Taking the Politics of Technology Seriously -- Guest Post by Jeffrey L. Vagle
We are only a few weeks into the second Trump presidency, and it is already quite clear that the confluence of interests that has put the Silicon Valley Ideology in the White House is rapidly—and chaotically—dismantling the political, economic, legal, and social institutions and structures that have held this country together as a democratic republic. Our failure to recognize and take seriously the Silicon Valley Ideology has led us to this moment, and things will only get worse if we continue to ignore or, even worse, decide to accept it as our nation’s new guiding philosophy.
In 1997, as a great wave of technological optimism was beginning to crest, Langdon Winner was invited to share his thoughts on our bright tech future at the Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery and held at Erasmus Universiteit in Rotterdam. Winner, a political theorist known for his critical studies of science, technology, and culture, was perhaps best known for his 1980 article “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, which described how technologies can become institutions unto themselves, promoting some social interests while hindering others. In his CEPE keynote, Winner identified the ideology that had been emerging out of the technology industry and its environs, calling it cyberlibertarianism.
Cyberlibertarianism, according to Winner, was the “collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics in the years to come.” Winner expressed concern at the philosophy’s enthusiastic adoption of technological determinism, radical individualism, and Austrian/Chicago school economics. Cyberlibertarianism packaged these ideas not only as a means that would “liberate humankind by generating unprecedented levels of wealth,” but was also inevitable, quoting Stewart Brand, who advised Wired readers that “[t]echnology is rapidly accelerating and you have to keep up.” But perhaps most insidiously to Winner, the movement had successfully positioned itself as the only way forward for a better world, better societies, a better humanity.
Some of these ideas had been percolating in the United States since the turn of the 20th century, when the term “technocracy” was coined to describe the control of government by engineers and scientists who could apply their technical competence and expertise to efficiently solve all of society’s problems, which was itself based upon earlier ideas promoted by Sainte-Simon, Comte, and Weber. A Technocracy Movement emerged in the United States in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression, led by engineers who argued that the only way for humanity to move forward was through the cold, rational administration of current scientific, sociological, and economic theories by technical elites, and simultaneously putting aside the corrupt and inefficient methods of our current system of government. And while the Technocracy Movement itself saw little success, the ideas it embraced have became embedded in pockets of American political thought, as illustrated in the 1978 writings of Daniel Boorstin, who held on to the idea that technocratic rule would transcend ideology and politics, and would therefore eliminate “tribalism, nationalism, the crusading spirit in religion, bigotry, censorship, racism, persecution, immigration and emigration restrictions, tariffs, and chauvinism.”
In 1995, Barbrook and Cameron described the evolution of the technocratic philosophy, especially as it was manifested in geographic areas where the explosive growth of the technology industry had taken root since the advent of the computer, as “a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism,” which had been “embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself.” They called this the Californian Ideology, as it “emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley,” and carried forward the ideals of the technocrats by “combin[ing] the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” sharing a “profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” According to the Californian Ideology, everyone who embraced this updated technocratic vision would enter a “digital utopia,” a technological “Jeffersonian democracy,” where everyone would be free, hip, and rich.
But Barbrook and Cameron, along with Winner, David Golumbia, and many others, have been pointing out the darker side of cyberlibertarianism since its earliest technocratic manifestations. Winner saw the optimistic communitarianism being promoted by this ideology as a screen that obscured the realities based in power dynamics that were necessarily implied by its tenets. For example, cyberlibertarians regularly promoted the argument that “cyberspace,” a term with many meanings, but one that generally connotes our experience with digital technologies, which can become a kind of mediated reality, is owned by “the people,” and not by governments. What “the people” actually means, however, is something closer to simple private ownership, which in turn defaults to technology and telecommunications companies. This has naturally led to concentrations of power in cyberspace, accompanied by negative effects like the squelching of viewpoints deemed unfriendly or unhelpful to those powers.
In addition to these more foreseeable outcomes, cyberlibertarianism has embraced far right philosophies and political theories that belie their earlier messages of community and freedom. At first glance, the libertarian ideas touted by the early Silicon Valley pioneers and the tenets of far-right thought might seem odd, but in hindsight, the paths from libertarianism to transhumanism to cypherpunk anarcho-capitalism to singularity theory, taken to their logical conclusions, merge well with fascist and neoreactionary philosophies. Proponents of these philosophies, writing under movements such as the Dark Enlightenment, rationalism, neoreactionism (NRx), and TESCREAL, advocate for a dismantling of the “Cathedral” (universities and the mainstream press), replacing democracy with a CEO-led monarchy, transferring all state administrative power to the technology industry, and establishing the option of “exit” from democratic society by the technology elite to form their own corporate states.
These ideas have gained a significant amount of traction among leaders in the technology industry. Peter Thiel was an early adopter, expressing such right-wing thoughts in the conservative Stanford Review while he was an undergraduate there, writing on such topics as the need to preserve “Western Culture” when the university proposed adding non-white authors to a course on the subject. Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan argued for a “society run by Silicon Valley,” and a founder of that firm, Marc Andreessen, has argued that concepts like “sustainability,” “social responsibility,” “tech ethics,” the Precautionary Principle, and “trust and safety,” are the enemy, an “ivory tower” filled with “know-it-all credentialed expert[s],” and who reportedly disparaged those living in economically depressed areas of the country, saying that he was “glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
This merger of cyberlibertarianism with far-right philosophies has been becoming something new and dangerous over the past few decades. Where it had once been limited to expected—if sometimes extreme—ideas about free markets and regulation, it has embraced anti-democratic and neoreactionary philosophies that have developed into an ideology that goes beyond what it had once been and is in ways greater than the sum of its parts. I call this accreted philosophy the Silicon Valley Ideology, a term that is meant to describe fully the collection of ideas that have now established themselves at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
The Silicon Valley Ideology became part of the mainstream through a confluence of interests that have manifested through Trumpism and its dominance within the Republican Party, resulting in a loose, but powerful, coalition that has put Silicon Valley Idealogues’ hands directly on the levers of power within the federal government. This confluence of interests can perhaps be best thought of as a kind of pyramid, with the base consisting of bog-standard free market ideologies of capital and markets, the middle an increasing willingness to ignore or run afoul of laws and regulations, and the top as the corporatist fascism being touted by people like Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump. And while the first two layers of the pyramid have been around for some time, it took a Trump presidency to add the capstone, the last steps occurring in a Hemingwayesque manner: “Gradually and then suddenly.”