The two towers near Aberdeen weren’t supposed to be monuments. They were supposed to be engines.
Drive west from Olympia and you’ll see the unfinished nuclear plant rising from the evergreen canopy. The project promised clean energy, jobs, and technological prestige. Instead, it became a cautionary tale of cost overruns and evaporating public confidence.
Nuclear engineering remained sound. Public confidence did not.
Industries rarely stall because they hit a technical ceiling. They slow when political and social permission erodes.
Artificial intelligence now sits in a similar moment. Public trust in major institutions is fragile, and trust in large technology companies is even lower. Concerns about job displacement, wealth concentration, and infrastructure strain are no longer fringe anxieties. They are mainstream political energy. Across multiple states, lawmakers have introduced proposals to pause or restrict data center expansion. That momentum did not emerge overnight.
Tech executives and investors are no longer background actors. Their statements travel faster than their products. As taxes, oversight, and regulation come under debate, tech’s most visible voices often frame them as hostility toward innovation. It may feel like a necessary defense, but it can reinforce the perception that the industry is unwilling to adapt to broader political realities.
In Washington state, that energy is visible in the debate around new capital gains and high-income tax proposals. Some startup leaders have framed tax proposals as existential threats to Seattle’s innovation economy and warn that Washington risks becoming “the next Cleveland.”
Incremental taxes on high incomes are unlikely to determine whether Seattle remains a technology hub. But public panic about those taxes can shape how the industry is perceived. To an average voter worried about job displacement or rising costs, highly visible opposition to millionaire tax proposals can feel disconnected from broader economic anxieties. That contrast hardens the sense that tech operates in a separate lane from everyone else. Perception like that carries consequences.
When distrust hardens into political momentum, policy seldom arrives as a narrow correction. It tends to be broad and reactive.
What makes legitimacy risk particularly dangerous is that it rarely begins with statute. It begins with friction. Hiring becomes harder in communities that feel antagonistic toward the industry. Government partnerships face louder opposition. Enterprise buyers extend diligence cycles. Distribution slows in subtle ways that don’t show up in quarterly dashboards but compound over time. These costs compound even if they are difficult to measure.
Industries under suspicion move differently. Telecommunications once represented the frontier of American innovation. As power consolidated and public suspicion grew, the response included structural control and heavy supervision. Innovation did not end, but it moved under tighter constraints and at a slower pace. The center of gravity shifted from experimentation to permission.
As a founder building risk and regulatory infrastructure for financial institutions, I think about these dynamics constantly. I expect guardrails. Thoughtful regulation is not the enemy. In many cases, it creates highly functional markets.
What concerns me is overcorrection. Sweeping licensing regimes, expansive liability standards for model outputs, escalating compliance overhead, infrastructure caps written in frustration rather than precision. Those burdens fall hardest on young companies without large compliance teams.
We are careful about pricing market and technical risk. We are far less disciplined about legitimacy risk, the moment an industry loses its social license to operate.
Over the next decade, legitimacy may be the binding constraint. Durability matters more than short-term velocity, and durability is built on public trust.
Seattle became a technology hub because it was broadly trusted to build. That trust gave companies room to experiment and scale. It was a form of oxygen. You rarely notice it until it thins. By then, the towers are already standing.
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