NY Times columnist Thomas Edsall has been writing a low of downbeat columns lately about the Trump administration and the end of America. His latest effort focuses less on Donald Trump and more on Elon Musk, who he portrays as the leader of an Ayn Randian cabal of oligarch leading Silicon Valley to replace democracy with some kind of libertarian dystopia. Here’s how it opens.
The Trump administration has enabled a small network of high-tech oligarchs to determine a vast proportion of federal spending and regulatory policy.
Much of the attention, understandably, has fallen on Elon Musk, but he is not working alone.
Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned.
Andreessen’s take is that universities have become expensive, arrogant, sclerotic and corrupt. You might even say that, in his view, these mega-corporations with mega-endowments are the real oligarchs in the system, unaccountable power that needs to be brought back to earth.
What follows in Edsall’s column is an explanation of how Democratic Silicon Valley moved right starting around 2017. Edsall quotes a former Sacramento Bee editor, Gil Duran, who summarizes one view of the libertarian tech outlook.
Many of the tech billionaires who have merged with Trump believe democracy is an outdated software system that must be replaced. They want a future in which tech elites, armed with all-powerful A.I. systems, are the primary governing force of the planet…
Look at the news. It makes no sense that a presidential administration would seek to crash the economy while allowing an unelected foreign-born billionaire to rip apart the government. This goes against every rule in politics. Trump’s poll numbers are sinking yet he’s taking no steps to correct the course. This is the logic of a suicide bomber.
Briefly, all of this is wrong and also ignorant. Tech elites like Andreessen have specifically warned about efforts by government (specifically the Biden administration) to regulate and control AI so that it becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government and a control layer over everyone.
As for the logic of a suicide bomber, Musk has said repeatedly that his motivation is about debt and deficits. We cannot continue spending $2 trillion more than we have year after year. At some points, cuts are not only a good idea they are necessary to prevent a collapse. It’s amazing the degree too which his critics ignore this point and in fact rarely if ever mention it, much less engage with it.
Moving on, Edsall concludes by quoting Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, who argues that Musk and others in Silicon Valley are using social media to mind control Americans.
Elon Musk owns X outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is C.E.O., chairman and effective majority owner, all at the same time.
What purports to be a collective phenomenon — the “voice of the people” — is actually in private hands, to a very great extent shaped by two extremely powerful individuals.
None of this is brainwashing, but it is reshaping public debate not just in the U.S. but in the U.K., Europe and other places, too. People’s sense of the contours of politics — what is legitimate and what is out of bounds, what others think and are likely to do and how they ought to respond — is visibly changing around us.
Again this is so wrong it’s amazing. There is a danger of social control with social media, which is why the elimination of TikTok as a Chinese owned company was supported by both sides of the aisle. However, the whole point of the Twitter Files was that it was arguably the federal government and groups of “disinformation” NGO’s that were stepping over the line by censoring voices online, including some that turned out to be right about a whole array of topics from the effect of school shutdowns, to the origins of COVID, to the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop. Henry Farrell is essentially arguing that tech oligarchs on the right might do what tech oligarchs on the left and the feds have already been doing, but without mentioning that of course. Trump actually signed an executive order to prevent this behind the scenes collusion between tech and government, which also goes unmentioned.
So that’s the paranoid case that the world is about to end thanks to Elon Musk and tech bros. On the other hand, the Free Press just did an interview with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson who have a book coming out presenting a sort of utopian case for the future based partly on more tech and less government regulation.
Ezra Klein: So the abundance agenda, just very simply put, is that to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. So one of the things we’re trying to do in the book is refocus. We’re liberals in the American tradition. Let’s refocus liberalism on problems of supply. Where do we not have enough of what we need, and what has stood in the way of us creating abundance there?…
Derek Thompson: The problem we have, and especially a problem that we have in Democratic-run places, is not just that we can’t invent things we don’t have yet, we also can’t build what we understand. The apartment building is a very ancient technology. Elisha Otis came up with the elevator about 170 years ago. But somehow we can’t build apartment buildings in San Francisco and Los Angeles and many Democratic-run cities.
I think we went from a world where liberalism was a liberalism of building, between the 1930s and 1960s, and then there was a turn in the 1960s and 1970s, and for the last half century, liberalism has too often meant a liberalism of blocking.
Thompson even praises Peter Thiel (one of the villains of Edsall’s column) specifically.
I think much of what Peter Thiel says is quite brilliant. And there’s many ways I agree with him, and there’s no way I agree with him more strongly than this idea that something happened to the character of American innovation in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the first half of the twentieth century, invention was a physical world phenomenon. We built nuclear power plants, we built airplanes, we built cars. We changed the physical environment of our cities. We could actually build trains, not just allocate $33 billion toward building them and then never actually build them.
Something happened in the 1960s and 1970s where I think that Thiel has a very interesting diagnosis, where he says, we regulated the physical world so much that we funneled innovation into the digital world. I think that’s a very compelling story—and it goes toward explaining why the physical world we imagined with jet packs and space travel, all of that stuff you have to build with atoms, is hyper-regulated. The only innovation that is legal from a certain perspective exists in the digital realm of bits.
A bit later they talk about how birth rates are part of this abundant future they envision. Thompson makes the case that parenthood gives purpose that informs everything else.
I hope that people who make political arguments like us are also not embarrassed about making emotional arguments for things like natalism because, again, abundance is not just about sending more electrons across the country and erecting more drywall. It’s fundamentally about what’s the good life and how do we build it. And I think kids are a part of the good life, they’re a part of the story too.
In other words, don’t give in to the depressive progressives who talk about not having kids for the planet. An abundant future is one with kids in it.
So there are the options. There are many who see libertarian oligarchs taking over and feel a wave of panic and there are those who see breaking up government regulation and more use of tech as key to a brighter future.
