On July 25, 2024, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for the presidential election in the United States, selected as his running mate 39-year-old senator JD Vance. It was in some ways a strange pick: many believed Trump might need to pick a running mate who would appeal to some of the demographics he was himself not popular with, such as women and minorities. Instead, he chose Vance, a middle-aged white male with some extreme views about women and minorities, who came with very little political experience (having only been first elected to the US Senate in 2022), and who had only just a few years before made clear his disdain for Trump, suggesting that he might be “America’s Hitler”.
However, once you start digging into why Vance might have been selected as Trump’s possible vice-president, and the people behind the push for him to be there, a whole landscape of weirdness comes into view – one inhabited by fringe political philosophies as well as some of the richest people to have ever walked the Earth. But if Trump manages to win the presidency in November 2024, those people and their fringe philosophy will soon enough be in control of the most powerful country on the planet, and could perhaps transform the world into something entirely new – but not for the better.
The Technocrats
On October 8, 1940 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested an individual, J.N. Haldeman, in Vancouver on a charge of “membership in an illegal organization“. The illegal organization that Haldeman was part of was ‘Technocracy Incorporated’, an influential faction of a larger ideology known as the technocracy movement.
The movement, which rose in popularity during the 1930s, proposed that modern societies should bin representative democracy, and instead directly appoint scientists and engineers who would manage nations with rationality and technical expertise, which would supposedly lead to a new utopian age.
One of the leading lights of the technocratic movement – and founder of the group Haldeman was a part of, Technocracy Incorporated – was engineer Howard Scott. His vision for technocracy – in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression – included a major change to the way economies worked:
At the core of Scott’s vision was “an energy theory of value”. Since the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned “that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy”, and that society could be designed more efficiently by using an energy metric instead of a monetary metric (energy certificates or ‘energy accounting’).
Technocracy Inc. officials wore a uniform, consisting of a “well-tailored double-breasted suit, gray shirt, and blue necktie, with a monad insignia on the lapel”, and its members saluted Scott in public.
However, the movement soon waned, not least due to its opposition to Canadian involvement in World War II. As a consequence, Technocracy Incorporated was declared an illegal organization, thus leading to the arrest of J.N. Haldeman, who was the head of the regional branch.
Haldeman died in a plane crash in January 1974, just two and a half years after his daughter Maye had given birth to his grandson, Elon Musk.
The PayPal Mafia
Fast forward to 2024, and Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world (perhaps in all of human history) – worth around $240 billion at the time of writing – and heading up world-leading companies built on cutting edge science and engineering including Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), and SpaceX. He has also planted his flag firmly in the political camp of Donald Trump, openly endorsing him for president. And with his flag comes his rather plump piggy bank, offering head-spinning amounts of money to back the campaign. Well, at least if Trump does what Musk wants him to do.
So it doesn’t seem coincidental that just a week after his endorsement, Musk – along with another billionaire, David Sacks – pushed for, and subsequently ‘received’, JD Vance as Trump’s vice-presidential candidate pick. This helps to explain the ‘weird’ choice of Vance as his running mate – the Trump campaign had been running low on funds in the first half of the year, and then some ‘angel investors’ from the tech industry offered access to their very, very deep pockets – on the condition that they got their man in the #2 position.
Elon Musk and David Sacks both originally made their fortunes some 25 years ago through their involvement in the early years of the online payment website PayPal – along with a number of other individuals (many of whom are also now billionaires and still involved in the tech industry) who are often referred to collectively as the ‘PayPal Mafia‘. Apart from Musk and Sacks, individuals from this group went on to found companies such as YouTube, LinkedIn and Yelp, as well as investing in fledgling companies that would go on to become corporate behemoths, such as Facebook.
Perhaps the most important individual from the ‘PayPal Mafia’ however, at least in terms of Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate, is Peter Thiel (front left of the image above). Apart from his status within the PayPal mafia, Thiel also wields considerable influence as an early mentor to two wunderkind who now stand atop the technology ladder: Meta/Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI founder Sam Altman. But it may be a third protege, JD Vance, that turns out to be Thiel’s trump card (no pun intended): because while Elon Musk and David Sacks may have been the ones that the media reported as pushing JD Vance to Trump, Peter Thiel metaphorically owns him. When Vance first announced his run for the U.S. Senate in 2022, Thiel dropped $10 million into a Super PAC supporting him, and also chaperoned Vance to a personal dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. But Thiel’s ties to Vance go much further back.
In 2011, while a student at Yale Law School, Vance heard Thiel give a speech in which he called for smart young people to come work in tech, and was inspired enough to email him directly afterward (in Vance’s words, Thiel’s speech was “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School”). Thiel invited him to move to San Francisco, where Vance took up a job at Mithril Capital, one of Thiel’s companies. When Vance later moved back to Ohio and started his own fund, Narya Capital, Thiel was one of the original investors providing funds.
It’s worth noting a subtle nod of the head to Thiel here that may demonstrate the depth of Vance’s fealty to Thiel – Vance’s fund ‘Narya’ is a name taken from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings fantasy saga. Thiel is a super-fan of Tolkien – once bragging that he’d memorized the entirety of the book series – and as a consequence has used names from it for a number of his companies, such as Mithril Capital and Palantir. Vance seems to have ‘paid tribute’ to his mentor by naming his company in the same way.
The Dark Enlightenment
Thiel and Vance both have another influence though: around 2007 a number of individuals gave birth to a far-right ideology that is referred to as the neoreactionary movement (abbreviated to NRx), sometimes also referred to as the ‘Dark Enlightenment‘. While it has a broad number of views, one of those is that – quite simply – democracy is a failed system of government. As one of its founders, Curtis Yarvin (also known under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’) has stated: “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”
Yarvin’s remedy for America is for a Caesar-like figure to take power, “retire all government employees” (a strategy he refers to by the acronym RAGE) and replace them with their own ‘yes men’, and for the system to be run like a corporate start-up, with an all-powerful CEO calling the shots.
Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote in Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.
Yarvin states in Patchwork that the power of the ‘proprietor’/CEO of each realm would be absolute. Using a newly undemocratized San Francisco as an example, he notes that they would “exercise undivided sovereignty over San Francisco. You have no constraint. Your residents are as ants in your kitchen… Since San Francisco is not an Islamic state, it does not ask its residents to agree that their hand will be cut off if they steal. But it could.”
Furthermore, Yarvin says that each realm would have “Orwellian powers of observation and action”, in which all residents are “genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
(Some of Yarvin’s other ideas include that humans have genetic differences that cause some groups to be “more suited to mastery”, while others – including Africans – were “more suited to slavery”. So…yeah.)
Thiel and Vance are friends with, and heavily influenced by Yarvin, and have fully embraced the philosophies of the Dark Enlightenment (Thiel biographer Max Chafkin described Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” for the network of Thiel-connected VCs and tycoons often referred to as the ‘Thielverse’). This influence is evident when we hear that Thiel has stated that he no longer believes “that freedom and democracy are compatible” (because, “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”).
Meanwhile, Vance has said that the advice he’d give to Trump upon being elected would be:
“Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say” — he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order — “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Vance’s views are straight out of Yarvin’s playbook, from his suggestion of replacing government employees with his own ‘yes men’ (Yarvin’s ‘RAGE’ ), to the need for a new Caesar/dictator to take control.
Furthermore, Yarvin’s patchworks fit right in with a long-held desire of Thiel’s – and a lot of other libertarians of his ilk – to live by their own rules (that is, without government regulation and taxes), in autonomous zones of some sort. In 2009, Thiel put forward what he saw as the possibilities for locations that would offer a new life of freedom, from cyberspace to actual space:
Cyberspace…In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order. The limitation of the Internet is that these new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more imaginary than real.
Outer space…Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space.
Seasteading…Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans. To my mind, the questions about whether people will live there (answer: enough will) are secondary to the questions about whether seasteading technology is imminent. From my vantage point, the technology involved is more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel.
Thiel has invested in all three of these ‘freedom locations’ (via, for example, Facebook, SpaceX, and The Seasteading Institute respectively). But Yarvin’s model offered something new to Thiel – the literal breakdown of existing, modern democracies into corporate-controlled autonomous zones.
Thiel later provided seed capital to the tune of $1.1 million for a company Curtis Yarvin founded in 2013, Tlön Corp. Rather than taking the name for his company from Tolkien, however, Yarvin borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges. As Corey Pein notes in his book Live Work Work Work Die:
The name Tlön referenced a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which “a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers… directed by an obscure man of genius” built a “brave new world” that forced old cultures and countries into extinction.”
The crossovers with the previous century’s technocratic movement are obvious. As is a petition created in 2014 at the White House website by Google engineer, Curtis Yarvin-fan (and Occupy Wall Street co-founder) Justine Tunney, which proposed three points for a national referendum:
- Retire all government employees with full pensions.
- Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
- Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
As a prescient 2013 TechCrunch article on the neoreactionary movement noted:
You can see that a certain set of ideas are spreading through out the startup scene… It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world.
Another prescient article at The Baffler (from 2014) hit the nail on the head:
Neoreactionaries are explicitly courting wealthy elites in the tech sector as the most receptive and influential audience. Why bother with mass appeal, when you’re rebuilding the ancien régime?
The New Technocrats
A decade on from the TechCrunch and Baffler articles, and it now feels like there are neoreactionaries everywhere in the tech industry. However, perhaps the most prominent, and influential, is Balaji Srinivasan.
Srinivasan has been CTO of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, and a general partner at the leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is also another member of the Thielverse: when Donald Trump won the Presidency in 2016, Thiel (who was in favour with Trump as one of his few financial backers leading into the election) put forward Srinivasan’s name as a candidate to lead the FDA in the new administration. Both Thiel and Srinivasan disapproved of the FDA’s regulations and trials for new drugs: “For every thalidomide, many dead from slowed approvals,” Srinivasan once tweeted (and deleted while under consideration for the gig). Thankfully, Trump rejected Thiel’s suggestion.
As far back as 2013, Srinivasan was promoting “a society run by Silicon Valley”, and citing tech VCs’ and CEOs’ interest in ‘exiting’ from US democracy and forming their own fiefdoms.
Larry Page for example wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation… Marc Andreessen: “the world is going to see an explosion of countries in the years ahead.” Two of the founders of PayPal – Peter Thiel is into seasteading, and Elon Musk wants to build a Mars colony.
Srinivasan also invested in a certain company along with Peter Thiel – Curtis Yarvin’s Tlön. This connection was not coincidental – perhaps more than anyone else, Srinivasan has taken Yarvin’s ideas of ‘patchworks’ and run with them, actively promoting for many years now the creation of what he has called ‘Network States‘: communities that are at first digital, being formed online, which then eventually crowd-fund resources to, as a group, buy into or build autonomous cities and states.
Srinivasan identifies the pioneers who would begin creating these new Network State societies as the ‘Gray Tribe’: intelligent people, mostly in tech, who have moved beyond America’s traditional Red and Blue political tribes and want to create a new political system…but nevertheless remain in alignment with the Reds, while being openly hostile toward Blues. He explained all of this in a rambling 4 hour podcast interview, in which he raised some truly fascist-style methods in literally taking control of San Francisco:
You have a foothold of private property and you have a group membership of Gray tribe…you also issue t-shirts [that are] gray color…you fence off a street and make clear that it’s under Gray control.
…Every week or every month you have a policeman’s banquet. All Gray-sympathetic policemen are allowed to come to this banquet. Every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, sibling, whatever should get a job at a tech company in security, and again you tap the Gray root network. You also do things like you donate to the policeman’s benevolent Union or what have you, right, and Grays publicly donate – they don’t just donate, they tweet out that they donate, okay? You start to actually merge the Gray and police social networks.
What you also do is all of the kind of military stuff that tech is funding – so Palantir, Anduril [ a military tech company set up by another Peter Thiel protege, Palmer Luckey…and yes, that is another Lord of the Rings reference]. You bring those folks in as speakers and the policemen can look at this stuff and they love that, right?
A huge win would be a great ‘Gray pride’ parade with 50,000 Grays, that would be massive, that would start to say “WHOSE STREETS, OUR STREETS”….you have the Bitcoin parade, you have the drones flying overhead in formation…you have the police at the Gray Pride Parade, they’re flying the Anduril drones…ideally you even design the police uniforms.
(It’s interesting to note that the gray shirt proposed by Srinivasan echoes the gray-shirted uniform of the Technocracy movement from almost a century previous.)
“Reds should be welcome” in this new Gray-ruled San Francisco, Srinivasan says, but “no Blue should be welcome there.” Furthermore, he says, movies of “Blue abuses” should be shown to residents. He compares these moves to the deNazification of Germany after the Second World War.
Despite how batshit insane and fascist in tone it all may sound, Srinivasan’s Network State following has grown in recent years – so much so that a yearly conference is now held to discuss the idea, featuring some of the biggest names in various tech industry areas such as crypto and venture capitalism.
At the conference, Srinivasan has explicitly laid out the plan for achieving “that seemingly impossible thing of building a new country”. Network Staters must first create, he said, a “parallel establishment”. By this he means two things – (1) creating ‘parallel societies’ (both online, and in the real world e.g. from tech ‘communes’ to ‘charter cities’), and (2) creating ‘parallel institutions’ in media, education, law, finance and science (to take over from the ‘legacy’ institutions of the NYT, Harvard University, the US dollar etc – those familiar with neoreactionary views will likely recognize Srinivasan’s “legacy institutions” as a parallel of ‘The Cathedral’). The new Network State institutions “exist alongside the legacy in parallel; they’re gaining strength, they’re pulling away users, until they become the new thing.”
The Network Staters even explicitly note that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now ‘X’) was an example of the creation of a parallel institution by the technocrats to challenge legacy media (which makes sense of all of Musk’s tweets deriding the NYT and others in the past couple of years). Talking to Srinivasan, Garry Tan – CEO of tech venture capital behemoth Y Combinator (and surprise, surprise, formerly of Peter Thiel’s Palantir) – discussed how the political landscape of San Francisco was already being transformed as per the Network State vision. Not only has Tan spearheaded a takeover of San Francisco’s local government by big tech through financial means, but he also noted Musk’s contribution to taking power through non-democratic means:
What’s next for San Francisco? We’ve stated the problem, we’ve outlined the political machine, and we’ve talked about how we’ve replaced some pieces of that political machine. Specifically, we have a parallel media now, with Elon’s Twitter, or X. Getting a parallel media was a key piece, and it wasn’t done through voting.
…that’s a possible recipe for reforming San Francisco, and building the alternative tech political machine. And if it works in SF, it will work everywhere…this is just getting started.”
(It is perhaps worth remembering that Yarvin’s original example for his ‘patchworks’ was a takeover of San Francisco.)
Similarly, Peter Thiel has acknowledged that the creation of PayPal a quarter of a century ago was intended to give birth to a parallel institution for finance.
[T]he great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms…I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.
…The founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were.
While PayPal has now itself largely become a part of the legacy financial system, it’s not difficult to see how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have taken its place as the ‘parallel institution’ for finance – so it is no surprise to learn that crypto-tycoons are all in on the Network State idea: Ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin was one of the speakers at Srinivasan’s Network State conference, and the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, has also embraced the idea.
It is therefore worth noting that the Trump campaign has in recent months pivoted hard to cryptocurrency. Despite previously being against it, labeling it as “a scam against the dollar”, in July Trump was suddenly the marquee speaker at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, at which he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital” of the world.
And cryptocurrency is not the only ‘parallel institution’ that the Trump campaign is backing – they have also proposed up to 10 ‘freedom cities’ on federally owned land. As already discussed, this meshes closely with the neoreactionary and Network State ideologies, and their related projects currently in development:
Balaji’s concept of the Network State builds on the idea of “charter cities”, urban areas that constitute a special economic zone, similar to free ports. There are several such projects under construction around the world, including in Nigeria and Zambia. At a recent rally in Las Vegas, Donald Trump promised that, if elected in November, he would free up federal land in Nevada to “create special new zones with ultra-low taxes and ultra-low regulation”, to attract new industries, build affordable housing and create jobs. The plan would, he said, revive “the frontier spirit and the American dream”.
Other similar projects are already underway beyond the United States. There is Zuzalu, a ‘pop-up city’ on the Mediterranean created by Vitalik Buterin (designer of the cryptocurrency Ethereum) that directly cites Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State as inspiration (Buterin also spoke at the recent Network State conference).
Meanwhile, Próspera is a private tech city in Honduras that “markets itself as a libertarian paradise with low taxes and pro-bitcoin policies,” as well as little regulation around biomedical technologies. One of Próspera’s funders is Pronomos Capital, which is backed by (surprise!) Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, advised by Balaji Srinivasan, and founded by Patri Friedman – who originally founded The Seasteading Institute, which Thiel also previously supported in his quest for a new residence free of government interference.
(The most recently elected Honduran government is however fighting to overturn the creation of the special zones by the previous government – but Próspera has now filed a $10.7 billion lawsuit against them in response.)
Próspera is just one of a number of ‘charter cities’ that is being funded by Pronomos Capital though. Other locations include Africa, South Asia and Palau. One in particular, however, seems to have star status. Praxis – which is funded by Thiel, Srinivasan, Andreessen, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the Winklevoss twins, and Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale (another of the ‘PayPal mafia’) – aims to be, as per Balaji Srinivasan’s playbook, “built on the Internet” first, and then manifested in the physical world through funding – the “first Network State”.
The website for Praxis doesn’t mince words, calling itself “The Next America” and promising the dream of “permissive regulation” to all its tech-bro funders. It has an application for citizenship, its very own weird cult-like promotional video, and has just claimed to have raised $525 million in financing to build the physical city.
As pointed out by journalist Gil Duran, last month it published a manifesto titled “The Network State: Crypto’s End Game“, which explicitly heralded the rise of Network States as modern democracies crumble: “As local communities dissolve and Nation States stumble, Network States will ascend. The next global superpower will be a Network State.”
It is little surprise then to see the influence that sits behind it all: a recent BBC investigation noted that Praxis had “a reputation for edginess”, due to its roots in the neoreactionary movement: “[Praxis] hosted legendary parties: people spoke of candle-lit soirees in giant Manhattan loft spaces, where awkward computer coders mixed with hipster models and figures from the “Dark Enlightenment” – people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates a totalitarian future in which the world is ruled by corporate “monarchs”.”
Furthermore, an internal company branding guide reviewed by the New York Times revealed some concerning philosophies that seem to resonate with some of the racist/eugenic overtones of certain neoreactionary identities:
The guide denounces “enemies of vitality,” who “reject what they consider the optional ‘European beauty standards.” It goes on to extol “traditional, European/Western beauty standards on which the civilized world, at its best points, has always found success.” Beauty, here, connotes proper breeding: “In humans, beauty implies a number of things — namely that two people, themselves of beauty, formed a union to create more beautiful life,” it reads.
“It’s basically a colonial endeavor that they’re involved in,” Sarah Moser, a geography professor at McGill University who specializes in new cities, told The Daily Beast. “They want to have a boys-only treehouse where they can go and do their bad-boy stuff and then come back to civilization,” she added. “They’re little boys who don’t want anyone to be the boss of them.”
As Gil Duran noted in his article for The New Republic, the basic strategy of the billionaire/neoreactionary funders backing these charter city ideas is:
Work with governments to create regulation-free, privately owned territories that, over time, will negotiate for full sovereignty (or file massive lawsuits against their host governments, if the experience of Honduras is any indication).
But now, with Trump beholden to them for funding his campaign, and their own man J.D. Vance just a heartbeat away from taking over the presidency himself if Trump wins the election, perhaps these neoreactionary tech billionaires will have no constraints, no-one to answer to, or any need to work within the system or otherwise exit it – and they will be free to enact their anti-democratic vision upon the United States itself.
Disrupting Democracy
Less than a century on from the technocratic takeover envisioned by Elon Musk’s grandfather, today’s technology billionaires stand on the cusp of making it a reality. Though, it should be pointed out, to some degree it won’t precisely be ‘rule by scientists and engineers’, as more than a few of those tech billionaires are drop-outs or business/law degree graduates. As much as they might see themselves as tech visionaries, a lot of them are simply just ruthless businessmen who have stood on the back of brilliant scientists and engineers to achieve their success.
‘Smart people’ are often the dumbest people you’ll ever meet, and in researching this article – watching numerous podcast and video interviews in which these ‘tech visionaries’ featured, or reading their writings – I discovered that many of these supposedly incredibly smart people are the dumbest motherfuckers you’d ever meet, with zero ability for introspection or emotional intelligence.
And while most of them would probably describe their political philosophy as ‘libertarian’, a little digging usually found that the personal freedom they supposedly support is typically reserved for themselves and their business strategies alone – not everyone else. As Robert Anton Wilson was said to have once clarified when asked about his own libertarian philosophy: “I am not that kind of libertarian, really; I don’t hate poor people”.
So Peter Thiel can say he’s a libertarian, while being the co-founder of Palantir, one of the modern world’s most powerful companies in the area of personal surveillance and monitoring, as well as funding the financial destruction of media outlet Gawker because they posted stories about him that he didn’t like. Or Elon Musk can say he is a “free speech absolutist”, but suspend journalists from Twitter/X when the subject of that free speech is him.
These tech bros live under the delusion that they are brilliant, rather than just fortunate, and should thus rule over the rest of us less-intelligent people. And as Anil Dash has remarked, “it’s important to remember, nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life.” These are not, therefore, people that you want with power and control over the rest of us. There’s a certain amount of sociopathy (possibly ranging to psychopathy) involved with a lot of these individuals – they are not in any way going to be benevolent, empathetic overlords.
Furthermore, as Dash notes:
If you have access to a billionaire (and billionaires all have access to each other, because it suits their ego to think of each other as peers), most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism, and so they push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. “I must be smart, look how rich I am.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has a similar view of of the growing extremism of tech billionaires, warning that “it’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble.”
They also, it should be noted, have a really low opinion of people who they see as lacking in intellect. Which makes their getting in bed with Donald Trump fascinating, as you can only imagine the contempt with which they would speak about him behind closed doors (even Vance himself has previously gone on record multiple times as a ‘never-Trumper’). The relationship is one of pure convenience for them, as he is the candidate they see as being most malleable to their cause. As Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie has stated, “They see Trump as a useful idiot… He’s somebody who’ll do what they want.”
Chillingly, one of the few points of agreements between Trump and the tech billionaires might be on the topic of ‘race science’. While Trump rants about “a lot of bad genes in our country right now“, neoreactionaries have for years complained about the ‘woke’ mainstream media not allowing them to speak their mind on the same topic. As the prescient 2013 Techcrunch article about the rise of neoreactionary views in the tech world noted:
They want to be able to say stuff like “Asians, Jews and whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics because genetics” without being called racist. Or at least be able to express such views without the negative consequences of being labeled racist.
Speaking of which, neoreactionaries are obsessed with a concept called “human biodiversity” (HBD) — what used to be called “scientific racism.” Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of — if not the — most important personal traits, and that it’s predominately genetic. Neoreactionaries would replace, or supplement, the “divine right” of kings and the aristocracy with the “genetic right” of elites.
Or as Gil Duran, who has long been warning of the danger posed by this neoreactionary tech elite, summarized it: “I’ve been describing this as an ideology of supremacy: tech supremacy, wealth supremacy, male supremacy, white supremacy, Western culture supremacy…they believe that they are the most important people on the planet; they believe they are the most important people in history; being wealthy they’re surrounded by people who don’t tell them otherwise; and they have enough money to make a lot of trouble for a long time.”
“Enough money” is an understatement. Pro-cryptocurrency donors were responsible for almost half of all corporate donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle. In the lead-up to the election, Elon Musk is the world’s richest person, and has been the leading backer of Trump and Vance’s ticket via America PAC – not to mention his control of one of the leading social media sites (a ‘parallel media outlet’). While you can’t give water to a voter standing in line in Georgia, Musk is free to award a $1 million prize each day to mobilize voters in swing states.
And while there’s a pure power simply in their wealth, it should also be noted that there has been a growing martial drift to the tech these tycoons are interested in. Post-PayPal, Peter Thiel created his spy company Palantir. Young entrepreneurs are seeing a lucrative future in creating technology for the military, perhaps best exemplified by Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey, who went from a kid who designed a virtual reality headset to founding the military tech start-up Anduril, and recently stated that “every country needs a ‘warrior class’ excited to enact ‘violence on others in pursuit of good aims’. Which of course, depends on how you interpret aims as being ‘good’…
An article in The Atlantic from early 2024 warned of the growing danger of this tech elite, under the headline “The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism“:
The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values — reason, progress, freedom — but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. And above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they’ve built or are building — to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more — impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed.
…Silicon Valley’s influence easily exceeds that of Wall Street and Washington. It is reengineering society more profoundly than any other power center in any other era since perhaps the days of the New Deal. Many Americans fret — rightfully — about the rising authoritarianism among MAGA Republicans, but they risk ignoring another ascendant force for illiberalism: the tantrum-prone and immensely powerful kings of tech.
So what happens when these radicalized, ultra-wealthy neoreactionary Silicon Valley billionaires “explicitly believe that democracy is not the preferable operating system of government or society“? After 10 to 15 years of talking about it, they now appear to be putting their plans into action in the real world:
You see, while the Network State cult mostly focuses on creating new sovereign territories, it also recommends an alternative: Taking over existing governments and institutions to bring them under tech billionaire control… They take this very seriously. They’re working to disrupt the very idea of nationhood and citizenship by creating a network of sovereign global territories protected by military grade security. They plan to use their massive wealth to reshape the balance of power in their favor – permanently… The Network State is no longer a fever dream in a tech nerd podcast. The NS cult is making big moves. It’s a global campaign, backed by billionaires, to execute colonialist power grabs all around the world.
As Network State believer and CEO of Y-Combinator Garry Tan – who has been working on the tech-funded takeover of San Francisco’s local government – proclaimed: “If we can build here, we can take over the whole country – we’re going to take over every nation in the world.”
President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous farewell address in 1961 has often been quoted for its warning about the grave implications of the establishment of a “military-industrial complex”. Few people who have cited it however have noted that Eisenhower’s warning was not just about the military-industrial complex, but also the possible future dangers of a technocracy: “Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture,” Eisenhower stated, “has been the technological revolution during recent decades… In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
63 years on from Eisenhower’s warning, that danger has become manifest.
This article came together after seeing the same threads of information constantly present themselves in various news stories and sources. These are linked throughout the article in the relevant places. However, two primary inspirations that must be acknowledged are Max Chafkin’s biography of Peter Thiel, ‘The Contrarian‘, and a number of articles by journalist Gil Duran. While the latter are linked within the article, I also recommend visiting his website The Nerd Reich for a one-stop place to explore these articles with additional commentary and context.
