Tech oligarchs impose their prophetic visions | Opinion

Witnessing the profusion of bold, often baffling, occasionally horrifying ideas from America’s tech elite delivers a disorienting thrill. Silicon Valley’s solutionist overdose has inflated an ideas bubble rivaling its financial ones — a marketplace where grand narratives appreciate faster than stock optionsConsider the heresies of investors such as Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, with his idea of the “network state,” conjures blockchain fiefdoms with à la carte citizenship and pay-per-view police forces, while the latter pines for oceanic platforms where the wealthy might float beyond government reachElsewhere, Sam Altman drafts planetary blueprints for AI (non-)regulation, while crypto acolytes (Marc Andreessen, David Sacks), aspiring celestial colonizers (Musk, Bezos), and nuclear revivalists (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Altman) offer their own grandiose, exciting solutions to problems of seemingly unknown origin.But more mundane subjects, from foreign policy to defense, increasingly preoccupy them too. Eric Schmidt penned two books with Henry Kissinger and regularly contributes to the likes of Foreign Affairs. Palantir’s Alex Karp likes to pose as scrappy David battling the spendthrift Goliaths of the Pentagon.As result, speculation on the future of warfare, once the cloistered domain of “defense intellectuals” mumbling into their tweed at RAND Corporation, plays as prime-time entertainment.RAND’s “specific intellectuals,” who earned their authority through specialized technical mastery, appear quaint. How can they match the braggadocio of Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, the VR wunderkind turned defense contractor, who struts through interviews announcing himself “a propagandist” willing to “twist the truth.”In this reordered pantheon, the sober analyst of the Cold War era yields to a new archetype, the tech founder: spectacularly wealthy, celebrity-conscious, and ideologically shameless, more “public offering” than “public intellectual.”These new types of thinkers are not to be dismissed. For one, they manufacture ideas with assembly-line efficiency: their blog posts, podcasts, and Substacks arrive with the subtlety of freight trains. And their “hot takes,” despite vulgar packaging, are often grounded in distinct philosophical traditions.And it’s full of strange, unlikely hits: Albert O. Hirschman would surely be surprised to see the powerful analytic of his Exit, Voice, and Loyalty fueling efforts to build network states, private cities, and seasteads.Thiel’s much-discussed dalliances with Leo Strauss and René Girard constitute just one branch of this philosophical family tree. Another, more robust limb belongs to Karp, whose doctoral thesis on Adorno and Talcott Parsons now serves as intellectual ballast for Palantir’s surveillance empire. His communications with investors arrive garnished with erudite citations; Samuel Huntington made a recent appearance.Yet, somehow, Karp’s realpolitik-for-optimists feels decidedly un-Adornian. “America’s ability to organize violence in a superior way,” he announced on Fox Business in March, “is the single reason why the world improved over the last… 70-80 years.”Karp’s militant rhetoric exposes Silicon Valley’s impatience with thought unmoored from action. Marx would surely toast their pivot to praxis: instead of just “arguing the world,” they have the will, the means — and now, apparently, the “Big Balls” — to change it.The taxonomic vocabularies we’ve relied upon — elites, oligarchs, public intellectuals — falter before this new species. Silicon Valley’s philosopher-kings aren’t merely the patrons of yesteryear bankrolling think tanks or non-profits. They’ve engineered a more muscular hybrid: investment portfolios that function as philosophical arguments, market positions that operationalize convictions. And while industrial-age billionaires constructed foundations to memorialize their worldviews, these figures erect investment funds that double as ideological fortresses.Consider the battleground of ethical investment — that corporate confessional branded ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), where Wall Street’s dubious attempt to measure virtue like a quarterly earnings report has mutated into a culture war flashpoint.Companies receive ESG scores that purportedly measure their environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and governance practices — a sort of moral credit rating for corporations eager to prove they’ve evolved beyond strip-mining both nature and human dignity.What’s peculiar — almost perversely fascinating — is how Silicon Valley’s elites have positioned their artillery on this battlefield, so seemingly distant from their digital kingdoms. The drama, much of it unfolding in the past few years, proceeded with mechanical inevitability: Musk’s dismissal (“a scam”), Chamath Palihapitiya’s denunciation (“complete fraud”), Andreessen’s burial rites (”zombie idea“).Yet, when praxis beckons, Silicon Valley answers with investment, not mere philanthropy. Thiel, having compared ESG to Chinese communism, bankrolled Strive Asset Management, an anti-ESG fund. Andreessen, having backed a Christian pro-MAGA fund called New Founding, also helped to seed 1789 Capital, another anti-ESG rampart now fortified by Don Trump Jr. Their genius? Converting intellectual positions into market arbitrage while wielding (and often owning) digital megaphones to reshape the very reality their investments bet against.While the likes of Andreessen cosplay as America’s plucky “Little Tech‚” what if they are something bigger than this pantomime suggests? Has Silicon Valley’s intellectual imprint carved deeper grooves than we realized?A hypothesis dangles before us, thorny and disquieting: what if our multi-tasking tech elites are the very forces — cunning, mighty, occasionally delusional — driving the “structural transformation” of the public sphere that Jürgen Habermas diagnosed in his early writings?The young Habermas — before systems theory bloated his prose and nuance diluted his fury — identified the villain with brass-knuckled clarity: the decline of critical, open debate was due to the corrupting influence of concentrated power. Truer words have never been spoken. And yet… Updating his 1962 analysis in 2023, Habermas, the patrician-academic, chose to fuss over topics like “algorithmic steering”— a quaint concern akin to adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole.Today, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the tech oligarchs — not their algorithmically-steered platforms — who present the greater danger. Their arsenal combines three deadly implements: plutocratic gravity (fortunes so vast they distort reality’s basic physics), oracular authority (their technological visions treated as inevitable prophecy), and platform sovereignty (ownership of the digital intersections where society’s conversation unfolds). Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), Andreessen’s strategic investments into Substack, Peter Thiel’s courting of Rumble, the conservative YouTube: they’ve colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld.We must update our taxonomies to account for this new species of oligarch-intellectuals. How should we situate such figures in established debates about intellectuals? In the late 1980s, Zygmunt Bauman mapped two intellectual archetypes: the “legislators,” who descended from mountaintops with society’s commandments etched in stone, and the “interpreters,” who merely translated between cultural dialects without prescribing universal rules. He traced postmodernity’s erosion of the legislative stance. Grand narratives died. Universal authority withered. All that remained was interpretation.Our oligarch-intellectuals begin as interpreters par excellence. They position themselves as technological mediums, passive channels for inevitable futures. Their special gift? Reading the tea leaves of technological determinism with perfect clarity. They don’t prescribe; they merely translate the gospel of inevitability. This performs the “intellectual” function of their double-helix identity.But the oligarchic DNA strand coils tighter. Armed with their prophetic visions, they demand specific sacrifices — from the public, the government, and their employees. Altman jetsets between capitals like a tech Kissinger, offering peace treaties for AI wars that have not even begun. Musk diagrams humanity’s cosmic destiny with the certainty of a Soviet five-year plan. Thiel and Karp redraft defense strategy while Andreessen reimagines money and Srinivasan governance. Their interpretive gift transforms, chameleon-like, into legislative mandate.In the process, Silicon Valley’s oligarch-intellectuals have built cathedral doors from what postmodernists once declared rubble: a grand narrative with “technology” (but also: “disruption,” “innovation,” “AGI”) inscribed on every stone, heavy with the weight of inevitability. They thumb through tomes like Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants not as readers but as editors, penciling in their own imperatives between the lines. The tech mogul, once content to predict the future, now demands we conform to it.An image of Elon Musk on a screen in Times Square, New York, last March.Eduardo Muñoz Alvarez/VIEWpress/Getty Images)Where RAND’s Cold Warriors may have whispered into Pentagon corridors, our oligarch-intellectuals orchestrate reality’s symphony — controlling media platforms, deploying venture capital like carpet bombs, and perfecting Steve Bannon’s “flooding the zone” strategy to a hydraulic science. Combining powers previously scattered across societal domains, they propose futures Monday, finance them Tuesday, and force their manifestation by Friday. And who questions prophets whose previous revelations birthed PayPal, Tesla, and ChatGPT? Their divine right to predict derives from their proven divinity.Their pronouncements frame the entrenchment and expansion of their own agendas not as corporate self-interest but as capitalism’s only chance at salvation. Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto“ — that digital encyclical urging America to “build” rather than lament — drips with references to economic stagnation and prescribes entrepreneurial daring as the only antidote to systemic sclerosis. Invoking Nietzsche and Marinetti, he legislates acceleration as virtue and condemns the cautionary impulse as heresy. “We believe that there is no material problem,” he intones, “that cannot be solved with more technology.”Thiel, in his continued insistance that the West has lost its capacity for bold innovations, also conjures an image of a technological desert that must be irrigated by Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Altman performs a nimble two-step: first declaring AI will devour jobs, then extending universal basic income as the only logical solution. These aren’t just self-serving bromides but existential imperatives: reject their proposals and watch civilization crumble to dust.This messianic self-promotion — tech oligarchs crowning themselves humanity’s official spokesmen—would have Antonio Gramsci reaching for his prison notebooks. The Italian Marxist theorized “organic intellectuals” as voices emerging from ascendant classes, especially the proletariat, who translate particular interests into universal imperatives in the battle for cultural hegemony. The bitter punchline? Capital has beaten the left at its own game—oligarch-intellectuals now serve as capital’s unanointed organic intellectuals, with capitalism perfecting in a decade what socialists couldn’t achieve in a century.Between the cold arithmetic of profit-seeking and the messianic theater of civilization-saving stretches the oligarch-intellectuals’ most revealing contradiction: they must extinguish the very revolutionary flames their empires were kindled to ignite. Their obsessive campaign against “wokeness” reveals power’s oldest reflex — containment of its own contradictions.Watch Musk denounce the “woke mind virus” or Karp attack wokeness as “a form of thin pagan religion.” Andreessen, meanwhile, paints elite universities as Marxist seminaries producing “America-hating communists.” Joe Lonsdale, another tech mogul (and a co-founder of Palantir) has been the driving force behind the University of Austin — the anti-woke university hoping to mass produce “America-loving capitalists.”Tracing the origins of this oligarchic anxiety requires revisiting the theory of the “New Class” advanced by the radical American sociologist Alvin Gouldner in the 1970s. Gouldner identified a “technical intelligentsia” whose very DNA carried revolutionary potential. Though they appeared docile — “wishing nothing more than to enjoy their opiate obsessions with technical puzzles” — their fundamental purpose was to “revolutionize technology continually,” to worship yesterday’s gods.The New Class alliance that Gouldner envisioned — that between rational engineers and cultural intellectuals — would challenge entrenched capital. As subsequent decades have shown, this utopia never quite materialized (though reactionaries like Bannon and Curtis Yarvin, with his conspiratorial notion of “the Cathedral,” might beg to differ).Yet Silicon Valley emerged as a strange exception. Its rank-and-file — if not always its generals — marinated in the countercultural ideals such as diversity and flattened hierarchies. Researchers probing tech’s trenches even detect an emerging “post-neoliberal subjectivity,” a consciousness allergic to issues such as inequality.The evidence isn’t merely anecdotal. A comprehensive 2023 study tracking political donations of 200,000 employees across 18 industries revealed tech workers as uniquely anti-establishment — and trailing only the bohemians of arts and entertainment in their liberal fervor.Most revealing in that study was the cavernous gap between liberal tech workers and their right-leaning bosses — a schism wider than in all but two other industries. That gap proved a ticking time bomb, which exploded at the start of the first Trump administration. Catalyzed by its clumsily executed but aggressive policies — on immigration, race, war — Silicon Valley’s “technical intelligentsia” transformed from compliant keystrokers into digital dissidents.The oligarchs found themselves ambushed from within — their liberal-leaning legions suddenly refusing to drape their technical artistry over the Pentagon’s blood machines or ICE’s deportation directive. These revolts — at Google, Microsoft, Amazon — threatened not merely contractual agreements but the very covenant that bound Silicon Valley to the military-industrial complex.The rebellion’s second front — climate consciousness — emerged with evangelical fervor when Amazon’s employees issued their green manifesto, declaring themselves capable of “redefining what is possible” for planetary salvation.For the oligarchs, this dual rebellion against militarism and for environmental stewardship — never mind other headaches like ESG — presented a malignant tumor requiring swift excision.Unable to reprogram their workforce through direct means, Silicon Valley’s oligarch-intellectuals adopted a more elegant solution: condemning “woke” infiltration with the fervor of medieval witch-hunters while disguising national security behind the rhetoric of patriotic duty.Karp, having already crowned “wokeness” the “central risk to Palantir and America,” now demands geopolitical fealty from his payroll peasantry. They must support Israel and oppose China; those who disagree are free to look for employment elsewhere. Recently, Andreessen even confided to the Times that it wasn’t uncommon to suspect that some employees were joining tech companies with the explicit goal of destroying them from within.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking in Seoul last February.Chris Jung (NurPhoto/Getty Images)The playbook behind all these declarations is brutally simple: re-align the tech intelligentsia with old-money power by cleansing them of any subversive thought. And it’s as a result of executing this strategy, that oligarch-intellectuals have emerged a stable and coherent social entity. They certainly won’t be retiring even after quashing their woke and ESG-loving enemies.In Trump’s Washington, they arrive not as guests but as architects. Their reality-bending machinery — money hydraulics, platform dominance, bureaucracies kneeling to translate private fantasy into public policy — wields unprecedented force. Carnegie and Rockefeller commanded respect but lacked this lethal arsenal: social media thunderbox, celebrity aura, venture capital chainsaw, West Wing passkey. By rewriting regulations, channeling subsidies, and recalibrating public expectations, they transmute fever dreams — blockchain fiefdoms, Martian homesteads — into seemingly plausible futures.Fortunately, what appears as the monolithic fortress of techno-oligarchic power conceals structural flaws invisible to worshipful observers. Their apparent capacity to bend reality to their will paradoxically undermines itself by constructing echo chambers that asphyxiate essential criticism, all while celebrating free expression.Divorced from the caustic touch of unvarnished facts, these Silicon Valley pontiffs lose their navigational instruments. And in a landscape already littered with founder worship, contact with unfiltered truth grows scarcer.This is one of the many ways in which politics is very much not like business. Standard venture capitalism still faces the market’s cold judgment. VCs who crowned WeWork the future of work watched pandemic realities puncture their bubble. The market, however flawed, regularly tests one’s investment hypotheses.But oligarchic power offers a darker temptation: why adjust predictions to match reality when you can bend reality to validate predictions? When Andreessen Horowitz anoints cryptocurrency as banking’s inevitable successor, the next step isn’t adaptation but activation — deploying Trump administration influence to transmute prophecy into policy.The collision between venture fantasies and stubborn facts becomes avoidable when you own the levers to reconfigure the facts themselves. This, then, is the final gambit: oligarch-intellectuals reconfiguring legislation, institutions, and cultural expectations until prophecy and reality fuse into a single hallucination (courtesy of ChatGPT, of course).Reality, however, maintains its breaking point — a lesson Soviet bureaucrats learned when their carefully constructed fictions shattered against material constraints. The Chinese Communist Party, shrewder in its methods, built multi-tiered grievance collection systems — digital forums, local officials, vetted NGOs — delivering crucial intelligence about potential turmoil.The oligarch-intellectuals demonstrate precisely the opposite instinct: they are treading the Soviet path. Musk’s DOGE apparatus converts remaining employees into nodding mannequins, while his cohort hunts dissenters across digital platforms with algorithmic efficiency. In selecting Soviet-style reality denial over Chinese-style reality monitoring, they’ve fashioned echo chambers that will ultimately fracture their grand designs.The irony cuts to the bone: these men who see communists lurking everywhere are about to perfect the cardinal sin of Soviet technocracy, mistaking their sleek models for the unruly reality they pretend to tame.We shouldn’t really be all that surprised: when oligarch-intellectuals seize history’s most powerful apparatus, they transform, inevitably, into apparatchiks — this time, holidaying by the makeshift tents of Burning Man rather than at the swanky sanatoriums of Crimea. Elon Musk might have started as a Henry Ford but he will exit as a Leonid Brezhnev.Evgeny Morozov (Soligorsk, Belarus, 1984) has a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University, is the founder of The Syllabus (a knowledge curation platform), and the author of To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2015).The complete version of this article was first published on The Ideas Letter.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition