Broligarchy Watch

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

This week represents a hinge of history. Everything has changed. America and Russia are now allies. Ukraine has been thrown to the dogs. Europe’s security hangs in the balance. On the one hand, there’s nothing any of us can do. On the other, we have to do something. So, here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting a conversation. I’ve recorded the first one - a scrappy pilot - a podcast I’ve called How to Survive the Broligarchy and I’ve re-named the newsletter too. This first conversation (details below) is about how we need a new media built from the ground up to deal with the dangerous new world we’re in. That can only happen, in partnership with you, the reader. The days of top-down command and control are over. Please let’s try and do this together.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/23256007

When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.

But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.

In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa.

He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.

Some draw a straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump’s side today.

The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.

Others are sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.

But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.

The story of Elon Musk, the way it's usually told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero - or supervillain. He's the world's richest man, and now an adviser to the US President. He uses X - his social media platform - to berate politicians he doesn't agree with around the world.

He plans to put chips in people's brains, and to save the world by colonising Mars. Musk's visions of the future seem to stem from the science fiction that has fired his imagination since he was a boy. But what's the real story, the true history, behind the comic book? Back in 2021 Harvard History Professor and New Yorker Writer Jill Lepore became fascinated by this question.

So she made a Radio 4 podcast which tried to explain Musk through the science fiction he grew up with - tales of superheroes with origin stories that seemed to influence how he understands his own life. So much has happened since then that we decided to update that series - and add three new episodes, too. Because Musk keeps changing, and so does what Lepore calls 'Muskism' - his brand of extreme capitalism and techno-futurism. And strangely, his origin story keeps changing, too.

How can understanding these fantasy stories - some of them a century old - help us understand the future Musk wants to take us to?

Well worth a listen, especially episode 2:

Musk is reinventing himself as a kingmaker for the United States and the world. He wants to shape the future. But in this episode, Lepore goes back to his past - to his childhood and family history. As a boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, Musk developed a fascination with science fiction - especially Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of Musk’s grandfathers was the leader of a strange sci-fi inspired movement known as Technocracy. Technocrats found democracy in adequate to modernity, and wanted engineers and scientists to run governments. Lepore argues Technocracy bears an uncanny resemblance to some things going on today in Silicon Valley and Washington today: from de-regulation of the economy to the rise of crypto-currency.

Observing the emergent broligarchy’s elaborate conspiracy to extract as much wealth and power as they can from Donald Trump’s second coming, it is justifiable to feel sick in the stomach. Men of tremendous wealth, with a history of treating the mothers of their children sadistically, of endorsing books justifying torture and the elimination of human rights, of making zillions from government and military procurement while tirelessly working toward disbanding government programs that offer a sliver of protection to the poor, have decamped at Mar-a-Lago kissing Trump’s ring and preparing for direct government power.

From their perspective, the deal they cut with Trump is an incredible bargain with a rate of return that no conventional business can hope to emulate. For a few hundred million dollars that they invested in Trump’s re-election, within minutes of his victory they amassed extra wealth to the tune of hundreds of billions. To be precise, the value of Peter Thiel’s Palantir shot up by 23 percent while Musk’s Tesla saw its stock rise by 40 percent to a capitalisation level higher than most of the rest of the global car industry combined.

For a few crumbs off their table, that they ploughed into the Trump campaign, the Big Tech brotherhood are in the process of receiving three amazing gifts: Gargantuan government contracts. A tremendous goldrush following the elimination of regulations that will allow them a gloves-off onslaught against the public’s concerns over their ways and wares (e.g., autonomous vehicles, rogue AI bots and drones, massive increases in electricity consumption). And, lastly, immense state-sanctioned bargaining power in their dealings with workers, suppliers, competitors and the rest of us.

And then there are, of course, the non-trivial concerns about their broader ambitions. Thiel’s favourite book is, reportedly, The Sovereign Individual. Its authors, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, literally and without the slightest hint of irony liken the broligarchs to the Olympian gods before going on to argue that it is only right and proper that they dominate the world. “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies,” they proclaim. As for Thiel himself, his explanation of why he likes this shoddy book so much is that it offers an “accurate” prediction of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today.” What Thiel neglected to say, of course, is that his dream is not one in which exorbitant power has withered but, rather, that it is a dream in which men like him monopolise it. At least he is honest enough to acknowledge that his version of freedom is incompatible with democracy.

But is any of this truly novel? However reprehensible the broligarchs’ practices and convictions might be, is it not possible that we are surrendering to a recollection of the past that is so recklessly optimistic that, by contrast, the present looks like a deterioration, when it is nothing but a recapitulation of our past?

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That’s all true. However, there is a superpower, a hyper-weapon, that the broligarchy possess today that their Big Business and Wall Street predecessors did not. It is a form of capital that never existed until recently: cloud capital which, of course, does not live up in the clouds but down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest.

Unlike traditional capital, from steam-engines to modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce commodities. Instead, it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. These produced means of behavioural modification train us to train them to determine what we want. And, once we want it, the same machines sell it to us, directly, bypassing markets. In this light, cloud capital performs five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, what it made us want. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us to sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour: As we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants and photos, we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs while, in the factories and the warehouses, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us are deployed – usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists – to make them work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time.

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.

That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.

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The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors.

Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton.

Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said.

And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.

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If you don’t like limits and rules, it stands to reason that you’re not going to like democracy. As Thiel wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the broligarchs are trying to undermine the rule of democratic nation-states.

To escape the control of democratic governments, they are seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, a la Musk and Bezos. But it can also come in the form of “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — independent mini-nations, carved out of the surrounding territory, where tech billionaires and their acolytes would live according to their own rules rather than the government’s. This is currently Thiel and Andreessen’s favored approach.

With the help of their investments, a startup city called Prospera is already being built off the coast of Honduras (much to the displeasure of Honduras). There are others in the offing, from Praxis (which will supposedly build “the next America” somewhere in the Mediterranean), to California Forever in, you guessed it, California.

The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25502522

A look into how the tech leaders may be using the new administration to achieve their own agenda. Looking specifically at Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andressen, Ben Horotwitz, Brian Armstrong, and David Sacks as well as their relationship with figures like JD Vance, Balaji Srinivasan, and Curtis Yarvin. There is a focused discussion on how a shaping of the government might take place based on convergences between the ideas of Yarvin, who influences the tech libertarian right, and Project 2025, who have authored a playbook exclusively for President Trump to help with his transition to power.

No, the emails aren’t from a Nigerian prince, but whoever is writing them seems to use the same style, cajoling and repetition. The sad thing is, these aren’t from some poor guy in an internet cafe circa the 2000s, no–these emails have been pummeling the inboxes of federal workers from their own government. These workers have had their email inboxes flooded with bizarre imperatives to basically go away. They’ve been insulted in the emails, being encouraged to leave and find “higher productivity” jobs in the private sector. They’ve had carrots dangled in front of them, saying they can take a second job or go on awesome vacations. They’ve been demoralized, and most are likely very confused, of course, by design. What we have here is the Grover Norquist quote coming to life, the: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it in the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” For those too young to have heard this, the quote is from one of the OG architects of this current bile-filled situation. It’s always been their fervent desire to implement this bathtub murder–they’ve been patient and have all the plans in place. Now they are in the stage where they’ve drawn up the water, telling you they have some nice lavender bath bombs and beckon you through the steam.

Of course, Grover Norquist types still have good versus bad government notions. They will never try to drown the missing dollars of the defense budget. You are only “federal bad” if you are someone like a physical therapist at the VA working with the mangled bodies of veterans–or someone working to keep food safe for consumption. You are incredibly “federal bad” if you were serving in some manner to keep illness counted and mitigated. You are “federal good” if you are a part of the massive military, ICE, or a teenager with a cross married to an old man, spouting nonsense for a federal paycheck. I think you understand. And, of course, it is crazy-making. That’s baked in and a very real part of how this is all designed to work. The few of us still trying to follow the blitzkrieg that is the real-time attempt to remake the entire government are probably in the minority. Mainly, it’s chaos and confusion to the vast populace, and this is often what causes a brain to simply shut down. It’s too much and we aren’t wired for it. It’s the plan, to bring in so much rapid damaging change that it will be near impossible to stop. It seems the goal of the broligarchy is to reshape all of it in some fashion that they seem to believe will become their new utopia (but of course, almost everyone else’s BAD PLACE).

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One interesting thing I’ve come across in trying to parse out the philosophy of this Business-Plot-Come -to-Fruition is that they seem to consider city-states to be an excellent form of government. These smaller entities can work more in line with their idea of states working as corporations. Everything stems from that idea that top-down, it all needs to be private and what they consider nimble. They love private schools, gated communities, tiny principalities with their own rules……..often with the right to be racist, sexist or any other ist they enjoy. But overall, they want it all to be like a myriad of corporations, slipping into a locality as they see fit to extract resources in the most “efficient” manner. No common good, simply commerce and extraction. Of course, they will need to keep the military to enforce their notions of masculine energy and conquest, but they seem to have a soft spot for fluid locales they can swing in and out of, taking advantage of the best tax breaks etc. I am hoping this leaves an opening for some areas to simply slip out of the noose during this chaos. Places like California who contribute more to the federal economy than they get back might consider simply walking backwards like Homer in the bushes. But seriously, this craziness will not be efficient in the long run, and I don’t think it’s illogical to consider a fracturing of the US might take place, whatever that might end up meaning.

It’s a cliché, but I’m sure that perhaps Sun Tzu might have a book or something about maneuvering in times of chaos. If that guy ever got published, that is. Even smaller areas like left leaning cities might be able to find a modicum of independence if they are annoying enough to try to manage. We have to look for hope– what’s the alternative? I think of places like New Orleans that have so little in common with the rest of their state. The ample money they take in from visitors gets funneled to places that decide the Ten Commandments should be on their school walls……on the walls that is, not actually obeyed by those in power. This is just one notion I think of when I try to consider what might happen in the setting of this truly abhorrent time. Managing a bag of cats might be disruptive to the end goal for them, however. Can a city or state do an Irish Goodbye to the US government when things get more unhinged? They are creating true chaos; I certainly hope individuals of good intent are looking for ways to benefit others in this situation and looking for exit strategies. The current state of affairs is a dead-end.

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At this point, though, we do have to realize we are stuck on the path with grade-A psychopaths. We need to be furtively darting our eyes in every direction like a character in a bad movie, looking for workarounds, escape paths and allies. In short, we need to fight the Bathtub Stranglers and all the chaos and hate they bring with them.

Lots of fascinating reads.

I had no idea about the Network State. Which, to me, is bananas-crazy. Felt like a conspiracy theorist just reading about it… but it’s all cited, it’s a very real ideology that a lot of people that are now in power subscribe to.

Also interesting was the implications for the Trump presidency (post appears to be written before the election).

A document authored by an anonymous group of whistleblowers accuses Elon Musk of attempting to spearhead a private hostile takeover of the US Government on behalf of an extremist anti-democracy philosophy known as the ‘neo-reactionary’ movement, by effectively hijacking the Republican Party.

The group, who are withholding their identity for fears of being targeted, includes former Silicon Valley and US technology leaders. They describe themselves as former followers of the neo-reactionary movement, also known as the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ – a burgeoning Internet philosophy which seeks to abolish the drive for greater equality and the very existence of democracy itself.

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“Elon Musk’s unchecked consolidation of power over government infrastructure, financial systems, AI governance, and digital media does not serve the interests of the Trump administration or the broader conservative movement”, warns the memorandum. “While some may view Musk as a useful instrument in dismantling the bureaucratic state, in reality, his actions demonstrate that he is not working for Trump or the Republican Party, but rather for his own power and the broader neo-reactionary agenda.”

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The neo-reactionary movement traces back in particular to the online writings of Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer who has received investments from billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and set up the data behemoth and Pentagon contractor, Palantir.

Musk, the memo warns, is moving rapidly to take control of the apparatus of US Government power on behalf of a core network of interests who subscribe to Yarvin’s ‘ Dark Enlightenment’ ideology. Other leaders in the US technology oligarchy aligned with Musk who subscribe to Yarvin’s ideas include Marc Andreessen (partner at venture-capital firm A16Z and author of the Techo-Optimist Manifesto), Balaji Srinivasan (former chief technology officer of Coinbase and author of the Network State), David Sacks (who co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel), and of course Thiel himself.

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According to the memo, “Despite this open disdain for the President, Yarvin recognizes the President’s utility—not as a leader, but as a tool… Yarvin even rejects the revolutionary impulse among the President’s supporters. He derides January 6 as ‘the last lame breath of mobocracy in America’ and scoffs at the idea that Trump’s base—’used-car dealers, general contractors, small-town investment advisors’—could ever rise up and install a new ‘Trumpenreich.’”

The memo reveals that Musk’s actions fit alarmingly well with Yarvin’s prescriptions for how a Trump administration can be exploited by the neo-reactionary movement to install a new faction of elitist Silicon Valley technocrats at the helm of a hollowed-out US Government. It highlights the following paragraphs from Yarvin:

“In a world where voters elect Trump with a mandate to just take over the government—as completely as the Allies took over the government of Germany in 1945—he will probably screw it up, anyway. Yet he doesn’t have to screw it up. (The only way to not screw it up, for Donald Trump, is to be the chairman of the board, and delegate to a single executive ready to be the plenary CEO of America.)”

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The end goal of this movement is shocking. The memo notes, for instance, that the neo-reactionary movement advocates a form of “techno-monarchism” where the CEO-ruler uses “data systems, artificial intelligence, and advanced algorithms to manage the state, monitor citizens, and implement policies. Yarvin’s vision for society is chillingly explicit; he suggests that unproductive members of society should be dealt with through a ‘humane alternative to genocide’—one that removes ‘undesirable elements’ from the public sphere without ‘any of the moral stigma’ of mass murder. His proposed solution? A VR prison where individuals are ‘waxed like a bee larva into a cell.’”

An influential Silicon Valley publication runs a cover story lamenting the “pussification” of tech. A major tech CEO lambasts a Black civil rights leader’s calls for diversifying the tech workforce. Technologists rage against the “PC police”.

No, this isn’t Silicon Valley in the age of Maga. It’s the tech industry of the 1990s, when observers first raised concerns about the rightwing bend of Silicon Valley and the potential for “technofascism”. Despite the industry’s (often undeserved) reputation for liberalism, its reactionary foundations were baked in almost from the beginning. As Silicon Valley enters a second Trump administration, the gendered roots of its original reactionary movement offer insight into today’s rightward turn.

At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote the longtime technology journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s”.

Their voices were largely drowned out by the techno-enthusiasts of the time, but Malone and Borsook were pointing to a vision of Silicon Valley built around a reverence for unlimited male power – and a major pushback when that power was challenged. At the root of this reactionary thinking was a writer and public intellectual named George Gilder. Gilder was one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal evangelists, as well as a popular “futurist” who forecasted coming technological trends. In 1996, he started an investment newsletter that became so popular that it generated rushes on stocks from his readers, in a process that became known as the “Gilder effect”.

Gilder was also a longtime social conservative who brought his politics to Silicon Valley. He had first made his name in the 1970s as an anti-feminist provocateur and a mentee of the conservative stalwart William F Buckley. At a time when women were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, he wrote books that argued that traditional gender roles needed to be restored, and he blamed social issues such as poverty on the breakdown of the nuclear family. (He also blamed federal welfare programs, especially those that funded single mothers, claiming they turned men into “cuckolds of the state”). In 1974, the National Organization for Women named him “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year”; Gilder wore it as a badge of pride.

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As Gilder became swept up in his own ideas about entrepreneurship, he turned his attention to Silicon Valley. The bourgeoning hi-tech industry, he began claiming, was the purest expression of entrepreneurship in the world. It’s not surprising that Gilder would be drawn to the tech industry in Santa Clara county, California. The state had its own powerful mythologies of masculinity and power. It was the end of the vast frontier, the end of manifest destiny. And it was the place of the former gold rush, where (white) men had struck it rich in the 19th century. It was also, counterintuitively, the birthplace of much of the modern conservative movement, including Reagan’s political career.

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This rising “technofascism”, as critics of the time had called it, was temporarily staved off by the dotcom stock market crash of 2000. George Gilder’s reputation was badly damaged after he failed to predict the crash. And much of the hype around digital tech was temporarily tempered after hundreds of startups went bust. But a younger generation of aspiring tech hopefuls had already come to the valley, seeking fame, riches, and power. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others had absorbed the lessons of the 90s. At the start of the new millennium, they were ready to put their stamp on the future, guided by reactionary dreams of the past.

The Silicon Valley titans of 2025 are following the same blueprint. In January, Meta said it was ending its DEI programs and changing its platform policies to allow more discriminatory and harassing posts. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg made his motivations clear: he claimed that corporate culture had moved away from “masculine energy” and needed to reinstate it after getting “neutered”. Elon Musk has reshaped Twitter into X, a platform in large part operating as a response to claims of a “woke mind virus”– the newest iteration of “political correctness”. And Marc Andreessen himself, the “boy genius” of the 1990s, has increasingly drawn inspiration from the Italian futurists, a movement of fascist artists in the early 20th century who glorified technology while seeking to “demolish” feminism.

But the history of the valley suggests this isn’t a blip or an anomaly. It’s a crescendo of forces central to the tech industry, and the current wave of rightwing tech titans are building on Silicon Valley’s foundations.

While the corrupting influence of big money over our government is not new, the specifics of this danger are different today than perhaps at any other time in our nation’s history. Tech billionaires, who already had enormous power, helped underwrite a winning presidential campaign in ways that would have been illegal just a few elections ago. And there are now fewer restraints than ever before on their ability, or the president they helped elect, to break through the checks and balances of our political system. This system, President Joseph Biden recently warned, can best be described as an “oligarchy.” Or, as others have dubbed, a “broligarchy.”

None of this means the situation is hopeless. Musk’s depredations are already encountering legal and political resistance, and it’s likely that the political pendulum will eventually swing back. When it does, those who care about the security of American democracy will need to be ready with fresh, bold solutions that meet the political moment, to ensure that our political system can actually respond to the needs of regular Americans.

Still, the question remains: How did we get to the point of having a tech billionaire campaign donor openly running huge parts of the federal government? And where do we go from here?

Meet Curtis Yarvin: whose seemingly crazed ideas have found fertile ground among technocrats and oligarchs who have never quite shaken entitled Ayn Rand’s “greed is good” sensibility.

Essentially, the guy wants the world to be run by smart CEOs commanding Corporate States. It is a form of National Socialism without the pollution of the socialism.

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His blog, “Gray Mirror,” offers dense insights into his philosophy. Not easy to digest but if you have the time and focus, it does reduce itself to a critique of modern governance and social structures through a lens of historical and philosophical analysis. Yarvin, or Mencius Moldbug if you prefer, argues that contemporary democracy and political systems are fundamentally flawed. His advocacy of more authoritarian forms of governance falls lockstep into the activities of historical examples from Caesar to Hitler and, currently, to Hungary’s Orbán.

According to Mencius: strong leader = stability and order. Well, as history has demonstrated in the first two examples, this can be finite. For Orbán? That remains to be seen.

But what would an activist sort of philosophy be if you cannot find those who will put it into practice?

Well, for Mencius, along came the dynamic duo of tech billionaire Peter Thiel and the current Vice President, J.D. Vance, both of whom became fans.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25720841

This isn’t mine, but it seems relevant for this community.

The richest men in the country are in the final stages of a 40-year plan to kill America and crown themselves kings. It’s not a conspiracy anymore: they’re bragging about it. And they’re convinced they’ve got you too distracted to care.