Interrogating the Silicon Valley Billionaires: The Shallowness of Techno-Optimism

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”   F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

A coterie of tech billionaires and Silicon Valley high-flyers has swung hard behind Donald Trump.  Their reasons center around the supposed hostility of Biden and the Democratic Party to their techno-dreams. In particular they object to attempts to regulate cryptocurrency and to put some brakes on AI development.  Though many used to support Democrats, now they echo MAGA talking points about DEI and the intolerant ‘woke’ culture that they claim is stifling free speech and interfering with progress.  They threw money at the Trump campaign and in return have been allowed to seed the Trump administration with their followers and policy positions.

Behind these public positions, many tech-geniuses have become enamored of much more radical views.  They view democracy as inefficient and slow, needing replacement by a new regime modeled on the start-up culture that has produced our giant tech companies.  Imbibing ideas from people like reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin and cryptocurrency advocate Balaji Srinivasan, they envision political systems that run on cryptocurrency, blockchains, and AI.  They toggle back and forth between pursuing utopias that stand outside all existing states—Peter Thiel’s Seasteading, Elon Musk’s Terminus on Mars, Srinavasan’s Network State—and plans for subverting and taking over the United States.  None of these would be democracies but would be run like corporations, top-down with a single enlightened ruler at the top. 

Here are some of the questions we should be asking about this puzzling turn of events.

First, WTF?   You folks scheming to overthrow America’s constitutional system are not the poor, the needy, the oppressed.  Quite the opposite.  You’re some of the richest, most successful people in the country.  You have made it to the top in the current democratic, two-party, ‘woke’ America—many of you sought this out by emigrating here—but that world is now somehow all wrong?  It needs wholesale replacement?  Something is badly off with this picture. 

Second, you want to run the country like a start-up?  You know, I assume, that the vast, vast majority of start-ups fail.  They go down for many reasons:  they don’t understand the market, they can’t hire good people, they underestimate costs, the founder turns out to be a pathological monster, someone else does it better, COVID changes the playing field, etc, etc.  Only a few turn into viable companies, and only a few of those become really successful.   

If this happens, it’s a shame, but there is isn’t much damage.  Some investors lose money that, hopefully, they can afford to lose.  The founders pick themselves up and go back to the drawing board.  But the US government?   We don’t have another one waiting in the wings.  Like 19th century anarchists, there is a hopeless romanticism at work that imagines that when government collapses, a thousand beautiful flowers will bloom.  But in reality, if this government, with all its flaws, goes under there won’t be any solid pad from which to launch the replacement. 

Third, even if the dream is realized, why is it better?  Why is it preferable to live in a super-efficient tyranny, rather than a messy, inefficient democracy?  The history of tyrannies is not exactly brimming with examples of efficiency and prosperity and stability.  Quite the opposite. 

But assume you can make the US like Singapore, with advanced AI taking it to the next level.  What is the argument that this will make people happier?   Or more narrowly, that it will accelerate the progress in technology that seems to be the be-all and end-all of this project?   You really think a dictatorship run by Elon Musk would be more likely to incubate great new companies and new technology?

Simply saying that because it resembles a big successful company it must be better, begs the question.  Companies have very simple and limited purposes.  They often dress them up to sound like they’re in the business of saving the world or realizing the customer’s innermost desires.    But they really aren’t.

Also, private companies are not, rhetoric aside, bastions of rationality and efficiency.  Have you not watched “The Office”?  They often do stupid things that lose money, damage the environment, cause people to suffer, and lead to bankruptcy.  People get sued and end up in court in handcuffs. 

Political systems have complicated and broad purposes.  They have to deliver something called Justice.  They have to protect Community, what we have in common.  Rights, what we protect against Community.  Dignity.  Equality.   Security, external and internal.  They have to create and maintain Legitimacy via some combination of performance, story-telling, historical narrative, and participation in selecting leaders and making decisions.  These inconvenient human needs don’t figure in the techno-utopian plans, which rest on  running roughshod over every human need if it gets in the way of greater productivity.

Fourth, why can’t the problems with our present regime be solved with reform rather than replacement? Have you tried?  No one denies that America’s constitutional system could use improvement.  If even part of the energy and resources and thinking devoted to overthrowing was devoted to improving, we might be in a much better place.  Put your ingenuity and money to figuring out how to fix the electoral system, make the Supreme Court fair, stop political corruption, make it easier to build things, ensure the benefits of technology and greater productivity benefit everyone.  Or is this not really in your interest?  Too tame?  Not enough opportunities to make big bucks? 

We should be more than slightly suspicious that something else is at work here.  The idea that the arena we are particularly good at should be the model for the whole society, that’s a pretty normal idea.  That’s how medieval barons and knights thought.  We are the best at hacking other people to death, so our world will be ordered to put hacking at the center.  The best hackers will rule and receive obeisance.  Hacking makes the world a better place!  Statues will be put up, pictures mounted on all the walls, operas and symphonies will sing the praises, of the great hackers.

In any society the people who are winners, the nobles or oligarchs or high priests, are, predictably, the ones who prate about ‘meritocracy.’  They believe in their bones that the current order is the right order and that they have triumphed in a civilizational episode of “Survivor.”   All that remains is for the losers to submit and recognize that the best have won.  This is why industrialists and financiers from the Gilded Age embraced eugenics and pseudo-Darwinian theories that placed people like themselves at the tip-top of the natural order.       

With this mindset, your goal is to keep upstarts from challenging your supremacy.  How might this happen?  One way, as Nobel Prize winning economist Simon Johnson points out, would be if the federal government were to spend lots of money and effort developing new technologies, as it has often done in the past.  These wouldn’t be patented and owned by today’s oligarchs.  So you might actually be in favor, somewhat counterintuitively, of cutting back sharply on government spending for science and R and D.  And you might also like high tariffs that protect your monopolies.  Hmmm….

One can’t read the books and Substack pieces and podcasts where the techno-utopian dreams are laid out without realizing that these ultra-rich, extremely clever folks have huge chips on their shoulder.  Just inventing things and starting companies and making money isn’t enough.  They don’t feel they are being sufficiently valued.  “We gave you all this and you aren’t grateful” seems to be a common feeling.

It rankles them that some people are less than enthusiastic about all these wonderful new toys. They aren’t convinced that all the social media and smartphones and automated systems, not to mention the coming era of cryptocurrency and AI, are unqualified goods.  They’re skeptical that the tech-bros with their genius brains but underdeveloped souls always know what’s best.  They are tired of constantly being the subjects of Silicon Valley’s latest science experiment.

Even worse, these unwarranted concerns were leading the Biden Administration to think about regulations and antitrust and holding hearings and taxing billionaires.  Asking annoying questions about where technology was going and what might go wrong.

The billionaires find this unacceptable, just the unwashed poking sticks in the humming wheels of progress.

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

For fun, let’s look at one of the more famous statements of purpose, Mark
Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, published in 2023.  Andreessen is a very successful investor whose firm, Andreessen-Horowitz, sits at the center of the Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem.

Andreessen’s manifesto explains why he has become a huge Trump backer.  He donated heavily to Trump’s campaign, and after the election he started to spend a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago along with his friend, Elon Musk.  (If you want to hear a presumably intelligent man embarrass himself, listen to Joe Rogan’s interview with Andreessen shortly after the election, where both men fall over themselves to tell each other how much they love Trump and how blessed, blessed we are that he won.)

The gist of the Manifesto is that technology, plus capitalism, is the absolute best thing human beings have ever come up with, it is the cause of all our progress and greater wealth and abundance.  If we just let it do its thing it will continue to make us all richer and happier.  But (for reasons Andreessen never addresses) some people are skeptical.  They are the Enemy.

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

There’s a lot more, but you get the idea.

There is of course much that is accurate in Andreessen’s picture.   The combination of science and technology and free markets—what he calls the ‘techno-capital machine’—has produced tremendous wealth and liberated much of mankind from want.  The turn away from nuclear power was a terrible mistake. 

It is however astonishingly blind, I am tempted to say deliberately blind, to the role of political and institutional structures in this process.  The rule of law, the sidelining of stifling oligarchies, the loosening of rigid class divisions, the empowering of ordinary people, the articulation and enforcement of free speech and a free press, the taming of religious sectarianism, and much more, have been essential to the progress he worships. 

Governments have sometimes stifled markets, but they have also delivered education and science and learning, aided infrastructure and trade and banking and on and on.  Government has again and again, through laws and regulation, made new industries safer and therefore more acceptable to the public.  They have prevented monopolies and trusts from destroying the progress Andreessen extols.  They have directed tremendous public resources towards research and science.  They have made the techno-capital machine acceptable by helping to ensure that its fruits benefit more than just a lucky few. 

Liberal democratic governments in particular have been the incubators of progress, and also its beneficiaries.  Liberal democracy, free markets, and technological progress have gone hand in hand.  The year 1776 famously saw both the Declaration of Independence and the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.  Andreessen quotes from Wealth perhaps the most over-used and poorly understood sentences in the English language: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”  Like so many he ignores the rest of Smith’s 750 pages where he tells us again and again that self-interest is dangerous and must be checked, and that rich businessmen always conspire to create monopolies and fleece the public.  For Andreessen, however, selfishness is something to be praised, and government is nothing but an obstacle in the way of Great Men.

Notice the timeline here.  Andreessen says we went off track 60 years ago, somewhere around 1973.  It was, somewhat surprisingly, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon that Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency. It was when the first Earth Day was held.  Awareness of the dangers of the techno-capital machine was growing and becoming institutionalized.  Andreessen is not specific about what caused this historical wrong turn, but we can assume this is what he has in mind. 

Of course we need to point to the obvious, that during the 60 years that we’ve suffered from this awful ‘demoralization’, the United States incubated an astonishing surge in applied technology, especially in computing and communications.  The new industries in these sectors have long overtaken the old manufacturing giants in value and influence.  Andreessen himself has thrived and grown rich off them.  True, we never built flying cars.  But maybe flying cars were a lame idea, compared to the internet. 

The wrong turn Andreessen wants us to lament doesn’t seem objectively to have derailed progress.  Maybe—gasp!—it helped progress by convincing the public that we could let technology go forward while being confident that someone, somewhere was watching out for its dangers and downsides and doing something about them.

Andreessen laments, for instance in this fawning 2025 interview, that productivity growth has dropped from its heyday in the first 2/3 of the 20th century.  He imagines this is because of his ‘enemies.’  There are many explanations for this, the most convincing being Robert Gordon’s analysis in The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth, that this was an abnormal time when the global economy was absorbing genuinely revolutionary technologies—electricity, the internal combustion engine, powered flight, indoor plumbing, antibiotics, radio and television, nuclear power.  These were the ‘low-hanging fruit’ for human ingenuity. It is unrealistic to expect this to continue, and for all the hype around the computer and software revolutions, they have not been nearly as transformative.       

The real difference between productivity then and now is that ‘then’, in the good old days, increases in productivity translated to higher wages and a higher standard of living for ordinary people.  Today, productivity growth is disproportionately grabbed by those who are already rich. Rising inequality is the result.  But this doesn’t seem to concern Andreessen, nor does it seem to occur to him that it might be a drag on progress.        

Finally, we can look at Andreesen’s attempt to articulate what this is all about, what vision of human nature or human good he has in mind. Here he stumbles, in a revealing way.  He wants  abundance, material security, and ultimately absolute freedom and power: 

We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization” – what economists call “dematerialization”. Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.

We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.

Andreessen goes on to cite the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to underscore his vision.  He quotes Nietzsche’s warning about the ‘Last Man’ of our modern age who has no great goals, no higher yearnings, who seeks only material abundance and comfort and security.  This is what Andreesen says he wants to avoid.  But his techno-capital machine is precisely what Nietzsche despises and sees as creating the Last Man.  What Andreesen and his fellow tech enthusiasts are asking for is to get to the Last Man as fast as possible. 

Andreessen says, correctly I think, that “the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.”  Nietzsche, however, is not interested in peaceful productive pursuits. He thinks they make us weak and boring.  He is calling on us to raise armies and start religions.

There was, however, another famous 19th century thinker who was in fact enamored of technology and, in his way, of capitalism.  His name was Karl Marx.  Marx of course wanted to transcend capitalism but he was clear-eyed about its great creative power.  In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels are rhapsodic about what capitalism has accomplished. In only a century it “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together… rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life…put an end to all feudal, patriarchal arrangements…all that is solid melts into air.”  All this ‘creative destruction’ makes possible a future of technology and unlimited abundance, when man will no longer need to labor but can paint in the morning and fish in the afternoon. 

Andreessen hates communism, by which he means Leninism, for its top-down planning and rejection of the profit motive.  But the vision he and others have for the future is far closer to Marx than Nietzsche: a single-minded surge towards abundance and unlimited wealth, stewarded by a small elite of enlightened experts.  Eventually human beings will merge with their technological creations and we will find ourselves at the true end of history. 

We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral – first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.

Andreesen has read too much Ayn Rand, a Nietzschean who tries to make his teachings compatible with capitalism.  Rand’s novels exalt the great inventor-businessman, a superior being whose work benefits us all, but who does what he does only for the love of the challenge, of the difficulty, of the fight.  This is the picture Andreesen has of himself and his Silicon Valley friends.  They are the ones who by their striving and sacrifice and genius make things for the rest of us.  Governments—especially democratic ones—are creatures of the Last Men who want only to tear down the great ones, loading them down with Precautionary Principles.   

In a section titled “Becoming Technological Supermen,” Andreesen quotes—slyly, without naming the source—from the 1909 Futurist Manifesto:  “To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: ‘Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.’”

Perhaps Andreesen wants us not to notice that the Futurists were precursors of Italian fascism.  A few paragraphs later in their Manifesto, we read this:  “We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.  We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.”

Mr. Andreesen and the other pseudo-Nietzscheans around him are playing with fire.  They throw out names and ideas that they don’t understand, in the name of a supposedly apolitical agenda that would throw aside every guardrail, every voice of caution, every consideration other than unrestricted progress. There is no question that anything resembling democracy is intolerable.  They want nothing to oppose them, and they want to be lauded and rewarded as they smash and grab their way through the lives of ordinary Americans.   

Andreessen says there can be left-wing and right-wing supporters of his manifesto.  He is otherwise silent on politics.  But he does say:

We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world. Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.

It sounds like Andreessen is a fan of liberal democracy.  But it is not clear that his blueprint for techno-capitalist progress is compatible with liberal democracy, or any democracy.  A society ordered around Andreessen’s model would have to abdicate almost all public supervision and control over private business.  His perfect meritocracy  would honor a few supermen, and ignore or denigrate those who don’t measure up. 

Many of the people close to Andreessen, who share his support for Trump and for unrestricted technological progress, are very clear about their rejection of democracy.  Peter Thiel said in 2009 that he doesn’t think freedom and democracy are compatible.  Curtis Yarvin (quoted approvingly by Andreessen in this 2025 interview) has frequently said a type of monarchy is needed in America, which should get over its aversion to dictators.  Trump himself, of course, has made clear that he rejects democracy, except when he wins.

It used to be taken for granted that democracy, and the free exchange of ideas at the heart of liberalism, were essential to America’s economic and technological success.  It was why we out-competed the USSR.  Andreessen doesn’t mention any of this.

Andreessen and his pals are up to their eyeballs in various libertarian schemes to separate from the United States of America.  Musk wants to go to Mars, Thiel wants to live in the middle of the ocean, Jeff Bezos envisions orbiting cities, Srinavasan (a former general partner at Andreessen-Horowitz) wants to create ‘network states’.  It may or may not be a coincidence that a project backed by Thiel, Praxis, is eying Greenland as the place to build a libertarian utopia; or that Trump has appointed as our Ambassador to Denmark—charged with implementing Trump’s demand that Denmark hand Greenland to the US—Mr. Ken Khouri, a co-founder of Paypal along with Thiel. 

These people who want desperately to leave America behind, who think America is a hopeless mess of pinkos and technophobes, are not interested in making America a better place.  They are looking to strip-mine America to get the money and power to realize their techno-libertarian dreams.  Their thinking is as shallow as their self-image is inflated.  In Donald Trump they think they have found a vehicle for their dreams, someone they flatter in public but in private doubtlessly scorn. 

We will see who is using who.  In The Prince, Machiavelli describes the actions of Cesare Borgia, who on conquering Romagna put in charge a cruel man to restore order.  He was understandably deeply unpopular.  After he had ensured Cesare’s rule:   “One morning, Remirro’s body was found cut in two pieces on the piazza at Cesena, with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside it.  The brutality of this spectacle kept the people of the Romagna appeased and stupified.”

Follow the Crypto

Follow the money, political sophisticates have said for decades.  But today, we need to follow not just money, but a particular form of money, cryptocurrency. 

In what follows, I will try to avoid sounding like Charlton Heston, shouting futilely “Soylent Green is people!”  But I think that’s the truth.  The coup of the Silicon Valley billionaires is well-advanced.  That it is taking place in plain sight makes it not less, but more alarming.*

As has been well-documented, Donald Trump was until recently not a fan of the bitcoin mafia.  Only a few years ago, in 2021, he called crypto a ‘scam’ and ‘a disaster waiting to happen.’   In this he was, for once, on target.  There is room for disagreement about the potential value of this artificial ‘currency’, but I am persuaded by people like Paul Krugman and Bill Gates that it is, in fact, a scam, a variation on the classic pyramid scheme.  By this I do not mean that it can be improperly used as a pyramid scheme, but that it is inherently and unavoidably and knowingly a pyramid scheme, designed to make early investors rich by fleecing latecomers, what Gates calls “the Greater Fool theory.” 

In addition it is also, undeniably, a major source of funding for illegal activities ranging from drugs to human trafficking to pornography.  It is a vehicle of choice for celebrities and public figures looking to make a quick buck.   It has been at the center of major scandals, such as the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.  Creating, or ‘mining’, cryptocurrencies requires huge amounts of energy and is a major reason for increases in electricity demand, requiring new generating capacity and greater use of fossil fuels, all over the world.    

But in the last several years Trump has changed his tune.  He has become a full-throated booster, promising to end the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate crypto and make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.” His campaign received huge donations from the crypto industry, which also donated heavily to defeat candidates in House and Senate races perceived as ‘anti-crypto’.  According to the New Yorker, “Pro-crypto donors are responsible for almost half of all corporate donations to pacs in the 2024 election cycle, and the tech industry has become one of the largest corporate donors in the nation. The point of all that money, like the attack on Porter [Representative Kathy Porter of California], has been to draw attention to Silicon Valley’s financial might—and to prove that its leaders are capable of political savagery in order to protect their interests. “It’s a simple message,” the person familiar with Fairshake said. “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we will tear you apart.”

Trump chose a Vice-President, JD Vance, who is close to Silicon Vally crypto enthusiasts, in particular Peter Thiel, who financed his Ohio Senate campaign.  After choosing Vance, NPR reported that “Trump’s Vance pick has drawn praise in crypto circles, with investors hoping for lax regulations of the digital currency. In his latest federal financial disclosure, Vance reported that he owns between $100,000 and $250,000 in Bitcoin.”   After picking Vance Trump quickly gained the backing of crypto entrepreneur Elon Musk and a host of other Silicon Vally crypto investors and backers.  Trump’s new crypto-czar,  Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, is a charter member of Peter Thiel’s “Paypal Mafia,” which includes Elon Musk.  His appointment was welcomed enthusiastically by the crypto industry, according to The Hill.

Trump just announced the creation of a ‘crypto reserve’, where the US Government is directed to buy crypto from five designated vendors, with the coins set aside to supposedly be used in a financial crisis or to pay down government debt.  State governments are moving to allow pension funds and other public organizations to invest in crypto.  This is despite crypto’s notorious volatility and the lack of a mature regulatory regime to safeguard crypto investors.  Why?

Trump’s enthusiasm is partly due to the opportunities crypto offers to make money and to receive donations/bribes anonymously.  The World Liberty Fund gives the Trump family 75% of its revenues.  Controversial businessman Justin Sun recently bought $75 million worth of Liberty tokens—a purchase he publicized on social media.  On February 26 the SEC announced it was dropping its civil fraud case against Sun for manipulating the price of another crypto token.   

Trump is also benefiting from $tRUMP, a ‘memecoin’ which has been marketed to his supporters and could potentially be worth billions of dollars, though investors could take huge losses if Trump decides to cash out.  Trump imitator Javier Milei, the libertarian President of Argentina, is being investigated for fraud after he endorsed a memecoin that rose in value and was then ‘dumped’ by early investors. 

For the Silicon Valley crypto enthusiasts who played a huge role in getting Trump elected, however, crypto is much more than a way to make money.  It is a vehicle for weakening and eventually replacing democratic governance altogether.  Crypto is the opening wedge in a campaign to have private mechanisms replace key government functions. These private mechanisms would respond to market forces and replace outmoded democratic systems.  Of course, they would be shaped not by a majority of citizens with each person having an equal vote, but by those with the most money. 

Here is how Mike Brock, a close follower of Silicon Valley’s ever-morphing ideological landscape, describes it in his recent piece “How Silicon Valley’s Corrupted Libertarianism is Dismantling American Democracy.”

”…figures like Thiel [Peter Thiel, influential reactionary techno-theorist and JD Vance’s former employer and mentor] began to see cryptocurrency not just as a new financial instrument, but as a tool for fundamentally restructuring society. If traditional democracy was hopelessly corrupt, as Yarvin [Curtis Yarvin, a formerly fringe monarchist and anti-democrat blogger who has become influential in tech circles] argued, then perhaps blockchain could enable new forms of governance built on immutable code rather than fallible human judgment. This vision found its perfect technological expression in Bitcoin.

From Yarvin’s early writings during the financial crisis to today’s constitutional crisis, we can trace a clear intellectual evolution. What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them. But the key accelerant in this process was cryptocurrency—it provided both a technological framework and a psychological model for opting out of democratic governance entirely.”

Who is Curtis Yarvin and why does he matter?

 Yarvin is a blogger and programmer whose ideas have gained a lot of traction with people like Thiel,  Musk, Marc Andreesen and other Silicon Valley heavyweights.  JD Vance is a fan.  Yarvin attended Trump’s inauguration and was seen hanging out with various movers and shakers.  This brief summary of his views from a recent piece in the Patreon blog, “The Philosophy Behind Doge:  Curtis Yarvin and the Butterfly Revolution,” makes him sound like the villain in a bad Marvel comic, but it’s pretty much on target:

·       Accelerationism: the belief that capitalism and technology must be massively sped up and intensified to destabilize existing systems, cause a collapse, and ultimately create radical social transformations

·       Techno-Utopianism: the belief that unbridled technology can create the perfect society— at least, for those who control it

·       Monarchism/neo-monarchism: the belief that absolute power should be wielded by a single sovereign

Yarvin has outlined publicly the process for making this happen, which requires a populist who calls openly for concentrating power in the Leader (Trump), and then picks a smart CEO (Musk) to execute the plan.

As we watch Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the federal government, his larger purpose is clear.  He and his fellow billionaires certainly want to reduce government for classic conservative reasons, to reduce their own taxes and weaken regulation and oversight.  But this is not the primary goal.  Musk’s DOGE cuts are minute and will do nothing to meaningfuly lower spending or reduce the deficit, the ostensible reasons.  The real purpose is to gain access to government networks in order to replace existing institutions with proprietary code, AI, and cryptocurrency.  According to Forbes, “Musk has confirmed he wants to put the U.S. Treasury on a blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—including Musk’s pet project dogecoin.”

Trump’s transition team was heavily funded by Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires, according to the New York Times.  The transition operation was responsible for identifying and vetting who would fill key government positions.  The Trump transition was entirely funded by private donors, unlike previous transitions, and Trump has not disclosed who they were despite a pledge to do so.   

A love of ‘efficiency’ and hatred for the messiness and slowness of democracy is the through-line explaining the techno-elites embrace of Trump.  Trump shares with them a contempt for democracy, and is easily manipulated.  He is the ‘useful idiot,’ the battering ram who will accelerate the transition to a new order, designed and run by super-wealthy genius elites.

Scorn for democracy and love of efficiency, we should recall, was the leitmotif of fascism and communism during their heydays in the 1920s and 30s.  The future belonged to centralized, top-down systems that would run rings around the decadent liberal democracies.  The trains would all run on time.  Millions in America and around the world were mesmerized by Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR—great states in the hands of pulverizing leaders who could sweep away opposition and modernize and rationalize everything overnight.   

It is men with this same vision who are now at the throats of the American people.  These are businessmen who have grown fat under the awful democracy they despise, but are now turning on the system that nurtured them.  Unlike in the 1920s, this time, they believe, technology is up to the task.  Crypto is the bright shiny object, but AI is the One Ring to rule them all.  The willingness of Trump to let the techies pursue AI without obstacles and to fund the massive new energy sources required to build advanced AI models was what drew Silicon Valley to his side. 

In a recent Ezra Klein interview with Ben Buchanan, Biden’s top advisor on AI, Klein and Buchanan agreed that radical breakthroughs in AI are coming very soon, probably within the next three years.  We will see something like AGI or Artificial General Intelligence.  If this happens on Trump’s watch, in an Administration stuffed with AI and crypto advocates, we can have no expectation that there will be adequate safeguards or planning to take account of the repercussions.  The people who believe that the correct approach to everything is “move fast and break things” will be in charge. 

These forces are taking over the MAGA movement and have bent Trump to their will.  They will be hard to stop unless America’s leaders and thinkers first wake up to the magnitude of the threat. 

*I recognize the picture I’m painting here may be exaggerated.  Maybe there is no Silicon Valley tech billionaire conspiracy and they all just switched to Trump to get less regulation and because they hate wokeness.  Maybe Musk really just wants to make government more modern and efficient.  Maybe Curtis Yarvin’s thinking is what it seems, a wild sideshow, not central to how the Thiels and Musks really think.  Maybe AI isn’t on the verge of a breakthrough to AGI or anywhere close to being able to run big public agencies.  Maybe Trump plans to dump Musk and his brethren after they finish their dirty work.  It’s always possible to connect the dots in a misleading way.  I would say, though, that there is enough information pointing in the same direction to demand we pay attention.

Three-and-a Half Overlapping Forces

The Trump administration can now be seen to consist of three distinct but overlapping forces.  What they have in common are two things:  a rejection of democracy, and a commitment to regime change here in America and around the world.  They are aided by support, or at least acquiescence, from the traditional business class.

First is Trump himself and the personality cult that engulfs a large chunk of his supporters.  Trump is an extreme narcissist who cannot distinguish between reality and what he wants reality to be.  He believes he deserves to rule because he is Trump; no other reason is required.  He has made it crystal clear that he accepts democracy if and only if he wins, i.e. he does not accept it. 

Trump’s idea of the proper regime does not extend beyond one where he rules, and everyone else bends to him.  We can call this a ‘personalistic’ regime, or a ‘cult of personality’, or whatever.  It is a frequently observed way of ruling that Americans used to guffaw at when we saw it in Africa or Latin America or Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China, but which many Americans now think is needed here.  

Some degree of narcissism is expected in anyone who aspires to lead, but extreme versions frequently win out precisely because of their absolute faith in themselves and their right to rule. This pathological egotism, which most of us would run from in anyone we met in our personal life, convinces many people from a distance that this is a ‘real leader.’

The advantage of coalescing around a person rather than an idea or a program is that it papers over disagreements.  The disadvantage is that it subjects society to the whims of the ruler, whose idiosyncratic preferences are unchallengable.  In the extreme cases this results in gas chambers and Cultural Revolutions.  In Trump’s case it is more likely to result in widespread corruption, a permanent erosion of the rule-of-law, and the loss of America’s standing in the world.   Bad enough, but we should prepare for worse: “appetite comes with eating.”

Second we have right-wing ideologues, such as Vice-President Vance and Steve Bannon and the scribblers at the Claremont Institute.  These people reject democracy because they believe the proper regime type is nationalist/fundamentalist rule, grounded not in majority preferences or the genuinely liberal principles of America’s founding, but in some mystical, historical ‘true America’ that must be rediscovered and restored.   This mystical America embodies a crabbed version of Christianity, a cherry-picked set of  ‘European’ or ‘Western’ values, deep suspicion of science and professional expertise, and, not coincidentally, rule by white men.  If the democratic process fails to uphold the correct regime, so much the worse for democracy.

The nationalist ideologues see Trump as the vehicle for their program, which requires foisting unpopular ideas onto an unsuspecting public.  Their models for the best state are Hungary, or even Russia, where speech is controlled, political opposition is suppressed, and the state promotes ‘traditional’ moral and religious values.  Most Americans don’t want this, so the ideologues try to pretend they are populists acting on behalf of ‘the people’—meaning of course the ‘real people,’ not those liberals who are communists and traitors.

They are in fact plotting to take control of the state to promote their undemocratic preferences.  Strengthening the executive to carry out this plot has been a longstanding goal.  To do this they need scapegoats, so issues that could with a small amount of good-will be resolved by negotiation and compromise—DEI, transgender athletes, and dog-eating immigrants—have been whipped up as a smokescreen to divert attention.

Third, and most recently, we have the billionaire technocrats.  Elon Musk is at the forefront, but followed closely by other Silicon Valley titans.  These people reject democracy on familiar Randian grounds—the naturally best and brightest should rule, without interference from the grubby masses.   

What Musk seems to have done is conduct a friendly takeover of Trump (whose worship of money and rich people makes him highly susceptible to manipulation) in order to reshape government, replacing civil servants and Congressional direction with AI.  Instead of the Constitution and its antiquated institutions, we should give authority to automated systems in the name of efficiency.  These will be supplied—surprise—by Musk and his peers, for boatloads of money.  This will supposedly allow us to save money while bypassing or ignoring any annoying restrictions imposed by elected officials and the people behind them. 

Implementing this model will give our genius technocrats free rein to reshape government to prioritize the unchecked development of new technologies, designed to enrich and empower the genius technocrats.  They want government to get out of the way—actually, to throw money at them—as they pursue their dreams of living forever, going to Mars, and accelerating the wholesale replacement of human beings by AI and robots.

These three forces are joined uneasily to another more familiar force, the wealthy 1%, which has labored for decades to direct the Republican Party towards low taxes, weak regulation, and the maximum leeway to use money to influence politics (“corporations are people”).  Weakening the state is a longstanding conservative goal that partially aligns with Trump’s preferences; while the 1% wants a state less able to stand up to the private sector, Trump wants a state stripped of any autonomy that can serve as an untrammeled vehicle for his will.   

It would be going too far to say these ‘traditional Republicans’ want a full-scale change of regime.  What most want is leeway to pursue their private business interests.  But what matters is that they have capitulated to Trump, with only token resistance.  Despite a variety of unpleasant Trump policy preferences, like tariffs and mass deportations, there is no longer any opposition.  Undermining the rule of law and creating a kleptocracy would seem to run against the self-interest of the business class, but the holy grails of lower taxes and weaker government are too potent.

Ironically the traditional 1%, which labored tirelessly to make it as easy as possible to buy politicians, has now been outflanked by people with even more money.  The world’s richest man can exercise dominance by threatening to fund primary candidates, forcing elected officials to bow down to Trump’s most unqualified, flame-throwing loyalists.   Business interests that would prefer more stability and less drama are powerless.

The threat to democracy was of course often pointed out in the 2024 election campaign, but failed to move enough voters, who were more concerned about the price of eggs.  They have, sadly, sold their birthrights for a mess of pottage.  I believe nevertheless that many Americans would turn around, in time, once they see what is being done.   

Whether we have time is the question.  The three forces are united for now in a strategy to move very fast and solidify control before opposition is able to coalesce.  Once Cabinet positions and thousands of subordinate posts are filled with loyalists, including in the armed forces, the FBI, and the Intelligence Community, resistance may be futile. It is vital to throw as much sand in the gears as possible.

(For a slightly different but similar analysis, I recommend this piece by Dani Rodrik:  “The Coming Showdown in Trumpworld”.  Rodrik emphasizes the likelihood that the different forces will start fighting one another; the question is what will happen then.  But I agree with his conclusion that no matter who wins, the average American will be the loser.)