Capitol Hill Ocean Week (CHOW 2025)

How Tech Culture Is Rewriting Ocean Stewardship

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The opening day of Capitol Hill Ocean Week (CHOW) 2025 carried less the air of a scientific gathering than that of a sleek tech convention, where optimism in innovation hummed just beneath the surface.

The lighting was soft, the branding crisp, the atmosphere thick with the scent of capital—and not the intellectual kind. If the shift in tone felt jarring to longtime attendees, it was also, unmistakably, by design.

In the months following the Trump administration’s deep and deliberate slashes to ocean science funding, the character of CHOW has evolved—or devolved, depending on whom you ask. Where once it stood as a bastion of evidence-based research and policy-driven dialogue, it now flirts with the glossy promises of entrepreneurial salvation. Science, it seems, is no longer the main attraction. Innovation is. Or rather, the idea of innovation as imagined by the investment class.