Newsletter #101: Who’s Going to Save the World?

By Edward Ongweso Jr

Long before Silicon Valley’s supposed right turn, it was a safe space for all manner of reactionaries: eugenicists, phrenologists, anti–New Dealers, ethnonationalists, and more. Still, there seems to be something different about our generation of reactionaries. 

Maybe it’s the ties to apartheid South Africa, as is the case for the “PayPal mafia”: Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. 

Maybe it’s the opportunistic embrace of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideologies as part of an ambitious bid to flense the administrative state, roll back its sovereignty, and relegitimize old forms of domination — racial hierarchies chief among them. 

Maybe it’s the paranoia about employee activism — workers, long referred to as “growth limiters” by venture capitalists, only affirm the epithet with every walkout, work stoppage, protest, or boycott aimed at blocking lucrative military contracts. 

As Daniel Denvir, Liz Franczak, and Brace Belden lay out in a recent episode of The Dig, the roots are legion and the consequences disastrous. 

We are trapped in a stubborn asset bubble that has unleashed waves of speculative frenzy that our plucky bands of reactionaries have ridden to turn paper gains into real wealth and power over our political, social, economic, and cultural lives. Society has rapidly degenerated into a world of slop. The same philosopher kings who have imposed this technological nightmare on us insist they are our salvation. Their products are engines of alienation, their platforms inculcate antisocial behavior, and their algorithms create an information ecosystem unmoored from reality. And what little “hard tech” our benevolent tech overlords do create is, more often than not, used to hurt people as well: to police communities, deport migrants, deny welfare, and assassinate civilians. 

Social media is algorithmically mediated with design insights gleaned from research into gambling and addiction. Consumer tech is dominated by surveillance, microtransactions, and relentless commodification of even the smallest interaction. Cryptocurrency and Web3 have proven to be little more than creative exercises in money laundering, gambling, theft, and grift. Artificial intelligence, then, is the great white hope — literally and metaphorically. This is the last chance capitalists have to rescue capitalism from the three evils blocking their path to greater profits: stagnation, democracy, and China.

Part of Palo Alto’s embrace of its reactionary roots has meant reacquainting itself with nationalism and the defense sector, embracing a rousing techno-nationalist screed: the American Century is over, the Chinese Century is upon us, unless we jettison every element of the state that is not slavishly dedicated to subsidy and anti-competition. Here Silicon Valley elites hope to emulate China’s state capitalist model, even as they actively sabotage the ability of the American system to embark on such a deep and intensive overhaul. 

Artificial intelligence emerges again as the salve. How will we generate demand, innovation, profits, and capitalist dynamism again? By integrating artificial intelligence into every single facet of your daily life, from advertisements to social media to cultural production to the provision of public services. How will we reform the cumbersome leviathan that blocks such a transformative vision? By integrating artificial intelligence into every single facet of the state apparatus. And how will we defeat the Red Chinese threat to American hegemony? By using artificial intelligence to beat them at their own game: at industrial policy, state planning, and technological innovation.

As AI reinvigorates hopes for a New Cold War and an American Century, it also deepens our reliance on fossil fuels and hastens what Denvir calls “planetary suicide Keynesiasm.” You or I may look at the shape of things to come — the demonic orgy of violence and speculation and authoritarianism waiting for us — and think this is the End Days. Thiel and company would chime in and say this is the beginning of something new, an “apocalypse” that will move us beyond capitalism’s limiters and into something new. Beware, our techno-kings would say, any false prophet who claims this is something to fear: Thiel says such fears are tantamount to welcoming “the Antichrist” into our homes.

Well, my door is wide open.