America’s bluest big cities are in an increasingly tense, co-dependent relationship with the tech behemoths that power their knowledge economies and anchor their prosperity. To see that dysfunction in action, you need look no further than at how things have played out in Seattle in recent years between Amazon and some elected officials on the left.
The question of why the marriage between Big Tech and big blue cities is so rocky – and whether it can survive Trump 2.0 – is central to understanding the present and future of blue urban America. That’s a question we tackled in the third and latest episode of Blue City Blues, our new podcast dedicated to exploring the distinctive politics, culture and governance of the “urban archipelago” of blue cities across America. Margaret O’Mara, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American History at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, the definitive history of the rise of Silicon Valley as America’s premier tech hub, joined us to offer her insights.
As O’Mara, who has penned numerous columns for The New York Times Opinion page on the relationship between tech and politics, reminds us, the relationship between big tech and big blue cites wasn’t always so fraught.
About 20 years ago, she explains, big tech decided that the old model of fostering tech innovation via cloistering workers on isolated, self-contained suburban campuses started to give way – to meet the expectations of their young employees who valued the excitement and vibrancy of urban living – to relocating many of those companies to city centers in creative class bastions like San Francisco, Seattle, Austin or Boston.
In Seattle, 2007 was the year Amazon announced its move into South Lake Union and began its massive expansion here, following closely on the heels of pre-Musk Twitter’s move into downtown San Francisco.
A torrid tech bromance with blue urban America ensued, with the companies bringing jobs as well as campaign cash to back mostly Democratic candidates. But the honeymoon phase of the relationship didn’t last long.
The romance began to sour as the companies profoundly transformed the cities where they operated, and not always for the better. As they brought new wealth and thousands of well compensated jobs, the cost of housing soared and inequality increased. By 2018, progressive activists in cities like San Francisco and Seattle were blaming big tech for rising rents and soaring inequality, and demanding that the enormously profitable tech giants pay more into municipal coffers to mitigate the perceived harm they were causing.
Here, former Socialist Alternative Councilmember Kshama Sawant began leading pointed “Tax Amazon” marches to Amazon’s gleaming new Spheres in Belltown, while “Fuck Bezos” graffiti appeared on the walls of Seattle buildings. By early 2019, after as Amazon had announced it intended to open a huge new “HQ2” campus in New York City, movement left councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda and Lisa Herbold were even traveling to New York City to detail what they saw as Amazon’s negative impacts on Seattle and to speak out in opposition to the incentives and tax breaks New York officials had offered Amazon to get the company to come to their city.
Meanwhile, the moguls and senior executives running these big tech companies were none too happy about the increasingly permissive progressive policies adopted by municipal leaders. As quality of life declined and street disorder rose in tech hub cities, those leaders have begun to question vocally – and increasingly to oppose – left progressive policies and the politicians who advocated for them.
Earlier this year, Musk announced the departure of X (formerly Twitter) from San Francisco, while Amazon, in a clear sign of their disaffection with Seattle City Hall, has been steadily moving thousands of its jobs across Lake Washington to Bellevue. And that was all happening before Trump’s resounding victory in this month’s election. Now, with Trump regaining power and many tech moguls already showing signs in the run up to the election of backing away from their embrace of cultural progressivism and resistance politics, we also dig in with O’Mara about whether further conciliatory moves from big tech to accommodate Trump 2.0 might risk the blue city-big tech marriage ending in a divorce.
O’Mara offers informed insights about how and why this relationship has become so fraught, and some interesting thoughts about what both the cities and the companies ought to be doing to get the relationship to a better place. It’s a fascinating and nuanced conversation with one of the nation’s leading authorities on the relationship between big tech and big blue politics, and you can listen to the full conversation here.
Since David and I had this conversation with Margaret O’Mara, there have been further post-election signs that, rather than aligning with their employees’ culturally progressive resistance politics as they did during Trump 1.0, big tech this time is going to work to make peace with Trump 2.0 and unwind their prior alignment with left progressive concerns. See for example Zuckerberg’s mea culpa on cooperating with the Biden administration on content moderation and his post-election pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago.
Which (as I suggested during the podcast episode) does not bode well going forward for the already rocky marriage between big tech and big blue cities.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/business/metas-mark-zuckerberg-wants-active-role-in-shaping-trump-tech-policy-exec-nick-clegg-says/
Very interesting conversation. I’ve also been thinking about moves in conservative southern and midwestern states to restrict access to contraception and abortion, as well as putting prayer in schools, and what, if any, impact that will have on a company’s decision on where to locate. It’s hard to see that tech workers would want to live under those circumstances. We may also see an accelerated brain drain from those places, making the poor states poorer and the rich states richer. But I’m sure the West and East Coast Cities will still be blamed for poor education and health outcomes, instead of leaders more concerned about which bathrooms to use.
I’d argue this shift away from Blue Cities has nothing to do with tech companies’ leaders’ values or political leanings changing, and everything to do with boosting earnings. Big tech companies used to find West Coast urban centers useful — they had office space, transit, and STEM degree holders. These days the big tech companies don’t need much of the first two, and they can hire STEM degree holders from around the world without the need to move them anywhere. Tech company leaders care about the value of their stock price, and these days how some city’s residents vote doesn’t concern them in the least.
Thanks Ellen! Excellent points but I’m not sure how much you’d disagree with what Professor O’Mara has to say in the podcast. She gets into this same territory beyond Sandeep’s excellent, but incomplete, summary.