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GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump is set to be the next president of the United States, after beating the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in a stunning upset.
She conceded to him early Wednesday morning, after Trump eclipsed Clinton in both the electoral college and the popular vote.
It is a shocking result, which will rightly generate lots of soul-searching in the Democratic party.
It should generate the same kind of self-reflection for the political establishment at large, which underestimated Trump and his supporters for more than a year. The same goes for the news media, which didn’t see this coming, all the way until Tuesday night.
The world’s financial markets are already reacting, though investors seem less worried Wednesday morning than they were a few hours earlier.
Silicon Valley, along with the broader tech world, will also need to think about its role in the discontent voters expressed Tuesday. It’s an industry that believes that the future is always going to be better and that it can help get to the future, faster. But many Americans clearly want to be on a different path.
Except for investor Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley is largely Democratic and was supportive of Clinton. It has been the target of Trump’s many broadsides, including those aimed at Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, investor Mark Cuban and Hewlett-Packard’s CEO Meg Whitman.
Trump is not friendly to a number of key issues for tech, from encryption (sorry, Apple) to immigration to, well, pretty much all of it.
He is, though, a kind of Twitter savant, having used the medium to maximum impact to get his message out to the people who voted him into office on Tuesday.
In his first speech as the presumptive president, Trump talked about a need to end the divisiveness, which was unlike his whole campaign. Whether those were just words, we will see.
But, this much is clear: This is not a simulation, Silicon Valley.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
