Feudal Dreams

The Seductive Delusions of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

By G.J. Nelson

Since Donald Trump took office, Elon Musk has hammed it up as the public face of DOGE, MAGA’s federal government killing machine. Americans have watched helplessly as this incredibly wealthy, incredibly sloppy manchild gutted one agency after another, cancelled countless grants for critical research, killed regulations that protect average Americans, crippled entitlement programs, and dumped thousands of dedicated public servants onto the streets.

The pretext for it all was eliminating government waste and tightening the budget. And yet these haphazard cuts have barely dented US spending. That’s because it was always a power grab by small government ideologues, anti-woke cultural conservatives, and big business favored by the regime. For everyone involved, cruelty is a happy side effect.

That all this carnage was overseen by a preening meme-poisoned capitalist with no official appointment or position reveals how utterly cartel capitalism has poisoned US democracy. Musk bought his power and has used it to cripple the federal government’s ability to stand up to or protect the public from people like him.

Part of this was just Musk’s revenge tour against a government that sought to hold him to account for his exploitative and dangerous workplaces, stock manipulations, and sketchy sales practices. His battles with the SEC have long been a sore point. But beneath his personal vendettas and self-dealing, there’s an insidious worldview at play, a reactionary Silicon Valley ideology that critics have accurately labeled techno-feudalism.

At its most extreme, it’s a neo-monarchist, deeply racist, and Social Darwinist movement that seeks to replace democracy with a pyramid-shaped dictatorship of tech barons. Its true believers view most of humanity—insufficiently greedy or technologically savvy—with dim contempt. It’s essentially market libertarianism with a piss-yellow coat of cyberpunk paint: authoritarian, monopolistic, and vertically stratified.

Elon Musk might not consciously subscribe to the ideology—I’m not sure he believes in anything other than himself—but its basic precepts come instinctually to him. He already thinks like a feudal lord.

He deserves power because he’s allegedly smart and obscenely wealthy. Mediocre federal employees waste time and money helping people who don’t deserve a hand-up—and, worse, don’t expect to profit from it. Only visionaries like him are fit to decide the value of government programs, voters and elected officials be damned.

Musk acts like a petulant child who can’t contain his emotions, who overshares and manically indulges in flights of fancy, who freely fibs, makes inappropriate comments to strange women, and puts down people who oppose him with schoolboy insults. Like his master Donald Trump, his default management style to bully, cajole, and make insinuations about subordinates, even when he has no official authority over them.

Techno-feudalism might seem like a bad joke to people who don’t follow this stuff, but the influence of Silicon Valley techno-feudalists can be felt across the MAGA regime. They have found natural allies in Project 2025’s brain trust who have their own old-school ideas about using dictatorial power to strip the state for parts while bolstering favored capitalists with deregulation and tax breaks.

I don’t want to overhype the novelty of this cobbled-together belief system; versions of it have been floating around Silicon Valley since Steve Jobs first tried on a turtleneck. The industry “mavericks” understandably came to see themselves as visionaries as they drove technological innovations that disrupted and upended business and the larger culture. 

It’s just the latest chapter in a long history of arrogant capitalists railing against mass participation in society and claiming that they alone have the intelligence and wisdom to decide the direction a society should take. It’s a reactionary strain buried in the American subconscious going back to the Business Plot in 1933 and beyond.

Free market libertarianism has always been skeptical of democracy and state interference in the market via rules and regulations, so its turn to more Pinochet-like attitudes during the tumult of the War on Terror and Great Recession era was predictable. If a libertarian has a choice between capitalism and representative democracy they’ll choose capitalism every time.   

What’s striking about extreme libertarianism like techno-feudalism is how politically immature and given to simplistic thinking its adherents are. They ignore the complexities of social and economic reality and invent fantastic systems to superimpose on everything. Their reaction to the messiness of societies is to sanitize it with one-size-fits-all theories.

This mixture of extreme arrogance, self-serving ignorance, and simplistic if grandiose views of power is the secret sauce of techno-feudalism. Which brings me to the other incredibly rich ex-resident of South Africa, Peter Thiel.

Thiel the Rage

Peter Thiel is a more private, buttoned-up businessman. He runs his ventures with an even keel, makes good investments, and generally avoids generating too much publicity. Temperamentally, he appears to be the opposite of Musk.  

Yet despite his more measured and detached affectations, Thiel is a true believer. And like many techno-feudalist types, he seems to have stopped thinking deeply about anything after reading the Lord of the Rings and playing Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. He’s the bright kid who, having read their first fantasy novel, believes he’s the first person to hit upon the idea of “like, what if we had a monarchy, but it was tech?”

Thiel has been a reliable funder of right-wing causes for decades, everything from idiotic provocateurs Project Veritas to the reliably pro-business Club for Growth to a host of Republican campaigns (spending $20.4 million in 2022 alone). Most notably, Thiel helped bankroll protégé J.D. Vance’s political career.    

Thiel came to prominence in the late 1990s when he cofounded PayPal (which later merged with X.com, Musk’s own online finance company). He followed that with several LOTR-themed financial ventures, Clarium Capital, Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital, in the aughts in 2010s. He made a smooth billion as an early investor in Facebook.

Perhaps Thiel’s first real brush with larger public notoriety was when he sued Gawker into oblivion in 2016 on behalf of the equally terrible Huke Hogan in revenge on the news/gossip rag site for outing him as gay. The fact that even many liberals cheered him on as he used his wealth to bury a critical news source was a foreboding sign of things to come.

In the heady years of the War on Terror, Thiel established Palantir Technologies, a data analysis and surveillance company, and offered his services to federal agencies looking to mine online data to find terrorists. Palantir produced the personal data that underpinned ICE’s reprehensible family separation policy, continues to provide data to governments under dubious pretexts, and will no doubt play a role in the regime’s crackdown on anyone who stands in their way.

Thiel started his reactionary journey while attending Stanford in the 1980s when he jumped on the anti-multiculturalism bandwagon with his rag, The Stanford Review. As with a lot of right-wing libertarians, what started as Thiel’s annoyance with liberal intervention in markets and society gradually grew into disdain for democracy itself.

He has openly stated that he no longer believes in democracy. And yet, he has spent a small fortune on electoral campaigns trying to bend American democracy towards tyranny. 

This is no doubt partly due to Thiel’s own paranoia as a member of the ruling class. His fear of being scapegoated by politicians or violent revolutionaries is as well known as his tendency to scapegoat and dehumanize others.

Thiel has expressed his belief that the state is too responsive to the needs of minorities, poor people, welfare recipients, and women. Only monopolistic capitalism, free of the shackles of pea-brained political constituents, could liberate smart (ideally white male) capitalists to push technological progress forward and send humanity to the stars.

Never mind that Thiel’s fortune exists because the U.S. has a robust higher education system supported by taxes, or that Silicon Valley itself is a product of government largess, or that this country was built on government spending, including welfare in the form of public investment and contracts awarded to people like him.     

It is also worth mentioning that Peter Thiel is obsessed with life extension, the perennially unattainable goal of wealthy narcissists who believe their continued existence on Earth is a net gain for humanity or at least fear the icy hand of death enough to try to buy their way out of mortality. 

The only reason I bring it up is because it perfectly reflects the mindset of the techno-feudalist, the ironclad belief that because they are wealthy they’re indispensable and have earned their right to immortality, while the rest of us serfs should shut up and do what we’re told unto death.

Your Encounter a Moldbug

Thiel’s political naivete has made him a profitable mark for Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin, a hack political philosopher who built his online reputation on highly reactionary, anti-democratic crankery. He does not hold a degree in philosophy, economics, or political science. His only expertise is convincing wealthy people to give him money.

A cofounder of the extremely online Dark Enlightenment movement, Moldbug has been arguing for two decades that democracy has failed and only a capitalist dictatorship can save us. A big fan of The Matrix, he believes that “red-pilled” people like himself, the Gnostics of the Dark Enlightenment, have discovered a hidden truth.

They see the true Social Darwinist reality obscured by the simulation liberal democracy and progressivism (“the Cathedral”) have spun around us. To bring down this crude, false reality, Moldbug has called for a “neo-reactionary” tech-monarchy, a kind of philosopher king who places profits and technological progress above all worldly concerns.

As with a lot of immature authoritarians, it does not occur to him that an unaccountable tyrant might not agree with his goals or even value his life. But I digress.

Moldbug wants to see liberal democracy replaced by a cadre of corporate shareholders who would select the chief executive from among themselves to rule with unquestioned authority. Sounds familiar? It’s the unstated political philosophy of MAGA: a king of and for the rich, unconstrained by checks and balances or the rule of law.

Human equality is a lie according to Moldbug. He has claimed that “low-IQ” minorities are dragging down humanity and has even defended slavery as an institution. While mainstream attention has forced him to distance himself from these positions, they are a logical extension of his misanthropic worldview that divides the world into masters and thralls.

These dorky edgelord views have made Moldbug a cult figure of the tech-oriented right. Thiel and Steve Bannon are among his most notable patrons. His “work” perfectly captured the convergence of tech bro reactionaries (the kind of people offended by women in the tech sector) and the nascent alt-right movement of the 2010s.

Moldbug is not technically stupid—he nearly completed a PhD in computer science at Berkeley—he’s just fundamentally unwise, unworldly, and convinced of his own genius. If you hang out with Silicon Valley elites, puffed up by decades of fawning media coverage, it’s natural you’d see yourself as a master of the universe even if you’re just an anti-social nerd from the Usenet.

The Seductiveness of Bad Ideas

It’s easy for very rich and naïve people to embrace the idea that if only people listened to them, if only governments would just let them do their thing—or, even better, run the government—utopian technocracy would take humanity to the next level.

The government is slow and inefficient, social programs are wasting tax dollars that could be better spent on investment in business, the dummy masses elect incompetent idiots who don’t understand how things really work (this may now be true, but not in the way they believe), and democracy stands in the way of “progress.”

I put “progress” in quotes because their idea of progress is deeply alien to me and most people with a kernel of humanity. For the feudalist, progress isn’t about making society more livable and pleasant, it’s not about lowering social and economic barriers so everyone can reach their potential, and it’s not about equality, egalitarianism or humanism.

It’s about suppressing voters, workers, and minorities so the wealth class is free to evolve into spacefaring posthumans dedicated to scientific advancement for its own sake. All of society should be oriented toward satisfying their whims.

Like a lot of pseudo-sophisticates, they gloss over the myriad complexities of people, societies, economics, and politics and propose simple, schematic and ultimately facile “solutions” in an attempt it handwave away those complexities. Like the Italian fascists and futurists before them, their ideology is dangerously stupid.

Democracy is messy, it is flawed, it is inefficient. But in its ideal state it’s also transparent, accountable, and must entertain different ideological viewpoints, and in doing so, can test the viability of political positions. Absolute monarchs, on the other hand, can make catastrophic mistakes. Because they’re not infallible, do not have perfect information, are not subject to accountability they can make life a living hell for everyone under their thumb.

Sure, democracies have historically been short-lived but so have absolute monarchies and authoritarian dictatorships. Monarchies have lasted longest when there was some element of consent, where outside parties have had enough power and say to restrain them, or even remove them peacefully or with violence.

The list of absolute monarchies that produced more than one good king can be counted on a couple fingers. Governments that last are not absolute sovereignties but are based on some degree of consent by the governed. Take the leash off and things fly off the handle quickly. As for the other kind of unaccountable dictatorship, the reactionary authoritarian of the 20^th century, the world is their graveyard.

Of course, with the techno-feudalism set, you can imagine things getting very Deus Ex quickly. Imbued with magical life extension, dripped out with cybernetic augmentations, attached to an all-knowing, all-seeing AI, their king would be a post-human superman capable of making decisions at the speed of light. What could possibly go wrong?        

Like the rest of the MAGA circus, Moldbug is the toxic byproduct of a greed-poisoned society where “information” is free, open, un-curated, and not subject to quality control—a world made possible by the very technologies the tech barons have built their fortune on. He’s just one stream in the deluge of nonstop bullshit that has brought us to this moment.

His audience, living in a rarified bubble, have no social commitments, civic spirit or attachment to the US’s political traditions. Unfortunately, they have the money, platforms, and political resources to spread their terrible ideas far and wide.

The End Game

What MAGA and DOGE have done to the federal workforce is not an isolated, one-off event designed to create a leaner, more efficient government. It is an arson, a violent, unlawful attack on a liberal democratic state. It is designed to unshackle American cartel capitalism from regulations, legal oversight, and the rule of law while disempowering citizens, workers and government employees from doing anything about it.  

It’s precisely the kind of Cathedral-shattering event the Moldbugs of the world have championed: the removal of public accountability and enthronement of capital in the place of government by and for the people. So, will the tech barons usher in a new world of unlimited advancement? Emphatically, no.

The tech sector has had decades of free-flowing venture capital, outside investment and fat government contracts. And, yet somehow they still haven’t delivered on their utopian promises of an online world. After decades of big talk about how the web and social media were going to improve human life, the same old problems are still with us and growing exponentially.

Will carbon-intensive AI finally be the big thing that saves humanity and brings about the singularity? Based on the web in its fourth decade, I wouldn’t bet on it. In fact, humanity will likely be spending the next few centuries solving the problems this new wonder will usher in.

So, what’s their end game? What happens after the chaos and fascist reorganization they envision? Tyranny.

The economy? A pyramid structure based on the patronage of monopolistic corporations. Society? What society? With no civic or public spaces and institutions, the U.S. would descend into pure survival of the fittest where only tenuous social alliances between elites and their vassals would matter. The culture? One that props up the king and justifies their divine right.

Their golden age would be a dark age. But a whole lot of people would have to forget for such a project to work in the long run. What makes the fantasy so dangerous is that its practitioners hold significant purse strings in US politics. A lot of the big tech companies have already kissed the MAGA ring, and they rule the information roost.

The fact that Peter Thiel has his finger on a company specializing in data analytics, national security, and surveillance is, at best, disconcerting. And it’s not just Silicon Valley ghouls promoting this kind of thinking; the entire conservative funding base and their think tanks are rife with it.

The one arguably true position Moldbug has put forth is that unfettered capitalism and democracy are increasingly incompatible. On this point, I agree with him. Indeed, MAGA and their allies seem to be in a mad dash to prove him right.