The New Legislators of Silicon Valley
There is a certain disorienting thrill in witnessing, over the past few years, the profusion of bold, often baffling, occasionally horrifying ideas pouring from the ranks of America’s tech elite.
Consider the heresies of Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, who, in celebrating the “network state” and seasteading have hatched an escape doctrine for digital aristocrats. Where Srinivasan conjures blockchain fiefdoms with à la carte citizenship and pay-per-view police forces, Thiel pines for oceanic platforms where the wealthy might float beyond government reach, their libertarian fantasies bobbing like luxury yachts in international waters.
Elsewhere, Silicon Valley’s solutionist overdose has inflated an ideas bubble that rivals its financial ones—a frothy marketplace where grand narratives appreciate faster than stock options. Thus, Sam Altman casually drafts planetary blueprints for AI (non-)regulation and even AI welfare (“capitalism for everyone!”), while crypto acolytes (Marc Andreessen, David Sacks), aspiring celestial colonizers (Musk, Bezos), and nuclear revivalists (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Altman) offer their own grandiose, exciting solutions to problems of seemingly unknown origin. (Who’s guzzling up all this energy we suddenly need so badly? A true mystery, this.)
But more mundane subjects, from foreign policy to defense, increasingly preoccupy them too. Eric Schmidt—a man whose personality could be mistaken for a blank Google Doc—has not only penned two books with Henry Kissinger but also regularly contributes to Foreign Affairs and other such factories of doom and dogma. And he is after big, meaty subjects, the kind that demand somber nods at think-tank luncheons. “Ukraine is losing the drone war” proclaims a piece of his from January 2024. Could this be – a pure coincidence, surely – the same Eric Schmidt, who, just months earlier, launched a drone company?
Now that the tech elites have joined the party, speculation on the future of warfare, once the cloistered domain of “defense intellectuals” mumbling into their tweed at RAND Corporation, plays as prime-time entertainment. Palantir’s Alex Karp and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey—combined net worth north of $11 billion—pose as scrappy Davids battling the spendthrift Goliaths of the Pentagon. Inevitably, Elon Musk, techno-capitalism’s own Zelig, also has strong opinions on the subject: in destroy-infrastructure-first wars of the future, he opined in a recent Westpoint appearance, “any ground based communications like fiber optic cables and cell phone towers will be destroyed.” If only someone ran an internet satellite company to save us!
Michel Foucault’s “specific intellectuals,” who earned their authority through specialized technical mastery, appear quaint next to someone like Palmer Luckey, the VR wunderkind turned defense contractor. Having swapped the tweed jacket for flip flops, cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, he struts through interviews announcing himself “a propagandist” willing to “twist the truth.” In this reordered pantheon, the sober analyst of the Cold War era yields to a new archetype: spectacularly wealthy, celebrity-conscious, and ideologically shameless.
To write off these founders and executives as mere showmen—more “public offering” than “public intellectual”—would be a misreading. For one, they manufacture ideas with assembly-line efficiency: their blog posts, podcasts, and Substacks arrive with the subtlety of freight trains. And their “hot takes,” despite vulgar packaging, are often grounded in distinct philosophical traditions. Thus, what appears as intellectual fast food – the ultra-processed thought-nuggets deep fried in venture capital – often conceals wholesome ingredients sourced from a gourmet pantry of quite some sophistication.
Not surprisingly, the billionaire bibliophile is Silicon Valley’s newest fetish, the bookshelf having supplanted the yacht as the ultimate status barometer. And it’s full of strange, unlikely hits: Albert O. Hirschman would surely be surprised to see the powerful analytic of his Exit, Voice, and Loyalty fueling efforts to build network states, private cities, and seasteads.
Thiel’s much-discussed dalliances with Leo Strauss and René Girard constitute just one branch of this philosophical family tree. Another, more robust limb belongs to Karp, whose doctoral thesis on Adorno and Talcott Parsons now serves as intellectual ballast for Palantir’s surveillance empire. His communications with investors arrive garnished with erudite citations; Samuel Huntington made a recent appearance.
Yet, somehow, Karp’s realpolitik-for-optimists feels decidedly un-Adornian. “America’s ability to organize violence in a superior way,” he announced on Fox Business in March, “is the single reason why the world improved over the last… 70-80 years.” Frankfurt School goes Nasdaq, with a pit stop at the CIA: where Adorno and Horkheimer saw Enlightenment rationality concealing violence, Karp sees organized violence revealing the global benefits of America’s hegemony – and a lucrative profit opportunity to help improve its further organization (this time, with algorithms, drones, AI!).
Karp’s militant rhetoric exposes Silicon Valley’s impatience with thought unmoored from action. Marx would surely toast their pivot to praxis: instead of just “arguing the world,” they have the will, the means – and now, apparently, the “Big Balls” – to change it. Trump’s return has granted them direct conduits to federal machinery: now Andreessen plays hiring coach, Thiel installs his lieutenants throughout government, and Musk’s confederates run amok in DOGE. Their approach? The same that leveled “dinosaur industries”: disrupt first, debug later.
The taxonomic vocabularies we’ve relied upon—those tidy categories of elites, oligarchs, public intellectuals – falter before this new species. Silicon Valley’s philosopher-kings aren’t merely the patrons of yesteryear bankrolling think tanks or non-profits, nor accidental plutocrats scribbling manifestos between yacht purchases. They’ve engineered a more muscular hybrid: investment portfolios that function as philosophical arguments, market positions that operationalize convictions. And while industrial-age billionaires constructed foundations to memorialize their worldviews, these figures erect investment funds that double as ideological fortresses. It’s the Hegelian evolution from capitalism (thesis) to philanthro-capitalism (anti-thesis) to cultural warfare as a profit center (synthesis).
Consider the battleground of ethical investment—that corporate confessional branded ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), where Wall Street’s dubious attempt to measure virtue like a quarterly earnings report has mutated into a culture war flashpoint. For the uninitiated, ESG represents the financial world’s belated recognition that perhaps poisoning rivers, exploiting workers, and installing boards composed entirely of golf buddies might eventually impact the bottom line. Companies receive ESG scores that purportedly measure their environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and governance practices—a sort of moral credit rating for corporations eager to prove they’ve evolved beyond strip-mining both nature and human dignity.
What’s peculiar—almost perversely fascinating—is how Silicon Valley’s elites have positioned their artillery on this battlefield, so seemingly distant from their digital kingdoms. The drama, much of it unfolding in the past few years, proceeded with mechanical inevitability: Musk’s dismissal (“a scam”), Chamath Palihapitiya’s denunciation (“complete fraud”), Andreessen’s burial rites (“zombie idea“).
But these men transcend mere commentary. When praxis beckons, Silicon Valley answers with investment, not mere philanthropy. Thiel, fresh from comparing ESG to Chinese communism and calling it an “ideological cartel,” bankrolled Strive Asset Management, an anti-ESG fund. (It was then led by Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s erstwhile DOGE lieutenant, who ran a whole presidential campaign on a single issue: attacking “woke capitalism.”) Andreessen, having backed a Christian pro-MAGA fund called New Founding, also helped to seed 1789 Capital, another anti-ESG rampart now fortified by Don Trump Jr. Their genius? Converting intellectual positions into market arbitrage while wielding (and often owning) digital megaphones to reshape the very reality their investments bet against.
Has Silicon Valley’s intellectual imprint carved deeper grooves than we realized? While the likes of Andreessen cosplay as America’s plucky “Little Tech,” what if they are something bigger than this pantomime suggests? A hypothesis dangles before us, thorny and disquieting: what if our multi-tasking tech elites are the very forces – cunning, mighty, occasionally delusional – driving the “structural transformation” of the public sphere that Jürgen Habermas diagnosed in his early writings?
The young Habermas – before systems theory bloated his prose and nuance diluted his fury – identified the villain with brass-knuckled clarity: the decline of critical, open debate was due to the corrupting influence of concentrated power. Truer words have never been spoken. And yet… Updating his 1962 analysis in 2023, Habermas, the patrician-academic, chose to fuss over topics like “algorithmic steering”— a quaint concern akin to adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole.
Today, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the tech oligarchs — not their algorithmically-steered platforms—who present the greater danger. Their arsenal combines three deadly implements: plutocratic gravity (fortunes so vast they distort reality’s basic physics), oracular authority (their technological visions treated as inevitable prophecy), and platform sovereignty (ownership of the digital intersections where society’s conversation unfolds). Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), Andreessen’s strategic investments into Substack, Peter Thiel’s courting of Rumble, the conservative YouTube: they’ve colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld.
We must update our taxonomies to account for this new species of oligarch-intellectuals. If yesterday’s public intellectual resembled a careful archaeologist methodically excavating cultural artifacts for display in rarefied literary journals, today’s model is the demolition expert, wiring entire societal structures with ideological explosives and detonating them from the safe distance of offshore accounts. They don’t write about the future; they install it, beta-testing theories on unwitting populations in history’s largest unreviewed experiment.
What distinguishes them from previous wealth-encrusted elites isn’t avarice but verbosity—a torrential output that would exhaust even Balzac. Where industrial barons funded think tanks to launder interests into policy papers, our oligarch-intellectuals cut out the middleman. Forget steering the algorithms: oligarch-intellectuals steer the conversation itself – and they do it with philosophical meme-grenades. Dropped at 3 AM on X, they invariably become international headlines by breakfast.
How should we situate such figures in established debates about intellectuals? In the late 1980s, Zygmunt Bauman mapped two intellectual archetypes: the “legislators,” who descended from mountaintops with society’s commandments etched in stone, and the “interpreters,” who merely translated between cultural dialects without prescribing universal rules. He traced postmodernity’s erosion of the legislative stance. Grand narratives died. Universal authority withered. All that remained was interpretation.
Our oligarch-intellectuals begin as interpreters par excellence. They position themselves as technological mediums, passive channels for inevitable futures. Their special gift? Reading the tea leaves of technological determinism with perfect clarity. They don’t prescribe; they merely translate the gospel of inevitability. This performs the “intellectual” function of their double-helix identity.
But the oligarchic DNA strand coils tighter. Armed with their prophetic visions, they demand specific sacrifices—from the public, the government, and their employees. Altman jetsets between capitals like a tech Kissinger, offering peace treaties for AI wars that have not even begun. Musk diagrams humanity’s cosmic destiny with the certainty of a Soviet five-year plan. Thiel and Karp redraft defense strategy while Andreessen reimagines money and Srinivasan governance. Their interpretive gift transforms, chameleon-like, into legislative mandate.
In the process, Silicon Valley’s oligarch-intellectuals have built cathedral doors from what postmodernists once declared rubble: a grand narrative with “technology” (but also: “disruption,” “innovation,” “AGI”) inscribed on every stone, heavy with the weight of inevitability. They thumb through tomes like Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants not as readers but as editors, penciling in their own imperatives between the lines. The tech mogul, once content to predict the future, now demands we conform to it.
The metamorphosis reaches its final stage not in manifestos or tweetstorms but in their colonization of Washington’s power chambers. Watch as they glide from boardroom to Cabinet Room, mercury-smooth and purpose-driven, having masterfully fused interpretation and legislation: first prophesying technology’s demands, then crafting policy to satisfy the gods they themselves invented.
Where RAND’s Cold Warriors may have whispered into Pentagon corridors, our oligarch-intellectuals orchestrate reality’s symphony—controlling media platforms, deploying venture capital like carpet bombs, and perfecting Steve Bannon’s “flooding the zone” strategy to a hydraulic science. Combining powers previously scattered across societal domains, they propose futures Monday, finance them Tuesday, and force their manifestation by Friday. And who questions prophets whose previous revelations birthed PayPal, Tesla, and ChatGPT? Their divine right to predict derives from their proven divinity.
Their pronouncements frame the entrenchment and expansion of their own agendas not as corporate self-interest but as capitalism’s only chance at salvation. Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto“—that digital encyclical urging America to “build” rather than lament—drips with references to economic stagnation and prescribes entrepreneurial daring as the only antidote to systemic sclerosis. Invoking Nietzsche and Marinetti, he legislates acceleration as virtue and condemns the cautionary impulse as heresy. “We believe that there is no material problem,” he intones, “that cannot be solved with more technology.” This isn’t just a statement—it’s a catechism for his desired future.
Thiel, in his continued insistence that the West has lost its capacity for bold innovations, also conjures an image of a technological desert that must be irrigated by Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Altman performs a nimble two-step: first declaring AI will devour jobs, then extending universal basic income as the only logical solution – not merely through rhetorical flourishes but via research dollars and Worldcoin, his other, less-known startups (after all, why not get paid – possibly, in perpetuity! – for letting Sam Altman scan your iris?). These aren’t just self-serving bromides but existential imperatives: reject their proposals and watch civilization crumble to dust.
This messianic self-promotion—tech oligarchs crowning themselves humanity’s official spokesmen—would have Antonio Gramsci reaching for his prison notebooks. The Italian Marxist theorized ’organic intellectuals’ as voices emerging from ascendant classes, especially the proletariat, who translate particular interests into universal imperatives in the battle for cultural hegemony. The bitter punchline? Capital has beaten the left at its own game—oligarch-intellectuals now serve as capital’s unanointed organic intellectuals, with capitalism perfecting in a decade what socialists couldn’t achieve in a century.
Between the cold arithmetic of profit-seeking and the messianic theater of civilization-saving stretches the oligarch-intellectuals’ most revealing contradiction: they must extinguish the very revolutionary flames their empires were kindled to ignite. Their obsessive campaign against “wokeness” reveals power’s oldest reflex—containment of its own contradictions.
Watch Musk denounce the “woke mind virus” or Karp attack wokeness as “a form of thin pagan religion.” Andreessen, meanwhile, paints elite universities as Marxist seminaries producing “America-hating communists.” Joe Lonsdale, another tech mogul (and a co-founder of Palantir) has been the driving force behind the University of Austin— the anti-woke university hoping to mass produce “America-loving capitalists.”
Tracing the origins of this oligarchic anxiety requires revisiting Alvin Gouldner’s predictions about the rise of the “New Class” from the late 1970s. Gouldner identified a “technical intelligentsia” whose very DNA carried revolutionary potential. Though they appeared docile—”wishing nothing more than to enjoy their opiate obsessions with technical puzzles”—their fundamental purpose was to “revolutionize technology continually,” destabilizing cultural bedrock and social architecture by their refusal to worship yesterday’s gods.
The alliance Gouldner envisioned—rational engineers joining hands with cultural intellectuals to challenge entrenched capital—constituted his “New Class,” a potentially revolutionary force hamstrung by its own privilege. As subsequent decades have shown, Gouldner’s utopia never quite materialized (though reactionaries like Bannon and Curtis Yarvin, with his conspiratorial notion of “the Cathedral,” might beg to differ). Yet Silicon Valley emerged as a strange exception. Its rank-and-file—if not always its generals—marinated in countercultural ideals, championing diversity and flattened hierarchies. Researchers probing tech’s trenches have documented an emerging “post-neoliberal subjectivity,” a consciousness allergic to inequality and increasingly hostile to the entrepreneurial theology that once demanded complete surrender of private life at the corporate altar.
The evidence isn’t merely anecdotal. A comprehensive 2023 study tracking political donations of 200,000 employees across 18 industries revealed tech workers as uniquely anti-establishment—and trailing only the bohemians of arts and entertainment in their liberal fervor. The source of this radicalism lies precisely where Gouldner placed his faith: in what he called the “culture of critical discourse” embedded in technical work itself. Thus, the researchers discovered that non-technical employees within the same tech companies showed none of this rebellious disposition, confirming that coding itself, not mere proximity to ping pong tables, contributes to their dissenting mindset.
Most revealing in that study was the cavernous gap between liberal tech workers and their right-leaning bosses—a schism wider than in all but two other industries. That gap was a ticking time bomb. And it exploded at the start of the first Trump administration. Catalyzed by its clumsily executed but aggressive policies – on immigration, race, war – Silicon Valley’s employees transformed from compliant keystrokers into digital dissidents.
Abetted by social media and rising racial tensions following the murder of George Floyd by police officers, tech workers emerged as an unforeseen challenge. The oligarchs found themselves ambushed from within—their liberal-leaning legions suddenly refusing to drape their technical artistry over the Pentagon’s blood machines or ICE’s deportation directive. These revolts – at Google, Microsoft, Amazon – threatened not merely contractual agreements but the very covenant that bound Silicon Valley to the military-industrial complex.
The rebellion’s second front—climate consciousness—emerged with evangelical fervor when Amazon’s employees issued their green manifesto, declaring themselves capable of “redefining what is possible” for planetary salvation. For the oligarchs, this dual rebellion against militarism and for environmental stewardship – never mind other headaches like ESG – presented a malignant tumor requiring swift excision.
Unable to reprogram their workforce through direct means, Silicon Valley’s oligarch-intellectuals adopted a more elegant solution: condemning “woke” infiltration with the fervor of medieval witch-hunters while disguising national security behind the rhetoric of patriotic duty.
Karp, having already crowned “wokeness” the “central risk to Palantir and America,” now demands geopolitical fealty from his payroll peasantry. They must support Israel and oppose China; those who disagree are free to look for employment elsewhere. As he told his Davos audience in 2023, “we want [employees] who want to be on the side of the West. You may not agree with that and, bless you, don’t work here.” Recently, Andreessen even confided to the Times that it wasn’t uncommon to suspect that some employees were joining tech companies with the explicit goal of destroying them from within.
The playbook behind all these declarations is brutally simple: re-align the tech intelligentsia with old-money power by cleansing their ranks of subversive thought. Gouldner’s dream of cultural-technical alliance lies fractured – shattered by pink slips, mockery of social conscience as weakness, and flag-waving paranoia about Chinese competition.
Oligarch-intellectuals have emerged a stable and coherent social entity as a byproduct of this battle for hegemony. And they certainly won’t be retiring even after quashing their woke and ESG-loving enemies. In Trump’s Washington, they arrive not as guests but as architects. Their reality-bending machinery—money hydraulics, platform dominance, bureaucracies kneeling to translate private fantasy into public policy—wields unprecedented force. Carnegie and Rockefeller commanded respect but lacked this lethal arsenal: social media thunderbox, celebrity aura, venture capital chainsaw, West Wing passkey. By rewriting regulations, channeling subsidies, and recalibrating public expectations, oligarch-intellectuals transmute fever dreams—blockchain fiefdoms, Martian homesteads—into seemingly plausible futures.
Fortunately, what appears as the monolithic fortress of techno-oligarchic power conceals structural flaws invisible to worshipful observers. Their apparent capacity to bend reality to their will paradoxically undermines itself by constructing echo chambers that asphyxiate essential criticism, all while celebrating free expression.
Divorced from the caustic touch of unvarnished facts, these Silicon Valley pontiffs lose their navigational instruments. And in a landscape already littered with founder worship, contact with unfiltered truth grows scarcer. (Don’t count on court hagiographers like Walter Isaacson to tell them!)
This is one of the many ways in which politics is very much not like business. Standard venture capitalism still faces the market’s cold judgment. VCs who crowned WeWork the future of work watched pandemic realities puncture their bubble. The market, however flawed, regularly tests one’s investment hypotheses.
But oligarchic power offers a darker temptation: why adjust predictions to match reality when you can bend reality to validate predictions? When Andreessen Horowitz anoints cryptocurrency as banking’s inevitable successor, the next step isn’t adaptation but activation—deploying Trump administration influence to transmute prophecy into policy. The collision between venture fantasies and stubborn facts becomes avoidable when you own the levers to reconfigure the facts themselves. This, then, is the final gambit: oligarch-intellectuals reconfiguring legislation, institutions, and cultural expectations until prophecy and reality fuse into a single hallucination (courtesy of ChatGPT, of course).
Reality, however, maintains its breaking point—a lesson Soviet bureaucrats learned when their carefully constructed fictions shattered against material constraints. The Chinese Communist Party, shrewder in its methods, built multi-tiered grievance collection systems—digital forums, local officials, vetted NGOs—delivering crucial intelligence about potential turmoil.
The oligarch-intellectuals demonstrate precisely the opposite instinct: They are treading the Soviet path. Musk’s DOGE apparatus converts remaining employees into nodding mannequins, while his cohort hunts dissenters across digital platforms with algorithmic efficiency. In selecting Soviet-style reality denial over Chinese-style reality monitoring, they’ve fashioned echo chambers that will ultimately fracture their grand designs.
The irony cuts to the bone: these men who see communists lurking everywhere are about to perfect the cardinal sin of Soviet technocracy, mistaking their sleek models for the unruly reality they pretend to tame.
We shouldn’t really be all that surprised: when oligarch-intellectuals seize history’s most powerful apparatus, they transform, inevitably, into apparatchiks—this time, holidaying by the makeshift tents of Burning Man rather than at the swanky sanatoriums of Crimea. Elon Musk might have started as a Henry Ford but he will exit as a Leonid Brezhnev.
Evgeny Morozov is the founder and publisher of The Syllabus. He is the author of The Net Delusion and To Save Everything, Click Here.
