20.03.2025
Divine right of CEOs
What explains the dominance of the ‘tech right’? Paul Demarty traces the ideological evolution of the Silicon Valley oligarchs from new-age woo to the hard right
The early days of the second Donald Trump administration have brought unusual scrutiny to a broad ideological tendency known as the ‘tech right’.
Already, during the lame duck period, there was the initial flurry of interest over the new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE), to be run by Elon Musk and the similarly-minded Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk is unambiguously a product of the American tech industry, who has recently swerved hard to the far right, while Ramaswamy’s background is more in pharmaceuticals (and, let us say, not spotless), but he is very much plugged in to the California tech elite. (Alas, he was offloaded from DOGE after ill-advised comments about American culture caused a great brouhaha in the Trump camp.)
Above all, vice-president JD Vance was, until recently, best known for his ‘rags to riches’ memoir, Hillbilly elegy. The ‘riches’ part consisted of him becoming a partner at a venture capital firm and a protege of Peter Thiel. Thiel is the most ideologically driven of the Silicon Valley billionaires and has been a significant presence on the rightward fringes of American politics for decades. For a long time he seemed like an outlier; the great and the good of Silicon Valley largely backed neoliberal Democrats for national office, and their cosmopolitan, globe-spanning businesses chafed awkwardly with the nativist passions stirred up by Trump’s first campaign.
Alongside Trump
But, come January 20 of this year, one could hardly miss the ranks of tech billionaires prominently placed at Trump’s inauguration ceremony - from Musk himself to new converts like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. It was, at last, possible to see the Thiel worldview as something more than a mere individual hobby-horse, but rather an intelligible ideology for a class fraction like the Valley oligarchs. The story of this ideology is interesting, not merely because it is a major player in the world of Trump 2.0, but because it illustrates something of how ideologies fit into historical situations.
Though there are many variants, the core of this ideology is that human progress is to be measured in essentially technological terms; that technological progress is advanced by the heroic exertions of great inventors and entrepreneurs; and, crucially, that democratic political institutions are a fetter on the development of new technology so conceived. The project is to directly subordinate the state to the tech oligarchy, either by a strategy of ‘secession’ - the creation of the so-called ‘network state’ that organises economic and armed force orthogonally to the existing state system - or by direct takeover, as perhaps seems to be happening in America.
The story of how this ideology became a plausible contestant in contemporary high politics is in part the story of how it came to be. Silicon Valley has always been an ideologically fecund place, by the usual standards of capitalist industrial centres. Stewart Brand, the 60s counterculture icon, became an unlikely guru to many of the key figures in the early days of personal computing in the following decade. Brand published the Whole earth catalog, which promoted a kind of radical ideology of self-sufficiency permeated by new-age woo; but before long he was collaborating with Douglas Engelbart on the famous ‘mother of all demos’, which showed off extremely rough early versions of everything from the computer mouse to the web, which went on to shape the first graphical user interfaces at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (better known as Xerox PARC) and then Apple.
Brand’s thinking was increasingly techno-utopian, but generally shaped by his fundamental political commitments to environmentalism and LSD-tinged global harmony guff. The libertarian side of his worldview, however, was to prove more adaptable in the 1980s, as Reaganism swept into power. Self-reliance was increasingly to be grabbed back from the government. Such, after all, was the sense of Ridley Scott’s famous 1984-themed advert for the Apple Macintosh. (Apple’s Steve Jobs, of course, had been a disciple of Brand, and remained so for the rest of his life.)
The explosive success of the personal computer in the 1980s, and the opening of the internet to the general public in the 1990s, had the effect of massively increasingly the sheer size - in terms of numbers employed - of the tech industry. One follow-on effect of this was the development of a distinct ideological culture among the technical professionals who staffed these businesses. It was, characteristically, a highly libertarian environment. Paranoia about spies and feds abounded. Members of the tribe who found themselves on the wrong side of the law - the hacker, Kevin Mitnick, for example - became causes célèbres. In terms of class position, the software and hardware engineers of the 90s and 2000s were more or less identical to the other highly-salaried professions (lawyers, financial analysts, etc).
Yet their dominant political outlooks - perhaps because these were early adopters of unorthodox proto-social-media like Usenet and IRC - were idiosyncratic, compared to the pretty mainstream liberalism and conservatism to be found on Wall Street. So were their modes of expression, influenced by the science fiction and fantasy literature that then, before The matrix and Harry Potter and Lord of the rings films, remained somewhat stigmatised as sad and geeky.
It was during this time, in the mid-to-late 1990s, that Thiel made his fortune, famously bringing PayPal to the public markets and making out like a bandit (knifing Elon Musk in the back in the process). Thiel is a curious hybrid. Financier he may have been, but like the stereotypical programmer of those days, he had spent more than a little time poring over Tolkien and rolling dice in games of Dungeons and dragons. Yet he had also shown a more serious interest in the humanities from his college days, where he eagerly attended lectures by the idiosyncratic French philosopher, René Girard. Girard explains human societies by means of the idea of mimetic desire - of wanting what others have - which, universalised, leads inevitably to violence. Human societies therefore adopt practices of propitiatory sacrifice to place these urges under cultic regulation.
Thiel’s view of the human condition, then, was rather less sunny than Brand’s. As with all such misanthropic pessimisms, however, Thiel’s mysteriously stopped at his own doorstep, and those of his fellow tech-business Übermenschen. As with Ayn Rand’s heroes, John Galt and Howard Roark, everything depended upon the self-realisation of these men, however little the ungrateful mob might appreciate it. By 2009, per a notorious essay, still primarily identifying himself as a libertarian, he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible” - a situation he blamed on “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women”.1
His solution at that time was ‘seasteading’ - basically building libertarian utopias in international waters (a sort of floating Galt’s Gulch). But he has always been open to other ideas, and the anti-democratic thrust of Thielism was to be taken in far darker directions by others associated with him, like the monarchist ‘neo-reactionary’, Curtis Yarvin (long-time pen name: ‘Mencius Moldbug’) and an expanding cast of believers in biological racism. Also lurking in the background here is the former libertine-leftist philosopher, Nick Land - one of the pioneers of so-called accelerationism (the idea that it is imperative that capitalist development be sped up in order to hasten … well, either the revolution or the counterrevolution, depending on one’s political priors). The appeal of accelerationism to tech business people, especially in its reactionary-authoritarian form, is clear enough.
I have emphasised the longer-term roots of all this madness because, for those not given to online political coprology, it could seem that it all just appeared overnight. That is because Silicon Valley was just as much subject to corporate ‘diversity’ ideology as any other industry in the decade beginning, roughly, in 2013. The Obama administration cosied up to tech oligarchs, and largely reaped the rewards. Barring the most obviously Thiel-affiliated enterprises like Palantir, corporate culture in Silicon Valley and its imitators became cartoonishly liberal.
Everyone
If we ask why, suddenly, everyone - from venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen to tycoons like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos - was prepared to switch teams (we leave aside Elon Musk for now, since his brain truly seems to have been pickled), we must view it as opportunism. There are a few elements - first of all the limits imposed by the official liberalism of the ‘great awokening’ era. This tended to disrupt the functioning of tech companies, in particular the ‘hyperscaler’ cloud computing vendors like AWS and Google Cloud, who faced workforce rebellions when they competed for juicy contracts at the pointy end of the US state apparatus - the CIA, Immigration and Custom Enforcement, etc.
This need not have made much impact outside the company offices, but the major social networks became increasingly liable to campaigns for speech controls and, after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, increasingly suborned by state agencies, leading to increasingly assertive action against ‘big tech’ on the part of the Republican right.
On top of that, the Biden administration undertook far more assertive anti-trust enforcement than had been the case since before the Reagan years - a serious problem for venture capitalists especially, who typically cash out by selling their companies on to larger ones. There was, finally, the problem that Biden was increasingly obviously going to lose his re-election, and that the victor was going to be - equally obviously - the vengeful, egoistic, but somewhat malleable Donald J Trump.
Mere opportunism would not be good enough, however, since, after all, these men really do believe that they are the hinge on which history turns. There had to be a larger project, something visionary. And so each has affixed himself to one or another variant of the tech-right, divine-right-of-CEOs ideology.
Like all ideologies, this one is both rooted in reality and false. It is rooted in the reality that the capitalist workplace is a dictatorship: the worker is free to enter into any contract of employment, but, without meaningful protection from either the political state or organs of defence like trade unions, that contract is likely to constrain her. Like the navy pressgangers conning young men into accepting the ‘king’s shilling’ before stealing them away to sea, the ordinary course of capitalist employment makes a mockery of the freedom of labour. In the factory (or the office, or on the cargo ship) management has the same prerogatives as the officer corps in an army. The liberty of the capitalist is the liberty to enslave - if not always de jure. It is thus perfectly intelligible that a capitalist might come to see his social role as heroic (in the Carlylean or Nietzschean sense) as that of a Napoleon or a Barbarossa.
It is false because, in the end, capitalism needs the very state that these people suppose themselves to be destroying in the name of the ‘network state’. Suppose we take the tech-right privatisation agenda to its logical conclusion - Palantir fills in for the CIA, Anduril for the Department of Defense’s DARPA, and so on - the result would be either generalised warlordism and attendant technological collapse (as supply chains cease to support all the hi-tech hardware), or the transformation of the victorious warlord regime into a new state in the old-fashioned sense, that issues currency, fights wars and throws you in jail if you don’t pay your taxes. Either tech-rightism surrenders the tech or it surrenders the rightism; on the road to such defeat, who knows how much blood might be spilled?
The lesson of the rise of the tech right, then, is not that we will get the promised dystopia, but that the ideological crisis of post-liberal capitalism has yet to be decided. And, of course, we have every interest in not leaving our rulers to decide amongst themselves.