What's Going on with the Tech-Fash Turn?

A Podcast With Max Read of Read Max

Today I have a something a little different for you: I joined my good buddy

Max Read

of the excellent

Read Max

Substack to record a special podcast where we compared notes about JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and the hard right turn in Silicon Valley.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2022:

Something like a class-consciousness of the most reactionary section of the tech bourgeoisie now appears to be crystallizing and, with it, a concomitant set of political practices and ideologies … The ideology, stripped of all its mystifying decoration, is actually pretty simple and crude: it says “bosses on top.” This is the unifying thread that runs through Yarvin’s tedious peregrinations from radical libertarianism to monarchism: the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good. It is, to borrow a term from the history of apartheid, baasskap—boss-ism. “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel once wrote, calling for a kind of “technocratic rejection of politics as such,” to quote the sociologist Dylan Riley. But this vision of “freedom” is not only shared by the bosses and their paid ideologues—there is a “mass” component of the politics as well: this ideal of freedom is shared by a mob that worships the power of the oligarchs and wants its own freedom to consist in the total license to behave online without encountering moral sanction from the pestering wokes or to have personal consequences of any kind. Through the adoption of crackpot racial or IQ notions they can flatter themselves that they are part of the elect, minor shareholders in the oligarch’s baasskap.

Here are some more pieces that form the background of our discussion:

• “How a Network of Tech Billionaires Helped J.D. Vance Leap Into Power” in The New York Times.

From

Read Max

:

• “The "is Twitter real?" election”

• “What I’m reading about J.D. Vance and Trump”

• “Techno-optimism" is a sign of V.C. crisis”

From me:

• “This is Land is Mein Land”

• “The Meaning of JD Vance”

• “Blood and the Machine - The Return of Reactionary Modernism”

• “The Enigma of Peter Thiel”