Kyle Chayka writes:

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, [Erin] McElroy [a geographer at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley] said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”

Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James Pogue has explained, their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech companies. In a January interview with Ross Douthat, of the Times, Bannon said, “They have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.” Whereas the MAGA right wants to restore things as they were (or as they imagine things were), the tech right wants to, in Mark Zuckerberg’s phrasing, break things. In the Times interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the top accelerationists,” referencing another technology-inflected political ideology that treats chaos as an inevitability.

Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an American monarchy have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0. The accelerationist attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.” Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. [Continue reading…]