Around the time it became clear that Donald Trump had a good chance of winning back the presidency, a deep chill blew through parts of the tech industry.

It had already been a strange and disorienting stretch. When the pandemic resulted in mass hiring, rather than layoffs, liberal and progressive workers at major tech companies felt secure enough in their positions to speak out about politics — sometimes against their employers — throughout the first Trump administration but particularly in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. Within a couple of years, though, tech leadership’s attitudes had begun to swing back. The ZIRP era was over, and they all decided that they’d overhired and it was time for employees to come back to the office. In hindsight, they felt they’d let employee activism go too far. More employees, less motivated by an acute sense of political crisis and now worried about getting laid off or replaced by AI, started keeping their heads down; those who didn’t, protesting their employers’ connections to the Israeli government, for example, were often disciplined or fired.

The looming reelection of a candidate who was vowing a campaign of revenge against tech companies, though, turned what had felt like a correction into an episode of full reaction. In Silicon Valley, explicitly MAGA investors and companies were outspoken and ascendant. Mark Zuckerberg redesigned his own interface and deployed himself to the Joe Rogan podcast. Elon Musk, well down the road to public radicalization, gave himself to the cause of the........

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