Tech/Lords

Democracy vs the “Freedom” to be Very, Very Rich.

In 2009, Peter Thiel sent shock waves through Silicon Valley when he published an essay, “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which he declared “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He added:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

Thiel is the billionaire investor behind products such as Facebook, Pay Pal, and JD Vance. He embodies the supervillain ethic among tech lords, in which cruelty (against women and “welfare beneficiaries”) is a manifestation of the right and power of the richest. A gay man, he backs homophobic Republicans; a successful investor, he declares capitalism and democracy dead, and spends his time training with guns. Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote—it gets in the way of tech bros solving our problems for us. Thiel’s solution is to get rid of democracy:

Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

A single, paramount person. Building a machine of freedom. That works “for capitalism.”

This is called “dictatorship.” This is called “slavery.”

How powerful are the tech lords? Brian Merchant, a former tech writer for The Los Angeles Times, wrote about the influence of tech companies on Jan. 17:

Google commands 90 percent of the search market. Seven in 10 of all Americans use Facebook. Amazon, Microsoft and Google control two-thirds of the internet’s cloud architecture — if any of it goes down, so does the web. Amazon owns 40 percent of the American e-commerce market.

What’s happening now, in one sense, is that the tech titans who have secured such large swaths of power over the digital world are increasingly comfortable wielding that power, openly, in the “real” world too; the tech oligarchs are becoming the American oligarchs, period, often using leverage from their digital platforms in tandem with their war chests of old-fashioned cash.