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Does being worth billions make you happy? Will it buy you love? If America’s current generation of centibillionaires are any guide, storied wealth is a one-way ticket to hell. Humanity’s only hope of saving itself is to move to Mars, according to Elon Musk. The Anti-Christ is coming, says Peter Thiel. Crypto is your only security against a collapsing US dollar, says pretty much every bitcoin pusher in the neighbourhood. Many of today’s dystopian plutocrats are the same people who promised utopia in the earlier phases of the internet. Something chemical must have changed since then in Palo Alto’s water supply. Instead of the lure of community and being connected, we are being sold cataclysm and apocalypse. The enlightenment has given way to the even more profitable “dark enlightenment”.
Like many people, I toggle between feeling amused by the adolescent nonsense that you hear from so many tech titans and deep foreboding about their tightening grip on our world. On the one hand, you get people naming their companies after fantasy fiction tropes, especially from Tolkien, and whose idea of a political movie is The Matrix. Their world consists of super villains and super heroes. They seem to have confused masculinity with childishness — petulance, aggression and self-obsession being their idea of maleness. On the other hand, their sway over the federal machinery of state has gone from tangential to central at remarkable speed. We should not be amused by the fact that Thiel’s acolytes are in charge of key nodes of Washington’s power ministries, not just the Pentagon.
Any Europeans puzzled about the level of transatlantic ferocity in last week’s US National Security Strategy document should listen more closely to the broligarchs. Their arch-enemy is the EU and its digital privacy and digital services acts, which they want swept away. Brussels bureaucracy, and woke member state governments, are what is standing between them and domination of the rest of the west. In the coming months, the Trump administration will assuredly step up its attack on EU regulations and make their dilution or abolition central to the future of the western alliance. The US federal government is playing the roles of lawyer, promoter, hitman and agent for Palantir, xAI, Meta and the rest.
As Paul Krugman noted in an incisive recent Substack, America has become a “digital narco state”. While Australia offers an alternative path of banning social media companies from doing business with under-16s, the Trump administration is pushing their toxins into every corner of society. Trumpian populism may be the story of our age but I am increasingly persuaded that we are underplaying the tech-authoritarian elephant in the room.
If you want insight into the broligarch mindset watch this Andrew Ross Sorkin interview with Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive. Karp suffers from no shortage of self-regard. “If people listened to me more proactively we’d have a better world,” he says. “I am running the most important tech company in the world.” “We are the backbone of US deterrence.” “If the Democrats ran someone who agreed with me they would win.”
Apart from the fact that Karp cannot sit still for a moment, my key takeaway was his sense of persecution. Here is a modern hero who wants to save western civilisation but people don’t show him the love he deserves. Don’t dare ask him about Palantir’s role in helping ICE target and deport illegal immigrants (its platform is called Immigration OS). Karp writes off criticism as “derangement syndrome”. In his mind, Palantir is all that stands between US democracy and its collapse. Please, Swampians, watch this and reassure me that we are in safe hands. You might also spare a couple of minutes to look at this illuminating “Authoritarian stack” compiled by the University College of London’s Francesca Bria. It provides detailed maps of the network of state capture both in the US and increasingly Europe.
I was also struck by this piece by my colleague Hannah Murphy, who was reporting on Balaji Srinivasan’s recent Network State Conference in Singapore. These are the chiefly Thiel-funded libertarians who want to escape the bonds of democracy by setting up corporate city states and even sovereign societies in which governance is decided by the corporation not their inhabitants. It is from Hannah’s piece that I borrowed the phrase “elite victim complex”.
I am thus turning to Hannah this week with a couple of questions. Hannah, you work in San Francisco, which has become a byword for liberal misgovernance. How much of the tech elite’s disdain for the left derives from their experience of that (until recently) woefully misgoverned city? Second, should we take the broligarch worldview literally and seriously? If so, it is hard to feel optimistic about the future of democracy.
Recommended reading
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My column this week looks at a different aspect of the same theme — “Trump is choosing the broligarchs over his base” “When historians assess this age of American populism, Silicon Valley’s plutocrats will surely be judged its winners,” I write.
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I greatly enjoyed Susan Glasser’s latest letter from Trump’s Washington on how “war is peace”, ignorance is truth etc, and peace prizes are all the rage. In addition to being awarded Fifa’s first peace prize by the world football body’s aptly named Gianni Infantino in the Kennedy Center on Monday, Trump this week renamed the US Institute of Peace as the “Donald J Trump Institute of Peace.” It’s so hard to keep up.
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Finally, for an admirably concise and vivid book, read Guiliano da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the autocrats and tech billionaires taking over the world. Alert Swampians might have noticed that I’m vaguely interested in this topic.
Hannah Murphy replies
Hi Ed, How much heed should one give to declarations from the likes of Musk that the desperate state of downtown San Francisco heralds “the end of civilisation” and can be blamed on the “woke mind virus”?
From my first-hand experience living in the city, its struggles with homelessness, housing shortages, open air drug use and theft are no joke for inhabitants — to the point that even the most liberally-inclined might sympathise with the tough-on-crime stance of new mayor Daniel Lurie.
But in reality, professional victims such as Elon have long swapped the hills of the foggy city for a life of private jets and sprawling compounds in remote corners of New Zealand or Hawaii.
Rather, the “woe-is-me” sentiment comes from a sense that despite contributing to American dynamism, building multibillion-dollar technology empires and generating tens of thousands of jobs in the process, they have been cast as villains in the court of public opinion, and persecuted by liberal politicians in the Biden administration and the EU daring to pursue Big Tech regulation and antitrust lawsuits.
The solution for the thin-skinned American broligarch seems twofold. The most radical route to pursue is the “network state” movement I wrote about — funding alternative governance initiatives reminiscent of feudalism. But these are highly experimental and to date, none have evolved too far.
More worrisome is the other option, under Trump’s more transactional second administration, of capturing the state. Think lavishing the president with praise at his recent tech titan dinner, and buying up properties in Washington DC as quasi-embassies to project power and have a presence on the Hill. The current goal of these efforts appears to be to ensure as little red tape as possible for their headlong charge into presumably lucrative artificial intelligence, rather than better civilisation or even helping to improve the city that made them.
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