It is unoriginal to refer to Donald Trump as a useful idiot, but the question as to whose idiot invokes both plausible and fantastical theories combined with sundry lampoons on social media. That Trump is Putin’s lapdog, for example, remains a popular theme, but Gil Duran, writing for The New Republic, makes a solid case that Trumpism, and specifically the reinvention of J.D. Vance, is the playbook of Silicon Valley’s billionaire ideologues who avowedly hate democracy.
There’s a video clip I’ve scrolled by a few times recently in which Pete Buttigieg tells Bill Mahr’s audience that Silicon Valley’s pivot toward Trump is explained by the simple fact that “These are very rich men, and historically the Republican party benefits very rich men.” But as much as I admire Sec. Buttigieg’s intellect and style, I think Duran is closer to the mark when he describes men like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as having plenty of money but now want all the power their money can buy. And not the kind of old-school power that merely influences policy to make them more money. Instead, the ambition of these tech oligarchs is ideological, arrogant, nutty, and possibly more dangerous than the hardline religious right with its fantasies of an American Christian theocracy.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible….Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” – Peter Thiel, CATO Institute 2009 –
Duran, in his article published on July 22, describes the relationship between Thiel, Vance, and the “house philosopher” of Thiel’s inner circle, a software engineer and apparent kook named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin advocates a techno-feudalist future, which Duran describes thus:
Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
It’s the stuff of dystopian sci-fi movies and should be dismissed as raving but for the fact that Thiel et al. take this shit seriously—and Thiel is the money and force behind the metamorphosis of JD Vance from ordinary Republican into the automaton Veep nominee parroting “ideas” that are blatantly unconstitutional. In this light, then, should we read Vance’s outlandish, Trump-like provocations as part of the Pay Pal Mafia’s ground-softening campaign? Because if one sincerely believes in a plan to reengineer society into a corporatized “patchwork” as described above, one must first convince some of the population to get comfortable with creeping authoritarianism. Or perhaps it is sufficient to simply make enough people uncomfortable with republicanism—a disorder that I maintain social media has fostered across the political spectrum.
In 2012, writing about the technological singularity, I asked, “What if what’s really happening is that technologists with the power to design these life-altering systems have intellectually and spiritually moved beyond the idea that the human individual has much, if any, value? In this case, it would be obvious that the rights of an artist, for example, would indeed look like a trifling glitch in the design that ought to be routed around like a bad line of code. After all, what right has the individual to assert his uniqueness in the march toward utopia?”
Let’s return to 2011/12, when Democrat, Republican, and Independent alike generally believed that social media companies, proclaiming themselves guardians of the speech and press rights, had provided the antidote to all corporate and government corruption. Google et al. preached the gospel that the “free flow of information” online would break the major media corporations’ “monopoly” control of news and cultural “content.” This populist notion fueled the anti-copyright/pro-piracy agenda, which should not be read as a story about copyright per se because the subtext of the gospel was that individuals with their pesky rights in their own work products were not going to stand in the way of a new world order. Silicon Valley wasn’t saying this overtly of course. On the surface, the message was egalitarian—a moral mandate to disrupt (i.e., “democratize”) everything, and this is still a key talking point in the PR about the alleged importance of Gen AI.
I have said it over and over—and I’ll say it until the internet breaks: the major significance of Silicon Valley’s deceptions in beating back the anti-piracy bills SOPA/PIPA in early 2012 was that it signaled a new insidious form of corporate manipulation of American politics. And at Google scale. The industry and its acolytes at the EFF et al. weaponized the rhetoric of “democracy” (namely the speech right), not simply to lie about bipartisan legislation, but to assert the primacy of online platforms over the traditional institutions of government. The message was, “YOU did it! YOU saved the internet!” Of course it was all bullshit. And at Google scale.
We may ridicule Trumpians today for “doing their own research” to support wild conspiracy theories about vaccines etc., but let’s not forget that time when “liberals” sported or cheered for the “Guy Fawkes” mask from V for Vendetta as if that ahistorical symbolism somehow represented a new tech-enabled form of “speaking truth to power.” In reality, of course, all that “hacktivism” was simultaneously eroding faith in real participation in government while feeding Big Tech the data it needed to arrogate political power to its private club of Ayn Rand Übermenschen.
Recognition that social platforms were toxic, particularly after the election in 2016 of a president who lies with every word, led to a fleeting moment of navel-gazing dubbed the “techlash.” Whistleblowers and Silicon Valley defectors came forward to affirm that social media induced harms were not a bug but a feature. “Profit over safety” was the general message Frances Haugen brought to Congress about Meta, and lest we forget, Mark Zuckerberg’s only answer was that Meta’s investments in “artificial intelligence” would fix everything.
I get that this begins to sound like conspiracy theory itself but for the fact that, as Duran reports in his extensive coverage, individuals like Thiel, Musk, Ray Kurzweil et al. have unwaveringly advocated strange and dystopian “visions” for the future of humanity. As this story in the Washington Spectator describes…
Dr. Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI researcher fired from Google in 2020 for speaking up against what she perceived as the company’s lack of proper ethical guardrails, has partnered with other researchers and philosophers to coin the (somewhat unwieldy) acronym “TESCREAL” to describe the overlapping emergent belief systems that characterize the contrarian, AI-centric worldviews challenging progressivism. It stands for: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.
Speaking as a secularist with a disdain for magical or spiritual thinking that borders on hostility, I admit to harboring an innate distrust of all isms. But uber-wealthy, smug tech-lord isms are acutely concerning because those are the beliefs of men who own or control the major modes of communication, which transform even criticism like this post or one of Duran’s articles into data that can be used to alter the course of history. Thus, when Vance insults Simone Biles or Trump is an asshole at the NABJ Conference, all the posts about those moments—even the outrage—feeds a dataset that can be used to keep unraveling core faith in the Republic. As useful idiots go, Trump has always been prêt-à-porter for any powerbroker who wants to ratfuck America. But the notion that Vance the Berserker, unrecognizable to his old friends, was forged in the crucible of Thiel’s world view makes too much sense to ignore.
