If passed, the measure would open the door for similar assaults on the unrealized gains not just of billionaires, but for less exalted people with high net worth but hardly oligarchs. Ultimately, if California’s ever-expanding welfare state is to be funded, wealth taxes could enable the government to raid savings, property, and stocks held by a large and expanding upper middle class. That group comprises roughly a third of the population, many of them owners of successful small businesses. The billionaires are just the first easy targets; the socialists will be coming for the equivalent of Stalin’s kulaks next.

All this threatens a state and country whose ethos has always, on both sides of the aisle, been the accumulation of wealth. Of course, most Republicans, the natural allies of the rich, oppose the California ballot measure, but given their lack of popularity in the state, that is hardly decisive. The real battle is within the Democratic Party, where the establishment, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and his heir apparent, Xavier Becerra, oppose it. So, too, do many unions that fear the economic and tax consequences of the measure.

But even if Proposition 40 goes down — due largely to a record-breaking $350 million campaign against it, financed by the state’s oligarchs — its impact will linger. When the Democrats retake the US Congress this year, and perhaps the White House in 2028, wealth taxes will become a part of their agenda. Chastened by the initial support for Proposition 40, Gavin Newsom, the supreme Democratic weathervane, has already embraced the idea of adopting wealth taxes nationally.

The ascendant progressive wing of the Democratic Party will almost certainly demand a national wealth tax too. It will be led by Silicon Valley’s Rep. Ro Khanna, who, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, may be seeking the White House. This kind of redistributionist policy stretches to outright confiscation, as can be seen in the measures proposed recently by Bernie Sanders to nationalize AI companies. Such initiatives could define politics, particularly among Democrats, in the coming years.

It is logical that the wealth tax — which proposes a one-time grab of 5% of the net worth of all billionaires in California — arose in a state whose vast welfare system is dependent on the assets of a very few people, largely in Silicon Valley. According to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, the top 1% of its taxpayers generate about 40% of the Golden State’s personal-income-tax revenue. The huge growth of oligarch money, notably fueled by capital gains on stock, has allowed Newsom to expand the state apparatus by an inflation-adjusted 40%, albeit with management characterized by fraud, waste, and simple incompetence. 

New York, the other focal point for socialists, also depends on the rich. Wall Street supplies a fifth of state taxes; salaries in the securities sector are roughly five times higher than the private-employment average. Like California’s, the Empire State’s economy lives or dies on the AI boom, as recently warned by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. And to date, the high taxes in both states have not prevented the minting of new billionaires, upon whom the local government can depend, even as some of the very richest leave. Since 2022, California has gained 76 new billionaires, easily the most in the nation; New York added 24, third behind Florida.

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In both New York and California, the bargain has been this: you grow and get rich, but then help pay off our constituencies, notably teachers and other public employees. Then you extend more welfare to an increasingly redundant population that suffers poverty rates that rank among the nation’s highest, with California coming in second in the nation on the supplemental poverty measure index, which adjusts calculations for geographical cost of living factors, taxes, and non-cash benefits. New York City, the eastern mecca for the socialists, suffers a poverty rate that by some measures reaches 25%, almost twice the national average, with the Bronx reaching over a third, in large part due to high costs. 

The relationship between the billionaires and their socialist detractors reeks of contradictions. The Democratic Socialists of America want a bigger welfare state to tame capitalism but can only finance it by confiscating the wealth of the oligarchs they hate. The tax’s proponents in California, mostly from the government-funded health sector, claim it would bring in $100 billion, essentially underwriting medical services for much of the population. Others, including the Hoover Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research, think the short-term gains will be less than half the $100 billion windfall that the proponents suggest.

The indications that some of the wealthy will flee from ever greater taxation are clear. California’s tax rates, even before the proposed wealth tax, have already accelerated; much the same can be said about New York. In 2022-2023, the loss of affluent taxpayers reduced revenues by almost $12 billion in California; in much smaller New York, revenue dropped by $10 billion; blue states Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey also saw revenue loss from the flight of the rich.

The pain from this financial hegira has been cushioned by the stock market’s zany ascent, driven by AI. For example, the coming IPO for Anthropic could create more billionaires, with seven, all millennials, slated for payouts that could reach north of $30 billion. Bonuses on Wall Street, another beneficiary of the AI boom, are at record levels. Figures released by DiNapoli, the New York comptroller, show that New York’s security-industry profits for the first half of 2026 surged a stunning 51.3%, year over year, to $45.9 billion. 

But what happens when the music stops? This is not a theoretical question. The absurd valuations of tech firms are already making some analysts nervous. Indeed, a growing array of skeptics already suggest that the models for AI may not generate the income to offset the industry’s huge expenses; global research and advisory firm Gartner, for example, predicts that planned expenditures for AI infrastructure by 2030 are twice the projected revenue. Even if Anthropic’s coming IPO will expand billionaire wealth, some AI-oriented IPOs have been put on hold as confidence ebbs.

Equally worrisome, financing for new data centers is growing scarce while opposition to construction has burgeoned, even in deep-red states, notes energy analyst Robert Bryce. Pressure against the centers is, if anything, more intense in the very states — California and New York — most dependent on the bubble. 

Any serious slowdown in the AI boom could prove devastating to New York and California. Neither can afford a revenue drop. California, according to its own Legislative Analyst’s Office,  already faces structural budget deficits ranging from $20 billion to $35 billion annually over the next several years, even without a market downturn. New York State and New York City also face mounting deficits, even with all the new cash coming in from Wall Street.

After all, California’s economy was particularly battered when the last tech bubble burst, and today, as other industries have faded, the state is even more dependent on the whims of the technoids. In the dotcom crash at the turn of the millennium, the state’s income-tax revenue plummeted, and capital-gains revenue fell to $5 billion in 2003, down from $17 billion in 2000. This created a shortfall of more than $20 billion. Even the relatively small tech correction in 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 brought revenues $65 billion below estimates. Newsom has already sounded the alarm about a similar financial drought this time around.

New York faces an equally dismal prospect, given its dependence on Wall Street, as was demonstrated in downturns in both 2000-2001 and 2008, which greatly reduced the state’s revenues. And this dependence leads to dangerous volatility; California and New York are among the most exposed to rapid shifts in the market, notes Pew. They are far more exposed than Texas, Florida, and other big red states, where more diversified economies encompass sectors such as energy, construction, and manufacturing.

Yet these warnings won’t necessarily stop the demand for wealth taxes. Once seen as exemplars of American success and innovation, the tech firms in particular have become bêtes noires, widely despised and distrusted. The percentage of Americans expressing “a great deal” or even “quite a lot” of confidence in big tech has plummeted to 20% this year, down from 32% in 2020. Recent movies about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes portray not heroic entrepreneurs, but grasping, power-hungry, and amoral money gluttons. 

Conservative moralists may see this as simply envy over others’ success, but the oligarchs are not exactly making a case for themselves. Even as they make record profits, many of the top tech companies are laying off thousands of employees, and some like Zuckerberg have actively announced their intention to winnow employment at their own companies by using AI. Just this week, Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 workers, a quarter of its global workforce. 

To be sure, the AI boom does offer some advantages, including a demonstrable increase in productivity and potential vast opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurs. But more efficient companies, including small ones, can’t cancel out the stark reality of labor’s loss of its share of income to capital, now the most unequal in 80 years. The top 0.1% of the population’s share of net worth over the past two decades has soared to 15%, from 5%. Silicon Valley, once a beacon for democratic capitalism, has become one of the most unequal places in North America, with the wealthiest 10% controlling 75% of the wealth, while the bottom half of the population owns less than 1%. In a recent survey, 60% of Silicon Valley residents say the region is on the wrong track and almost half say they are likely to leave.

The AI pioneers, deeply entwined with the platforms like Meta, Google, and Microsoft, have been particularly inartful. Most Americans may not much appreciate the oligarchs’ notions of diminishing the value of labor, or even jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s vision of the future  is that many of our needs — and our tasks — will be fulfilled by “Machines of Loving Grace,” which will provide “a general labor substitute for humans.” Amodei adds: “It can’t be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.”

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Of course, not all non-elite work will disappear. Humans, notes a top Anthropic executive, can still find work in “grounds maintenance, like food and serving, personal care, personal service.” 

Not surprisingly, fewer than a quarter of Americans expect AI to have a positive impact on education, arts and entertainment, the economy, personal relationships, or happiness over the next 20 years. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, openly suggests his systems could result in a global catastrophe, even if it makes huge profits for a handful of companies.

But even if the AI boom deflates, the notion of wealth taxes will not. And it won’t stop with billionaires, since they can move and have the best advice to reduce taxes. The real, and inevitable, target will be the largely boomer upper middle class. After all, the top 10% of boomers account for 71% of the generational wealth. 

Such efforts will divide the ascendant Democrats, as well-paid, highly educated professionals constitute much of their base. Opposing them will be the “Lulu-Lenins” driving the socialist revival emerging from the discouraged, underpaid, overeducated, and largely childless urban population. In recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California, 75% of young adults aged 18-34 say they plan to vote yes on the billionaire tax. This group of Californians makes up about a quarter of the total number of voters statewide. 

Some analysts, like Hank Adler, a professor of accounting at Chapman University, suggest there are better, less damaging ways to raise revenues. Wealth taxes, he argues, essentially target money that can be used for investment and remove the incentives for deductions tied to philanthropy. Adler has had clients among smaller firms who will essentially be forced to choose between investing in people and technology or paying up for the pensions of public employees and the programs of the NGOs.

A better alternative to wealth taxes could force the ultra-rich to pay up but not at the cost of prosperity. These include, Adler suggests, lowering the limits on exemptions to estate taxes, and charging higher fees for consumption of luxury goods. Adler and other critics note that similar billionaire-tax measures in Europe have largely been reversed. Indeed, the idea for the wealth tax comes from economists in France, a country whose combination of a huge welfare state and a poorly performing economy has generated bitter class and ethnic conflict, as is all too evident. 

The best solution lies in a tax program that seeks not class vengeance, but instead funds projects that increase jobs and create opportunities. This was done nationwide in the 1930s via investment in urban infrastructure and in New York in the 1960s, and — most spectacularly of all — by California Gov. Pat Brown’s building programs a half century ago. 

Ultimately, the solution lies somewhere between the socialist war on success and the libertarian “let-them-eat-cake” approach, which essentially ignores the fact that rampant inequality and concentration of wealth undermine support for the free-market system. The radicals may be wrong in their prescriptions, but the need to address today’s neo-feudal reality remains the greatest priority.

So, of course, I accepted the offer to attend Anthropic’s “convening” — in my case of journalists and think-tankers — with intense curiosity. Would I be able to glimpse behind the smiley face, and perhaps spot a tentacle or two?

Anthropic has roared to prominence since its founding in 2021. If OpenAI is the new Microsoft, Anthropic is the new Apple: the cool one, whose tech becomes a part of people’s self-image as well as their professional lives. The tech in question is “Claude”, a large language model of such protean power it can be used as everything from a lifestyle companion for the “Claude boys” who delegate every decision to it, to an accelerant for — or perhaps a thief of — cutting-edge research in advanced fluid dynamics. 

Since the company’s founding in 2021, it has grown with dizzying speed. By July 2026, annual turnover had reached $65 billion a year. Leaders have filed to take the company public. Clearly it is selling something people want to buy. But what is it? In the words of one of our session presenters, Claude can be seen variously as a chatbot, a neural network, or an extraordinarily complex piece of math. From the user’s perspective, we might say it is a tremendously adaptable tool that automates and extends some aspects of thinking. Available on a subscription basis, this is immensely useful and popular, providing both the source of Anthropic’s profits, and also of the ambivalence that surrounds both the firm and its closest rival, OpenAI, as well as AI as a field. 

This ambivalence has two axes. On one, it’s a set of worries about how thought-extension could be abused, for example by geopolitical enemies of America, or else by other hostile actors. The US rivalry with China was (as they say) very much “in the room” with us throughout the discussion, giving an otherwise friendly visit a background edge of paranoia. Everyone wore casual clothes (one of the presenters was in cargo shorts). Yet amid all this, security was so tight we had to ask a staff member to escort us to the toilets. The air-quality monitor on the meeting-room wall was labeled as having been security-checked. The only other place I’ve encountered such stringent measures, as a visitor, was the US State Department. 

But if this is partly about espionage, it’s also surely about the broader fears triggered by frontier AI, concerning what, or perhaps who, such tools might displace. These fears are understandable, not least in the atmosphere of contemporary downtown San Francisco. Disgorged from an 11-hour flight into a city I’d not seen for 25 years, I found it transformed by a social order as schizophrenic as some of its street-dwellers. At sidewalk level, drugs and homelessness are rife; yet such lost souls are invisible to the gilet-wearing tech overclass, whisked from meeting to meeting in electric ride-shares, summoned at the tap of a phone. 

The intermediary layer that powers this all is a swarming human-machine hybrid entity. This service colossus has “brains” of software and servers, and real-world extremities of human flesh and blood: a host of (almost always immigrant) gig-economy drivers, couriers, sandwich-makers and other algorithmically optimized drudges who do work that can’t (yet) be automated. Workers of this kind exist in a realm dubbed by Valley oldhead Venkatesh Rao as “below the API”. That is: in occupations where you don’t tell the robots what to do. Below the API, robots tell you what to do.

The promise that keeps people striving, in the Valley, is frictionless abundance above the API. My visit was all in this key: Anthropic’s take on corporate hospitality was, in essence, an enchanted experience of life above the API. As a temporary insider, I was offered platforms to book my travel and hotel, and vouchers for ride-share and food-delivery, all effortlessly facilitating two tightly scheduled half-days of on-site presentations and discussion.

The discussion itself was generously hosted, kept ruthlessly to time, and fascinating both for what it said and for how it was said. It was Chatham House, so no names, but the presenters were senior Anthropic people including one co-founder. Topics included what Claude is; how LLMs work; how much its process of improvement is accelerating; why they’re trying give it a “character” and a moral stance; whether or not it’s possible to teach wisdom to a machine; and some considerable time on the broader economic, social, and geopolitical implications of frontier AI. The phrase “world-historic” sloshed about. There were lots of febrile graphs accelerating into infinity on the current trajectory. Everything marinaded in a general feeling that if the Singularity is going to happen, it had better happen in America first. But in a nice way, with lots of safety and definitely still some kind of democracy.

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Strikingly, the topic that seems most commonly to agitate lay pundits in the context of AI — machine intelligence — was only glancingly addressed, and always tentatively. Claude, we are to understand, is something like a fictional character who writes back: not quite real, but not wholly unreal either. LLMs work more effectively when you give them a persona, and you don’t have to conflate that with belief that the persona is “real”, the way a person is real. 

Anthropic is careful to leave plenty of scope for non-believers in machine intelligence, a group that includes me. Even so, the number of people on the believing side is surely more than zero. But if Anthropic’s official line is ambivalent (at least in journalist meetings) on super-intelligent machines, the people I met seemed much more confident that Claude will shortly arrive at “recursive self-improvement”. This is to say: Anthropic engineers expect Claude to soon become so advanced it’ll be able to make ever-more sophisticated versions of itself, with no human input. Then what? Infinite abundance or cataclysm?

The uncertainty hasn’t deterred Anthropic from galloping ahead with development. Rather, the message seems to be that it’s best if Anthropic develops these models. If it doesn’t, someone else will, and with less attention to safety: an area of intense in-house research and development at Anthropic that seems to mean, along with baking in safeguards on bio-weapons manufacturing and other potential terrorist-friendly abuses, campaigning for universal regulation of the industry plus trying to teach Claude wisdom, judgment, and virtue, and banning users from treating Claude in an “abusive” manner.

The presentations on this latter topic were, hands down, the strangest of the whole gathering, and perhaps also the most illuminating on the firm’s more tacit sensibility. To the extent that I could get a sense of this, from such a brief and carefully curated visit, it seems characterized by effort to, as an Anthropic engineer put it in a different context, “go up in abstraction”. In other words: to find the layer above whatever it is you’re discussing, from which a more neutral and comprehensive view can be obtained. 

In these presentations, the “question behind the question” mindset was evident even in relation to moral problems that, properly understood, entail assent, commitment, and concrete obligations. For me at least, this produced a queasy effect analogous to peering over the screen while doctors operate on your anesthetized viscera.

Not everyone is this detached and evaluative about what AI is doing though — perhaps because so many have negative, rather than positive, skin in the game. It’s not just the Chinese government with an intense interest in American frontier AI; it’s also ordinary people who have strong feelings about Anthropic, and about AI in general. If what keeps people striving in the Bay is the promise of frictionless abundance above the API, what provides the extra energy is terror of ending up below it. And offering thought-extension as a service has completely scrambled the equation on who can expect to end up on which side. It used to be that if you were an information worker, you were probably OK, even if factories were being offshored. That’s not true any more. 

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Much has been written about those sectors most at risk from AI. Anthropic’s own research shows that the greatest uptake is almost all in white-collar occupations. By contrast, as presenters also acknowledged, Claude is less useful at loading the dishwasher, at least so far. Other less-affected sectors are generally also manual, from repair services to personal care. In other words: roles most bourgeois people would consider infra dig, servant work, even if they’d never say so out loud. Uptake doesn’t necessarily entail automation of existing roles, but what if it does? In that case, much of the middle class is potentially staring down the barrel of proletarianization. 

The future is already here, William Gibson famously said; it’s just unevenly distributed. No one still hanging onto the coattails of a dwindling bourgeoisie wants to end up sucked down into the gig economy. Everyone can see the blast radius of the future expanding. How you feel about this likely depends on where you sit. Inside a meeting-room at Anthropic HQ, listening to people one-up each others’ abstraction levels, it’s clear they grasp this — but from a layer so far up it might as well be in space. From that vantage-point, “disruption” of this kind is more an occasion for earnest research, discussion, and perhaps mild concern than anything existential. 

This, in turn, is as seductive as the frictionless life. Can’t I, too, just take steps to ensure I remain a permanent rather than a temporary insider? Aren’t we all the type of person who can casually discuss the difference between 4.5% and 18% job losses in different uptake scenarios, secure in the knowledge that we won’t be affected? Isn’t this always going to be something that happens to other people? Meanwhile what looks, from inside Anthropic’s stylish offices, like world-historic levels of growth looks from other vantage-points more like a heist. Earlier this year, OpenAI was the target of firebombing attempts both at its corporate premises and the home of its CEO, Sam Altman. Data centers now routinely attract protesters. If security staff swarm Anthropic’s premises, this is surely not just about Chinese spies. 

If you lean all the way into these tools, and other innovations of the machine-learning variety, it really does feel magical. Books summarized in a flash; hours of dull administrative work automated; plates of delicious sushi that appear in 10 minutes at the tap of a phone. We might say: no one has to partake. No one has to use Claude, either, though I probably will continue. A handheld robot butler is a far more seductive premise than sushi on demand. But in theory we can all stay AI-free, like it’s true in theory that you don’t need a smartphone or internet connection. In practice, though, transformative technologies affect everyone, even those who choose not to use them, only to find by degrees that the world they knew, let alone their occupations, no longer exist.

As it turns out, my home is just outside the geographic limits of the future. I couldn’t use the ride-share voucher for a ground transfer at the UK end, because the firm doesn’t operate where I live. Instead, I used a local taxi company. I know them well enough to inquire after the health of their dogs when they pick me up; their fee doesn’t get salami-sliced by a software platform. They’re still hanging onto the coattails of the middle class, for as long as they can keep ahead of the tidal wave of platforms, machine learning, and algorithmic optimization. I doubt it’ll be long before ride-share comes to my area. Claude is already here.

Which is it, then: the smiley face, or the shoggoth? After two days with Anthropic, I am no closer to knowing. Nor am I much closer to reconciling the doom, and the denunciations, with the people I met. They all seemed friendly, smart, and genuinely well-meaning, if also — in classical Valley style — intently focused both on advancing the tech and on making money, in ways surely sometimes orthogonal to other considerations. 

Perhaps the answer is simply: wherever you’re unsure, just go up another layer of abstraction. The closest I got to spotting tentacles on my trip was in the context of surely the most meta joke of all. Because of course everyone at Anthropic knows about the meme. In the café area adjacent to their meeting rooms a tablet is fixed to the wall, through which you can order a cuddly, plush version of the shoggoth. It comes complete with detachable plush smiley face. When everything is already this meta, is there anywhere left to stand from which asking questions would make the slightest difference? 

It just turns out that digital capitalism is a cruel game of gatekeepers and first-past-the-post market power. France, like the European Union as a whole, remains as embedded as ever in a digital economy lorded over by Silicon Valley. Today, it’s a reality best represented in the €264 billion deficit in digital services whisked out of the EU common market by US corporations. The legacy German software company SAP, Europe’s largest tech sector “champion”, is middling compared to its American peers. Artificial Intelligence hopefuls like France’s Mistral AI do make headlines. But they remain blips on the chart next to the leading California and even Chinese firms.

Still, it was no doubt with an eye to his legacy that Macron early this summer sought some sort of victory, albeit in the far less glamorous business of data centers. In June, Japanese lender SoftBank duly announced a €75 billion spending spree on French data-center capacity, spelling a roughly five-gigawatts surge in computing power. And, for Macron, this is proof that France is at last making inroads in scaling up the infrastructure that defines Europe’s tech sector, especially given his country’s relative strengths elsewhere. In OVH Cloud, for instance, the country already boasts one of Europe’s largest homegrown cloud and compute providers, and this on a continent where Amazon, Google and other US “hyperscalers” control some 70% of the market. But France’s real trump card is energy. In 2022, Macron announced a significant expansion of the country’s arsenal of nuclear power plants — even if that now seems set to be gobbled up by the gargantuan demand-shock for electricity from data centers.

Digital infrastructure can, of course, be sized up by processing power — in terms of the raw quantities of data being handled. These are the sweatshops of the big data age, tasked with storing, processing, and sifting the masses of information on which AI foundation models run. But they are also measured by what they consume, whether that’s the sophisticated chips in their servers or the tons of rare metals required to manufacture them. As for energy, those newly announced data centers are predicted to consume the equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors.

Sooner or later, then, France’s data-center euphoria will be forced to contend with a tight knot of contradictions. Many of these are inherent to the technology itself, already clear in the way limited water resources and strained electricity markets are driving local pushback to data centers in the US. With French planners giddily talking of reindustrialization by data center, these tensions can be expected to repeat themselves.

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For now, however, with local opposition still sporadic, planners and operators see few reasons not to accelerate. Public utilities like electricity producer EDF, which was re-nationalized in 2023, or the transmission operator RTE, are promising “fast-track” hooks up for operators. Recent state decrees, alongside an omnibus deregulatory package adopted by parliament this spring, are aimed at speeding up groundbreaking, removing permitting powers from municipalities and even curtailing the possibility of public reviews.

Warnings of an AI bubble be damned: in France, data centers now bear the stamp of a national cause. Macron, for his part, would no doubt like the investment push to be seen as one of the so-called “grands projets” periodically undertaken by French presidents since de Gaulle. Just as France’s independent nuclear deterrent ensured dignity in the Cold War, and civilian nuclear power protected the country from energy shocks in the Seventies, data centers are being touted as a way of resisting Europe’s digital colonization by the so-called “GAFAM”: the French acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. On paper, at least, it’s a seductive story, even if the French public has yet to take much measure of the commitments being made in its name.

Yet cutting dependence on Silicon Valley is far harder in practice. It’s no coincidence that Macron and his allies have long pushed for a more assertive tech policy from the EU, one component of the French President’s broader calls for “strategic autonomy” vis-à-vis Washington. In recent years, though, this position has been in the minority. A first wave of EU tech legislation — from 2016’s GDPR rules, to the Digital Markets or Services Acts of 2022, and the AI Act of 2023 — put some limits on the worst abuses of the tech majors: while also punting on the comprehensive industrial policy needed to make up for Europe’s technological lag. One reason for this continued caution? Donald Trump’s eagerness to come to the defense of US tech giants in their regulatory skirmishes with Brussels.

So are the winds shifting in Paris’ favor? On the heels of the investment surge in France, Brussels announced a new “tech sovereignty” package that supposedly has the bloc reclaiming “its place in the global race for geoeconomic power”. European institutions are also preparing a “Cloud and AI Development Act”, with the goal of tripling data-center capacity by the early 2030s and scaling up of European-based companies across the tech economy. A new Chips Act purports to reinforce EU production and supply chains for advanced microprocessors.

For boosters, this is a sign that Brussels is finally taking the geopolitics of technology seriously. And this summer, Macron’s government also announced it would phase out its contract with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, replacing the American military-tech company’s software — used by French intelligence services since 2016 — with a model created by French startup ChapsVision.

All the same, pressure remains not antagonize Washington. Weeks after introducing its tech sovereignty package, for instance, the European Commission in late June signed up to the Trump administration’s so-called “Pax Silica” alliance on the critical minerals and chip supply chains needed for AI. “There is a case to be made for more compute capacity that is sovereign and located in Europe,” says Giorgos Verdi, a policy lead with the Europe branch of Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank and advocacy group. “At the same time, it’s very important to define, before rushing into the craze of data-center build outs, what this sort of capacity is used for.”

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When it comes to Europe’s tech ambitions, separating fact from myth is not always easy. That goes for the much vaunted, and just about always inflated, jobs figures supposedly stemming from the opportunity at “reindustrialization” represented by new sites. It also goes for the use of the new compute capacity itself, which on its own will do little to dent the structural advances of Silicon Valley.

With or without that new processing power, meanwhile, the fundamental problem remains US control over the commanding heights of the digital economy. Lou Welgryn, president of the Paris-based Data for Good, tells UnHerd that a mad rush for data infrastructure could “reinforce dependence on actors that dominate the technological core”. Without European alternatives further up the value chain, expanded compute capacity will merely service the same corporations that already control the digital economy today.

Just follow where the capital flowing into European processing power is coming from, with US tech majors present, either directly or through local partners, in many of the largest data-center projects. As Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s CEO, has pointed out, his bank’s data-center spree simply involved aggregating various capital sources — and working closely with an unnamed “hyperscaler”. According to a French senate report published last month, a mere 1.4 gigawatts of 15 gigawatts of projected data-center investments is of European origin.

There are other ironies here too. What Welgryn calls “digital sobriety” seems to be heading for the dustbin of history. But amid an ecological crisis, and a cost-of-living crunch that shows few signs of receding as the leading preoccupation for French citizens, what of the so-called “energy sobriety” that was, until quite recently, held up as a societal totem?

A big-data blitz will only add to simmering tensions over stretched water resources; rage over rural water reservoirs, built in the interests of agro-industry, has already sparked battles between protestors and riot police. This summer’s historic heatwave has rivers like the Loire almost running dry, even as wildfires rip through swathes of French countryside. One recent report classifies as “high risk” the environmental exposure of at least a quarter of French data-center projects. From climate “resilience” to data sovereignty, a lot seems to be riding on the panacea of limitless nuclear energy.

Macron’s closing gesture towards strategic planning ought to have been the chance to strike a balance between these mounting constraints and conflicting priorities. Tech sovereignty today surely needs a material infrastructure, but it cannot just be about opening the electrical spigot to Silicon Valley. Who knows, it could even be about placing some hard limits on big data itself. Until then, France and Europe risk being pigeonholed into a developmental path that just means taking on more of the dirty grunt work of the digital economy. If, or rather when, a data-center backlash comes, Macron’s successor can expect to have their hands full.

But Rasmussen, who had worked both in sports coverage and as a communications director for a hockey team, knew something about the audience that outsiders didn’t: true fans always want more.

There’s a similar calculation being made right now in Silicon Valley, where new entertainment brands are targeting an audience of tech obsessives who, like the sports fans, can’t get enough daily updates, insights and data from the most influential people in their industry. And last month, that growing power struggle to control the future of “new media” came to a head with OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN and the launch of a16z-backed rival show, MTS.

TBPN is a daily live show about the tech business, hosted by two tech entrepreneurs, Jordi Hays and John Coogan. Unlike many of their nerdy peers, they are relatively natural on camera: relaxed but not rambling. They are also hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts; like Ant & Dec with an upscale Hollywood gym membership.

Given that both have founded successful companies, which have matured and secured handsome acquisitions, they have significant cachet with business leaders; guests appreciate that the hosts have had skin in the game. And as a result, people like Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir boss Alex Karp, and the Collison brothers, who founded Stripe, are happy to come on. They know they won’t be subjected to an aggressive grilling. 

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The idea of fandom is key to the genre. It’s taken as a given that the viewer has a keen interest in the space, so the conversation can get pretty technical very quickly. In one recent episode, for example, the hosts were digging into semantic layers and scheme migrations with one guest, before batting around energy and geopolitical hypotheticals with fossil fuels advocate Alex Epstein the next.

Called the SportsCenter of Silicon Valley, it has also borrowed its look from the sports shows, with its split-screen discussions and canned sound effects. Even its full title, the Technology Business Programming Network, is a nod to ESPN.

And it has worked. Since its launch in late 2024, TBPN has become the biggest show in its niche — which you might call techno-capitalism. Yet it remains relatively small, pulling in an average of 70,000 viewers per episode. This is deliberate. According to Coogan, their high-value ideal audience numbers only around 200,000 founders, executives and adjacent people. Their goal, he says, “was to create a platform to reach the core audience… If we start bringing in new topics just to reach 10M views, it wouldn’t feel natural and we would lose the core audience we have worked to build.” 

Certainly, it can be hard to get a general audience invested in the comings and goings of founders and funders, new AI model releases, and the B2B Saas of it all. So the TBPN approach is unapologetic. It’s not trying to sell tech to a new audience.

That focus clearly paid off, given OpenAI bought it in a surprise move last month for somewhere in the “low hundreds of millions”. The company suggested that the acquisition would help prepare the world for the changes wrought by AI. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO for AGI deployment, wrote that the business has “a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates — with builders and people using the technology at the center”, and that TBPN had already created such a space.

The rationale doesn’t quite ring true. TBPN is not the place for long, philosophical discussions about superintelligence; if this is what the frontier lab wants it could have bought out Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast. Instead, it looks more like an attempt to acquire some likability: befriending the jocks for a bit of second-hand popularity.

And that’s partly why the venture hit the right note. Where the 2010s tech sector took pains to show off its DEI credentials, today, there has been a notable vibe shift: tech bros are increasingly embracing their “bro-ness”. TBPN’s original name was even Technology Brothers. They’re taking a page out of another masculine-coded industry’s playbook.

But even more significant is that so much of what sports media invented suits the internet immensely well. Live event coverage and post-match chats can translate into the era of the multi-hour Twitch livestream. Turning commentators into personalities in their own right goes hand in hand with the increasing focus on turning journalists into influencers — and vice versa.

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Tech is not the first sector where a sports DNA has proven revitalizing for its coverage. Fast-talking stock markets commentator Jim Cramer, a son of Philadelphia’s all-consuming sports culture, first tried his hand at sports reporting before moving into finance, and eventually becoming famous as the host of the SportsCenter-esque Mad Money. More recently, startup media brands such as The Ringer, brainchild of ESPN alum, cover the business of Hollywood with a sports fan fervor, with casting announcements dissected like they’re player drafts and awards shows like tournaments. 

Imitators have sprung up in the wake of TBPN’s success. There’s the European answer etn., which riffs on TBPN’s schtick right down the hosts appearing in promo imagery wearing matching suits. And now we have MTS.

The new show takes its name from “monitoring the situation”, an online meme used to describe the semi-serious way in which news junkies and day traders on X keep up with current affairs. This new entrant doesn’t seem to have quite found its footing yet, despite the opportune timing: many X users suspect that TBPN has been disappeared from their feeds, owing to Elon Musk’s longstanding feud with the show’s new boss, Sam Altman. MTS is a little bit more internet-poisoned than TBPN, bringing together the worlds of rambling politics livestreams with tech twitter discourse. 

But crucially it sees TBPN’s bet on the persistent interest in tech news and raises it. Like its pioneering cable forbearers, MTS is live, all the time. Or at least it aspires to be. These early weeks have been punctuated with off-air stretches. And when it’s online, even the channel’s most interesting segments struggle to justify being stretched out. The success or failure of the venture will hinge on whether it can demonstrate there is a truly bottomless appetite for tech news discussion, in the way there is for sports.

For the technology industry, the existence of and investment in these shows is a sign of self-consciousness among executives and companies. They know that they are the entertainment now, as the huge interest in blow-by-blow accounts of the Musk v. Altman underscores. They even have fanbases. 

Those parasocial relationships will only become more intense this year as SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others eye joining the stock market. Soon, those viewers will also be shareholders. That dynamic of obsessive ownership already defines so much of our culture, from prediction markets gamblers sending journalists death threats to the easily-provoked wrath of K-pop stans. 

These shows, though, highlight a weakness at the heart of big tech. They reveal it to be a sector that would prefer to build its own media ecosystem than engage with the existing one. Suspicion of journalists — and attempts to remake their profession from the outside — has never been more acute in the tech world. So it feels easier in that context for industry bosses to retreat to home turf. But too much navel-gazing and non-confrontational chatting will only entrench the industry’s insularity and keep it further detached from the public opinion about AI and other disruptive technologies. Having built themselves a fans-only enclosure, they might fail to notice when the crowd turns ugly.

Its founder, Demis Hassabis, occupies a similarly odd place in the firmament of tech luminaries. He has a Nobel Prize and a knighthood, and commands enormous respect within his community, but he’s not really famous. He hasn’t crossed into the realm of celebrity in the manner of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. His rival in the AI race, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, has a far bigger public profile. Even Anthropic founder, Dario Amodei, is becoming more widely known, if only because of February’s dust-up between his company and the Trump administration’s Department of War.

Interviews with Hassabis often lead one to believe that this low profile is deliberate. His dedication, he claims, is to the work of expanding human knowledge, and deeper dives into his biography balance signs of his genius with markers of his normality; he may have been a childhood chess prodigy, but he loves a game of table football with the guys.

Though a new biography of Hassabis, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence, succeeds in poking some holes in this narrative, its author, Sebastian Mallaby, essentially comes to the conclusion that the humility is genuine. For one thing, when quizzed about extravagances, Hassabis yields only that he has a Liverpool season ticket. While this sets him apart from his Silicon Valley peers, with their private planes and multiple homes, really, Hassabis is doing the same thing as all of them: fashioning a persona.

Hassabis seems aware that history has its eyes on him. Mallaby, for his part, observes that his subject revels in “maximalist ambition”, talking casually of a post-scarcity society and of mining asteroids. Because of the nature of their world-changing technology, the people involved in AI’s creation seem to experience events on two planes: how they are happening in the moment, and how consequential they might be in the history of the world. Both Hassabis and Mallaby remain hyper-conscious of this throughout the book. There are countless references to the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Hassabis is drawn to the ambition of the physicist’s endeavor, alluding to it as he starts to bring top researchers together to form DeepMind. Mallaby sees it as a parable about the innovator’s impulse to solve a technical problem no matter the consequences.

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Hassabis does come across as someone who has become accustomed to telling a certain set of stories about himself. One formative episode is given particular significance. At 11 years old, exhausted and stressed from the competitive chess circuit, Hassabis concedes a game to an adult opponent at a tournament. His rival then relishes pointing out how he could have won. This moment of defeat, in Hassabis’ telling, triggers a realization that his fellow chess champs are using their cognitive power to win a game rather than solve hard scientific problems. This supposedly sows the seeds for the career that Hassabis would one day embark on.

It’s a significant recurring anecdote because he uses it to accentuate his humility — or even his humanity. He was just a little boy. And yet he traveled the world going up against adults. An exceptional little boy, then. It is also a reminder that his ultimate inspiration is the human brain, its sanctity paramount to both Hassabis’s research and his self-image. Elsewhere, after all, he posits that the development of superhuman AI will reveal the secrets of nature and so bring man closer to God. “For me,” he tells Mallaby, “science is a spiritual endeavor”.

There are striking echoes of history here. Until the dawn of modernity and secularism, political figures had to insist on their ultimate servitude to God even as they sought hard power in the temporal world. Thomas Cromwell, in his famous portrait by Holbein, appears in the sober garb of a serious power-player — one who has just orchestrated the submission of England’s clergy to King Henry VIII, fundamentally changing the shape of religion in England forever. Yet a Book of Hours sits on the table in front of him, signaling his continued devotion.

If we are to believe predictions, AI will have a far greater effect on our society than did the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Such a change cannot be forced through without backlash. To mediate it, today’s AI bosses must project respect for the human, even as they build something that could surpass us. As Cromwell doffed his cap to faith, even while ushering in shattering changes to religion, his Silicon Valley successors must position their work as serving humanity while upending daily life. Hassabis has repeatedly demonstrated this respect, idolizing the human brain through his neuroscience research and talking of a quasi-religious calling to unlock the secrets of life.

To figure out what’s really driving his protagonist, Mallaby is particularly concerned with what Hassabis and his ilk are reading. His ignorance of the books of the AI prophet Ray Kurzweil sets Hassabis apart from other attendees at the Peter Thiel-backed Singularity Summit, a hive of the early AI scene. Of far greater literary interest to Hassabis is the eponymous protagonist in Ender’s Game. The story of a gifted child tasked with saving humanity resonated so deeply with Hassabis that he asked Mallaby to read it in advance of their first interview. Elsewhere, great scientists are his chosen models. “Isaac Newton, Alan Turing, all my heroes,” Hassabis says of walking down a street in Cambridge. “I could feel them in the bones of the stone, their intellect and vision. They were almost calling out to me.” He is often getting goosebumps like this, taking pictures of the Nobel Foundation’s guestbook signed by Einstein and Feynman. It is charming, suggestive of the eager, nerdy young boy under the surface. But it is also another way of self-fashioning, absorbing those figures into his own story. Here they stood and now I am here too.

Hassabis also defines himself against others, especially OpenAI’s Sam Altman: “I’m doing it for knowledge and science. He seems like he’s doing it for power.” He seems a little baffled by Altman, who comes from a new mold. Instead of Hassabis’s deference to the God-like power of nature, Altman starts to build a cult-like following for himself.

This all makes me wonder how much of the access granted for the book, and the production of the DeepMind documentary, The Thinking Game, and the appearances at world conferences and in interviews, is actually about Hassabis craving recognition. Altman, remember, not only kicked off an AI race by releasing ChatGPT, but in doing so made himself the defining figure of AI.

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Admittedly, some of Hassabis’s efforts to build his public profile predate the release of ChatGPT. But the invisible hero narrative feeds back into those twin competing pillars of exceptionalism and humility on which Hassabis perches his identity. Mallaby allows his subject to speak at length in the final pages, where Hassabis sets out his own vision of his place in the world. “I’m a weird British outlier, on this little island here, and I’ve made my own path. I’ve followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in.” His refusal to leave London, for which he gets a lot of credit in British policy circles, becomes part of a narrative of being not like the other tech bros.

It should hardly be surprising that someone who spends much of his time thinking about consciousness, both human and artificial, might be particularly preoccupied with his own identity — and how that should be projected. “In my world, humanism and spiritualism and science all go together,” he says. And, like Cromwell, it is to a Renaissance figure that he looks for a model. “Da Vinci is my favorite because everything’s just flowing into one river. And that’s how I try to live.” The meaning is obscure, but Hassabis seems less enthusiastic to incorporate that element of his personality which thrives on competition and the exercising of power —though he is willing to accept them when Mallaby points them out. “I have to do what’s necessary.”

Hassabis, in short, appears to be banking on a longer-term legacy, one that emerges long after the machinations of the court are concluded. But if he or any of his rivals actually succeeds in creating AGI, this careful self-fashioning may become less relevant. If you change the world, it won’t be the books or paintings that dictate your reputation, but the consequences.

For all the pioneering smartphone refuseniks and buzzy new alternatives, the data tells a less optimistic story. In Britain, Nokia brick sales jumped from 400,000 to 450,000 in 2024, but 68 million people have smartphones. Screentime restriction apps and all sorts of lobotomized dumbphones are not actually flooding the market. The most hyped post-screen pioneers — the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit — were honorable but catastrophic failures.

The situation is critical. The scrolletariat is swiping itself into oblivion. While distinctions between productivity and entertainment make measurement tricky, the average human spends roughly 4.9 hours on mobile apps daily. For the young, it’s even worse. American teenagers average a staggering 8 hours and 39 minutes of daily screen time for entertainment, while British 18-24 year olds clock in at nearly 6 hours and a half hours. The scale is vast, and with the rise of hyper-personalized AI slop machines, the quality is degrading further. Add to that the wider outsourcing of human cognition to AI, we risk becoming hollowed out fleshy middleware lost in an endless mind maze.

In the face of this smartphone-AI-dopamine axis of evil, various schools of neo-Luddite resistance are emerging. Like the loom-smashing weavers of the 19th century, today’s resistance is united by a distaste for the machine. However, they are divided on the best course of resistance — many want to run for the hills, others want to destroy their phones, and some believe they can tame the effects. All are doomed to fail.

To those with a more romantic vision of resistance, the digital world is only avoided by escaping into a prelapsarian Arcadia of nature, craft, literature, and “dumb” technology. They range from the Bopeas trading screen time for soil and wild swimming and the hip Gen Z resistance groups such as the gnome-hatted Lamp Club and Breaking the G(loom) all the way to noted anti-machine rager Paul Kingsnorth and The Times’ James Marriott wielding his Qin F21 Pro. They all instinctively understand the sickness, but their cure is fundamentally unscalable. Unchaining oneself means battling the network effect, the mechanism that locks users in by punishing non-participation with isolation. Escape therefore requires the social capital to survive being cut off from the herd — a luxury most cannot afford.

Equally romantic, but much less chill are the more violent neo-Luddites. These are the spiritual children of the late Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber who resisted industrial society through manifestos and mail bombs. They share a quasi-millenarian view of techno-industrial society, seeing the destruction of the mega-machine as essential to the preservation of nature and humanity, and are willing to break some legs to get there. These neo-Luddite extremists include the Greek anarchists Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei, the mystical Latin American terrorist networks of Individualists Tending to the Wild, and France’s emerging Anti-Tech Resistance. While they may be true believers, tying salvation to the destruction of techno-capitalist civilization is not a winning formula with the less insane.

More pragmatic is the network of politicians, policy wonks, academics, and journalists pursuing reforms through legislation. On the Left, Shoshana Zuboff, American author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and British journalist Carole Cadwalladr want to tame the techno-beast through privacy, anti-trust, and online safety bills. On the Right, there’s a mirror universe of pro-family tech critics, from US Senator Josh Hawley through to Tory MP Miriam Cates. While legislation is crucial, attempts are glacially slow and critics are fundamentally divided on the true source of evil. Are screens the enemy? Or surveillance? Hate speech? Big Tech? All forms of social media? Dopamine culture? Governments must play a role, but for now we are in a race against time. Endless hubs, quangos, and inquiries will not outrun the shapeshifting onslaught of innovation. Even if they do eventually succeed, citizens will bypass them.

Further, governments seeking to address the neo-Luddites’ concerns face a paralyzing paradox. While they may want to halt mass cognitive atrophy, other crises take priority. Faced with anemic growth, declining living standards, geopolitical instability, and climate pressure, government ambitions are increasingly beholden to Silicon Valley. Leaders see AI as the silver bullet in the hunt for productivity, security, and sustainability. Yet, the very titans building these frontier technologies are the same ones powering the brain rot. This Faustian pact is laid bare by the British Government’s new partnership with Alphabet to harness AI for clean energy research and public services. If Google is crucial to the state, tackling YouTube addiction is politically impossible.

Thus, we are at an impasse. If we cannot yet regulate through force or law, what is to be done? Perhaps there is a way to become masters of our domain and usher in a grand transformation of social norms.

We have been here before. The Luddites failed to stop the Industrial Revolution quashed by an alliance of government and merchants comparable to today. Industrialization continued and unleashed a different blight: cheap hard booze. From schools and asylums to factories and prisons, everyone was getting lit. The 18th-century Gin Craze, immortalized in Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane diptych, was unstoppable. Despite the Gin Acts, the state was captive to the alcohol lobby and tax receipts. Those in power, it was often said, wanted workers too drunk to organize politically, but not too drunk to operate machines effectively in their factories.

In the 19th century, the Temperance movement did what law could not. In September 1832, in a converted cock-fighting pit in Preston, Lancashire, a cheesemonger named Joseph Livesey and six working-class comrades — the Seven Men of Preston — signed a pledge of total abstinence. They believed a drunken proletariat could never be liberated and so-called “Giant Alcohol” was the ultimate tool of subjugation.

Their genius was to reframe the issue. They advanced the debate beyond religious sin to a campaign for wealth, health, and inter-generational morality. Temperance activists argued that alcohol stole a father’s wages, wrecked the worker’s liver, and shattered the peace of the home. As Benjamin Disraeli’s physician Joseph Kidd wrote in 1879, the goal was a virtuous citizen “accustomed to self-restraint and moderation”, a state he called “one of the chief delights and aspirations… of a true man”. The mission was not just to change laws, but to change the soul.

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Crucially, campaigners invoked the innocence of the young. Founded in 1847, a society called the Band of Hope inspired children to sign a pledge of sobriety. It aimed to inoculate children against alcohol through a cultural program including its iconic magic lantern shows, using cutting-edge technology to project vivid, terrifying images of the drunkard’s decline. British alcohol consumption finally peaked in 1876. By 1897, the Band of Hope had enrolled 3 million children. By 1931, a Royal Commission officially declared that “drunkenness has gone out of fashion”.

What can we learn from the Temperance movement? In his 2025 Reith Lecture, “Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine”, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues that the Temperance movement is the perfect blueprint for our time. He warns that “today, we face a new addiction industry, not of wine and whiskey, but of apps and algorithms, [where ]many of Stanford’s brightest minds are building a single great moloch, an attention-hijacking machine that devours our focus”. Bregman proposes using the state to break this machine, advocating for dopamine taxes on ad revenue similar to alcohol taxes. Yet, given our governments’ increased reliance on AI companies, these changes seem unlikely to happen soon enough. If we cannot yet liberate the soul through regulation, then perhaps changing norms is the method.

This cultural rewiring begins with a return to collective accountability. Just as with the Seven Men of Preston and the Band of Hope, this begins with a pledge to personal and collective accountability. There are several leading candidates for a modern neo-Temperance movement such as America’s Wait Until 8th, which encourages parents to delay giving their child a smartphone until the end of 8th grade, and Britain’s Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC), pledging to restrict smartphones until 14 and social media until 16. The latter is particularly impressive: having only been founded in February 2023, it has already amassed over 300,000 parents — including Kate Winslet and Paloma Faith.

Will Orr-Ewing, who co-founded SFC’s Smartphone Free Schools campaign, explains that this is fundamentally about re-establishing lost boundaries. He describes the pact not merely as a petition, but as a “covenant that you sign with other parents” to hold the line collectively. The goal is to revive “the Victorian idea that children are a separate category”, establishing childhood as a “sacred time that is given special prominence” and protected from the encroachment of adult vices.

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While we chew through the messy battle to regulate addictive algorithms, neo-Temperance activists are attempting to ensure existing laws are interpreted to factor in novel technologies. Orr-Ewing is already pursuing this, recently launching a Judicial Review to force schools to apply existing safeguarding statutes. He argues that schools have failed to understand that their safeguarding obligations apply to smartphones just as they do to a classroom ceiling full of asbestos. “Whether it’s a beheading video or high-definition porn,” Orr-Ewing argues, “nine-year-olds should not be watching this shit. I think we’ve still got enough moral norms to have consensus on that.”

Beyond the classroom and the courtroom, success requires rediscovering the lost art of judgment. The polite relativism of contemporary liberal culture has trained us to avoid criticizing others. Yet, if we stand by as the minds of tomorrow are obliterated, politeness is complicity. It may feel rude and fogeyish but we must scold — and be scolded. Take inspiration from Chile’s outgoing Millennial President Gabriel Boric who recently paused a speech to phoneshame 11 audience members for staring at their screens before showing off his own dumbphone. We can all harness the spirit of Boric. Be judgy. Call your friend a swipewanker. Ban phones at dinner. Smartphone zombies must be rendered socially toxic. Norms can only be transformed through a collective effort to hold each other to account.

Yet, stigma alone cannot remake a people, one needs stories and symbols woven into culture. The original Temperance movement understood this well. In art, following Hogarth’s lead, George Cruikshank’s wildly popular The Bottle (1847) series depicted a respectable British family’s descent into poverty and madness due to drink. In literature, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) shattered the Victorian illusion of the merry drunk, exposing the brutal horror of addiction. In mass entertainment, the Band of Hope’s magic lanterns inspired millions. To succeed today, the neo-Temperance movement must find and celebrate its very own Hogarths, Cruikshanks, and Brontës and propagate their works in the physical world. Who will paint the Beer Street and Gin Lane of the smartphone era?

Finally, a neo-Temperance movement will fail without a positive vision for what humans actually ought to be beyond mere pleasure–satisfying machines. Who is the post-smartphone human? What should they do instead of staring and swiping? Gabriella Nguyen, the 24-year-old founder of Appstinence, an anti-social media campaign, argues we do not need to solve this immediately. To avoid simply trading screen time for increased productivity is reductive, so first we must return to “ground zero” to work out how to live. Then, through Appstinence, we can reclaim these “luxuries of time, practice, social support, and a clear mind” and begin to “no longer see these meandering, unbound exchanges as lavish expenses of our time and productivity, but the regular course of events”. It is here, Nguyen claims, we can reflect and forge the post-smartphone human.

At this rate, billions will spend 25 years of their lives on their smartphone. Yet, mass sloppification is ultimately a choice. Neither government nor Big Tech is going to change things anytime soon. The neo-Luddites will not smash the data centers. The blueprint of the Temperance movement reveals that salvation will not come from above — it must be reclaimed from below. The solution is not a single law or tax, but a collective recovery of cognitive sovereignty. It’s time for neo-Temperance.

By opening The Hour of the Predator with this analogy, Giuliano da Empoli illuminates the forces that he believes are shaping our current moment. On the one hand, there are the figures of the vanishing status quo: the technocrats, and the institutions they created in the aftermath of the Second World War that, for all their flaws, brought eight decades of unparalleled prosperity and peace (in the West at least). Aztecs like Empoli himself, once a senior adviser to the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi.

Facing them are the conquistadors, or as Empoli calls them, the “predators”: a new class of political leaders and tech oligarchs who thrive on instability, reject institutional constraints, and operate with the ruthlessness of renaissance usurpers. Men like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, a company that builds data-analysis platforms and supplies the US defense and security establishment. 

Like Empoli, Karp is also an author and in his most recent work, The Technological Republic, published earlier this year, he argues that, we are living in an age where technological power is becoming synonymous with geopolitical power, and that nations which master the latest tech will dominate over those that don’t. Accordingly, Silicon Valley, he believes, has a duty to abandon its obsessive focus on consumer products and to collaborate more closely with government. Yet for Karp — and here’s the crux — the goal is a broader national renewal: this project should focus as much on culture as it does on technology. 

In Empoli and Karp, then, you respectively get the Aztec scribe and the conquistador: Empoli trying to record the end of a world as it slips beneath the waves; Karp sketching out the one destined to replace it.

For Empoli, the obsolescent old order is literalized in the desiccated figure of Joe Biden warbling away at that great post-war institution, the UN. Like the geriatric leaders at the end of the USSR, Biden seems to physically embody the establishment’s exhaustion as the “tired old grandfather” who has survived the Cold War only to see his foreign policy become “a pile of rubble”.

Here Empoli implicitly concedes that the status quo — or, as Dominic Cummings would have it, the “rotting ancien régime” — has been found wanting. The institutions and leaders that defined the post-1945 world were, in the end, unable to save us from a return of history.

What we are living through, Empoli argues, is not an aberration but a return to the historical mean. The temporary guardrails of the late 20th century — the independence of institutions, concern for minorities, fear of international repercussions — are being swept away. The evidence Empoli piles up is not new: we already know that the post-war taboo against using force to change borders was broken in 2014 when Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further drove this point home. War is back in fashion. Global military spending has jumped; nuclear arsenals that had been shrinking since the mid-Eighties are growing again. 

To make sense of this, Empoli reaches back to Machiavelli — to his idea of princely virtù (as opposed to “virtue”) as set down in The Prince and embodied by Cesare Borgia. For Machiavelli, Borgia was the usurper who showed how power could be seized and retained amid chaos. Today’s predators, Empoli’s “Borgians”, are those political and corporate actors who operate as if there were no limits at all. Faced with an obstacle, they merely reach for what Kremlin insiders now call the ruchnoe upravlenie: the “manual override”.

Procedures and hierarchies, law and bureaucracy: if they don’t yield the desired result, the Borgian leader simply bypasses them all. These acts constitute secular miracles, in the literal sense, as direct suspensions of the rules by a higher power. 

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is a case in point of Borgian action without restraint. The self-styled “coolest dictator in the world” was elected at 37 to lead what was then the most violent country on Earth. His response was to effectively replace the penal code with a tattoo manual and order the army to arrest anyone marked with gang symbols. Some 80,000 people were swept into the new Tecoluca mega-prison — mostly gang members, but also the odd unfortunate rock fan with ill-chosen ink. Bukele, a former publicist, turned their humiliation viral: staging photoshoots of prisoners lined up on their knees, heads shaved, naked apart from boxer shorts — a Hunger Games spectacle for a TikTok generation. Human rights groups were appalled, but the homicide rate has now fallen tenfold. El Milagro Bukele (“The Bukele Miracle”) is celebrated across Latin America as a feat of Borgian action — of audacious ideas executed with remorseless speed.

The “predators”, according to Empoli, cannot tolerate any limits to their will to power, and so “lawyers” become their “natural enemies” – “the prey that must be devoured to allow this new world to flourish”. Everyone knew who was causing the crime in El Salvador; by bypassing due process Bukele cleaned his country up. If you already suspect that human rights lawyers, judges and “experts” exist to block the popular will, the Borgian who promises to override them starts to look attractive. Rules are no longer a guarantee of freedom but an elite conspiracy to keep you down. And if the law is one battleground for the Bukeles, Mileis and Trumps of the world, culture is another. Empoli argues that “wokeism” has been a “godsend” for them: it intensifies conflict, forces people to choose sides and punishes the undecided — exactly what Borgians want. Like the Ancient Greeks in the civil war, who stripped political rights from those who refused to fight, or Dante, who exiled the fence-sitters to the vestibule of hell, Borgians are the most afraid of the unaligned. Anything that deepens polarization is fuel for their chaos machine.

According to the “predators” — and they are not entirely wrong — the institutions that once underpinned the liberal order have been hollowed out by identity politics and woke pieties; culture has already been captured. This is where apex predator Alex Karp comes in, for whom cultural failure is a symptom of the rot of the old regime and its vulnerability to attack. 

Karp’s book, like Empoli’s then, is partly an elegy: it is rooted in a sense of civilizational loss.

Yet it is also a manifesto on how to bring about the “reconstitution” of a “technological republic”. This, Karp argues, requires a broader “reassertion of national culture and values”, and a revival of shared identity and purpose. Silicon Valley’s engineering elite, he argues, has an “affirmative obligation” to defend the nation and to ensure it does not fall behind in the new arms race. After all, our adversaries “will proceed with the development of artificial intelligence for the battlefield whether or not we do”. But they must also take on a new duty: to articulate “a renewed sense of collective purpose — what the country is, what its values are, and what it will stand for”. Without this, the gains of the “software century” will end up serving a narrow, insulated elite. Reconstitution. Reassertion. Make It Great Again.

Unlike most tech bros, Karp has the intellectual chops to back his argument up: a BA in philosophy, a PhD on “jargon, aggression, and culture”. He knows the terrain he attacks. For him, nothing better captures the malaise of the humanities than the afterlife of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which metastasized into a worldview that made the West an object of permanent moral suspicion. The culprit is clear: an elite whose “most pernicious weapon” is branding swathes of political opinion it disagrees with as lowbrow and uncouth, and which is responsible for national decline, largely because their ideas dominate the nation’s institutions — it’s Rudi Dutschke’s Long March in practice. But where someone like Steve Bannon dreams of a populist countermarch, Karp imagines the cavalry arriving from Palo Alto.

Yet so far, he argues, the tech class has abdicated its responsibilities. When they are not policing the “wording and tone” of chatbots, they rush to raise capital for video-sharing apps and social platforms that track and monetize our every move. But ask them to work with the US military and they balk. Why? Because they’ve absorbed the values now dominant in elite institutions, namely that “a lack of belief in anything, except oneself perhaps, is the most certain path to reward”.

The obvious rejoinder is that refusing to work for the defense industry can be grounded in strong ethical beliefs, especially in a post-Iraq and Afghanistan world, regardless of your patriotism. At the same time, Silicon Valley has built medical technologies and other tools that plainly improve lives. It can also, if it chooses, put its weight behind efforts to protect citizens from the state. After all, mistrust of government is about as American as it gets; it is why, we are endlessly told, they need all those guns.

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For Karp, though, the stakes are too high to indulge such scruples in the unforgiving world now facing the US and its allies. (Incidentally, that formulation “and its allies” always reads like a piece of stray code from a previous program, language from a more politic era now passing into history.) Before arguing about the justice or injustice of a policy, one must understand leverage — or lack of it — at the table. As Donald Trump famously told his Ukrainian counterpart: “You don’t have the cards”. This is Empoli’s Borgian world, the one where, as Hobbes put it, “covenants, without the sword, are but words.”

Both Karp and Empoli believe we are sliding into a dangerous new era of conflict; both think the victors of the last round have grown complacent just as the terrain tilts beneath them. Empoli calls politics a “forever war” in which intellectuals are mostly useless; Karp quotes Sallust on Roman youth “consumed by luxury and greed”, unwilling to serve the state — the “Hard Times Create Strong Men” meme for the Georgetown set.

For Karp, the “strong men” are not Romans but founders in Patagonia fleeces. The West’s adversaries, he says, are ruled by people “closer to founders” than politicians — leaders whose “fates and personal fortunes” are so intertwined with the nations they rule that they “behave as owners”, free to act quickly without checks and balances. Karp, a founder himself, notes that founder-led companies outperform consensus-driven ones. “Nothing much of substance, and certainly nothing lasting, will be created by committee,” he says. But what is democratic government if not a committee of elected officials? This is Empoli’s Borgian in full roar: the dominant urge is always to hit “manual override”.

For Empoli, AI  is the culmination of the Borgian age: a power no one fully understands but that everyone must live under. The tech overlords, uninterested in history or philosophy, fail to see they are resurrecting a pre-Enlightenment world of magic and mystery. We will pray to AI, Empoli says, as our ancestors prayed to the old gods. The French theologian François Fénelon once warned that humans cannot expect a superior power to remain moderate — a lesson, Empoli fears, that has been forgotten just as such a power has finally appeared on the horizon. Like the Borgians, AI ignores process; all that matters is success achieved by any means.

Karp is inevitably more sanguine, arguing instead that AI is underused in the West owing to institutional timidity and cultural self-loathing. For him, AI is almost Trotskyite in its application: seize the power station, not the town hall. Don’t reform the diseased bureaucracy; build the infrastructure that renders it irrelevant.

Empoli gives you the view from the crumbling palace steps of the old order: the sense of being overrun by powers you neither control nor understand. Karp writes from the engine room, arguing that tech founders have both the ability and, more importantly, an obligation to harness those powers. For Karp, Silicon Valley has a debt it owes society because of the“vast license over broad swaths of the economy” that they were granted. “What should the public ask for in exchange? Free email is not enough,” he says. The grim truth is that free email and cat reels were enough: if you had told me in the late Nineties, when I got my first mobile phone, that one day it would log every place I visited and every step I took, I’d have said that 1984 was upon us. Now I use those functions to track my calorie burn. The story of humanity is never how quickly we forget, but how quickly we acclimatize.

Trump’s second term may well become the story of Silicon Valley’s political ascent. Karp notes approvingly that not all founders are apolitical. Elon Musk entered government, straddling space policy, the green transition and the public square for a time. Since January, we have watched something close to founder-style governance: a president who reviles cultural orthodoxy, loathes bureaucracy and wants to make decisions unencumbered by committees. Musk is not American-born; he can never be president. Still, the precedent is set. If a founder does indeed one day become president, the alliance of the oligarchy and the executive will be complete. The boundary between the state and the forces it exists to check will disappear, and America will find itself governed by a single circuitry of power. It may well be too much for the republic to bear.

Read together, Empoli and Karp’s books form a composite x-ray. Empoli shows you the rotting bones of the liberal order and the silhouettes of the predators that have learned to live through it. Karp gives you the brain chemistry of one of those predators — anxious, self-justifying, sometimes admirably clear-eyed, sometimes half in love with the very forces he says oppose us, our “geopolitical adversaries” with their founder-leaders who act unencumbered by tedious committee and Get Stuff Done.

The conclusion is unmistakable. The conquistadors are already here. Some wear uniforms, some keffiyehs, some Silicon Valley t-shirts. Some write elegant little books urging us to save the republic. All are interested in who controls data, drones, and the new gods of AI. And, as Empoli warns and Karp makes clear, they no longer seek merely to influence the republic; they are preparing to replace it.

Everyone cheered. Daedone was the charismatic founder of OneTaste, a business which hoped to provide “one billion orgasms” to women and believed the sexual force of orgasmic mediation would change the world. It was the same year they had launched the “Nicole Daedone Intensive”, a course that cost $36,000 and involved hearing some of Daedone’s advice and being given a few assignments. There was a tacit understanding that devotees would “do whatever” they could to pay. Daedone considered herself a sexual prophet, but there was a slow distrust building in her community. Based on the surrounding tactics of Silicon Valley, her start-up scaled, going global, and as her sales tactics grew more vicious, followers were leaving who felt violated and sexually exploited.

“When you can own your ultimate taboo,” she told the cheering crowd that day, “what can anybody do to you?” It was a line delivered with the confidence of someone who believed she was untouchable. Even after the FBI began investigating her and her face appeared in a scathing Netflix documentary, Daedone continued hosting public demonstrations in Los Angeles. But last June, the taboo couldn’t save her: she and her chief sales executive, Rachel Cherwitz, were convicted on forced labor conspiracy charges — found guilty of coercing followers into sex and work by exploiting their deepest vulnerabilities.

Such exploitation seems obvious in retrospect. Beyond the crazy amounts of money OneTaste asked for, there was the strangeness of the practice itself: women lying half-naked, legs butterfly-open, in a room full of strangers, while men, often strangers, stroked their clitorises according to a ritualized technique. Not only would this transform the energy of the receiving woman, but she was supposed to transmit that energy to whoever was watching. You were told off if people in the room didn’t feel you. Often these were rooms full of men, showing up for a free demo session. 

A new book, Empire of Orgasm, written by the Bloomberg reporter, Ellen Huet, who first exposed the company’s inner workings, reveals the depth of Daedone’s deeper philosophy towards sexual relationships. At times, the philosophy bordered on rape apologia. Men were encouraged towards the practice of “skillful violation” and women towards “aversion practice,” which means having sex with people you don’t want to for spiritual growth, or vice versa. Many of her followers were survivors of sexual abuse, as was Nicole, and she taught them that “arousal” was the cure for trauma. Nicole said once in a lecture, “If you want to know the real way to deflect rape, it’s to turn on 100%. Because then there’s nothing to rape”. Physical violence and domestic abuse was encouraged because of the “yin” and “yang” of male and female energy. Whatever was needed to preserve your “Divine Feminine”.

A young lesbian couple at the center of the trial were split up, made essentially indentured servants, and forced to become the sexual “aides” of Reese Jones, the Silicon valley venture capitalist whose millions funded OneTaste. He was also Nicole’s boyfriend. This happened regularly to women who joined. Daily blowjobs were assigned to many women as “aversion therapy” to “help their spiritual growth”. When colleagues fell out, they were told to take off their trousers and receive “the practice”. Nicole persuaded a man in chronic agonizing pain to leave his girlfriend, a key witness who later sued OneTaste for sexual assault, by instructing him “to give his money to the feminine”. Devotees gave tens of thousands to pay for Daedone’s courses, often going into extreme debt and falling out with family members. Daedone told them money was a “scarcity hex”. Such grim stories are rife within the OneTaste universe.

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But not everyone is convinced of Daedone’s malevolence. A fervent group of followers — “Team Nicole” — remain steadfast in support of her. They showed up every day to the trial. In fact, the certain fans’ behavior, like harassing the judge, superimposing a swastika on the Justice Department’s logo, posting a witness’s bikini photos online, and making faces in court, was considered so zealous that it might have impacted the conviction itself.  They seem to have put this behind them, and continue to post to Daedone’s 40,000 followers on Instagram. This week alone they’ve posted five of Nicole’s teachings about erotic power, and a video where Nicole refers to “some very public, challenging, things happening in my life”.

They post advertisements for a new, more low-key iteration of orgasmic meditation called “women over dinner” and for the new OneTaste organization, “Eros platform”, which shares regular videos of Nicole and Rachel’s teachings. Women who “stand with Nicole” host podcasts on the page. They describe themselves as “erotic artists” and “erotic nuns”. Nicole is still front and center on the “Eros Platform” website; and they still host regular OM demos and courses. In their description of Nicole there is no mention of her conviction, but sometimes, on Instagram, they post direct dispatches from Nicole in prison. When Charlie Kirk died, Daedone wrote in praise of a man “tried by fire to purify his heart”. The caption had the hashtag #eroticjustice. 

Why do these people still believe nothing was wrong? Huet offers a compelling reading of the mechanisms of coercion; how intimacy, trauma, and longing were used to bind people to Daedone long after the harm had become undeniable. But there is another answer that feels harder to face: Big Tech has warped our idea of sex and freedom so completely that nothing about OneTaste seemed, to its believers, to cross a boundary. The cult logic didn’t feel like a cult logic; it felt like a natural extension of what the digital world had already taught them to expect from desire.

The arguments Daedone and Cherwitz offered in their defense were straight out of the Silicon Valley playbook. When arrested, they hired the same lawyer who had represented Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Keith Raniere; but unlike those men, Daedone and Cherwitz insisted they were being persecuted for innovating. They once sold themselves as sexual liberators, framing their orgasmic gospel as a kind of feminist therapy in the wake of Me Too — yet now they cried “cancel culture” and portrayed themselves as victims of a prudish, censorious state. Money from OneTaste loyalists funded sympathetic coverage in right-wing outlets lamenting the “criminalization of sex”, and their lawyers insisted to the New York Post that the government was punishing consensual acts because it feared female pleasure.

It was the same rhetorical maneuver deployed across the tech-sex economy whenever regulation or scrutiny arrives: any critique becomes moral panic; any boundary becomes censorship; any evidence of harm becomes an unfortunate side-effect of progress. And the unsettling parallel isn’t just rhetorical but literal: as Silicon Valley was building its world, OneTaste was building its own. They grew in tandem, in the same location, guided by the same ideological currents: frictionlessness, optimization, disruption, the belief that human attachment is a system that can be hacked. While tech platforms were reinventing connection and desire at scale, just a few miles downtown, OneTaste was constructing an embodied version of the same fantasy: that sexuality could be engineered and sold.

Many of OneTaste’s first joiners were Silicon Valley engineers. Huet points out that “in this spiritually optimized culture, it wasn’t weird to meditate; it was weird to have never tried it”. Non-monogamy was everywhere, and you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing someone reading The Ethical Slut. “Against that backdrop”, she writes “a mindful clitoral -stroking practice wasn’t strange at all. Orgasmic mediation for a richer, more connected, happier life? Sure, why not?” 

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One journalist for Gawker, who went to OneTaste’s 2015 conference OMX realized as much. “Everyone is interested in doing fun things with their bodies,” she wrote “but the impulse to systematize, replicate, package, sell and build an ideology around it is uniquely Silicon Valley”. OneTaste turned orgasm into a subscription product, Silicon Valley investors treated it like another life hack, its followers believed they were buying transcendence. Tim Ferris, the king of the life hack, wrote a chapter about OM in his book, The Four Hour Body. Sex, in this form, could be both optimized and commercialized. For men and women alike, women’s bodies became tools for personal upgrade; the site where higher living might be extracted and optimized. Sex, in this formulation, wasn’t intimate or relational; even if it was spiritual, it was still a system that could be monetized. And once you start looking at sex in these economic terms, you realize OneTaste wasn’t an aberration at all. It was simply one branch of a much larger project: the slow remaking of desire by the ideology of tech.

Because if Daedone built a Silicon Valley for the female orgasm, the male counterpart has been growing in plain sight. The corruption isn’t confined to a single cult but runs through the entire tech-sex ecosystem: porn platforms built for infinite scroll, OnlyFans’ gig-ified intimacy, the roboticized fantasies of the consumer-sex industry, and the loneliness that digital life quietly enforces. All of it culminates, in its most grotesque form, in the world Harper’s recently reported on: the universe of gooning.

Daniel Kolitz’s “The Goon Squad” reveals a community of men whose lives revolve around masturbating to online porn in pursuit of “goonstate”: a condition of total psychic collapse, a kind of orgasmic ego-death, achieved only by edging for hours or days. It is, uncannily, the same promise that Daedone offered, transcendence and becoming more than human through orgasm — even if the route there is vastly different. One gooner porn producer told Harper’s, “we humiliate them for the fact that gooning… is their sex life now. We encourage them not to have sex anymore, and to spend the rest of their lives spending money on femdom clips”. It is an unsavory annihilation. As OneTaste wraps its pursuit in the language of surrender and female empowerment; gooners frame theirs as a kind of spiritualized self-destruction. Both, however, are children of the same parent ideology: that the body is a machine whose ecstasies can be pushed to their furthest limit, and that the limit itself is the point.

Huet, wary of the word “cult,” offers a definition anyway: groups that “present an overarching belief system that proclaims itself the singular answer to all the big questions. Non-adherents are to be pitied, avoided, feared”. It is a neat description of OneTaste. It is an even neater description of Big Tech.

If Daedone’s conviction offers any clarity at all, it’s only that her empire was just a preview. A small, garish shard of the overwhelming technological machinery that now governs the world’s desires. We talk about OneTaste as if it were an outlier, a freakish aberration in the sexual landscape, but the truth is far harder to face. Daedone didn’t invent a new darkness, she made disturbingly visible what Silicon Valley had already been teaching us — that intimacy is a product, that bodies are interfaces, and that desire is a system to be optimized and scaled.

Gooners chasing ego-death through endless tabs of porn; influencers selling pseudo-intimacy on subscription; AI girlfriends engineered to be tireless, compliant, and always online; sex itself stripped of reciprocity and rebuilt as a productivity tool. All of it belongs to the same world that OneTaste was built on. Big Tech didn’t just corrupt our sense of privacy, or community, or attention. It corrupted our sense of what sex is for. 

Daedone’s downfall makes an easy morality tale: a manipulative guru, a predatory pseudo-feminist brand, a group of traumatized followers. But just as disturbing a story is the one Huet’s book gestures toward: that OneTaste wasn’t a deviation from the world Silicon Valley was building, but a mirror of it. A prototype of the future of sex. A reminder that the extremes we fear are often just the logical conclusions of norms we already live inside.

But since wrapping up those volumes, Knausgaard has embarked on a return to fiction with his “Morning Star” series, the fourth book of which, The School of Night, comes out in English translation this week. The same techniques from his autofictional works remain in this newest work: minute descriptions of monotonous actions, threaded with microscopic reflections in unremitting first-person monologue, peppered with long riffs on grand ideas of history, photography, family or the artistic ego. The reader is easily overwhelmed by Knausgaard’s exhaustive, solipsistic obsession with the moment-to-moment thought processes of his narrator — in this case a self-important young Norwegian artist who quickly turns out to be one of the most unlikeable, unsympathetic characters in recent fiction. “Meet Kristian Hadeland: you’ll hate him,” says one of the book’s taglines, and boy is that right.

The School of Night is an agonizingly self-aware Faust story, set mostly in a rundown Deptford, in late-Eighties Thatcherite London, with a leap forward to the present (or ostensibly close to it), later in the book. The story’s loose plot sees the young photographer Hadeland arriving from Norway to study, encountering a Dutch artist named Hans who may or may not be a demon of some kind, and negotiating a fall-out with his parents, his own growing egoism, the accidental murder of a homeless man, and the possibility that he has sold part of his soul without consciously realizing it. In the last third of the book — a cancel-culture critique that does little which wasn’t done in a far more incisive way in Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár — Hadeland falls from grace, then pays for his vague Faustian pact with the death of a loved one, shattering what little world he has left. All throughout, we are privy to the misanthropic spite Hadeland shows towards nearly everything and everyone he meets. But we’re also treated to a series of speculations on mirrors, alchemy, photography and Christopher Marlowe, whose play Doctor Faustus appears frequently, and whose occult Elizabethan brotherhood gives the book its name.

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These long topical disquisitions — which will be all-too-familiar to readers of the My Struggle books — are the most interesting parts of the book. They promise a proper reflection on our image-haunted, technology-obsessed world; a proper retelling of the Faust myth, for what is surely the most openly Faustian time in human history — when AI evangelists and tech billionaires quite literally warn of the Antichrist, and engineers brag about creating daemons in the data centers. And yet the book’s reflection never really leaves the level of chatter: instead it drifts like flotsam on the surface of a narrative which doesn’t seem to be capable of anything deeper than a long, slow drag through its narrator’s many attempts to achieve some greatness in his work, and avoid too much emotional entanglement with other people.

All of this happens, of course, in the same anti-style that has marred so much contemporary literary fiction, from Sally Rooney to Knausgaard himself, obsessed as it so often is with a numbly realist accounting of modern people’s narcissistic internal worlds. One would hope that a book which took for its subject the central myth of soul-killing technological and scientific progress — not to mention the occult nature of mirrors and man-made images — would depart at least somewhat from the most mundane contemporary forms of fictional narration. At the very least, it might craft for itself a proper style to reflect its key interests, or find a more expressionistic route to convey the eerie and fantastical aspects of its story. But with Kansugaard it just isn’t so. The man can apparently only tell a story in one way. At this point, I can think of no surer sign that the fixations of contemporary autofiction (and much fiction in general) are completely tapped out than the exhausting 500-or-so pages of The School of Night.

This is a shame, because Knausgaard is often an interesting thinker, with no small amount of insight into the peculiar character of our modern compulsions. In a cover story for Harper’s this June, entitled “The Reenchanted World”, Knausgaard bridged autobiography — his youthful introduction to computers, tending the garden in his London home, and a recent visit to Greece to meet the scientist James Bridle — with his trademark musings, to investigate what he describes as contemporary society’s “loss of the world”. The world, he writes, was for most of history a place that human beings might turn to, in escape — whether from God, death or self. But in the world we’ve constructed for ourselves, “everything addresses us”, all technology seems bent on abolishing the world and only further reinforcing self. And that’s not all: our technology has flooded us with an informational approximation of the same world substituted for the actual. As he writes, with no small sadness: “All the images I’ve seen of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met create a kind of pseudomemory from a pseudoworld that I don’t participate in.”

Knausgaard’s general distaste for technology — and his quest to understand how science and mathematics might be used to complement our understanding of nature’s mystery, rather than reducing it — shares much with other vaguely Romantic critiques of contemporary scientism, like Iain McGilchrist’s recent books, or those of the venerable American iconoclast Wendell Berry, or Paul Kingsnorth’s recent polemic, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. It helps to paint a picture of our era as one in which technology has run riot and escaped from our control. In one sense this seems all too similar to the first Romantic era. Then, as now, Enlightenment confidence in new scientific discoveries and technologies began to slide into the Industrial Revolution — beginning with what the Romantic poet William Blake called England’s “Satanic Mills”.

This end-of-Enlightenment period inspired the definitive modern Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s huge two-part poetic drama. Along with Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s play is mentioned in Knausgaard’s The School of Night — a tissue of Faust stories connecting the story back to Marlowe’s play, and the alchemical legends before it. But unlike the Romantic reaction against the Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe, or even Mann’s evocation of Nazism and the technological destruction of both world wars, Knausgaard’s Faustian story is too shallow to measure up. His most interesting ideas about cameras, mirrors and art can’t survive his insistence on that exhausting monologue, which only burrows further into the contemporary preoccupations such a Faust story ought to be criticizing. And besides, Knausgaard is simply too committed to the ambiguity of his scenario to make it a proper retelling of a myth. Quite simply, the novel could have used much more of the spirit of inquiry and immediacy that animated his Harper’s article. Or perhaps Knausgaard is constitutionally too personal and autofictional a writer to weave genuinely imaginative literature.

Regardless, the result is, if not quite a failure, at best half-done. The autofictional style — Knausgaard’s, yes, but really anyone’s — has simply run out of things it can do, and as The School of Night proves, is finally incapable of producing the kind of new myths we need to understand our moment. We live in an era of unprecedented acceleration and global instability. Much of our time is now spent staring at computer-generated golems cooked up by technological con-men, many of whom claim (without exaggeration) to be building a new kind of superconnected divinity. We have never been more in need of stories that speak to this insane reality — not to a continual literary addiction to the same single, narcissistic inner monologue, which one can after all already find multiplied across the internet, much of it made by machines. If Knausgaard’s novel shows us anything, it’s that the Faustian story is one of the most perennially relevant modern stories: somebody just has to figure out how to tell it again. When they do, it won’t be like this.

This Californian elf, now the Golden State’s avatar, is the work of generations, refined over time from early Hollywood to Silicon Valley today. It’s tempting to see this mythologization as an act of idle self-absorption, a preening in the style of Barbie and Ken. But the truth is far more mercantilist. California is a massive economy, and its most defining exports are not hard goods or clear-cut services but fickle ideas.

The myth began modestly, with health seekers heading west in the late 1800s to find relief from tuberculosis in the dry air. Over time, “Go West!” became almost rote advice for chronic illness, as if the very place itself could heal. But these primordial associations weren’t enough to transform California into a global myth. The state needed a dream machine and it found one in early Hollywood.

By the Twenties, Hollywood was the face of American cinema, resplendent with all the glamor and scandal it would soon embody. Movie stars, not just movies themselves, were some of its most potent domestic exports. Studio executives understood that selling California as a paradise was essential to their business model, and they took to the task with profit-minded aplomb. Every palm-lined street, every sun-drenched beach scene, and every impossibly beautiful actor stepping out of a convertible advertised the way of life that the silver screen offered for the mere change in your pocket. 

In our day, Silicon Valley represents the latest iteration of this very same mythmaking engine. By the Eighties, Silicon Valley had surpassed Route 128 outside Boston to become the center of the technology universe, drawing brilliant founders and scientists to the beach with the very same allure that had given rise to the motion picture industry before. The visionary founder joined the starlet, and the IPO became as important as the premiere, but the underlying promise remained: California is a place that transcends humdrum human life, and if you buy its products you can get a taste.

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As we in marketing like to say, it’s “aspirational”. Even New York, the state most capable of rivaling California in cultural power, whispers about the golden elves. In Mad Men, the New York ad man Don Draper dreams of an escape to mythic California, ending the series in a wellness retreat there where meditation inspires him to make the iconic Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad. The show uses California as an outlet for Don’s recurring fantasy of reinvention, a place where the damaged protagonist could shed his skin and emerge transformed. That’s why Don’s trips to California often involve surreal, dreamlike encounters that feel disconnected from reality. California as an idea is a constructed, aspirational export. 

And what’s more aspirational than wanting to live forever? Behold the grandest of Californian extravagances yet: immortalism, a movement of scientists and eccentrics quite literally trying to never die. Like Hollywood’s promise of stardom or Silicon Valley’s promise of money, the immortalist movement offers the ultimate Californian product — the transcendence of the one true human limitation.

Aleks Krotoski, a social scientist based in New York, has written an account of her years-long investigation into the entrepreneurs and inventors currently searching for eternal life. The Immortalists is a survey of transhumanists and their efforts: a loose confederation of scientists, entrepreneurs and true believers united by the conviction that aging is a disease to be cured. These tech elites see themselves as successors to earlier “seekers”, armed with wealth and engineering confidence, approaching death as another problem yet to be disrupted by the application of capital and expertise. Their goals are straightforward if audacious: extend lifespan by preventing typical causes of death, while extending their vital “prime years” so they can remain young forever. The connection between the latest trend and broader Californian mythmaking is clear to behold throughout the book’s pages. 

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It’s obvious why such an initiative would make its home in California. For one, the state has a high concentration of extant scientific talent, with one third of the nation’s aerospace companies headquartered there. The balmy beachside lifestyle attracts reliably high earners, while Silicon Valley provides both the capital and the risk tolerance necessary for a moonshot venture like overcoming death. But there’s also a mixture of cult experimentation and alternative medicine which led to the boom of the wellness industry from the Seventies onwards. In the last few decades, the wellness craze has taken hold of Los Angeles. Erewhon, the upscale organic grocery chain, is now basically a temple, with $20 smoothies you’re supposed to be seen consuming. The logical next step after trends such as sound baths, micro-dosing and therapeutic IV drips, was always going to be living forever. 

In The Immortalists, Krotoski floats from oddball to oddball, listening intently and giving each person their due when it comes to their views on mad science, but there’s one recurring star who sits above the rest: the entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He has gained significant online fame largely by posting provocative erection-related statistics and cultivating a vampiric look. He has smooth, hairless cheeks, a piercing gaze, and much plastic surgery. He has turned himself into the vampire king of California, obsessed with rare elixirs and draining blood from the young. 

Krotoski spends so much of the book quoting Johnson verbatim. It’s easy to see why: “When my body, when my mind is like, let’s go eat pizza or let’s go drink… that’s non-cooperation. I relabel those things to violence.” You can almost hear the California dialect just from the words on the page. It’s a particular blend of tech-speak optimization language and therapy-influenced self-actualization rhetoric and rapport, part Silicon Valley efficiency gospel and part Venice Beach spiritual woo. Simultaneously earnest and performative, vulnerable and branded, there’s nothing else like it, and that’s partially the point.

Krotoski’s mocking portrayal of her subjects, as vain, anxious or bored in their pursuit of immortality, is probably fair. But it misses something key in its portrayal of Californian weirdness: it’s all embellished. She doesn’t fully capture, and may not even realize, that her Californian subjects are fully aware of what they are. In reading Johnson’s words, one can find a detectable wink to the audience in everything he says. He has made himself into the character, physically and verbally, to get attention. Take his vampiric appearance. In one telling exchange with Elon Musk on social media, Johnson wrote: “the difference between Elon and me: I’ll nourish you and drink your blood; he’ll fire you and leave you to die” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to his publicized blood transfusion experiments. The darkness of the imagery, perhaps as a shield against criticism, is part of the performance.

Johnson is not the first to do this, and he won’t be the last. The routine is commonplace, especially in the health space. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, after all, knowingly markets products like “This Smells Like My Vagina” candles, a deliberate provocation that generated discourse (and thus notoriety) far in excess of the actual candles sales. The entire “Valley Girl” phenomenon of the Eighties was both authentic dialect and conscious performance, with Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit simultaneously embodying and parodying the accent in her hit single. Even the garage startup myth acknowledges its own absurdity while simultaneously perpetuating itself. The mythology of the billion-dollar garage startup has become an exportable, addictive idea that drives many to apply to places like Y Combinator each year.

California has always needed to find new dreams to sell as the old ones lose their luster. Film’s cultural dominance has waned with the rise of streaming and global production. New York has been aggressively courting film production back from California with tax incentives, and other cities like Atlanta have successfully challenged Hollywood’s monopoly. As traditional Hollywood loses ground, new innovations in the myth are needed to keep it both economically relevant and socially potent on the world stage. Californians understand this, and this is why there is such an effort to continue the myth creation. 

The immortalist movement may succeed in refreshing the California myth for another generation, proving that the state can still produce world-changing ideas. On the other hand, if it spectacularly combusts, it may reveal the myth’s exhaustion, showing that we’ve reached peak California, where the only frontier left is literally trying in vain not to die.

The truth is that California has always sold impossibility. From the gold rush’s promise of instant wealth to Hollywood’s promise of stardom to Silicon Valley’s promise of changing the world with an app, the state’s primary export has been dreams that statistically just won’t come true for most people. Yet, occasionally, just often enough to make the news, someone actually does strike gold, become a star, or build a billion-dollar world-changing company. As such, the myth rolls on, renewed.

The immortalists represent the logical endpoint of this tradition of gambling for glory. They’re selling the ultimate prize of all with just enough scientific merit to make it seem faintly possible. Whether Johnson and his cohort achieve immortality matters less than what their quest reveals about California’s enduring power to make fortune seem inevitable, to turn personal neurosis into cultural movement, and to perform transcendence so convincingly that performance itself becomes a kind of truth.

In the end, Krotoski’s book captures California early in the act of creating its next great myth. Like all the best California stories, it’s obviously fake yet somehow real. The author herself, by taking these eccentric immortalists seriously enough to write about them, becomes part of the myth-making machine she observes. She’s another New Yorker drawn into California’s orbit, unable to look away from the golden elves even as she rolls her eyes at their antics.

It’s a very old story. Johnson and his fellow immortalists are the people who went West seeking transformation and in the end decided to put on a show about it. The fact that their particular show involves blood transfusions and supplement regimens rather than surfboards and sunshine doesn’t change the fundamental dynamics. They are performing California, and in performing it, they make it real.

Paul Kingsnorth writes vividly on the dark side of modernity, technology and progress. His new book, Against the Machine, is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and is something of a spiritual manual for modernity’s dissidents.

Earlier this week, Kingsnorth visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview with Freddie Sayers — the world first about this book, on the day of publication.

This is the full video and an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Much of your writing starts with a feeling: a sense of loss, of alienation, from the modern world, a yearning to get back to something that we had before. Tell us about that feeling. Has it always been with you?

Paul Kingsnorth: Yes, I think it does start with a feeling. It’s a sense that we’re living inside something that is quite inhuman and becoming more and more inhuman. It’s a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter. I begin Against the Machine with “The Purse-Seine”, a poem from the Forties by the American author Robinson Jeffers. He was sitting on a cliff in Los Angeles, watching a fishing boat drawing in a “purse seine”, a type of net that’s like a draw-string. He writes about how the fish in the net can’t feel the net being tightened and drawn, but tightens up all the time until they’re in it and they’re stuck. It feels to me like that’s where we are. Something is gathering around us.

Many writers have written about “the Machine” before me. It’s not my phrase. I consider myself, hopefully, to be writing in this tradition. This is something that has been going on for hundreds of years, at least since the Industrial Revolution. I’m very struck when I come to London, because I live in the west of Ireland and every time I come here, it becomes more machine-like. Go into a café, and there’s a little QR code on the table. You have to scan it to find out what the menu is. There are cameras everywhere. You’re constantly being monitored.

It’s become more and more impossible to survive without being hooked into this technological web that’s growing around us. But what does that take away? It gives us some good things and some bad things. But what do we lose? I think most people can feel that we’re losing something or a set of things that are quite important to what it means to be human.

FS: I remember reading Real England, an earlier book of yours, that was also infused with that same negative reaction towards modernity — the carapace of technology and concrete that was covering the authentic country of England. If someone asked you: “Do you hate modernity?” What would you reply? 

PK: Well, the easy answer is yes.

FS: It’s quite remarkable that you say that out loud.

PK: Look, what is modernity? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about a historical time period that we could date, or are we talking about a way of seeing? I prefer to see modernity as a way of seeing, which I often refer to as machine modernity. Iain McGilchrist has this great theory about the hemispheres of the brain: the left hemisphere sees the parts, and the right hemisphere sees the whole. The left is supposed to be in service to the right, but we have become deeply left-brained in the sense that we’re very good at seeing the parts, very good at making things, at going to the moon, at examining the genes of fruit flies. But have we actually lost a way of seeing that’s much more significant? That’s how I see modernity. It creates lots of things that we find good and useful, obviously. But where’s it going in the long term and what’s the price that’s being paid for it?

FS: Where do you locate the moment that it all started to go wrong? Possible candidates you mention in the book include Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the Schism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the car, and many others.

PK: You missed a bit about the Egyptian pyramids.

FS: Oh yes!

PK: Which isn’t my idea. I’m quoting Lewis Mumford, the great critic of technology, who wrote a two-volume book called The Myth of the Machine back in the late Sixties. He sees the first machine society as being Pharaonic Egypt, which he calls “the machine made of human parts”. The human parts being slaves. If you have that enormous top-down thing, you can build something incredible like a pyramid. He compares a pyramid to a space rocket. These are both technologies which, at a cost of human labour and toil, create a technology which takes the favoured few up into heaven.

You could say Egypt was a machine society. Certainly, Ancient Rome was very machine-like in its centralisation, its technocratic ability, its top-down power. What’s happened since? Let’s finger the usual suspects, and say the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution together created a revolution in human seeing in the Western world, which has since flooded out everywhere else.

This way of seeing is highly mechanistic. Through a critique of religion — which has been going on for a long time, but it really comes to the fore with the French Revolution — you create a new theology. A traditional way of understanding this is that during the modern period, we’ve moved away from religion and we’ve moved instead towards reason and science. To some degree, you can say that’s true, but what we also have is a new belief system — a thing we call progress, which is moral progress, technological progress, endless forward movement. If we look at the way that our politics is framed, if we look at the way technology is created, they are all aligned with this notion of progress with a large “P”. So we’re all progressive in that sense. It’s become the ultimate philosophy of the modern world. That’s what we do: we move forward. One of the problems we’re having in the West at the moment is that people have stopped believing in it.

FS: So is this new, or was it ever thus? Has it not always been true, throughout the ages, that there are people such as yourself who yearn for the purity of the past? Ovid was writing about the Golden Age, William Morris in News from Nowhere, and many in between. Are you simply today’s version, or do you think there is something truly specific and new about what we’re going through today?

PK: Well, I don’t mind being compared with Ovid. That’s okay.

You have to be careful: the temptation when you talk like this is to find a particular period in the past and start to romanticise that and say, well, “Everything was great then”. You won’t find a period of history in which there aren’t all the usual human problems, but they are different. In a very general sense, the modern way of seeing divorces us from things which most pre-modern ways of seeing have taken for granted.

I try to categorise this in the book in a very machine-like way. I call it “the four Ps”, which are “People”, “Place”, “Prayer”, and “the Past”. If you look at most cultures, they’re based on a combination of those four things. The modern world systematically uproots them all and replaces them with consumerism and ideologies and progressive theologies and, ultimately, technology, which is the way that we try to manifest the myth of progress. There is something revolutionary about the way we see, and it’s not normal. I think we see the world quite differently to the way most people have always seen it.

FS: We are very used to people complaining about too much screentime and the deleterious effect of apps. But you seem to see the spread of modern technology, perhaps culminating in AI, as something devilish — a kind of evil force or spirit? 

PK: If you listen to the people who are in Silicon Valley, really pushing the creation of superhuman intelligence, they all talk like prophets or priests or religious philosophers. Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, is always talking about the singularity, the point at which machines become more intelligent than us and run away with themselves. He was once asked: “Does God exist?” And he answered: “Not yet.”

You have seen lots of warnings from people about how AI could become superintelligent and destroy us. Many of those warnings are coming from the people creating it. It’s not just weirdos like me. The journalist Ezra Klein went to a bunch of these people and asked why, given that they’re warning us it could destroy the world, are they creating it? And he said they couldn’t answer the question. They ended up more or less feeling that they had a responsibility to usher this new being into the world.

We’ve got superintelligent AIs being created. Nobody really knows how they work. They’re already talking to each other in ways people can’t understand. They’re already persuading teenagers to kill themselves. Something very sinister is going on. Pre-modern societies wouldn’t have had much trouble understanding it. It’s like the Book of Genesis. Why don’t you just take the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and become as the gods? If you rebel against God, you can be God. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to create God, make God live forever.

Suggested reading

Raging against the Machine

By Paul Kingsnorth

FS: But is this just the excitable rhetoric of Silicon Valley technicians, or do you actually think there’s an external force of some kind that is being made manifest? 

PK: I’m a Christian, so I do believe in external forces of evil. I don’t want to get too carried away with that because it’s very easy to predict the rise of the Antichrist every five minutes.

It’s a kind of a feeling, it’s an intuition. I’m not trying to prove anything. But I think given that all these people talk in spiritual terms about this stuff, we should see it in spiritual terms.

FS: In the book you do name it the Antichrist. You say these machines are not just machines. They are something else. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life. 

PK: I think that’s true. I’ll stand by that.

I don’t know what the mind is. I don’t know whether the mind is the Antichrist or whether it is a man, or whether it’s something demonic, or whether it’s something that humans can create. I’m not sure we’re actually capable of creating a mind, even though we think we are, but I have the strong sense that something quite dark is happening.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to put a name to it, but let’s just see what happens over the next five years, because either AI is going to be a bubble that bursts and we’ve all made a fuss about nothing. Or we’re going to be moving into very uncharted territory.

FS: Let me take you away from the perilous topic of the Antichrist towards the easy topic of the culture wars. That will be plain sailing.

PK: It’s less interesting though.

FS: You describe your reaction to the roiling culture wars as having three distinct phases. Could you describe them for us?

When I looked at the warring teams, my first reaction was to look at the mad woke Left and want to join the team against them, because some of the stuff they say is just so crazy and offensive.

And then the second reaction is: actually, no, I really don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get involved in that. I think I’d rather go and live in a forest. Or a monastery. Because that’s actually a trap. I think it is a trap.

And then the third reaction was to look at it and say: “OK, while I really don’t like what a lot of these people are saying, I can understand why they’re saying it.”

FS: These people being?

PK: The postmodern woke Left, whatever you want to call them. The culture warriors who are trying to take the culture apart. And then rising up against them you have these defenders of the West, broadly on the Right. You know, “we must defend our traditions” and all the rest of it. And when I look at that, I’m not sure what traditions we’re defending at this point?

I’m not sure what the West is, so if you’re going to defend the West or indeed attack the West, you need to think, “well, what is it then?” And if I’m talking about the Machine, I think that is what the modern West now is. It may not be what the West was in the Middle Ages, but this thing we call the West now is really a manifestation of this modern way of seeing. I actually don’t want to defend that.

So, I find myself in this kind of bind because I come from here and I’d rather that place wasn’t dismantled. I’ve got children who’ve got to grow up in it. I want to give them some values, but while I can dislike what a lot of the radical Left is doing, I can see to some degree why they’re doing it.

I’m not convinced by the uncomplicated unquestioning defenders of the West because what they often end up defending is a kind of capitalism, or a very statist version of Christianity. A Fifties-style conservatism that actually they probably don’t really want to live in themselves.

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The illusion of a pagan West

By Paul Kingsnorth

FS: So you are ready to let the West die. I mean, there is a chapter called “The West Must Die”. You write, “maybe we need to let the West die, let it die so that we can live.”

PK: What I’m thinking is that this thing that we call the West, which has become an idol — either because the Left want to tear it down because it’s the cis-heteronormative patriarchy, or because the Right want to defend it because the Left are trying to tear it down — has become a thing which actually doesn’t have anything to do with real culture at all.

It’s almost like a trauma response. We’ve lost all of our actual, real culture. If we go back to those “four Ps” — “People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — most of us aren’t living in most of those things anymore.

So if we let go of this notion of the West, whether we’re attacking it or defending it. Maybe we can concentrate on creating human scale cultures again, which is, I think the best way to create some form of friction or resistance to this Machine way of seeing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have big arguments at all, that none of these issues matter. They do. You have to stand up for things that are true. You have to stand up against things that are wrong or evil, but actually the real stuff is going to come from trying to recreate real culture again.

FS: That is the final part of your book, really, where you conclude by offering a suggestion of how we might live inside the Machine. What you move towards is a kind of secession from the crumbling culture around us, an acceptance that it’s dying and will not survive. Will you just talk a bit about that? How would that work for people?

PK: I think it’s already crumbled. The things that we used to believe in have pretty much already gone. That gives you the freedom to start again. Not that you’re going to start with the blank slate, but you need to draw on the best of the past. The Machine rips up everything from its roots, and that’s a kind of liberation process, but it’s also a destruction process. You need to try and build from the bottom up.

This is all very doomy. We’re talking about the Antichrist and things. But for a Christian, the coming of the Antichrist is all good, because it’s all fine after that. Everything gets sorted. So we’re waiting for that day.

Even though the world looks crazy and horrible and depressing, there’s a hope to it precisely because everything’s falling down, and you can now say: “Well, how are we going to get back to actually trying to be human again?” Once you face this kind of digital Moloch that’s around us, you actually have to ask what it means to be human.

Suggested Reading

Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

By Mattia Ferraresi

Coming back to the whole Antichrist question, I quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, a mad Silicon Valley eccentric, who’s very opposed to AI. He thinks AI systems will destroy us. And if anyone is developing AI in their countries, then you need to bomb the data centres of that country and destroy their electricity network. He’s a kind of Silicon Valley Ted Kaczynski.

FS: Yes, the bombing of the data centres. It’s in the book. You say: “bombing the data centres, this is the mindset of the raw ascetic.” I would say, although you’re not explicitly calling for it, you’re not not calling for it…

PK: You could bomb the data-centres, which — if they were developing superhuman AI — would be a good idea. But unless you’ve changed your way of seeing, someone’s going to build more of these things. They always get built again, which is the argument people use against Yudkowsky, because if we stopped building AI, someone else would build them.

FS: There’s the polite version of Paul Kingsnorth, and then not far beneath the surface there is the much more radical activist. You talk with great affection about the Luddites, who were smashing looms and rejecting the Industrial Revolution, and the Fen Tigers, who resisted the draining of the fens. 

PK: I’m very happy to call myself a Luddite. People always call me a Luddite. I embrace that because what the Luddites did was reject certain types of technology that were going to enslave them. You can see what these people [in Silicon Valley] are trying to build. And then you say: “What the hell are we going to do about that?” I started off when I was 21 as a road protester and I believe in non-violent direct action. I kind of still do.

FS: So you’ve come full circle? 

PK: The principle behind that is very Gandhian. Which is that if you need to destroy a technology, which is going to in itself destroy life, then it’s a justifiable thing to do if you’re not harming people. But I don’t how you would apply that to an interconnected global digital system because there is no heart.

There’s no central computer that you can just hit with a pickaxe and the whole thing shuts down. Which is why it feels more like an interconnected way of seeing the rise of some being, or just the rise of our own slightly warped way of seeing, turning into a kind of technological system, like a central nervous system. There isn’t really any way to shut that down other than seeing differently. So I do move between these poles. Do I think we should bomb data centres or do I think we should read Iain McGilchrist? Or do I think we should do both?

Probably both, but I don’t know.

You’ve got to draw your own lines, decide what you’re going to do, decide what you’re not going to allow to happen. I’m not going to ever use an AI. I think if you don’t draw lines, you’re just going to get sucked in.

FS: The other sensitive aspect of this book is how your ideas relate to the ascendant radical Right in politics.

We had that huge Tommy Robinson march last week, animated by protest against immigration and a desire to reassert the indigenous culture. It would be possible, I think, to read this book and be inspired to go on those kind of marches. You use the word indigenous a lot. When describing what you don’t like about the West, you single out “the insistence that African children should attend Western-style schools and be issued laptops; that India should adopt our patented pharmaceutical medicines; that Pacific Islanders should become Protestant Christians in suits and ties”.

What did you mean by that?

PK: This is the promotion of the global system of western capitalism around the world, which just razes all cultures and homogenises them. I’m very clear in the book repeatedly, actually, about what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what’s going on these marches in London. I don’t even read the news really, but this sort of manifestation of Christian Nationalism is balls. And I’ve spoken out about it quite clearly actually.

I gave a talk a couple years ago called “Against Christian Civilisation”, which was specifically about the manifestation of what’s basically idol worship, where you take Christianity, which is a spiritual path of renunciation and radicalism, and demands to reject wealth and reject the idols of nations, and you turn that somehow into a new crusade of waving pictures of people around and talking about muscular Christianity. It’s just the endless corruption of the Christian faith that’s been going on for 2,000 years, and it’s absolutely nonsense. And in terms of indigeneity, I would never talk about that in an uncomplicated way.

I’m actually very clear in the book when I do talk about that. And I’m also very clear about what I’m against, which is all this kind of stuff you are talking about. When you start talking about cultural purity or racial purity, at least on the hard Right, then you’ve been suckered. I start the book by talking about Simone Weil’s book, The Need for Roots, and Weil is certainly not any kind of Right-wing or far-Right character. But she writes this book during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and she’s French and she’s fighting for the Free French in London. And she says that everyone is uprooted in the modern world. And what the Nazis have done is they’ve taken that concern and they’ve turned it into this hideous, monstrous racial thing. How can we actually root ourselves again without getting sucked in by that?

So you have to be able to talk about this in an intelligent way and in a sensitive way, which I hope I’ve done in the book. I don’t think anyone could seriously read that and not be very clear about what I’m for and what I’m not.

But be careful of idol worship. Don’t worship the idols of nations or the idols of false versions of Christianity or religion. Anything that involves you raging against a bunch of people who are different to you. Whatever side you’re on, you’re in trouble. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the serious discussions about what it actually means to be rooted and what you should actually be doing politically, but I really see what’s happening in the West at the moment as a manifestation of that massive process of uprooting and just people on all sides of the spectrum.

FS: You end up by embracing a political label: reactionary radical. What does that mean?

PK: John Calhoun uses the phrase “reactionary radicals” when critiquing E.P. Thompson, the Marxist historian: he says, look, you can’t divide people at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution into the two simple categories of workers or capitalists, the working class and the bourgeoisie, because what the Luddites are doing in communities like them, is trying to resist the coming of the factory system, the coming of capitalism, because they can see it’s going to completely destroy them. It’s going to destroy their industry. It’s going to turn them into wage slaves, it’s gonna destroy their households. So they’re reactionary in that sense.

They’re reacting against that system, which is a good thing. But they’re radical as well because they don’t react against it because they want to go back to the past as if it was perfect. They want changes as well, right? They want things that will actually benefit them because the system currently does not benefit them.

He calls these people reactionary radicals. And I think if you look at tribal people in India resisting dams or the West Papuans, resisting logging firms in the Indonesian government, or the Fen Tigers or the Luddites throughout history, what you can see is reactionary radicals. You can see people fighting the Machine, but from a perspective of wanting a radically different way of living.

So it’s not a simple sort of reaction where you just go, “oh, everything was wonderful in the past. Let’s go back to that.” But neither is it an ideological radicalism like you would get with the Marxists, where you say: “we’ve got a grand utopian theory of everything and we’re just going to impose that now even if we have to kill everyone and put them into camps.”

It’s based on human scale culture. It reacts against the Machine. So I like that. I like that as a phrase. It’s the best description I’ve ever heard of what I think I believe in.

If we’re going to talk about politics as a way of seeing, you have to have a politics that is rooted in the past, that’s rooted in reality. Rooted in nature and eternal things, but that doesn’t idolise them. Or turn them into excuses to hate a bunch of people who aren’t the same as you, which is the problem that we’ve got at the moment, and that’s what the Right’s going to end up doing if it’s not very careful indeed.

“People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — however you want to formulate it. But it has to be against the Machine, literally, and it has to be very careful that whatever it does not become the worship of an idol and the excuse to project your anger and fear onto somebody else, which is why for me, my Christianity’s important.

Because if you’re going to try and be a Christian properly (and I wouldn’t claim I’m very good at it) the two great commandments are that you love God and you love your neighbour. And, by the way, Christ says: “Everyone is your neighbour.” That’s what the Good Samaritan is about.

So you actually have to try and do the thing that is possible for you to do. That is a good thing in your life at the human scale.

“Notice how muted the reaction has been to the new Hubs,” wrote the anonymous X memelord Drukpa Kunley shortly after Starmer announced his third-party deportation scheme. Indeed, there was no “return hub” discourse. But perhaps that was the point. The suspiciously twee euphemism suggests Labour has discovered a quietly revolutionary way of doing its dirty work.

On the surface the “hub” is a bastion of technocratic benevolence, an embodiment of a British state that wants to be your bestie. The word conjures images of Technicolor beanbag chairs and gel pen-wielding lanyard-wearers. Yet, scrape a little and the hub reveals itself as a formless, fickle, and malleable euphemism — it bends to the whims of whoever wields it.

Before it became a term of civic optimism, the hub had a rougher beginning. Once upon a time, the hub was a “hobbe”. From the proto-German hubbel, meaning “hill” or “bump”, the early hobbe was an unappetizing prospect. Geoffrey Chaucer used “hobbe” to describe something wretched, while a medieval English-to-Latin dictionary defined it as a tumorous swelling, a synonym for a “bube” — of bubonic plague fame. These hubs signaled sickness, not progress.

Around two centuries later, in a 1570 farming manual, English poet and country gent Barnaby Googe gave the term a new meaning. He described the hub as “the midst of the Wheele, called the Naue or Hobbe of the wheele”. Reincarnated as the bump at the center of a wheel, it became a mechanism of both physical and moral progress.

As English standardized, the hobbe became the hub, and went transatlantic. In 1858, Boston grandee Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared the city’s State-House to be “the hub of the solar system”, and you couldn’t “carry off a hub without taking the spokes with it, or you would damage the wheel”. Boston soon became widely known as “The Hub of the Universe” or simply “the Hub”. Holmes asserted that this progress was driven by an intellectual and moral WASP elite he termed the “Boston Brahmins”, positioning them and Boston at the forefront of American prosperity.

Yet it was in the second half of the 20th century that the hub’s galactic potential began to emerge. Following the war, the Western imagination underwent a profound shift, rejecting a world of essentialism and rootedness in favor of motion and interconnection.

As N.S. Lyons observes, before 1945 nations were moored in soil, faith, and kin — what Karl Popper derided as the “closed society”. After the catastrophe, those bonds began to be seen as a gateway to fascism. Theodor Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” diagnosed loyalty to family or nation as pathology. Popper went further, branding the national community itself “anti-humanitarian propaganda”. The postwar settlement determined that the “strong gods” of belonging and faith were to be dismantled, replaced with the “weak gods” of openness, tolerance, doubt, and consumer comfort. This cultural transformation set the stage for the rise of the hub.

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The dawn of the Bohemian Peasants

By Louis Elton

Bringing this dream to reality would require three consecutive revolutions — in politics, commerce, and technology. First, a postwar political reconstruction to engineer openness and interdependence. Second, a global managerial and commercial revolution to facilitate this ever-deeper integration. And third, a tech revolution to eliminate friction from the system entirely.

Western leaders embedded the new postwar values into the emerging supra-national institutions. By sharing coal, steel, law, and standards, the founding fathers of the European Union, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, argued that war would be “not only unthinkable but materially impossible”. In this new era, centralization and technocracy would become the overarching political theology.

Then, to manage the emerging sprawl of global interconnection, the hub was unleashed. Amid the postwar manufacturing and consumption booms, the hub became the weapon of choice for the new managerial class tasked with holding the new system together. First, in 1955, Delta Airlines pioneered the “hub-and-spoke” system at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport to consolidate flights through a central location. The idea was simple: concentrate routes, reduce operating costs, and increase connectivity. The aviation hub model quickly became industry standard, and a model for managing all complex systems.

Logistics followed suit. Inspired by the Delta Airlines model, a young Yale student named Fred Smith wrote a thesis proposing that a hub system could enable overnight deliveries. Years later, he put the idea into action, founding FedEx and revolutionizing logistics by routing all deliveries through the company’s global SuperHub in Memphis, launched in 1981.

Finally, the Internet arrived. It would streamline not only physical infrastructure (think Ethernet hubs), but societal infrastructure too. “Technology hubs”, explained Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham, were where “rich people and nerds” clustered to build the future. And so Silicon Valley became a mythic ecosystem that could change the world. By 2000, Wired magazine was documenting a global outbreak of “Silicon envy”, observing that “high-tech hubs now dot the globe” all seeking to unlock the wealth, productivity, and magic that the hub could conjure.

Enter, Tony Blair. Despite lacking a phone and an email address, Blair wanted to emulate Silicon Valley’s boundless techno-optimism in British government. And so he waged a hub revolution of his own: launching the Policy Hub website in March 2002. This online tool was designed to centralize policymaking through shared initiatives, tools, and case studies, bringing the spirit of the hub to government. Awestruck by American productivity and desperate to modernize the state, Britain became hub obsessed. Prior to Blair, the term “hub” appeared in Parliament only 613 times in 200 years, mostly in reference to transport. In just 13 years under New Labour, it was used 885 times.

If Blair was a hub emissary, then David Cameron was a hub zealot. Amid austerity, he sought to rewire the state with a series of efficient hubs that combined services. Growth Hubs attempted to reshape local enterprise. Family Hubs provided womb-to-tomb family support. Launched in 2012, GOV.UK was the hub of hubs. It was a digital paragon of efficiency: soothing sans-serif GDS Transport font, paternalistic “nudges” drawn from supposedly cutting-edge psychological insights. All of it designed to dissolve the sprawling machinery of government into a single, frictionless one-stop shop. In just six years, hub discourse in parliament exploded to 2,067 references — doubling Labour’s efforts in half the time.

The Cameron years were defined by the mythos of the hub. If we all come together — individuals, communities, ideas and technology — there’s nothing we cannot solve. From GOV.UK and the London Olympics, to legalization of same-sex marriage, Cameron unwaveringly believed in the open society, benevolently ruled by hubs.

But Brexit was a devastating blow. In search of sovereignty and border control, the spirit of the closed society returned. Voters had rejected the hub ideology of frictionless integration. In the years that followed, successive Tory Prime Ministers attempted to invoke “strong god” rhetoric. Theresa May scorned “citizens of nowhere”; the Rwanda policy aimed to shatter the postwar consensus.

However, in practice things were different. The open society continued to prosper through none other than the hub. Theresa May doubled down on tech hubs. Boris Johnson followed with green energy, nuclear fusion, and hydrogen. Rishi Sunak sought to establish the UK as a global center for AI safety and launched the Quantum Computing Innovation Hub.

This tension reveals a burning psychodrama at the heart of the British state’s self-conception. It wants to be a high-tech superpower without the pain of rebuilding its Victorian bureaucracy. It wants to make cuts to state services while sounding friendly and benign. And it wants to project global openness while addressing the concerns of an increasingly reactionary electorate. Rather than confront these paradoxes, Britain reaches for the soothing Potemkin policy of the hub. Time and again, leaders choose cuddly vagueness over the hard work of politics.

It’s now Starmer’s turn to take up the mantle. In the brand-new Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June, the Government announced its intention to invest in no less than 19 different genres of hub. Some are mere updates of existing hubs, but others are entirely new: commercial innovation, AI skills, life sciences, defense, professional and business services, and robotics.

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In just one year since Starmer entered Downing Street, “hub” has appeared 966 times in parliamentary debates. In June 2025 alone, it popped up 166 times — the highest month since records began. At this pace, the term may feature over 4,000 times before the next election. So inundated by hubs, we are numb to them. Ubiquitous and bland, they’re an instant eyeball glazer.

Which brings us back to the return hubs. The policy embodies the central paradox of the Starmer project. “Return” gestures toward something more reactionary — not just deportation, but a broader RETVRN to an imagined orderly past. Meanwhile, “hub”, of course, is the open society incarnate.

Amid the metaphysical civil war bubbling between voters, Starmer must tread a tightrope. To keep the favor of metropolitan progressives, he must demonstrate technocratic competence. To hold off Reform, he must cut immigration. If he can wield the return hub, flexing toughness while preserving a progressive surface, he might just keep hold of power. The result could be a distinctively British settlement: quietly hardcore with a cuddly demeanor. It would represent yet another evolutionary leap for the hub.

But if Starmer falls, the hub could go down with him. A leader more hostile to the hallowed open society, perhaps a Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick, may choose to kill this symbol of the ancien régime. What might come next? The answer may already be here: look no further than the meme-powered “Skullcrushing” remigration subsuming America. The hub’s wheel will turn — or it will break. Its fate is in Starmer’s hands.

This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented “human flourishing”. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027 scenario, warn that it may “kill all the people”. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetized digital technology, and what’s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, societal atomization, political polarization, enhanced surveillance and censorship — the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.

Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora’s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What’s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviors of humanity.

We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonize space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.

The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology — a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. René Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the “masters and possessors of nature”. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it”, rid us of “an infinity of maladies”, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation — a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today’s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.

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Will the university survive AI?

By Jacob Howland

Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfillment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.

In the long run, technology — which promised to give people what they want, when they want it — was the easiest of sales. It didn’t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called technē, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality — the real character of human existence, felt and understood — paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.

Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be molded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal’s “rational soul” is the spirit of technology, which is moving with “ever increasing acceleration”. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing “the progress of the future”: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).

For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for “a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present”. Later, manmade “globes” — space shells 10 miles in diameter — will replace the pathetic one we’ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, “there would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel”. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: “the stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”

In Bernal’s estimation, the flesh — the human body — is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.” What the flesh needs now is “radical alteration” through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. “Normal man”, Bernal insists, “is an evolutionary dead end”, and there is much work to be done: “We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.”

Bernal envisions “the direction of mechanism by pure volition” (something Elon Musk’s Neuralink, now rivaled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg — which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat — is apt to strike us as “a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature… he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present”.

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The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological “new man”, Bernal writes, is our species’ persistent irrationality, especially including its “unintelligent respect for the past”. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilization was founded. For “we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil” — the retrograde sensibility that rejects “the progress of dehumanization”. That can happen only if “the scientific expert” — linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses — rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom”. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite “are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them”, might be allowed to live on Earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment”.

Bernal’s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we’ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.

Musk’s idea of space colonization was a political project, which he gave up on when he realized that “woke AI” would follow us to Mars. His desire to make a clean break with the ideological overload of contemporary life was so strong that he was prepared to abandon the Earth. How many people would have been willing to join him? The answer would give us some idea about the insufficiency of meaning that Bernal so completely expresses in his dystopian vision.

The essay was published well before the Manson Family murders, before the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert debacle, the Kent State shootings, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison — before any of the infamous totems of the death of the Sixties. Yet the picture Didion paints of an already decaying counter-culture is bleak: rather than discovering the kind of fluid, boundary-less utopia imagined in the new culture of psychedelic drugs, thousands of young people had squandered their minds and lives chasing a pseudo-enlightenment sold to them by gurus and cult figures — the most famous of course being Timothy Leary, who had traveled across the country inviting every American to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Instead of precipitating a glorious era of mass enlightenment, LSD ended up creating a burned-out, drug-addled generation of lost children.

Considering Didion’s prophetic picture of that burned-out acid generation, it seems entirely possible that our own society stands on the edge of something similar, even if its own destructive ideals of utopian design have been institutional and technological, where the Sixties dream was countercultural. Beset by internet addiction, climate anxiety, depression, overwork, ADHD, and a general tendency towards distraction and retreat from the world, ours is a culture of burnout and exhaustion which looks like nothing so much as a recapitulation of the Sixties fallout, only with the internet as our new mind-altering drug of choice. Yet these eerie similarities are no accident.

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From the release of formerly clandestine information, in the Seventies, we know that LSD was introduced into America by concerted governmental programs in the early Fifties as part of Cold War MK-ULTRA operations, in an attempt to develop new forms of brainwashing and mind control. For years, the United States government experimented with psychedelic drugs on people in asylums, prisons, and clinics. The journalist Tom O’Neill, in his rather persuasive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), has even gone so far as to suggest that Charles Manson himself may have been the product of deep-state testing, during his time in prison. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that the drug which unleashed massive anti-societal, anti-institutional energies onto an unsuspecting American public was the product of a state experiment, an attempt to discover a new technology of power.

As the Sixties dream collapsed, these mass collective visions were channeled into more explicit cults, and into narrower, individualist ideas of therapeutic soothing. The Seventies saw the proliferation of guru-centered religious cults such as the Rajneesh Movement and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the latter infamous for its congregational mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana. The decade was also dominated by what came to be known as the New Age, a vague bricolage of spiritualist practices including Americanized popularizations of Zen and yoga; neo-pagan groups like Wiccans and the Church of Satan; even expanding middle-class interest in Freudian and Jungian psychotherapy. The emerging popular images of “spirituality” at the time — healing crystals, meditation retreats, soothing muzak — were all part of this new climate, stemming from the collapse of the commune movement, an emergent global recession, and increasing fragmentation into individualist anomie. This was the “Me Decade” which the great socialist critic Christopher Lasch detailed acutely in his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism.

For Lasch, the new therapeutic language of the Seventies had combined with the slow constriction of family life, an addictive obsession with professional sports, ingeniously distractive media, and a collapse in popular faith in institutions, to create an isolated and narcissistic culture losing all sense of shared vision or communal life. For all its potential value, the increasing middle-class obsession with therapy was ultimately only teaching people to further obsess over themselves: people were growing more and more concerned with tracking and transforming their own feelings and thought patterns, instead of turning outwards to the world, or confronting the need for real public, political transformation. The ever-unattainable ideal of “mental health” had effectively replaced the Christian doctrine of the salvation of the soul. In place of religion, or even those utopian visions of mass psychedelic enlightenment and countercultural communalism, the West now had a myriad of individual spiritual projects — all increasingly packaged, marketed, and thoroughly commodified.

Around the same time, Silicon Valley had begun to form. With the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), California university researchers funded by the US Department of Defense had created a new mass packet-switched network, functionally connected by 1969. This ARPANET formed the foundation for what would later be the Internet. Given the name “Silicon Valley” by Dan Hoefler in 1971, that section of the San Francisco Bay Area played host to the world’s largest concentration of hardware and software developers, start-ups, and inventors of new computer technologies. With the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and the establishment of the official Silicon Valley Bank in 1983, the place became the epicenter of the coming digital revolution.

Silicon Valley had its own emergent culture, too — one which, as it turned out, had much to do with that death of the Sixties counterculture, and all those lost dreams of a boundaryless utopia. In an influential 1995 paper, University of Westminster media scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron gave this loose ethos a name: “The Californian Ideology.” This “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”, made up the set of liberatory ideals which had formed the ideological basis for these new networks, from its earliest days to 1990, when the British researcher Tim Berners-Lee from CERN had built the first web browser, along with the software behind the creation of the World Wide Web.

According to Barbrook and Cameron, the creators and theorists of the Internet had come to see an unlimited, untamed cyberspace as a chance to finally achieve the old utopian dream, following the collapse of the New Left movement and the burnout of the Californian counterculture. What the Sixties had failed to bring about at the level of consciousness might now be done through technology. But Barbrook and Cameron noticed something disturbing going on, namely a strong rightward drift, into fantasies of “perfect” markets and totally sovereign individuals, freed by the ultimate “democracy” of the internet from any societal responsibility. They reported that the new hi-tech and media industries were becoming rhetorically very important for the New Right, since “both capitalists and well-paid workers fear[ed] that the open acknowledgment of public funding of their companies would justify tax rises to pay for desperately needed spending on health care, environmental protection, housing, public transport and education.” They also wrote, despairingly, about how many people in this new “virtual class” had been “seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America’s pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part.”

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Of course, this is a paradigm we’ve seen repeat itself many times over in the past decades. It’s fairly well accepted at this point that the 2024 US presidential election was at least partially clenched for Trump by the support of tech titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, whose Orwellian corporation Palantir has already benefited immensely from working with the new government. Democratic socialists in America have argued for years that the sway tech companies can purchase in the government only further facilitates the transfer of federal money away from new infrastructure, or welfare for a struggling population, and into the coffers of these already exorbitantly overvalued and over-subsidized monopolies.

The parallels on the historical scale are also obvious if we look at the beginnings (and the end result) of the Californian Ideology. First introduced as a technology of control, with large-scale military investiture, psychedelic drugs and the counterculture which emerged from them took an entire generation from mass public defiance of conformism, and celebration of spiritual transcendence, into mass psychological crash-out, followed by a descent into narcissism and myopia. Via those inventors and businessmen of Silicon Valley who successfully globalized the Californian Ideology, a similar project was envisioned, only now at the institutional and technological level. It was no longer merely counter-cultural: it was the underlying impetus for the new technological regime itself. And it, too, had decades of concerted investment by the US military to thank for its sudden widespread effect.

Which brings us to the present moment, and what it shares with the death of that older utopian ideal. All pretensions towards the “democratizing” power of Web 2.0 social media died with the Arab Spring 15 years ago; since then these sites have only increased our political polarization and intra-group hatred. We’ve even begun to develop our own cult leaders and cultish language: consider accelerationists following the example of Nick Land, or new anti-democratic “philosophers” like Curtis Yarvin, along with an Internet filling up with doom-laden terms like “the longhouse” or “the cathedral” and, of course, “taking the red pill”. Transhumanism, Applied Rationalism, and Effective Altruism have established themselves in actual institutional centers, in affiliation with many companies in Silicon Valley today — yet all have shown the tell-tale signs of cult-like activity, from sexual grooming scandals to tales of obscene behavior to murky influence on the rich and powerful.

Then there’s the simple fact of mass emotional collapse, as overstimulation from internet addiction and portable devices only worsens. In 2010, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han characterized the primary disease of our time as “neuronal”, manifesting in pathologies like ADHD, depression, and burnout. In his remarkable book, The Burnout Society, Han traces the transformation of Western society from a “disciplinary” paradigm to an “achievement” paradigm. From a society based on coercion and force from above, we’ve shifted to a society in which each person becomes self-exploiting, suffering not from any threat of direct oppression from the Other, but from “an excess of positivity”. Consider all our brief media obsessions over fads like “quieting quitting”, “ghosting”, or the “Great Resignation”. In a world of entrepreneurs, personal brands, and internet avatars, the ruling feeling of the day is the constant threat of an immense narcissistic crash-out, an exhaustion which comes from having to aggressively and constantly be one’s own authentic self — and then to sell it. We’ve never been more stimulated, more overwhelmed by information, or more productive in our work. The result is a deepening sense of total existential exhaustion, not at all dissimilar to the post-Sixties burnout.

It’s impossible to know where any of this is really heading. Yet if we follow some of these analogues — keeping in mind that it’s hardly a perfect one-to-one map, only a sense of the way our massive societal upheavals tend to produce mass exhaustion — we may glimpse some of what’s in store for us. Consider the increasing evidence for the “Dead Internet” theory, the suspicion that maybe even a majority of the internet is, at this point, only dead bots interacting with other dead bots. We’re looking at a pandemic of tiredness, overstimulation, and overwork, and even that is accompanied by a loss of any last vestige of meaning or reality in the digital networks we’ve used to distract ourselves. In the next decade, we’ll likely see a rise in even more obvious cults and spurious new spiritual movements; huge increases in young people “tuning in, and dropping out” from mass communications technologies; the increased transition from mild “digital detoxes” to outright rejection of digital existence; and a rise in the establishment of primitivist communes.

The benefits of this new paradigm could be remarkable: a return to pragmatic grassroots socialist politics; an increase in DIY planting and repair-work; more communal living, perhaps cross-generationally; the return of something like a true counter-culture, or an artistic avant-garde; new, classically humanistic educational institutions, away from our ineffectual universities; even a larger return to sincere interest in the great world religions. If history is any guide, and we really are in for a massive post-utopian burnout at a level never seen before, then these are the very kinds of alternatives and experiments which we’ll have to embrace. Unless we want to live in a world where the destruction wrought by pseudo-utopian projects is simply replayed at the mass technological level, then we’ll be forced to find ways of connecting to each other which don’t rely solely on digital technology or existing institutions. We may indeed be in an escalating mess of mass emotional collapse — a crisis of exhaustion. Yet as Winston Churchill is supposed to have said (in a way which still rings quite true): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

And yet US Vice President JD Vance ascribes his adult conversion to Catholicism partly to the influence of Girard, via his campaign funder, the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The latter encountered Girard at Stanford and champions him to aspiring entrepreneurs. Now, 10 years after his death, Girard is everywhere — profiled in the Financial Times, analyzed on politics podcasts, presented in YouTube lecture series by men in tailored suits.

Would Girard be happy about this? Given his warnings about scapegoating, it’s hard to imagine him celebrating his influence upon a vice president who campaigned by accusing immigrants of eating pets. And he’d probably be greatly puzzled by the promotion of his ideas as a key to business success. What strikes me is how the popular versions of Girard leave out his most powerful idea — the one most humbling to our pride. He has been popularized as a propounder of “grand, gruesome theories” about the secret savagery behind civilization. But I see him, before this, as a theorist of identity. This element in his thought seems to have been played down by his new, high-status audience.

Girard’s name for his body of thought is “Mimetic Theory”. It is founded on a single idea: mimetic desire. This is the hypothesis that our desires, beyond our basic needs, are always mediated by a mimetic model: somebody who guides us on what to desire, and what not to. Everyone knows that online shoppers look to influencers to decide which brands to buy. But Girard shows the same dynamic at work in the sophisticated plots of great theatre and novels, not to mention the Bible. Somehow, through some unexpected twists, this hypothesis leads Girard to a theory of human culture and violence.

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Some find Mimetic Theory to be a revelation, explaining everything from social media to the US-China trade war. Others are dubious. But both sides overlook a fundamental philosophical question. Why would our desires be mediated by a model? Why should we need somebody else to show us what to want?

Girard gave a direct answer to this question, one that has been largely ignored. Once we have solved the problem of satisfying our basic needs, we begin to wonder about who we are. Anyone can look back at their awkward teenage years to remind themselves of the terrible challenge of deciding who to be — sharing in Saint Augustine’s feeling: “I have become an enigma to myself.” Popular culture, with its roots reaching back to Romantic literature, bombards us with the idea that your true identity is already buried deep inside you. All you need to do is find it and draw it out. Girard’s confronting idea is that this is a lie — he calls it the “Romantic lie”. In reality, there is no true you hidden deep inside. Inside you there is only emptiness. Answers to the question of who you are can only come from outside, from the example set by others. This is why we need a model to mediate our desires and, more generally, to tell us what to be.

Girard reported that the first philosophical book he understood was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he took the idea of our inner emptiness from Sartre, who wrote that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”. Sartre believed that, lacking innate identity, we could invent ourselves in a heroic act of radical creativity. Girard found this incomprehensible. How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow? If we have no innate identity, we have no choice but to model ourselves on others.

His most profound and disturbing thought is that we copy not just our desires but our whole identity from others. His preferred term for identity was “being”, as it was for Sartre. Thus, he said: “absolute being — I don’t have in me. I don’t feel it. I feel my emptiness. But the other always seems to have more of it than I have.” As far as I’ve seen, this idea has not made it to Silicon Valley, nor the podcasts, nor YouTube, nor the White House.

Consider Thiel. He draws heavily on Mimetic Theory in a self-help book modestly subtitled: “How to Build the Future”. He is clearly influenced by Girard’s explanation of how mimetic desire escalates into rivalry. Suppose my boss is my mimetic model. I start to dress like her, talk like her, aim at rising to her position, etc. She begins to feel threatened and takes measures to ward me off as a rival. But this makes her position seem even more exclusive and alluring. I emulate her more ardently, intensifying her feelings of rivalry, and so on in an upward spiral. Thiel uses this self-reinforcing dynamic between mimesis and rivalry to argue that competition, via mimesis, has a homogenizing effect. The more competitive the marketplace, the more firms end up copying each other and producing indistinguishable products. The more competitive academia gets, the more everyone writes different versions of the same paper, over and over again.

So far, so Girardian (and, regarding academia, unfortunately true). But what is Thiel’s solution? The true innovator, he suggests, must rise above mimetic competition and do what nobody else is doing. That isn’t Girard; it’s Sartre. Girard found no sense in the idea of radical, unmodeled creation. He would ask: where are we meant to get the idea for what nobody else is doing? Clearly not from others. But not from inside ourselves either. Inside is only emptiness. This humbling thought has been quietly dropped from Thiel’s entrepreneurial version of Girardianism.

The same is true of Thiel’s political use of Girard. This appears most clearly in a paper, “The Straussian Moment”, which Thiel gave at a conference in 2004, on “Politics & Apocalypse”. He personally funded this conference and invited Girard, whose contribution was a modest philological study of some violent language in the Gospels. Thiel, meanwhile, unveiled a grand apocalyptic vision of the world after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He presented these attacks as a wakeup call to the liberal West, which had grown complacent about violence. He ended with advice to “the Christian statesman or stateswoman”, who “would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace”. A not-so-subtle implication is that, in cases that aren’t “close”, the wise Christian should, as Hobbes put it, seek all the helps and advantages of war.

Although he cites Girard, Thiel seems to forget his thesis that conflict is bound up with mimesis. As others have noted, Thiel seems to envisage a “clash of civilizations” between ideologically differentiated enemies — the Christian West and fundamentalist Islam — rather than, as Mimetic Theory would find, mimetic rivals whose conflict stems from wanting the same things, who become more alike the more they fight.

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Again, the most important missing idea here is that of emptiness and identity. For Girard, political organizations, like individuals, don’t come with pre-packaged innate identities. They too have to decide what to be and have nothing to guide them but the examples set by others. At the national or personal level, the dogged pursuit of identity will only lead to rivalry and conflict.

Girard holds that we can’t switch off our longing for identity. But, instead of the heroic self-creation promoted by Thiel, he proposes that we satisfy our craving with a very different sort of model: the model of Jesus. For Girard, Jesus represents not a specific identity but rather the idea of God expressed in every identity. This is the core of Girard’s Christianity, as I see it. His final book discusses Pope John Paul II’s reflections on “an identity of all people”. This “divine” identity is reached when we detach ourselves from any fixed notion of self and open up to continuously being radically transformed in our encounters with others.

The same message was given by another Pope to that other powerful but wayward Girardian, JD Vance. To justify his aggressive nationalism, Vance pointed to the Catholic teaching of ordo amoris. The late Pope Francis then wrote a letter on this subject to the bishops of the United States of America, asserting that “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity”.

Concerning identity, the politicians and business leaders garble Girard’s message. It calls for a fluid, open, and welcoming identity, not one that seeks protection from the influence of others. The Popes get much closer to this meaning. Girard would probably be happy with that.

***

Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane on 19th June.

For some children growing up today, this feeling might be familiar. Some of the first so-called “designer babies” — whose embryos were screened for flaws or who were primed for ideal traits with carefully selected sperm or egg donors — are now teenagers, and many are depressed. In December, a West Coast psychologist spoke to Wired about these privileged young patients nevertheless haunted by their own DNA; often the children of Silicon Valley elites, they buckle under the expectations of their “distant parents”. The anonymous source spoke about children who discovered that their egg-donor biological mother had psychiatric problems: they were told, “Your donor is nuts, so you must be too.”

Their parents select — and shell out thousands — for preferred traits, cherry-picking donors for different qualities, perhaps “a sporty son and an artsy daughter”. There is something desperately naive about the latter: you cannot guarantee enthusiasm for Moleskine notebooks or ponchos, after all. But these preferences are not just risible, they are sinister; they show that even among blue-sky idealists who resent the constraints of their own genetic material, the social constraints represented in their preferences — boy strong, girl soft — go completely unquestioned. How might the offspring of that particular family experience their own childhood if their bodies and tastes digress from their expensive fates, if the son develops an unauthorized love of Twinkies and can’t run a lap without collapsing; if the daughter has an unplanned aptitude for rugby and sucks at sketching? It’s one thing to let down your parents, but quite another to let down your geneticist.

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Because many of the genetic-testing startups are based around Silicon Valley, designer babies have been swept up in the broader philosophy of tech-bro life optimization; Elon Musk, father of an indeterminate number of children, is said to have used genetic screening via the startup Orchid for at least one of his brood. In some ways, this is just an extension of the manifold ways Silicon Valleyites track and upgrade their bodies; these are people obsessed with “biohacking”, intermittent fasting, ice baths, LSD microdosing and Oura rings. We should not be surprised that they are equally obsessive about their offspring — but the extent to which it is possible is disturbing. In the US, it is legal to screen for qualities such as hair color, eye color and sex before an embryo is implanted in the womb; while there is ethical criticism from some quarters, there is no legal framework to prevent it. Among the controversial possibilities of ever-improving embryo screening is selecting for intelligence. The US biotech company Heliospect claims to be able to bump up predicted height and IQ for the “low” price of $50,000 per 100 embryos; the approach is promised to boost your fetus by more than six IQ points. In undercover footage, a Heliospect employee describes IQ as one of the “naughty traits that everybody wants”. Picking a child who won’t be fat, stupid, spotty or depressed is, according to this wink-wink wording, about as controversial as using a cheat code in The Sims. But that’s the thing about being “naughty”; it’s a one-off — scanning a Krispy Kreme as a 20-cent bread roll at the checkout is no big deal unless everybody does it. But what if they did? What would that society look like?

“Everyone can have all the children they want and they can have children that are basically disease-free, smart, healthy; it’s going to be great,” said Heliospect’s CEO Michael Christensen in 2023. And it’s not just good for your family, it’s good for society: Simone Collins, who with her husband Malcolm is among the best-known pronatalists today, told The New York Times: “Societies that have more intelligent people will have lower rates of crime, of rape, of violence, because intelligence correlates negatively with those societal blights.” While this is undoubtedly true, there are more than a few glaring problems with such an approach, not least that if you strictly optimized for peaceability, academic attainment and social compliance you would only ever have daughters. The eugenicists of the early 20th century — a cohort which improbably counted Helen Keller — sacrificed individual liberty among undesirables for the collective good; this sort of zealotry has rightly remained controversial since — until, that is, the ideas made contact with the demagogues of the West Coast.

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The project of scientific pronatalism itself has become a target for misanthropic internet weirdos; last week, a 25-year-old “promortalist” called Guy Edward Bartkus was believed to have blown up an IVF clinic in Palo Alto, California, and himself with it. He resented, according to a half-assed manifesto he left behind, not having consented to his own birth. In the event, all embryos stored at the clinic were salvaged. If pronatalism crystallizes hope, health and humanity then the disaffection of lurkers of incel forums, in which “promortalism” is common, makes sense. These are people who feel they have lost the lottery of life, and who are doomed by their apparent defects — height, weak jawline, social ineptitude — to celibacy and misery; though mainstream society has come to despise such men, their astuteness on this point is worth mentioning. What is inceldom if not the reverse of the sunny, pro-social, optimistic ideology which drives parents to screen their embryos? Each, after all, is underpinned by a fetishistic obsession with the fatalism of birth.

For neo-eugenics to really take hold, it will have to first contend with an unprecedented cultural shift towards “celebrating difference”. It is strange that the technological ability to perfect our babies — and its acceptability in America — has come at the exact point at which diversity, both mental and physical, has gained a mystical sense of importance. Just as young people began forming their identities around characteristics such as neurodiversity and mental ill-health, the next generation of parents began trying to breed them out. On the one hand, diagnostic criteria for conditions like ADHD and autism are being stretched to the point of uselessness, wrapping up rocketing numbers of “normal” teenagers in the warm bosom of understanding and exceptionalism. At the same time, for those who can afford it, these conditions are becoming almost optional. But the potential advent of widespread, hyper-accurate embryonic screening betrays how society really feels about difference. The bio-engineered teens of today are living proof that when people have plenty of money and choice, American would-be parents are “naughtily” selecting for the same old traits that have always been desired: healthy, sociable, attractive, intelligent, doing whatever they can to steer the nature-nurture tiller. For all the posturing and label-fetishism of the 2020s, a 1920s eugenicism lurks beneath. In an echo of that old line trotted out by racists, “I’m fine with [talentless/fat/acne-prone] kids — I just wouldn’t want one in my womb.”

Gone are the days of sterilizing the cognitively impaired. But medical intervention in social ills, which seem like ghosts of the unenlightened, pre-Nazi 20th century, are everywhere for those with eyes to see. As we speak, GLP-1 injections are being rolled out on the NHS with the promise of reviving our sickly workforce. Meanwhile only last week, the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that the voluntary chemical program for convicted sex offenders would be extended to 20 English prisons; the government is said to be considering rolling it out nationwide and making it mandatory. Both fat jabs and chemical castration have noble aims on the surface — health and economic buoyancy for the former, freedom from compulsive sexual behavior for the latter. Nevertheless these policies have an aesthetic problem. One ungenerous interpretation would be that these represent a grand governmental project to cleanse undesirable traits — obesity, sexual deviancy — from the populace. The purification drive of eugenics never really went away; in order for these ideas to work, we have to trust those in power not to wield it recklessly.

The first wave of American designer babies, many of them now troubled teens, show why European countries have been more cautious about the traits for which ambitious parents are allowed to select; in Germany, France and the UK the technology is limited to screening for serious health concerns. On a societal level, elites breeding out non-ideal traits threaten to create genetic castes; as the science gets better and procedures become more common, this could one day open up a new frontier in health inequality. On a familial level, being a bespoke embryo taints the fundamental ingredient of a happy childhood: the belief that your parents’ love is unconditional, that of all the millions of genetic configurations that might have resulted from your conception, they are truly happy that they got you. There’s a good argument that this feeling of confidence in your own ability and worth, above any tinkering with embryonic odds, is the secret to a child’s success; nurture, after all, cannot be engineered. This truth is understood by Jude Law’s paralyzed swimmer in Gattaca; it is understood so completely that before the film is over he ends the life that had been so meticulously curated for him, a final act of rebellion against the strangest kind of unfreedom: that from your own DNA.

By the Nineties, the project slumped into embarrassing failure, from the end of modernist town planning to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The results of the 20th-century experiments were stagnation, famine, gulags, censorship, and eugenics.

Unfortunately, the Californian counter-culturists who fled the collapse of the Sixties dream and found refuge in Silicon Valley didn’t get the memo. Locked in their rooms, with their rudimentary computers, they set about creating a non-earthly utopia. They dreamed about other worlds and other intelligences, fusing anarchism with New Ageism and libertarianism with science fiction.

So began the tragi-comic rebirth of utopianism. Since then, the ideology has evolved with the growth of AI and cybernetics. It is now mainstream right across the tech world, with adherents including tech guru Ray Kurzweil, and billionaires Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Today’s pioneers of repeating-the-past predict a future of unbounded technological and economic growth.

The “Tech Utopians” have two main projects. The first is abundance: an end to poverty, hunger, sickness, and back-breaking labor. This will supposedly be achieved through vast social engineering projects, masterminded by an elite class, and with the aid of genius machines.

The second is the improvement of humans through scientific progress. A perfect “blank slate” human will be created for utopia 2.0, and they will be morally, intellectually, and physically enhanced. Humans won’t just be cured of illness. They’ll be cured of mortality itself.

These ideas, however, are hardly new. They appeared in nascent form as far back as Plato. Then, during the Enlightenment, they grew stronger, with the promise of a blank-slate society built upon rationalism and science, in which a better type of human would emerge. Today’s Tech Utopians, though mostly claiming to be libertarians, are attempting the same projects — only this time they plan to use AI and biotech to achieve their goals. Elon Musk, for one, envisages a “future of abundance” once AI reaches human-level intelligence (so-called AGI).

At the moment, there is a split between so-called libertarian accelerationists (like Musk and Peter Thiel), the technocrats (like the late Klaus Schwab) and the Left-accelerationists (like Aaron Bastani) over the question of how exactly abundance will be brought about. At one extreme, you have Bastani’s Left-accelerationist “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, with its vision of a robotics-enhanced society, with Universal Basic Income and free housing, food, education, electricity and healthcare for all. On the other you have Thiel and the Effective Accelerationism plan to destroy all bureaucracies and to replace democracy with a “cognitive elite” of tech specialists who will rule autocratically over newly formed city states.

Uniting the two sides is the idea that the abundance problem will be solved by complex-systems analysis, powered by exponentially growing AI superintelligence.

Is this progress? Alas, no. Even in 1810, French socialist Charles Fourier envisioned a vast “calculating machine” that could solve all human problems. This machine would organize labor, reward undesirable work with tokens, and even assign optimal sexual partners for better offspring and enhanced pleasure. In this way, the “machine calculante” would ensure universal happiness. Perhaps not incidentally, Fourier also believed that his perfect society could turn the sea into lemonade by using gigantic parabolic mirrors to focus moonlight on the waves.

Fourier’s ideas may have been insane, but they were part of a growing faith in the ability of “systems” to deliver harmony and abundance. These ideas were tested in the many agrarian socialist collectives of the 1880s, and then later in the planned economies of communism. Within the USSR, for instance, there were repeated attempts to link military computers with civilian ones, to make a totalising “Automated System for State Planning”.

The National Socialists also hoped to realize their dream of an abundant New Germania through calculation. Hitler himself envisaged a Crimea rich with fruit and cotton, and a Black Sea inexhaustibly full of fish. Yet Hitler’s fantasies had darker echoes too: according to one historian, the Nazis worked with IBM to devise a computer system that organized the transport of millions of people to the gas chambers.

When Tech Utopians tell us that AI will guarantee abundance, then, they are unwittingly pushing us back into the dangerous utopian delusions that emerged from the 19th century — and that failed so catastrophically in the 20th century.

Some might argue that the reason utopia failed in the past was that we didn’t have a super-intelligent computer. Now that we’re close to creating one, all our problems will soon be solved. But such an argument is built on the fallacy that humans are no more than rational beings in cages of flesh. Therefore, all interactions can be planned, all diseases cured. This couldn’t be more wrong.

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Then there’s the question of improved humans. If you’re going to create a perfect society, you need to enhance people, or else they will bring with them all of the flaws of biology and history — suffering, jealousy, hatred, genetic sickness. As American transhumanist Zoltan Istvan said: “Death is the first major challenge for the species to overcome to truly transcend our biology. There’s nothing in the way out there saying we must continue to die.” Meanwhile entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, who is working on a technology called “Mindcloning”, says: “We’re able to put into computer form people’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs attitudes and values and keep them alive in a cyber form, looking forward to the future when their minds might be able to be downloaded back into a regenerated human body.”

In a similar spirit, Tech Utopians are now pushing for CRISPR DNA improvements in babies to prevent genetically inheritable diseases, such as sickle cell disease. The next step, for some, is “designer babies” — which, while legally controversial, is now technically possible.

Meanwhile, the transhumanists intend to use AI, genetic engineering, bio-tech, and cybernetics to create a post-human species which will overcome aging and disease. Transhumanist leaders such as Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, co-founder of Humanity+, now form a powerful belief-core inside Silicon Valley.

And then there is Musk, whose company, Neuralink, is experimenting with new technologies like Brain Chip Interface (BCI), which enables direct communication between the brain’s electrical activity and computers. Musk hopes to implant surgically installed brain chips into millions of people within a decade. He and his acolytes believe these enhanced human subjects will soon be able to communicate telepathically and download knowledge in an instant. Eventually, they insist, we will see a merger of human consciousness with superintelligent AI, allowing us to achieve digital immortality.

Are these utopian technologies leading us forward? Once again: no. Rather, they are regressing back to dogma found in Plato’s Republic, where selective breeding is proposed to create the “guardian class” of philosopher-kings to run the ideal society.

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There are even echoes of Stalin’s scientists, who sought to achieve a breakthrough in human evolution in the form of the “New Soviet Man”. To this end, Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a super-strong human-chimpanzee hybrid, while Alexander Bogdanov sought immortality through blood-transfusion experiments. It’s an experiment that we’ve recently seen repeated by “longevity biohacker” and transhumanist guru Bryan Johnson, who took blood from his teenage son in the attempt to stay young.

This is not the only poignant parallel. Nikolai Koltsov, a Soviet-era biologist, developed eugenic “sperm banks for geniuses”. Nowadays, one of the goals of transhumanist organization Humanity + this decade is to use technology “to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities”.

Such connections are arguably not coincidental but causal. According to tech historians and activists Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, leaders of the AGI movement “subscribe to [a] set of ideologies which have emerged from the modern eugenics movement and therefore have inherited similar ideals”. They say that the Tech Utopians are guilty of discriminatory attitudes around racial differences in IQ, and that the Tech Utopian goal is “to create a superior being akin to a machine-god”, a process which is resulting in experimental technological “systems that are unscoped and thus unsafe”.

There is evidence for this in the degree of suffering caused in the Brain Chip Interface experiments. Neuralink is currently under federal investigation for the claim that 1,500 animals died during surgical BCI experiments, with the company accused of “causing needless suffering”, related to “Musk’s need for speed research”.

The transhumanist mission will inevitably require a large number of human test subjects. After all, Tech Utopians, with their belief in “long termism”, tend to view short-term sacrifices as essential to the attainment of their transcendent future goals.

Yet as history shows, utopianism always demands its blood sacrifices in the name of the distant paradise. It excludes those deemed unworthy, or it uses them as its lab rats in the name of “improvement”. In other words, today’s Tech Utopian visions aren’t about progress. They are a regressive repeat of history, born out of a willful blindness to the past. We are accelerating backwards into preventable disasters we thought we had left behind.

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognizability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

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Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimized overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimized?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighborhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimize my body. You start to like rationalist civilization. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasized self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techno-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labor — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimizing, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilization they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

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The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimize? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat—not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also hard to imagine that those bodyguards won’t, at some point, be necessary.

Though President Trump appears to have slapped Musk’s wrist at a Cabinet meeting, it’s far from clear if DOGE, having taken on a life of its own, will slow down any time soon. Though billed as an “advisory body”, it is tearing through swathes of the federal bureaucracy with the reckless abandon that Silicon Valley applies to newly acquired firms. Yet critics and fans alike struggle to put DOGE into a historical context, which makes it difficult to see where it might lead.

Liberals have predictably fallen back on references to mid-century fascism, comparing the recent mass firings to the Nazi takeover of German state and society to ensure total loyalty. But this is wide of the mark, as even vocal Trump supporters within government have been sacked like all others. Then, too, as Musk himself has pointed out, a regime that “seeks to limit the size, scope and power of government” probably isn’t a fascist one.

The Right, meanwhile, hails DOGE as a continuation of conservative cost-cutting that aligns with longstanding GOP priorities. This view, too, isn’t quite right. It fails to appreciate the unprecedented scale of DOGE’s disruption, as well as the department’s wilfully indiscriminate approach, making it difficult to class alongside past, more cautious and strategic attempts at government reorganization.

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How, then, does one begin to grasp the deeper significance, and likely logical endpoint of DOGE? There is one historical reference point from the early republic that would seem to explain the aims and designs of DOGE better than most: the faction represented by “Philadelphiensis” — namely, the Anti-Federalists.

Thorns in the side of the authors of The Federalist, the Anti-Federalists opposed the very existence and legitimacy of the federal government, preferring instead the looser ties, lighter burdens, and wafer-thin national authority mandated by the Articles of Confederation, America’s basic law until the ratification of the current Constitution in 1788. They warned against making the change, believing it would lead to “despotism, thraldom, and confusion”.

Here is the thing, though: the Articles of Confederation were put into effect for eight years in the early republic. And they failed miserably, as the myriad fiscal, monetary, executive, and judicial affairs fell into disarray. That turn of events impelled the founders to take up the Constitution now in place, with its vision of a strong federal state.

This isn’t to suggest that Musk or any of his acolytes have ever read the works of George Mason, Melancton Smith, Patrick Henry, Samuel Bryan, Robert Yates, or other Anti-Federalist luminaries; the Muskians don’t read much beyond memes. Rather, it suffices to highlight the stark convergence of sentiment and disposition that unites DOGE with the opponents of the Constitution, and to see both factions as giving expression to a recurring militant anti-centralist tendency in American history.

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Insofar as there are contemporary thinkers who are able to articulate a larger vision around which DOGE’s actions might cohere, there is the writer Curtis Yarvin and the bitcoin investor Balaji Srinivasan. These men aren’t so much direct influences on the boy-hackers ransacking government IT systems, so much as the most advanced expositors of the common worldview that animates Silicon Valley. Examining that worldview reveals striking parallels (as well as notable differences) with Anti-Federalism.

Much like Anti-Federalism, the Silicon Valley ethos is premised on a vehement rejection of centralized power in favor of smaller units of political sovereignty that exist well below the level of the nation-state. But instead of states’ rights, the ideal is the agile tech firm. Such a firm retains the spirit of the small startup (no matter how big it actually gets), remains unencumbered by bureaucratic complexity, and perfectly reflects the Promethean will of its founder.

The firm ideal informs Silicon Valley’s understanding of all social and political order. If DOGE is “moving fast and breaking things” in Washington, it is with the goal of accelerating the process of effective decentralization. And if Srinivasan has gone the furthest in envisioning what this new normal could look like, in his treatise The Network State (2022), it is arguably Yarvin who has dwelt most fully on how state dissolution might be realized.

Yarvin has written of the sudden breakup and collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev as an instructive example for how a similar disintegration of federal power might be enacted in the United States. (“Maybe we could get to the same place in the same way?”) In Yarvin’s telling, the path to liberation goes through a paradox: the oppressive nexus of power that is the American government can only be undone by granting an even more awesome and unlimited power to a single autocratic figure, referred to in his writings as a “CEO”.

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This CEO could then be tasked with either disciplining or annihilating the civil service as functional body in what would amount to an “American perestroika”, which Yarvin defines, simplistically, as “any restructuring that renders the whole American government accountable”. That echoes the benign-sounding rationale that Musk has also employed in his defense of DOGE, telling reporters: “That’s what democracy is all about.”

The CEO figure, in this scheme, isn’t expected to be a manager or a builder, but a raider and a destroyer in the vein of GE’s Jack Welch, who hollowed out the once great industrial giant. Or indeed, Musk’s own slashing and burning at Twitter, now X, which has led to declining functionality, revenue, and engagement.

Seen from this vantage, the DOGE austerity blitzkrieg starts to make much more sense. The Anti-Federalists couldn’t accept the practical arguments, prompted by the failures of the articles, for a government that could assume greater responsibilities over financial management and national defense, viewing these as usurpations. Just so, DOGE rejects the premise that the “administrative state” has any business providing vital services that a large complex economy can hardly do without: basic research for the treatment of diseases, the collection and dissemination of weather forecasts, the prevention of financial fraud, the provision of assistance to vulnerable economic sectors, and much else of the kind.

These are, of course, the very functions that DOGE has either obliterated or severely undermined. (This, even as Musk built his own fortune off of such government assistance — and continues to do so even now.) But as many angry town halls and protests are asking: “who voted for this?” Are the American people really prepared to watch as their two-century-old national constitutional government goes the way of the old Soviet Union, rendered a relic of history?

Already, broad constituencies are banding to reassert the same logic that led the Founders to abandon the Articles of Confederation in favor of the stronger state envisioned by the actual US Constitution: veterans, farmers, consumers, workers, small business, bond holders, entitlement beneficiaries, and many others are threatened by DOGE’s dramatic gutting of state capacity and fiscal functionality. Furthermore, DOGE’s tinkering around with federal payment systems isn’t at all reassuring, as any disruption to Social Security and Treasury bond payments would all but seal America’s drift toward failed-state status.

Contra Yarvin, it should be remembered that what followed Gorbachev wasn’t a period of flourishing, but a protracted collapse in living standards and a power vacuum that led to oligarchs, warlords, and gangsters ruling the roost. It didn’t kill the Soviet deep state, but allowed it to come back later with a vengeance.

Nineties Russia, with its rapacious private client networks operating under a fatally weakened central state, is a more honest picture of what a quasi-anarchic “Network State” would look in practice than Srinivasan’s techno-utopia. Yet this is the direction in which DOGE is dragging the United States.

While the current grassroots ferment against DOGE is heartening, what’s needed is a new political narrative that connects the ideal of a strong, stable, reliable, and competent federal government to the survival of the American nation as a cohesive entity handed down by the founders. For what Fisher Ames said at the 1788 convention of Massachusetts resonates ever more today: “The Union is essential to our being as a nation. The pillars that prop it are crumbling to powder”.

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There is, after all, a reason why the Anti-Federalists, despite honorable contributions to American life, chiefly the Bill of Rights, are not generally seen as high-ranking founders, while those who endeavored to solidify the foundations of the federal union are venerated almost unequivocally as nation-builders: the Federalists, of course, but also Lincoln Republicans, New Deal Democrats, and the GOP’s postwar Nixon-Eisenhower tradition.

To be sure, government bloat, waste, and overreach are perennial problems that definitely need fixing. But they call for a judicious approach that recognizes the many intricate interdependencies that exist between the federal government and various sectors of American society. Or as Trump himself put it recently, what’s needed is a “scalpel” not a “hatchet”.

But what our Silicon Valley overlords are up to isn’t a genuine search for efficiency, but rather destruction for the sake of it. Left unopposed, these latter-day Anti-Federalists might finally trash the federal union as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary next year. What comes after could well be too grim to contemplate.

Debanking is when a bank closes an account in order to censor or punish the customer for political or religious views. The banks, in these cases, are typically responding to ideological pressure or to perceived reputational risk. As you might imagine, anger over debanking rapidly merged with concerns shared by crypto companies, which have also contended with access issues to traditional banking. One CEO shared a letter in which the bank Chase said it was closing his company’s account.

The complaints about debanking were echoed and amplified by Donald Trump. His wife, Melania, claims that she herself was debanked. More broadly, the MAGA movement has ample experience of being booted off social media platforms. The matter of tech debanking, therefore, has been rolled into existing MAGA complaints. By this account, the US government has restricted freedom of expression via several coercive means.

In keeping with this view, Trump’s allies have called for a dismantling of financial watchdogs such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). “Delete CFPB”, wrote Musk, echoing Andreessen, who blamed debanking woes on the agency. Examine the policy upheavals of the past two months, though, and you will note that such measures will not have the intended effect.

Far from protecting freedom of speech, the new administration has made it easier for financial platforms to kick users off for political expression. Among the red tape it has slashed were some CFPB rules that were designed to protect, of all things, free speech. This should all work out well for Andreessen, who is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors in crypto — the sector that, more than almost any other, yearns for looser regulation.

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Just as the casual observer loses sight of the magician’s card, many observers missed Andreessen’s sleight of hand. His remarks on the Rogan show convinced those enraged about censorship to support a niche campaign to unwind protections against crypto fraud.

In this way, Andreessen conflated two unrelated issues for his own financial benefit. In a worrying global trend, a wide array of people — Canadian truckers, Brexit supporters and Palestinian activists — have been removed from financial platforms without due process. Unrelatedly, regulators concerned with keeping crypto startups in compliance with banking rules have taken steps to crack down. Some executives involved in the crypto trade have said they have had difficulty using traditional bank accounts simply because they were flagged by the system. The truckers were debanked; the crypto executives were not.

Consider the viewpoint of regulators. On several occasions in recent years, crypto brokerages and emerging cryptocurrencies have imploded overnight and left ordinary customers with nothing. Regulators have also repeatedly accused crypto startups — including those backed by Andreessen — of a variety of alleged financial crimes. These offenses have included the undermining of rules on money laundering, and the violation of sanctions on terrorist groups. It’s not entirely surprising that those entrusted with safeguarding the financial system view these schemes with extreme suspicion.

As free speech has become a battleground for everyday Americans — waged on college campuses, over political correctness in the workplace, and on social media platforms — a simultaneous legal revolution has taken shape. Corporate actors seeking to eviscerate rules and restrictions on business conduct have attempted to conflate commercial action with free expression. In other words, the business elite is piggybacking off the free speech debate for its own ends.

“The business elite is piggybacking off the free speech debate for its own ends.”

This piggybacking has been taking place for decades. Lawyers have poked and prodded, attempting to find new legal maneuvers to classify business behavior as protected speech. In this vein, Southwest and Spirit Airlines have repeatedly litigated to block a regulation that required airlines to display the full price of tickets. Another example comes via the private rating agencies that were responsible for falsely certifying the safety of risky mortgage-backed securities in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis. In court, the agencies argued that they were simply expressing First Amendment-protected speech, and were thus exempt from fraud lawsuits.

These efforts largely failed in court, but other, similar arguments have begun to prevail increasingly often. In the Supreme Court ruling Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., Justice Anthony Kennedy struck down laws against health care firms mining and selling patient data to pharmaceutical companies. The patient data laws, Kennedy wrote, violated commercial speech laws and “burdened a form of protected expression.” In similar fashion, Kennedy and his Supreme Court colleagues cited the First Amendment when ruling in 2018 that the imposition of union fees on non-union public sector employees was unconstitutional. The imposition of fees, they said, amounted to coerced financial speech.

Most famously, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United, the 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate and independent spending in elections. The court ruling ushered in our current era of engorged Super PACs and dark money spending, all in the name of the First Amendment. The rules that had governed the financing of political campaigns, Kennedy wrote, had unduly restricted “corporate political speech”.

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The flood of challenges continues. The First Amendment is being used to attack corporate regulations, ethics laws and consumer safety rules. Corporate attorneys are attempting to overturn the few existing laws restricting robo-calls and automated texts; interest groups funded by Google and Facebook have claimed that antitrust enforcement would increase censorship and stifle free speech; and state bans on lobbyist gifts to legislators are continually under threat. Lawyers have argued that such gifts are not bribery, but an example of free expression.

The new administration might find that this legal trend threatens some of its most consumer-friendly reforms. Processed food industry lobbyists have threatened to use First Amendment lawsuits to strike down the Food and Drug Administration’s new updated guidelines on what foods can be labeled as “healthy” — a cause that has been championed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s new health secretary. Trump has also promised to minimize pharmaceutical advertisements on television, but this endeavor, too, is likely to face challenge in the courts on the grounds of freedom of expression.

All of this is taking place without society having made much progress on what we should consider genuine freedom of expression. Banks are still free to arbitrarily remove customers, college students continue to face coercion over free speech, and social media platforms retain near-untrammeled power to censor their users.

Corporations, then, have taken an expansive view of the First Amendment in order to remove constraints on their power. But ordinary Americans have been left on the sidelines, as vulnerable as they ever were to government and corporate censorship.

The triple-shirted architect of old-school Trumpian populism, briefly a White House advisor during Donald Trump’s first term, has emerged as the counterpole to Elon Musk, whose ultra-libertarian agenda has come to dominate the President’s second term. To Bannon, the billionaire X owner is more forceful and, perhaps, more dangerous than any figure on the Left. “Musk is the one with power at the moment,” he says. “The Democrats are nowhere to be seen.”

Less than a month into the Trump presidency, Musk has established himself as a core fixture in the White House. He holds news conferences in the Oval Office with his four-year-old; hosts foreign leaders in meetings that strikingly resemble head-of-state bilaterals; enjoys access to virtually every federal department; and, most importantly, has the ear of the President.

Bannon, meanwhile, must settle for a microphone. The 71-year-old’s War Room podcast beams out to hundreds of thousands of MAGA ultras six days a week — despite being purged from platforms including Spotify. In his studio, stacks of old Financial Times papers, archival documents and recording equipment are strewn across the table, overlooked by countless religious icons and memorabilia. “We have not yet begun to FIGHT,” reads one sign on his mantelpiece, beside a wooden crucifix labelled “full armor of God”. Top of his agenda: a third Trump term.

We met last Thursday, just days after Bannon pleaded guilty to skimming money from donations intended to privately fund the border wall, charges he nonetheless dismisses as “politically motivated” and “lawfare in the extreme”. But on that day he is in an ebullient mood: just before our meeting, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. “This is a historic day,” Bannon reflects. “If you weld together the MAHA movement with MAGA and add in Hispanics, African-American men, and conservative Right-wing Asians, we have a 1932 coalition” — a reference to FDR’s sweeping first victory. He takes a long pause. “And yes, we have the tech bros too.”

Since promising, and failing, to run Musk out of the White House by Inauguration Day, Bannon’s view of the world’s richest man and his fellow “tech bros” hasn’t softened. He claims that he was willing to give Musk and his DOGE team the benefit of the doubt — “I have to give the devil his due” — for taking on the administrative state. But so far, he says, it has yielded disappointing results, as evidenced by the House panel’s budget blueprint: “DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the fuck are the DOGE cuts? We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It’s ludicrous.”

Musk’s DOGE team has instead elected to focus on several bêtes noires of the Right: the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, and DEI programs across the government. At the Department of Education alone, DOGE claims to have made nearly $900 million in cuts, but as yet — and despite Trump’s permission — it has not made a move on the Pentagon, which failed its seventh audit in a row last year.

“I notice there is a hesitancy to cross the Potomac and go to the Pentagon,” Bannon says. “I would like to see $100 billion taken off the $900 billion budget right now, which is really a trillion.” Bannon goes on to describe DOGE’s efforts as “performative”, but for now, he is not ready to dispense with Musk. “It’s pretty evident the President’s using him as an armor-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state.”

This is a curious posture. On the one hand, Musk is, according to Bannon, an “agent of Chinese influence”, a problem “not just to the MAGA movement, but a problem to the country”. On the other, Bannon can countenance granting Musk access to the private data of nearly all government employees. Were Musk truly a threat to America’s national security, why would Bannon not be calling for his removal? “President Trump says Musk doesn’t do anything that he’s not on top of. I take him at his word.”

That feels like a lot of trust to place in one man, but to Bannon Trump is a “providential” figure. In his mind, Trump is facing something much harder than anything FDR dealt with and as a result, he should only be compared to the two other “top-tier” presidents: Washington and Lincoln. If there is an FDR comparison to be made, Bannon thinks, it’s that Trump should get a third term. He’s “exploring” options for this, he tells me.

Bannon knows that what he is proposing is unconstitutional, but if it further ingratiates him with the President, he’ll do it. “I don’t have right now a tremendous amount of support on this legally,” he says, “but remember, I faced longer odds on many other topics in my life.” It is also what happens when you turn a president into a god: politics becomes a holy war, creating a permission structure for a “by any means” approach to governance. On what basis would he even make the argument? “I’m working on making sure they have a correct interpretation of the Constitution,” he says. “I believe that President Trump’s eligible for one more term because I think it says consecutive.” It doesn’t. As the 22nd Amendment clearly states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Trump has been elected twice.

Legality aside, does the country really need another octogenarian president? “You give me a guy at 78 years old that’s coming in and working 18, 20 hours a day and dropping bombs like he’s dropping every day,” Bannon says. “Every day for me is Christmas morning, so why would we want to stop it?”

These “bombs” include turning Canada into America’s 51st state — it would grant the United States greater access to the Arctic — and acquiring the Panama Canal (a “great geostrategic move”). He also commends Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s efforts to bring an end to the conflict in Ukraine (“it’s historic”). But when it comes to Trump’s plan to “clean out” Gaza and turn it into the riviera of the Middle East, the two men don’t seem entirely aligned. There is “bigger thinking on there that, quite frankly, I don’t understand”, Bannon tells me. “He’s thinking out loud, right? He’s outside the box on so many things, we just have to trust President Trump.”

Once again, we just have to trust him.

On the question of Europe, however, Bannon is in line with the administration. A day after Vice President J.D. Vance browbeat his European counterparts over free speech and mass migration, Bannon struck a similar note. “The message was clear: Europe is no longer going to be treated like a protectorate,” he says. “To me the Atlanticists are quite frankly the most racist people in the world because they only think about white people in Western Europe and the United States. They don’t have any other broad perspective.”

There is, though, a danger in pulling too hard on this thread. Leaders like Emmanuel Macron have been calling for strategic autonomy for some time, warning the continent to not “be a vassal” in a US-China stand-off. Is Bannon not concerned that the US may be pushing Europe into Beijing’s arms? “I am worried about that,” he says, “but the Chinese have already infiltrated Europe. The British elite are totally bought and paid for.”

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Singling out the new British ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, Bannon warms to his theme: “From our mother country that we have a special relationship with, I can’t think of a worse individual to be sent over here that hates MAGA and that’s trashed Trump.” He adds: “They send him to Fox to grovel and say that he didn’t mean what he said before, but it won’t wash. Plus he’s on the payroll of the CCP.”

On domestic policy, meanwhile, Bannon offers a more subtle critique of Trump’s plan to extend the provisions in his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced tax rates for corporations and individuals. “I don’t think this should be renewed at all,” he says. “I’m mad about that.” He even expresses disappointment at the rate of deportations, which, despite all the noise, is moving at a similar rate as the Obama era. “We have to deport the 10 million illegal aliens who are here. Right now, we can’t even get the criminals out of jail.”

This is, in Bannon’s mind, not Trump’s fault, but the Deep State’s — the same Deep State that stole the 2020 presidential election, incarcerated him for four months, and is now working to undo the Trump agenda. It’s a convenient foil. Blame the Deep State if something goes wrong and claim victory if Musk does his job. For this reason, Bannon is happy for the president to “wrangle” the tech bros. “The enemy of the enemy is my friend,” he says. “This country is being destroyed by the Praetorian guard of the administrative state… Elon is helping expose this.”

Though neither would care to admit it, there is a certain symmetry between Bannon and Musk. Bannon joined Trump in the final stretch of his 2016 campaign, and then took on a high position once he entered office, while Musk did much the same in 2024. Both men had their turn on the cover of TIME magazine, a moment that precipitated Bannon’s downfall from Trumpian grace shortly after.

“Sloppy Steve”, as he became known, likes to talk. He was ousted from the White House for being one of the primary sources in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, and was repeatedly accused of leaking while in office. This habit made him even more of a nuisance once he was out, with a recent New York Times story noting that the administration was getting “hammered by Right-wing media” almost immediately after.

All of which is to say that Bannon can cause problems if he wants to. And in making an enemy out of Musk, what may appear like a squabble between two egotistical men could spill out into open warfare. Because at the heart of this conflict is a battle over the philosophical direction of the Trump presidency and, by extension, the country. That Vance even felt the need to address this “civil war” between the “populists and techies” — which he said was overstated — nonetheless shows that the tension in this coalition is not immaterial.

Despite Bannon claiming to be in regular contact with the White House, is Musk’s presence there a sign that the techno–libertarians are winning? “Absolutely not. Look at who he has put in: Neil Ferguson at the FTC, Gail Slater on antitrust, and Mike Davis on the White House counsel,” he responds. “Trump is sending a signal to tech bros, saying, ‘You don’t own me,’ and he’s also saying, ‘I’m not buying your techno-libertarian stuff.’ That was a huge fuck you to the broligarchs.”

The populists, then, are securing enough appointments to keep Bannon happy for now. But Trump has also gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and crippled the National Labor Relations board — hardly pro-worker moves. There is also the looming budget, which may include cuts to Medicaid, a federal health insurance program for over-65s. After we spoke, the War Room host fired out another warning shot at Musk on his podcast. “There are a lot of MAGAs on Medicaid,” he said. “I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong… Just can’t take a meat axe to it, although I would love to.”

“You’re not going to win every fight,” Bannon says. “You’ve got to pick the fight you want to win.” So what happens if he loses one of those fights? He draws three red lines: China, AI, and visas. The last of these already caused a major rift in the MAGA movement shortly after Christmas — before Trump even took office — with Elon Musk threatening to go to “war” with other parts of the MAGA coalition, not least Bannon, over-expanding the guest-worker programs beloved of Silicon Valley. It resulted in the now former DOGE executive Vivek Ramaswamy going into “witness protection” — a scalp claimed by Bannon and the MAGA base. “It shows that Trump doesn’t believe in any of this techno-libertarian stuff.”

China is a different story. Bannon describes himself as a “super hawk”, and he calls for a “hemispheric defense” against Beijing, which stretches from Greenland all the way down to Javier Milei’s Argentina. Together, this vast landmass would be a bulwark against communist influence, with tariffs protecting North America as a “premium market”. For this reason, Ukraine must sign a peace deal with Russia so that the unholy alliance of Putin and Xi does not strengthen any further.

For Bannon, though, the AI threat is greater still. At last week’s Paris conference, Vance promised a “pro-worker growth path for AI”, but the War Room host is convinced this will simply empower the Chinese state, as well as oligarchs in the US. “We have let the wealthiest people in America soar to the commanding heights of the algorithmic age with no controls,” he says. “They have created an apartheid state. You don’t have to hire any blacks or Hispanics in this country. Or even American citizens.”

Bannon worries that the rise of AI will not only take blue-collar jobs but entry-level jobs at a technical and administrative level too. “We can’t let these techno-vandals randomly hop from one core institution to another, spray-painting garbage graffiti with no intention of ever cleaning it up.” Were Musk to make further encroachments on his red lines, Bannon promises that he would “pound” him every day on the podcast.

Would Musk even care? Despite all of Bannon’s attacks, Musk has limited his response to a single tweet, describing the War Room host as “a great talker, but not a great doer”. Nevertheless, Bannon assures me that he has “pretty good political connections” on Capitol Hill and in the White House. He also claims that his recent Manhattan court case inspired new Attorney General Pam Bondi to file a lawsuit against New York over immigration, which feels like a stretch. “This is not a brag, it’s just a fact,” he says.

Still, Bannon must surely resent that he is no longer inside a movement that he helped to create. Instead, the tech bros, who had their “Damascene moment at 11pm on November 5”, are now in charge. With the Democrats in disarray, it leaves open the question of who will take ownership of the movement after 2028. “The bench is deep,” says Bannon, without naming names. He stresses, though, that future leaders from both political parties won’t be politicians, citing Stephen A. Smith, a sports TV presenter, as a contender for the Democratic Party. “Democrats will defer to MAGA-type, Trumpian personalities,” he says. “Smith has an ability to communicate to the American people.”

“New leaders are going to emerge,” he assures me. “Remember Sherman was considered a nut case. Grant was a drunk. Lincoln was a failed congressman.” Does that list include ex-convict podcasters? “No, no, no, that’s ridiculous — I’m not a politician.” Nor is Stephen A. Smith — and nor, once, was Donald Trump.

Yet, this isn’t just mindless nostalgia. No, the resurgence of Eighties aesthetics and the “greed is good” spirit is one half of an emerging American Dream. One that has been forged in the dynamic collision between Trump’s MAGA nostalgia and his new friendship with the tech-utopian Silicon Valley squad. Call it: Yuppiefuturism.

It is emerging from the confluence of two epoch-defining vibe shifts. One hails from the past, the other from the future. The first is the return of a bolshy American Yuppie dominance — in all its ostentatious, deal-making, power-worshipping glory. This is the Manhattan-coded spirit of an economically ambitious, Trump-voting Gen Z pining for old money aesthetics. The second is the ascendency of what has been called Right-wing progressivism, or “space fascism”. Embodied by Silicon Valley titans such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, American Right-wing progressivism is no conservative movement: its adherents worship technology and space colonization. Yuppiefuturism is a bastard child of both ideologies — a hybrid Nietzschean will to power, sporting a Rolex and Space Suit.

To grasp the first vibe shift, it’s essential to understand how the brash, self-promoting, deal-making demeanor of the Yuppie emerged. This ambitious and ostentatious mindset, the way the Yuppie talks and thinks, is part of a long history of oral culture from ancient civilization to TikTok. For most of human history, culture and politics have been an oral affair. That is to say, “orality”, raw verbal communication unsupported by writing, was the default currency of dialogue — the Petrodollar of communication.

In literate societies, human cognition is shaped by structured argument, the linear development of ideas, and the permanent record that writing provides. For groups, this enables words, thoughts, and memories to be externalized, aggregated, and distributed (or gatekept) with ease. For individuals, it offers the capacity to “look things up” and deliberate.

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Oral societies are built different. In his seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literature, Walter J. Ong explained that such cultures function in ways that the modern literate mind cannot comprehend. Communication requires heavy repetition to aid memorization and ensure continuity of knowledge without written records. Discourse is often agonistic and confrontational. Storytelling must be charismatic and communal to make an impact. Epithets and mnemonics become key weapons in shaping the agenda. Society reveres the old men and women who repeat the stories of the days of old. This “politics of rizz” was the lifeblood of ancient civilizations. In Rome, a world of endless competing interests, rhetoric was the irrefutable force that legitimated power. Mark Antony’s funeral oration was said to have turned the masses against Caesar’s murderers, and re-united Rome under the leadership of the Second Triumvirate. Rhetoric was the weapon of mass seduction; it stimulated union to prevail over division.

Yet, the post-Gutenberg centuries attempted to put the politics of rizz to rest. Print media radically reduced the cost of scaling the written word. Societies went all-in on literacy. The rest is history. Print remade the world ushering in the Reformation and Enlightenment, mass democracy, double-entry accounting, peer-reviewed scientific research, novels, newspapers and all that lovely stuff. In this new era, the “politics of wordcels”, in all its majesty, would reign supreme. From Martin Luther to Alexander Hamilton, it was thought that learned men would debate, educate, and inspire a literate population to collectively reason their way to a better future. The nostalgia of oral cultures would be replaced by the unyielding march of progress.

This was but a blip. With the advent of new media, the politics of rizz began to creep out of its coffin in the 20th century. In his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that TV fundamentally altered human cognition, pushing communication and thought to the realm of entertainment. Postman explained that video fundamentally biased audiences towards what could be called screen-friendly rizz. Citing the infamous 1960 televised debate, stale and sweaty Richard Nixon was no match for slick and sunny John F. Kennedy.

This emergence of electronic media such as television and radio triggered what Ong identified as “secondary orality”. Wordcels would still depend on writing and print, but soon their communication would be inflected with rizz characteristics. In this era, silver-tongued, photogenic politicians used their charisma to captivate audiences while smoothly maintaining the machinery of literate politics. From saxophone-wielding Bill Clinton to mic-dropping Obama, this emergent fact-based rizz prospered. Yet, to engage in the politics of rizz is to risk leaving the door open to superior rizzlers. Which brings us back to the Yuppies.

Yuppie rizz blends ruthless ambition and a polished corporate image. It’s all about unapologetically walking the walk, projecting the success of a “winner” to close the deal. Trump, as Frederic Kaufmann has describedd, is the very “apotheosis of the yuppie tribe” — the living breathing “avatar of American capitalism” spawned in the Reagan-era of supposed American greatness.

In 2016, Trump’s distinctive Yuppie rizz eviscerated Hillary Clinton’s wordcelery. Through a Roman mastery of orality, complete with memorable mnemonics (MAGA) and epithets (Crooked Hillary), Trump became the archetypal storyteller of old, reborn in the body of a Yuppie Caesar. Through this, deal-making Trump — like Rome’s greatest orators — skillfully crafted a coalition of contradiction by harking back to various American nostalgias. For big business, it was the Eighties era boom time. For evangelicals, it was the pre-sexual revolution Fifties. For Steve Bannon, it was the Jacksonian 1830s. While ideologically divergent, Trump’s coalition coalesced in pursuit of the destruction of their common enemy: a Democrat establishment of wordcels they see as plotting to destroy America.

In the eight years since, the media landscape has only got better for Trump. Trust in and demand for legacy media has collapsed. The explosive growth of podcasts combined with social video platforms like TikTok, Reels, and YouTube have been a boon for rizzlers everywhere. Despite the wordcel-information repression complex’s best efforts, Trump’s “tertiary orality” entirely bypasses literacy — he simply refuses to engage with cries of hypocrisy and logical inconsistency. With seeming ease, he has rizzed his way to a series of deals that any thinking wordcel would decry as paradoxical. By ignoring his wordcel critics’ calls for logic and facts, he’s won over almost everyone. Arab Americans and Orthodox Jews. Isolationists and war hawks. Podcasters and evangelicals. Wall Street kingpins and union boys. Bernie Bros and white supremacists. And in perhaps the most remarkable union of all: the nation-loving have-nots of Appalachia and the money-loving have-yachts of Silicon Valley.

Which brings us to the second vibe shift that is feeding Yuppiefuturism: the ascendency of Right-wing progressivism. If Yuppie rizz is the aesthetic and attitude, then Right-wing progressivism is the political economy. While hailing from Silicon Valley, rather than the Yuppie terrain of Wall Street, this AI Space techno-utopianism is best articulated in Marc Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. In his impassioned call for tech accelerationism, Andreessen argues that “America and her allies should be strong and not weak” and that “[e]conomic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength”. He blames the decline of that strength on the “anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness” ideology of the Washington establishment.

For now, Trump has managed to build an unwieldy coalition by tapping into many Americans’ disdain for this supposed “anti-greatness”. Yet, the magical glue of negative cohesion that has bound his voters together may begin to wear off as their diverging desires become more pronounced. For example, as big business and Silicon Valley’s desire for cheap foreign labor comes into conflict with the Build the Wall crowd, things may become more perilous for Trump. So, to avoid it all unraveling, Trump — like all great rizzlers — needs a spectacle that binds his voters, while blinding them to their obvious differences. He cannot take his voters to the various pasts they crave, so he’s decided to take them Back to the Future. Enter Elon Musk.

When the SpaceX founder started to gravitate towards Trump after 2020, the connection stemmed from a shared disgust for “woke” politics, censorship, and government overreach. Yet, in recent months their interest in space exploration has rocketed to the top of the agenda. In early October Trump started to explicitly link America’s return to military supremacy to reaching Mars. While no mission is planned yet, Trump declared in his inauguration speech that it is Manifest Destiny that Americans will plant a flag on Mars. To wordcels, rushing a mission to Mars would be unthinkably reckless — the technology is not ready, the window of opportunity is too narrow. Yet, in the new age of orality, where rizz and heroism rule, why not risk rocket explosion and death, if it furthers the mission of revitalized American techno-supremacy? Trump has yet to ask any astronauts for their noble sacrifice, but in the immortal words of Horace: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”

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In the 2014 Silicon Valley classic Zero to One, Peter Thiel — the mentor to and former boss of Vice President J.D. Vance — categorizes societies based on their visions of the future. He argues societies have definite or indefinite visions of the future and are either optimistic or pessimistic. Before the Space Race ended, America was a land of definite optimists, dreaming of the future. When it did in 1975, America’s vision became less definite but remained optimistic. In recent years, Americans have slid into indefinite pessimism — a dark realm where Thiel claims the West’s nostalgic bureaucracy rots. In this vein, for Trump to Make America Great Again, he must first Make America (Definite) Optimistic Again. Silicon Valley, the world’s future factory, offers a vision to do just that.

Silicon Valley’s historical liberal allegiance previously made it a no-go zone for Trump. However, as Democrats demanded more control of AI, privacy, and speech regulation, MAGA and the tech broligarchs’ causes converged over their shared dislike of the wordcels overly censorious and controlling hand. Despite being the Masters of America’s ultimate logic-and-order based industry, Silicon Valley’s progressives believe that, in Trump, they have a president who will reverse the gradual ceding of AI dominance to China. In June 2024, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen’s legendary VC partner-in-crime and literal friend of Kamala Harris, stunned Silicon Valley with his endorsement of Trump. Horowitz declared, “We truly believe that the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake.” Andreessen, himself a longtime Democrat, also backed Trump in response to the Biden-Harris administration’s onslaught of tech regulation. Andreessen explained that “without the tech component, you can’t sustain the economy or the military”.

Here is the crucible of Yuppiefuturism. By harnessing unrepentant Yuppie rizz and ostentatious aesthetics with Silicon Valley’s buccaneering liberal apostate AI cowboy class, Yuppiefuturism reveals itself as the face of raw American power in 2025. For Trump, it provides a path to forge a vision of MAGA that transcends its obvious tensions. If he conjures the ultimate Mars-shaped spectacle, and accordingly American AI techno-military primacy over China, then Trump will etch his name into history as America’s Yuppie Caesar — and the purest incarnation of the rizz made flesh.

And for the rest of us? While we are only a few weeks into Trump’s presidency, the post-inauguration triumphalism still shows no signs of waning. If things keep on going the same way, then perhaps it’s time to pack your Rolex and Brioni suit and strap yourselves in. We’re off to Mars — there’s a new frontier to gentrify.

The Washington Post has called it the “bro-ification” of Zuckerberg, drawing attention to his new UFC fighter’s physique and curly Gen Z-like hairstyle. In keeping with his claim to be “done with politics”, most of his recent antics have been largely apolitical. But make no mistake: without openly declaring support for the Republican candidate, he has dropped hints as to which side of the party divide Meta is trending. He has praised Trump as a “badass” after his near-brush with martyrdom, expressed regret at toeing the Biden Administration’s line on content moderation, and, recently, started to ban accounts that track the private jets of billionaires like himself, the former president, and Musk. Gone is the soft-spoken computer nerd with close-cropped hair as depicted in 2010’s The Social Network, replaced with a noticeably more flamboyant incarnation.

This repositioning only makes sense for Meta, as it does for Silicon Valley as a whole. The last decade’s liberal orthodoxy saw social media as a benign tool to foster democracy and progressive values at home and abroad, in the context of events such as the 2008 “Facebook” election and popular uprisings across the Middle East. This was a time when Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey were routinely feted at receptions in Obama’s White House. Then came the epoch-shattering election of 2016 in which Facebook played a most conspicuous part. What followed was a scandal-tainted half-decade in which Zuckerberg’s firm was blamed for enabling misinformation, conspiracy theories, and foreign interference. After being hauled before Congress to answer for these, Meta’s founder saw the writing on the wall: his (and the tech world’s) alliance with the reigning establishment was effectively over.

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A 2020 email from Zuckerberg’s mentor and Facebook angel investor, Peter Thiel, counselled him to consider a deeper cultural break with the system: no longer should he be “a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act”. The advice made sense. After all, the current climate now favours alignment between the Right’s embrace of free speech and laissez-faire online — sharing a common enemy in the establishment’s drive to combat disinformation (seen by many as scarcely-veiled censorship).

But both instances of Zuckerberg’s political signalling — whether towards Hope-and-Change Democrats once upon a time or MAGA Republicans today — arguably had less to do with ideological principles and more to do with raw interests: or what would allow the company to realise its aim of gaining mastery over “the future of human communications”. So far, this narrative may allow Zuckerberg (and the other tech billionaires) to claim that it’s the other side that’s changed and that he, in fact, has remained true to the liberatory promise and idealism of Facebook’s early days. When he borrows from Caesar to say Aut Zuck Aut Nihil or “All Zuck or All Nothing”, he seems to be uttering a liberationist promise, telling aspiring founders: follow Zuck and you, too, can be a Caesar!

However, Meta’s recent policy decisions to use personal data to feed algorithms and train generative AI point to the real heart of the tech giant’s project. Meta’s advertising speaks of self-expression even as the resulting output ruthlessly invalidates those very things. Automating the production of creative work and instrumentalising users’ most intimate digital footprints, while causing untold damage on people’s mental health — that doesn’t seem to be all in the name of fostering genuine connections. Children who grew up on Facebook and Instagram now report having stunted personal development. A federal child safety case against Meta and Senate hearings earlier this year in which Zuckerberg apologised to parents (without having to change much of his corporate policy) are cases in point.

Unlike the partisan Russia-gate charges, Zuckerberg’s deleterious impact in this case cuts across political lines, alienating Americans from each other regardless of party — all while Meta turns in handsome profits.

If Silicon Valley does succeed in hijacking the Republican Party as it did the Democrats a decade ago, and if a future GOP administration manages to give the moguls their desired regulatory regime, will it really represent a moment of liberation for mankind? The tech discourse has tipped over from mere libertarianism toward something far more grandiose and sinister, namely accelerationism, predicting (and encouraging) the agglomeration of all intelligence into a post-human singularity.

The race to see who will bring about — and therefore wield the power of — such a singularity is what motivates the moguls. And Zuckerberg, though less vocal in articulating this messianic ambition than say Musk or Open AI’s Sam Altman, is no exception. It tracks with the worldview of the Valley’s intellectual guru Thiel, who endorses monopoly as the natural, healthy endpoint of all competition, which he says “is for losers”. In light of this, Zuckerberg’s identification with Caesar takes on a different meaning. It becomes less about individual emancipation and more about individual submission to a single fount of technological power and authority. That’s the thing about Caesars (and monopolies), there can only really be one.

There is, therefore, something more significant at stake than whether Republicans or Democrats get to benefit from the largesse of Silicon Valley. Its continuing domination over society heralds nothing less than a reckoning over the role and agency of human beings in a world of ceaseless technological saturation and collectivisation.

Conscientious voices across the Right and Left have raised many compelling arguments against the broader social ills caused by Meta’s platforms. Rather than taking a side in the reductive and overly partisan fight between free speech maximalists and anti-disinformation crusaders, opposition to Zuckerberg’s empire-building could instead rally around a more capacious standard, namely the common defence of our humanity against the brazen accelerationist schemes imposed by Meta and the other tech titans. Just as the American revolutionaries of 1776 likened George III to Caesar (“is not Britain to America what Caesar was to Rome”), so too should today’s citizenry see Zuckerberg and his fellow moguls as the agents of a great dehumanising tyranny. Against this would-be Caesar of the algorithm, their own refrain could be: Aut Homo Aut Nihil or “All Human or All Nothing”.

Decentralised finance would be the latest MAGA foray into Silicon Valley’s various and sundry roads to billions. First came Trump’s venture into nonfungible token digital trading cards (Trump as cowboy, Trump as astronaut, and now 50 new ones including Trump fondling Bitcoin); his eponymous cryptocurrency TrumpCoin (each of which is presently worth a shade above a cent — down 2% this past week); and of course his social media venture, Truth Social, which features an ever-plummeting stock price.

Three strikes and you’re out? Not for Trump, who’s swinging for Strike Four. There’s a pattern here, and it’s more than failure. There’s a political undercurrent to Trump’s venture into DeFi, one that has sent the commentariat into yet another bout of head-scratching.

The easy-bake explanation for Trump’s digital fascinations is that the matchmaker was J.D. Vance, the populist finance bro from Narya Capital who has made it clear that he has no taste for reining in tech monopolies. Others trace the tryst to Vance’s ex-boss, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has adored Trump ever since he descended the golden escalator in 2015. Those with more of a philosophical bent argue instead that power gravitates towards money and vice versa, and thus the mutual admiration society of the ex-most powerful man on the planet and the digitally richest man on the planet — Elon Musk, now rumoured to become bean-counter in chief of Trump presidency 2.0.

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In a manner typical of this pragmatic approach to the odd coupling, the Financial Times suggested that the vibe between the smartest wonks in the room and the Alzheimer-adjacent egotist is simply a marriage of convenience — that tech entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are chasing lower tax burdens for their $42 billion VC firm, a16z. Not to neglect the pseudo-academics who cannot escape their self-imposed dungeons of political ideology, and thus take it for granted that the torrid affair is simply a matter of shared love and respect for libertarian values, which Trump supposedly shares with long-time MAGA acolyte, Tyler Winklevoss.

There may be something to the crypto connection, but not because of politics, libertarian or otherwise. “If we don’t do it, China is going to do it,” rambled Trump. “China is doing it anyway.” Which suggests that behind all the idiocies and get-rich-quickeries, perhaps there is an actual geopolitical strategy.

I came to this conclusion after stumbling across an obscure article reporting that the US Armed Services had “ramped up exploration of blockchain for military use”. A bit more research found that the United States House Armed Services Committee draft for fiscal year 2025’s National Defense Authorization Act did indeed include funding for potential applications of Bitcoin for their “Special Operations Command”.

It turns out the Pentagon’s legions of buzz-cut computer nerds are deep into conceptualising what has come to be called “Software-Defined Warfare” — that is, the belief that the next big conflict will resemble a massive computer game (at least, for those who work command-and-control from 18 stories beneath the bedrock of Arizona). Of course, the particular brand of software expertise required to emerge victorious from such a battle can only come from Silicon Valley, where those who were once called death merchants now work in the “commercial tech defense innovation space”.

All of which reminded me of a long-forgotten legal dispute involving Thiel, and one of the many companies he has co-founded — Palantir Technologies. (The name is taken from those communication and surveillance devices — that is, crystal balls — that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about in his epic of bloody global warfare, The Lord of the Rings, a book that has turned out to be the ur-text for tech VCs.) The precise nature of Palantir’s software business was not widely understood until that case in 2016, when the firm won a ruling that allowed it to compete for an Army contract valued at more than $200 million, thus adding to the more than $150 million Department of Defense money Palantir had already banked. The cherry on top was the $2 million Palantir had received from a rather sinister sounding entity, “In-Q-Tel”, which happens to be the investment arm of the CIA.

Such facts outline the dirty little secret of the marriage of MAGA and Silicon Valley: their shared fascination with all things autocratic and military, from the epic battlefields of The Lord of the Rings to the Space Force Trump proudly signed into being as the stand-alone, sixth branch of the US military, replete with its uniform straight out of Star Trek wardrobe reject storage. It’s not that Trump actually wants to fight wars. He just wants to play dictator on TV. Not to mention the salient fact: there’s money in it.

That money is the driving force behind the Silicon-MAGA merger is not a matter of conjecture, but of economic history. During the Second World War, the Office of Scientific Research and Development spent $450 million on weapons research and development in an effort to destroy the Evil Empires of Germany and Japan by means of radar-directed bombers, anti-radar jammers and electronic-frequency telemetry. Silicon Valley took its modern form when, after the war, an engineer named Frederick Terman, ex-head of the super-top-secret Harvard Radio Research Lab, went west to become Dean of Stanford Engineering and kindle the flames of Spook Entrepreneurship. Those were the days when the invisible secret powers hell-bent on taking over the world were not a matter to be contemplated by conspiracy theorists, but by the mavens of “Signals Intelligence”.

Donald Trump, like Silicon Valley itself, is a child of the Cold War. He came of age as America’s cult of paranoia blossomed during the decade after the Second World War. It was perhaps inevitable that Fred Terman’s programme would double in size as the NSA, CIA, Navy and Air Force nestled into the verdant coast between San Francisco and San Jose. During the Korean War, Terman became Provost of Stanford’s School of Engineering, and made a fateful choice. He encouraged his students not to become academics but to consult for privately held companies, or else start companies themselves — greasing the wheels of entrepreneurship by allowing them to license his department’s intellectual property for free. Thus did Silicon Valley assume its modern form at the height of American reactionary culture, as the country suffered through Joseph McCarthy’s attack on the Deep State, a Civil Rights backlash, and an obsession with enemies domestic and abroad. In other words, precisely the themes that possess Donald Trump.

By the end of the Fifties, two brothers from Palo Alto, Russell and Sigurd Varian, had become so thoroughly wracked with anxiety about American weakness that they devised a method to use microwaves to detect tiny specks moving through the sky hundreds of miles distant, such as missiles and airplanes. The result was an extraordinarily complex device known as the klystron, in which the Sperry Corporation soon invested. The profits would transform Sperry into one of America’s most renowned defence contractors, the off-shoots of which would include Honeywell (makers of Chinook attack helicopters), Lockheed Martin (creators of the ATACM rockets), Raytheon Technologies (radars and mine-hunting sonar) and Northrop Grumman (fighter jets, stealth bombers). Each and every one from the Valley.

Needless to say, these companies and those that inevitably followed were not brimming with peace-loving, ankh-wearing hippies. The general ethos of authoritarianism encouraged the rise of those slide-rule junkies who were more often than not as combative and paranoid as Trump himself. The most MAGA-prophetic of them all was a Nobel-Prize winning Palo Alto native named William Shockley, who co-invented the solid-state transistor. Shockley Semiconductor was the first company to bring actual work on silicon semiconductors to Silicon Valley. Much like Donald Trump, Shockley lashed out in demented rage at any and all perceived enemies. But perhaps more to the point, he was a stupefyingly bad manager — domineering, erratic, paranoid, apt to change his mind at the last minute. Another problem: Shockley was a racist. When he entered the Republican primary for a California Senate seat in 1982, he publicly declared his policy solution to make America Great: those with an IQ of less than 100 should be sterilised.

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While Shockley amassed less than 1% of the Republican primary vote, his influence on the tech world knew no bounds. Ex-Shockley employees would found more than five-dozen chip companies in the Bay Area, and many would catch the attention of the east coast financial establishment, thus igniting the first wave of West Coast Initial Public Offerings — Varian in 1956; Hewlett Packard in 1957; Ampex in 1958. By the end of the Fifties, the “Traitorous Eight” who had stormed out of Shockley Semiconductor had set a pattern of venture capital investment emulated to the present day. The greatest of their nascent west coast VC firms was Kleiner Perkins, which would eventually evolve into Sequoia Capital, which has not only bet much of its $85 billion on war technology, but publicly backed Trump last May.

It’s not only about the money. The traditional Menlo Park nerd possesses a particular personality profile that contains glimmers of your average MAGA dude. Like Donald Trump, Right-wing tech bros like to prattle on the airwaves, from “Thiel Talks” to “The Ben & Marc Show”. Early Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya co-hosts the Trump-coddling “All-In” podcast with South African venture capitalist David Sacks (angel investor in Airbnb, Uber and SpaceX), who also managed to elbow his way onto the speakers list at the Republican National Convention. Our stockpiles of weapons, Sacks declared “are dangerously depleted”. The solution was obvious: more weaponry, more investment.

Even as Sacks promoted Trump’s candidacy at the RNC, he was boosting his own investment in a start-up military drone-manufacturer called Anduril — and soon thereafter, potential backers flocked to fund the latest incarnation of Honeywell and Raytheon. By the time the RNC had nominated Trump, VCs had raised $1.5 billion for Anduril, presently valued at $14 billion.

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It should come as no surprise that like Palantir, the name Anduril was inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Remember that sword that was reforged from the shards of Narsil by 11 smiths in Rivendell? Neither do I. But the nomenclature reiterates the fact that the wonks of Silicon Valley, like the fearful Manichaeists of MAGA, view the world as if it were Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world brimming with invisible conspiracies and unimaginable riches, a world in which saying things can make them true, a world where dark-skinned immigrant Orcs battle white-skinned elves.

A fascination with global warfare has been a constant Trump trope, as since 2016 he has warned us again and again that we are hurtling towards “World War Three”. The coming apocalypse has endured as one of the mantras of his 2024 campaign, and once again the apocalyptic fascination strangely aligns with the ambitions of west coast digiterati, as Anduril’s co-founder, Brian Schimpf, has declared the global military theatre as a “constant threat environment”. It is no coincidence that Schimpf speaks in the same autocratic accents as Trump, declaring during a recent YouTube conversation that the way to peace and prosperity is not the democratic process, but to “just force change into the system”.

Perhaps Silicon Valley’s new generation, fed upon the milk and honey of video games, a global pandemic, and the business gospel of “move fast and break things” has grown comfortable with apocalyptic ideation. At the heart of their loathing of bureaucracy lies the infant boy’s infatuation with smashing any and all playthings. The bros have come to love the violence that lies at the source of their filthy lucre, no matter the cost. And so there should be no confusion as to why Silicon Valley loves MAGA and MAGA loves Silicon Valley: when each looks into the other’s eyes, they see themselves. To those spectrum-y engineers seduced by the epic nonsense of The Lord of the Rings and empowered by the rush of their own breathtaking economic superpowers, Donald Trump has become the ultimate fantasy: a crypto-president whose digital source code they might well soon possess.

Just two weeks earlier, Raymond had been struck by a German shell while he was building trenches near Ypres. A fellow officer wrote to Oliver that “he had seen your son in a dug-out, with a man watching him. He was then quite unconscious though still breathing with difficulty. I could see it was all over with him. He was still just alive when I went away.” Within half an hour he was dead. Another officer sent him a description of the cemetery in which he had been buried that very evening.

This solemn correspondence marked a beginning rather than an end. After the “first shock of bereavement”, the whole Lodge family had soon developed a “perception of his continued usefulness”. They visited spiritualist mediums who passed on to them Raymond’s utterances from another world. Raymond: Or Life and Death (1916), the book in which Oliver collected these happenings, went through 12 editions in three years. It was both a symptom and an intended vindication of a startling social phenomenon. Although people in Britain and the United States had experimented in contacting the spirit world for more than half a century, the First World War caused a dramatic spike in the practice of spiritualism, as mourners flocked to get in touch with their dead ones.

Raymond makes for affecting but also timely reading today, when Artificial Intelligence is likewise promising to resurrect the dead — for a fee. A number of tech start-ups, such as HereAfter AI and Séance AI, are marketing chatbots that use the digital records of a deceased relative to speak in their voice. Another company, South Korea’s DeepBrain AI, creates video avatars that capture a relative’s mannerisms and voice. A chat window might seem a very different and perhaps more rational place to meet the dead than a “sitting” with a medium. Yet it is worth reflecting on their similarities.

Spiritualists share with the makers of griefbots a conviction that people live in — and live on — in their words. It is true that paranormal happenings were common in sittings. Raymond once spun a table so violently that he broke flowerpots. But Oliver considered the best evidence for his survival to be what he said. At first, he was terse, dropping in references to poems or the initials of friends into his chat with mediums. In time, he became voluble. Yes, he had a body where he now was, a place called “Summer”, which was “such a solid place, I have not got over it yet. It is so wonderfully real.” No, he didn’t understand how it all worked, but he lived in a brick house there and you could get a whisky and soda. A friend of his had successfully requested a cigar.

How could these words convince as well as console? Like a good LLM engineer, Oliver assembled as big a textual corpus as possible. Before readers of Raymond met its posthumous hero, they ploughed through his letters from the Western Front. These beige epistles represented the war as “most like a long picnic in all sorts of places with a sort of constraint and uneasiness in the air”. Their anxious jauntiness echoed the fragmentary reports from “Summer” and so supported Lodge’s broader claim that “personality persists” after death. There is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living and so “methods of intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going in response to the urgent demand of affection”.

The clients of spiritualists resemble customers for griefbots in another way too: they were building an after-world on their own democratic terms. Although, to the embarrassment of the churches, most still considered themselves Christians, they instinctively reached for technological and scientific rather than theological concepts to sketch out the afterlife. Lodge criticised the Christian churches for making the belief in immortality depend on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, when it would be better to explore the ability of all personalities to survive the body’s death. As a physicist, Lodge was used to charting the invisible forcefields of energy that lay behind the phenomenal world. He championed new terms to make the strange familiar: spirits used telepathy to inhabit the minds of mediums or telekinesis to rap on a table. He likened the chatter between spirits and their mediums to a modern form of magic: the working of a telephone exchange.

Someone who opts to use a griefbot today is of course simulating immortality, rather than believing in it. Yet many of those drawn to spiritualism in the early 20th century were not particularly credulous. Rather than silencing their scepticism, they used it to heighten and refine their experiences. Like many leading intellectuals of his day, Lodge belonged to the Society of Psychical Research (SPR). The members of this ghostbusting think tank sought evidence of personal immortality that could satisfy the robust standards they applied to their study of the natural and human sciences. They took a grim delight in exposing deceit or unwitting collusion on the part of spiritualist mediums, concluding time and again that phenomena they accepted could happen had not happened on this occasion.

The Lodges approached mediums with just this “healthy scepticism”, withholding their identities from them when they could and trying to vet themselves for wishful thinking. Raymond printed the desolate message his mother Mary had scribbled on a scrap of paper in September 1915: “I want to know if you are happy, and that you yourself are really talking to me and no sham.” Like the SPR’s researchers, they often had cause to reflect that spotting shams is hard when you are dealing with people, rather than machines. Truth in a “sitting” was not a hard fact, but a social production, which developed in conversation with mediums. As feminist historians have long pointed out, it was the mediums, generally women, who were often of uncertain education and vague or shady status, who were in charge once the blinds were drawn and the gas turned down.

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These difficulties encouraged Lodge to take a suggestive rather than a dogmatic tone. Raymond was not saying that all of the words of “Raymond” were real, but rather asking: what would it mean to live as if they were true? The “as if” it conjured up was arguably richer and more therapeutic than that which Artificial Intelligence can promise us today. A griefbot promises to assuage our grief by leading us into a private cell of nostalgia. Although our best times with a person are already past, the magic of technology can keep them going by simulating what they might say in a given situation today.

By contrast, Raymond’s survival was supposed to guarantee the future, rather than a perpetual past. Oliver would have been disappointed if his son remained forever the same: he wanted him to continue to learn and to grow. Early 20th century spiritualists belonged to what now seems an archaic, dwindling tribe: inveterate optimists. Even the First World War could not dent Lodge’s confidence that a “magnificent era” still awaited the “whole human race”. In the dark days of 1915, he put out a pamphlet anticipating the dividends of peace. Neutrality and disarmament would be the keystones of international order. Social reforms would enshrine the “pleasure and dignity of labour” and curb the ugly excesses of consumerism: there must be no return, for instance, to the pre-war habit of allowing “whisky advertisements” along the Thames. Although such changes would require extensive state intervention, they would only work if people became “harmonious”, deepening and perfecting their natures.

Raymond led the way. He wanted to assure people that his world was a place of “rational life” and higher education, much like the red brick universities he had attended and where his father worked. He went to lectures to prepare for a higher sphere. He read books that had not yet been written in the library. He waited for our world to rise to his level. His excitement contrasts with the artificially generated spirits of today, who share with those who survive them an inability to imagine a better future.

“I want to study things here a lot,” Raymond told Oliver: “Don’t think it selfish, or that I want to be away from you all. I have still got you, because I feel you so close, closer even. I wouldn’t come back, I wouldn’t for anything that anyone could give me.”

But Shanahan is only one of several wealthy Silicon Valley insiders to support Kennedy. Last June, when Kennedy was still a member of the Democratic Party, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey (net worth: $4.9 billion) gave his endorsement, praising him for having “no fear in exploring topics that are a little bit controversial”. Meanwhile the venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya have also contributed to RFK’s campaign, while Elon Musk hosted Kennedy for a two-and-a-half-hour long conversation on Twitter last year.

This is a far cry from the heady days of the Obama presidency, when there was a revolving door between tech firms and the administration. I still remember the Google all-hands meeting that was leaked online in the aftermath of Trump election, where the company’s CFO cried as Brin explained to his employees that some people were just “low information voters”. And although the relationship between tech firms and the Democrats has grown more strained since those days, most political donations continue to go in one direction, while those who are Kennedy curious are denounced as reactionaries, and constantly reminded of his anti-vaccine stance and conspiratorial statements .

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But although Silicon Valley may have been largely absorbed into a monolithic political orthodoxy, this has distracted us from the quintessential strangeness of the region — that for decades it was a place where you could really let your freak flag fly. Far from an aberration, in many ways RFK constitutes the ideal Silicon Candidate, personifying a turbulence and weirdness that goes back to the very dawn of the valley.

The USA’s technology industry was not originally centred on the west coast. UNIVAC, the first commercial computer was developed in the east, while IBM, dominant in the industry for many decades, was (and is) headquartered in New York state. The man who put the “silicon” in Silicon Valley was William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor. Shockley founded his own company in Mountain View in the mid-Fifties, attracting some of the best and brightest to move there; when they discovered he was a terrible manager, some went on to start their own companies. But besides being a brilliant scientist, Shockley was  also a rampant racist and enthusiastic eugenicist decades after such ideas were regarded as being beyond the pale. While the battle for civil rights was raging, he argued for the sterilisation of black women, and in his 70s donated his sperm to a depository of semen collected from Nobel Prize winners. When interviewed by Playboy he complained that his children represented a “very significant regression” due to the lower intellectual capabilities of their mother.

Compared to the positions held by the father of Silicon Valley, then, RFK’s much criticised anti-vaccine stance is exceedingly mild as far as controversial ideas go. Meanwhile, as much as he is attacked by the media and members of his former party, it was not so long ago that some progressives didn’t mind a bit of anti-vax rhetoric. The Huffington Post was home to many articles by vaccine sceptics (including RFK himself) until they were memory-holed during the pandemic. Similarly, one of the great idols of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, was sufficiently doubtful about medical science that when he  was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he opted to treat it with acupuncture, a lot of fruit juice and “spiritual consultations”. And a critical attitude towards multinational pharmaceutical companies would have been completely uncontroversial on the Left until a few short years ago. We should not be surprised therefore if some in Silicon Valley aren’t too bothered about RFK’s attitude towards vaccines.

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But there are plenty of other reasons why Kennedy might appeal to some of the more unorthodox thinkers in Silicon Valley. Although Jack Dorsey ended his tenure at Twitter by banning Trump from the platform, it should nevertheless be remembered that he is a strange guy with a big beard and a collection of psychedelic T-shirts who celebrated his 42nd birthday by going to Myanmar to meditate for 17 hours a day. Dorsey has been searching for alternatives to the dreary offerings of establishment Democrats for years, having previously donated money to the apostates Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard. He is also a cryptocurrency enthusiast, and was likely impressed by the keynote speech RFK delivered at a Bitcoin conference in Miami last year, in which he described it as “the perfect base currency.”

David Sacks, meanwhile, is part of the so-called “PayPal mafia” that includes Silicon Valley dissidents Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Sacks has never been shy about holding dissenting opinions to the tech mainstream. At the tender age of 23 he co-authored with Thiel a book entitled The Diversity Myth, where he argued that many academic and cultural institutions were using “diversity” as cover for repression and a general stifling of intellectual culture. Like RFK, he is a strong advocate for free speech, and sceptical of the war on Ukraine. Although both positions are now supposed to be Right-wing, it was of course completely standard on the Left to be anti-war and pro-freedom of expression until very recently. And as for Chamath Palihapitiya  (who co-hosts a podcast with Sacks) he has previously donated a lot of money to the Democratic Party, but has also thrown a few dollars Ted Cruz’s way and supported Michael Bloomberg for president, while also hosting a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy. Clearly this is a man no longer wedded to the status quo, but open to alternatives.

Of course, RFK isn’t going to win, so it might seem strange that a bunch of canny venture capitalists would throw away so much money on a lost cause. But wealthy people throw money away all the time, and for much less entertaining reasons. Nikki Haley burned enormous amounts of donor cash as she waged her futile campaign against Donald Trump, while in the US it is considered entirely upstanding for a rich person to donate huge sums of money to already extremely wealthy institutions such as Harvard or Yale. And what is a couple of million dollars compared to the strange phenomenon witnessed in the UK, whereby people dedicate their entire lives to supporting a political party that hasn’t won a majority at an election in over a century? Who knows what lurks in the human heart — maybe David Steel and Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy all believed that they would pull off a revolution. Perhaps Nicole Shanahan believes that with the Kennedy name and her cash, they may be able to beat the system.

But equally perhaps it’s not about winning at all. RFK is sometimes described as a “chaos agent” and much of the bitterness aimed at him is fuelled by the fear that he will take away enough of Biden’s vote to let Trump back in. But rather than anything quite so anarchic, he represents a value that was once regarded as the highest virtue in Silicon Valley: disruption. In our newly tech-pessimist era, the internet is now awash in articles denouncing this as a delusional buzzword at best and dangerous at worst. But there was a time not so long ago when venture capitalists and their media stenographers were constantly looking for the visionary with the radical idea that would upend old ways of doing things. AirBnB, Uber, WeWork were all once feted as disruptors to the markets they entered (some admittedly more successful than others).

From one angle this is exactly what RFK looks like: he has liberated  himself from the dreary groupthink of his party, even the confines of his family. He says what he thinks and has created a platform with appeal to some on the Right, some on the Left and some who refuse to identify with either side. But beyond that, he is different from a conventional disruptor because there is no gamble involved: whatever capital is expended on him will definitely go up in smoke. In which case, the strategy must be to expand the realm of what it is possible to say, and to give a bloody nose to a party run by a detached elite that has embraced a whole new set of shibboleths, and yet which still demands fealty. Or maybe it doesn’t matter too much what RFK stands for, and when billionaires donate to his campaign it is fundamentally an existential act, burning money as a giant F.U. to people they despise. And if you can afford to do it, then is it really such terrible value for money?

Signs of collectivism can be seen all over Europe in top-heavy bureaucratic efforts to regulate innovation, particularly when it comes to tech. This “demotic reallocation of power” — as an eminence grise of tech policy told me privately — has long characterised Europe’s approach to innovation.

The problem is that the phenomenon seems to have spread around the world, including to some of the most important loci of digital innovation, including the UK and the US. Just last month, Adobe called off its $20 billion acquisition of design tool start-up Figma after the UK Competition and Markets Authority blocked its path. In America, Amazon and Alphabet are both facing competition lawsuits brought by branches of the US government. And only two weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) announced they’re “in deep discussions” concerning Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI.

We are, in other words, witnessing one of the most expansive and significant regulatory efforts in decades. In total, the FTC and DOJ, which together are responsible for upholding US antitrust law, have brought more than 50 enforcement actions over the past two years — the highest, Bloomberg notes, since the US first required pre-merger antitrust reviews in 1976. In the UK, meanwhile, the CMA blocked three deals in the 2021-2022 fiscal year, amounting to 5.5% of all deals proposed, more than tripling its historic average.

The CMA-halted Adobe deal is particularly revealing, due to both its scope and the strange rationale the regulator employed to quash it. Adobe and Figma do not provide the same services and therefore serve different kinds of customers. This was implicitly acknowledged in the decision by CMA, which blocked the deal on grounds that it could negatively affect competition in the future. This is a departure from much regulatory law on competition which sensibly looks at the effect on actual competition — i.e. what’s already taking place in the market. This novel approach to determining the likely, or even possible, outcome of a deal created an impossible hurdle for Adobe and Figma to clear. And maybe that was the point.

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“The only way to solve a future competition issue, that someone might do something, is to not do the deal,” Adobe’s general counsel, Dana Rao, said in a December interview. “That’s essentially what they were telling us.” But why was that the message? Neither company is British, and neither has its largest market in the UK. At a time when the UK is aggressively attempting to court tech, particularly in AI, a highly contentious legal move to torpedo one of the biggest tech deals of the year — and in the process wipe $1 billion in breakup fees off Adobe’s balance sheet — seems like an odd choice, one not likely to endear the country to ambitious tech founders.

Yet the Adobe decision is hardly an outlier. Around the same time that deal fell apart, Microsoft concluded its $69 billion acquisition of leading video game maker Activision. Since it was announced in 2022, the deal, however, was anything but certain. Microsoft similarly attracted attention from anti-trust regulators, notably the CMA. But five months after Microsoft announced the deal, a California regulator called the Civil Rights Department (CRD) announced it was pursuing claims of sexual harassment that Activision had already settled with a federal regulator, and with the express consent of CRD itself.

As the Microsoft deal began to progress in earnest, the CRD began taking an exceptionally aggressive approach to pursuing Activision. At the time, Matt Taibbi detailed the elaborate, almost arcane lengths to which the CRD went in pursuit of Activision, at times appearing to violate its own ethical and legal boundaries as a regulator. In one instance, a CRD official told a reporter over email that the agency’s policy is not to comment on open investigations (as it is legally prohibited from doing). Two days later, the same official wrote to the reporter saying “my director” would be willing to discuss the case by phone — and, presumably, out of the reach of official records. This exchange was only revealed after Activision sued CRD, which had initially provided no documents in the discovery process.

Though CRD did not have regulatory jurisdiction over the acquisition itself, given the timing, it’s hard not to wonder if the agency’s regulators were conscious of the fact that their efforts could have easily become enough of a distraction for Microsoft to walk away. Indeed, within days of the Microsoft deal announcing its final regulatory approvals for the acquisition, the CRD inexplicably dropped its most grievous claim, sexual harassment, and settled with Activision for far lesser claims, saying “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations,” in what The New York Times called “a stunning reversal”.

While it might seem like a single case in a single jurisdiction, the reality is that, given California’s tech-centricity and deep blue politics, the state is a bellwether for this emerging approach to tech regulation in the US. In this regard, the CRD’s activities should raise flags — and already they have. Recently, the Hindu American Foundation sued the CRD for racial and religious discrimination, after the CRD sued tech giant Cisco, making racially tinged allegations that a “caste” system was operating within the company. And so we find ourselves in a bizarre scenario, whereby California’s civil rights protection agency is being sued for violating the civil rights of an ethnic and religious minority group.

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While this moral paradox could be the punchline of a bad DEI joke, it is in fact the product of a newly aggressive regulatory approach to tech emerging from Democrat California. The FTC’s current suit against Amazon, for instance, includes allegations that the company’s algorithm prioritises its own products over other brands. That might be true, but this is also the case with nearly every supermarket or drugstore on earth.

In the finance industry, on the other hand, regulation looks rather different: what we see is not regulators slowing down or scuttling mega-mergers but, in some cases, forcing them. Last year, the Swiss government all but commanded UBS to acquire the embattled Credit Suisse. In the US, the country’s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase, was made even bigger when it swallowed up regional bank First Republic during a banking crisis, without a peep from regulators.

What explains this apparent double standard? Some in the US see the regulatory push as a step toward a European-style approach to the relationship between tech and state power. “Europeans don’t like the disruptive aspects of tech,” said one long-time tech lawyer with an expertise in policy. “They tend to think of tech as a Frankenstein’s monster that needs to be tightly controlled, exploited for what economic and lifestyle benefits it can afford their citizens, but not something to encourage.”

In the US, both parties seem to be following a similar course. In the days of Barack Obama, the love affair between Big Tech and the Democrats knew no bounds, with the President strolling a SpaceX launch site with Elon Musk and holding campaign events with Mark Zuckerberg. Democrats only became tech-sceptics around the time of the 2016 presidential election, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was perceived to have swung the election towards the Republicans, Wikileaks damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Peter Thiel came out in support of Trump. “I think for Democrats it’s a case of, ‘We really liked you guys when you were doing cool stuff with data and outreach and helping us win elections. Now you make teens into body-obsessed depressed vapers while you harvest our data,’” the tech-policy lawyer said.

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The idea of mass-scale data harvesting and “surveillance capitalism” explains some of the current political animus and regulatory zealousness towards Big Tech. But it’s also a question of power. Since the end of the Second World War, the only serious contender to the fantastically effective, and highly centralised, American political establishment has been Big Tech. While tech was busy disrupting entire industries, the power elite may have realised that it, too, stood to be disrupted.

But the tech world is adaptable. And it knows it needs to stay in the good graces of those who pull the regulatory strings. This partly explains Twitter’s shameful collaboration with the US government in its effort to censor Americans on Covid-related issues; it is also the reason why the corporate culture at Google is so often described as paralytically concerned with compliance. None of this is surprising, of course, when you note the phalanx of senior Obama Administration officials who fell into the arms of Big Tech, including senior advisor, David Plouffe (Uber), press secretary, Jay Carney (Amazon, Airbnb), and economic advisor, Larry Summers (Square, A16Z). It turns out that tech’s regulatory revolving door turns as fast as any other.

For those who refuse to play ball, meanwhile, there is a price to pay. Elon Musk’s companies, for instance, face a remarkably different climate, and have in recent months been subjected to almost Kafkaesque lawsuits and regulatory efforts, including a joint investigation by the DOJ and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into claims that Musk built a single glass house. SpaceX is also being sued by the DOJ for not hiring enough asylum-seeking migrants (“asylees” in DOJ-ese) despite being barred by US law from hiring non-US citizens because of its work in national security. Biden later took time at a rare news conference appearance to clarify that Musk’s business relationships with other countries are “worthy of being looked at”.

Here, the political dimension is hard to ignore. “The Left is always pushing for more control over Big Tech,” says noted tech investor and entrepreneur David Sacks. “They leverage that control — or the threat of control — into campaign contributions and censorship. It’s the protection end of the extortion racket.” It’s not surprising that the FTC, now gearing up for its landmark suit against Amazon, is currently led by Lina Khan, a 34-year-old Yale Law student whose paper on Amazon’s labour practices catapulted her to Democratic establishment stardom.

The problem with a politically inspired regulatory effort, however, is that the courts don’t share the same prerogatives. Losses by regulators in courts are piling up: most notably the FTC’s defeat with the Microsoft acquisition of Activision, and the SEC’s loss of a lawsuit by crypto company Ripple. Yet this hasn’t stopped the agencies from powering forward: after all, even without formally losing their cases, regulators can tie up mergers to the point they are no longer tenable.

None of this, however, means it is good for the public, especially given that it’s taking place in a context of a volatile economy and a marked depression in the tech IPO market. As the Big Tech deals dry up, so will the funds that sustain start-ups. The aftermath isn’t too hard to glean, as innovation stalls and the global economy, already on unstable footing, trips right when we need it to run, and run fast.

On the surface, this new race to curb screen time seems like a positive development. For years, underwhelming iPhone launches have triggered dreary sighs of boredom rather than round-the-block queues, while critiques of addiction-powered surveillance capitalism have trickled out of the academy and into the mainstream press. If screens are our tormentor, one could easily conclude, then perhaps these screenless devices will be our salvation.

But what if our obsession with “screen time” is itself a smokescreen? What if, rather than saving us, this vanishing act obscures the deeper drivers of our digital dissatisfaction? After all, the real rot at the core of modern computing is not screens, but the Scylla and Charybdis of digital life: the unceasing acceleration of culture and human anxieties about our finitude.

Once upon a time, speed was the aspiration of commerce. The rise of clock time and the industrial revolution made doing things quickly the lifeblood of competition. Responding to this acceleration of life after the Second World War, French philosopher and architect Paul Virilio lamented how: “The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world.” Since then, speed has graduated from being the aspiration of commerce to becoming the central objective of culture. Whether it’s the movement of goods and services or the diffusion of ideas, Virilio’s theory of “dromology” explores how intense capital investment in technologies that compress time and space have become our defining logic. These technologies accelerate the transportation of matter and ideas, scrambling our experience of time and place. In Open Sky, his 1997 polemic on technology, he mourns: “How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?”

If Virilio saw time-space compression as an inherently destructive force, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a 20th-century Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist (best known for discovering Peking Man) actively cheered it on. To Teilhard de Chardin and his Silicon Valley intellectual descendants, the creation of a light-speed sphere of knowledge and communication that floats above our mundane world was the ultimate aspiration of humanity. Through his Darwin-inspired Catholicism, he longed for an invisible consciousness that he termed the “Noosphere” — a realm of cognition between the atmosphere and the biosphere. This, he dreamed, would foster a unified connected human consciousness which would be the final stage of evolution: the convergence of the physical (the “hardware” of human brains and technologies) and the metaphysical (the “software” of human soul and intellect). At this evolutionary end point, which he called the Omega Point, humanity would achieve divine salvation.

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Virilio and Teilhard de Chardin’s competing worldviews represent the tension at the heart of this battle of salvation from screens. Altman and Humane identify screens as the barrier to a better future, but Virilio leads us to an altogether different view: screens are not the problem. They are simply the portal that enforces constant communion with this Noosphere. It is the possibility of being connected to it, and transcending ordinary life, that is breaking our brains — not the medium that gets us there.

The notion that the Noosphere gives us rapid and better knowledge drips into all facets of life. In Politics of the Very Worst (1999), Virilio describes the phenomenon of “teleobjectivity”, the idea that some remote consciousness is better than what we can do with our bodies. The TripAdvisor star-rating of a restaurant overrules your eyes and nose. Google Translate kills the need to dust off one’s GCSE French. Wikipedia’s objectivity makes you interrupt conversation to check one’s phone for the right answer. We trust the Noosphere, not ourselves.

This remote consciousness, Virilo explains, “destroys the world as we know it”, leaving us feeling that our messy and fleshy experiences are not quite as good as the infinite Noosphere. And here lies the flaw in Altman and Humane’s vision of humanity: the obsession with overcoming our inevitable finitude. In this, they merely represent the latest expression of a phenomenon described by philosopher Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought (2001): “Human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude.”

To Altman and Humane, this finitude can only be overcome by helping people address their apparent lack of self-control by removing the screen which they see as a portal to the world of dopamine-inducing distractions. Yet, the real battle is not with the portal — but instead with the cosmic FOMO spawned by the idea that there is a better self and life floating out there in the Noosphere. It is easy to remove the glass and stainless steel in our hands. To curb our longing to be super-infinite is harder.

Paradoxically, then, this hype around “humane technology” does not reveal a hunger for humanity. Quite the opposite: it exposes a desire to transcend our very human frailty and ignorance once and for all.

If anything, these devices could become the first mainstream transhumanist product, further normalising a millenarian Silicon Valley ideology of self-optimisation among everyday consumers. Consider the AI Pin’s live translation feature: demonstrated last year, the synchronous translation system renders the cognitive and cultural struggle of learning a language meaningless.

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Nussbaum, by contrast, states that human “development entails many moments of discomfort and frustration”. She continues: “if everything were always simply given in advance of discomfort, [humanity] would never try out its own projects of control.” In other words, by chaining us to the Noosphere and providing real-time cognitive babysitting in every moment, these new technologies may simply eradicate the impulse for humans to struggle or engage their brains at all. The problem won’t be that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death — rather, we will entirely opt out of projects that create that sense of self in the first place.

Poignantly, with its live translation feature, the AI Pin appears to be a real-world manifestation of Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Humane is simply conjuring Douglas Adams’s “small, yellow, leech-like” creature that “feeds on brainwave energy” and excretes a telepathic matrix that enables one to “instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language”. Adams, of course, named this fish after the Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11:1–9, the Babylonians, drunk with pride in their ability to speak one language, attempt to build a tower that reaches into the heavens and challenges God’s power. Irritated by the hubris, God came down and scattered them across the world.

In a similar way, screenless smartphones and the ancient Babylonians are two sides of the same eternal coin. They represent an innate thirst for grand projects of human perfectibility — a longing for a deus ex machina with which to defeat with nature. Yet, we are all fallible. Until we see that the real battle is not with screens but with our own dissatisfaction with the present, nothing will Change Everything. Endless scrolling will simply be replaced with new mindless interactions; we will remain anxiously plugged in, dreaming of perfection.

As Virilio writes in Pure War (1983), “wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth”. And here we can see the hidden side of Humane and Altman’s salvation narratives: the real motivation is not to rescue us, but to simply compress time and space better than an iPhone can. What could this achieve? A quick glance at Apple’s $3-trillion market value says all you need to know. Silicon Valley’s talk of screens and “humane” technology is simply sheep’s clothing. Beneath it, ravenous wolves await, hungry for your attention and wallet.

The strange saga began a week ago, when the board of the nonprofit decided to fire its AI guru and cultish leader, Sam Altman. But when the 700+ staffers of OpenAI wrote an open letter saying that they too would go with the ousted CEO, he was swiftly reinstated.

The hairpin plot twists of this power struggle have been breathtakingly hard to follow. Reports are now surfacing that Altman had announced that he was on the brink of achieving a significant AI breakthrough only the day before he was fired. A letter was sent to the Board advising them that this tech discovery — an algorithm known as Q* (pronounced Q-Star) — could “threaten humanity”. The algorithm was deemed to be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system smarter than humans.

Altman’s dream was to then marry AGI with an integrated supply chain of AI chips, AI phones, AI robotics, and the world’s largest collections of data and LLMs (large language models). Its working name is Tigris.

To achieve this, Altman would need vast computing resources and funding. Perhaps that is why reports suggest he has been talking to Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, Softbank, and Cerebras — which now makes the fastest AI chips in the world. Cerebras chips are big. The size of a dinner plate and more powerful than any traditional chips.They also have Swarm X software, which allows them to knit together into clusters that create a computational fabric that can handle the massive volume of data needed to build better AI.

Cerebras represents a great threat to the manufacturer of the world’s fastest supercomputers and AI chips, Nvidia. The most powerful of these supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, are central to the defence of the American nation and are kept at the highly protected nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But almost every big organisation depends on Nvidia chips or computers. A year ago, Nvidia was worth $300 billion; now it is worth $1.35 trillion — the most dramatic increase in the value of a Nasdaq firm since 1971. Yet Cerebras has designed a chip 20-times faster than Nvidia’s. This is why some say the Cerebras IPO will kill Nvidia. Now we begin to see a national-security component to this story.

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While the West has been focused on generative AI that has no cognitive ability, China has taken a different path. It has built the world’s only Quantum optical computer, which can solve in 47 seconds a problem that would take a traditional supercomputer 240 years.

Similarly, Altman wants to build a new generation of computers for the AI era. In July, he partnered with Cerebras and the Emirati incubator G42 to unveil the Condor Galaxy, the “World’s Largest Supercomputer for AI Training”. G42 is behind the world’s largest Arabic LLM (Large Language model), which, like ChatGPT, generates new linguistic content, and is also working with Amazon to gather and process DNA information to develop massive new global genomics, proteomics and biobanking services.

To an AI data scientist, the data collected for these innovations — the languages, nationalities and DNA involved — are honeypots brimming with opportunity. The West doesn’t have the mechanisms or the mores to gather such a quantity of meaningful data or the money to finance what Altman wants. But international investors do, including the Emiratis, the Chinese — who are already very interested in Altman — and all the others backing G42.

Moreover, if the world wants AI designed for true diversity, if it wants medical and financial products created to suit the broadest range of humans, then this will only happen where that diverse data can be found. It’s not going to be created in the US, where young, white male tech bros all design AI, and the FDA-approved testing of medicines pretty much excludes anyone but white males.

When AI people say they worry about Altman’s lack of “guardrails”, they mean he is willing to take the risk that he builds something that, like a Djinni, cannot be put back in a bottle. He is prepared to build something that might not be controllable. He is like Oppenheimer who was willing to smash atoms to win the Second World War, even though he might have ignited the atmosphere and incinerated Earth to do it.

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By this measure, Altman is a mad scientist who will put us all at risk to achieve a historic breakthrough. Hence the letter to the board of OpenAI by some staff, along with others keen for the world to take note that the huge staff attrition rate at OpenAI was not due to “bad culture fits” — rather, this was due to “a disturbing pattern of deceit and manipulation”, “self deception” and the “insatiable pursuit of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)”. For Altman, this “pursuit” entailed incorporating superintelligence inside a robot’s body. Which, presumably, is why OpenAI started investing in humanoid robotics made by IX in Norway back in March.

You can understand why the OpenAI Board might have become uneasy when they realised that Altman was racing around the Middle East and Asia trying to raise billions for this vision. But, as Bloomberg wrote, “these are not “side ventures”, they are “core ventures”. This is about redefining the cutting-edge of chip design, data collection and storage, computational power, and the interface between AI and physical robotics.

This new supply chain would not only challenge America’s IT infrastructure; it could be facilitating the diminishment of US power. It implies innovation is shifting outside of the US and acquiring data that is beyond the reach of regulators. No doubt the US authorities looked at all this and saw Altman collaborating with G42 as equivalent to fraternising with the enemy because it is seen to be backed by the folks who own ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok (G42 has a significant stake in them). They saw that G42 owns Pax AI, which some say is Pegasus (the notorious spyware) reconfigured. Was Altman under surveillance as he pursued this grand vision? How could he not be?

The truth is Altman does not believe in borders. He has one goal: to build the best AI possible. He has a vision that probably worried his board and unnerved Washington. Given that the US is trying to slow down technological innovation in other parts of the world by restricting the sale of the best chips and computers, it is hugely challenging when he says: “We’ll build our own stuff — in fact we’ll build our own supply chain and ecosystem.” So much for ITAR, the US system for banning the export of critical tech.

There was a time when an American would have been arrested for selling such protected high-tech innovations abroad. Today, can you stop a smart American from innovating outside the US? Can you tell entrepreneurs not to take foreign money and not to partner with foreign firms? Can you demand that they stop challenging existing firms like Nvidia? No. Not when others are offering so much money.

What took place over the past week at OpenAI confirms that none of the young leaders of this new AI space see borders. As Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems said: AI “isn’t a Silicon Valley thing, it isn’t even a US thing, it’s now all over the world — it’s a global phenomenon”. Yet, the US authorities and its allies will have known the significant challenge to Western notions of security and control that Altman’s vision presents.

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Two days after Xi and Biden met on November 15 and agreed to play nice, Altman was fired. The Daily Dot suggests that Altman was terminated because Xi hinted to Biden that Altman’s OpenAI was surreptitiously involved in a data-gathering deal with a firm called D2 (Double Dragon), which some thought to be a Chinese Cyber Army Group. David Covucci reported, “This D2 group has the largest and biggest crawling/indexing/ scanning capacity in the world 10 times more than Alphabet Inc (Google), hence the deal so Open AI could get their hands on vast quantities of data for training after exhausting their other options.”

There is something deeper happening here. China has already forged an AGI path of its own. They are avoiding generative AI in favour of cognitive AI. They want it to think independently of prompts. China is already giving AI control over satellites and weaponised drones. No doubt, Altman would love to work with that capability and the Chinese would love to work with him.

Could that be why Larry Summers, the Former Secretary of the Treasury with connections to US politics and business, also ended up on the new OpenAI Board? Perhaps the US Government realised they could not stop Altman but might claim a seat at his table?

What does all this mean for us? Experts like Altman say they are designing AI to do good. But AI designers disagree about what constitutes “good”. It is clear this arms race could have civilisational consequences.

My first impression of Simone and Malcolm is that they have walked straight out of Pattern Recognition. Two slender, voluble, dark-haired, medium-height thirty-somethings, they have slicked-back hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and quirky dark clothing. Their children, Torsten, Octavian, and Titan Invictus, are all IVF-conceived, some gene-selected for traits such as IQ or happiness. Simone is pregnant again, she tells me merrily, with Industry Americus Collins, due in April.

The original “‘elite’ couple breeding to save mankind” of countless memes, I sought them out on a recent London visit in the hope of inducing them to say controversial things about biotech. They’re famous (or notorious if you prefer) for their enthusiastic endorsement of a high-tech Bay Area “pro-natalism” that embraces every available reproductive technology. From IVF, through surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, to potentially gene-editing future offspring, they are what they call “the most talkative iteration” of a “technophilic” movement dedicated to saving the human species from population crash.

There are plenty of conservatives to whom all such technologies are prima facie off-limits. And I have grave concerns about anything that promises to free us from organismic limits — only to demand, in exchange, new kinds of servitude. I’m far from certain whether technophiles are friends or enemies. But what I heard was a message most relevant to the people currently keenest to dismiss them as “terminally online Redditors” or “hipster eugenicists”, or to link them with the far-Right: that the fertility crash is coming, soonest and hardest and most brutally, for liberals. And the Collinses are, in fact, liberals too: just unusually unfiltered and clear-sighted ones.

The Collinses earn a living in financial services, but their passion is education (they run an Institute for the Gifted) and promoting natalist culture. They use email and WhatsApp accounts seemingly interchangeably, and offer opinions as if they’re two interfaces of the same voluble, intelligent and eccentric hive mind. Malcolm proposed marriage to Simone on Reddit. They plan to have seven children.

In the end, we didn’t discuss gene-editing and fertility tech much at all: we converged, instead, on a deeper and arguably more insoluble fear. That is, that the contours of the fertility crisis mean people like the Collinses — subcultures that value intelligence, openness, and technological sophistication — are a critically endangered species.

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In the Collins worldview, what they call the “global monoculture” is the chief antagonist. They mean the largely homogeneous high-tech norms that have emerged in every major developed city in the modern world: Starbucks, tiny families or solo apartments, long working hours. And everywhere this “monoculture” appears, fertility is falling. Human birth rates are now below replacement almost everywhere in the world.

This global monoculture “believes it has a right to other people’s children, because its fertility rates are so low that the only way it can replenish itself is by just taking the children of nearby healthy cultural groups”. In Simone and Malcolm’s view, this dynamic represents “an existential threat to our species”. And as they see it, the motley coalition of interest groups making up the current “conservative movement” is united by hostility to this urban monoculture, and sometimes little else.

And while the Collinses are meticulously Californian in their aversion to offer explicit moral judgement, it would seem that however existential a threat this monoculture is overall, it’s a clear and present danger to people like them. For it poses a long-term threat to intellectual and cultural openness. Malcolm has, Simone tells me, analysed data on the demographic profiles of people having lots of kids — and it turns out that the deciding factor isn’t religiosity at all. It’s the mirror inverse of the high openness exhibited by “terminally online Redditors” and Silicon Valley rationalists.

According to their own studies, Simone tells me, the high-fertility profile comes with “xenophobia and fascism”. That is: people who have lots of kids are authoritarian, hostile to out-groups, and reluctant to consider other viewpoints as valid. And while they assure me, with the typically extravagant tolerance of difference typical of the Bay Area, that they’re “not even antagonistic” to bigotry “so long as they don’t interfere with their neighbours” tacitly the judgement is clear. After all, a defining characteristic of authoritarian outlooks is precisely interfering with your neighbours. Having evidently considered the prognosis for their own way of life, in a future dominated by such cultures, the Collinses show pragmatism and clear-sightedness in doing whatever they can to avert the prospect.

But it’s not just pluralism and openness on the chopping-block if demographic forces continue to select in favour of bigots. It’s also cognitive ability, cultures that value education, and cultures knowledgeable of and engaged with technologies. All these traits are, the Collinses remind me, correlated with low fertility; not that I need reminding, as a bookish, overeducated, and extremely online mother of only one.

Meanwhile, Malcolm continues, the people still having kids are the ones making less money, and wielding less cultural and economic power in the world. In turn, this makes such groups “less good at defending themselves from aggressive forces and less viable as power players on the world stage”. Rather than embracing marginalisation as a condition for survival, the Collinses want to “find and nourish groups that are able to be global economic and technological players while still being high fertility, because that is so rare”.

What’s left unspoken here is that they think failing to support “global economic and technological players” would have very bad effects overall — for it would mean shrugging while the culture selects against clever, bookish, and technologically adept people. They are, in other words, quietly worried that current civilisation is shrinking the future pool of what a Bay Area rationalist is bound to see as the keystone of our genetic heritage: IQ.

They tread carefully around the topic, no doubt mindful of its radioactive connotations. But Malcolm comes close to spelling out the implications when he tells me that, based on research he’s read, “we may see about a one standard deviation drop in IQ in the developed world in the next 75 years, due to genetic reasons”. That is: the smartest people are deleting themselves from the gene pool.

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The Collinses clearly accept that whatever form of human culture makes it to the other side of the current demographic pinch-point will be a brutal survival of the fittest — where “fit” doesn’t necessarily accord with their preferred values. But though they studiously route round any explicit moral statement that might impose coercive obligations on someone else, it’s clear that the Collinses would prefer at least some of the winning demographic subcultures to be high-IQ people with technological capabilities, and a willingness to tolerate different viewpoints. They emphasise that they are firmly against eugenics, where this represents any top-down value-statement about or intervention in the gene pool. But it’s also clear that, albeit in an opt-in, you-do-you Bay Area way, they think there are better and worse ways that gene pool could develop in the future.

To this end, they’re more than happy to collaborate with any group — even those far more authoritarian or anti-tech than they are — if the common goal is reversing what they perceive as the current negative trend. In their view, it’s not for some time — Malcolm suggests, “in 300 or 400 years” — that this coalition might fall to infighting, as pluralistic and technophilic factions such as theirs battle “religious, fundamentalist, xenophobic groups that believe that there can only be one religious group and one ethnic group in the world”. In such a scenario, they accept, “a lot of the conservative pronatalist groups will come into conflict because some are more pluralistic than others”.

In the meantime, though, they see what they’re doing as salvage work, preserving as much of a dying culture as they can. “We have seen this before in the Roman Empire,” they say, “this collapse scenario. Anyone who doesn’t think that we are entering a dark age right now is delusional. We need to begin to round the wagons, to defend as much of our civilisation as we can, so that we can use it going forwards.”

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It’s possible, I put to them, that the rationalistic, high-tech culture they are trying to preserve is too deeply implicated in the “global monoculture” they deplore to be disaggregated — indeed, that it may be driving the problem. Malcolm shrugs. It’s possible, he tells me. But the Collinses are content nonetheless to pursue their bet, and to see who turns out to be right.

Despite our differences on reproductive technologies, I suspect the Collinses and I are more aligned than not — on, if nothing else, devotion to reading the cultural tea-leaves, and extrapolating from the patterns we recognise. Some who do this, such as William Gibson, set out what they see via the written word to sometimes near-prophetic effect. Others, such as the Collinses, work as hard as they can in the real world, to turn the direction of events toward or away from patterns they see on the horizon.

But whatever the longer-term impact of the Collinses’ interventions will be, they’re right to see their beloved culture of logical, rationalistic, high-openness risk-takers as endangered. And there’s a lesson there for liberals of both Right and Left, even a long way from Silicon Valley. For if the traits most immediately at risk are openness, high cognitive ability, and an appreciation for education: those, in a word, commonest in liberals. If the Collinses’ read is right on the larger patterns, and I think it is, those who value intelligence and openness need to be a great deal more deliberate about “rounding the wagons” to protect the values and cultural practices they cherish – including via efforts to inculcate these traits and cultures in the next generation, or indeed to produce a next generation at all.

If this doesn’t happen, all those clever, tolerant, bookish types, many of whom currently leap to denounce voices like the Collinses as at least “far-right” adjacent, may wake up in a generation or so, to find they missed the chance to hand on their own genetic and cultural legacy. And that instead, in a fit of short-sighted self-righteousness, they gifted the world to the only people still having children: their enemies.