Our Straussian Techocracy - Liberties

The Silicon Valley elites funding the New Right believe it is much more difficult to be cynically correct than idealistically wrong. This is central to the worldview of figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen. They believe it is their lot in life to possess superior judgement that enables them to pierce through conventional thought. In a few domains — most notably, venture capital and tech entrepreneurship — this can bring immense rewards. When it comes to politics, however, society tends to punish those who attempt to disabuse the masses of their false idealism. The tech billionaires therefore despise pious “liberal elites” who want to enjoy the fruits of civilization while condemning all of the dirty work required to make society function. These out-of-touch idealists, they say, want prosperity without inequality, safety without policing, excellence without rigor, and progress without disruption. This poses a dilemma: Suffer for speaking unpopular truths or allow society to continue deluding itself with bad ideas?

The tech oligarchs therefore see themselves as having undertaken a heroic but thankless task. This helps explain why, despite amassing enormous fortunes, they all sound so miserable: Elon Musk claims he built SpaceX, not to accumulate lucrative government contracts, but because he alone understood what needed to be done to ensure an interplanetary future for our species. Similarly, Peter Thiel did not cozy up to Trump to boost his investment portfolio, but because he recognized the fate of Western civilization hung in the balance. And Marc Andreessen had no intention of influencing the federal government to support his various crypto schemes, he just knew leftists failed to grasp that “societies, like sharks, grow or die.” All three men imagine themselves as lonely Atlasses holding a perpetually ungrateful world on their shoulders. Are their ideologies self-serving? Absolutely. Are they hypocritical? Even more so, coming from three self-proclaimed free-marketeers. But people contain multitudes, and Silicon Valley’s vision for a post-liberal, techno-authoritarian future is not entirely in bad faith, which makes it all the more troubling.

It’s easy to forget just how far the core values of certain Silicon Valley elites stray from those held by ordinary Americans. Would anyone hire a babysitter who believed she could live forever by uploading her brain to the cloud? Would parents trust their children to a teacher who was convinced ChatGPT had become sentient and would eventually enslave humanity? Could a small-town mayoral candidate win an election if she genuinely believed her children would not live in that community, or even this planet, but in a space colony on Mars? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, “no.” But we have become numb to what are, quite frankly, creepy and anti-human values. For decades, these ideologies were tolerated as part of a tacit social bargain: A group of intelligent eccentrics were left to their own devices on a patch of land in the Santa Clara Valley, and, in return, American society received an extraordinary set of new technologies. There was no fine print in this bargain about space colonies, American monarchs, or network states. And yet, here we are.

In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (2025), Palantir executives Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska set out with the admirable goal of realigning the culture and values of Silicon Valley with those of the greater United States. They seek a return to the Cold War ethos in which “the pursuit of public interest through science and engineering was considered a natural extension of the national project, which entailed not only protecting U.S. interests but moving society, and indeed civilization, up the hill.” Instead of serving the common good, they say, the modern tech industry responds to the whims of consumers. Tech founders regard the U.S. as “a dying empire, whose slow descent could not be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise and the new era’s gold rush.” Software engineers opt for the “perceived safety of building another app” because they fear the social stigma that would come with assisting the American military. “Far too much capital, intellectual and otherwise, has been dedicated to sating the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes,” they write.

Karp and Zamiska provide a compelling cultural critique of Silicon Valley, even if The Technological Republic occasionally reads like a very long recruiting brochure. Social activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s are blamed for driving a wedge between the government and the tech industry. Karp and Zamiska acknowledge that these movements aired legitimate grievances. But the protests, they say, deconstructed one vision for a collective national project — however flawed — and offered nothing in its place. The resultant...