Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldA whirlwind of shocking decisions keeps coming from the new Donald Trump administration — “muzzle velocity” is the new term of art, apparently — and so I repeat my admonition from last week. While you struggle to keep up with the latest outrage, don’t allow yourself to get disorientated but keep an eye firmly on the horizon and ask yourself what all this activity is meant to lead to. It is so much easier to connect the dots if you realise that the dots are in fact connected.A good place to start, I have found, is to read what the big beasts now in power in the US say about their fundamental beliefs. So today I share some of the pieces I have recently found helpful to learn about the ideas animating the new US tech oligarchy.It is curious but telling that there should be quite a rich hinterland of ideas behind the Trump tech oligarchs. Many of them — not all by any means, but certainly some of the most vocal Trump supporters — rather fancy themselves as thinkers. Some are no doubt well read. They are certainly motivated by ideas. So it’s important to learn what they are.Credit where it’s due: several of my colleagues have also recently delved into the strange underbelly of Silicon Valley ideology. In a recent Swamp Notes newsletter (sign up if you haven’t already) Rana Foroohar traces the influence of “Dark Enlightenment” writer Curtis Yarvin on Elon Musk’s thinking, and Richard Waters, our man in Silicon Valley, goes back to a 15-year-old essay by Peter Thiel. It’s clear that there is a degree of ideological unity among these oligarchs. But is it best thought of as techno-libertarianism or techno-reaction?For a possible answer, Henry Farrell’s essay from December on why Silicon Valley turned right is a must-read. He describes well how a previous coalition of ideas — between mainstream Democrats’ combination of progressive values and “Washington consensus” economics, and Silicon Valley’s belief in how its innovation worked in favour of freedom and liberal democracy — could not survive the evidence of actual economic and technological developments from 2008 onwards. For Farrell, Silicon Valley chose to hold on to innovation and give up any concern for democratic benefits. So far, so techno-reactionary. But also libertarian insofar as it comes to regulatory constraints on what tech developers are able to do.That point is clear from Ross Douthat’s podcast interview with Marc Andreessen, the influential tech funder. The strident opposition to regulation by the EU, in particular, is striking. So is a strangely thin-skinned reaction to being disapproved of, including by one’s employees. Andreessen and others really don’t like being criticised, especially by younger progressives. That includes Musk. If Musk has given similarly thoughtful interviews, I have missed them (send them my way!). But Ezra Klein just hosted Kara Swisher on his podcast. She has followed Musk for a long time and gives a rich sense of how his and other tech leaders’ attitudes have evolved. One common tendency is having opened up a space for employees to say what they think, then not liking what they hear — whether on “woke” issues or on the legitimacy of working for military clients. Swisher says these companies are “set up as a kingship”; compare with how Yarvin thinks countries should be run by monarchical chief executives, as my colleague John Thornhill described here. Again, a passage from progressive sympathies to techno-reaction. Douthat has also done an interview with Steven Bannon, who is fashioning himself as an anti-oligarch. Every revolution eats its children, I suppose, but it’s worth teasing out where Bannon’s populism and tech oligarch ideology overlap and where they are opposed. And one overlapping theme — you can see this in the New York Times profile of Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, for example — is the importance they give to class rather than the left’s strong focus on race and ethnicity. I also found our magazine piece on Palmer Luckey, founder of defence tech contractor Anduril and self-described libertarian, interesting. Note the Tolkien nomenclature; there is a love for fantasy literature here that is worth probing. The influence of video games, sci-fi and manga also comes up frequently in many of these portraits.Thiel himself — who perhaps has had the longest-standing, most consistent set of beliefs — wrote an op-ed for the FT recently. The message he decided to send was not the one I would have expected. He interprets Trump’s victory as heralding a moment of truth revelation (which, he is keen to point out, is the original sense of the Greek word “apocalypse”). The “pre-internet custodians of secrets” — media, bureaucracies, NGOs and universities — will no longer “delimit public conversation” but will have to tell the truth about . . . who killed JFK and the origins of Covid!There are enough threads here to make a tapestry: an ability for technical disruption that is at the same time an iconoclastic desire to disrupt reigning ideas; a disdain for democratic procedures, bureaucracy and rules that impede a strong leader’s or great mind’s freedom of action; and finally a sort of heroic-epic view of life that prizes world-reshaping endeavours. It is no surprise that such views should go with support for Trump.There is a rich seam to mine; I hope Free Lunch readers will do their own reading and share their thoughts about the ideas that have so spectacularly come to power. I have two brief thoughts to finish on.One is that there are important fissures in this intellectual landscape. One is on whether policies should favour the working class or the rich: Bannon lambasts the tech oligarchs as “techno-feudalists . . . they’re not with us when it comes to the little guy”. The hints of ambivalence about Big Tech’s dominance in this administration (vice-president JD Vance is an example) are something to watch. Another fissure is, perhaps surprisingly, over nationalism. Some of the tech executives working on defence speak in favour of the west and of the US. But for others, the stage seems to be the world (note that Bannon denounces the tech oligarchs “globalists”). Farrell notes Big Tech leaders’ ambition to “connect the world”, which is indeed a “globalist” project rather than an “America first” one. Recall the high priority they place on Trump fighting their corner against EU regulation. As I point out in my latest column (see Other Readables below), that means they think the EU matters.The second thought flows from that. How might these thoughts operate in a non-US context? The politics-tech complex of Silicon Valley does not have an equivalent in Europe, for example. Of course, ideologies are contagious, and both the tech oligarchy’s ideas and Trumpist politics are influencing thinking in other countries. But they can’t simply be replicated, if only for the reason that what for American big tech is global dominance, becomes subordination to American dominance in other places. Sooner or later, expect a flourishing of ideas inspired by the ones I’ve scratched the surface of here — but influenced by the local context, either in adaptation of or in opposition to the tech intellectualism now spilling out of America.Other readables
