Milwaukee is a victory for Silicon Valley’s shadow state
The real venue for the Democratic National Convention will not be Milwaukee, but the online platforms that will facilitate and stream it: Zoom, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and so on. Necessity is the mother of symbolic invention: Democratic politics and Big Tech have been merging for some time. Now COVID has rendered a political party indistinguishable from the Silicon Valley shadow state. Barack Obama, who will speak to the convention on Wednesday, made a sustained effort to connect Washington DC to Silicon Valley throughout his time as president. One measure of his success is that many former members of his administration have migrated to the tech industry. David Plouffe, a key campaign adviser, went on to work for Uber and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.