Episode Transcript
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Morgan Sung: So there’s this bit in Silicon Valley, the HBO show I mean, where one of the characters, Jared, gets into a self-driving car owned by this billionaire named Peter Gregory.
Automated Voice: Buckle up, please. Okay. Enjoy your ride.
Morgan Sung: But then, things go off the rails.
Automated Voice: Destination override. New destination, 1 Gregory Drive, Arallon. Distance to destination, 4,126 miles. Enjoy your ride.
Morgan Sung: Instead of taking him home, like it’s supposed to, the car ends up getting rerouted to Peter Gregory’s offshore private island. It’s situated in international waters, so it’s basically in the middle of nowhere. And when Jared’s finally able to get out of the car, he faces another horrifying predicament.
Jared Dunn: Excuse me, can you help me?
Automated Voice: Obstacle averted. Resuming operations. Please be careful.
Morgan Sung: The man-made island is run entirely by robots, so there’s no one around to help him. The idea of a sovereign, self-contained tech utopia island sounds like a TV satire exaggeration, but here’s the thing, it’s drawn from real life. Silicon Valley’s Peter Gregory is based on Peter Thiel, the godfather of the PayPal mafia and an actual tech billionaire who funded a similar project to the one parodied in the TV show. Though there’s no public record of anyone actually getting stuck on one.
In the late 2000s, he became a huge proponent of what’s now known as seasteading, the dream of establishing these offshore, autonomous ocean communities that would be hubs for innovation. The purpose of seasteading was to put technological progress above everything else, to build them outside the grasp of anything that could limit that progress, especially things like pesky government regulations. Thiel was an early investor in the Seasteading Institute, an organization that originally planned to establish libertarian startup countries off the coast of San Francisco.
While that never came to pass, and similar VC-funded Tech Island projects in the years since have also faced a slew of issues, this ideology persists: the belief that innovation shouldn’t be hampered by regulation or any kind of social responsibility really, and that tech business leaders should be the ones in charge, not elected officials in a traditional government structure. And with a growing group of broligarchs stepping out from behind their standing desks and into positions of real political power and control, it seems like they’re getting closer to that goal. So, what’s behind this continued mingling of the tech industry and government power?
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
Okay, so we’re seeing tech business leaders aligning with the president, Elon Musk leading the dismantling of federal agencies, and the anti-government ideologies fueling things like the seasteading movement. We’ve been calling this the brologarchy, but there are other terms getting thrown around in an effort to describe what’s going on in our country right now.
Let me just list them out. I’m gonna grab my whiteboard.
Okay, so we’ve got authoritarian technocracy, cyber-populism, tech oligarchy, techno-feudalism, techno-libertarianism. Oh, and I’ve seen this one a lot lately, techno-fascism. But what do these jargony terms even mean? Are they just hyperbole? Is one more accurate than the others to describe what’s happening right now? I think it’s time for a deep dive. You ready?
All right, let’s open a new tab. Is this techno-fascism?
Do you know faskism? It’s coming to get us. Is the broligarchy really driven by “faskism,” sorry, fascism as former bachelorette and TikTok icon Gabby Windey says? To get an expert opinion, I called up Margaret O’Mara. She’s a historian and a professor at the University of Washington where she teaches about the tech economy and American politics. She also wrote a history of the modern tech industry in her book, The Code: Silicon Valley, and the Remaking of America.
Margaret O’Mara: First of all, the brologarchy is a delicious term and I’m going to deploy it often. You know, I think for one thing, the tech industry, Silicon Valley, has always contained multitudes, right? But it is novel to, you know, dial back to January of this year and see all of those tech CEOs on the dais at the inauguration. John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie did not show up at William McKinley’s inauguration, this is really unusual to kind of just have the front and center display of, these are people who are so proximate to power where the president is kind of showing “I have these close connections with these people.”
Morgan Sung: Okay, let’s go back to our whiteboard. I asked Margaret about a few of our jargony terms. First, technocracy.
Margaret O’Mara: Is that what this is? Well, it’s really interesting because technocracy is a really old term and it goes back more than a century ago. Rather than being anti-institutional or anti-establishment, it’s been, “hey, let’s bring expertise to these big institutions. Let’s use the best knowledge and specialized knowledge we can to inform policymaking or inform whatever we’re doing to, whatever we are governing and however we’re governing it.” This isn’t really technocracy. Technocracy is like bureaucracy kind of slow and kind of deliberate and very much in the institution and using people who are not partisans but just pointy headed experts. And sometimes that’s right now some of these pretty headed experts aren’t really in fashion with the prevailing administration.
Morgan Sung: Right, I’m thinking of during FDR’s administration, that’s kind of when we saw a lot of technocrats establishing these government agencies, which DOGE is currently slashing.
Margaret O’Mara: That’s right, the 1930s, the New Deal, the advisors around Franklin Roosevelt were known as The Brains Trust. They were there because of their expertise, not because of who they knew or because of their political acumen, although some of them were very good at politics. But they were technocrats, and they believed in the power of government to steer the economy in a certain direction.
Morgan Sung: Okay, crossing out technocracy. How about techno-libertarian? Libertarianism being the idea that the government should generally stay out of people’s lives.
Margaret O’Mara: You know, techno-libertarianism has always been kind of a slippery term because, you know, truly pure libertarianism in any context is a really hard thing to stick to because you really have to be comfortable with, even if it’s something that I don’t agree with, I believe that the government, you know, shouldn’t be doing anything about it to change that status quo or change that from happening. So this is kind of different. You know, this is very specific actions that are directed at specific parts of the government.
Like for example, and this is a priority that Elon Musk supports very vocally is kind of getting rid of DEI or kind of quote unquote woke-ism in the government and in sort of a micromanaging way, right? Like banning certain words from government documents and websites, preventing funding of certain programs and not just things that are kind of new from the last several years, but things like the EPA’s environmental justice program, which is designed to address the disproportionately high levels of pollution in poor neighborhoods. And this isn’t libertarianism, this is very much trying to steer U.S. society in a certain way.
Morgan Sung: Got it. So, techno-libertarian doesn’t really describe what’s happening. Cross that off. What about techno-fascism? Historian Janice Mimura wrote about this concept in her book, Planning for Empire, which focuses on Japan’s colonization of Manchuria in the 1930s as a test case for techno-fascism. She defines it as an authoritarian regime driven by technology with technocrats at the helm. Some people also call this technocratic populism.
In this example of Imperial Japan, the fascist rule wasn’t concentrated behind a single leader. They still had an emperor, but the real power was in the hands of the technocrats. They established huge bureaucracies to force industrial development in Manchuria by exploiting the people that Japan colonized. Essentially, the public and private sphere were fused into one. This is just one example, but Margaret says there is a historic link between technological progress and fascism around the world.
Margaret O’Mara: I mean, you go back to authoritarian regimes of the 20th century of different political systems, whether it be Stalinism, whether the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler, whether it be other authoritarian regimes, communist and non in during the Cold War, and often technology and technological progress plays a really important role. It’s something that that these leaders invest in and technologists are often favored actors in that. You know, you go back to Nazi Germany and the V-2 rocket program of 1930s, 1940s Nazi Germany. That was the technology that was so advanced and so valuable that the U.S. allowed the rocket scientists from the Nazi regime to emigrate to the United States. And they became the people who were building NASA’s own space program.
Morgan Sung: Some argue that aspects of life in the U.S. right now do point to fascism—the scapegoating of minority groups, attacks on education, rising sexism, potentially illegal deportations—and that the broligarchs’ incursion into the government is a sure sign of techno-fascism’s arrival. But Margaret is wary of using that term. She says the current movement is too anti-bureaucratic to be techno- fascism. She says it’s not technocracy, and not quite techno-libertarianism either. So what is it? Maybe there isn’t one fixed term to describe exactly what’s happening, or maybe it’s more of an amalgamation of a bunch of these things. But Margaret did bring up one more term that was not on my whiteboard.
Margaret O’Mara: I think one thing that’s kind of consistent through a through line is techno-optimism or a belief in the power of technology to do good things and that more technology is better, and that I think with that kind of is an adversarial or a suspicion of government bureaucracy, feeling like tech is better than the bureaucrats. This tech is something that… ultimately, will do things better and improve things.
Morgan Sung: Techno-optimism sounds, honestly, kind of positive? But right now we’re also seeing the very real consequences of this ideology play out in government operations, people losing their government jobs, infrastructure crumbling. I mean, we could talk about that for the rest of the episode. What even are the core beliefs here? Who’s pushing it? And that is another tab. Techno-optimism? So Margaret was just telling us about this adversarial relationship between techno-optimists and government bureaucracy.
Margaret O’Mara: That sentiment ranges from yes, a sort of explicitly anti-government, you know, get the state out of things as much as possible, liberate currency, liberate individuals and groups from the control of state regulations and nation states. And then there’s also a kind of more affirmative, “hey, the government needs our help, let’s improve it and use all of these principles that we’ve used in developing these amazing products in the valley and let’s bring them to the government.”
Morgan Sung: A lot of these beliefs are laid out in The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was written in 2023 by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Here he is reading from it on the Startup Archive YouTube channel.
Marc Andreessen: We believe that we have been and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. This is a really key point today.
Morgan Sung: Mark Andreessen was the co-founder of one of the early internet browsers.
Margaret O’Mara: Netscape, which was the kind of original kind of gateway drug to the internet. This was the browser that started it all. This was also the company that when it went public 14 months after it was established, it started the dot-com boom. By the time he’s 25 years old, he’s on the cover of Time magazine sitting on a throne.
Morgan Sung: Andreessen went on to co-found the legendary Andreessen Horowitz Venture Capital Fund that has, among other things, invested heavily in crypto. And unsurprisingly, investing in crypto, a currency that doesn’t rely on a government or bank to maintain it, is informed by his beliefs. In his 5,000-word techno-optimist manifesto, Andreessen writes this: “Centralized planning is doomed to fail. The system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone. Centralization will starve you to death.”
Margaret O’Mara: Oh yeah, that’s such a fascinating document. Andreessen’s framing of techno-optimism and his manifesto really points the finger at not just bureaucracy and government bureaucracy and regulation as something that’s standing in the way, but also programs like DEI programs and the pressure that tech employees have brought on within companies over the last five years to diversify workforce and to create better working conditions for different types of employees. Um, unionization drives, you know, we’ve seen this activism in tech that really was unprecedented in the industry up until the last decade. I mean, not at this scale. So these are things that are, you know, being identified as this is standing in the way of, you know our progress.
Marc Andreessen: Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology. Both unnecessary and self-defeating, we are not victims, we’re conquerors.
Morgan Sung: This manifesto is considered extreme, even in the tech industry. In it, Andreessen names what he calls “enemies.” Bureaucracy, regulation, academia, risk management, tech ethics, sustainability, social responsibility, and trust and safety. His version of techno-optimism sees anything that could hinder technological progress as the enemy. Even things that most people would agree make society better. like user safety or labor rights. In his manifesto, he also makes some very dubious claims that society doesn’t need those things because the free market will only drive innovation that is ultimately good for humanity.
Andreessen’s manifesto doesn’t speak for everyone in Silicon Valley, but a lot of these broligarchs seem to espouse very similar anti-government, anti-diversity talking points. And this lines up very well with the modern Republican Party. But techno-optimism is an ideology that doesn’t fit neatly into a political box. So how can we make sense of the recent political swings of the tech world? Okay, let’s dig into this when we come back from this break.
Let’s open a new tab. Is Silicon Valley right or left?
In recent history, tech industry leaders have aligned with political parties, not necessarily by ideology. They’ve stood by whichever party was better for business. And following the techno-optimist way of thinking, they’ve chosen whichever party wouldn’t stand in the way of innovation.
Margaret O’Mara: It’s moved from being Republican to Democrat to back again. Even though in recent years, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area generally has been a pretty blue place, right? It’s associated with Democrats, with national Democratic lawmakers, and for a long time it was the Republican party that was just pro-business, low taxes. There were enough Californians and Northern Californians in Washington during the Reagan years that there were people who could advocate for the special things that, say, the semiconductor industry needed and its competition with Japanese chipmakers, which was a really big deal in the 80s. And then that changes in the 90s. The Republican party, social conservatism becomes more predominant. And the Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton and Al Gore, kind of presented themselves as business-friendly centrists and especially internet business-friendly centrists and really wooed Silicon Valley very successfully.
Morgan Sung: And this very friendly approach to tech continued throughout Obama’s eight years as president, which meant that regulations were minimal. Very techno-optimist, right?
Margaret O’Mara: This is also when everyone’s kind of feeling that social media is basically a net good and awesome and hadn’t realized that bringing humanity online would bring all the great things about humanity online as well as the not great things.
Morgan Sung: In the years after Obama was in office, technology has progressed at a breakneck pace. And with that, society has realized that progress at all costs isn’t always what’s best for actual human beings. Remember when whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance programs? Or when the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened and news broke that your Facebook data could be mined for political advertising without your consent? And then there’s everything happening now with AI.
Margaret O’Mara: This isn’t what we signed up for. And then there’s increased criticism of privacy or lack thereof. These companies not doing enough to protect user privacy, that’s starting to gather steam. There’s starting to be criticism of the gender imbalance in VC and in companies.
Morgan Sung: Still, the tech industry was doing pretty well by the end of Trump’s first term. Margaret says that tax cuts and other incentives were part of it, but there were outside forces too. Think of the state of the world back then. The COVID pandemic had just started, and online platforms had a huge growth spurt because everyone kind of just had to be online. So, Silicon Valley flourished.
Margaret O’Mara: And then Biden is elected, and his administration kind of takes a more aggressive stance when it comes to antitrust. It’s kind of going back to the way things were 50 years ago, but that’s after this really long time of very loose enforcement. What happened during the Biden years is this love affair between the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley started souring because there were antitrust enforcement actions and there were, you know, support of the unionization drives in some of these tech companies and some pretty tough talk from the Biden White House about “tech is too big and we need to do something about it.” But for this handful of very powerful, very influential, very vocal tech leaders, they really shifted their allegiance.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, I also am really curious by your thoughts on whether this shift to the right in Silicon Valley is actually purely just about business, just about pro-capitalism, or if it’s actually ideological. I mean, I’m thinking, like you said, Marc Andreessen was once a—well, he keeps flip-flopping. He was a Republican and a Democrat, now Republican again. Elon Musk was a Democrat until a couple years ago. I mean, I’m thinking of a tweet where he was like bragging about LGBTQ equality at Tesla, which seems unfathomable now.
Margaret O’Mara: It was a different world. Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk built electric cars. Democrats were and are his constituency. Yeah, it’s very different. I think it is both business and ideology, and it’s all bound up together. That’s the way I read it. I think there is kind of a core, let’s protect the business. But there’s also, yes, I think there’s ideology. I think there is a lot of resentment. There is a lot of, you know, these billionaires are feeling aggrieved. They’re like, all we did was we built these amazing products that you guys love so much that you can’t stop using. You don’t even understand how this stuff works. And you’re trying to regulate us.
There’s this real sort of disdain for Washington policymakers who legitimately have, you now, time and again, there have been many instances in which senators and members of Congress have shown their deep ignorance about technology. That is fair. And there’s also resentment of like, okay, our employees are like rising up against us and they’re not focused on building the next great thing. They’re focused on, you know, other stuff that we don’t think is important to the business.
Morgan Sung: So we’ve got this foundation of resentment, ideology, and business interests. What is it building toward? How about another tab? What’s the techno-optimist agenda? At the top of this episode, we have a bit about those self-governed islands funded by tech billionaires.
Automated Voice: Distance to destination, 4126 miles. Enjoy your ride.
Morgan Sung: But it’s not just a bit. These are real-life projects. How does that play into the dream of techno-optimism?
Margaret O’Mara: Oh yeah, the self-funded, it’s all in the name of escaping from the state, escaping from the old ways of doing things. It’s the ultimate disruption, right? And we can see lots of different products and projects and tools, both fantastical utopian ones that haven’t come into being yet, and ones that are very, very real, like, say, the blockchain, spurred by this philosophy that the existing financial institutions, governmental institutions, fiat currency, you name it, that has failed people. It is something where nation states have too much power. And also it’s kind of this populist argument too, that ordinary, the little guy’s been, you know, hasn’t been given a fair shake.
Morgan Sung: While cryptocurrency hasn’t reached the widespread adoption its advocates predicted, it’s still doing pretty well for itself. But in practice, these techno-optimist, human-built startup islands that operate outside of government oversight have fizzled out. Unfortunately for Peter Thiel’s seasteading dream, the flourishing network of independent tech hub islands off the coast of San Francisco still does not exist. The Seasteading Institute has tried, again and again, to build floating cities in different parts of the world over the years, but those plans have also… sunk.
And then there’s Prospera, another VC-funded libertarian city, this time built on existing land. It’s on an island off the coast of Honduras, backed by familiar names like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Construction started in 2021, but since then, the project has been accused of neocolonialism, weighed down with legal battles and embroiled in political turmoil. So instead of going through all the effort of building whole new tech island nations, it appears that some techno optimists are shifting their focus back home. They’re trying to bring it stateside, like California forever. A couple of years ago, this company started buying up acres of empty farmland in the Northeast Bay Area.
News Anchor: Getting some exclusive renderings tonight of a proposed new city in Solano County, California Forever. The group behind this huge plan says the community will be home eventually to some 400,000 people.
Morgan Sung: They’re trying to build a utopian walkable city of tech startups and sustainable residential homes from scratch, about 50 miles from San Francisco. They’ve got some pretty big name investors backing the project, like Mark Andreessen and PayPal mafia member and LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman. But this project is also facing a lot of local resistance. Some of these proposed cities go even further than just being startup hubs. According to reporting from Wired, some groups have met with Trump to launch Prospera-like startup nations here in the United States, what they call “freedom cities.” They want to build modern-day company towns on federal land, which would be exempt from any regulatory oversight or taxes. But it begs the question, “whose freedom would be prioritized?” Freedom cities would not be required to be democratically run and wouldn’t be held to workers’ rights laws.
Margaret O’Mara: It isn’t about a better government. It isn’t about a better, you know, better delivery of government services. It’s about, “let’s get this government out of the way and let’s build something entirely new and something that we control that’s driven by this engineering thinking, by this tech-forward, techno-libertarian thinking, because we have made amazing things, we have been responsible for amazing progress, and if we are given the power to do it and the smartest people in the room are allowed to build these things independent of government.”
So it’s not technocracy. It’s not bringing the experts into government necessarily, although a number of Valley people are now in the government. But I see sort of an end game kind of feeding into this philosophy that seems kind of radical but is something that’s been percolating for a really long time, which is, “where we’re going and where we need to go as a — humanity needs to go is beyond these old bureaucratic governmental structures as they are now.”
Morgan Sung: Techno-optimism says that we don’t need tech ethics or regulatory bodies or any sense of social responsibility because the invisible hand of the free market will guide innovation. But if you look at history, that story that techno-optimists like to tell is complete fiction. Okay, how about one last tab? The real story of Silicon Valley innovation. So despite the origin story that a lot of tech titans like to claim, Margaret says that the legendary innovation of Silicon Valley exists because of government intervention, not in spite of it.
Margaret O’Mara: There’s a really interesting collective amnesia that is part of the secret of Silicon Valley, funnily enough. So the government has played a huge, huge role in the growth of the electronics industry, the computing industry over time here and elsewhere. But it’s done in a way that’s kind of been hard to see. It’s been indirect, right? It’s contracts going to private companies or universities. It’s regulations that are lowering taxes or lowering regulation. I mean, that’s government action. That’s government help, right. because it has been kind of indirect and subtle, a lot of people in the industry kind of say, okay, where our success comes from, government getting out of the way. Like we are so great because government has not been kind of micromanaging us or curbing our growth. And yeah, that is true, but part of this was this industry was only in the last 15 years has become as enormous as it has.
Morgan Sung: Turns out, that dreaded government regulation that these corporations fear so much has historically been great for the industry.
Margaret O’Mara: Anti-trust enforcement has been this really important factor in driving innovation over time.
Morgan Sung: As an example, Margaret talks about the history of the transitor.
Margaret O’Mara: The invention that started it all, the thing that is the core of every microchip, that this is the digital revolution, the transistor. That was developed in Bell Labs, which was AT&T’s industrial laboratory in New Jersey in 1947.
Morgan Sung: The transistor was revolutionary in electronics. It basically controls the flow of electric signals. At the time, Bell Labs and AT&T had a monopoly over the telecommunications industry. They manufactured all the parts and operated the service itself. In 1949, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into AT&T. They settled the lawsuit in 1956, and AT&T was required to grant all applicants non-exclusive licenses for all existing and future Bell System patents, including the transistor.
Margaret O’Mara: And so the DOJ forced AT&T to allow the transistor to be freely licensed by other companies. And this is how you had chip companies that emerge in the valley in the first place. We would not have silicon in the Valley if not for that Department of Justice condition, you know, putting that restraint on AT&T. This is why this political history is really useful to be aware of because there’s a, it’s legitimate to fear government interference in the innovation machine if you think that this has been a free market miracle and if government’s around, it is going to mess it up. But if you know the history and you realize, “oh, the innovation machine has actually been something that the government’s been part of and entrepreneurialism and government policy have existed side by side the whole time. Like, oh okay. So maybe that isn’t a bad thing.”
Just the sheer presence of having regulation or having policymakers and politicians in the room, setting the terms of the debate, that’s not going to be an innovation killer. In fact, an innovation killer will be if all the power just resides in the hands of a few companies and a few people.
Morgan Sung: Of course, there are so many terms that can still apply, but we can’t cover all of political theory in a single deep dive, and no single ideology will explain what’s happening with our government. What we do know is that beyond semantics, we can always look at history to understand why this is happening now.
Margaret O’Mara: We are in uncharted waters in many ways right now in terms of where things will go next, but I do believe that historical knowledge is power. So the more you know, the more, you know.
Morgan Sung: Okay. I’m gonna cap these markers, roll away this whiteboard, and close all these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our senior editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Catherine Monahan. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer.
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