July 17, 2024 - 4:00pm
Are we witnessing the end of tech’s domination by California — and the Left? Elon Musk announced yesterday that he’s moving the SpaceX and X headquarters from the Golden State to Texas. At almost the same moment, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced on their podcast that they’re endorsing Donald Trump, citing Trumpian policies on cutting-edge tech that are far more aligned with their aspirations for America’s future.
This crystallises a trend that’s been visible for some time, and which was explored in depth earlier this year by the always-prescient N.S. Lyons. I predicted in April that this “Progressive Right” would emerge victorious among the assorted agendas currently wrestling for control of the conservative movement. And lo and behold, America’s most cutting-edge technologists are coalescing behind Trump — providing heavyweight endorsements and new funding sources that will, they hope, translate into more friendly relations with the White House after November.
Musk, of course, has been a bête noir for the Biden administration for some time, having prised a major consensus-formation tool from progressive fingers in the name of “free speech” and been subjected, perhaps coincidentally, to lawsuits from all quarters. When Musk announced the Tesla HQ move, he declared that “the final straw” was new state rules on how and when schools must disclose pupils’ gender wishes to parents, which included a ban on schools requiring disclosure.
And perhaps that was the final straw. But Musk also mentioned “the many other [laws] that preceded it, attacking both families and companies”. At least some of what he’s referencing here is likely to be the increasingly adversarial relation between Biden’s Democrats and the tech sector, which has included a slew of policies aimed at regulating and constraining cutting-edge technologies such as crypto, AI, and biotech.
If social media was broadly Left-liberal in sensibility, with the biggest firms becoming progressive political actors in their own right, these newer fields of innovation are often fiercely resistant to such collectivist moral constraints. Crypto, for example, is strongly libertarian: the whole point is to cut the state out of currency creation. As for AI, in order to function usefully its pattern recognition capabilities must accurately reflect reality. So for innovators in the field, “AI bias” obligations seeking to constrain, say, an AI’s ability to surface or express politically incorrect patterns look less like progress in protecting vulnerable people than obstacles to progress in tech development in the national interest.
This faction is now firmly behind Trump. Andreessen and Horowitz are evidently on friendly dining terms with the former president — and as they put it, only the Orange Man is promising to “champion innovation”, in sharp contrast to the Biden administration’s “brutal assault” on the nascent crypto industry. As Andreessen sees it, under a Democratic government the “default path” for AI would be a “reign of terror” in regulation, comparable to the one they complain of in crypto, which would mean the industry is “in profound trouble”.
They contrast this approvingly with Trump’s proposal to “build the greatest economy in history”, promising to repeal Democrats’ regulatory constraints on AI, eliminate “radical Leftwing ideology”, and promote AI development “rooted in free speech and human flourishing”. In their view, AI will be transformative, including in warfare, and could deliver “the biggest technological boom of all time” provided it’s freed to play out.
When we put these sentiments together with the nomination of the tech titans’ favourite J.D. Vance as the Republican VP, the elite counterpart to Trump’s mass coalition comes into focus. This matters: for as historian Peter Turchin argues, the “silent majority” will have very little effect unless a mass movement gains elite support. This is especially true given that the Republican masses have for some time now coded increasingly lower-status: Vance himself reportedly described them in 2016 as, whether they liked it or not, “the party of lower-income, lower-education white people”.
The question has therefore been which subsets of the elite would break Republican. In tech, this is now clear: where Obama’s allies in the industry were social media platform moguls, Trump’s are crypto, AI, and biotech investors eager to accelerate America into a new Golden Age of innovation. Time will tell how aligned their aspirations are with those of the broader American public, but one thing seems increasingly clear: they have the (bandaged) ear of a man who may be about to become president again.
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SubscribeVery interesting developments – for all our futures. Trust MH to be one of the first to develop the very recent events into a narrative that can be readily entertained.
There’s a slight sense of unease in the way in which tech futures becomes right-coded, in the natural human questioning of where that might lead us, with or without our consent or understanding. Nevertheless, if foreign powers elsewhere are seemingly free to develop their own versions of “the future”, we might as well at least embrace a western version emanating from a state with some democratic accountablity.
Well-said, but to me the only legitimate source of unease about right-coded tech is the ramifications for AI, which points back to the almost certain impossibility of unbiased decision-making. I think this in turn relates to the fear that the current rightward turn of sentiment and institutions will inevitably go too far… what will that look like in the times to come?
> Orange Man
I’m sorry, but did Mary forget quotation marks here or are people really still calling Trump that unironically?
The initial caps did the job.
Nothing like a bunch of tech oligarchs backing someone who gives them the freedom to do what they want and make as much money as possible with no controls at all. I hope Trump has got his accommodation sorted for the next Davos summit, he will fit in fine there.
I’m also not so sure how libertarian they really are. They enjoy direct subsidies and QE a lot.
It’s very important that AI in its foundation stage is not forced to spew out woke lies such as black people in medieval England etc. At some point though the uneducated low income white people wil be rendered unemployed by the humanoid robots that are now just round the corner. Democrats will be stocking up on popcorn to watch this.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Manual labor involves movement, mass, and the laws of physics. Moving mass through space requires force, and generating force requires energy, either the energy produced by living bodies or the electrical energy that powers our machines. As machines use more and more of this energy, it will increase demand and energy prices will go up, which will in turn make manual labor look more appealing and allow laborers to demand higher wages in keeping with the increased cost of eliminating them. No, the people in greatest danger from AI are the overpaid middle managers, technical writers, low level programmers, secretaries, working at the corporate offices of large corporations, who will also have the earliest access to AI since they can pay the high costs. There’s a whole host of highly paid clerical work that AI is likely to decimate well before robots that have to substitute electrical energy for people energy can be cost competitive in many, many fields, and best of all, they don’t have to design or build a physical robot to ‘do’ anything, just train the AI. It’s all just typing on a computer anyway. I’m sorry but I’m afraid you’ve got this one backwards.
Hard to believe that a robot or machine will, anytime soon, be able to work as a jobbing builder.
until building technology develops a technique that is easily mechanized…perhaps factory built houses…then all bets are off!
I agree with the basic premise here, but don’t forget that the most working class men are employed as drivers of some kind and AI will automate this job.
Random reminders:
Read about the Russian Revolution again. There are only four units that have a wall for the internet (the usual suspects), but only one of them has a backup on the ground if, God forbid, everything stops working—China! Looking forward to a dictatorship in the US… just a rerun for most immigrants, but a new brave world for the West…but it is only painful if you stick out your head to criticize! LOL
If we look at predictions from the 60s, we are nowhere near as advanced as many believed we would be back then. Venture capitalists would of course argue this is because of ‘too much government’. I’m not so sure, we have been hearing that doctrine for a long time now. Yet, much of big tech seems to be the optimization of cold war technology, while new fundamental inventions are less common.
“If social media was broadly Left-liberal”
As Musk repeatedly points out, his politics haven’t changed, the left has.
Anyone calling these people ‘left-liberal’ – despite their obvious transformation into frothing fascists – must secretly be a leftist.
And so the wheel turns. A new group of elites in newer fields sees an opportunity to gain power at the expense of older elites in more traditional fields by allying itself with a powerful grassroots political movement. People need economic as well as political leaders, and the closest to the throne always gain an economic advantage. I expect the farm lobby and the MIC (Vance has ties with them) will not be far behind given the rural leanings of the Republican party and the brewing global conflicts that make high technology, and keeping secrets from adversaries and even allies, a matter of national security. Keeping the best technology out of Chinese and Russian hands is going to take precedence over the stock prices of the S&P 500 and gaining access to to foreign markets. If that comes to pass, it’s a winning team that will quickly build a new consensus that can’t be easily beaten or dislodged. The biggest losers are likely to be big banks and the financial sector, for whom globalism has been the biggest boom, and media and higher education, who are going to be left holding the grenade for the failures of the previous era as being the most visible avatars of progressive globalist ideology, DEI, etc.
I expect Vance to destroy Kamala in the debate in a way that’s hard to ignore, and that will reinforce the notion of the Republicans as the party of the future. Things look bleak indeed for the Democrats, but it’s largely their own fault.
Fitting, given how both the tech sector and Trump’s abilities are both vastly overhyped.
I need to clear up a few things. Musk did not move Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas. The headquarters was in Delaware. Musk got into a spat with a judge about taxes and Musk’s huge compensation as CEO. Texas had no taxes so off he went. This followed the move of his auto manufacturing plant in Fremont to Texas. Why? The people who worked there wanted to earn more than minimum wage. The workers agitated and there was talk of a union. You try to live in the Bay Area on minimum wage. Anyway, the plant was shut down. The J.D. Vance’s of the world put down the uneducated white men in America as losers. Read Hillbilly Elegy. Yet, in the same breath they promise to lift these men up. Vance, Musk and other tech Lords of the Universe care only about their own wealth and amassing more power via Washington. No, I’m not a socialist. I actually care about lifting up the workers so they have a chance of a happy life.
I believe that you are equivocating on the term “headquarters”. In the U.S. many corporations are legally “registered” as such in Delaware because of legal advantages peculiar to that state. Few of those corporations are physically headquartered there, headquartering being defined as the place your management show up to work every day. Musk has never run any of his companies out of Delaware.
Okay. However, that’s when he moved his headquarters, not when he was upset about trans rules in California. He also loves Texas’s tax policies. No taxes on capital gains.
Where’s your evidence that the people who worked at the Fremont plant made minimum wage? That sounds extremely unlikely. As a matter of fact, one source says the average wage at Fremont is $22.13/hour, while California minimum wage is $16.00/hour.
There are already companies producing fully autonomous swarming drones for combat. If there is another big war our children and grand children will be turned to rags and vapor and little bits of bone by the tens of thousands before they get anywhere near the front.. Then the powers-that-be will use AI to “count” the dead (using sophisticated statistical methods, of course) and write the letters.
My point being that we humans are incapable of controlling these mega-moguls and the tech they assail us with. They’ve already dragged us down into this pit we’re in. And they’re not done yet.
Human flourishing, indeed.
Indeed. Optimism around AI mirrors earlier exuberance about social media and mobile phones which we later found how much they changed society beyond their basic benign premise.
However, unlike those, AI is vastly more capable and important, and will as fundamentally change human lives as industrial revolution did probably rendering large parts if not all of humanity as economically unimportant. When people don’t wield economic power, they will cease to have political power. This is why people keep referring to the coming age as technofeudalism which is the kind of existence we will have if we continue to exist at all.
The reason Silicon Valley is probably happier with Trump coming into office is that Silicon Valley has turned into a machine focused on creating weapons. Everything they develop is a weapon first before being commercialized. They are not primarily focusing on commercial products.
Many people in Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, want to create a different world, not just weapons but also exploring other planets. You cannot allocate resources for both weapons and space exploration due to research and capital restraints. There is no need for so many weapons if USA is not creating environments and chaos that need weapons around the world.
They want more freedom to create what they envision (exploration, health related like death defying or delaying products etc.) rather than just producing weapons. This is one area most people do not understand about silicon valley. They are more oppressed in terms of creativity than any other industry and must focus on weapon technology – that is not innovation for them. They also want freedom to create a flying car that will not be used as a weapon!
Recalls the famous quote by the First Republican and the one president just a whisker ahead of President Trump, to wit, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Abraham Lincoln (And, sometimes, Peter Drucker, Conservative.)
An excellent read with some solid analysis, and thankfully free of the “orange man, Bad” that seems almost a requirement in any article that comes anywhere near Trump.