The Financial Times asked, “Has Silicon Valley gone Maga?” CNN claimed “A rash of tech billionaires are pivoting to Trump — but not because they’re MAGA bros.” New York Magazine explained “why Silicon Valley elites are turning MAGA.” Axios said “Tech's billionaires warm to Trump,” and Bloomberg’s Big Take podcast looked at “Silicon Valley’s Embrace of the MAGA Movement.”
Put simply, after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and his subsequent announcement of making Ohio senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance his running mate, a number of prominent tech elites have endorsed the Trump/Vance ticket or are at least being more vocal than usual about their support for the Republican party and their policies. In much of the media, this has been treated as a clear shift, leading to head-scratching headlines like The Washington Post’s “The Silicon Valley realignment leading tech titans to Trump” — taking for granted, as Max Read pointed out, that this is anything like a realignment at all.
I haven’t written here in a little while, partly from being busy with traveling and other work, but partly because I’ve been trying to figure out how to tackle this topic in a way that feels useful. Put simply, the turn to the right for Silicon Valley is not a turn at all, nor is it even an opportunistic moment revealing long-held but private values. These beliefs have been part of the Valley’s very DNA, emerging out of Stanford University and other nearby institutions, which cultivated the technocratic-libertarian ethos that so many tech leaders now embody and take action on.
As Malcolm Harris chronicles in his book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, this also reaches back to governmental tendrils of the 1930s post-Great Recession under Herbert Hoover, and Congress’ imperative to protect corporate interests. But a greater figure is William Shockley, the inventor who developed the transistor and semiconductors at Bell Labs, leading in 1956 to the opening of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the very first entity to work on silicon semiconductor design. He was also a virulent racist and eugenicist. In 1963, he became a professor at Stanford, where he taught engineering and applied science, and spread his views on race science. Eventually, he would run for the Senate in California as a Republican as a single-issue candidate: the genetic threat posed by people of colour. He received 0.37% of the vote.
You can read more detail about all this in Harris’ book, and Ben Tarnoff gives a great overview of what has happened in the Valley during the Trump and Biden years, but the main takeaway here is that the racist beliefs and other far-right values espoused by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, J.D. Vance, and other tech elites from the Valley have a long history in the region, and the development of semiconductors and other technologies are inherently tied up with this hatred. Shockley may have lost credibility by the time he tried to enter politics, but his ideas had already settled into the very culture of Stanford and the his other networks. He wasn’t alone, to be sure, in inculcating these beliefs there, and we lose a lot of perspective by focusing instead on the countercultural ~vibes~ of the 1960s and 70s in California and its relation, however imprecise, to figures like Steve Jobs.
(Of course, the Bay Area in general tends to vote Democrat, at least since the 1990s, and Kamala Harris herself hails from Oakland and has maintained relationships to the tech world, but we’re talking more specifically about the ideological underpinnings of the area’s venture elite.)
Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and others, as Adam Tooze summarized, see a figure like Vance (and so, Trump) as useful because they:
It goes deeper than that, though. For some, surely, it is easy enough to ignore threats posed by far-right politics and figureheads — further erosion of abortion rights, rights for trans people, immigration (which particularly makes no sense, since so much tech talent and labour is due to immigration, let alone the fact that Musk, Thiel, and others are immigrants themselves), getting rid of no-fault divorce — in light of how they can also boost your pocketbook and shore up nationalist technological supremacy at a moment of great competition from China and others.
For many, though, they really believe this stuff at their core: as Elizabeth Lopatto points out in reference to Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” from 2023, he listed the “patron saints” of this so-called movement:
They include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurist who was also the co-author of The Fascist Manifesto; Nick Land, whose writing is a foundational text for the so-called alt-right; Neven Sesardic, a philosopher who argues that race is biologically real and not socially constructed; and Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that democracy is an illusion.
Thiel and Vance (who worked at Mithril Capital, one of Thiel’s venture firms, in the mid-2010s), for their part, are deeply inspired by extremist psycho people like Curtis Yarvin, a techno-authoritarian who is behind what is sometimes (cringe) called the “Dark Enlightenment,” a pseudo-philsophical project advocating for dictatorship and the breaking up of governments into various entities (“patchworks”) which would each be controlled by tech corporations (“realms”). As he once wrote, by way of example:
The realm, having sovereign power, can compel the resident to comply with all promises. 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. And San Francisco, likewise, can promise not to cut off its residents’ hands until it is blue in the face—but, since it is a sovereign state, no one can enforce this promise against it.
Right…
Yarvin has also led the charge for RAGE: Retire All Government Employees, now a key component of Project 2025, whereby Trump and Vance would fire hundreds of thousands of government employees and dismantle departments.
We don’t need to go over the things Musk has been spouting.
The point is, whether these various funders and boosters are simply comfortable ignoring the extremist ideology behind these political movements or they fully buy into them, Silicon Valley’s arbitrators of wealth are upholding a foundational rot at the centre of its mythmaking of innovation and progress, all under the guise of accruing evermore power.
Ephemera
This isn’t Ted Chiang’s best article about generative AI, but it’s still quite good: “Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical…The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.”
Holly Lewis on AI realism: “Our data is not just fodder for machines to analyze, our data is a precondition for the machine’s existence. If the ethos of the data transfer era was seamless communication and the ethos of the data analytics era was surveillant control, how do we decipher the meaning of a world enthralled with the possibility of letting the steering wheel steer the wheel?”
Wendy Brown on Marx and Capital: “The brilliance and enduring relevance of Marx’s anatomy of capitalism rest in his formulating of its object as at once singularly theoretical and material, as human made yet beyond human control, with more power to set the conditions for all planetary life than anything the species has ever unleashed.”
Song Rec: “Check Your Face” by Okay Kaya