Why the tech titans are now disrupting US politics

Industrialists, landholders and media magnates were once the political kingmakers, especially on the Right. Nowadays, it’s contrarian tech bros

Photo by Mylo Kaye on Unsplash

Thirty trillion dollars of easy money has been tipped into the world economy, doing little more than to keep it spluttering along, and pumping money into speculation centred on knowledge and information tech. As millions have seen their wages shrink, and straightforward jobs disappear, they see the world they do not have the educational tools to understand the workings of soaring away from them. They can understand it enough to know that it is destroying the forms of value — repetitive, solid labour, the making of things — on which their lives were based…

It’s now possible that the Trump-Vance ticket — and Vance is a connection to the new Silicon Valley, by back channels, the Randian-Nietzschean change-your-blood-monthly-on-Mars Silicon Valley — will take an overall majority, and the rust belt as well. Trump promises an absolute fantasy: that labour-intensive manufacturing can be returned, as can the cheap goods that make low-income life affordable…

A manufacturing revival will be high-automation, same as the Chinese are doing, marching towards the abolition of labour altogether. Could it generate new jobs? Yes. Better jobs? No, not really. They will be service jobs, extra jobs, fluid, bitty, ungrounded. Anyone who thinks that this will be sufficient to assuage the raging anger of a Western working class thrown on the scrapheap has been deluded by the abstract notions buried at the heart of the discipline of economics. 
Guy Rundle, Crikey, 23/7/24

Here's how industry regulation has worked historically. A new industry emerges but precisely because it’s new and (initially) economically insignificant, nobody pays much attention to it for years and sometimes decades. As a result, those pioneering the industry can go about their business little troubled by regulators or ‘concerned consumers’.

Many new industries quickly peter out, meaning regulation never becomes an issue. But if an industry grows to be significant, those within it will typically seek to maximise revenues and profitability.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that – it’s how capitalism works, after all – but those in a lightly regulated newish industry can rarely resist the temptation to engage in, shall we say, questionable business practices.

Sooner or later, enough influential political actors – typically aggrieved voters and sometimes also politically well-connected heavy hitters from other industries (think Rupert Murdoch in the case of the tech industry) demand the new kid on the block be brought to heel.

The hard-charging alpha males who pioneer new industries and amass multibillion fortunes in the process don’t take kindly to being told no, whether it’s by Teddy Roosevelt or Joe Biden. But usually the politicians ultimately win. The lesser-known Roosevelt triumphed over the railroad barons. Rather more to the point, Xi Jinping slapped down Jack Ma hard as soon as he engaged in – by Western standards – the mildest of political interventions.

Biden came to power back in 2020 promising to break up big tech and rein in the power of increasingly all-powerful and politically active tech barons. Many smart people believe that breaking up big tech would have all kinds of benefits for tech industry workers, consumers, the tech industry, and the American (and global) economy. But I don’t see it happening, especially now significant sections of the American tech industry have swung behind Trump and successfully lobbied for Peter Thiel acolyte and venture capitalist J.D. Vance to get the VP nod.

How we got here
On one level, we have a stock-standard power struggle between a newish generation of tax-shy, negative-externality-generating, Dark Triad-indulging, arrogant billionaires and the elected representatives of the little people.

That’s the line the Democrats will run for the next three months. It’s not entirely false. Just like it will be true that racism and sexism will play a role in the freshly beatified Kamala’s imminent defeat.

But it’s nowhere near the whole truth.  

In the unlikely event any of those on the Left are open to some fresh thinking after yet another defeat come November 5, here are some thoughts on where it all went wrong.

The Democrats' violent lurch to the cultural left
One of the reasons I’m sceptical of the idea the tech industry-Democrats divorce was an inevitability is because plenty of current-day tech titans were Democrats, albeit very libertarian – and often libertine – ones long after they made their first billion. Does it really make sense that Musk was happy to support the Dems when he was only earning $10 billion a year, but his head was turned, and he suddenly turned into a greedy, heartless Republican once he started pulling down $20 billion?  

Leaving aside the fact I’m about $200 billion and, at the very least, 30 IQ points poorer than him – and somewhat less successful with the ladies – I’ve got a fair bit in common with Musk. We’re both 53-year-old, ‘cisgender’, heterosexual Caucasian men who work in the tech industry and are almost certainly ‘on the spectrum’, as the kids say nowadays.     

Regular readers will know I’m no fan of identity politics. But to coin a phrase, while stale, pale males like Musk and I can choose not to be interested in identity politics, identity politics has been extremely interested in us in recent times.

Curiously, despite the inescapable might of The Patriarchy, many men, especially the working-class ones, are flailing. Millions have become so despairing they have chosen to commit suicide, either in slow motion or more abruptly.

Those on the Right, reasonably enough, focus on Communism’s death toll. I wonder if there will one day be a tallying of all the lives lost, shortened or deranged by the free-market fundamentalism of the last four decades.

But you can’t write paragraphs like the one above nowadays without being accused of being “Far Right”, often by a fellow white, cisgender, heterosexual Caucasian male (of the university-educated progressive variety).

One of the more dispiriting developments on the Left has been working-class men going from being heroic figures to the scum of the earth in the progressive cosmology. That’s because, as Eric Kaufmann and countless others have observed, the broken-hearted Left swapped economic socialism for the cultural variety when the working-class masses declared themselves satisfied with capitalism. At least the gentler, Keynesian variety of it.   

Safe spaces aren’t safe for everyone
Eric Kaufmann is a 54-year-old Jewish-Chinese-Costa Rican university professor who has lived in several countries. You might assume this makes him better placed than most to call out the overreaches of the academic Left. Nonetheless, his vibrant diversity didn’t stop him from being targeted by the cancel culture mob.

Kaufmann was targeted by activist students and colleagues and eventually forced out of the university he worked at for two decades. Those on the Woke Left appear to rejoice in such cancellations, presumably imagining that silencing free thinkers and contrarians like Kaufmann will hurry along the arrival of utopia. Maybe it will. But I suspect it just comes across as thuggish bullying to many people. Not least, ‘socially awkward’ tech founders with traumatic memories of failing to read the room and blurting out inconvenient facts.

At this point, I can almost hear the boilerplate left-liberal response being typed in the comments section: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

It’s a clever line and, once again, one that contains some truth.

But anyone with an IQ high enough to found a successful tech company is likely to find it an unsatisfactorily pat response. They may even, once again, fail to diplomatically observe the social niceties and start asking entirely logical but deeply problematic questions, such as:

*If it’s only the undeniably privileged who have any issue with the Woke Left’s political program, how come so many of the critics of the Woke Left come from the sacralised victim groups the Woke Left blindly lionises?

Say what you will about ‘heterodox’ thinkers such as Tim Dillon, Coleman Hughes, Konstantin Kisin, Claire Lehmann, Glen Loury, Douglas Murray, Bridget Phetasy, Andrew Sullivan, Josh Szeps or Bari Weiss, but it’s challenging to make the case they are straight, white males enraged at the loss of the spoils straight, white males putatively used to enjoy.

*Even if you accept the boilerplate left-liberal cope that those who don’t toe the approved party line don’t ultimately qualify as homosexual/trans/African-American/female, that doesn’t necessarily mean the arguments these individuals advance are incorrect. Glen Loury – and all the other African-American conservatives – may not be ‘real’ African-Americans. Nonetheless, it may still be the case that the progressive policies designed to uplift the African-American community have proved at least partly counterproductive or futile.      

*Naval Ravikant is given to drily observing American progressive politics is increasingly a matter of “white-on-white crime”. As a result, it’s of limited relevance to non-white people. I presume what Ravikant meant is that, across the Anglosphere, those lavishly denouncing white people and the nations they live in are almost always themselves (university-educated, Professional-Managerial class) white people.

In contrast, many ‘minority’ heterodox thinkers, such as Ravikant, seem to be able to much more freely acknowledge that being born white (or straight or male) doesn’t automatically guarantee entry to those smoke-filled backrooms where all the important decisions get made.

The latest front in the political-realignment war
As you may have heard, we’re at a political inflection point where the long-held pieties of economic and social hyperliberals are finally being closely scrutinised.

Lots of men, Caucasian and otherwise, are tired of getting no credit for their contributions and shouldering all the blame for the ills of the world.  

‘Populist’ political entrepreneurs, not least the unapologetic hyper-masculine Trump, will continue to attract their support.    

Update: I just ran the copy above through ChatGPT, asking it to identify its weaknesses and got the following feedback:

In summary, while the article raises important points about the tech industry's influence on politics, its effectiveness is hindered by a lack of evidence, logical inconsistencies, bias, and overreliance on rhetoric. A more balanced, evidence-based approach would strengthen its arguments and provide a clearer understanding of the complex issues at play.

Maybe Big Tech is yet to be as ‘de-wokified’ as many hope or fear.