponized against Black and Latino communities.
Asian Americans who participate in Silicon Valley's hierarchy without questioning it are collaborating with a system that exploits them while using them as racial cover.
The "Move Fast and Break Things" Ethos
Facebook's famous motto is a restatement of colonial logic: we take what we want, destroy what's in our way, and consequences be damned.
This philosophy is the tech industry's version of "manifest destiny." The land grab is digital, but the entitlement is the same.
The Military-Tech Pipeline
Silicon Valley was born from military contracts (Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Lockheed in the Bay Area).
DARPA funded the internet. The Pentagon funds AI research. Palantir's surveillance AI is used in warfare. Amazon's AWS runs CIA cloud infrastructure. Google's former motto was "Don't Be Evil"; now it competes for Pentagon contracts.
The tech industry is the military-industrial complex with better branding. The same engineers building your social media feed are building the targeting systems dropping bombs on Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
The Innovators Who Didn't Fit the Mold
What They Gave Us (Despite Everything)
Every one of these people achieved breakthroughs while the system worked against them. Imagine what they (and the millions like them who never got the chance) could have done in a system designed for inclusion:
Lewis Latimer (Black Man, 1848–1928):
Invented the carbon filament that made lightbulbs practical and affordable. Drafted the patent for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. Worked with Edison. Edison gets the credit. Latimer made it work.
Katherine Johnson (Black Woman, 1918–2020):
Calculated trajectories for Mercury and Apollo missions at NASA. Her math put Americans in space. Her name was hidden for decades, until the book and movie Hidden Figures (2016).
Henrietta Lacks (Black Woman, 1920–1951):
Her cancer cells (HeLa cells) became the foundation of modern biomedical research — vaccines, cancer treatments, and gene mapping. They were taken without consent. Her family never compensated. Billions in pharmaceutical profits generated from her biology.
Chien-Shiung Wu (Chinese-American Woman, 1912–1997):
Designed and conducted the experiment proving parity violation in physics. It's one of the most important experiments in 20th-century physics. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang won the Nobel Prize for it. Wu did not.
Rosalind Franklin (woman, 1920–1958):
Produced the X-ray crystallography image (Photo 51) that revealed DNA's double helix structure. Watson and Crick used her data without crediting her. They got the Nobel Prize. She died at 37 and was erased.
Lynn Conway (Trans Woman, born 1938):
Pioneered VLSI chip design. The technology that made modern microprocessors possible. IBM fired her in 1968 for being transgender. Her contributions were hidden for 30 years. The microchip industry—now worth trillions of dollars—rests on the work that IBM tried to bury because its inventor was trans.
Katalin Karikó (Hungarian-American Woman, born 1955):
Spent decades developing mRNA technology while being demoted, denied tenure, and told her work was a dead end. That work became the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. She finally received the Nobel Prize in 2023. Only 40 years after she started the research.
Alan Turing (Gay Man, 1912–1954):
Father of computer science. Cracked the Enigma code, helping win WWII. The British government chemically castrated Turing for being gay. He died by suicide at age 41. The computing revolution is built on the work of a man his country tortured to death for who he loved.
This is on the British. But let's be honest, the US would've done the same thing
What We Lost by Erasing Them
These are the ones we know about; the ones who succeeded despite the system. For every Katherine Johnson, there are thousands who never made it to a university, a lab, or a patent office because the system was designed to keep them out.
The cost is the innovations that never happened.
The cures never discovered. The technologies never invented. The breakthroughs never achieved because the people who would have made them were denied education, denied funding, denied credit, or denied humanity.
Lost Innovation (Quashed by Corporate Profit)
"Useful" Tech That Should Exist But Don't
Public Broadband:
The internet was publicly funded. It should be a public utility.
Instead, Comcast and AT&T carve up monopoly territories, charge the highest prices in the developed world for mediocre service, and lobby against municipal broadband (which consistently outperforms and underprices private ISPs wherever it's allowed to exist).
Open-Source Medical Devices:
The insulin pump, the ventilator, and the hearing aid. These are life-saving devices that should be produced at cost and accessible to all.
Instead, they're patented, monopolized, and priced at 10–100x manufacturing cost. A $35 insulin pump that works as well as a $7,000 one has been developed by open-source communities and blocked by regulatory capture.
Worker-Owned Platforms:
A cooperatively owned Uber would pay drivers fairly, charge riders less, and reinvest profits into the community.
The technology exists. It's been built (see: cooperative platforms like Stocksy, Up & Go, and Eva). It can't scale because it doesn't attract VC money. Cooperative ownership doesn't produce 100x returns for investors.
Right to Repair:
Every phone, tractor, car, and appliance could be designed for user repair.
Manufacturers deliberately design products to be unrepairable (Apple, John Deere, and Tesla), and use software locks and patent threats to prevent independent repair shops. This produces billions in unnecessary waste and forces consumers to buy replacements by design.
NO Planned Obsolescence
Your phone is designed to slow down after 2 years. Your printer is designed to stop working after a set number of pages. Your appliance is designed with a plastic gear that breaks on schedule.
In a sane system, products would be built to last and designed for repair.
The circular economy is technologically possible today. It's blocked by corporate profit models that depend on forced repurchasing.
Scientific Discoveries That Should Have Happened
Climate Solutions, Decades Earlier:
If the $106 billion/year Pentagon R&D budget had been directed at renewable energy, battery storage, and carbon capture starting in the 1970s (when the science was clear), the climate crisis could have been dramatically mitigated.
Instead, ExxonMobil buried the research and funded climate denial in response to their own scientists documented climate change in 1977.
Cancer Research Acceleration:
NIH funding has been effectively flat (inflation-adjusted) for two decades, and then gutted under Trump 2.0.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than on research, and basic science is underfunded because it doesn't produce immediate shareholder returns.
The cancer breakthroughs that are happening (mRNA therapeutics, and CAR-T cell therapy) were enabled by decades of public funding that nearly didn't happen because Karikó couldn't get a grant.
Pandemic Preparedness:
The U.S. had intelligence about pandemic risks for years.
Preparedness was underfunded because it didn't benefit any corporation. COVID-19 killed 1.2 million Americans. A functioning public health infrastructure would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
How Other Nations Are Kicking Our Ass
China
China doesn't just build trains (50,000 km of HSR).
China is:
- Leading in quantum computing research
- Has the world's largest 5G network
- Deploys more renewable energy than any other country
- Manufactures 80%+ of the world's solar panels
- Produces 60% of the world's electric vehicles
- Leapfrogged the U.S. in multiple emerging technology sectors
China also has their own problems, but on pure technological capacity, it is doing what the U.S. claims to do while the U.S. spends its tech budget on weapons, surveillance capitalism, and another food delivery app.
The CR450 prototype (next-gen train) hit 896 km/h (≈557mi/h) in testing. The fastest train in America is the Acela, which maxes out at 150 mph on a good day.
South Korea
Has the fastest average internet speeds in the world, near-universal 5G coverage, and a semiconductor industry that rivals anyone's (Samsung andSK Hynix).
South Korea was poorer than Mississippi in 1960.
It invested in public education and public technology infrastructure. The U.S. invested in the military-industrial complex.
Japan
Has had high-speed rail since 1964. 60+ years with zero passenger fatalities.
Japan's robotics industry leads the world. Its public R&D institutions (RIKEN and JAXA) consistently produce world-class research despite a fraction of the U.S. budget.
Japan did this without bombing anyone since WWII.
The European Union
The EU leads in digital privacy regulation (GDPR), renewable energy deployment, and public research collaboration. CERN created the World Wide Web and released it as an open protocol; imagine if an American company had invented it and put it behind a paywall.
Germany's Fraunhofer institutes do applied research that goes directly into the economy. Publicly funded, publicly beneficial.
India
India runs the world's largest biometric identification system (Aadhaar, 1.4 billion enrollees).
They've built a public digital payments infrastructure (UPI) that processes 10+ billion transactions per month free and interoperable. No Venmo or PayPal extracting fees.
India has problems. But India built public digital infrastructure that works for people. America built Venmo, which charges you to send money to your friends.
Estonia
built an entire digital government (voting, taxes, health records, and business registration) all online, all functional, and all accessible.
Population: 1.3 million. Meanwhile, the U.S. can't get the IRS website to work.
Cuba
Again, under 66 years of embargo, developed its own COVID-19 vaccines (Abdala and Soberana) with limited resources and shared them with the Global South at cost.
The U.S. had $955 million in Warp Speed funding, and Moderna charged governments full price while opposing patent waivers that would have let poor countries manufacture their own vaccines.
Was ALL of This Worth It to Be "WHITE" (and Rich)?
Was it worth it to privatize the internet, publicly funded technology, so that three companies could harvest your data, manipulate your emotions, and sell your attention to advertisers?
Was it worth it to let 98% of VC money go to white men building $400 juice squeezers and cryptocurrency scams while the technologies that would actually improve your life went unfunded?
Was it worth it to let Elon Musk become the richest human in history using government subsidies, government contracts, and publicly funded research, then watch him use that wealth to buy a social media platform, spread far-right propaganda, advise an authoritarian president, and run a government efficiency operation that dismantles the agencies to protect his empire?
Was it worth it to route 1.2 million scientists and engineers into the defense sector — building better bombs instead of curing cancer, designing surveillance systems instead of solving climate change — because the military-industrial complex pays better than the NIH?
Was it worth it to erase Katherine Johnson, steal from Henrietta Lacks, fire Lynn Conway, chemically castrate Alan Turing, and deny Katalin Karikó tenure, and then wonder why America is losing its technological edge?
Was it worth it to build a tech industry where Palantir's AI helps target schools in Iran, where Amazon's Alexa records your conversations, where Facebook knew Instagram harmed teen girls and did nothing, and where Uber destroyed an entire industry to enrich investors who've never driven a car for money?
Was it worth it to be told you live in the most innovative country on Earth while China builds 50,000 km of high-speed rail, India builds free digital payment infrastructure, Estonia builds digital government, and Cuba develops its own vaccines despite being under a 60+ year embargo?
The innovation myth is the same con as the "American Dream" of homeownership and the "freedom" of the car-dependent suburb.
You were told America is the best at technology. You were told the free market produces the best outcomes. You were told Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.
None of it is true.
Every foundational technology was publicly funded.
The "meritocracy" is a pipeline from three universities to the same demographic. And the "innovation" is mostly surveillance, monopolization, and the enclosure of things that used to be free.
The real innovators were disproportionately people the system tried to destroy. And the innovations we actually need are systematically suppressed because they don't generate 100x returns for venture capitalists.
It was never worth it.
Not for the scientists who were erased. Not for the gig workers with no benefits. Not for the communities that got "disrupted" into poverty. Not for the planet choking on data center and server farm emissions.
And not for you scrolling a feed designed to get you addicted, using a phone designed to break in 2 years, paying $100/month for internet access that costs $10 in Seoul.
The empire even stole your future.