Silicon Valley's Rightwing Roots. Plus, the CEO of Bluesky Reimagines Social Media

When Donald Trump returned to office, tech companies donated millions of dollars to his inaugural committee. On this week’s On the Media, the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley. Plus, the CEO of the burgeoning social media platform, Bluesky, on how to billionaire-proof the internet.

[01:00] Micah Loewinger speaks with Becca Lewis, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, about how Silicon Valley has always had rightwing roots — an influential group of conservative thinkers in the tech world have long seen new technologies as tools for restoring older social orders.

[14:47] Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, a competitor to Twitter/X that’s seen massive growth recently, about how Bluesky is structured in a fundamentally different way than other social media platforms, and why that might make it “billionaire-proof.”

[32:27] OTM producer and new parent Molly Rosen speaks with Amanda Hess, author of the new book Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, on how new technologies have transformed the experience of parenthood and what this signals about the future.

Further reading:

• “‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley,” by Becca Lewis
• Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, by Amanda Hess
• “My Son Has a Rare Syndrome. So I Turned to the Internet,” by Amanda Hess

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