From Steven Hackett:

Corruption Is Winning

On Friday's episode of The Vergecast, there was an exchange that really caught my attention. David Pierce mentioned the photos of all the tech CEOs at Trump's inauguration in January, to which Nilay Patel replied:

The thing that kills me at that is the expectation they had going into that photo was corruption. Right? Tim Cook is going to personally donate a million dollars to Trump's library and that will take the DOJ case away from Apple. Naked corruption. That is a nakedly corrupt thought.

That's fine in the sense that a lot of people believe the government is corrupt, and so Trump being even more corrupt does not offend them. But it's not fine in the sense that like even when we were covering the Google case today, people on Bluesky were replying to me being like, "they'll just buy him off." What? That means that the system is collapsed. Like you don't believe in it anymore. And maybe you didn't before, but the level to which we have accepted that just naked corruption is how this works is a little more dangerous than I think people are giving it credit for.

If you believe that Google can be like, ah, screw it, write them a check and it'll go away. Maybe you don't think that's right, but you think that is possible, it's gone. You have to not believe that's possible. You have to actually hold everybody to account and say, actually, that's corruption. […] If you give into nihilism that the corruption is already won, you've just given in. You should not feel helpless; you should feel outraged that the expectation of that photograph was corruption.

I am sure if we were to poll the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, they would say that they are just trying to find ways to work with this administration. With Trump, that means money. That collection of dudes doesn't like to think pay-for-play is a corrupting force, but it is.

None of this is new — just look at the army of paid lobbyists who make a living charging these companies a zillion dollars a year — but seeing it so nakedly (as Patel put it) is sobering. Tech CEOs may think they are doing what's in the best interest of their companies and shareholders, but their actions do the rest of us — and the country — a disservice. They may be able to get what they want out of Trump (for now, at least) by writing checks and putting on a show, but the leopards are coming for their faces eventually.