Lost Friendships and The Cost of Understanding

To the Silicon Valley employee who made peace with Trump

You were terrified that Donald Trump would win in November 2024. And before the result, you understood enough about him that you wanted him kept far from power. You did not need someone to explain why.

I am writing to that person who remembers that specific fear and has since found a miraculous way to live comfortably inside the thing they feared. Then, within what seemed like moments of Trump being declared winner, going along began to seem more sensible than continuing to object. You had a life to get on with, and the objections were making it difficult.

What did you learn about him after he won that you had somehow failed to understand when you were frightened he might? I would like an answer that concerns him, because I already understand why it became inconvenient for you to keep objecting. That part of the transformation is hardly a mystery.

Maybe you are one of my former friends, someone I told off in person or in a text you still have. And yes, I was angry, which I imagine made it easier to spend the conversation thinking about what had happened to me.

But I would like you to remember what you thought was going to happen to the country. My anger did not put that fear in you, and explaining my anger does nothing to explain how you became comfortable with what you had already understood.

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In a clip Acyn circulated yesterday, Jensen Huang corrected himself: “We want to advance AI,” followed by “advance SI. I’m gonna get good at this.” And I suppose he will, since this is one benchmark whose requirements are perfectly clear.

Donald Trump’s September 29 executive order directs executive agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in their communications and nonstatutory documents, to the maximum extent permitted by law. If you were wondering what technological achievement earned the promotion, Section 3 of the order initially gives the new term the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence, with sixty days allowed for proposed legislative language establishing a new definition. So the name has improved, and someone will get around to explaining what it means.

I find the performance humiliating, and nothing about that judgment requires me to pretend Huang has stopped being intelligent. A person can retain all the intelligence that made him successful and put it to work figuring out how to please a fool. He may even become quite good at explaining why people who object do not understand the responsibilities of someone in his position.

At the White House gathering, the companies agreed to a voluntary accord involving internal controls and independent external auditors, with committees of their own boards evaluating the reports. Trump described the commitment as “morally binding” and promised “a tremendous self-policing aspect.” Those measures could do useful work, provided the people receiving an unwelcome finding are prepared to do something about it even when doing so threatens an arrangement they would prefer to preserve.

Perhaps you laughed at the clip, and then explained to someone that Huang has a business to protect. Well, yes. That is a perfectly intelligible account of why he might go along, and it leaves us with the question of what else protecting the business will eventually require him to go along with.

Somewhere, presumably, there is a demand you would refuse even if refusal became expensive. I wonder whether the person you were before November 2024 would recognize where you have decided to put that limit.

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Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” And the difficulty becomes especially interesting when the man understood perfectly well until his circumstances made it preferable that he didn’t.

A person can work their way through this without ever having a conversation with themselves in which they decide to become dishonest. The concession seems temporary, and staying useful seems more responsible than making some grand gesture that will accomplish nothing. You intend to demonstrate the usefulness later, while the concession is something you have already made.

In the meantime, the people who continue objecting become increasingly difficult to be around, because they keep bringing the original question back into a life you have worked very hard to make bearable. Their refusal to move on begins to look like a problem with them. And once the problem is that they are too emotional, you have a way of explaining the unpleasantness without having to revisit what you did.

I do not know every conversation you had with yourself, and I am not pretending there could have been no serious obligations involved. If losing your job would put someone dependent on you at risk, then of course that belongs in an honest account of the choice. But you can tell the truth about being constrained without teaching yourself that the conduct you feared has somehow become acceptable.

When you start telling other people that they are unreasonable for continuing to object, you are asking them to make the accommodation with you. Your need to get through the day has become a reason somebody else should stop protesting, which is quite a demand to make of someone whose judgment you once shared.

I understand wanting to sleep at night. But I am not going to help you by pretending that the person you were before the election was foolish to be afraid.

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This morning, I wrote that none of the terrible predictions I have watched come true required some exceptional intellect to make. They required not lying to myself, and I have been watching with a certain morbid amusement as the things I was told I was unreasonable to fear become things we are expected to accept. I would much rather have had less to be right about.

In February 2025, I wrote “The Plot Against America” about the alliance between people who regarded democratic government as an obstacle and a president willing to attack its constraints. I saw no reason to assume that being good at building technology would make them responsible with political power, and the argument was there for anyone who wanted to explain where I had gone wrong.

Of course I can be wrong. But telling me that I am angry does not identify the error, and I am tired of being offered an account of my temperament by people who seem to think they have thereby answered what I wrote.

One former colleague, who I like, said to me: “Honestly, my impression is not that you’re not being principled. People think you are just angry and lashing out and are dismissing you because they think you’re too emotional.”

I replied: “Good. Have them go on thinking that. Tell them I approve of their dismissal.” Once I had written them off, I stopped wanting to convince them of anything or spending time worrying about their interpretation of me.

There are people whose approval I no longer want back, and it seems to be taking some time for that fact to become clear. The argument remains available if they want to read it. Making my disapproval comfortable enough for them to reconsider is no longer something I regard as my responsibility.

I’ll tell you what my line was: the moment I realized that my personal gain was coming at the cost of harm to others and I could not dismiss that, I changed my mind. Acting on that realization cost me dearly. I lost nearly every friend and lost my career. But more importantly, I gained myself.

So yes, I know there is a cost, and you are not going to resolve our disagreement by patiently explaining that fact to me. What I would like you to explain is why the obligations we claimed to believe in became negotiable just as we were being asked to honor them.

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You do not have to be a chief executive to encounter a concern that is technically sound and professionally unwelcome. And if remaining useful means revising your judgment until the concern becomes something everyone can comfortably disregard, then the people relying on your judgment have a problem that your intelligence will do very little to solve.

Being intelligent can help you recognize a danger, but it can also help you produce an exceptionally persuasive explanation for why confronting it ought to be someone else’s responsibility. I would like to know who that someone is supposed to be, and why they should accept a cost you have decided is unreasonable to ask of you.

Having a principle means holding it when it might cost you something. Especially when it costs you something. If your defense of acquiescence is that resistance would have threatened your interests, you have described the test you failed.

When you abandon a judgment because you are afraid of what maintaining it will cost, I think cowardice is a perfectly reasonable word for the decision. I don’t see why a sophisticated explanation should spare it the moral judgment we would apply to a friend who withdrew their solidarity as soon as having it required something of them.

And if you are a parent, you owe your children more than a comfortable home inside a country whose protections you helped weaken. They are going to have to live in that country, and the question of whether they can speak freely or refuse the demands of someone more powerful will matter long after anyone remembers the professional advantage you were trying to preserve.

You can leave them a larger inheritance and still have been a bad steward of the future they will inhabit. They were not consulted about the trade you were making on their behalf, and I would be careful about assuming they will be grateful for it.

You still have to decide whether you will keep defending what you once recognized as dangerous, and what you are prepared to withhold from it. But I am asking what you will do while doing it still costs something, rather than after the arrangement becomes embarrassing enough that leaving it can pass for another sensible career decision.

You owe the future an apology for your acquiescence to evil, and it should not have to wait until the arrangement stops paying. Before you explain to your children why you went along, remember how frightened you were that he might win.

So some of you will read this and have a query: Does Mike think he’s better than I? If you fit into the grouping of moral scorn I have forthwith laid out to you, the answer is an unqualified yes.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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