To support my index of resources about neoreaction and adjacent far right movements which overlap with “tech” culture, I have taken the liberty of capturing commentaries from other people tucked into Xitter & Facebook. These are not quite the same as my reading, but both are illuminating in exploring how “tech” executive culture itself understands the shift. Emphasis in quotes are the authors’, not mine.
Aaron Bartley
3 February 2025
Why are they doing this? What’s motiving the techno-feudalists (Musk, Thiel, Vance, Andreessen and their minions) to wreck our country and tank the economy?
I’ve subjected myself to hours of YouTube interviews and dozens of screeds by the tech overlords and their high priests. They have made no effort to hide their motivations. This is my attempt at a basic synthesis of how they explain their shift from neo-liberals to Trumpists:
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The techno-feudalists have billions invested in crypto and without a big push from the government and the removal of all regulations, their money will be lost. Crypto has not mainstreamed in the way they expected, both because of Biden-era regulations on speculative investments and because the public just isn’t into it. They need the state to manage the transition to crypto.
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Similarly, they’re gravely concerned about the trillions they’ve invested in AI. Any amount of regulation or constraints by the state is seen as a death-knell. They know that AI has prompted a speculative bubble and they need the state to manage the bubble through subsidies and contracts. They also need the state to aggressively shield the US from Chinese AI technology.
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Both crypto and AI are burning up the earth. The electricity demands of both AI and crypto are enormous. They need a completely deregulated energy industry and rapid shift away from any climate policy. Even the mention of climate change is a threat to their fortunes.
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China has caught up faster than they expected in all realms of tech. They need an ultra-protectionist/nationalist regime to keep Chinese technology at bay.
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Lastly, they resent their employees deeply for the political concerns they’ve been raising about climate change and DEI. They blame the “radicalizing” influences of elite institutions and want the government to shut these institutions down or reform them heavily.
(Edited: As Mike Puma and Frits Abell have commented, the over-arching motivation is to make the state a profit center for themselves through privatization, subsidies and contracts, just like the post-Soviet oligarchical takeover in Russia.)
A couple of supporting links from JK:
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Blockchain in 10 minutes — my no-math primer on the tech behind cryptocurrencies
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The Twin Insurgency — my single favorite examination of What Is Going On, addressing that final point about the plutocrats & criminals trying to hollow out and exploit state capacity
Jasmine Sun 30 January 2025
Here’s a 4-part grand theory of the tech right.
“Tech disposition”
First, there is a unique “tech disposition”. David E. Broockman and Neil Malhotra surveyed 700 founders:
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they’re more liberal than most Dems on social issues + taxes, but very conservative on regulation + labor (even outside of tech)
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pro-market values trace to adolescence & cannot be explained by demographics or economics
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these beliefs do not resemble other economic elites
First, technology entrepreneurs are far from monolithically conservative; rather, they overwhelmingly support Democrats. This is not an artifact of our survey sample: campaign contributions from technology industry employees and ultra-wealthy technology entrepreneurs to Democrats have long exceeded those to Republicans. Although it is not surprising that individual wealthy Democrats exist, we show that the wealthy in an entire industry support the party pushing for higher taxes, deviating from the norm among the wealthy at large.
However, our findings are not so simple as that most technology entrepreneurs are liberals. Our second group of findings is that most technology entrepreneurs share a particular set of views across policy domains; that this set is conservative on many issues; and that this set is distinctive to technology entrepreneurs, being rare among other wealthy individuals, other Democrats, and other wealthy Democrats. In particular, on issues related to economic redistribution, globalization, and social issues, technology entrepreneurs are typically as or more liberal than Democratic citizens, Democratic wealthy individuals, and Democratic donors; they are also more liberal on all these issues than millionaires in the mass public. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs indicate support for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes. However, technology entrepreneurs are very skeptical of government regulation. Indeed, technology entrepreneurs’ views on regulation closely resemble those of Republican donors, and are more conservative from those of other millionaires in the mass public, Democratic citizens, and wealthy Democrats. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs also think the government should make it easier to fire workers. These large differences persist even between technology entrepreneurs who identify as Democrats and other Democratic constituencies.
This finding is surprising in light of popular accounts that describe technology entrepreneurs as falling within categories familiar in American politics: as typically liberal, typically conservative, or typically libertarian. However, we show that most technology entrepreneurs have a pattern of views that does not fit in any of these categories, has not been seen elsewhere, and is not predicted by prior work: a majority of technology entrepreneurs explicitly describe their views as supporting redistribution of wealth but opposing regulation of business, approximately double the share as in any other group of citizens, donors, or wealthy individuals we surveyed.
Our third set of findings concerns suggestive evidence for the theoretical mechanisms we posit for why technology entrepreneurs have this unique pattern of views. Our theoretical argument, elaborated below, is that the wealthy from a particular industry may have a unique set of political views because of the distinctive set of political predispositions of the individuals who select into each industry, and further, the experiences they will tend to have working in it. Consistent with this argument, we show that technology entrepreneurs share a distinct pattern of values and predispositions that correspond with their views in related policy domains. For example, with a series of pre-registered comparisons and survey experiments, we show that it appears technology entrepreneurs’ opposition to government regulation can be traced to positive predispositions towards markets and entrepreneurship. We also cast doubt on alternative explanations for their views related to demographics, geography, and pure self-interest.
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Sun’s thread includes screencaps from what appears to be a slightly different version of the linked paper; I have quoted the corresponding section of the paper I have access to — JK
]
Mark Andreessen’s recent [New York Times] interview with Ross Douhat is very illuminating. Andreessen describes this exact disposition: “pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised” was the implicit deal of the Clinton-Gore era:
As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, “Oh, of course, I’m a normie Democrat. I’ll be a normie Democrat forever.”
Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.
Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.
Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.
Yes, 100 percent. I would say even more than that. We all voluntarily live in California. We not only have the federal dimension of what you’re saying; we also live in these very high-tax cities — San Francisco, Palo Alto. And I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them, you prove you’re a good person. For that generation of enlightened centrist liberals, it was: Of course you pay higher taxes, because we’re the Democratic Party. As an agent of positive social change, of course you want to have a bigger safety net. Of course you want to fund all these programs, and you want to fund all these activist campaigns. Of course you want that.
The term “Camelot” was never used, but there was a Camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have felt in the early ’60s in the same way. Like, wow, yes, it’s all happening, and it’s all going to happen, and it’s going to be great. Yeah, they’re going to tax us, but it’s going to pay off. That was like a full-fledged part of the Deal.
Look, quite honestly, I am trying in none of this to claim moral high ground or moral sheen or anything, just to kind of take the edge off that, if that’s what I’ve come across.
Quite honestly, the tax rates didn’t really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, you’d make another 10X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers. So we weren’t forced to really think that hard about it. It just seemed like this was the formula that would result in everything working.
Social justice
Second, social justice fused with labor, nonprofits, & the state — fueling a wave of employee activism and speech / DEI / climate requirements. Structural issues demanded process solutions. Tech’s hatred of bureaucracy trumped their support for social justice.
See again the Douhat interview with Andreessen:
Andreessen
By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
Douthat
But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.
Andreessen
Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”
They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”
See comments from
Paul Graham:
For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word “inclusion” in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an “inclusive language guide.”
This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence. But these bureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even greater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only people who shared their political beliefs. The most egregious cases were the new “DEI statements” that some universities started to require from faculty candidates, proving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used these statements as the initial filter and only even considered candidates who scored high enough on them. You’re not hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.
Dem pivot
Third, Dems started to pivot away from key Clintonite ideas:
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neoliberal economics would be good for america
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digital tech would spread good liberal values
Henry Farrell calls this the collapse of both the “neoliberal” and “Palo Alto consensus”:
If that has changed, it is not simply because progressives have moved away from Silicon Valley. It is because both the neoliberal consensus and the Palo Alto consensus have collapsed, leading the political economies of Washington DC and Silicon Valley to move in very different directions.
A lot of attention has been paid to the intellectual and political collapse of neoliberalism. This really got going thanks to Trump, but it transformed the organizing ideas of the Democratic coalition too. During the Trump era, card-carrying Clintonites like Jake Sullivan became convinced that old ideas about minimally regulated markets and trade didn’t make much sense any more. Domestically, they believed that the “China shock” had hollowed out America’s industrial heartland, opening the way for Trump style populism. Reviving U.S. manufacturing and construction might be facilitated through a “Green New Deal” that would both allow the U.S. to respond effectively to climate change, and revive the physical economy. Internationally, they believed that China was a direct threat to U.S. national security, as it caught up with the U.S. on technology, industrial capacity and ability to project military force. Finally, they believed that U.S. elites had become much too supine about economic power, allowing the U.S. economy to become dominated by powerful monopolies. New approaches to antitrust were needed to restrain platform companies which had gotten out of control. Unions would be Democrats’ most crucial ally in bringing back the working class.
Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes. Platforms like Facebook have been used to mobilize ethnic violence around the world, with minimal pushback from the platform’s moderation systems, which were built on the cheap and not designed to deal with a complex world where people could do horrible things in hundreds of languages. And there are now a lot of people who think that Silicon Valley platforms are bad for stability in places like the U.S. and Western Europe where democracy was supposed to be consolidated.
My surmise is that this shift in beliefs has undermined the core ideas that held the Silicon Valley coalition together. Specifically, it has broken the previously ‘obvious’ intimate relationship between innovation and liberalism.
I don’t see anyone arguing that Silicon Valley innovation is the best way of spreading liberal democratic awesome around the world any more, or for keeping it up and running at home. Instead, I see a variety of arguments for the unbridled benefits of innovation, regardless of its benefits for democratic liberalism. I see a lot of arguments that AI innovation in particular is about to propel us into an incredible new world of human possibilities, provided that it isn’t restrained by DEI, ESG and other such nonsense. Others (or the same people) argue that we need to innovate, innovate, innovate because we are caught in a technological arms race with China, and if we lose, we’re toast. Others (sotto or brutto voce; again, sometimes the same people) - contend innovation isn’t really possible in a world of democratic restraint, and we need new forms of corporate authoritarianism with a side helping of exit, to allow the kinds of advances we really need to transform the world.
The Biden admin was far more pro-unions, tech regulation & antitrust. Dems probably needed to adjust (neoliberalism isn’t popular), but this broke the tech / liberal coalition — they were seen as abandoning business to back the activist class.
Douhat
So what, in concrete terms, does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?
Andreessen
They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.
The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.
Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on “Rogan.” Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”
Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.
Trump
Fourth, tech found a home in Trump’s less ideological, more deal-friendly Republican party. Traditional conservatives were a poor fit, but Trump runs the country as a cult of personality — institutions be damned. and isn’t that what “founder mode” is?
From Pirate Wires:
As President Trump begins his second term, he has the support of many business leaders, especially the entrepreneurs and founders who make up the ascendant ‘tech right.’ Why did this faction emerge and rally behind the president? Some point to policy issues such as regulation, taxation, government contracting, and antitrust. Others note that self-interest and perhaps self-preservation motivate its members as much as principle or policy.
But sincere converts to the tech right share at least one thing in common: a belief in founders — change agents capable of upending stale industries — taking on Goliaths, and reaching into the future to unite it to the present. The tech right sees founders, and the qualities they embody and inspire in others, as the key to company success. Conversely, founder-less institutions don’t work, like a body without a head — or perhaps, without a soul.
With its support of Trump, the tech right is just applying this model to politics, the ultimate stale industry, and Washington, D.C., the ultimate Goliath. In Donald Trump, the tech right and the American people see a leader. More to the point, we see a founder.
Other factors
There were other contributing factors: post-2016 techlash, defense money, mean journalists, COVID, plain old opportunism in the new Trump admin. Vocal Trump support from Andreessen, Sacks, Musk ignited a preference cascade.
But I maintain that SV elites’ deepest commitment is not right or left, but to unfettered innovation (& the wealth / growth that results). It’s the spirit of “get out of my way & let me cook” — they’ll align with whichever party makes that possible.
My overall thought on the sort of cultural versus material debate is like, the left liberal camp still underrates the cultural stuff. I think you're right that considering the counterfactual, would Zuckerberg be being like, “Meta is too feminine now” if Kamala won — obviously no. At the same time, when I read PG’s essay, I was like, oh, this is a complaint about bureaucracy as much as it’s a complaint about politics.
It's this cultural thing of builders in, prigs out. There are all these memes like “high agency” or “founder mode” or “live players” or “you can just do things.” My friend Clara, who edits Asterisk Magazine, was telling me about some conference where someone called it “Robert Moses libertarianism.” What does that even mean? And I think this is incoherent, except for that Moses was really going founder mode. He was a high agency guy. He’s very effective, right? And there is some disposition where tech, because it is the industry of innovators and disruptors, is just like: Anybody who’s super effective and hacks the system, whether it's from the inside or the outside, whether it's in tech or in politics, they get that respect.
That relates to why I see progress as like the primary coalition rather than like left or right. Or as Lonsdale calls it, the “builder class.” There is economic self-interest, obviously, but it’s also an aesthetic preference.
Another consequence is that this is causing real rifts between maga right and tech right — most notably over H1-B, but IMO that’s a sign of more fights to come.
The more traditional conservatives — not Hanania, that is — go on to express skepticism about the “Tech Right”’s lack of a moral compass (of the Christian sort); its willingness to endure short-term social harms for long-term economic gains; and its overall bias toward disruption — whatever chaos may come. They’re suspicious of tech’s talk about “human capital” and its flirtations with fascism. The essays read like a warning to fellow reactionaries: Can the tech titans be trusted to preserve American values? Or are they riding the Trump train on the way to a robot-ruled transhumanist utopia? Take slogans like Accelerate or die! — there’s nothing “conservative” about it.
