Remember when Silicon Valley was America’s greatest export?
It wasn’t so long ago—just over a decade—that Silicon Valley occupied a rarefied space in the global imagination. The founders of American technology companies were the great disruptors, the optimists, the engineers who would remake sclerotic political systems and extractive industries. While politicians dithered, Big Tech would engineer solutions.
Remember when Silicon Valley was America’s greatest export?
It wasn’t so long ago—just over a decade—that Silicon Valley occupied a rarefied space in the global imagination. The founders of American technology companies were the great disruptors, the optimists, the engineers who would remake sclerotic political systems and extractive industries. While politicians dithered, Big Tech would engineer solutions.
From Beijing to Berlin, delegations arrived in Mountain View and Palo Alto asking the same question: How do we replicate this? The world didn’t just want Apple’s iPhones or Google’s search engine. It wanted America’s innovation culture, its garage start-up mythology, its belief that smart people with code could build a better future.
That faith has collapsed with stunning speed. And with it, a pillar of American soft power.
Today, Big Tech occupies the space once reserved for Big Tobacco and Big Oil—reviled, distrusted, and facing a global regulatory backlash that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The numbers tell a grim story. In the United States, negative views of major technology companies surged from 33 percent in 2019 to 45 percent by early 2021, with those holding “very negative” opinions more than doubling from 10 percent to 22 percent. Calls for increased government regulation rose from 48 percent to 57 percent—a remarkable turnaround in a country generally skeptical of government intervention.
But here’s what should worry Washington: It isn’t just Americans who feel this way. After two decades as the most trusted sector in the Edelman Trust Barometer of 28 countries, technology now arouses more and more anxiety, especially in the developing world. This is part of a larger pattern of decline of trust in the tech sector, captured in the Thales 2025 Digital Trust Index, which surveyed 14,000 consumers across 14 countries: Not one category within the tech sector achieved 50 percent approval when consumers were asked which they trusted with their personal data. Social media—dominated by American platforms—ranked among the lowest at just 4 percent. Perhaps most damning: Eighty-two percent of consumers abandoned a brand in the past year due to data concerns.
This isn’t merely a commercial problem. For decades, American technology has been one of the country’s most potent instruments of soft power—the concept Joseph Nye famously defined as the ability to shape global preferences through attraction rather than coercion. If Hollywood exported American culture, then Silicon Valley exported American values: free speech, privacy, respect for diversity, innovation unbounded by legacy thinking. When the world ran on American technology, it ran on an American operating system, both literally and metaphorically. That conferred enormous geopolitical advantage.
Now that advantage is eroding. Consider what unfolded on March 29, when tens of thousands of protesters gathered at over 200 Tesla locations worldwide—not just in the United States, but across Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Protesters in the United Kingdom held signs reading, “You thought the Nazis were extinct? Don’t buy a Swasticar.” In Paris, demonstrators carried banners declaring “Send Musk to Mars now.” In west London, protesters told reporters they felt compelled to act because “it’s too overwhelming to do nothing.”
The Tesla Takedown protests targeted Elon Musk’s political activism. But they revealed something more troubling: A major American technology company had become such a lightning rod for international anger that thousands felt moved to take to the streets in in a number of countries simultaneously.
Or consider the reaction when the European Union fined Apple 500 million euros and Meta 200 million euros on April 23 for breaching the Digital Markets Act. These were the first penalties under the EU’s new tech rulebook—a set of regulations that exist because European publics and policymakers have concluded that American tech giants can’t be trusted to regulate themselves. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made the subtext text, declaring, “Our digital laws must be enforced consistently, regardless of where the companies are based.” Translation: American exceptionalism no longer applies in the digital sphere.
Big Tech’s transformation tracks the trajectory of previous corporate villains. Like tobacco companies that marketed cigarettes while knowing about cancer, like oil giants that knew about climate change while funding denial, tech companies professed ignorance while optimizing for engagement at any cost. Internal documents revealed what Facebook knew about teenage mental health and how Instagram’s algorithm targeted vulnerable girls. Scholars have also documented how YouTube became a radicalization machine and how Twitter’s design let harassment flourish while driving traffic and revenue.
The damage wasn’t contained to America’s shores, and that’s precisely why the soft-power toll has been so severe. Facebook served as a platform for inciting genocide in Myanmar. WhatsApp became a vector for deadly misinformation in India. YouTube radicalized viewers from Brazil to Germany. When American technology facilitates mass violence abroad, when American platforms undermine democratic discourse in allied nations, when American companies treat foreign users as test subjects for algorithms optimized for addiction rather than well-being, it reflects poorly not just on the companies but on America itself.
Previous administrations made tentative efforts toward accountability, but tech companies resisted fiercely, hiding behind appeals to free speech and innovation. The resistance only deepened international skepticism. When European regulators finally stepped in, American tech companies cried protectionism. But the Europeans argued that if American companies won’t police themselves, and Washington won’t police them, someone has to.
The tragedy is that American technology genuinely was a force for good in many ways. It enabled entrepreneurs, spread knowledge, created wealth. It empowered pro-democracy activists and movements. The iPhone really did put powerful tools in billions of hands. Google really did democratize information. These innovations carried American values to every corner of Earth.
But that’s mostly past tense now. Today, European consumers eye American platforms with suspicion. Democratic governments from Brussels to Canberra craft regulations explicitly designed to constrain American tech companies. Citizens worldwide delete apps, cancel subscriptions, and search for alternatives—82 percent of them, according to Thales—because they no longer trust what American tech companies do with their data.
This is how soft power dies: not in dramatic confrontation, but in the accumulated weight of betrayed trust. When the world’s digital commons become toxic, and American companies are the landlords, America itself becomes associated with that toxicity. When teenagers worldwide struggle with mental health crises amplified by American algorithms, their parents don’t just blame Facebook—they blame America. When democracies fracture under the pressure of algorithmically amplified outrage, their societies don’t just call for regulation—they rethink their relationship with American technology wholesale.
The commercial consequences will take some time to play out—not least because there are very few non-American alternatives to the dominant companies. But the damage may already be irreversible. A decade ago, countries aspired to build their own Silicon Valleys. Today, they aspire to regulate the original. That’s not just a commercial setback, it’s a geopolitical disaster. Because if the world no longer wants what American technology offers, it no longer wants to be like America. And if it doesn’t want to be like America, American influence, the real currency of global power, is devalued.
