Ro Khanna’s forgotten Silicon Valley boosterism
Yesterday, Ro Khanna — the progressive Congressman from Silicon Valley — blasted out a tweet that left a lot of his prog-left fans and supporters scratching their heads.
Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange that allows people to trade speculative blockchain products like bitcoin, went public on NASDAQ — the first for a crypto outfit. Ro praised this development. To him it was the start of a glorious future — the surge of a democratic “inclusive” technology that gave everyone a chance to invest in the “next digital frontier” and to own a piece of Silicon Valley prosperity. The People can log on now. The People can finally get rich!
Huh? Isn’t Ro supposed to be a Bernie guy? What is he doing going spewing Silicon Valley investment tips and going all soft for a comically ridiculous libertarian technology — a “currency” that isn’t good for much other than launching speculative bubbles and superheating the planet (and maybe facilitating some dark money transfers). I mean, just one crypto currency — bitcoin — uses more energy that whole countries. And by some estimates, it consumes half the electricity of all data centers combined on the planet — that’s about the energy it takes to power half the internet, just to run a speculative bubble. If crypto coins are “inclusive” to anything, it’s our ridiculous capitalist system and it’s ever-quickening death march.
So what the hell happened to Ro? Well, nothing happened to him.
Despite his association with the Bernie movement, I think he’s always been this way. Ro might be mostly a progressive now — whatever that loose term means, anyway — but when he was first getting into politics less than a decade ago he was a Silicon Vally man.
The reason I know this is because I covered and interviewed Ro way back in 2014, during his first unsuccessful attempt to primary a liberal Democrat — from the Silicon Valley pro-business right. Back then Ro was a Silicon Valley corporate lawyer and a tech favorite. Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway — all of them supported and gave him lots of money. Why? They were enthralled with Ro as someone who got Silicon Valley’s culture and its values. And Ro, in turn, promised to take their vision to Washington DC.
As he said at fundraiser hosted by Sean Parker back then:
“The premise of this campaign is quite simple. We’ve had quite brilliant people…use technology to change the world. And it’s time that we actually change politics, that Silicon Valley has the potential to do this. … It’s not just about having a tech agenda. This is about something much deeper — our values, and our ability to use those values to change Washington and the world.”
I attended one of his early campaign events. The talk he gave and the lit he passed out was all about unleashing the power of Silicon Valley and private enterprise on the world. He wanted the kids to “learn to code” their way to success. And in his book, he praised Ronald Reagan and talked in utopian terms about technology fixing society. Listening and talking to him and reading his stuff back then, it felt like he had just crawled out of a Google Labs 3D printing vat. It was kinda sad. The guy had no real politics.
He lost in 2014. But he tried again in 2016 with the same Silicon Valley innovation platform and finally won, edging out old school Democrat Mike Honda by less than 2 percent.
But then something strange happened a few years later. He pivoted hard to Bernie-style progressivism. He supported the public ownership of utilities, called for the breaking up Silicon Valley monopolies, wanted to pass a living wage, and backed Medicare For All. And even more surprising, he started coming out against America’s imperial wars — including America’s backing of fascists in Ukraine and our undeclared war in Yemen. He got a lot of shit for his new direction and even got smeared as a Putin propagandist. But it elevated his status and earned him a lot of support, as well.
How did a bland Silicon Valley business-friendly candidate switch to being one of the most progressive people in the House? I wondered about that over the years.
I think the answer…
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—Yasha Levine