USA: An “armed” and extremist plutocracy is on the verge of taking control of the world’s greatest superpower.
Luca Celada, il manifesto, 17/12/2024
Translated by John Catalinotto, Tlaxcala
Luca Celada is the Los Angeles correspondent for the Italian daily il manifesto.
This week, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg announced donations of $1 million each as contributions to Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony on January 20. Digital moguls have often been under attack by Trump, who until a few weeks ago asserted that Zuckerberg, in particular, should “go to jail” for censoring right-wing views on his platforms. After Trump’s victory, there was a virtual pilgrimage from Silicon Valley to Mar-a-Lago to perform an act of submission. Last week, Meta’s boss flew there for a meeting with Trump; Bezos has an appointment in the next few days.
Many other plutocrats have a permanent presence in the revolving court that has been orbiting around the returning president since the November elections. Among the many tycoons who generously contributed to his re-election, many were immediately rewarded with ministerial appointments. Among them, Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, whom he pardoned in 2020 [he had been convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering] , honored with the post of ambassador to France.
(Another “dynastic” appointment is that of first-born Donald J’s (possibly ex) fiancée, Kimberley Guilfoyle, as the new ambassador to Greece, while his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is set to move from the Republican Party National Committee to the Senate).
Ministers with opulent fortunes (over $1 billion) include Linda McMahon at Public Education, Scott Bessent at Treasury, Doug Burgum at Interior, Howard Lutnick at Commerce, Jared Isaacman as head of NASA, and Steve Witkoff - Trump’s business partner in a new crypto-currency company, World Liberty Financial - as special envoy to the Middle East.
As well as creating another blatant conflict of interest for the new president, the family’s entry into production of “Trump coin” is the latest indication of a growing partnership between Trump and the new capitalism incubated in Silicon Valley. Silicon tycoons are fantastically wealthy, and for Trump wealth has always been an ostentatious symbol of success. According to a recent New York Times article, he likes to show off his new political associates like trophies in his kitschy palace. “I’ve brought two of the richest men in the world,” he was recently quoted by the Times as saying, as he introduced himself to a meeting of journalists in the company of Elon Musk and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “You, who did you bring?”
It’s Elon Musk who epitomizes the influence of Silicon Valley’s accelerationists in Trump’s restoration: as we know, he has been entrusted, along with another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswami, with a central post as administrator of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). Musk would, however, have greater freedom of action, including over the composition of the government framework itself, on which numerous collaborators “on loan” from his companies would work in Florida.
Among the key figures would be Jared Birchall, director of Neuralink, the company in charge of neurological implants, but also administrator of the tycoon’s personal finances and generally his right-hand man, in charge of family affaires, the foundation, as well as Musk’s real estate, travel and security. To these tasks are now added talks with potential State Department representatives. The fact that Birchall has no experience of international affairs is clearly not seen as a problem in a selection which, as with other departments, would seem to focus primarily on ideological affinities and the nominees’ loyalty to the President.
Another advisor, this time to select intelligence personnel, is Shaun Maguire, a Caltech physicist who became a billionaire as a partner in Sequoia, one of Silicon Valley’s leading investment funds and (needless to say) a friend of Elon Musk, with whom he shares the cult, so fashionable in the Valley, of the undisciplined, misfit genius, perhaps even a little misanthropic, but always brilliant.
In other words, many of the decisions destined to shape the Trump 2.0 government are in the hands of an ideological faction of extremist “meritocrats,” not to say “Darwinist” theorists of the triumph of the best over the mediocre. Another “advisor” located in Palm Beach, for example, is Marc Andreesen, the billionaire founder of Netscape and one of the leading ideologues of the neo-reactionary oligarchy, a fervent advocate of radical libertarianism and minimal state interference in corporate affairs.
Many other plutocrats have a permanent presence in the revolving court that has been orbiting around the returning president since the November elections. Among the many tycoons who generously contributed to his re-election, many were immediately rewarded with ministerial appointments. Among them, Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, whom he pardoned in 2020 [he had been convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering] , honored with the post of ambassador to France.
(Another “dynastic” appointment is that of first-born Donald J’s (possibly ex) fiancée, Kimberley Guilfoyle, as the new ambassador to Greece, while his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is set to move from the Republican Party National Committee to the Senate).
Ministers with opulent fortunes (over $1 billion) include Linda McMahon at Public Education, Scott Bessent at Treasury, Doug Burgum at Interior, Howard Lutnick at Commerce, Jared Isaacman as head of NASA, and Steve Witkoff - Trump’s business partner in a new crypto-currency company, World Liberty Financial - as special envoy to the Middle East.
As well as creating another blatant conflict of interest for the new president, the family’s entry into production of “Trump coin” is the latest indication of a growing partnership between Trump and the new capitalism incubated in Silicon Valley. Silicon tycoons are fantastically wealthy, and for Trump wealth has always been an ostentatious symbol of success. According to a recent New York Times article, he likes to show off his new political associates like trophies in his kitschy palace. “I’ve brought two of the richest men in the world,” he was recently quoted by the Times as saying, as he introduced himself to a meeting of journalists in the company of Elon Musk and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “You, who did you bring?”
It’s Elon Musk who epitomizes the influence of Silicon Valley’s accelerationists in Trump’s restoration: as we know, he has been entrusted, along with another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswami, with a central post as administrator of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). Musk would, however, have greater freedom of action, including over the composition of the government framework itself, on which numerous collaborators “on loan” from his companies would work in Florida.
Among the key figures would be Jared Birchall, director of Neuralink, the company in charge of neurological implants, but also administrator of the tycoon’s personal finances and generally his right-hand man, in charge of family affaires, the foundation, as well as Musk’s real estate, travel and security. To these tasks are now added talks with potential State Department representatives. The fact that Birchall has no experience of international affairs is clearly not seen as a problem in a selection which, as with other departments, would seem to focus primarily on ideological affinities and the nominees’ loyalty to the President.
Another advisor, this time to select intelligence personnel, is Shaun Maguire, a Caltech physicist who became a billionaire as a partner in Sequoia, one of Silicon Valley’s leading investment funds and (needless to say) a friend of Elon Musk, with whom he shares the cult, so fashionable in the Valley, of the undisciplined, misfit genius, perhaps even a little misanthropic, but always brilliant.
In other words, many of the decisions destined to shape the Trump 2.0 government are in the hands of an ideological faction of extremist “meritocrats,” not to say “Darwinist” theorists of the triumph of the best over the mediocre. Another “advisor” located in Palm Beach, for example, is Marc Andreesen, the billionaire founder of Netscape and one of the leading ideologues of the neo-reactionary oligarchy, a fervent advocate of radical libertarianism and minimal state interference in corporate affairs.
Thanks to its strategic alliance with Trump, a partnership that only really matured in the final stages of the election campaign, this small group of entrepreneurs radicalized by the success of the Silicon Valley oligopolies, now has the opportunity to transport the philosophies of management (and eugenics) to the state apparatus. Musk has, for example, repeatedly expressed the idea that immigration should be managed like a “sports club” selection campaign, required to select the best players and discard the people who for him as for Trump are the much-hated “losers.”
But Musk’s main obsession is cutting public spending, against which he constantly rails in X-posts as a source of inflation and unsustainable budget deficits. These are the classic themes of conservative economic philosophy that the Silicon Valley right has imbued with an almost religious zeal. It is striking that a faction which, until recently, would have been considered fanatically extremist, has risen to such a position of power almost without prior planning. The very creation of Musk’s super-ministry occurred “live” during the recorded live X broadcast of the two men after the failed attack on Trump last July.
“A lot of people just don’t understand where inflation comes from. Inflation comes from government overspending because the checks never bounce when it’s written by the government. So if the government spends far more than it brings in, that increases the money supply,” the Space X owner (who collects billions of dollars in public space contracts) remarked during the conversation. “I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, to the taxpayers’ hard-earned money is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”
“I’d love it. […]Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it.” (Laughs).
Musk and Ramaswamy don’t miss an opportunity to point out that the main sources of unnecessary spending are programs such as food aid for needy families, pensions and healthcare. “At first, it may cause some discomfort,” Musk even admitted of the dreaded remedy (cutting $2 trillion in public spending, equivalent to more than a third of the state budget), ”but in the long run, it will be better for everyone.”
But Musk’s main obsession is cutting public spending, against which he constantly rails in X-posts as a source of inflation and unsustainable budget deficits. These are the classic themes of conservative economic philosophy that the Silicon Valley right has imbued with an almost religious zeal. It is striking that a faction which, until recently, would have been considered fanatically extremist, has risen to such a position of power almost without prior planning. The very creation of Musk’s super-ministry occurred “live” during the recorded live X broadcast of the two men after the failed attack on Trump last July.
“A lot of people just don’t understand where inflation comes from. Inflation comes from government overspending because the checks never bounce when it’s written by the government. So if the government spends far more than it brings in, that increases the money supply,” the Space X owner (who collects billions of dollars in public space contracts) remarked during the conversation. “I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, to the taxpayers’ hard-earned money is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”
“I’d love it. […]Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it.” (Laughs).
Musk and Ramaswamy don’t miss an opportunity to point out that the main sources of unnecessary spending are programs such as food aid for needy families, pensions and healthcare. “At first, it may cause some discomfort,” Musk even admitted of the dreaded remedy (cutting $2 trillion in public spending, equivalent to more than a third of the state budget), ”but in the long run, it will be better for everyone.”
’Captain X’, by Vasco Gargalo
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump asserted in this regard. “It will be an interesting few months. But the country is cluttered with regulations and unnecessary people who could be more productive in the private sector.” Now, with unprecedented influence, Silicon Valley’s “broligarchs” are preparing to get their hands on the social welfare apparatus like one would a recently acquired subsidiary, with the intention of implementing a colossal “entrepreneurial” reform.
The fortunes accumulated by today’s plutocracy invite comparisons with the “golden age” of the early twentieth century, when the stratospheric wealth of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and major industrial and banking families underscored the abysmal inequality with the subordinate economic classes. But the political influence of these “robber barons,” remarkable as it was, pales in comparison with the current situation.
That era had been the prelude to a season of enormous social conflicts in the country and to the creation, under Franklin Roosevelt, of the social safety net (health care and pensions) that still exists today. Today, however, the tensions produced by globalization and rampant social inequality have apparently produced a government directly controlled by the most gigantic monopolies generated by neoliberal capitalism, which, in alliance with a populist demagogue and the most reactionary parts of the ideological right, are preparing to dismantle this social pact.
All this is despite a blatant conflict of interest on the part of the corporations who are in fact responsible for dismantling the federal agencies charged with regulating them. The first heads the tech industry would like to see fall are those of Lina Kahn, architect at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the antitrust campaign that recently dragged Google and Amazon through the courts, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who, as chairwoman of the Consumer Protection Authority, is one of the most consistently left-wing voices against corporate overreach (Andreesen has expressly called for her to be “removed”).
However, it’s not just a matter of securing the services of a friendly administration (although with a dealer like Trump, these will be all but assured). Trump’s promised decimation of the “deep state” as an anti-system populist aggregation device is, for Silicon Valley’s activist plutocracy, an ideological goal that Musk pursues with particular fervor.
In their recent book “Character Limit,” Kate Conger and Ryan Mac trace what happened in the days following Musk’s purchase of Twitter. A succession of layoffs, communicated by e-mail, department heads summoned by surprise and asked to justify the usefulness of their jobs in 60 seconds, with their severance packages withheld. An economic “restructuring” was transformed into a theater of cruelty, based on ritual and punitive humiliation. An area of strong affinity between Musk and Trump, already the owner of a reality TV show whose slogan was “You’re Fired!”
The liquidation of 80% of employees “without consequences” for the company (not to mention the destruction of a platform now reduced to a megaphone of disinformation and propaganda), turned Musk into a kind of anarcho-capitalist hero for a large group of followers. And it’s the same recipe many expect him to use to decimate the “Deep State” once and for all. In recent weeks, Musk has often been seen in the company of another associate, Steve Davis, one of the heads of the Boring Company (Musk’s tunnel-building company). According to the Times, Davis, who specializes in cost-cutting, has also engaged in discussions with other experts to “optimize the federal budget.” He too is likely to play a leading role in the new DOGE department.
It may not be possible to replicate Twitter’s 80% cuts, but even Musk’s paradoxical reduction of nearly 50% in government spending would represent a catastrophic apotheosis in the war of the rich against the poor. To prepare the ground, the campaign, amplified by Musk, to vilify the “profiteers” of public subsidies and “liberate” businesses from “suffocating bureaucracies” has already begun on “X.”
The other impulse is privatization, with another Musk team leader: Shervin Pishevar, director and co-founder of Hyperloop (the supersonic capsule company with several projects in the experimental phase). Pishevar hails “the opportunity to reimagine government functions in light of unprecedented economic and technological developments.” A phrase that sums up Silicon Valley’s economic interests and technological messianism. According to Pishevar, services such as the post office, NASA and the prison system “will benefit immensely from the ingenuity of the private sector.” All with the aim of creating a “future aligned with ownership and prosperity”. One of the hallmarks of ultracapitalists is that they glibly boast about what, until recently, and again during Trump’s first term, employer groups would have hushed up and publicly denied.
The fortunes accumulated by today’s plutocracy invite comparisons with the “golden age” of the early twentieth century, when the stratospheric wealth of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and major industrial and banking families underscored the abysmal inequality with the subordinate economic classes. But the political influence of these “robber barons,” remarkable as it was, pales in comparison with the current situation.
That era had been the prelude to a season of enormous social conflicts in the country and to the creation, under Franklin Roosevelt, of the social safety net (health care and pensions) that still exists today. Today, however, the tensions produced by globalization and rampant social inequality have apparently produced a government directly controlled by the most gigantic monopolies generated by neoliberal capitalism, which, in alliance with a populist demagogue and the most reactionary parts of the ideological right, are preparing to dismantle this social pact.
All this is despite a blatant conflict of interest on the part of the corporations who are in fact responsible for dismantling the federal agencies charged with regulating them. The first heads the tech industry would like to see fall are those of Lina Kahn, architect at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the antitrust campaign that recently dragged Google and Amazon through the courts, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who, as chairwoman of the Consumer Protection Authority, is one of the most consistently left-wing voices against corporate overreach (Andreesen has expressly called for her to be “removed”).
However, it’s not just a matter of securing the services of a friendly administration (although with a dealer like Trump, these will be all but assured). Trump’s promised decimation of the “deep state” as an anti-system populist aggregation device is, for Silicon Valley’s activist plutocracy, an ideological goal that Musk pursues with particular fervor.
In their recent book “Character Limit,” Kate Conger and Ryan Mac trace what happened in the days following Musk’s purchase of Twitter. A succession of layoffs, communicated by e-mail, department heads summoned by surprise and asked to justify the usefulness of their jobs in 60 seconds, with their severance packages withheld. An economic “restructuring” was transformed into a theater of cruelty, based on ritual and punitive humiliation. An area of strong affinity between Musk and Trump, already the owner of a reality TV show whose slogan was “You’re Fired!”
The liquidation of 80% of employees “without consequences” for the company (not to mention the destruction of a platform now reduced to a megaphone of disinformation and propaganda), turned Musk into a kind of anarcho-capitalist hero for a large group of followers. And it’s the same recipe many expect him to use to decimate the “Deep State” once and for all. In recent weeks, Musk has often been seen in the company of another associate, Steve Davis, one of the heads of the Boring Company (Musk’s tunnel-building company). According to the Times, Davis, who specializes in cost-cutting, has also engaged in discussions with other experts to “optimize the federal budget.” He too is likely to play a leading role in the new DOGE department.
It may not be possible to replicate Twitter’s 80% cuts, but even Musk’s paradoxical reduction of nearly 50% in government spending would represent a catastrophic apotheosis in the war of the rich against the poor. To prepare the ground, the campaign, amplified by Musk, to vilify the “profiteers” of public subsidies and “liberate” businesses from “suffocating bureaucracies” has already begun on “X.”
The other impulse is privatization, with another Musk team leader: Shervin Pishevar, director and co-founder of Hyperloop (the supersonic capsule company with several projects in the experimental phase). Pishevar hails “the opportunity to reimagine government functions in light of unprecedented economic and technological developments.” A phrase that sums up Silicon Valley’s economic interests and technological messianism. According to Pishevar, services such as the post office, NASA and the prison system “will benefit immensely from the ingenuity of the private sector.” All with the aim of creating a “future aligned with ownership and prosperity”. One of the hallmarks of ultracapitalists is that they glibly boast about what, until recently, and again during Trump’s first term, employer groups would have hushed up and publicly denied.
The progressive privatization of services is an integral part of the programs of many Western liberal governments. But the giga-capitalists now see an opportunity to finish the job very quickly, adopting the slogan “move fast and break things.” Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, favored by tech thaumaturges, would thus apply to the state apparatus to be “reinvented.” After all, even the infamous Project 2025 is based on a “blitzkrieg” aimed at crushing institutional resistance (or constitutional roadblocks) and armoring the apparatus without giving resistance time to organize.
The “blitzkrieg” project promises to assault all areas, starting with research, health and public education, and in some cases is already well advanced. The network of detention centers for migrants to be deported, for example (over 200 in the country, and which mass deportations promise to increase dramatically), is already outsourced by the government to companies in the prison industrial complex, companies like Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, paid for each prisoner held, and whose share price soared on the day of Trump’s election.
But the revered “disruption” must, in the project of the “broligarchs”, extend to society as a whole. What Pishevar euphemistically calls the “revolutionary restructuring of public institutions” will follow the familiar script of their sabotage and withholding funds with a view to their replacement by “management” companies and, consequently, a massive transfer of public funds to private coffers. Much of this is likely to be implemented by executive order, but on this occasion, Trump and his sponsors have both houses of parliament and a reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court - an unprecedented convergence of purpose and power.
Still in the context of “innovation”, one significant appointment has partly flown under the radar, that of David Sachs to the invented post of “cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence czar.” A venture capitalist and old acquaintance of Musk’s from his PayPal days, Sachs is one of several South Africans who play a prominent role in Silicon Valley’s reactionary wing. Roelof Botha (grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha) is a Sequoia investor (the same as Shaun Maguire), Patrick Soon-Shiong is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, which had banned pro-Kamala Harris editorials from its editorial board and recently announced the introduction of an AI algorithm to “correct” the progressive biases of its editors.
Of all the digital tycoons with ties to the southern hemisphere, it’s certainly Peter Thiel who has the highest profile. Linked to the anarcho-capitalist think-tank Property & Freedom Conference and the Bilderberg Group, the tycoon, who grew up in Namibia in a German family, is not only a Trump supporter, but has also been the financier and career mentor of JD Vance, whose vice-presidential nomination he directly sponsored and guaranteed.
A founding member of PayPal, Thiel studied at Stanford, where he founded the Young Conservative Journal. Famous for theorizing that “democracy is no longer compatible with freedom,” he is today the eminence grise of Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary cult.
Last month, in an interview with Bari Weiss, he compared the tech ultra-capitalists who led Trump to victory to the resistance fighters who bring down the Empire in Star Wars (an analogy in which Biden would presumably play Darth Vader).
In addition to leading the holy alliance against the “establishment,” Thiel is the owner of Palantir, a data analytics and AI company with multiple military applications (the company is named after the wizard Sauron’s divination stones in JRR Tolkien’s books). Control of artificial intelligence, as we know, will be crucial to the next capitalist and geopolitical phase, and the Trump-oligarchs cabal has therefore also been consumed with a view that they must pursue a new AI arms race, notably with the Chinese arch-rival.
Founded in 2003, Palantir first supplied neural networks and data analysis algorithms to intelligence agencies, then to military special departments. Today, it is a leader in military AI applications, which it also supplies to numerous global customers. Always, it is said, those who are on the “right” side. The company’s CEO, Alex Karp, is a staunch supporter of Israel and a defender of the new U.S.-led global Manichaeism. “We have to explain to Americans that the world is divided into two parts, and one of them is run by terrorists whose goal is to dominate the West,” he asserted at a recent Reagan Institute conference.
In Karp’s thinking, technological supremacy goes hand in hand with the moral superiority of the U.S.-led West. And supremacism is inseparable from the logic of permanent war (which, after all, corresponds to the corporate business model). Karp asserts that “[U.S.] Americans are the most fearful, impartial, least racist and best-disposed people in the world. At the same time, they want us to know that if you wake up in the morning thinking you’re going to hurt us, take us hostage or send fentanyl to kill us at home, something very bad is going to happen to you, your cousin, your lover or your family.”
At Karp’s headquarters, his rantings sounding like a Doctor Strangelove of algorithms are commonplace. “We have the best technology and it has to stay that way,” he declares in another video. “We can’t afford to be equivalent with anyone because our opponents don’t have our moral scruples.” A staunch Zionist and Netanyahu supporter, Karp put his company’s “moral superiority” to work for the IDF in the campaign against Gaza and tested his own artificial intelligence in the Ukrainian theater. In Karp’s new “digital pax americana,” Dr. Fiolamour meets Terminator in a scenario where the “enemy” sky is permanently paved with Starlink satellites (Musk’s subsidiary already has 6,500 in orbit) and numerous others armed with missiles.
A fortnight ago [Dec. 2, by 166-3 with 15 abstentions], 166 members of the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a treaty on “intelligent” weapons, “killer robots” with “autonomous decision-making.” This treaty is nothing more than wishful thinking, as the USA is opposed to any compulsory limitation. In fact, the proliferation of smart weapons is already well underway, and will remain a top priority for the next White House.
At the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s new digital military-industrial complex, work is well underway to ensure U.S. supremacy in space and in the oceans, where “swarms” of autonomous robot submarines are already crossing paths, produced by another leading company in the sector, Anduril (a name also taken from Lord of the Rings, this time Aragorn’s sword). These are increasingly common scenarios in which the transhumanism of giga-capitalists veers into the post-human.
The model can now be definitively consolidated by a White House where reactionary ideology and industrial interests will overlap infinitely without distinction, a government composed in equal parts of apocalyptic ideologues and arms industrialists who will have a 100% business partner in the Oval Office.
A state of emergency, roundups and constitutional modifications by decree (the end of birthright citizenship), to start with, followed by radical restrictions on dissent) are on the horizon starting in late January. Behind this project is a faction which, in addition to their certainty they are right, will now have the power to enforce it with the full support of an imperial presidency.
The “blitzkrieg” project promises to assault all areas, starting with research, health and public education, and in some cases is already well advanced. The network of detention centers for migrants to be deported, for example (over 200 in the country, and which mass deportations promise to increase dramatically), is already outsourced by the government to companies in the prison industrial complex, companies like Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, paid for each prisoner held, and whose share price soared on the day of Trump’s election.
But the revered “disruption” must, in the project of the “broligarchs”, extend to society as a whole. What Pishevar euphemistically calls the “revolutionary restructuring of public institutions” will follow the familiar script of their sabotage and withholding funds with a view to their replacement by “management” companies and, consequently, a massive transfer of public funds to private coffers. Much of this is likely to be implemented by executive order, but on this occasion, Trump and his sponsors have both houses of parliament and a reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court - an unprecedented convergence of purpose and power.
Still in the context of “innovation”, one significant appointment has partly flown under the radar, that of David Sachs to the invented post of “cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence czar.” A venture capitalist and old acquaintance of Musk’s from his PayPal days, Sachs is one of several South Africans who play a prominent role in Silicon Valley’s reactionary wing. Roelof Botha (grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha) is a Sequoia investor (the same as Shaun Maguire), Patrick Soon-Shiong is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, which had banned pro-Kamala Harris editorials from its editorial board and recently announced the introduction of an AI algorithm to “correct” the progressive biases of its editors.
Of all the digital tycoons with ties to the southern hemisphere, it’s certainly Peter Thiel who has the highest profile. Linked to the anarcho-capitalist think-tank Property & Freedom Conference and the Bilderberg Group, the tycoon, who grew up in Namibia in a German family, is not only a Trump supporter, but has also been the financier and career mentor of JD Vance, whose vice-presidential nomination he directly sponsored and guaranteed.
A founding member of PayPal, Thiel studied at Stanford, where he founded the Young Conservative Journal. Famous for theorizing that “democracy is no longer compatible with freedom,” he is today the eminence grise of Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary cult.
Last month, in an interview with Bari Weiss, he compared the tech ultra-capitalists who led Trump to victory to the resistance fighters who bring down the Empire in Star Wars (an analogy in which Biden would presumably play Darth Vader).
In addition to leading the holy alliance against the “establishment,” Thiel is the owner of Palantir, a data analytics and AI company with multiple military applications (the company is named after the wizard Sauron’s divination stones in JRR Tolkien’s books). Control of artificial intelligence, as we know, will be crucial to the next capitalist and geopolitical phase, and the Trump-oligarchs cabal has therefore also been consumed with a view that they must pursue a new AI arms race, notably with the Chinese arch-rival.
Founded in 2003, Palantir first supplied neural networks and data analysis algorithms to intelligence agencies, then to military special departments. Today, it is a leader in military AI applications, which it also supplies to numerous global customers. Always, it is said, those who are on the “right” side. The company’s CEO, Alex Karp, is a staunch supporter of Israel and a defender of the new U.S.-led global Manichaeism. “We have to explain to Americans that the world is divided into two parts, and one of them is run by terrorists whose goal is to dominate the West,” he asserted at a recent Reagan Institute conference.
In Karp’s thinking, technological supremacy goes hand in hand with the moral superiority of the U.S.-led West. And supremacism is inseparable from the logic of permanent war (which, after all, corresponds to the corporate business model). Karp asserts that “[U.S.] Americans are the most fearful, impartial, least racist and best-disposed people in the world. At the same time, they want us to know that if you wake up in the morning thinking you’re going to hurt us, take us hostage or send fentanyl to kill us at home, something very bad is going to happen to you, your cousin, your lover or your family.”
At Karp’s headquarters, his rantings sounding like a Doctor Strangelove of algorithms are commonplace. “We have the best technology and it has to stay that way,” he declares in another video. “We can’t afford to be equivalent with anyone because our opponents don’t have our moral scruples.” A staunch Zionist and Netanyahu supporter, Karp put his company’s “moral superiority” to work for the IDF in the campaign against Gaza and tested his own artificial intelligence in the Ukrainian theater. In Karp’s new “digital pax americana,” Dr. Fiolamour meets Terminator in a scenario where the “enemy” sky is permanently paved with Starlink satellites (Musk’s subsidiary already has 6,500 in orbit) and numerous others armed with missiles.
A fortnight ago [Dec. 2, by 166-3 with 15 abstentions], 166 members of the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a treaty on “intelligent” weapons, “killer robots” with “autonomous decision-making.” This treaty is nothing more than wishful thinking, as the USA is opposed to any compulsory limitation. In fact, the proliferation of smart weapons is already well underway, and will remain a top priority for the next White House.
At the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s new digital military-industrial complex, work is well underway to ensure U.S. supremacy in space and in the oceans, where “swarms” of autonomous robot submarines are already crossing paths, produced by another leading company in the sector, Anduril (a name also taken from Lord of the Rings, this time Aragorn’s sword). These are increasingly common scenarios in which the transhumanism of giga-capitalists veers into the post-human.
The model can now be definitively consolidated by a White House where reactionary ideology and industrial interests will overlap infinitely without distinction, a government composed in equal parts of apocalyptic ideologues and arms industrialists who will have a 100% business partner in the Oval Office.
A state of emergency, roundups and constitutional modifications by decree (the end of birthright citizenship), to start with, followed by radical restrictions on dissent) are on the horizon starting in late January. Behind this project is a faction which, in addition to their certainty they are right, will now have the power to enforce it with the full support of an imperial presidency.
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