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silicon valley
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.
Aug 27, 2025
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.
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Artificial Intelligence Is on a Collision Course With the Green Transition
The choice now is whether the United States continues to aid and abet Silicon Valley’s environmental rampage or to fight it.
Aug 23, 2025
The tech industry’s accelerating buildout of infrastructure to power artificial intelligence is rapidly turning an industry once lauded as “clean” and environmentally friendly into an air polluting, ecosystem destroying, water guzzling behemoth. Now, there’s an intensifying rift on the left about how to approach what was, until recently, a steadfast Democratic ally.
Progressives are now at a fork in the road with two very different options: a political reckoning with Silicon Valley or a rapprochement paid for with environmental havoc.
Some pundits and industry figures have counterintuitively argued that the proliferation of data centers to power AI is a good thing for the environment. The massive energy demand for training artificial intelligence will, in this telling, necessarily prompt a massive investment in clean energy and transmission infrastructure to meet that demand, thereby catalyzing a world-altering transition toward renewable energy. This argument, already suspect years ago, is entirely untenable now.
Following US President Donald Trump and company’s evisceration of the clean energy investments from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the narrow path of AI buildout being aligned with a green transition is now completely walled off. The choice now is whether the United States continues to aid and abet Silicon Valley’s environmental rampage or to fight it.
At present, there is simply no way to have the scale of AI buildout that the United States is seeing without terrible environmental downsides.
Even prior to Republicans torpedoing the IRA, AI electricity demand was growing faster than both renewable energy production and overall grid capacity. Without strong additionality regulations to require that new data centers be powered by the construction of new renewable energy generation, the AI boom will continue to increase consumption of fossil fuels.
Much of the increased energy demand was already being met by natural gas before the Republican spending package. It’s only going to get worse now. Without the clean energy tax credits, the advantages of incumbency that fossil fuels enjoy mean that the AI energy boom will further hook us on unsustainable resource consumption.
The firms building out AI infrastructure know this and often point to major investments in clean energy to protest characterizations of data centers as environmentally disastrous. But there are two major problems there. First, those investments may be in totally different locations than the actual data centers, meaning the centers are still consuming dirty energy. Second, and more importantly, at our present juncture in the climate crisis, we need to be actively decreasing our use of fossil fuels, not just containing increases in dirty energy production. (It’s worth noting that AI is also being used to enable more fossil fuel extraction.)
And the environmental destruction doesn’t stop there. The Trump White House recently moved to exempt data centers from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, paving the way for tech companies to despoil local environments without a second thought, and limiting opportunities for the public to gain information about data centers’ environmental impacts.
Perhaps nothing captures the excesses of AI quite so clearly as its water usage. Despite some pundits glibly claiming that there’s actually tons of water to go around, data centers threaten to worsen already dire droughts. We’re already beginning to see this in arid places like Chile and the American Southwest.
The Colorado River’s mismanagement is the stuff of public policy legend at this point. Aquifers across the Western US are being depleted. People were not mulling the idea of partially rerouting the Mississippi River for giggles. There is, unequivocally, a water crisis unfolding. And those data centers are very, very thirsty. A single data center can use millions of gallons a day.
There are already more than 90 data centers in the Phoenix area alone. That’s hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day. Protesting that “there’s plenty of water” is not just detached from the drought-stricken reality, it’s dangerous.
Data centers are being built in arid places intentionally; the low humidity reduces the risk of corrosion for the processor stacks warehoused there. Fresh water supplies, when depleted, are not easily renewed. Devoting more of it to cooling GPUs means less for drinking, irrigation, fighting wildfires, bathing, and other essential uses.
And there isn’t a way to bring water to the arid environments to mitigate that, either. Some people point to desalination, but that isn’t tenable for multiple reasons. To start, most of these data centers tend to be inland, as the sea air has similar corrosive effects as humidity. That, in turn, means that even accepting desalination as a cure for water scarcity, data centers would require transporting massive quantities of that purified water over significant distances, which would require complex energy-and resource-consuming engineering projects unlikely to proceed within the hurry up and go of our AI bubblish moment. (Desalination also has its own serious environmental harms.)
At present, there is simply no way to have the scale of AI buildout that the United States is seeing without terrible environmental downsides. The only choice left is whether to get out of Silicon Valley’s way or whether to slow the industry’s pace.
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AI-tocracy Complete?
The AI regulatory moratorium threatens to obliterate America’s frayed social contract.
Jun 05, 2025
I grew up under Enver Hoxha’s totalitarian regime in Albania, where paranoia reigned supreme, propaganda was relentless, dissent was crushed, and concrete bunkers dotted the landscape. Now, as I witness the United States marching toward authoritarianism, I am struck by the haunting echoes of my past. The effort to reshape society through fear, intimidation, and division; the attack on independent institutions; the surveillance state; and the apocalyptic fever remind me so of the dynamics that once suffocated Albania. Beneath it all simmers a pervasive social malaise and a sense of moral decay.
Today’s crisis is not accidental. It’s a long time in the making and the result of powerful interests—Silicon Valley billionaires, MAGA ideologues, Christian nationalists, and Project 2025 architects—who have set aside their differences and coalesced to accelerate collapse, fuel division, and destroy democracy.
AI Regulatory Moratorium
A chief goal of this agenda is the race to build and deregulate artificial intelligence (AI). Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, we’ve been subjected to the largest tech experiment in history. AI evangelists promise miracles—curing intractable diseases, solving climate crisis, even eternal life—while ignoring its insatiable appetite for water and energy, much of it still sourced from fossil fuels. Revealingly, some billionaires who once called for AI regulation now fund efforts to ban states from regulating AI for the next decade.
Tucked in over 1,000 pages of the recent Republican reconciliation bill is a sweeping moratorium which would ban states and municipalities from regulating AI for 10 years. The same bill slashes hundreds of billions from Medicaid, Medicare, and food aid—an unprecedented transfer of wealth upward that will gravely harm both the most vulnerable and the working class—while pouring over a billion dollars into AI development at the Departments of Defense and Commerce.
The real risk is not that the U.S. will lose to China by regulating AI, but that it will lose the trust of its own people and the world by failing to do so.
The impact would be immediate and profound. It would preempt existing state AI laws in California, Colorado, New York, Illinois, and Utah, and block pending state bills aimed at ensuring transparency, preventing discrimination, and protecting individuals and communities from harm. The broad definition of “automated decision systems” would undermine oversight in healthcare, finance, education, consumer protection, housing, employment, civil rights, and even election integrity. In effect, it would rewrite the social contract, stripping states of the power to protect their residents.
The “End Times Fascism” Forces and the “Network State”
Make no mistake—this isn’t an isolated effort. It’s what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call “the rise of end times fascism”—an apocalyptic project of convergent factions to accelerate societal collapse and redraw sovereignty for profit. Particularly, the Silicon Valley contingent merits closer scrutiny. Its ultra-libertarian and neo-reactionary wing, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen has abandoned faith in democracy and invested in Pronomos Capital—a venture capital fund backing “network states” that can best be described as digital fiefdoms run by corporate monarchs. Existing enclaves include Próspera in Honduras and Itana in Nigeria where the wealthy bypass local regulation and often displace communities. Now, billionaires lobby for “Freedom Cities” within the U.S.—autonomous zones exempt from state and federal law, potentially enabling unregulated genetic experimentation and other risky activities.
Silicon Valley’s Ideologies
Animating this project is a bundle of techno-utopian ideologies permeating Silicon Valley’s zeitgeist—most prominently, longtermism and transhumanism. Longtermists believe our duty is to maximize the well-being of hypothetical future humans, even at today’s expense. These worldviews envision replacing humanity with AI or digital posthuman species as inevitable, even desirable. Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who publicly warn of AI extinction, stand to benefit by positioning their products as humanity’s salvation. As philosopher Émile P. Torres warns, these ideologies spring from the same poisoned well as eugenics and provide cover for dismantling democratic safeguards and social protections in pursuit of a pro-extinctionist future.
DOGE
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) exemplifies the risks. Operating as an unelected, extra legal entity, it has employed AI-driven systems to automate mass firings of federal employees, and deployed Musk’s X AI Grok chatbot to analyze sensitive government data, potentially turning millions of Americans’ personal information into training fodder for the model. Reports indicate DOGE is building a data panopticon pooling the personal information of millions of Americans to surveil immigrants and to aid the Department of Justice in investigating spurious claims of widespread voter fraud.
AI Harms and the Threat of Mass Unemployment
The perils of unregulated AI are not theoretical. Like any powerful technology, AI has enormous potential for both benefit and harm, depending on how it is developed, deployed, and regulated. Embedded within AI systems are the biases and assumptions of the training data and algorithmic choices, which—if left unchecked—can perpetuate and amplify existing social disparities at scale. AI is not merely a technical tool. Rather, it is part of a larger sociotechnical system, deeply intertwined with human institutions, infrastructure, laws, and social norms.
The states must “flip the script,” drawing on the strength of our democratic tradition and shared humanity, to build a future where people and not the “end times fascism” forces can flourish.
Documented AI harms include wrongful denial of health services; discrimination in housing, hiring, and lending; and the spread of misinformation and deepfakes, among others. Where Congress has failed to act, states have stepped in to fill the regulatory void. If they are now prevented from addressing these harms, without a federal framework to take their place, the consequences will likely be severe. Not only will known harms worsen, but new risks will emerge, including the specter of mass unemployment. Some tech CEOs, anxious on making good on their massive AI investments, boast about automating away people’s jobs and another warns of mass job losses, regardless of whether AI is up to the job.
The Purported China Threat
Supporters of the moratorium claim that state-level regulation impedes America’s ability to compete with China. But flooding the market with unregulated, potentially harmful AI risks eroding public trust and creating instability. Contrary to the perennial argument propounded by Big Tech, targeted regulation does not slow innovation. Rather, it creates the stability, predictability, and safety that allow American companies to thrive and lead globally. The real risk is not that the U.S. will lose to China by regulating AI, but that it will lose the trust of its own people and the world by failing to do so.
The Public Opinion Is for AI Regulation
The American public is not fooled. Polls show overwhelming bipartisan support for strong AI oversight. State attorneys general and civil society groups have also opposed the moratorium. In the Senate, the provision may face challenges under the Byrd Rule, which prohibits including provisions in budget reconciliation bills that are “extraneous” to fiscal policy. If enacted, the moratorium would likely be challenged as unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government. Regardless of its fate, the intent of its supporters is clear: to harness AI without guardrails, in pursuit of a monarchical dystopian agenda.
The Way Forward
Americans do not aspire to a future of despotic power and unaccountable surveillance—akin to the unfreedom I experienced in communist Albania. We know where that road leads: oppression, corruption, mass brainwashing, and eventually the breakdown of social order. But America’s story isn’t written by those who surrender to fear, fatalism, or nihilism. As James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Now is the time to face this challenge together. The states must “flip the script,” drawing on the strength of our democratic tradition and shared humanity, to build a future where people and not the “end times fascism” forces can flourish. Let us answer this moment not with resignation, but with courage and resolve, and ensure that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
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