There’s a dominant narrative within the media about why tech billionaires are sucking as much as Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, both fortunately assist or have largely acquiesced to Trump as a result of they suppose he’ll supply decrease taxes and friendlier rules. In different phrases, it’s nearly defending their very own egocentric enterprise pursuits.
That narrative shouldn’t be precisely flawed — Trump has actually promised large tax cuts for billionaires — but it surely leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work right here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — that is about way more than simply sustaining and rising their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology impressed by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that claims they’re supermen, and supermen shouldn’t be topic to guidelines, as a result of they’re doing one thing extremely vital: remaking the world of their picture.
It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who embrace Musk, Zuck, and Bezos in addition to the enterprise capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s as a result of MAGA is all about granting unchecked energy to the highly effective.
“It’s a way of full impunity — together with impunity to the legal guidelines of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of financial sociology at Dartmouth who research the conduct of the ultra-rich, informed me. “They reject constraint in all of its types.”
As Harrington has famous, Trump is the proper avatar for that worldview. He’s a person who incited an tried coup, who bought convicted on 34 felony counts and nonetheless received re-election, who notoriously mentioned in reference to sexual assault, “If you’re a star, they allow you to do it. You are able to do something.”
So, what’s the “something” that the broligarchs need to do? To grasp their imaginative and prescient, we have to notice that their philosophy goes nicely past easy libertarianism. It’s not simply that they need a authorities that received’t tread on them. They need completely zero limits on their energy. Not these dictated by democratic governments, by monetary techniques, or by information. Not even these dictated by dying.
The broligarchs’ imaginative and prescient: science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality
The broligarchs are usually not a monolith — their politics differ considerably, they usually’ve generally been at odds with one another. Keep in mind when Zuck and Musk mentioned they had been going to combat one another in a cage match? However right here’s one thing the broligarchs have in frequent: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has formed their imaginative and prescient for the way forward for humanity — and their very own roles as its would-be saviors.
Zuckerberg’s quest to construct the Metaverse, a digital actuality so immersive and compelling that folks would need to strap on cumbersome goggles to work together with one another, is seemingly impressed by the sci-fi creator Neal Stephenson. It was really Stephenson who coined the time period “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, the place characters spend a whole lot of time interacting in a digital world of that identify. Zuckerberg appears to not have seen that the guide is depicting a dystopia; as a substitute of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction handbook.
Jeff Bezos is impressed by Star Trek, which led him to discovered a business spaceflight enterprise referred to as Blue Origin, and The Excessive Frontier by physics professor Gerard Okay. O’Neill, which informs his plan for house colonization (it entails tens of millions of individuals residing in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton.
Musk, who desires to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is impressed by one of many masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Basis collection, Asimov wrote a couple of hero who should forestall humanity from being thrown into an extended darkish age after an enormous galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that’s you must attempt to take the set of actions which might be more likely to lengthen civilization, decrease the likelihood of a darkish age and scale back the size of a darkish age if there may be one,” Musk mentioned.
And Andreessen, an early net browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with little or no regulation, is impressed by superhero tales, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we must always develop into “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” entails “conquering dragons and bringing dwelling the spoils for our group.”
All of those males see themselves because the heroes or protagonists in their very own sci-fi saga. And a key a part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, because the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you just’re above the legislation. Commonsense morality doesn’t apply to you since you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it ought to be famous, is an enormous Nietzsche fan, although his is a particularly selective studying of the thinker’s work.
The ubermensch ideology helps clarify the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ a part of broligarch shouldn’t be incidental to this — it’s constructed on this concept that not solely are these guys superior, they’re superior as a result of they’re guys,” Harrington mentioned.
For one factor, they valorize aggression, which is coded as male. Zuckerberg, who credit combined martial arts and looking wild boars with serving to him rediscover his masculinity (and is sporting the makeover to show it), not too long ago informed Joe Rogan that the company world is simply too “culturally neutered” — it ought to be develop into a tradition that has extra “masculine vitality” and that “celebrates the aggression.”
Likewise, Andreessen wrote in his manifesto, “We imagine in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — power.” Musk, in the meantime, has jumped on the testosterone bandwagon, amplifying the concept that solely “excessive T alpha males” are able to pondering for themselves; he shared a put up on X that mentioned, “That is why a Republic of excessive standing males is greatest for choice making. Democratic, however a democracy solely for many who are free to suppose.”
This concept that most individuals can’t suppose for themselves is essential to Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch. What differentiates the ubermensch, or superman, is that he’s not slowed down by commonsense morality (baseless) or by God (lifeless) — he can decide his personal values.
The broligarchs — as a result of they’re in twenty first century Silicon Valley and never nineteenth century Germany — have up to date and melded this concept with transhumanism, the concept that we will and may use expertise to change human biology and proactively evolve our species.
Transhumanism unfold within the mid-1900s because of its fundamental popularizer, Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the up to date futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that we’re approaching a time when human intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, turning into unbelievably highly effective.
“The human species, together with the computational expertise it created, will be capable to clear up age-old issues…and will likely be able to vary the character of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in flip, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose firm Neuralink explicitly goals at merging human and machine intelligence.
For a lot of transhumanists, a part of what it means to transcend our human situation is transcending dying. And so you discover that the broligarchs are very keen on longevity analysis. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups which might be attempting to make it potential to reside endlessly. That makes good sense when you think about that dying at present imposes a restrict on us all, and the purpose of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.
How the broligarchs and Trump use one another: startup cities, crypto, and the demise of the very fact
If you happen to don’t like limits and guidelines, it stands to motive that you just’re not going to love democracy. As Thiel wrote in 2009, “I not imagine that freedom and democracy are suitable.” And so it shouldn’t come as a shock that the broligarchs are attempting to undermine the rule of democratic nation-states.
To flee the management of democratic governments, they’re searching for to create their very own sovereign colonies. That may come within the type of house colonies, a la Musk and Bezos. However it will possibly additionally come within the type of “startup cities” or “community states” constructed by firms right here on Earth — impartial mini-nations, carved out of the encompassing territory, the place tech billionaires and their acolytes would reside based on their very own guidelines fairly than the federal government’s. That is at present Thiel and Andreessen’s favored method.
With the assistance of their investments, a startup metropolis referred to as Prospera is already being constructed off the coast of Honduras (a lot to the displeasure of Honduras). There are others within the offing, from Praxis (which can supposedly construct “the following America” someplace within the Mediterranean), to California Perpetually in, you guessed it, California.
The so-called community state is “a flowery identify for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the previous yr reporting on these constructing initiatives, informed me. “The concept is to construct energy over the long run by controlling cash, politics, expertise, and land.”
Crypto, in fact, is the broligarchs’ financial instrument of selection. It’s inherently anti-institutionalist; its attraction lies in its promise to let folks management their very own cash and transact with out counting on any authority, whether or not a authorities or a financial institution. It’s how they plan to construct these startup cities and community states, and the way they plan to supplant the normal monetary system. The unique concept of crypto was to exchange the US greenback, however for the reason that US greenback is intimately sure up with world finance, undercutting it might reshape the entire world financial system.
Trump appears to be going together with this very cheerfully. He’s now pro-crypto, and he’s even proposed creating “Freedom Cities” in America which might be harking back to startup cities. His alliance with the broligarchs advantages him not solely as a result of they’ve heaped tens of millions of {dollars} on him, but in addition due to how they’ve undermined the very notion of the reality by shaping a “post-truth” on-line actuality by which folks don’t know what to imagine anymore. Musk, underneath the guise of selling free speech, has made X right into a den of disinformation. Zuck is shut on his heels, eliminating fact-checking at Meta regardless that the corporate mentioned it might be scrupulous about inflammatory and false posts after it performed a severe function in a textbook instance of ethnic cleaning.
“Much more pernicious is the truth that these guys can management the algorithms, to allow them to resolve what folks really see,” Duran mentioned. “The issue shouldn’t be a lot that folks can lie — it’s that the system is designed to favor these lies over reality and actuality.”
It’s an ideal set-up for a president well-known for his “various information.”
However the underlying ideology that unites MAGA and the broligarchs is opposite to the goals of most atypical Individuals, together with most Trump voters. If the US greenback is weakened and the very concept of the democratic nation-state is overthrown, that received’t precisely “make America nice once more.” It’ll make America weaker than ever.