I’ve probably mentioned before that I love Steven Johnson’s book about Victorian Era epidemiology The Ghost Map. At Medium, the author pushes back against some points George Packer makes in his just-published New Yorker article (gated here) about Silicon Valley’s reach into politics. An excerpt:

“The first assumption, cited half a dozen times in the piece, is that the default political framework of the Valley is libertarian. When I was writing Future Perfect—which makes a cameo in Packer’s piece—I spent quite a few pages clarifying that while the new ‘peer progressive‘ worldview shared some superficial characteristics with Randian libertarianism, it was in actuality fundamentally different. Yes, people who work in the tech sector today (particularly around the web and social media) believe in the power of decentralized systems and less hierarchical forms of organization. But that does not mean they are greed-is-good market fundamentalists. For starters, almost all of them recognize that their industry itself arose out of government funding (see ARPANET), and some of the most celebrated achievements of the digital culture (open source software, Wikipedia) involve commons-based collaboration with no conventional definition of private property whatsoever. It’s precisely because we lack a new vocabulary to describe this worldview that we end up lumping the tech sector together in the libertarian camp.

You can see this confusion most clearly in a series of datapoints that go amazingly unmentioned in Packer’s piece: namely, the election returns from last fall’s presidential race. As Nate Silver observed in a detailed postmortem on Northern California votes, Obama won Santa Clara county by 42% — more than ten times his margin nationally, and more than twice his margin in the rest of liberal California. (While San Francisco and Oakland have long been hotbeds of progressivism, Reagan won Santa Clara by double digits in both of his successful campaigns.) You would think such a dramatic swing to the left would at least warrant a mention in Packer’s piece, but from reading it, an outsider might reasonably assume that the Valley was a Republican stronghold—a vast army of Koch brothers with hoodies.

The numbers are even more stark when you look at campaign finance. According to Silver’s analysis, Google employees gave more than 97% of their political donations to Obama, with comparable percentages at Apple and eBay as well. If libertarianism is so rampant in Silicon Valley, why are they voting for higher taxes and funding a big government liberal by such overwhelming numbers?” (Thanks Browser.)