Capitalisn’t: Is Silicon Valley Turning Fascist?

Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean.

Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea?

Luigi: I’m Luigi Zingales.

Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

Bethany: This is Capitalisn’t, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?

Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t.

Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process.

Bethany: There’s a line that I found chilling in a recent story in The New Republic. It read, “Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like taxes and regulations, but that’s only part of the story.”

Stay with me. I know this sounds bland, but it actually leads into a pretty disturbing rabbit hole that is based around an idea that might actually be oxymoronic called the Dark Enlightenment.

Luigi: It sounds like something out of a dystopian science-fiction book, and in some ways, it is. The idea is convoluted, as is its intellectual history, but the phrase itself comes from a philosopher named Nick Land.

The essence is to reject liberal democracy in favor of more authoritarian forms of government and to leave humanism behind in favor of accelerating technology and capitalism to induce radical changes in society and the economy.

Land wrote this stuff in 1992, and he wrote that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead, it had always been held back by politics, “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind.” He has argued that the so-called accelerationists should support figures like Donald Trump to blow up the current order as quickly as possible.

Bethany: This thinking leads directly into something called accelerationism, which, basically, as best I can tell, means speed everything up, and if it all breaks, that’s good.

Land’s thinking has intersected with that of another philosopher of sorts named Curtis Yarvin, who, among other things, has promoted dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States like outdated software systems.

Yarvin wants to re-engineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called patchworks, which would be controlled by tech corporations. He argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy, run by what he has called a CEO, basically, a friendlier term for a dictator.

Yarvin has also argued that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted. He called his plan, which he articulated in 2012—let’s pause on that, 2012—RAGE. It stands for Retire All Government Employees.

RAGE, in turn, was captured pretty perfectly in Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration called for firing an estimated 500,000 federal employees and dismantling entire agencies.

Now, do you see where this is going? It matters, and it matters because the ideas have found their way into both Silicon Valley and into the Trump administration’s thinking through several paths.

Luigi: One way is through Peter Thiel, who has invested in Yarvin’s startup—it’s hard to tell how real a business it is—and has called Yarvin a powerful historian. Yarvin, for his part, has said about Thiel that he is “fully enlightened” but “just plays it very carefully.”

In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the house political philosopher of the Thielverse, a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit.

Through Thiel, it has infected his protégé, JD Vance. “So, there is this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about these things.” This is Vance talking on a right-wing podcast in 2021.

He went on to explain how Trump should remake the federal bureaucracy if re-elected: “I think what Trump should do is, if I were to give him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat and every civil servant in the administrative state and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now, let him enforce it.’”

Bethany: It has also infiltrated Silicon Valley. In his famous “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”—you might be thinking, “Hmm, optimism?”—Marc Andreessen wrote, “Combine technology and markets, and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.”

Andreessen cites Land and others in his sphere in the endnotes to his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Lest you doubt that Yarvin has become an important figure, in January 2025, he attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington. Politico reported that he was an informal guest of honor due to what they called his outsized influence over the Trumpian right.

Luigi: Bethany, why do you say the word “chilling”?

Bethany: Maybe it doesn’t matter that there’s a philosophy behind what Trump is doing and where some in Silicon Valley have gone. I think it does.

This philosophy of sorts gives ideas that might seem crackpot—maybe they are—some potentially dangerous intellectual heft. I think the theories are also explanatory. Andrew Sullivan wrote this in 2017, and it turns out it was prescient.

He wrote this about the Dark Enlightenment: “Willfully blinding ourselves to the most potent political movement of the moment will not make it go away. Indeed, the more I read today’s more serious reactionary writers, the more I’m convinced they’re much more in tune with the current global mood than today’s conservatives, liberals, and progressives. I find myself repelled by many of their themes yet at the same time drawn in by their unmistakable relevance.”

He hit the nail on the head. Luigi, do you find it concerning?

Luigi: What I find the most concerning is how much Silicon Valley has seemed to embrace these ideas, not only from people who have a tradition of being right wing like Peter Thiel, but somebody like Marc Andreessen. He was a square Democrat who financed Obama’s campaign and voted for Hillary Clinton and Biden and now is out there basically trading in these ideas.

Bethany: Yeah, ideas are really, really powerful, and it’s very rare that people pause to unpack all the ideas and make sure that the final version coming out of their mouth is actually something that they sign onto.

Anyway, how do you understand this term—let me see if I can say it without tripping over it—accelerationism. We touched on it a few minutes ago, but how do you think about it?

Luigi: I think it’s an increasingly diffused tendency—especially in Silicon Valley, but throughout the country—of basically saying our only savior is technology. As a result, we should let it rip, accelerate as fast as possible, and not get anything in the way.

This was clear in Andreessen’s manifesto a couple of years ago—which, by the way, I immediately recognized as very similar to “The Manifesto of Futurism” that was written in the early 20th century by some Italian poet.

What is interesting is that all those guys ended up as intellectual pillars of the fascist regime. There is a natural connection between saying let it rip, we believe in the strength of technology, our only faith is technology, and saying, if your only faith is in technology, we want technology to rule the world, and we don’t want this inefficiency of democracy, inefficiency of even letting the people speak. We decide for them because that’s what’s best.

Bethany: Explain that a little bit more. How in Italy, back in the day, did that turn into fascism, and is that the most prominent example you can think of? In some ways, I could see without a historical example that you could make the argument that techno-optimism could be really optimistic. Andreessen says enough in his manifesto that is very pro-human. I’m not sure I believe it, which we should talk about, but why does it inevitably become anti-human, if that’s even what we think of as fascism?

Luigi: I’m not saying that the only way to be a techno-optimist is to be right-wing. However, this idea of technology as a creator of a superior human being is very much in line with the superhuman that is so associated with Nietzsche. To the right wing, the creator of technology is considered a superior human being, and you don’t want him to waste time with poor human beings that have their own little concerns. You want to set him free. It’s a bit like Atlas Shrugged on steroids that can break loose from every constraint to save humankind with his superior knowledge and superior creations. I think that this idea is very authoritarian in nature.

Bethany: Why does it inevitably become—or is it not inevitable—a political movement and not just a business movement? In other words, why doesn’t it stay a movement where people are advocating for this in art and technology, even capitalism? Why does it also seem to always become political, as it has today?

Luigi: My fear is that especially in Silicon Valley, they are very clear minded about what the impact of artificial intelligence will be in the next five to 10 years, and maybe even the next two to three years. This impact will be, in my view, very socially disruptive.

I’m putting words in their mouth, so I might be completely wrong, but my fear or understanding is that they value technology more than anything else. If you want technology to progress as fast as possible, you don’t want to care about the human disruption that you bring. You want an authoritarian regime to keep the losers silent. After all, the First Industrial Revolution triumphed by shooting the Luddites. There were more people shooting the Luddites than fighting Napoleon at the time.

Did that accelerate progress? A little bit, yes. How many people were left on the side? A lot.

Now, it’s a trade-off. Do you care about reaching AGI a year earlier, or do you care how many people are left on the wayside? I think that that’s a trade-off.

Clearly, for Silicon Valley, the only thing they care about is to get there sooner rather than later. You can pretend or claim or think that this is all about the fight with China, but at some point, it’s about itself. You love technology so much and you think it’s a savior and you want to achieve it as fast as possible, and you want to get rid of all the obstacles. How do you do it? You create a political movement that allows you to do so.

Bethany: Do you think that either in historical experience or in what you see today—and, obviously, we’re speculating a little bit—that those who are espousing this believe it because they genuinely believe this is the way forward for humanity, or do they believe it because it’s a way for them to make money?

I guess I’m asking if it’s a way of simplifying a lot of complexity. If you just forget about the complexity and you just say more is better, it’s a whole lot easier than if you try to wrestle with the complexities.

Luigi: Most people believe what is in their interest. It’s very hard to really believe in something and do something else for your own interest. I think most people don’t sleep well at night when they do that. The majority of people don’t change the way they behave. They change the way they believe so that what they believe coincides with what is in their interest. If you were to give a lie-detector test to Marc Andreessen, I believe he would pass with flying colors. He believes that 100 percent.

Bethany: It does actually make something make sense, which is the discrepancy between how Andreessen has described his interactions with the Biden White House over AI and how the Biden White House described those same interactions. It’s like they were in two entirely different rooms, but if Andreessen believes that the only way forward is no-holds-barred, completely unleashed AI development, then he’s going to see anything short of that as a terrible attempt to hold in the industry and not as an honest, good-faith effort to figure this out.

Luigi: I’m slowly appreciating the impact of all these elites living in California. I’ve never lived for an extended period of time in California, so I cannot relate to that. But the more people I listen to, including Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and the book they wrote about abundance, that’s an attempt to have a version of techno-optimism that is not necessarily right wing.

There is this disconnect, because on the one hand, you think that this should be the best place in the world to live. You are on the frontier of technology. You are on the frontier of the liberal elite. You’re in a place where it’s very warm and pleasant. You should be in paradise, but you’re not.

You’re not because it takes forever to build even a single-family home, let alone a bigger house. It’s not, because it takes forever to build any infrastructure. The bullet train is still a dream after 20 years and I don’t know how many billions. It’s a nightmare because you go down the street in San Francisco and you see, I’m sorry to say this word, s——t in the street. You are afraid because there are hobos and people who are drugged all over the place, and this is one of the richest cities in the world.

I think that the revolt of the Silicon Valley elite against the status quo is broader, and it manifests in some people like Andreessen into, basically, a tendency toward fascism and in others, like Ezra Klein, a more benign version of utopia. But they are all very much in the spirit of, get rid of every regulation and let’s build, baby, build.

Bethany: One of the things that’s confusing to me about this, when you think about the intellectual antecedents behind Andreessen’s thinking, is that both Yarvin and Land strike me as fundamentally pessimistic. Perhaps I’m just missing the optimistic part of their thinking, what will be unleashed if we accelerate to this wonderful place.

But Yarvin recently said this to The New York Times in an interview: “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there’s an inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.”

What do you think? Do you see this worldview as fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic or nihilistic or none of those words?

Luigi: There are, of course, different nuances. Not everybody thinks the same. However, I think that a tendency to push in the direction of an authoritarian state, when you say that countries should be run like companies with a powerful CEO, which is, basically, an absolute monarch, is straight totalitarian.

Then, they have this claim that, oh, we protect you with the possibility of actually leaving the states because the states are smaller. These are patchworks or city-states in which people can move around if they don’t like the state.

This is like some remake of a version of anarcho-capitalism. It has been around with Murray Rothbard for a long time but was very much at the fringe of the intellectual debate. The Silicon Valley people really love this aspect because they feel that they are the modern heroes, and they want the modern heroes to take over the political system. This philosophy is very much in sync with what they believe and what they aspire to.

Bethany: It is interesting because this idea, also, that some of us would think of as too far-fetched to become reality . . . I hadn’t realized, through this city called Prospero, that it already has become reality in some ways, this idea of freedom cities where you can create these swaths of land that are free from any regulation.

It sounds like, based on some writing, there are people who seriously think this has a chance of becoming real in the Trump administration in the United States. In other words, Silicon Valley is getting its wish list.

Luigi: Yeah, they are basically gated communities on steroids because you’re not only a gated community, but within that gated community, there is a ruler who rules for everybody, and you are exempted from any regulation.

We discussed the other week with Sam Peltzman the inefficiency of FDA approval, and what they claim is that in these cities, you can sell any drugs you want. When I say drugs, I think it’s pharmaceutical drugs, probably also other drugs, because it’s a free market everywhere. I think, in some sense, this is very attractive to rich people who want full protection from the mob in every possible dimension.

Bethany: Except I couldn’t help thinking that these cities won’t last very long if the rich people can’t get someone to clean their house and to watch their children. It does break down at some point, doesn’t it?

Luigi: Oh, they might import them as slaves. Who knows? Maybe in the free cities, they allow slavery. Why not? If you allow every form of contract, voluntary slavery should be allowed, according to their principles.

Bethany: Just to push on this a little bit, is there anything possibly appealing about this idea of freedom cities where cities compete with each other to offer people the best living standards and the most freedom? Can that coexist with a democracy? Can that coexist with a capitalist system, or does it inevitably descend into feudalism?

Luigi: The idea of experimenting with some stuff at a small scale with a city is not a crazy idea. This is how Deng Xiaoping got China started.

Bethany: Really?

Luigi: Deng Xiaoping was very taken by the fact that Hong Kong was very developed, and the rest of China was not. He said, it’s not that we Chinese cannot develop. There’s not a culture that prevents it. We just need to imitate Hong Kong.

He started with the city of Shenzhen, allowing a bunch of freedoms that were typical of Hong Kong, and created a model city. The city worked very well, and then slowly, they expanded this idea to all of China, and it brought about the success of China.

If this is an experiment to see the effects of some stuff, I completely agree that it’s a good idea. If this is simply a way for rich people to isolate themselves . . . At the end of the day, they’re going to determine that you have no taxes, or you’re going to determine that the justice system will be based on arbitration rather than a popular jury. We know that arbitration tends to favor rich people more. You’re going to have an entire system that is biased in one direction, and that, to me, is the risk.

Bethany: Speaking of China, do you think that some of the impetus for this is coming from this spoken and unspoken sense that we are losing the race with China because, somehow, our system of government is inferior to those?

This leads to some other questions, but I’d actually read somewhere that Land, who once was in the UK, has actually moved to China because he loves this techno-authoritarian political system. He told a reporter that once he lived there, he realized that, to a massive degree, China was already an accelerationist society.

Would Silicon Valley choose China, as long as they could have a China that didn’t occasionally just have a temper tantrum and malfunction and lash out at its tech leaders? But is some of this fed by the sense that China’s system is somehow better because of the authoritarian nature of it?

Luigi: If you take China and you take away the leftovers of communism that sometimes make them overrule Jack Ma and Alibaba, et cetera, what do you have left? You have left something called fascism, right? That’s what they like.

The famous definition by Roosevelt said that fascism is ownership of the government by an individual, by a group, or by another controlling private power. If you take this definition—of course, there are a lot of definitions of fascism—that’s what they like. They want the government owned by an individual, and they say that very clearly.

I remember that I visited Russia in 2003, and there were some Western observers that were very gung-ho about Russia at the time. They would say: “Oh, in the West, we have these publicly traded companies with a lot of shareholders, a lot of tension. Here, we have the true entrepreneurs who own their companies 100 percent. They’re young, they’re aggressive, they’re going to do phenomenal things. They’re going to make the country a better place.”

Now, 20-something years later, you see that was not the case. This analogy between the way firms are run and the way countries are run is really irritating me because it shows, in my view, a lot of ignorance. If you really want to compare firms and government, and firms and markets, then you should say that you want a centrally planned economy because firms are little centrally planned economies.

If you want to run the US economy as a centrally planned economy, then, fine. But if you say that you believe in free markets, but you want to copy firms, you’re wrong. Then, you don’t understand that there is specialization, that firms are doing what they’re better at doing, leaving the rest to the market and sometimes to the government.

The government does, most of the time, the most difficult things. We know that it’s much easier to maximize profits than to give away money because to maximize profit, you have the right incentives, but giving away money is complicated, which I think brings their third mistake.

Firms operate in a competitive market. If I don’t like Tesla, I can buy Mercedes. Governments generally don’t do that. Yeah, they want to introduce this patchwork that you can leave, but how can you really leave? There are a lot of frictions. It is not a competitive market at all.

I heard Yarvin say if you just bring the average CEO to govern a country, he would do much better than the politicians. Now, unfortunately, the country where I come from did this experiment, and it did not pick the average entrepreneur. It picked one of the best because Berlusconi, with all his defects, was a much better entrepreneur than Trump. Trump inherited his fortune, but Berlusconi made his own fortune, and the country under him was run terribly.

So, it is not true. Being a politician is a super difficult job, and there is no evidence whatsoever that picking a CEO and putting them in place of a politician is going to do a good job.

Bethany: It always strikes me as just so incredibly strange to hear this dismissive thinking about government coming out of Silicon Valley, which was created by government money. I get that no one understands exactly how that magic of entrepreneurship and government money came together to create the modern Silicon Valley, but it, for sure, was government money. Speaking of being ignorant of history, it strikes me as a really weird ignorance of history for them to be as dismissive of the role of government as they are.

Luigi: I don’t think they’re really dismissing the role of government because, as you said, if they like China, the government plays a big role in China.

I think what they are really dismissive of is the role of democracy. They don’t want democracy to get in the way because democracy slows things down. I understand that if you live in Silicon Valley and you’ve seen how difficult it is to get your permission to build your house, you are a bit frustrated by maybe what is called the excess of democracy or the excess of the veto power that the local councils have over all the decisions.

I am sympathetic to this, but I think they are transferring this at a much bigger level that in order to be an efficient government, you want to not be slowed down by all these issues about democracy, and we should get rid of it.

I think Peter Thiel is the first one to be honest. He said that they are incompatible, and he doesn’t want to deal with that. I think that most of the people in this sphere think along the same lines.

Bethany: Yes, it seems to me that this is all this desire to just simplify the world and strip away what people view as stupid or getting in their way or preventing them from doing and being exactly what they want to be.

But I keep thinking—and you were the first one to bring up that wonderful Isaiah Berlin quote that now I think I’m overusing because I use it all the time—“Freedom to the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

Luigi: Yeah.

Bethany: I think when Peter Thiel says that freedom and democracy aren’t compatible, it’s basically because the people who say that believe that they’re going to be the winners, and they’re going to be the ones who can consume and accumulate, and they don’t want to have to care about the others who are left behind.

Luigi: The scary part is, I don’t remember which of these people in this sphere, but several of them are pretty close, and sometimes they have even discussed genetic differences across human types. They basically believe in a superior race. Whether this is simply white or maybe Asian or maybe another characteristic, they do believe in a superior race that has the right to rule over the inferior race or inferior races.

Some of them even make comments that I don’t want to repeat about, “What do you want to do with the inferior people that are falling by the wayside?” To me, it’s a rediscovery of the worst part of fascism, and I’m scared that people don’t see that very clearly.

Bethany: The worst part of fascism dressed up in something called accelerationism that gives it a grand terminology that makes it sound like something different, but really, it’s just the same old, ugly stuff being served back at us.

I was really struck by this line in Marc Andreessen’s manifesto, which I hadn’t read as carefully as I should have until we were preparing for this podcast. This is going to sound really basic and prosaic, but he wrote, “We believe a universal basic income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.”

I’ve thought the same thing, that the dignity of work is paramount, and he talks a really big picture and quite lovely sentiments about how people need valuable, meaningful work. But then he skips.

If you go from here to there at an accelerationist speed, and AI and the development of technology leave everybody behind, what do you do to ensure that all those people can have decent work and do not become zoo animals being farmed by the state?

I think that’s one of the things that bothers me about this thinking, that it just pretends the ugly details don’t exist. When it is optimistic, like Andreessen, it pretends the ugly details and the messy details don’t exist. When it is really dark, like Yarvin, he says that human beings who aren’t useful should be turned into biofuels.

It feels like there isn’t really an attempt to deal with this in a humane way. Not surprisingly, they don’t believe in humanism. But I don’t think I like the optimistic version of this much more than I like the pessimistic version because the optimistic version strikes me as disingenuous.

Luigi: I actually, for once, am optimistic about the potential of AI. We have to face the fact that technology has made us much, much better off than we were in the past. Of course, this was not a costless process, as I described earlier, but I think as long as technology is directed and controlled by a democratic system, it can bring a lot of benefits to a vast majority and, ideally, everybody in the population. So, I’m sympathetic to some of the points that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make in their Abundance book.

However, it’s dangerous to ignore some of the issues, and particularly, it sounds a lot like laissez-faire, laissez-passer. It’s the term for the most extreme version of liberalism in which you let it all go through.

What I didn’t know until recently is the term initially was brought by some entrepreneurs that went to, I think, Colbert and said, “Laissez nous faire—let us do it.” This is not that different from what Silicon Valley is saying now: “Let us do it. Trust us. We’re so good, and you’re just in the way.”

Bethany: Isn’t it a fast speed train to . . . where? Say they got their way, and democracy is gone, and we’re run in an authoritarian way such that they can just go at whatever pace they want with AI. What’s left on the other side of it?

If you don’t have a democracy, and you don’t have a society, and you have a world where most people have been reduced to whatever is left when you’re not living in a democracy, why would anybody want the world to get there?

What good does all the money in the world do you if there’s nothing left at the end of that journey, at the end of that speeding train? It seems to me like it’s a speeding train to nowhere.

Luigi: It’s possible, but if you are one of the rich billionaires, your life is going to be tremendously better.

Bethany: How so? They have everything they want already. How does it get better?

Luigi: No, I think that this is where you need to listen carefully to the interview that Marc Andreessen gave to The New York Times, where he said, until Obama, there was this sense that you could become rich and also have prestige. That’s what he calls “the deal.”

All of a sudden, with 2016, for a number of reasons we can analyze if you want, this alignment broke down. What they want is to be rich and be prestigious, and in this moment, a vast fraction of the population hates them. He doesn’t like that. So, he wants a system in which he is a monarch.

Bethany: But people don’t like their monarchs. How is this going to get . . .

Luigi: That’s not true. The monarchs are loved, especially by the poor people whom the monarchs give bread to. Since the Roman times, you give bread and games, and they are happy and they celebrate you.

Bethany: I was thinking, how can you have prestige if there’s no society left to admire you? But your view is they have prestige in the same way the kings of old did, that they get to go through the streets in their, I guess they won’t be carriages anymore, there’ll be some flying whatever, and sprinkle down little pieces of chocolate on all of the adoring populace.

Matt Hodapp: I think I’m far more conspiratorial than both of you.

Luigi: Go ahead. We wanted to break the fourth wall.

Matt Hodapp: Hi, everybody. This is Matt, the producer of Capitalisn’t. You’re talking about money and prestige, which I’m sure is part of the story. But if you read what a lot of these tech CEOs say in their interviews about AGI, the singularity, which is supposed to be this moment where AI can essentially train itself and thus do anything, at least within the laws of physics . . . Your mileage may vary on how real you think that is, but many of these people proclaim that they do believe in it. You look at Bryan Johnson, the tech multimillionaire, and his “Don’t Die” movement about trying to live forever.

I think some of these tech leaders really believe that if they can accelerate AGI, they might be able to live forever and build a society where human labor may not necessarily be required to maintain the world that they’re interested in living in, if you look at advances in robotics as well.

I think the reason why money and prestige feel like they can’t quite explain these wild political swings is because the goals these people are chasing could be far stranger or weirder than I think we’re even used to talking about.

Bethany: It may not even have a precedence in history because in history before, no matter who you were, you died. In this view of the world, the AI can allow the wealthiest to extend their lives forever. Then, they want a world where they’re perhaps the only ones left and have everything to themselves besides, perhaps, some little crushed beings on the ground who can look up and admire them.

Luigi: Go to Mars and be left alone on Mars.

Bethany: Yeah. OK. This was happy.

Luigi: OK, on this nice note, bye-bye.

Bethany: Bye, everybody.