In continuing to unpack the ideologies of the oligarchs who are part of the new Trump administration, Iain Davis examines how their ideas are being translated into policy. He considers the consequent infrastructure rollout that is preparing the US and the world for an imminent Gov-corp Technate within a multipolar world.
In Part 1 of this series, we explored the political philosophies that have long been adopted and promoted by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and considered the implications, given both men’s obvious influence on the Trump administration. Musk is a high-profile advocate of Technocracy, and Peter Thiel is an accelerationist neoreactionary who favours, in particular, the Dark Enlightenment. Before you read this article (Part 2), I urge you to familiarise yourself with the explanations of Technocracy and the NRx (the neoreactionary movement) provided in Part 1. Otherwise, many of the references here will lack context.
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As we noted in Part 1, Thiel and Musk are part of the oligarchic class by virtue of being invited to join a network led by other oligarchs whose stratospheric wealth far surpasses that of the names published on the “richest people in the world” lists. Welcomed into their exclusive club, Thiel and Musk are made men. In Part 2, we will explore how the political philosophies and the associated economic theories of Thiel and Musk are shaping public policy. Keep in mind that these two men are far from alone in attempting to create an American gov-corp Technate.
Libertarian Technocrats?
Although they borrow some libertarian ideas, there is nothing truly “libertarian” about either technocrats or accelerationist neoreactionaries. Their convoluted theories, once applied, could not be more authoritarian, more anti-liberty. Just as it is an oxymoron to describe Musk as a “libertarian technocrat,” so is it absurd to think of Peter Thiel as an “anarcho-capitalist.” Yet propagandists persist in encouraging us to see them in these terms. Witness a 2014 article in The Atlantic titled “The Libertarian Capitalist’s Case for State Power and Making No Money.”
It is possible that people like Thiel and Musk self-identify as libertarians because they think “liberty” means freedom granted by — and to — the oligarchy.
In Part 1, we referenced the Venetian Republic. The Doge of Venice was the ruler of the banking, finance, and commercial empire of the Venetian Republic. That is to say, the Doge was given the liberty to rule by the oligarchs of the day. We might wonder if the naming of the Department of Government Efficiency (the DOGE) that Musk leads deliberately references the Venetian magistrate. Some say it does, while others suggest another possibility.
Created as a joke in 2013 by cryptographers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, the Dogecoin, a memecoin, has seen its price and market cap soar and fluctuate wildly thanks in no small measure to Elon Musk’s comments about it. Much of Musk’s talk about Dogecoin has been deliberately provocative. For example, in 2019 he declared himself the “former CEO of Dogecoin,” though that was never the case. His social media posts alone have provoked major changes in the price of Dogecoin. Musk has also aggressively hiked its value by, for instance, hinting it might become the basis of the proposed “X pay” payment system on his newly acquired ‘X’ platform — formerly Twitter.
Musk encouraged bullish investment in Dogecoin. Of course, just because someone encourages you to do something that doesn’t negate your personal responsibility to conduct due diligence. When some investors lost their shirts, as Dogecoin prices tumbled, they tried to sue Musk in 2022 with a potential $258 billion class action lawsuit. The case was dismissed last year. The judge ruled that Musk’s comments were just “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified.” Though it is worth noting the offhand comments of one man took the Dogecoin from a literal joke — a crypto parody — to achieving a market capitalisation of $14.5 billion in 2021.
If there is an in-joke to the naming of the DOGE, nominally led by Elon Musk, some argue it is Musk’s fondness for the Dogecoin that is reflected in the D.O.G.E acronym. Yet, the symbolism of “the Doge ”— one who is granted the liberty to rule by oligarchs — is perhaps more conspicuous. Just as with the term “Accelerator” — meaning high-impact investment to accelerate the growth of a startup — an obvious underpinning ideology is implied, even if rarely discussed.
In the introduction to his 2012 treatise, “The Dark Enlightenment,” political philosopher Nick Land highlighted the importance of an article written three years earlier by oligarch Thiel.
Land wrote:
One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In a related article Thiel penned, titled “The Education of a Libertarian,” he was describing himself, and yet the personal philosophy he outlined in it was pure accelerationist neoreactionism.
Thiel opined that “the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed,” given that the government’s response to every crisis was “more government.” He also claimed that the post-WWI deflationary depression in Western nations was the last “sharp but short” shock to have allowed the alleged advantages of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” to flourish. After that depression, he said, so-called “democratic” politics had stifled the opportunities to capitalise on crises. As a result, Thiel said he no longer believed “that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world.”
Asserting, in so many words, that democracies were useless, Thiel announced he had found a new life goal:
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.” The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.
For Thiel, the “unthinking demos” is us: the holders of the “neo-puritan faith” in progressive “social democracy” — the acolytes of the Cathedral (and the people whom Nick Land considers “inarticulate proles”). In Thiel’s view, we must embrace our “technoplastic” future, become intelligible, move beyond politics, and liberate capitalist innovation by swearing fealty to the gov-corp model.
To this end, Thiel identified three “technological frontiers” upon which he could construct his darkly enlightened aristocracy.
[1] Cyberspace was the first frontier he identified. There, Thiel focused on creating “a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution.” Cyberspace would enable “new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states” — and would result in a new world that would “force change on the existing social and political order.”
[2] Outer space would be another Thiel frontier, where the “libertarian future of classic science fiction” could be built.
[3] Seasteading would be his interim frontier, where the unclaimed oceans could be settled by humans. He called seasteading “more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel.” Seasteading would at least give us the time to develop the outer-space ideas on earth, prior to colonising the stars.
These frontiers are necessary, Thiel insisted, because “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” He concluded:
We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person [Trump?] who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. [Emphasis added.]
Between 2006 and 2012, Thiel was instrumental in organising the Singularity Summits convened by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute — originally the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) — in partnership with Stanford University. Thiel provided much of the funding.
Thiel cannot be both an advocate of accelerationist neoreaction and simultaneously an anarcho-capitalist — a libertarian. The two philosophies are mutually exclusive.
In Part 1, we noted the technocrats’ rejection of the notion that “all men are created equal.” In a similar vein, Land, Yarvin, Fisher, and other accelerationists consider it essential to have a ruling entity, which can only be comprised of a few human beings exercising an unequal, additional right to rule. Both the technocrats and the accelerationists fundamentally misunderstand, or misinterpret, what the Preamble to The Declaration of Independence means. They completely ignore the second clause of the relevant declaration — namely, “that they [human beings] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“Equality,” in real libertarian thinking, does not infer a held belief that everyone is the same — though that is certainly how technocrats interpret the word.
Libertarian “equality” doesn’t deny that people have relative strengths and weaknesses. It is not a rejection of either leadership or possible forms of meritocracy. It self-evidently means that every human being has an equal right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These rights are unalienable — or inalienable. Our rights are not decided for us by others or limited by others, and no one on earth has any more or any fewer “equal rights” than anyone else.
This idea is not difficult to grasp. It is central to the political philosophy of anarcho-capitalism, as clearly enunciated by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995):
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[N]o man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else.
Anarcho-capitalism wholeheartedly rejects the initiation of the use of force — the aggressive imposition of claimed authority — by the state to coerce individual persons or seize their property. An example is the threat of fining or imprisoning someone who hasn’t paid taxes to the “proper” authorities. Anarcho-capitalism resoundingly rejects the state and all its dictatorial demands.
By contrast, the proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise. Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.
What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.
