That's the title of Henry Farrell's interview with Le Grand Continent in Programmable Mutter.
Louis de Catheu - Something that is quite striking with the second Trump administration is the part taken by the Tech Bros in his entourage and his coalition. To you, what are the causes of this new alignment between the MAGA movement and Silicon Valley active bosses?
Henry Farrell - There are a number of areas where they share common interests. One thing, which is always very important to remember, is that they have common enemies. Many people on the Tech right are very much opposed to some of the measures that the Biden administration was associated with.
The Tech right also harks back to a particular vision of the politics of technology. [...] It more or less suggests: wouldn't it be incredible if we lived in a world in which we did not have to worry about government anymore?
That vision is very clearly part of the animating vision of Peter Thiel. [...] This will be a new world order in which technology founders will effectively be treated almost as the God Kings of these micro communities. People would be able to move back and forth between these communities according to Albert Hirschman’s logic of exit. [...]
The second thing that is important is a much more immediate set of political tensions, some of which are purely and simply due to people in the Silicon Valley right feeling that they did not get sufficient recognition from the Biden administration. [...]
The third thing is that there is an extreme hostility towards unions in Silicon Valley, which goes across the far right through to moderate left Democrat leaning people among the founders. The research of Neil Malhotra, David Broockman, and Gregory Ferenstein, suggests that in many ways Silicon Valley founders and funders are pretty left wing when it comes to a variety of social issues. They are more left wing than you might expect with respect to certain kinds of distributional issues, such as, being more favorable to basic income or to the distribution of welfare. But they are virulently hostile towards anybody who tries to tell them how to do their business. [...]
Opposition to woke is a significant part of the new way of thinking about things, but this is not because people have opposition to individual lifestyles, to people getting gender alteration surgery or any of these things. On principle, many people in Silicon Valley often tend to be radically libertarian when it comes to people's lifestyles. What they really objected to was the possibility that other people could tell them what they could or could not do to shape the workplace of their firms. These three forms of opposition helped to explain why you saw the Big Tech and Trump coming together.
Great Men:
You just spoke about God Kings and the need for respect. That make me think about your writings on the Silicon Valley canon. Some founders in Silicon Valley seem to have very specific views on history, the great men and their own place in history.
When I said that there was a lack of respect, I think that this involves changes in the broader conversation. Over the last number of years, Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists have been treated with a significant degree of worship by the United States press — until around 2015-2016.
If Silicon Valley people wanted to pronounce on something, their grand statements were treated with enormous respect by the press. They had entourages, as if they were presidents. Mark Zuckerberg and other people were deemed by many to be world historical figures.
That, unsurprisingly changed the sense among Silicon Valley people about what their world historic role was. Here, one of the key essays for me is Marc Andreessen's piece, from 2011, called “Why Software is Eating the World,” which suggests that he and his colleagues are going to bring through a fundamental transformation in the way of things. [...]
When you talk to Silicon Valley people, you get the sense that they either read a lot or —which is in some ways nearly the same thing— they pretend to read a lot, because being well read is viewed as being part of the culture.
That is very different from 15 years ago. When my friend Aaron Swartz was alive and was still part of the debate, he used to be extremely grumpy about the lack of intellectual curiosity among Silicon Valley people. Now Silicon Valley people at least feel that they are obliged to pretend to read — and some of them actually do read. [...]
I think that the reason why Silicon Valley leaders read is because they are looking for models of how to act in the world as great men. [...]
We're in a world now where Silicon Valley people really began to identify with the idea that they were great men. This is not to say that great men are perfect, but they are people with very large virtues — and very large flaws as well. Silicon Valley founders were going to be world historical colossuses, bestriding the stage, reshaping the world in their image.
DOGE and its aftereffects:
First of all, there's DOGE's official goal, which is to achieve efficiency in the federal government. Indeed, there were probably a couple of people attached to DOGE for whom that was actually their primary goal.
A second goal was to effectively eliminate large chunks of the federal government. Of course, if you look at where DOGE acted, very often it was acting in those parts of the federal government, which were left coded rather than conservative coded. [...]
Finally, you could argue that a significant part of DOGE and efforts associated with it involved Elon Musk looking to position his own people in places of power. [...]
The first part, the efficiency part, I think never really took off in any very serious way. Perhaps under different Republicans or under Democrats, you might begin to see that take off again seriously. I don't think that was ever really a serious part of the project, as opposed to an ideological justification for it.
The second part, trying to rip away large chunks of the US government, I think is going to continue because it does not just involve DOGE, but is also about the people associated with Project 2025.
The final part - Musk installing his own people into the government - is obviously now unlikely to succeed. A lot of people are probably not going to continue on in the same way, or they will be asked to sign different loyalty oaths than the one that they felt that they were signing when they first came in. [...]
My personal theory is that if you really want to understand the Trump administration, read the autobiography of Cardinal de Retz or similar people who worked in these courts. The modern equivalents don’t have titles of nobility - perhaps they might like to - but they are engaged in the same squalid intrigues based around personal advancement, sex, rivalry. All of these things are going to be part of the Trump administration in a way that they were not part of the Biden administration — which of course had its own rivalries, but they tend to be much more technocratic ones.
AI and AGI:
We're now in a different world. It is very hard to say exactly how the Trump administration thinks about AI and AGI. It has not come out with any explicit documentation. But from what we can tell, this is much less of a coherent vision that the Biden administration had — whether you liked it or not — and much more a question of convergence between the interests of particular powerful companies and the national interest of the United States, which is defined in a somewhat flexible way.
The deals that were done in the Gulf a few weeks ago, or the apparent deal that has been done between the United States and China, which we have not seen the details of, suggest a much more flexible approach to AI. The United States still wants to be the country which really dominates the AI debate and discourse, but it also wants to take full advantage of the opportunities to do deals around AI, which will cement not simply US power, but also the power of particular people within the administration and of particular business interests which have strong connections with the administration. [...]
Throughout all of this we will see a perpetual opportunism in place of planning and strategy. I think that this is going to be a world of deal-making, rather than a world of the United States trying to fulfill a grand vision as it has in the past.
There's much more at the link.
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