Brin\u2019s complaint also rests on a commonplace myth about Silicon Valley: great fortunes are the natural reward for individual brilliance. This is the self-congratulatory story told by many of the Valley\u2019s loudest libertarians, such as Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel.<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s own history tells the real story<\/a>. The company did not emerge from Brin and cofounder Larry Page\u2019s genius but from government funding. Its foundational search technology was developed at Stanford, inside a public research ecosystem built over decades by federal funding, elite universities, skills-based immigration, and the thick institutional ecology of Silicon Valley. Stanford\u2019s account<\/a> of the search engine giant notes that the development of Google\u2019s algorithms ran on computers \u201cmainly provided\u201d by the National Science Foundation and other governmental funders. One of Brin\u2019s own papers<\/a> even acknowledges this support.<\/p>\n This is not simply hypocrisy. It is denying the economic history of Silicon Valley: public institutions absorb the risk, workers and researchers build the infrastructure, and then private owners capture the upside. Public investment helped create the foundations of the modern technology economy: the internet, GPS, touchscreens, voice recognition, semiconductors, artificial intelligence research, biomedical tools, and countless other commercial breakthroughs. But after those investments are converted into private fortunes, the wealthy beneficiaries ignore the source, denounce taxation as theft, and cast themselves as victims of \u201csocialism.\u201d<\/p>\n This arrogance would be irritating enough on its own. But in the current political moment, it\u2019s outright dangerous.<\/p>\n At the same moment Brin and his fellow tech bros are raging against billionaire taxation, they are supporting an administration that is actively attacking<\/a> the research system that made companies like Google possible. The Trump administration has sought deep cuts to science agencies, canceled or threatened grants that no longer align with its political priorities, and moved to impose political and ideological screening on research funding.<\/p>\n Its proposed 2027 budget<\/a> included major reductions across the scientific state, including cuts to the National Science Foundation, NASA science programs, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Energy\u2019s Office of Science, and the National Institutes of Health. Most dramatically, it recently dismissed<\/a> the entire National Science Board, the independent body that oversees the National Science Foundation. Subjecting science to ideological loyalty tests is not how free societies govern knowledge. It is a hallmark of authoritarian systems, from Russia to China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brin\u2019s complaint also rests on a commonplace myth about Silicon Valley: great fortunes are the natural reward for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[614],"class_list":{"0":"post-65972","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sergey-brin","8":"tag-sergey-brin"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116555337079022406","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}