In the coming weeks we will translate and publish several articles on the political economy of AI and the new coalition between the Trump government and the ‘tech-capitalists’. The articles were written by comrades of the German magazine Wildcat. We have already shared one article on the impact of AI on translator’s work that you can read here.

Many on the left were surprised about the new coalition between aggressive nationalism and the tech-sector. The tech-sector was largely seen as a liberal ally because of its global nature and because it was very successful in hiding its ‘dirty secret’ of manual labour, water pollution and brutal mining regimes. This mystification as a clean and liberal industry was partly aided by lefty ideological concepts such as ‘immaterial labour’ or ‘network capitalism’. The text below shows how dependent the ‘tech-sector’ is on aggressive state policies, in order to defend global monopolies, enforce new (nuclear) energy regimes and maintain a racist division of labour.

Leland Stanford fled from his workers to Palo Alto, Elon Musk wants to go to Mars

Palo Alto was the birthplace and is the capital of Silicon Valley; Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Cisco, Facebook, Instagram, Google, AMD, SanDisk, Adobe, Symantec, Yahoo, eBay, Nvidia and many other so-called ‘tech companies’ come from here. In his book Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris tells the story of American capitalism through this small town of 68,000 inhabitants in the Santa Clara Valley, its geographic name.
Each new generation of adventurers in Palo Alto presented itself as ‘pioneers’, who try a fresh start. In doing so, they referred positively to the land conquests of the ranchers, the massive land destruction caused by people during the gold rush (their ‘hydrolickers’ were a precursor of fracking), and the racialised exploitation in railway construction, in the mines and in agriculture. In fact, there is a common thread running from the ‘early pioneers’ to the early chip factories and the start-ups: Palo Alto has repeatedly managed to change the rules of the game in order to extend a very old system of privilege.
Palo Alto stands for a speculative capitalism, always on the verge of fraud, and for an exploitation that believes it can keep its fingers clean because it banishes the exploited from view, sometimes to the other side of the world. Silicon Valley is dominated by a team made up of Stanford University and venture capitalists.

Stanford

The first Western settlers massacred the buffalo herds to starve the native inhabitants of the land; within 20 years, the prospectors (people engaged in gold mining) had murdered 80 percent of the original inhabitants. With the founding of the federal state of California, genocide became official policy: ‘That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.’ (the first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, in a speech to the California legislature).
In California, the concept of ‘whiteness’ became institutionally powerful [wirkmächtig] for the first time in history. In contrast to the East Coast, Italians, Irish, Germans, Swiss and Portuguese were granted equal rights and could get land and jobs more easily. The native inhabitants, the Chicanos, and later the Chinese, the Japanese, Filipinos, Punjabis and African Americans were denied this. As another governor of California said about Chinese immigrants: ‘There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race’ – that governor was Leland Stanford.

The construction of the transcontinental railway had made him a railway millionaire. Fleeing from the (poor) masses of San Francisco, who hated him, he moved to his huge latifundium right next to San Francisco in the small town of Palo Alto. He later founded a university there, Leland Stanford Jr. University; it is still the most important training ground for the Internet companies. Its first president was David Starr Jordan, an enthusiastic eugenicist who was concerned about the ‘blood of the nation’ and the ‘degeneration of the races’ and wanted to create a new, rejuvenated type of human being in California: entrepreneurial, open to the world, allied with the most modern technology.

To this day, Silicon Valley is dominated by the great-grandchildren of these ‘valorisers of human capital’ who fantasised about breeding superior humans. Among the ‘Californian engineers’ who put their know-how at the service of the mining conglomerates, the railway, the land speculators, and then the arms industry, was the future US president Herbert Hoover, also a Stanford graduate. Hoover was a supporter of the efficiency movement and Taylorism; he became very rich by implementing the racial division of the working class in the mining industry, which had been so successfully tested in California, in the British colonies worldwide. Using his great wealth, he donated systematically to Stanford University, to which he owed his rise and whose development he influenced with his donations. Bill Gates is an extreme example, but he is by no means the first to demonstrate the influence of billionaire foundations.

As Food Administrator under President Woodrow Wilson, Hoover enforced food rationing in 1917 (hence the term ‘to hooverize’). In 1920, he became Secretary of Commerce. In this role, he promoted the radio and aviation industries, both of which benefited the Bay Area. He served as US President from 1929 to 1933 and is best known for his drastic austerity measures. In 1922, Hoover published his essay American Individualism, in which he propagated the superiority of private enterprise in the USA over ‘European capitalism and communism’.

The arms industry (Navy and Air Force) brought large-scale immigration to Los Angeles and the rest of the Bay Area. During World War II, several aviation companies, including Lockheed, settled in the area around the region’s central military airfield. These companies served as a stepping stone for the high-tech industry. During the Cold War, the US government launched a major research funding programme.
The defence industry, which had been the mainstay of Palo Alto since the 1950s, was building components for a new kind of war: semiconductors and other high technology for the arsenal of absolute destruction. Stanford’s head of administration, Fred Terman, created a ‘Technology Park’, and the many innovative companies that settled there worked on intercontinental missiles and similar projects. In 1965, the Pentagon bought 70 per cent of the microelectronic components produced there.

The second important man in the concentration of the computer industry in the valley was William B. Shockley, son of another historical Stanford figure (Shockley Sr. was closely associated with Hoover). In 1956, he founded the first semiconductor company in the area, which developed electronic components based on the semiconductor material silicon that is commonly used today, which gave Silicon Valley its name. Shockley, tyrannical and also an eugenicist, scared away all of his personnel; the young men who had wrestled themselves free from his influence became the first founders of Silicon Valley. One of them was Gordon Moore (see below).

Venture capital

Stanford had already become extremely wealthy through something that is now called ‘venture capital investment’. These venture capitalists continue to shape the history of Silicon Valley to this day. They have influenced the way we live and work even more than Google and Co. The more inventions made in Palo Alto turned into a symbol for innovation, the more they determined what was understood by progress in general. For a long time, they were less visible than the high-tech companies they controlled. This has changed with the ‘Paypal Mafia’ (see below),

For this type of manager, ‘competition and dominance, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and class hatred (…) are not problems, but the purpose of capitalist technology. (…) This was Jordan’s plan, Hoover’s plan, Shockley’s plan, and today it is Peter Thiel’s plan.’ (Malcolm Harris: Palo Alto – A History of California, Capitalism, and the World; Little, Brown and Company, Boston 2023) Venture capitalists like Thiel do not employ large workforces, but rather investment analysts, programmers and teams of software engineers. And the companies in which they invest also usually keep their distance from the exploitation of surplus value from large workforces by using subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. Apple is a typical example of this: design in Silicon Valley, production in Asia.

Speculative capital and ‘progress’

In 1957, eight engineers – including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore – resigned from Shockley and founded their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Sherman Mills Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instruments provided $1.5 million in start-up financing.

In 1958, Robert Noyce succeeded in producing the first monolithic integrated circuit (IC). This invention was mainly based on the planar technology developed by Fairchild, which for the first time allowed several transistors, diodes and resistors to be placed on a silicon substrate, later called a ‘chip’. In 1965, another milestone was the first operational amplifier that was manufactured entirely within a housing (with silicon as the semiconductor material and integrated circuits).

In 1968, Moore and Noyce left the company and founded Intel (Integrated Electronics). In July 1969, Intel brought the first 64-bit SRAM chip to the market. In October 1970 – half the time originally estimated – the first ‘highly integrated’ DRAM memory module.

In 1965, Gordon Moore had promised ‘lower costs and faster turn around’ in a three-and-a-half-page letter to the investors of Fairchild Semiconductor – the letter was barely disguised as a research article (‘The experts look ahead – Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’). It contained two graphics, a rather silly cartoon-style drawing, bold claims, the usual science speak, glowing predictions (some of which came true, some of which were way off the mark) and, of course, his ‘observation’ that computing power doubles every year per chip. He wanted to reassure investors who were feeling insecure because Fairchild Semiconductors had just lost a lot of capable engineers. When he made his observation a ‘law’ ten years later – now as head of Intel – Moore doubled the interval to 24 months. (‘A conversation with Gordon Moore: Moore’s Law’; 1975) For a long time, Intel was able to use ‘Moore’s Law’ to control technology development, industrial investment decisions and government subsidy policy.

Initially, Intel dominated the market with the ‘Intel 8008’, released in 1972. It was the standard CPU for a long time and was widely used in cash registers, traffic lights, bank terminals, weighing systems, controllers, but also in cruise missiles. Motorola was able to keep up with Intel for some time, especially in the home computer and Apple computer markets. But in 1974, Intel released the 8080, the processor that made home computers and the CP/M operating system popular. It was also used in the Altair 8800, which was launched in 1975 as a $395 kit (around $2000 in today’s purchasing power); a television set served as a monitor, and audio cassettes were used for storage. The Apple 1 came in 1976, followed by the Commodore PET in 1977. In 1977, the Apple II: 8-bit Apple Bus system, eight free slots, ‘open system’ (all essential design details were published). There were numerous video games and software for the Apple II; it was very important for the US BBS (Bulletin Board System / electronic mailbox via modem) scene.
The personal computer was a completely new concept: no longer an input console in a networked system, but a separate, freely programmable machine. In terms of resource consumption, it was a pretty crazy concept. But it caught on for decades – similar to the way the car won out over public transport.

Wintel – the devilish Siamese twins

The successor to the 8080, the Intel 8086, was the first 16-bit processor to be released in 1978. The 8088 followed in 1979 as a 16-bit processor with an 8-bit data bus to enable cheap peripherals. This is when IBM, the world’s leading computer manufacturer, entered the picture. At the beginning of 1980, IBM commissioned developer Bill Lowe to develop a ‘personal computer’. Lowe chose the 8088, thus laying the foundation for Intel’s rise to become the world’s largest chip producer; at times, 85 percent of PC CPUs came from Intel.

And IBM produced a second monopolist. After all, the operating system for the new PC was not to be written by IBM engineers either. Bill Gates, who was 25 at the time, seized the opportunity – even though he didn’t actually have an operating system. Instead, he bought Tim Paterson’s Quick and Dirty Operating System QDOS for $50,000 and licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS 1.0. Gates’ real coup, however, was that he retained the rights to DOS and was thus able to turn his company Microsoft into a global software giant with MS-DOS. DOS became the industry standard.

On the 12th of August 1981, IBM presented the IBM PC 5150, developed in the greatest secrecy, in New York. The thing was disappointing: the chip was not powerful enough for a decent graphics display. DOS was criticised as a weak software architecture… But the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC was able to execute more complex calculation models than the Apple II and ousted the competition from the offices. Gates also recognised this and finally made himself a monopolist with Excel.

When the PC became a mass product in the 80s, there was talk of a software crisis again. Twice as much money was invested in the maintenance of software as in its development. ‘Quick and dirty’ had its price – and the others had to pay it. Window 3.x was based on it, was also ‘market-dominating’ and not a bit better. In the 90s, maintenance and service costs rose again by 30 per cent.

During these decades, Intel and Microsoft developed a symbiotic partnership, which was called ‘Wintel’ in the industry. Every new version of Windows needed better chips. Even today, Microsoft is still exploiting its monopoly position and forcing users to purchase new hardware when upgrading to Windows 11 – even where it is not necessary.

Intel was also a pioneer in surveillance technology. In 1999, it was revealed that the first Pentium III processors were equipped with a globally unique ‘processor ID’ that could be read by software. Due to public pressure, Intel switched off the processor ID by default. But since 2008, all chipsets for Intel processors have been equipped with the Intel Management Engine. This is an autonomous subsystem based on Minix that allows administrators to bypass the operating system and gain full access to the computer, even when it is turned off.

The dot-com crash of 2000 and the global crisis of 2008 hit Intel hard. In addition, Intel missed out on the smartphone business. In 2013, the management was replaced. But there were repeated glitches in production and delays in the introduction of new chip models. In 2017, Intel withdrew from the race for ever lower ‘technology nodes.’ The foundries of TSMC (Taiwan) and Samsung had outperformed Intel. ‘Moore’s Law’ was now officially dead.

Intel’s problem remained production. Intel was also unable to benefit from the AI boom, but proved adept at securing government aid. Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO in 2021 and campaigned for billions in government financial aid in both Europe and the US (Intel will receive almost $20 billion in subsidies and loans under the Chips and Science Act alone). The ten billion subsidies promised by the German government for the factory in Magdeburg – diverted from the ‘climate fund’ – would have corresponded to three million euros per planned job! But now it won’t happen. Over the course of 2024, Intel’s stock has lost around 60 percent of its value; in August, it plunged 26 percent in a single day. Intel recently made the largest quarterly loss in the company’s history, at $16.6 billion. After he laid off 15 percent of the workforce and closed the Magdeburg factories in September, it then hit Gelsinger himself at the beginning of December and he was removed. Even before that, Microsoft had begun to develop Qualcomm into a potent competitor to Intel. The end of Moore’s Law – the end of Wintel.

In this crisis, the company took shelter under the wings of the military-industrial complex: Intel is also to receive up to three billion dollars for the development of a domestic chip production from the US military’s Secure Enclave programme. (Even Gordon Moore could only name the military and the Apollo moon programme as potential customers in his 1965 letter to investors…). And the EU can forget the goal of the European Chips Act passed in 2023 to double Europe’s market share of global computer chip production to twenty percent. The aim was to become independent of semiconductor production in Southeast Asia.

Disruption

All that money went to Steve Jobs of Apple and to Bill Gates of Microsoft not because they had the better products, but because they were the tools for large companies like IBM and General Electric to undermine the high wages of their unionised workforces. It’s the same today, Elon Musk wants to show that you can build rockets without regulations and a space agency.

‘Apple could build computers without unions‘ (Harris p. 507), that was Steve Jobs’ real skill. Exploiting inventions that had previously been made possible by taxpayers’ money. The iPhone is the best-known example of this: the GPS used in it is a US military project, the music comes as MP3, an invention of the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, and the groundbreaking display is based on research work – also state-funded – by a US professor.

From the very beginning, Apple’s rise was based on racialised labour. Almost 80 percent of the employment growth in the Valley between 1984 and 1997 was in subs (externally contracted workers). In the 1990s, 40,000 immigrants from Indochina (one third of their total number) were employed in subs with PCB assembly, while in the whole of California, industrial jobs in electrical and electronic engineering fell by 38.7 per cent between 1980 and 1995.

‘The Silicon Valley labour regime did not enlarge the cake, but was good at shifting shares of it from workers to bosses, managers and shareholders.’ (Harris p. 524f.) Tech companies were “lean” (lean) because they outsourced as much as possible. Their ideal was a company that worked on an idea, software. All the material work was outsourced to subcontractors, either locally or further afield. The founder of TSMC, Chang, also a Stanford graduate, went further afield: under Deng’s opening-up policy, his Taiwanese company was given the opportunity to produce in mainland China.

The dynamics of the flight ahead

Semiconductor Fairchild was a typical ‘startup’ financed by venture capitalists. It was precisely this constellation of science/technology/industry depending on investors that had led to the formulation of ‘Moore’s Law’. The business model has remained the same from Moore to Gates to Bezos: convince investors of your own ‘potential’ until you have pushed all competitors out of the market and become a monopoly. The dynamics of software development (in terms of working conditions, orientation towards use value, etc.) has more in common with the sale of insurance than with industrially organised processes (Word for Windows was pushed into market readiness during the famous ‘death march’, after which everyone went on a company holiday in Cancun – the ‘error analysis’ of the software was done only after it entered the market). In the early 1960s, Romano Alquati had worked out that at Olivetti the customer does the final inspection – but since DOS ff. the customer has become a co-developer (‘banana principle’). This way of developing software for PCs was then transferred to the production processes themselves. Today, the ‘minimum viable product’ is the industry standard. Permanent updates follow, also because most errors can be traced back to software.

The responses to the ‘software crisis’ at the end of the 1960s and the ‘Wintel’ monopoly have led to huge profits and a massive waste of resources. The ‘crisis solution’ at the end of the 1960s was a headlong rush into the arms of investors who have to be convinced again and again: the next generation is supposed to keep the promise with which the current combination of hardware/software was sold.
This dynamic determines the entire sector: the 3G mobile communications standard, which was auctioned off at a very high price at the height of the dot.com boom in 2000, has never been exhausted. And 5G was introduced before the scope of 4G was even close to being exhausted; when it comes to attracting investment, they are already talking about 6G.
* At the beginning of the 80s, the PC was touted as a universal machine – by the end of the decade, everyone was despairing of Windows 3.0.
* In the 90s, the internet promised to transform every industry – by the end of the decade, we had the dot-com crisis.
* After the global crisis, big data and platform economics flourished – until the tech crisis.
Each time, productivity gains were promised, each time working conditions deteriorated – and none of them resulted in macro economic productivity gains.
So now it’s the turn of AI.

AI as the final stage?

The Large Language Models are the latest hype from Silicon Valley. ‘More profound than fire or electricity,’ says Sundar Pichai, the head of Google. ‘Comparable to the invention of the internet,’ says Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft. AI will ‘bring prosperity and wealth the world has never seen before,’ says Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI. To do so, he says, he needs only seven trillion dollars to radically expand the semiconductor industry, nuclear energy to meet the power needs of the data centres, and more freedom for American entrepreneurship (Altman’s main job is venture capitalist, he has invested in hundreds of start-ups). Altman sees himself at the helm of a techno-optimistic empire. Silicon Valley billionaires have ‘reached a point where they feel they should control the world,’ warned Mark Cuban, a tech billionaire himself, in the summer. The ‘Paypal Mafia’ (as they call themselves) sees the possibility of using Trump to ‘take power’.

(We have already written about the Paypal Mafia and their ‘long-termism’ ideology in Wildcat 110 and Wildcat 112, so we will keep this as brief as possible.)

The Paypal Mafia takes over

Trump opened the door to the billionaires of Silicon Valley by nominating J. D. Vance (otherwise he would never have stood a chance against Kamala Harris’s 1.5 billion dollar election campaign). He would not be the first president to be made compliant by Silicon Valley. In 1996, they dissuaded Bill Clinton from Proposition 211. This was a bill in California that would have redefined the admissibility of lawsuits against bosses of companies of the type common in the wider Silicon Valley area. Their private-sector control of information would have been called into question. An alliance of companies such as Intel, Sun and Cisco formed to oppose it. They spent forty million dollars until Clinton, initially a supporter of the bill, then wavering, finally declared that the proposed instrument was ‘bad for the economy’. Proposition 211 failed.

Elon Musk is the most controversial figure in Trump’s takeover of power. With the planned ‘Government Efficiency Agency’, which he is taking over together with climate change denier and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he wants to prune public institutions. The influence of Peter Thiel, an extreme example of the power of venture capitalists, is greater. In 1998, Thiel and two others founded the company Confinity in Palo Alto. In March 2000, Confinity and Elon Musk’s company X.com founded the start-up PayPal; Thiel invested 280,000 US dollars. He took PayPal public in 2002. He ultimately realised $55 million by selling it to eBay. Thiel was also the first external investor in Facebook. He invested $500,000, which he later converted into shares. When Facebook went public in May 2012, he sold shares for $640 million, and shortly thereafter sold more shares for around $400 million.

280,000 became 55 million, half a million became more than 100 million. Venture capital investments only have to be successful once for you to be astronomically rich for the rest of your life. And if you then invest some of that money in start-ups in the early stages and spread it across enough companies, especially those that are financed by other large venture capitalists, it is almost impossible to lose money in the process. Some clever young entrepreneurs had understood this and joined forces to form the ‘Paypal Mafia’. Today, Silicon Valley is the third most billionaire-rich place in the world, after New York and Hong Kong (84).

Thiel was involved in the founding of many other companies. Together with Joe Lonsdale and others, he founded the data analysis company Palantir, which supplies the CIA and the Pentagon with software and is involved in the war in Ukraine. Thiel’s private fortune is estimated at twelve billion dollars.
For several years now, there has been a shift in Silicon Valley towards the Pentagon. This is because the Pentagon is willing to pay huge sums for software that is not particularly good. Palantir was the pioneer in 2003. In 2015, the Pentagon founded the Defense Innovation Unit. Arms manufacturer Palmer Luckey also wants to win wars with AI. Trump and Vance’s election victory consolidates this trend. Thiel and Joe Lonsdale have built J. D. Vance.

Their ideology

“Diversity” is a “cancer,” Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital Fund, explains in a podcast. Elon Musk is virtually obsessed with a ‘woke mind virus’ that is not only destroying companies, but also ‘civilisation’ itself. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen declares terms such as ‘sustainability’ or ‘social responsibility’ to be ‘enemies’ and ‘zombie ideas’, many of which originated from ‘communism’.
Thiel believes that liberal democracy has failed. He argues that only right-wing nationalism can provide a ‘decisive corrective’ to the ‘madness of the masses.’ Companies are better run than governments, he says, because they have a sole decision-maker at the top with quasi-dictatorial authority. He is critical of women’s suffrage, although it should not be abolished for tactical reasons. But the participation of women, elections and democratic participation in general are not a promising way to control a free society. By this, Thiel imagines a world in which rich men are free to impose their will without being restricted by regulations or a ‘redistribution economy’.

This elitism still refers to the mediocre writer Ayn Rand. In her bestseller Atlas Shrugged (which has been repeatedly republished in German under various titles: Der freie Mensch, Der Streik, Wer ist John Galt? Atlas wirft die Welt ab), she argues that ‘workers and other mediocre people attach themselves like parasites to the ideas and efforts of a few gifted people’. State regulations are only sticks in the spokes of good entrepreneurs. It is not the working population that creates wealth, but the elite. The world must be re-founded on ‘the virtue of greed’.

Such thoughts have been further developed by ‘effective altruism’; it is rooted in the idea that it is imperative to choose, through cool calculation, the act that will ‘effectively’ do more good for more people. It is the current ideology of the Palo Alto billionaires, just as Taylorism and the Efficiency Movement were in the days of Hoover. You should make as much money as possible and then use foundations to exert political influence, as Bill Gates does. ‘Long-termism’ is the top priority. So, for example, not donating to charities, such as Welthungerhilfe (World Food Aid), but to space programmes, so that trillions of future humans can lead happy lives as members of an interstellar civilisation. What are a few million children starving today compared to the ten to the power of x future children on other planets who are prevented from ever being born?

The investments of Silicon Valley billionaires are ‘strategic’ in the sense of long-termism. Thiel has invested several million dollars in research to overcome the aging process in humans and is interested in cryopreservation; Musk is driving the Mars mission and owns the company Neuralink…

South Africa

Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971. His socialisation as a youth took place in the notoriously brutal South African veldskools, in survival camps where he and other adolescents were encouraged to fight each other. Today, he relaxes by watching cage fights with Trump. Thiel, who was born in Germany, also lived in South Africa as a child in the 1970s. David Sacks, another member of the Paypal mafia, was born in Cape Town and, like Thiel, is a graduate of Stanford. At an event at his home in San Francisco, he raised more than $12 million for Trump. Together with Thiel, he wrote a book titled The Diversity Myth in 1995. In it, they claim that promoting diversity weakens higher education and academic freedom.
Their warnings about the end of white supremacy are reminiscent of the fears of white South Africans about the ANC. Musk tweeted about an impending ‘white genocide’ in 2022. Thiel also patronises Curtis Yarvin, a start-up founder who is considered a thought leader of the so-called New Right (‘neo-cameralism’) and equated the actions of mass murderer Anders Breivik with the ANC’s violent struggle for freedom. Yarvin is not particularly intelligent, a terrible conspiracy windbag who considers universalism to be a ‘mystery cult of power’.

Their political programme

Marc Andreessen knows where salvation comes from: his techno manifesto sounds like the futurists’ enthusiasm for technology at the beginning of the 20th century: “Give us a problem in the real world, and we can invent the technology that will solve it.” [1]

Trump fits their techno-nationalist vision of American strength. From his government, they expect tax breaks and less regulation in key business areas, especially with regard to their investments in crypto currencies. By far the most important thing, however, is AI. This is where they have reached a critical point because, firstly, they are running out of money and, secondly, AI is not delivering as promised. Their capital and energy requirements exceed anything that a democratic government could provide. That is why the ambitions of the Paypal mafia go beyond economic issues. ‘This was not an election, this was a revolution, the end of a system that had outlived its usefulness,’ Thiel commented on Trump’s election victory.

The book Dawn’s Early Light by Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, was published only after the election – apparently to avoid harming Trump, since this right-wing think tank’s detailed Project 2025 had already met with vehement criticism. Roberts writes in familiar settler romanticism: ‘When dusk falls and you hear the wolves, you have to set up the wagons in a circle and load the muskets.’ In view of the country’s deeply rotten state, only total disruption will help. The existing hollowed-out institutions cannot be reformed – ‘they have to be burned down’. The foreword to this pamphlet was written by J. D. Vance.

The tech billionaires are by no means united – some hate each other. Bill Gates, for example, has donated to Kamala Harris, while Musk fiercely attacks Microsoft and OpenAI. And even the group behind Trump has contradictory and sometimes opposing positions. But it is precisely this that can lead to the kind of dynamic we saw in the Nazi movement: that their contradictions cancel each other out in a radicalisation.

P.S. dated 25/11/2024

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is joining a growing list of US companies making a U-turn on diversity. Among other things, the company will no longer consider race and gender when awarding supplier contracts.

Footnotes

[1]
“Our civilization was built on technology. … Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential. For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this — until recently. … It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag. It is time to be Techno-Optimists. …I am here to deliver the good news.”
The opening lines of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto