America has always seen itself as a shining city upon a hill, an exceptional country that doesn’t have to follow the old rules. And since the birth of the modern internet in the mid-1990s, tech exceptionalism has made Silicon Valley the economy's city on a hill — a place where the normal rules didn’t apply.
Giants such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google have become some of the wealthiest corporations in history, seen by many as indestructible money-making machines. Even as the nation struggled through a “jobless recovery” after the Great Recession of 2008, Big Tech was the Ayn Randian sector proving America had the best of all capitalisms. Technology has been criticized for harming American democracy, youth mental health, and even contributing to long-term economic stagnation. But the sector argued that its innovation made it exceptional enough to operate in its own quasi-libertarian golden state — that regulatory burdens shouldn’t apply, and that its geniuses should be free to work without hurdles. They pointed to the FAANGs outperforming the S&P 500 as proof.
