Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Donald Trump’s victory represents many world-changing things. One is the marriage of techno-determinism and libertarianism. In the world of this new administration, the line between Milton Friedman and tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg blurs into a philosophy that aims to end all constraints on markets.
Trump’s band of techno-libertarian “volunteers” — as Musk rather disingenuously put it, given Tesla and SpaceX get more federal funding than NPR — believe that they should be left alone to get on with dismantling the apparatus of the state in service to efficiency-building and profit making. The latter goal has already been achieved, at least for the Silicon Valley crowd — artificial intelligence, crypto and any business attached to Musk have soared in value since the election.
But the US is by no means the only place in which digital overlords exert undue influence. Last week, Musk announced that UK MPs “will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens”. This followed a call by Labour MP Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons’ science and technology select committee (and a telecoms engineer), to have Musk give evidence about the spreading of misinformation prior to the UK riots last August.
Thank goodness somebody has the guts to stand up to Big Tech. Peter Kyle, the UK science and tech secretary, dropped the ball this month when he opined that countries such as Britain should interact with the most powerful global technology companies as with a nation state. Governments should show a “sense of humility” and use “statecraft” when dealing with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Meta, he said.
If we’ve learnt anything since the mid-1990s, it’s that being cautious and humble isn’t the way to deal with Big Tech, which plays by its own rules, for its own gain. As Trump builds his new administration, the gains have already been stupendous. Watch as Palantir takes over the military-industrial complex, bitcoin surges to new heights, X continues to favour Republicans over Democrats and the wealth of the techno-libertarian class soars. As Andreessen put it on a podcast recently, Trump’s victory feels like “a boot off the throat. Every morning I wake up happier than the day before.”
The dream of a technology-driven world free from all governmental constraints has been around for at least as long as the internet has. Ronald Reagan-era deregulation helped it along, but so did a laissez-faire attitude to the development of the consumer internet in the 1990s under Bill Clinton. He granted the now infamous “section 230” liability exemption for the spate of new dotcoms popping up in Silicon Valley.
Jonathan Taplin wrote the prescient 2023 book The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto about Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and Zuckerberg. He draws a direct line between the Clinton/Gore era, Musk and the comments by Kyle.
“I think the tech oligarchs are already in charge,” he says. “After all, these are the entities that build cloud computing and AI infrastructure for nation states, the underwater cables that power digital commerce and communication, the military drones and satellite technology that are crucial for defence, and now, the new international currency systems that may well be at the heart of the next financial crisis.”
But Big Tech’s cognitive capture of policymakers and government is just one part of the problem. In recent years, techno-libertarianism has dovetailed with the proliferation of extraterritorial domains — free ports, tax havens, special economic zones and even privately run cities — where digital titans and those who want to be like them can escape the bounds of democracy. A spate of recent books, from Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism to Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s The Hidden Globe, lay out the ways in which these places funnel wealth from rich countries to poor ones without the bother of taxes or local rules and regulations.
A lot of the money and people in such places come from Silicon Valley. Consider Próspera, a private town in Honduras, financed in part by funds backed by Andreessen, Thiel and Sam Altman. Here businesses can create their own bespoke regulatory frameworks, entrepreneurs can run wacky medical trials free from Food and Drug Administration standards and citizens are protected from crime (though presumably not the white-collar kind) by a private firm of armed guards. Its goal says it all: “building the future of human governance: privately run and for-profit”.
That might well be the Trump administration’s mantra, too. But investors should remember that techno-libertarianism often peaks before a fall. In 2006, Richard Haass, a former George W Bush state department official, wrote a piece arguing for corporations to be elevated to near nation state status. Companies such as Microsoft and Goldman Sachs had a role to play in “regional and global deliberations”, as the “near monopoly power” of states was eroded.
The great financial crisis made that notion both passé and politically toxic, at least for a time. Now, we are about to see what private monopoly power in the guise of government looks like. I wonder how long the dream — or perhaps nightmare — will last before the world once again wakes up.