The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.
Sitting face to face on grey sofas, Peter Thiel and Ross Douthat continued another propaganda piece for the New York Times. Thiel is the billionaire owner and founder of Palantir, the world's largest private surveillance company, one of the biggest financiers of OpenAI and one of Silicon Valley's most influential ideologues. Douthat asked Thiel, "You would prefer the human race to endure, right?" After hesitating, Thiel replied, "I don't know." A glimpse of the impact of his response and the journalist's astonishment led him to amend his statement: "I, I would prefer, I would prefer." Would he, though?
Thiel is one of the main promoters of the archaic ideology that dominates the thinking of men such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Andreessen Horowitz, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates. Although these tech moguls are presented as neutral or technology driven, reality is different. Their adaptation to the far-right is no longer surprising. The techlords have laid some of the cornerstones of authoritarian politics and provided the means for the rise of the new ideology of a return to the past.
So what do Thiel and the other techlords stand for? Their ideological base revolves around something called the "Dark Enlightenment", also known as the "Neo-Reactionary Movement." It is a mixture of libertarian doctrines with scientific racism, an anti-historical vision of a return to feudalism and an acceleration toward social and environmental collapse. According to Curtis Yarvin, another of its ideologues, this shadowy enlightenment is the formal recognition of the realities of existing power, aligning property rights with current political power and defending that "corporate power should become the organizing force in society." They seek to assert inequality not as an accident, but as a structure. For all practical purposes, the ideology of the techlords aims to overthrow any democratic illusion and install in its place a feudal division of territories, under which the supreme lords, technological monarchs, President-CEOs, the Techlords, would rule.
We can see what they aspire to in the most banal science fiction: a Star Wars world with a Supreme Emperor who rules the entire galaxy; a Dune world where noble houses dominate technologies, planets, resources and religions; or a Hunger Games world where, after a global rebellion, production has been forcibly distributed geographically and different peoples have to kill each other to entertain the elite. The ideology is so lazy that it has not evolved beyond the books that mostly teenagers read for entertainment during the holidays. The rejection of formal education, with these men abandoning university studies, so touted in the "self-made man" propaganda they peddle about themselves, has deprived them of essential information about history, biology, chemistry, physics, and other key areas of knowledge. The markets reward their audacious ignorance by offering praise and money in exchange for each usurpation. No wonder they think they are demigods and seek ideological rationalisations for their privilege. For the techlords, the reading of these works of popular science fiction culture is contrary to the instincts of people with a basic sense of justice. In Star Wars, they defend Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader; in The Hunger Games, the Capitol and President Snow.
Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right.
In a work such as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where eugenics runs through the narrative from all sides, the techlords seem to support the most perfidious position. Palantir, the company Peter Thiel created to surveil, steal data, and hand it over to authoritarian governments or whoever pays him, is a name taken from this fiction. Palantir is a crystal ball that reveals information, but is actually being used by the main villain, Sauron, to deceive and pervert wizards and kings, turning them against their territories and peoples. It would be difficult to interpret this name in any other way.
The ideology of the techlords is directly opposed to democracy, which they see as an obstacle to the accumulation and maintenance of wealth and power by the rich. They advocate corporate monarchies and authoritarian city-states controlled by themselves, praising Singapore as a model. To destroy democracy, they advocate dismantling the institutional apparatus of nation states, not because of any oppression or inequality, but to ensure that injustices have no social opposition and that, if opposition does arise, it can be strongly repressed. They advocate the removal of almost all public officials and services, increasing the numbers of the armed forces and police, building up the capacity for repression by the powers that be, no longer public, but corporate and business. The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, combined with the expansion of a militia-style political police force such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is a trial run of this. This month, the US government announced a $10 billion contract with Palantir to create a super database that aggregates information from all federal agencies and a platform to detect migratory movements in real time.
Another cornerstone of techlord ideology is accelerationism, which advocates the removal of all restrictions on capitalist growth and technological development, even if this leads to social and environmental collapse. As Zuckerberg said, "Move fast and break things." This idea does not differ fundamentally from neoliberal ideology but, unlike the latter, it does not hide the fact that social collapse is a goal of deregulation, rather than a side effect to be ignored or concealed. The removal of restrictions in accelerationism actually serves to create social breakdowns that allow the techlords to establish themselves as the new masters. Because they are accelerationists, they describe any opposition to their ideological infrastructure—social networks, "Artificial Intelligence," trips to Mars or outer space—as attacks on progress. This is the ideological strand that is trying to create a widespread feeling that the development of Large Language Models, touted as "Artificial Intelligence," is inevitable. There is no possibility that language models will not be biased and racist. Building on these and other prejudices, accelerationism argues that we must ignore the current suffering of billions of people in order to optimize technological developments that will create the environment in which future humans will colonize space. This suffering is destined for people other than the techlords, who are constantly building bunkers to hide in.
Added to the techlords' beliefs are other segments of science fiction, all of them anti-scientific: the imminent colonization of space, the physical fusion of humans with digital technology, the Singularity (the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence), and the childish idea that "Artificial Intelligence," Large Language Models, will solve all of humanity's problems. Authors such as Yuval Noah Harari and fields of "research" such as AI Safety are attempting to consolidate these ideas in popular culture and academia.
The science fiction in the minds of these billionaires, articulated with the orphaned leaders of the new fascist movements on the rise, has concrete and material effects. They are producing, in addition to suffering on a massive scale, a catastrophic waste of time and resources in the face of the greatest crisis in human history, the climate crisis. The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens. They lead a political movement that is rising today against the future of our entire species, seeking to subjugate all societies to a technological dystopia in which CEOs rule and behave like survivors of the apocalypse (and what is Elon Musk's reproductive frenzy if not his idea that he can be the warlord after the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead, i.e., climate collapse, and repopulate the world and the galaxy as a new Adam?).
Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right. They already use "Artificial Intelligence" to impose their ideology on education, information, public services, justice, the arts, and every field they can usurp. They have set the traps, and we have been caught in them for a long time. The mainstream digital space is a straitjacket of complacency and a black hole of energy and ideas. Algorithms isolate us and deprive us of information that is useful for our collective life. The techlords and their ideology are mortal enemies of humanity and will stop at nothing to impose their dystopias in the coming years, trying to prevent us from stopping the collapse of all human civilisations. To make the digital space controlled by Meta, Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon a battlefield is to accept fighting underwater with our hands tied and weights on our feet. But it is in their arrogant ignorance that their vulnerabilities lie. These giants do indeed have feet of clay that must be knocked down, and their ideology is central to this: They despise material reality, reject the collective and the social as realities, and are submerged in fiction. Moving away from their preferred playing field, social media, may be one of the first steps toward their demise.
