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    Doge wants to replace our institutions with a tech utopia. It won’t work | Mike Pepi

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    Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.Doge’s website dubiously claims $190bn in savings. The receipts show that they are less about efficiency than they are aimed at effective dissolution, a fate met by USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign assistance.Don’t be fooled. These brash new reductions are not just your garden-variety small-government crusades or culture-war skirmishes. This administration’s war on institutions derives from the newfound power of Silicon Valley ideology – a techno-determinism that views each institution’s function as potential raw material for capture by private digital platforms.All the while, Elon Musk sold the White House on an “AI-first strategy” for the US government. The recent executive order Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence mandates that barely tested Silicon Valley AI be jammed into the government’s work. It directs agencies to use AI to “lessen the burden of bureaucratic restrictions”. This is a thinly veiled attempt not just to reduce institutional activities; it’s also a degradation play.Doge makes plain an often misunderstood tension: Silicon Valley’s final dream is a world without institutions. Since the rise of the internet, startups have long encouraged, and profited from, institutional decline. This anti-institutionalism goes back to the roots of computing. Charles Babbage’s difference engine, central to modern computing, was built on technologies meant to control labor. It was a reflection of Babbage’s belief that the highest intention of the factory manager was to reduce the skill and cognitive complexity of laborers’ tasks. If the machine could manage production, humans – now smoothed-out automatons – would hardly need accompanying social protections, or even any governance at all.In 1948, Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine”. This automated governance was eventually brought into direct competition with public institutions. The revolt against the state took many forms in the history of computing thereafter, from the libertarian California ideology (“information wants to be free”) to the very idea that a new “cyberspace” would be liberated from governments. Here the individual is an entrepreneur of the mind, able to instantly improve their lot without the mediating hand of the institutional form.To get to the real heart of Doge’s ideology, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s manifesto on building open-source software. For Raymond, cathedrals are “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. This slow, deliberate work is no match for the networked and digitally enabled bazaar, where many software developers move fast by releasing early and often, delegate everything they can, and are open to the point of promiscuity. Something like scripture for computer engineers, Raymond’s ideas soon jumped out of the network and into governance of the physical world, where all human organizations were scrutinized as the maligned “cathedral”.Entrepreneurs loved this idea, too. The management method known as the “lean startup” is a lightweight program of data-driven optimizations designed to quickly scale businesses. Instead of human labor and judgment, lean startups use data and algorithms to experiment their way toward governance.But there’s a catch: a public institution is not supposed to be run like a digital startup. Silicon Valley may have carved out a niche in which its organizational philosophies mastered food delivery apps, AI girlfriends and money-laundering shitcoins, but the moment they take these methods to institutions entrusted with public welfare, they’ve lost the plot. Governments don’t have customers – they care for citizens. If classical liberalism had the state and its many sovereign institutions, and neoliberalism had the divine hand of the free market, today’s platform class elevates computation as the ultimate arbiter of truth. When presented with an institutional force, the platform class first asks: how could this be delivered by way of a digital platform?Digital technology doesn’t have to be this way. Good software can augment institutions, not be the rationale for their deletion. Building this future requires undoing Silicon Valley’s pernicious opposition to the institutional form. By giving into the digital utopian’s anti-institutionalism, we allowed them to reshape government according to their growth-at-all-costs logic.If the newly empowered digital utopianism goes unchecked, we face a platform-archy where black-box AI makes decisions once adjudicated through democratic institutions. This isn’t just a Silicon Valley efficiency fantasy; it’s on the roadmap of every authoritarian who ever sniffed power.Thankfully, the anti-Doge backlash was swift. The abrupt layoffs backfired, leading many Americans to fully understand just how much research and resources for advancing science, medicine and culture are tied to federal support.In the private sector, since capital is no longer free after the federal government hiked interest rates in 2022, the growth of the big Silicon Valley platforms have almost completely stalled. In search of an answer, Silicon Valley is making a big bet on AI, overwhelming users with automated answers that hallucinate and mislead at every turn. It’s becoming harder and harder for the average person to buy what the digital utopians are selling.The response to this assault on our institutions might be a kind of Digital New Deal – a public plan for institutions in the AI era. This 21st-century economics must go well beyond solving for mass unemployment. Reconstructing the institutional foundations of public goods such as journalism, libraries and higher education requires more than just restoring the public funds stripped by Doge. It will require forceful assertions about their regulatory value in the face of a fully automated slop state. Governments come and go, but free and open institutions are critical to the functioning of democracy. If we make the mistake of misrecognizing digital platforms for public institutions, we will not easily reverse Doge’s mistakes.

    Mike Pepi is a technologist and author who has written widely about the intersection between culture and the Internet. His book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, was published by Melville House in 2025 More

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      View image in fullscreenThe movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court.Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.Inspired by the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.View image in fullscreenOne might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).View image in fullscreenThe governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.View image in fullscreenNot so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”View image in fullscreenElon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.View image in fullscreenAs fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.View image in fullscreenAt the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism”, or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.View image in fullscreenAs the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys implanted into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, telling Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies, rebukes the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new datacenters calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”View image in fullscreenHis comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: according to Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”). There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to interview Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”View image in fullscreenHow do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.View image in fullscreenThat future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”Spot illustrations by Sophy Hollington More

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      Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? | Ben Davis

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      The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign More

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      I’m a recent Stem grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over

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      When my friends and I graduated with our math degrees this past May, we felt like we could do anything.After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs.That’s because, for decades, the progressive movement worldwide has failed to organize technical talent for its own interests.Upon graduation, an average science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) student often faces a binary choice between industry and academia: BlackRock or grad school. Sure, there’s a handful of research non-profits out there, like Radical Data or the inactive Algorithmic Justice League; but they mostly focus on advocacy instead of governance. While there is excellent progressive work in data science being done by organizations such as OpenSecrets, Split Ticket, ProPublica’s Data Store, and even Twitter accounts such as Stats for Lefties, there is no systematic effort by progressives to recruit technical talent at scale.Meanwhile, financial and tech industries begin targeting Stem students with aggressive recruitment tactics as early as freshman year: over time, these industries become the only careers students can imagine outside of grad school. It’s no wonder that Stem students are more conservative than humanities and social science students, even though scientists tend to be more liberal. There are really only two things you can do with a Stem degree: stay in the ivory tower, or – to paraphrase Audre Lorde – go build the master’s house.In an interview with Ross Douthat, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claims that the left alienated Silicon Valley because “companies are being hijacked as engines of social change”: gone are the days of the agitprop 1984 Apple ads, or the naive “coding for good” movements of the 2010s. After the term “Stem” was coined in 2001, the next two decades saw the further division of science and the humanities into two opposing, irreconcilable systems of knowledge at the institutional level. While educational policy-makers obsess over Stem enrollments, funding and research as metrics to assess an education’s worth, students were incentivized to concentrate on one discipline, all while a liberal arts education diminished in appeal and practical utility.This made a generation of Stem students into technical ideologues. Starting from high school olympiads, they learn to worship technical capability above all else – and value the acquisition of technical skills above everything else. In college, they are never taught problem-solving frameworks outside those offered by programming or economics courses: game theory, homo economicus, Pareto efficiency. Crucially, these approaches always attempt to simplify the world instead of tackling society’s complexities head on: simplifying, as an impulse, has given rise to neoliberal, Silicon Valley-funded social movements such as “effective altruism” that do nothing to tackle crucial inequalities. Without alternative paradigms, these theories become real and universal ways to see the world and solve its problems.And so, empowered by Trump and Musk, it is the rightist technocrats who get to change the world today. With flashy tech stacks and a blind confidence to code up a solution to any and every problem, they set out to fix our government once and for all, armed with only three principles – simplify, automate, optimize. And so Doge runs the government as if solving an optimization problem: cut employees, retain key workers, minimize losses, simplify the structure. But already, Doge is reinstating fired federal workers who were working on crucial issues. Classic tech bro blunder: what else did they expect from trying to solve the problems of society without even bothering to understand their nuances?As the technocrat right rises into power, a luddite left also emerges in America – a narrowing base of grassroots organizers, local politicians, activists, academics and non-profits, that increasingly disaffiliate from technology with fear and distrust. As technical industries become more explicitly aligned with the agendas of the new American right in the post-Covid years, there has been little effort from progressive political organizations to recruit self-starting hackers and radical technologists, who exist in abundance on the decentralized internet. Did anyone even try to scoop up the workers who walked out of Google in 2018? Now, in 2025, we realize that a generation of politically naive engineers have already built a singular matrix of algorithmic oppression and universal surveillance that we cannot opt out of. Today’s progressives not only do not understand technology; worse, we have completely ceded technological power to the right.The dearth of efforts to recruit technical talent on the left essentially create a failure of imagination. Talented young engineers fail to imagine how their skills can be used to challenge existing power structures, and movements fail to imagine how technology can be used as a tactic to seize power. As Justin Joque argued in Revolutionary Mathematics, progressive movements need technical people who “understand the current metaphysics of capitalism – not in order to de-reify them, but rather to understand how they can be replaced”. One wonders whether more sophisticated data scientists could have made past Democratic campaigns more effective, or whether a collaboration between engineers and progressive thinkers could have led to more online platforms such as Bluesky.In order to hack and dismantle the technocrat right, American progressives must teach the engineers to dream again. Today’s engineers may be hard at work building the master’s house, but with the right organization and renewed senses of purpose, they, too, can learn to turn the master’s tools against him.

      Jaye Chen is a writer based in New York City More

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      The left needs to abandon its miserable, irrational pessimism | Aaron Bastani

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      View image in fullscreenAt the start of the millennium it was widely presumed each successive generation would achieve a higher level of prosperity than the last. Today that is no longer the case. Just 19% of Americans expect their children’s lives to be better than their own, while two-thirds believe their country will be economically weaker by 2050.So our zeitgeist is increasingly one of pessimism, from anxiety about the climate crisis to concern over rising inequality. According to the historian Adam Tooze, we are living through a “polycrisis” – where such challenges are not only simultaneous but mutually reinforcing.Yet there is one sliver of society where optimism still reigns supreme: Silicon Valley.For a long time technological utopianism was a leftwing idea. Its patron saint was Edward Bellamy whose 19th-century novel, Looking Backward, was more influential among the American left than Marx and Engels. In Britain this perspective was best represented by Fabian socialism. Its rationale was alluringly simple: human progress was a corollary of technological development, with both needing scientific management. Over time, more complex technologies would require a larger state. And a larger state would require socialism.Today such thinking has been inverted, with supporters of market capitalism, and a minimal state, most optimistic about the future. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, even penned a “techno-optimist manifesto” last year – in part to counter the prevailing winds of despair. If nothing else it reveals how Silicon Valley thinks, with Andreesen expressing this with particular clarity when he writes how “there is no material problem   … that cannot be solved with more technology”.As the magazine Current Affairs observed, no evidence is forthcoming alongside such bombastic claims. For instance, when Andreessen writes how “central planning is a doom loop”, he conveniently omits how the development of the internet, solar cells, lithium batteries, the jet engine and nuclear power all relied on state-backed R&D. But while his screed is bizarre, uninformed and in parts even dangerous, he is right about one thing: our instinctive miserabilism, increasingly pervasive on the left, is unwarranted.Take recurrent arguments against having children. Choosing to have kids is a personal matter. Yet in recent years I’ve repeatedly encountered the claim that having descendants is immoral because of climate change. Even if you agree that ours is an age of polycrisis, this is absurd.After all, 100 years ago the average person, in one of the the world’s wealthiest societies, could expect to live until 40. Today global life expectancy is 73. In 19th-century England, between 40 and 60 women died in childbirth for every thousand births. Today that figure is seven for every 100,000. As Ezra Klein has noted, no serious climate models suggest a return to the world of 1950, let alone 1150. Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, nobody should have had children before our grandparents – in which case humanity should have long been extinct.Such irrational pessimism inflects how we view technology too. Yes, there are moral questions surrounding innovations like gene-editing and Crispr, but these same tools could eliminate thousands of inherited conditions – from sickle cell to Huntington’s disease. The 2030s may well be a decade of inflationary shocks and extreme weather events, but it could also herald the arrival of real-time language translation and cancer vaccines used by billions.View image in fullscreenIn their defence many pessimists acknowledge such developments – they are simply aware that any benefits will be unequally shared. This is particularly relevant for machine learning and the world of work. AI could add as much as $13tn to the global economy between 2017 and 2030. Given recent technological changes have, according to the World Bank, meant that “advanced economies face increasingly polarized labour markets and rising inequality”, concerns around who benefits from an innovation as potentially disruptive as the steam engine make sense. While some will get rich from its commercial applications, many more will lose jobs or see their wages squeezed. Ignoring that, and maintaining technology as somehow neutral, is a covert form of class war.The philosopher Alfred Whitehead once declared that the greatest invention of the Victorian age was the idea of invention itself. Yet as humanity mastered how to innovate, we progressively lost touch with why we should. This now seems to have reached its apogee with “effective accelerationists”, whose answer to every challenge is simply more technology. I can think of no idea more ill-suited for a world of polycrisis.So what is the alternative from the left if mindless tech optimism will only deepen problems heading our way?As with the right it should be a project of individual freedom. But such freedom should be understood as meaningless, or even destructive, if it generates unfreedom elsewhere. The economist Amartya Sen defined unfreedom as constraints beyond our control which undermine our ability to pursue lives of meaning. Inadequate access to food is a source of unfreedom, as is being homeless or not having an education. Franklin Roosevelt put it best when he said that “necessitous men are not free men”.If eliminating unfreedom is the end, then the creation of Universal Basic Services (UBS), is the means. These UBS comprise housing, healthcare, transport and education, should be free at the point of use, and funded by progressive taxation. Accessing them should be viewed as necessary for any citizen to fully participate in economic life. Indeed they are just as fundamental to a life of freedom as legal and political rights.Markets would still exist for things like cars, or silk ties, but the logic of profit wouldn’t apply to UBS. So rather than machine learning creating the conditions for the world’s first trillionaire, as gleefully predicted by Mark Cuban, it could provide the basis for a post-carbon, autonomous transport infrastructure, or free adult education throughout one’s life.Alongside UBS, the dividend of technological progress would also make possible a four-day week. After all, countries with a shorter working week enjoy higher levels of social capital, more volunteering and greater gender equality. What is more, those who work less report greater feelings of personal satisfaction. To be clear: this isn’t a post-work society, not least because, in our lifetimes at least, there will be enough work to go around with an ageing population and climate adaptation. But a four-day week should be to the 2030s what the eight-hour day was to the late 19th century.For all the extraordinary inventiveness of recent decades, perhaps our greatest technology remains the state – that unique vehicle for collective action. To create UBS, and expand leisure time for all, means believing in it once again. Indeed meaningful optimism about technology requires political demands and a specific vision for our collective future. Without that we are always at the whim of the 0.01%.

      Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media. He is also the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism More

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      ‘Musk? He’s horrendous’: Martha Lane Fox on diversity, tech bros and International Women’s Day

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      As Elon Musk grinned in the Oval Office, one of Britain’s most influential tech investors looked on in horror. “He is absolutely horrendous. I have said it multiple times: I think it is horrifying what is happening,” says Martha Lane Fox.For the British peer and ex-Twitter board member, the sight of Musk holding forth from the bully pulpit of Donald Trump’s White House shows the Silicon Valley dream has gone sour.“The richest man in the world, who can stand there alongside the president, and kind of carte blanche make jokes about how he’s carving up people’s jobs in the government. Then he can be there with a chainsaw laughing on stage…“It is really, really alarming, and I find it extremely unpleasant at a values-based level – but also, just how can we be watching this in plain sight? It makes me feel very anxious. I think it is gross.”In an interview with the Observer to mark International Women’s Day, the president of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) warned the diversity pushback orchestrated by Trump and his tech bro acolytes will not only damage society, but also the economy at large.Since his return to the White House, the US president has shut down all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is ripping up funding schemes.Some of the world’s biggest companies are following suit. Amid a wider pushback against everything from environmental targets to sustainable development, among the most prominent taking part are US finance and tech companies, including Goldman Sachs, Accenture and Amazon, while UK businesses such as GSK have also fallen in line.“He needs to be contained,” Lady Lane Fox says of Musk’s role in the rollback. “I find it extraordinary that the richest man in the world is trampling all over these things and that we still have kind of fanboying from the tech sector. It’s already been corrosive for society, and I would argue it is going to continue to be.”For businesses, she says the bottom line is that companies that take diversity seriously appeal to the widest possible employee talent pool and are better placed to target a broad range of customers. This, she adds, is about profit as much as social justice. However, she has a broader concern about the future.“The first thing, it’s financial. But the second thing, it’s about power and money – like everything, right?“If you’re looking at a sector like the digital sector, where there’s the growth in jobs, growth in opportunity – it is the growth sector in the economy. Yet you are not including a whole bunch of people in that. Then you are going to be creating inequality. Full stop. So it’s financial and it’s a question of social justice.”Given the close ties between Britain and the US, there is a view that where corporate America treads, the UK naturally follows. But there are signs that some UK businesses – and even the British operations of some US companies – are prepared to stand apart.The accountancy firm Deloitte instructed staff working on contracts for the US government to remove pronouns from their emails, while also announcing the end of its DEI programme. But its UK boss told staff its British operations remained “committed to [its] diversity goals”.“It feels as though global companies rooted in the US are making a politically motivated slight shift in emphasis and tilt, through to rowing back everything. And it does feel a bit more tempered here,” says Lane Fox.UK businesses have an opportunity to do something different, she says, which could bring financial benefits. “I think we’ll build more robust companies, attract talent and have a much better shot at building the most resilient companies of the future.”For almost three decades, Lane Fox has built a career – and multimillion-pound fortune – in tech. She made her first big money floating Lastminute.com, the online travel site co-founded alongside fellow Oxford graduate Brent Hoberman in 1998.View image in fullscreenShe joined the board of Twitter – now X – in 2016, landing herself a huge payday in Musk’s $44bn hostile takeover in 2022, before he dissolved the board and appointed himself the sole director.Seeing Musk in the Oval Office, parading his son X on his shoulders, made her question the gender divide. “Can you imagine if that was a woman? Can you imagine what that would look like? I mean, I just think the whole thing is really gross.”But while railing against Musk in a personal capacity, the BCC president does not suggest this approach is for everyone. “It is really tricky to navigate. You have a responsibility to your customers and your employees that might be different to our personal view sometimes.”Government regulation to enshrine diversity targets is also a bad idea, she says, preferring instead that companies report their progress. “Keeping it in the light, keeping up the reporting, is important – keeping up good investors, looking at the right metrics and investing in the right companies all helps.”However, not enough progress is being made. Analysis this week showed that worsening unemployment and workforce participation for women has pushed the UK behind Canada to its lowest global ranking for workplace equality among large economies in a decade.The gender pay gap has been declining slowly over time, but average pay is still 7% less for women than for men. It is a challenge Lane Fox is all too aware of. “Look at the data and it is really freaking depressing – and it is not moving,” she says.“What worries me is that it’s far too easy to find numbers that I thought we were moving on from.“In this week of International Women’s Day, we see representation at the executive level has gone back. I see progress on boards is still good at the FTSE 100 level, but bad at FTSE 250 and 350 level.“I know there will be people in the sector thinking: ‘Oh, here she goes again.’ That’s true of many women [that people think that]. But it is so important to keep making these arguments.” More

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      What does Elon Musk believe?

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      View image in fullscreenElon Musk is not a people person, as millions around the world will be able to attest after the planet’s richest man cut off food supplies, healthcare and probably even life itself to some of the most vulnerable without so much as a fore- or afterthought.Musk sees himself as a data man, wielding numbers like a machete to slash and burn his way through government waste and corruption as he leads the rightwing charge to capture the US state.Within days of Musk dispatching his minions to kick down the doors of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and rifle through its finances, the agency was in effect out of business. Musk claimed USAid was “a criminal organisation” and full of Marxists – an assertion called “laughable” by the agency’s former administrator under George W Bush, Andrew Natsios, who describes himself as a conservative Republican.Musk didn’t care. Less than three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the head of the new “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group that Trump created, has built an extensive power base in Washington of a kind not seen before.Trump has given free rein to Musk to send his operatives into more than a dozen federal agencies to look for evidence of mismanagement and subversion, and to generally create chaos, outside of the usual bounds of oversight and regulation.Crucially, Musk now in effect controls the office of personnel management (OPM), which oversees federal employment. He immediately encouraged more than 2 million government workers to resign with the stated aim of forcing a few hundred thousand out the door.View image in fullscreenIt’s clear who Musk thinks should be running the country instead, from his recruitment to Doge of “special government employees” from his own companies and the wider tech industry to storm the federal citadels. They include a significant proportion of young male software engineers of the kind who tend to worship tech billionaires like Musk, including a teenager who has gone by “Big Balls” online.Few, if any, have undergone the security clearances other government workers need to access sensitive and personal information. If they had, Doge might have been discouraged from hiring another recruit from Silicon Valley, Marko Elez, who was sent into the US treasury department, where he had access to taxpayer records. Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had posted racist messages on social media and defended eugenics.“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez wrote on X in July.He was reinstated on Friday.On the face of it, Musk is implementing Trump’s commitment to cut spending, “dismantle the deep state” and sack “rogue bureaucrats”. But his embrace of the far right, including an unrestrained endorsement of the German nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and what looked to much of the world like a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration celebrations, has raised urgent questions about Musk’s political beliefs and how he intends to use his newfound power.As it happens, much of what Musk is doing is also good for his businesses, including scrapping regulatory bodies and curtailing the power of unions and workers. The labor board, which upholds workers’ rights, has been frozen and agencies that regulated the financial industry have either been scrapped or told to abandon key parts of their work.Musk’s politics have been eclectic. In the past, he has backed universal basic income and a tax on carbon emissions. At the same time, he has a deep dislike of trade unions and public transport because it means being around “random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer”. He espouses a visceral hostility to diversity programmes and appears to regard those who believe in helping the less fortunate as subversive.Thrown into this mix is Musk’s fascination with the pro-natalism movement, for which he has done his bit by fathering 12 children, and his hope that one day his rocket company, SpaceX, will help them colonise Mars.Raised in South Africa under apartheid, Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces. His grandfather headed a fringe political movement in Canada in the 1930s, Technocracy Incorporated, which sought to abolish democracy in favour of government by elite technicians, but its overtones of fascism saw it banned during the second world war.Musk shows some of the same tendencies, as do other libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley billionaires unhappy with the messiness of elected government. He has spoken in support of direct democracy, where policies and other issues are decided by popular referendums rather than elected representatives.In the meantime, Musk appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler through the Republican right’s “unitary executive theory”, which regards the authority of the president as paramount and Congress as an impediment to the implementation of his or her will.Over the years, Musk has described himself as “not a conservative” and “politically moderate”. He backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 until he soured on the party in the past few years.View image in fullscreen“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he wrote on X in 2022.But there were clues to other motives, including a statement that he would be voting Republican because of Joe Biden’s support for trade unions and what he regarded as insufficient Democratic backing for his companies.Not long before last year’s presidential election, Musk declared that Trump would save American democracy from Democrats trampling on individual liberties. But he kept moving ever further to the right in public, with an open embrace of racist European political leaders, including the AfD, and the promotion of claims of a “white genocide” in the country of his birth, South Africa.Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, has linked his shift from Obama voter to cheerleader for the AfD to the transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.Wilson was 16 when she texted a relative: “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna. Don’t tell my dad.” The day after Wilson turned 18 in 2022, she changed her name because of “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.Musk told Isaacson he was sanguine about the change but then Wilson became a fervent Marxist and wouldn’t speak to him any more, a situation he described as one of the most painful of his life.“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told the author.Musk blamed Wilson’s progressive Los Angeles school and said he was disturbed at the “woke mind virus” holding back America.After California passed a law barring school districts from requiring teachers to tell parents of changes to a student’s sexual orientation and gender identity, Musk announced he was moving the headquarters of his two largest companies, SpaceX and X, to Texas. He said that the law caused “massive destruction of parental rights” and put children at risk of “permanent damage”.Musk did not say that moving his companies also had significant tax advantages for himself and his businesses, which would additionally be subject to fewer climate regulations than in California.Still, his apparent anger over his daughter’s transition appears to have set in motion a broader hostility toward identity issues, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, a favourite target of the Trumpian right. Musk announced that the words “cis” and “cisgender” were considered slurs on X, and he came out against pronouns, tweeting that they “suck”.In late 2022, another tweet linked Musk’s hostility toward the way people choose to identify themselves – an odd position for a man who claims to be a champion of free speech – to his anger at the Biden administration’s Covid restrictions.View image in fullscreenMusk mocked Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, who was instrumental in the lockdown and other measures to contain the crisis.“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he wrote.Some saw the tweet as evidence that Musk was now openly identifying with the far right, which defied mask regulations and stay-at-home orders and called for Fauci to be locked up for intruding on their liberties.But while Musk’s hostility toward pronouns was personal, Covid regulations touched on his businesses and net worth.Musk refused to close his Tesla factory at the height of the pandemic, claiming without evidence that “panic” over the virus would do more damage than the disease itself. He disparaged social distancing, predicted that the virus would claim few lives in the US (it eventually claimed more than 1.2 million), and described the lockdown as “fascist” and “erasing people’s freedoms”. Musk tweeted a meme comparing Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to Hitler over his government’s Covid restrictions.Musk may have dressed up his position as a concern about people’s welfare but its immediate effect was to keep his factories rolling even if the people working in them were at greater risk of infection and death. And while Musk claimed a principled position in favour of individual liberty, he has a history of suppressing the rights of his own workers.In 2023, he said that he disagreed with the concept of trade unions.“I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants sort of thing,” he told the New York Times Dealbook Summit. “Unions naturally try to create negativity in a company.”One reason Musk may not like unions is they tend to stand up for their members. He has faced accusations from former employees of aggressively using a secretive dispute-resolution process to fend off repeated claims of sexual and racial harassment within his companies, including accusations of women enduring a “frat house” atmosphere of groping and other abuses ignored and even perpetrated by high-level managers.Tesla has paid out millions of dollars to Black workers subjected to racial harassment.Yet, while Musk restricts the rights of his employees to seek redress from the courts, he and his companies filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts in the year to August 2024, according to Fortune magazine.They include a legal action by X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate over a report accusing the social network of making millions of dollars out of accounts spewing hate from “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories”. A California judge threw out the lawsuit last year, saying it was clear the “case is about punishing the defendants for their speech”.Musk will probably spend a lot more time being frustrated by the courts. Judges have already put on hold his push for mass resignations from the civil service and placed some restrictions on Doge’s mass collection of data. Federal workers, unions and civil rights organisations are lining up a flurry of lawsuits to challenge Musk’s actions.But the courts themselves may become a target for Musk as he works to tear down the old order.Isaacson in his biography wrote that Musk once described being in “a state of war at all times” as one of his default settings.No one thinks that, so long as Trump continues to regard the billionaire as more of an asset than a liability, Musk’s thirst for power will stop at gutting federal agencies. The question is where he will launch his next offensive. More

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      Kamala’s tech ties: what is Harris’s relationship with Silicon Valley?

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      About 700 wealthy Democratic supporters packed into San Francisco’s Fairmont hotel on Sunday to see Kamala Harris in her first return to the city since launching her campaign for president. Among the crowd at the fundraiser, where the cheapest tickets cost $3,300 and went up to $500,000, was a mixture of tech billionaires, executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have quickly embraced the vice-president in her bid for the White House.The event, which raised more than $12m, was the latest in the Harris campaign’s outreach to tech Democrats and an extension of a relationship with Silicon Valley elites that goes back more than a decade.Harris has extensive ties to some of the tech industry’s most influential players and prolific donors, in part due to her time as California’s attorney general and later, senator. While her campaign has yet to release detailed policy positions on issues such as tech regulation, Harris’s track record has led tech executives to speculate whether she could take a friendlier approach to the industry than Joe Biden has.Among the tech industry Democrats who have promoted or contributed to the Harris campaign are former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who attended the fundraiser in San Francisco, as well as philanthropist Melinda French Gates, IAC chair Barry Diller and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway. Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire philanthropist and former wife of Apple’s Steve Jobs, is a longtime friend and in 2013 held a fundraiser at her home for Harris. Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, who publicly called on the president to drop out after his disastrous debate performance, donated $7m to a pro-Harris Super PACac within days of her becoming the presumptive nominee.Some of these donors have arrived to Harris’s campaign with their own policies to promote, most notably Hoffman and Diller’s demands to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan. The FTC under Khan has taken an aggressive stance toward regulating big tech, pursuing cases against Microsoft and Amazon, which has rankled the industry. (Hoffman is a board member of Microsoft, which has been the target of FTC antitrust litigation.)Hoffman and Diller’s demands to remove Khan while donating heavily to Harris give the appearance of billionaire donors trying to sway policy for their personal benefit, despite denials from Hoffman that his contribution is in exchange for influence. Harris has yet to comment on Khan or the donations from her critics, meanwhile her campaign held an organizing event featuring Hoffman in early August following his attacks on the FTC chair.In addition to big-name donors, Harris has also received public pledges of support from hundreds of other venture capitalists and tech workers. A “VCs For Kamala” site featured more than 800 signatures from a variety of firms, while Bloomberg reported that a Tech4Kamala open letter received more than 1,200 signatures. The two groups are planning to host an event later this month.As he fights Harris, Trump forges new ties in Silicon ValleyAlthough Harris may have more vocal tech backers than Biden, the industry has also undergone a conservative shift and embrace of far-right beliefs that gives her a number of prominent opponents. A San Francisco fundraiser for Donald Trump held last month by venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya raised about $12m, while Silicon Valley power players Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced they plan to make substantial donations to the former president.JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, also ran his campaign for Ohio senator with the help of approximately $15m in contributions from tech billionaire Peter Thiel, whose venture firm briefly employed Vance in 2015. Prior to becoming a senator, Vance worked in Silicon Valley, where he plugged in to a broader network of wealthy conservatives in tech.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionElon Musk, the world’s richest man, has openly backed Trump while promoting attacks against Harris and Democrats on his social media platform X. Musk shared a deepfake parody video on the platform last month which featured manipulated footage of Harris, in which she was made to say “I am the ultimate diversity hire.” Musk’s Grok chatbot also spread false information suggesting that Harris was ineligible to appear on the ballot in some states, prompting condemnation from Democratic lawmakers.On Monday, Musk held a more than two-hour interview with Trump in which the Tesla CEO lauded Trump and gave no pushback as Trump rehashed a variety of falsehoods and baseless election conspiracies.“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself – self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,” Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in a statement following the interview.California connections to big techAs state attorney general and then senator for California between 2010 and 2020, Harris was in office during a crucial period in the ascendance of Silicon Valley’s biggest social networks such as Facebook. Her record on legislation and litigation around tech has over the years alternatingly drawn applause from some regulation and privacy advocates and at times criticism from others that Harris didn’t attempt to rein in companies as they amassed monopolies.Harris enjoyed a fairly cozy relationship with the industry as attorney general, including developing a friendship with then Facebook COO Sandberg and participating in the PR campaign for Sandberg’s memoir Lean In. Sandberg gave the maximum legal individual contribution to her 2016 senate campaign and, according to emails acquired by HuffPost, sent Harris a message two days after that election that read “CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! We need you now more than ever.” Harris did not respond.During Harris’s time as attorney general, Facebook acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp in moves that helped it expand its dominance over social media. Antitrust advocates have since criticized federal regulators and state officials for failing to more intensely investigate or block those deals, with the FTC citing the acquisitions as evidence of anticompetitive practices in its antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. Harris has tended to stay away from taking a firm stance on antitrust actions, and in 2019 gave a vague answer to a direct question from the New York Times on whether big tech companies should be broken up.View image in fullscreenAreas where Harris took a more aggressive approach toward the tech industry were online privacy and sexual abuse, choosing what’s often called “revenge porn” as her marquee issue to fight. As a senator, Harris has introduced legislation and backed initiatives to criminalize sharing nonconsensual sexual images online, an issue that has become more pertinent in recent years with the rise of sexualized deepfakes of celebrities, politicians and average citizens. Her strategy with big tech companies on the issue, Politico reported in 2019, was to take a less publicly adversarial stance and instead forge relationships with executives who could change platform policies.When Harris chose to take legal action that involved tech companies, she instead tended to focus on smaller platforms or individual incidents of cybercrime. One of Harris’s most prominent prosecutions as attorney general was against the CEO and controlling shareholders of Backpage, an adult classifieds site that Harris accused of enabling illegal sex work, abuse and human trafficking. The prosecution, which Harris has touted in campaign ads, remains controversial and was heavily opposed by sex worker activists who viewed Backpage as a means to safely vet clients and avoid working on the streets. The founder of Backpage and two executives were convicted of prostitution and money laundering charges; a federal judge acquitted them on appeal.Harris’s record as a prosecutor shows other examples she could claim show that she’s tough on tech even as she maintains close relationships with the industry’s power brokers. She threatened to sue Uber as attorney general in 2016 after the company vowed to break state laws and put driverless cars on San Francisco streets without regulatory approval. Uber ultimately relented and ended its driverless tests days later. Meanwhile, Tony West, who became Uber’s chief legal officer a year after Harris threatened legal action, is now one of her campaign’s best-connected fundraisers. He’s also her brother-in-law. More

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      Venture capitalists including Mark Cuban back Kamala Harris’s campaign

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      A group of more than 100 Silicon Valley investors, including Mark Cuban, the TV host and NBA owner, and Reed Hastings, a co-founder of LinkedIn, launched a website in support of Kamala Harris.A statement said vcsforkamala.org expressed support for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee from “venture capital investors, founders and tech leaders who pledge to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election”.It added: “We spend our days looking for, investing in and supporting entrepreneurs who are building the future. We are pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship, and pro-technological progress.”The statement did not name the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, or running mate JD Vance.But it pointed to Democratic concerns about the former US president’s and the Ohio senator’s authoritarian impulses on issues including immigration, crime and reproductive rights, and what a second Trump presidency might do to the US’s standing in the world.“We also believe in democracy as the backbone of our nation,” the investors said.“We believe that strong, trustworthy institutions are a feature, not a bug, and that our industry – and every other industry – would collapse without them.“That is what’s at stake in this election. Everything else, we can solve through constructive dialogue with political leaders and institutions willing to talk to us.”It is a little more than a week since Joe Biden withdrew from his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate against Trump fueled concerns that at 81, he was too old to effectively run and serve.Since then Harris, 59, has transformed the presidential race, driving $200m in fundraising with eye-catching big name endorsements including those of Mark Hamill, best known as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie saga, and Jeff Bridges, aka Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski.The arrival of VCs for Kamala also pointed to growing rifts among the giants of Silicon Valley, where Vance worked for Peter Thiel, a leading donor to Republicans and propagator of “new right” political thought notable for its authoritarian bent.VCs for Kamala followed Tech for Kamala, an open letter seeking contributions and orchestrated by “technology leaders and innovators”.The Tech for Kamala letter said: “We acknowledge there are a few people in tech with very loud microphones who support a very different vision of the future. But as the names on this letter show, they do not at all represent the entire tech community.“In Vice-President Harris, we choose the future over the past, stability over chaos, a hopeful America with expanded opportunity over an extreme agenda that drags us backward.”On Wednesday, Leslie Feinzaig, founder of the venture capital firm Graham & Walker and a lead organiser of VCs for Kamala, told the New York Times that rightwing, pro-Trump tech moguls such as Thiel, David Sacks and Elon Musk “don’t speak for me”.“They don’t speak for most of us,” she added. “And they don’t speak for the founders.” More