It was 2003, and I was sitting on the floor of my tiny New York apartment when I read that Boris Berezovsky, a Russian entrepreneur who was highly critical of President Vladimir Putin, had been arrested in Britain. I threw my newspaper across the room. It was the moment I realized that Russia would, tragically, be returning to a place of censorship, oppression and fear.
At least I was back in the United States, starting up a software company. My days living and working in Russia were far behind me. What was happening there could never happen here, I thought then.
The pain of watching Russia lose its briefly held freedoms has made me particularly attuned to what is happening at the intersection of tech and the Trump administration. That history is why I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw the photo of tech chieftains — people who control the social media outlets that so many Americans use to form their political views — paying homage to Donald Trump at a White House dinner. Or when I realized that Mr. Trump is reportedly handing TikTok, which 20 percent of Americans rely on for their news, to a consortium of investors that includes companies owned by his billionaire allies. Or when my teenage son saw a TikTok about the suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel and told me how it reminded him of tales I have told about life in the Soviet Union.
Of course, the situation is not nearly as dire today in the United States as it was in the Soviet Union or is today in Mr. Putin’s Russia. We do still have a free press. You’re reading it. But I see how fragile our freedom is becoming. And I have witnessed firsthand how state-run media can brutalize a population.
I moved to Moscow in 1990 from the U.S. fresh out of college and full of optimism. The firm I was working for was investing in the conversion of defense facilities into civilian production — tanks into tractors, swords into plowshares. My colleagues, our investors and I were so hopeful about what glasnost — namely President Mikhail Gorbachev’s experiments with freedom of the press — could mean for Russians and for the world. The official Soviet newspaper, Pravda (or “Truth”), was still full of lies. The Russians I knew primarily purchased it to use as toilet paper, which was in short supply.
For the first time in decades, media organizations were no longer forced to publish propaganda. My friends and I talked at first in hushed tones, and then more openly, about once-forbidden topics like Stalin’s terror and the war in Afghanistan, both featured in Moscow News, a paper with then-soaring circulation numbers. I’ll never forget when Moscow’s gray streets lit up with kiosks full of lilies and roses as people began to engage in private economic activity, illuminating the promise of a free press and a free economy.
Still, the scars of the prior decades were evident. The chilling thing about a state-run newspaper called Truth was not so much that people believed its lies, but that telling the truth had been so dangerous, for so long, that it left the population traumatized. People were still profoundly mistrustful of one another, and this gave the Soviet regime enormous power. When the people are afraid of one another, it is difficult for them to unite against a tyrant.
When Mr. Putin came to power 25 years ago, he immediately targeted Russia’s newly minted media moguls. First to be arrested was the owner of a media company that included an independent television network critical of Mr. Putin. Next was Mr. Berezovsky; he got asylum and lived in London, where he was later found dead. One of the country’s wealthiest men, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who at one point acquired the Moscow News, was imprisoned for a decade and then exiled.
It was during this time that my Russian friends began speaking more guardedly and would no longer write anything critical of the regime in email or any unencrypted system. The constant surveillance meant they were constantly self-censoring. It was exhausting, they would say, explaining the fatigue in their eyes. I encouraged them to emigrate to the United States, where they would be safe. Some of them did.
How frightening it has been, then, to see the freedoms we always enjoyed come under attack. When I arrived in Silicon Valley, I was proud to work at companies like Apple, Google and Twitter, whose leaders eschewed an elitist, top-down, hierarchical leadership style. My early Silicon Valley bosses urged me to speak truth to power.
What is so alarming now isn’t that an authoritarian president and a small cadre of right-wing tech executives want to take over. It’s hardly surprising that centi-billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk would shift the messages in their social media empires to cater to Mr. Trump. What is truly surprising is that everyone else — the same people who once believed in the power of technology to strengthen our society and our democracy — is allowing them to get away with it. The same Silicon Valley leaders who used to trumpet their anti-authoritarian leadership style have gone ominously quiet.
Today, when I mention to former colleagues that I am writing this essay, they tell me I am brave. And there lies the problem. We are not Russia yet, thankfully. It’s not actually courageous to write this. The risk is in not speaking out, because silence enables future cycles of censorship and fear. However, it’s increasingly clear to me that the assets accumulated in the tech boom have silenced many of us. Affluence and courage have become negatively correlated; the wealthy have too much to lose. Thus, their fortune makes them less, not more, secure.
Rather than speak up, a lot of Silicon Valley denizens are instead looking for a safer harbor. People with enough money are buying citizenship in New Zealand or Portugal. When conversation turns to passport shopping at dinner parties, I think about where this is going and how I convinced my Russian friends to escape to the United States. Fear is a tyrant’s best weapon. The people in Silicon Valley who have made fortunes still have a platform and a voice. Now is the time to exercise them, and to stand together in solidarity. Our silence will not protect us.
Ms. Scott, the author of the book “Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,” was an executive at Google and Apple.
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