One of the strangest things about our current moment is the seemingly abrupt right turn of the tech industry in support of the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. This is especially unsettling for Irish people, long used to being the affable middleman between a welcoming America and a more culturally inscrutable Europe. Those of us who see the pixels of their US colleagues on Zoom, Teams or Meet every day have often sympathised – even if silently – with the gloomier faces, while finding the unfettered glee of others harder to take. It is as if Biff Tannen’s cinematic politics had taken spiteful and determined administrative form, or your watch had started to suggest mindful two-minute hates.
Explaining this rightward lurch is not easy. True, Silicon Valley and the US government are wound around each other like so many tangled cables at the bottom of a drawer, but it has been that way for a long while, and it’s not as if everyone in the Valley agreed simultaneously to pivot to the right. In particular, tech workers overwhelmingly vote Democratic, understand governance as acceptably legitimate, and volunteer to try to make it better. They are internationalist by habit, and those doing engineering work at ground level have a deep suspicion of bullshit. How can this have led to our current moment, packed with anti-immigrant, anti-science and anti-diversity cant? Big Tech was hardly a left-wing utopian paradise beforehand, but to find it adopting such extreme regressive and oppressive politics is genuinely surprising.
To understand the arc of the future, we must understand the trajectory leading up to it. In broad-stroke summary, a unique combination of working culture, favourable business regulations, physical concentration of expertise, ease of access to capital, efficiency of scaling business with software (and later on, online services), and perhaps even the weather, created the Valley. It has been phenomenally successful, and many countries have tried to reproduce it – cf our own Silicon Docks, Africa’s Silicon Savannah the UK’s Silicon Roundabout, etc – but have failed.
The Valley gave us many successful and storied companies; it also both supported and required a particular mindset and belief system. The first tenet of that belief system was the American Dream, or near enough: work hard, get rich – and it actually mostly worked. The second tenet was the Great Man theory of history, applied to business: exceptional individuals mattered more than systems, and it was best to remove blocks and let them focus on what they did best. The third tenet was that speed, agency, and the ability to break things (in the right way) is crucial – in other words, what’s at stake in the future generally outweighs the value of the past.
You might squint at those tenets and struggle to see anything Democratic-coded. But for decades the Valley was seen as primarily left-oriented, at least by American mainstream political standards. This was true for a few reasons. Firstly, the Democrats are generally seen as the party of science and social progress, with the Republicans firmly on the side of tradition in the tradition-versus-progress debate. (Consider Gore versus Quayle by way of illustration.) Secondly, the American Dream was relatively bipartisan, compensating somewhat for the Republicans being historically more associated with wealth and advantage. Thirdly, many of the people who came to the Valley came as the result of intense competitive pressure of various kinds – academic, industrial, etc. – and though success within a system is not confined to one party, academic success is definitely seen as more Democratic today. Fourthly, there was support for immigration: the Valley has always been hungry for talent, and foreign tech workers had even deeper reasons to work hard for success. (The Valley liked this, though it remains a flashpoint in the Trump coalition today.) Finally, there was a kind of capitalist social liberalism probably as Californian as it is Big Tech – it doesn’t matter who you are as long as you get results. But it’s probably the trifecta of competitive excellence, immigration and social liberalism that goes a long way to explain the bulk of the historically strong Democratic flavour of the Valley, garnished with libertarianism as it is.
Part of what’s going on is that the old story, as above, hid some detail in its assumptions. One factor that allowed Big Tech to be inaccurately perceived as fundamentally progressive for so long was the relationship between management and workers. By and large, they were bound together by a loose kind of social contract, with a quasi-feudal feel. Workers used their energy and agency to improve the world in some poorly defined but strongly felt way in a demanding and totalising environment, usually in return for substantial amounts of money. Leaders were supposed to facilitate this, look after and respect their employees and keep things growing overall, since growth is key to share value and worker compensation. For many decades this contract held, with useful tension between the two camps of management and workers facilitated by talent being scarce and movement between companies being easy.
But Covid, as with so many other things, played a huge part in jolting the system into another pattern of behaviour. Labour’s power, derived from its scarcity, reached an apex during the lockdowns. But after the unlocking and the subsequent layoffs (and therefore increased leverage of employers), worker power is now at an almost all-time low. To those fired and struggling, it’s hard not to find a tone of exultant retribution in executive communications about such layoffs : for example, the better.com CEO likening his employees to “dumb dolphins [who] get caught in nets and eaten by sharks.”
The clearest explanation of what has happened is a class revolution, except by capital against labour – a counter-revolutionary coup. (We might almost call it Marxist, given that Marxism is ultimately a class-based analysis of economics.) A similar reversal is happening with AI, where the old-style Valley business playbook is being deployed against workers rather than products: in this case, lower-cost AI disrupts labour by replacing costly, weak humans, on foot of a widespread expectation at leadership level that AI will shortly be able to do almost everything knowledge workers do. (One famous moment in the annals of AI was when Larry Page accused Elon Musk of being ‘specist’ by favouring humans over machines.)
Another theme is the sexual exploitation of workers by leaders – usually of women by men. It happens everywhere, and it’s certainly a theme in Big Tech and venture capital workplaces. Power may be an aphrodisiac, but it’s also a shield, and Bill Gates, Andy Rubin and Roy Price all felt empowered to mix business with unpleasantness. During the #MeToo movement, companies were occasionally prepared to oust offenders, even if in compromised ways, though this seems increasingly unpopular now. For example, the Google Walkouts of 2018 (which originally started as a protest against Andy Rubin’s massive exit package) forced Google leadership to support the movement in public while fighting it in private. As a result, two of the key organisers of the event were dismissed or resigned in 2019 under circumstances hard to interpret as anything other than retaliation. Arguably, that outcome reveals the anger of the mostly male ownership class at the attempt to curtail their power and aligns with the widespread dismantling of DEI programs.
Another relevant feature of American society is the Calvinist idea that evil and depravity are total in mankind, and that only some of us can and will be saved, by unquestionable mechanisms of God. By extension, fear, suspicion and even malignant action against one’s neighbour can be justified by their likely state of sin: clearly some people just deserve what they get. In this view, the exercise of power and sovereignty is somehow godly in itself, as is submission to it, and if someone fails (in their faith, in the original context) then they were predestined to do so. Taken together, these ideas support a very useful framework of conduct for the powerful: treating people terribly is valid without excuse; some of us are just exceptional and that’s all there is to it; failure is a property of the individual and all efforts to help were, by definition, useless.
This might not seem to have much to do with the Valley, whose accepted religion is atheism, but the basic value framework is obviously a large part of the Republican worldview. The performance management systems generally used in Valley companies also echo it – specifically, its tendency to take the side of the establishment. Of course, the status quo naturally tries to preserve itself, but in the review committees I sat on, when we discussed someone who ‘failed to adapt to their local team culture’, it was hard to avoid the framing that the fault lay with the individual.
Another religious conflict, concerning the ordo amoris – the ordering of groups to whom one should give love, which recently had JD Vance and both the current pope and his predecessor at loggerheads – supposes an ideal order of support starting with family, then nation, then wider world, with decreasing quantities of love and support provided at each stage. (The Valley has a similar one: manager, team, business unit and company.) The pope’s belief is that no such mean-spirited parcelling out of limited love should apply – we are entreated to love (all) our neighbours as ourselves. But there has been a huge reaction in evangelical circles against the so-called ‘sin of empathy’: a sickening phrase to many of us, especially those raised in the Catholicism that gave us, inter alia, ‘whatever you did for the least of my brethren, you did for me’. This representation of empathy as a so-called sin is an ideological obfuscation for those who like to exercise cruelty with righteous conviction, and a disruption of millennia of religious teaching.
An intellectual culture values ideas, and the Valley has long been such a culture. One problem with this is how often the Valley’s ideas are in fact neither its own nor even new: last century John Maynard Keynes wrote that ‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’ One such scribbler is Curtis Yarvin, whose radicalisation owes something to the libertarian atmosphere he found in the Valley in the 1990s. Over the years, it developed into something more like what 1930s English and German fascism would look like if filtered through a mesh of Internet memes and marinated in, regrettably, 4chan. Yarvinism may exist, but it’s hard to say precisely what it is, since it adopts the communication style of the post-modern, Internet era: multiple layers of irony, active conceptual contradictions, provocative statements issued then withdrawn with a knowing wink, then reissued with a slightly different phrasing – and underpinning it all, a kind of rustic sadism.
This contrasts with, say, Thatcherism, where, even if you found it morally repugnant, you had at least a decent chance of understanding Thatcher’s position on any particular issue given what you already knew. In that sense, the animating spirit of the current US government is definitely Trumpism rather than Yarvinism. But the programme is Yarvinist: the actions of Musk’s DOGE map closely to his malevolent maxim ‘retire all government employees’ (abbreviated in his writings, inevitably, as RAGE), and the assault on universities is linked to Yarvin’s conversation in 2021 with Michael Anton characterising them as ‘the heart of the beast’. Equally, the fracturing of the rule of law can also be found in his exhortations, which, though not precisely defined, generally argue for the singular supremacy of a CEO-figure. In general, his programme is laced with a familiar Social Darwinism.
Whether or not he is the ultimate source of these neo-fascist ideas, Yarvin has influential friends who in turn reference his influence. One in particular is Vance, but many others in the Silicon Valley tech right are in the picture too. Perhaps the most important of those is Peter Thiel, a long-time supporter of Yarvin who very much deserves more detailed description. Suffice to say that he is notorious for founding Palantir, the shadowy government-contractor data-mining company; destroying the media outlet Gawker; believing that the US has been in decline since women got the vote; believing that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible; supporting JD Vance’s senate run; and in a memorable interview, accidentally revealing that while he had signed himself up to be cryogenically frozen in case he could be revived post-death, he had neglected to do the same for his husband. Another prominent Yarvin fan is Balaji Srinivasan, most notable for promoting the Network State, the idea that the logical successor to the nation state is an area where no larger law or constraints on founder behaviour apply (somewhat akin to the Freeport proposals of the Tories in the UK); he has also opined that policing in San Francisco should become politically tribal in a way reminiscent of Northern Ireland, and is on the record as ‘calling for […] something like tech Zionism’, after comparing the Network State and himself to Jesus Christ and Christianity.
In summary, a significant part of Silicon Valley’s leadership – existing and emerging – has come to believe that in order to achieve the dream of not having any constraints on accumulating more wealth and power, it is necessary to destroy what most ordinary people, like you and me, would understand as civilisation. They are eager to take the business techniques of the Valley, in particular blitz-scaling and disruption, and apply them in politics, with the aim of implementing a paternalistic and authoritarian programme in the guise of perfect liberty. It is liberty for them and bloodshed for us.
The Valley has undermined truth and falsehood: a constant tide of disinformation reduces everything to mere pixels flowing past on a screen, all equally believable or unbelievable. As a result, the most profound social change of the past decade is escaping our attention, and even writing down the plain facts is an act of wilfully overcoming disbelief. But writing (or reading) these facts is the only way to begin to properly absorb the scale of what has happened, and what lies in wait.
I cannot be clearer: the most powerful people in the world are engaged in a programme of destroying the social contract, eliminating those they see as weak, eradicating state capacity and making it socially unacceptable (and in many cases, impossible in practice) to care about anyone except increasingly narrow slices of society. They are now preparing for an endgame where machines either supplant human beings, control them, or in the worst case scenario, eliminate them. To write it out in plain language like this invites the charge of misrepresenting sensible, sober people as the worst kind of moustache-twirlers, hell-bent on the destruction of the world. But the evidence is undeniable. The question remains what we are going to do about it. The answer needs to be more than we currently are.
References
Detailed article references available on request.
Techno-sceptical critical theory has existed for as long as technology. Arguably, one early example is the Luddite movement, who are described in the 2004 book Writings of the Luddites as being ‘totally fine with machines’, but attempting to prevent machine-owners from using them to get around awkward labour practices. EM Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909) describes a future where ‘each individual [lived] in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine’, and outlines what happens when, in due course, the machine stops. Günther Anders wrote about very early computers in similar terms (The Obsolescence of Man, 1956). Ivan Illich, familiar to many Silicon Valley types interested in education or libertarianism for Deschooling Society, also wrote Tools for Conviviality (1973), which outlines ways to examine how tools contribute towards greater integration or greater domination. Finally, the author of the famous ELIZA/DOCTOR program, which pretended to be a human psychotherapist convincingly but very shallowly compared to today’s Large Language Models, wrote on the topic of Computer Power and Human Reason (Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976). It is perhaps no surprise that the author of the first chatbot had deep misgivings about the tendency of human beings to impute human feelings and behaviour to software.
We now turn from the general to the particular.
On Peter Thiel, start with The Contrarian, Max Chafkin (2022), and this Atlantic piece https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-thiel-2024-election-politics-investing-life-views/675946/ is also worth considering, as well as his recent interview with Ross Douthat.
On the Network State: the original source is best, and is https://www.thenetworkstate.com (2022), though you could also consider The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, James Dale Davison and William Rees-Mogg (1999), in which a number of ideas overlap with the Network State approach.
On AI, there are too many works to possibly cite, but consider Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao (2025), and AI 2027, https://www.ai-2027.com.
On Curtis Yarvin: this New Yorker article is probably a good place to start https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile; there is no shortage of other coverage.
On Silicon Valley generally, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Malcolm Harris (2024) is probably the densest place to start, though A People’s History of Silicon Valley, Keith Spencer (2018) is shorter and has similar positioning. More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Adam Becker (2025) is also useful criticism (written by a physicist with some familiarity with the technology). Finally, Patrick Collison’s book list at https://patrickcollison.com/svhistory gives us a considerably more optimistic and technology-focused collection.
1/7/2025
Alan Craige has worked in the technology sector in the US and in Ireland.
References
Detailed article references available on request.
1/7/2025
