Does being worth billions make you happy? Will it buy you love? If America’s current generation of centibillionaires are any guide, storied wealth is a one-way ticket too hell. humanity’s only hope of saving itself is to move to Mars,according to Elon Musk. The Anti-Christ is coming, says Peter Thiel. Crypto is your only security against a collapsing US dollar, says pretty much every bitcoin pusher in the neighbourhood. Many of today’s dystopian plutocrats are the same people who promised utopia in the earlier phases of the internet. Something chemical must have changed since then in Palo Alto’s water supply. Instead of the lure of community adn being connected, we are being sold cataclysm and apocalypse. The enlightenment has given way to the even more profitable “dark enlightenment”.
Like many people, I toggle between feeling amused by the adolescent nonsense that you hear from so many tech titans and deep foreboding about their tightening grip on our world. On the one hand, you get people naming their companies after fantasy fiction tropes, especially from Tolkien, and whose idea of a political movie is The Matrix. Their world consists of super villains and super heroes. They seem to have confused masculinity with childishness – petulance, aggression and self-obsession being their idea of maleness. Conversely, their sway over the federal machinery of state has gone from tangential to central at remarkable speed.We should not be amused by the fact that Thiel’s acolytes are in charge of key nodes of Washington’s power ministries, not just the Pentagon.
Any Europeans puzzled about the level of transatlantic ferocity in last week’s US National Security Strategy document should listen more closely to the broligarchs. Their arch-enemy is the EU and its digital privacy and digital services acts, which they want swept away.Brussels bureaucracy, and woke member state governments, are what is standing between them and domination of the rest of the west. In the coming months, the Trump governance will assuredly step up its attack on EU regulations and make their dilution or abolition central to the future of the western alliance. The US federal government is playing the roles of lawyer, promoter, hitman and agent for Palantir, xAI, Meta and the rest.
As paul Krugman noted in an incisive recent SubstackAmerica has become a “digital narco state”.While australia offers an alternative path of banning social media companies from doing business with under-16s, the Trump administration is pushing their toxins into every corner of society. Trumpian populism may be the story of our age but I am increasingly persuaded that we are und
Hannah Murphy replies
Hi Ed, How much heed should one give to declarations from the likes of Musk that the desperate state of downtown San Francisco heralds “the end of civilisation” and can be blamed on the “woke mind virus”?
From my first-hand experience living in the city, its struggles with homelessness, housing shortages, open air drug use and theft are no joke for inhabitants – to the point that even the most liberally-inclined might sympathise with the tough-on-crime stance of new mayor Daniel Lurie.
But in reality, professional victims such as Elon have long swapped the hills of the foggy city for a life of private jets and sprawling compounds in remote corners of New Zealand or hawaii.
Rather, the “woe-is-me” sentiment comes from a sense that despite contributing to American dynamism, building multibillion-dollar technology empires and generating tens of thousands of jobs in the process, they have been cast as villains in the court of public opinion, and persecuted by liberal politicians in the Biden administration and the EU daring to pursue Big Tech regulation and antitrust lawsuits.
The solution for the thin-skinned American broligarch seems twofold. The most radical route to pursue is the “network state” movement I wrote about – funding alternative governance initiatives reminiscent of feudalism. But these are highly experimental and to date, none have evolved too far.
More worrisome is the other option, under Trump’s more transactional second administration, of capturing the state. Think lavishing the president with praise at his recent tech titan dinner, and buying up properties in Washington DC as quasi-embassies to project power and have a presence on the Hill. the current goal of these efforts appears to be to ensure as little red tape as possible for their headlong charge into presumably lucrative artificial intelligence, rather than better civilisation or even helping to improve the city that made them.