Last Wednesday, a lone gunman sent a single bullet through the neck of Charlie Kirk as he spoke in an open-air forum on the campus of Utah Valley University in Provo.
Given that this shooting took place 800 miles away and in a state that bears little cultural resemblance to ours here in the Bay Area, it would be easy enough for us to momentarily mourn the rising cost of U.S. political violence, shrug our shoulders and then move on.
But I hope we won’t — here’s why:
We live in and benefit from perhaps the most vibrant economy in the history of the world. Silicon Valley, broadly defined, produces so much economic, intellectual and technological capital that it has become the envy of the world. Government, civic and business leaders come here from all corners of the Earth to learn what makes our culture and economy tick.
And, most importantly, Silicon Valley constitutes the beating heart of the dominant digital culture that effectively rules much of the world.
Here, within an astonishingly small radius, are housed such digital titans as OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe and HP.
To a degree unimaginable in any prior era, this small list of companies controls not just the flow of money but, much more to the point, the flow of information the world over.
As we humans come to increasingly integrate ourselves with our digital devices — we are all already effectual cyborgs whose smartphones might as well be sewn into our bloodstreams and brains — the subtlety and ubiquity of the control these tech companies have over our collective perception of reality is becoming very nearly unfathomable.
But that brings us to why the death of Charlie Kirk cannot be a moment where we simply shrug and move on.
Whatever else is true, reporting suggests that the alleged killer — 22-year-old Tyler Robinson — was deeply immersed in the online world. He was, as best we can tell, a cipher shaped by the flows of bits and bytes across screens. And, in any case, the assassination occurred amid a world increasingly dominated by the digital.
Clearly, the killer is but a single data point that fits into a broader trend and deeper reality: Increasing evidence suggests that the architecture of the online world we in Silicon Valley have built has the potential to warp politics, elevate hatred, dumb down democracies, enable authoritarianism, amp up partisanship, and weaken the civic and familial bonds that constitute the fabric that binds us together.
The effects of social media are endlessly complex — but the point is that those effects are real and matter.
We who shape them must assume appropriate responsibility for caring deeply about the consequences of the online world we are building. For most of the world, after all, this is an external problem over which they have little or no direct control. But such is not true for us.
We work at these companies; we lead these companies; we are these companies. Perhaps bots someday will run the companies. But that day is not yet. Today, those who build these nearly omnipotent algorithms are still possessed of a human conscience. We — all of us — still have the power to choose good over corporate profit; people over dollars; communities over division; substance over clickbait; and the cultivation of affection over the elevation of invective.
And while these decisions certainly matter for corporate officers, what will likely matter most is the cumulative effect of the combined micro-decisions made by coders, user interface designers, accountants, product managers, advertisers and every other member of the entire ecosystem that is creating our digital world.
This does not mean every tech employee needs to move to a mountain monastery — there are ways to both make money and do good. But increasingly it feels like that literal fate of the world hangs on the willingness of all of us here in Silicon Valley to insist that the unimaginably powerful companies we have built prioritize the protection of the public good above the creation of more wealth and the accrual of more power.
Dr. Tyler Johnson is a clinical associate professor of medicine and oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.