Silicon Valley is right to be rattled by the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. But some in the Valley are now suggesting that California secede from the U.S.—a small-minded, knee-jerk response that a community of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists should know better than to embrace.
To be sure, Trump will harry tech companies in California, the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere. He will likely pursue Amazon over antitrust claims, chase tax payments from the likes of Microsoft and Google, and may try to halt AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner. A doubling down on issues such as immigration, trade, and more directly tech-related concerns such as encryption and privacy will all ruffle the tech world’s feathers.
Sure, California could easily go it alone. It’s certainly rich enough: according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, it had a gross state product of $2.5 trillion in 2015. That makes it the sixth largest economy in the world.
But the proposal to exit the U.S. is an immature response to a grown-up problem. Really, the suggestion is little better than the “us and them” sentiment that underpins Trump’s questionable desire to build a wall between America and Mexico. Silicon Valley has already created huge tensions within its own state; a splinter would exacerbate those problems and hurt America, too.
The future for technologists does look uncertain, and their relationship with government is about to change. Calexit, though, is not the answer. Instead, “regardless of which candidate each of us supported as individuals, the only way to move forward is to move forward together” No, that’s not Donald Trump’s rhetoric (though he did say something similar during his acceptance speech). It’s actually a quote from Tim Cook’s memo to Apple staff yesterday.
There are some sane voices in Silicon Valley. The technology industry would be well-served to heed them, rather than building walls of its own.