Silicon Valley, the greatest wealth-generation machine in the history of the world, is at an inflection point. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are now worth nearly $3 trillion, having upended or assimilated a vast swath of the U.S. economy. The Bay Area has replaced Wall Street as an object of national fascination and cultural significance, with an entire HBO show dedicated to the exploits of the billionaire boy-kings that now rule most every aspect of our lives. The future, we are told, is being sketched out in boardrooms in Palo Alto and built in airship hangars outside Mountain View.

It is a vision of the future that, for a large portion of the country, is also increasingly out of view, alien, even hostile. The same social media platforms that have connected the world have also decimated the advertising and media industries as profits accumulate to a tiny faction of kingpins and kingmakers. Companies that allow anyone to summon a car at the touch of a button are also working tirelessly to develop self-driving software that promises to put millions of Americans out of work. Amazon, which Donald Trump warned has “a huge antitrust problem,” is in a position to lay off thousands of employees at Whole Foods, which it bought for $13.7 billion last week, and replace them with the cashierless technology it has been developing at retail-concept stores across the country (an Amazon spokesman told Bloomberg no job cuts are planned). Tech leaders who once fancied themselves the vanguard of a post-partisan, technocratic future, now face a mounting public relations crisis in the Age of Trump.

It is in this volatile political context that a dozen Silicon Valley executives descended on Washington, D.C., on Monday to hold a series of high-level meetings at the White House as the Trump administration looks to the private sector to modernize I.T. across government agencies. Among the luminaries who attended the tech summit hosted by Jared Kushner were Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook, Amazon C.E.O.Jeff Bezos, Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella, venture capitalist and Trump adviser Peter Thiel, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt (Facebook declined to send a representative, citing a scheduling conflict). Many, presumably, would prefer to have avoided the optics of the inevitable photo-op with President Trump, whose views on immigration, net neutrality, and climate change are antithetical to most of their own. Other tech executives, like Uber’s Travis Kalanick, have already experienced a backlash from advising the administration, and have seen protests from their employees over the president’s policies. At the same time, these companies are eager to remain part of the conversation, and more, important, stay in the White House’s good graces. With Republicans in Congress debating a sweeping tax overhaul with enormous consequences for the tech sector, executives have a fiduciary duty to engage. As Politico reported, Silicon Valley has been scooping up lobbyists with connections to the Trump administration in a bid to steer those conversations in a more profitable direction.

They’re also hoping to make their voices heard. Cook, who has defended his continued involvement with the president as a moral responsibility, reportedly plans to raise issues related to veterans' affairs, encryption, immigration, and how the Trump administration talks about human rights. While the strategy hasn’t yet recorded any results—just ask Elon Musk, who stayed on the president’s advisory council in a doomed effort to convince him to stay in the Paris climate agreement—executives are still betting that they can do more good by engaging with the White House than by waging war on it.