Why wouldn't it be? Tech companies, perhaps until very recently, have been extremely left-leaning.
And if you disagree that they were all very left wing: college being an overpriced scam is a conservative take! So either side will happily highlight that, although perhaps only one will suggest why that is.
> Tech companies, perhaps until very recently, have been extremely left-leaning.
You Americans really have lost the touch of reality with regards to politics, that's for sure.
Tech companies are the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the world. They do what they do in order to increase profit. Nothing left-leaning about that.
In a few days your new president and his gamer buddy takes office, and they both have their own social media networks.
... and if companies support, for example, LGBT rights (not that it should be political or left-wing, but here we are in such times...) - because ultimately it profits them. If you compete for engineers or skilled workers in a place where there are no LGBT rights, they will go somewhere else if it can be helped if they're LGBT, most likely. Or even if not, still may apply.
Works the same for other things too ;)
Not that it's a necessarily bad thing (invisible hand of market of Smith goes as an example), but it's a thing.
They're liberal on cultural issues, because it's an easy marketing win, (or at least was), they're not interested in any left-wing ideas that would give greater ownership of these companies to their employees for example.
> college being an overpriced scam is a conservative take!
Sure, the left wing take is to have high quality education paid for via tax dollars and thus being universally available, same as healthcare should be.
Some tech companies have been liberal on cultural issues in the past for promotional and branding reasons, like you suggest. Some, more recently, have promoted conservative talking points and ideas for the same reason. Those political positions and policies should not be seen as anything other than profit seeking and are almost completely disconnected from any ideological positions held by the leadership of those companies. If pretending to be MAGA creates engagement, they will all be MAGA.
> Tech companies, perhaps until very recently, have been extremely left-leaning.
No, none of the big for profit, often venture-capital funded or publicly traded, firms in the tech industry have been advocates for any of the pro-labor and anti-capitalist ideologies that define the left. Being (often only performatively) on the Democratic side of some of the culture war issues between the centrist Democratic Party and the hard-right Republican Party while spending lots of money to keep the Democratic Party strongly committed to corporate capitalism doesn't make them even slightly left-leaning.
Of course it does. "Left" describes more than economics. You might say, that makes left-right a bad range, and you'd be right at that point, but I think it's pretty obvious what aspects of left/rightism I meant.
I think the other commenter is right in calling them neoliberal, not left wing. An economically left wing corporation is sort of an impossibility…but I don’t want to veer into that debate here.
To answer your question: because a good portion of a company like Netflix’s annual revenue is derived from credit card payments that are sort of “forgotten” monthly bills. These companies don’t benefit at all from a financially-literate and secure customer base.
To put a finer point on it: Instruments that exist to enable the owner class to buy and sell control of the means of production are incompatible with systems that don't distribute control of the means of production to an owner class.
I'd very much count employee-owned businesses as corporations. In certain jurisdictions they may or may not meet the legal definition of a corporation but that feels like semantics.
Employee-owned businesses are certainly a coherent left-wing concept. On the other hand, NASDAQ is an organization built around exchanging money for ownership of businesses, which tends to concentrate ownership in the non-employee direction.
> During the 1990s, members of the entrepreneurial class in the information technology industry in Silicon Valley vocally promoted an ideology that combined the ideas of Marshall McLuhan with elements of radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberal economics, using publications like Wired magazine to promulgate their ideas. This ideology mixed New Left and New Right beliefs together based on their shared interest in anti-statism, the counterculture of the 1960s, and techno-utopianism.
> Only a person who has no idea about left wing politics could describe tech companies as "extremely left wing."
I don't see the need for this sort of poor attitude in phrasing. I have some idea about left wing politics, and also have seen a lot of very left-leaning policies enforced at social media companies and other related companies. You might say some people are neoliberal, or being very left wing (or perhaps "progressive") between 2010-2020 was just the most money-making stance for a neoliberal, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant.
Why don't you actually firm up your original claim with examples, because as stated large numbers of people disagree with it for good reason, and it's not clear what you mean by 'left wing'.
America's corporate seemingly managed to convince y'all that identity politics are "left".
First of all: identity politics are extremely right-leaning (for lack of a better term). Focusing on identity means focusing on the individual. There's nothing left-leaning on that. In fact it's the epitome of individualism when you're focused on what makes you different from them instead of focusing on what is common between the general population (which they are part of). Labeling it as left has been a very successful psy-op to create a controlled dissidence (which is not dissident at all).
Why do you think megacorps like Disney et al are so adamant on pushing this agenda? Everything a company does, everything, is calculated. This is not "neoliberalism" like sibling comments are mentioning. This is a very calculated power move to shift the narrative (and how it's labeled as "left" is proof that it succeeded).
The only alternative explanation would be that they're trying to capture a greater market share, but it has been proven time and time again that it has only led to flopping (by pushing away the majority of non-identitary people while not even capturing the already small minorities) and yet they still push for it. Why?
By making vast swaths of "revolutionary" youngsters (as all youngsters are) fight for this nonsensical cause, they have effectively suppressed any possibility of a real struggle for power that might topple the actual elites.
And as a neat side-effect this identitarism has managed to make the everyday man focus on their peers as the source of all their woes. Corpos like that. It prevents Mangiones that might take action against their actual oppressors. Energy is finite, so they're trying to make it be wasted on intra-class instead of inter-class politics.
> First of all: identity politics are extremely right-leaning (for lack of a better term). Focusing on identity means focusing on the individual. There's nothing left-leaning on that.
Identity politics, at least as I've seen them over and over again, look at identifying an individual's struggles / privileges / speech rules / etc through their membership of groups, not their individual struggles or advantages.
Ah, so if a political party spent several election cycles emphasizing how the opposition was ignoring the problems of "rural Americans," or "parents," for example.
Yes, groups so fragmented they consist of exactly one individual in your state. You might be gay, but are you gay-hispanic like me? Then we're not in the same overlap of the intersectionality Venn diagram. Sorry.
Have you considered why the pride flag (a rainbow, metaphor for inclusion of all "colors", has no need for extensions) now has so many additional flags superimposed on it?
Wikipedia's "List of gender identities" has dropdowns for letters of the alphabet (and growing).
And if you disagree that they were all very left wing: college being an overpriced scam is a conservative take! So either side will happily highlight that, although perhaps only one will suggest why that is.