Nearly thirty years ago, the writer Paulina Borsook penned an influential essay, “Cyberselfish,” that explored the naïve libertarianism of Silicon Valley’s rising elite. Unlike the last generation of scientists who worked at Caltech or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory— “beneficiaries of government largesse” who acknowledged and embraced government as a force for good—the tech workers Borsook encountered suffered from selective amnesia. They seem to have forgotten how the road to Silicon Valley was paved with public funding, from the development of the Internet and microprocessors to the support for research universities that pioneered discoveries and trained computer engineers:
These are the inheritors of the greatest government subsidy of technology and expansion in technical education the planet has ever seen; and, like the ungrateful adolescent offspring of immigrants who have made it in the new country, they take for granted the richness of the environment in which they have flourished, and resent the hell out of the constraints that bind them. And, like privileged, spoiled teenagers everywhere, they haven’t a clue what their existence would be like without the bounty showered on them.
There is still much to recommend Borsook’s piece on the “revenge of the nerds”—and particularly the nature of rule by “those whose greatest strengths have not been the comprehension of social systems, appreciation of the humanities, or acquaintance with history, politics, and economics.” Yet, nearly three decades on, there is also reason to doubt whether “libertarian” remains an adequate descriptor of Silicon Valley’s dominant political culture—not least because the libertarian label obscures the nature of the “broligarch” assault on American democracy.
We have reason to doubt whether “libertarian” remains an adequate descriptor of Silicon Valley’s dominant political culture.
From Libertarianism to Turbocapitalism
It’s often taken for granted that tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks are libertarian warriors facing off against big government: bio-hacked knights in self-driving cars out to slash regulation, public spending, taxes. Rather than relying on the stories that tech elites spin about their political commitments, it is more instructive to look at their behavior: from the demand for a government bailout of Silicon Valley Bank to the critical role that federal funding has played in the success of Elon Musk’s companies, to the tech set’s pivot toward defense technologies in an attempt to capture lucrative military contracts. Among the lucky recipients of the latter are Anduril Industries, the defense startup whose founder achieved infamy by creating an exploding VR headset that kills the user if they die while playing a video game. As Anduril President Christian Brose stated in a recent interview, “We have relationships with the current administration – it’s not secret that our founder has given money to Trump and is very supportive of Trump and has been for a very long time.” As he added, “At the level of vibes, it’s good.”
The National Conservative project represents an aggressive attempt to use state power to inculcate a particular type of public virtue.
Peter Thiel’s own political evolution is instructive in this regard. Though never abandoning the libertarian label, Thiel has thrown his support behind the National Conservatism movement and its protégé, Vice President J.D. Vance. As I’ve noted elsewhere, national conservatives have broken with libertarian principles on everything from free trade to industrial policy, the centrality of individual freedom, and pro-natalism. In a 2020 article for the libertarian outlet, Reason, Brian Doherty expressed alarm that Thiel’s change of heart signaled a world in which “ideas libertarians once thought were reasonably and blessedly settled on the right…are now up for grabs.” And indeed, the NatCon project represents an aggressive attempt to use state power to inculcate a particular type of public virtue. As Doherty noted about Thiel’s address at the 2019 National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., “The dog that never barked in Thiel’s long disquisition on national conservatism was any concern about government size, scope, or spending. Nor was there any nod toward the moral value and material fecundity of free markets.”
We cannot take seriously the supposed libertarianism of a man like Peter Thiel, who co-founded a surveillance company fueled by government contracts.
In truth, there were indications long before 2020 that Thiel’s self-professed libertarianism ran afoul of his actions. The most obvious of these is Palantir, the massive data mining and surveillance company that Thiel co-founded in 2003, which has become synonymous with the invasion of privacy on a grandiose scale. As Bloomberg News wrote in a 2018 profile, the company “is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens.” The CIA was an early investor and customer and government agencies—from ICE and domestic police forces to the UK’s National Health Service and the Israeli Defense Ministry—account for the majority of Palantir’s revenue. Today the company enjoys a higher market capitalization than Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics combined. We cannot take seriously the supposed libertarianism of a man who co-founded a surveillance company fueled by government contracts.
Like many of his cohort, Thiel has been particularly influenced by the writing of Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer turned philosopher of the so-called Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin identifies first and foremost as a monarchist, calling for a revolution to overthrow American democracy and install a CEO-sovereign-qua-absolute-dictator who will govern the country like a start-up. Notably, Yarvin does not believe that the public sector is innately inept or that small government can cure what ails us. As he writes in an essay that lays out a vision of “the maximal state”:
When we think about how government works, we are used to thinking of the public sector as inherently less energetic and efficient than the private sector. While this is often true, it is not inherently true. It is a specific, contingent situation, resulting from specific prerequisites both public and private.
When the government is properly rebooted, the energy of the public sector becomes greater than the energy of any startup ever. This energy may still be inefficient. It is not inherently inefficient, though.
Tellingly, Yarvin reaches for colonial metaphors to describe the model he would like to implement in Western democracies. He suggests that El Salvador—whose president, Nayib Bukele, has emerged as a right-wing hero for making Bitcoin legal tender and imprisoning immigrants deported by the Trump administration—would be the perfect place to pilot a “sovereign reboot”: overturning the existing government and replacing it with a “startup regime” staffed by “YC founders, McKinsey veterans, Google engineers, SpaceX rocket scientists, hedge-fund masters, etc.” But successfully executing the plan would require breaking with the libertarian impulses popular among the tech set: “Under a startup regime in an old Third World country—possibly even an old First World country—the central government is the most energetic and efficient way to accomplish anything. This runs contrary to almost every expert’s political intuition.”
Yarvin proposes a new fusion of the public and private sector, one in which the state identifies key competitive industries, nationalizes them to optimize their performance, and then eventually privatizes them. He even coins a new term to refer to this new political-economic amalgam: turbocapitalism. As he explains, “Under turbocapitalism, the state establishes a new private sector using public-sector energy, by first scaling up a high-efficiency productive sector, then privatizing it.” The model he has in mind for these state-run monopolies is “the classic joint-stock company” that colonized the globe in search of raw materials and markets—one in possession of “durable, centralized, absolute executive authority fully confident in its own legitimacy and permanence.”
Here is a clear articulation of Silicon Valley’s shifting ethos: libertarianism may have worked for our ancestors, but current conditions require a more aggressive stance. The democratic state must be captured and dismantled—not in the name of freedom, but in that of efficiency, profit, and a certain type of law and order.
Prior to last January, Yarvin was little known beyond the tech world and scholars of the New Right. The ascension of Elon Musk to grand vizier—and the subsequent havoc that DOGE has unleashed on federal agencies and workers—has spurred many to take a closer look. You will not find a skeleton key to the Trump administration hiding in Yarvin’s medley of sophomoric arguments, meaningless historical anecdotes, and winks to white nationalists. What you will find, however, is a clear articulation of Silicon Valley’s shifting ethos: libertarianism may have worked for our ancestors, but current conditions require a more aggressive stance. The democratic state must be captured and dismantled—not in the name of freedom, but in that of efficiency, profit, and a certain type of law and order.
Catastrophes Lurking…
Referring to this political orientation as libertarian not only misses much of what is intellectually noteworthy. It also understates the danger by failing to recognize the stakes and vision of those who stand opposed to the democratic project, whether in the United States or abroad. What other terms might be better suited for the moment? Techno-feudalism is one option: a scenario in which the seizure and dismantling of state capacity—even of the state’s traditional monopoly on violence—creates a highly stratified society characterized by tiered access to basic social services, from medical care to firefighters. The crucial factors separating this dystopian vision from an Ayn Rand fantasy (which even Milton Friedman dismissed as too extreme) are a) the realization that the state’s democratic mechanisms must be dismembered; so that b) public resources can be “productively” redirected to pad the profit margins and market caps of patriotic entrepreneurs.
Perhaps there are other, older terms and frameworks that can still yield fresh insights. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt described imperialism as a process in which the owners of capital convinced politicians and citizens alike “to identify the economic interests of a relatively small group with national interests as such.” Unable to achieve their goal of endless accumulation without “the expansion of the national instruments of violence,” businessmen set out to conquer both the mechanisms of government and logic of politics. They “became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.”
The disastrous consequences of this merger of economic power with political violence were first felt in the colonies, but in turn came home to haunt the metropole in the form of totalitarianism. Describing the era of high imperialism that extended from 1884-1914, she wrote, “Some of the fundamental aspects of this time appear so close to totalitarian phenomena of the twentieth century that it may be justifiable to consider the whole period a preparatory stage for coming catastrophes.” It’s a lesson well worth recalling as our own catastrophes lurk on the horizon.
Suzanne Schneider is a historian and writer. She is a core faculty member at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the author, most recently, of The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. Her writing on right-wing politics has appeared in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, NYRB, The New Republic, Dissent, and New Statesman, among other publications.She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, working on a new book about the politics of risk.
Image made by Aaron Irion using “Elon Musk speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; “Peter Thiel speaking with attendees at the 2022 Converge Tech Summit at The Waste Management Phoenix Open,” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; “Flag on the Treasury Building,” by Ben Schumin licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
