🧵 I've spent this year writing for the @newrepublic about how a group of Silicon Valley billionaires has gone WEIRD. Now their weirdness is mating up with Trump's MAGA weirdness in the 2024 election. Here's a few things to understand about these guys:
11. Not all tech is bad! But a lot of people in Silicon Valley have been aware of this weirdness for a long time and have stayed quiet ... or agree with parts of it. With Thiel/Musk/Vance putting it on the Trump ticket, it's time to tune in. Because folks -- it's gonna get weirder.
Crypto plays a HUGE role in this weirdness. Just as they created new currencies to challenge existing ones, they want to create new countries to challenge existing countries.
8. For example, tech authoritarians see technology as being above God (if they even believe God exists).
As tech founders and investors, they see themselves as the top of the hierarchy -- the masters of the universe. These beliefs have resulted in some strange sub-cults...
The Network State is one sub-cult -- the idea of replacing existing countries with tech-run countries.
9. Transhumanism is another -- a belief in merging with machines to obtain eternal life. That's gonna sound pretty weird to fundamentalist Christians. . . Lots of tech cults!
The tech billionaires behind Trump already have money. Now they want power -- to create their own countries, to change what it means to be human, to control the fate of the world. Their interest is mainly *ideological,* not economic.
7. This is not an exhaustive list. But you can see here how many of the tech authoritarian goals align with MAGA.
Antipathy toward taxes and regulations may be the root of their alliance, but there are many branches. But there are key ways in which tech diverges from MAGA...
5. Most newspaper analyses suggest that these tech authoritarian guys just want lower taxes and friendly regulations, but that's only part of the story. They have developed their own weird sci-fi influenced tech authoritarian IDEOLOGY. It overlaps with MAGA in multiple ways...
#1: They despise democracy. These Trump-loving billionaires believe democracy is bad. They want to create their own corporate dictatorships called Network States. They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world.https://newrepublic.com/article/177733/billionaire-solano-california-tech-secession
#2. They want control over existing governments. In addition to building weirdo colonies, they're also trying to capture existing governments. In San Francisco, a group of these tech zillionaires is trying to win control of City Hall ...(and now, by supporting Trump, they want control of the USA!) https://newrepublic.com/article/178675/garry-tan-tech-san-francisco
3. They want to punish Democrats in weird ways. One of their main influencers has suggested that tech bros should form a "gray tribe," purge Democrats from San Francisco and build statues to remind people of how bad Democrats supposedly are... https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat