Nerds are an oppressed class
Who deserve to rule the world
The title is clickbait, I’ll be the first to say it. I’m only talking about a narrow subset of nerds here, ones who defile the title, if anything. I’m talking about a Silicon Valley class, a group who think they own the universe, or deserve to, a group represented all too well in Elon Musk’s cadre of “DOGE” minions infesting the federal government. To understand these young men, the ones currently being exposed for racist and eugenicist beliefs, we need to understand how they think. Namely, we need to understand the beliefs that permeate Silicon Valley, like believing we ought to kneel at their feet, and even believing they created this world of ours.
The man who sent out that tweet is primarily a Roblox Youtuber now. For those who won’t know, Roblox is a popular online game for children. Here we get a little glimpse into the minds we’re dealing with. Silicon Valley certainly created some part of the modern world, but more than anything it created a tremendous, societally destabilizing amount of wealth for a handful of people. In the process it also created a cadre of guys who contribute less and less of lasting value to society in an industry more and more bent on short-term rewards rather than real invention, but think the world owes them more than we can possibly comprehend.
It’s hard not to think of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and specifically the author’s description of the men who work on Wall Street regarding themselves as “Masters of the Universe.” The Wolf Of Wall Street and countless other depictions of the world center of finance also depict these men, many of them very young, as seeing themselves as titans on a global stage as they rip off the working class and perform dizzying, sometimes disastrous financial maneuvers. We know how this all came crashing down in 2008, but we also know that the young men of Wall Street continue their cocaine-fueled adventurism, and continue to think that they stand at the center of the universe.
But they don’t. And that is, in part, because Silicon Valley supplanted them. The six biggest companies on Earth are tech companies. Seven of the ten richest people on Earth are tech barons. The list is led by Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos. The center of the financial universe has shifted, but the people who power it still think they deserve to have the world bow down to them. The current self-obsessed ‘masters of the universe’ may reside more on the West Coast than the East, but the same insidious egoism, the same thirst for endless wealth, adulation, and political power, the same capitalist excess is still the driving force of these new oligarchs. And these men are the driving force of the Trump-Musk presidency.
It’s no surprise to anyone that this Silicon Valley mindset is wrapped up with racism and grievance and all manner of supremacist beliefs. 25-year-old Marko Elez just became the poster boy for this outlook, after social media comments from as recently as December were revealed. These DOGE staffer’s posts included: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool” in July, “Normalize Indian hate” in September, and a raft of other racist and eugenicist sentiments. But he’s not an outlier. Both Musk and JD Vance rushed to defend Elez. Musk said he’d rehire his racist minion, and the VP eagerly voiced his support. That fact that Vance’s wife, and his children, are of Indian descent appeared irrelevant to the sniveling sycophant who occupies the second highest office in the U.S.
Almost immediately after the series of events described above, it was revealed that Gavin Kliger, another DOGE lackey aged 25, reposted well-known Nazi Nick Fuentes and other white supremacists. But it’s hard to see why he would step down, as Elez initially did, when his boss embraces white supremacy and eugenics so publicly with such open arms. And it’s worth noting that this isn’t new. It certainly isn’t new for Musk, but it’s also not new for Silicon Valley. From the very early days of Palo Alto the first President of Stanford, David Starr Jordan, embraced and uplifted eugenics. He thought it was cutting-edge science, and embraced white supremacy as fact. Malcolm Harris expands insightfully on Jordan, Stanford, and some of the currents that shaped Silicon Valley in his excellent book Palo Alto.
There isn’t a simple, straight line from the first president of Stanford doing race science to leading figures in Silicon Valley thinking they deserve to control the world, and yet there is a line. For well over a century American culture has venerated the inventor, particularly the profitable inventor. The belief that tech can make humanity transcend the limits of the natural world, can make us something more than human, has persisted despite all evidence to the contrary. When science fiction provides warnings, they’re often read instead as challenges or even goals for the tech industry. This cultish approach to technology has both reinforced the delusion that people are distinct from the natural world, and reinforced for some in Silicon Valley that they are separate and above the rest of us.
These semi-tangible threads running through the tech world have manifested concretely as well. It was in the late ‘80s, at Stanford, where Peter Thiel, the first tech billionaire to openly declare his techno-monarchist ambitions, founded a conservative student publication called The Stanford Review “to wage war on what he saw as the university’s liberal agenda, including ‘mandatory race and ethnic studies” and ‘domestic partner status for homosexuals,’” as Sharon Weinberger wrote in 2020. She continues, “The Review served as a breeding ground for Palantir: Over the years, according to an analysis by a Stanford graduate named Andrew Granato, 24 of the company’s employees came from the staff of Thiel’s student publication.”
Now Thiel is better known as JD Vance’s biggest backer and advisor, and the co-founder of Palantir. And he’s also backed Donald Trump and much of the anti-democratic “New Right.” But he first got his start at PayPal, before founding tech-defense-surveillance company Palantir and becoming the first outsider investor in Facebook. He has a fortune of about $8 billion, and he used it to help fund the Senate campaign of Vance to the tune of $10 million. He’s also poured many times that amount into the techno-feudalist movement via other campaigns, events, and institutions.
It’s no surprise that this man emerged from Silicon Valley. Tech, merged with the relentless and fundamentally anti-social drive for profit, was bound to produce a Peter Thiel, and a Palantir, which makes its money off deportation software, surveillance tech, and its connections to the Pentagon, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, particularly under Trump. As Weinberger writes, “Thiel and Karp [his co-founder] have effectively positioned Palantir as a pro-military arm of Silicon Valley, a culture dominated by tech gurus who view their work as paving the way for a global utopia.”
The exact nature of that utopia is, of course, a techno-monarchist regime, with the Silicon Valley ‘masters of the universe’ at the center of it all. This may seem outrageous, delusional, and dystopian. And it is. But it’s also a belief system that has broken containment, and whose adherents are now some of the most powerful people in America, and therefore the world.
At the epicenter of the techno-feudalist cult is Curtis Yarvin. Many of you have read about him by now, and his main accomplishment is providing a thin philosophical and political theorist veneer to a belief system that aims at capitalist domination and the destruction of democracy. He believes in a dictatorship and a “hard reset” of society. And over the last two decades or so he acquired acolytes across Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel. As Corey Pein reported for the Baffler, at the beginning of a fantastic piece about Yarvin, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a “strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website” back in 2014. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:
1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.
This petition might seem to be an extreme outlier, to you, when it comes to the strange developments in the political outlook of Silicon Valley. And it should have been, but instead Yarvin’s ideas gradually took root, assisted by millions of dollars. Some of the specifics changed, but now a chunk of the tech world opposes basic democracy. A cadre of rich, powerful, nerds fundamentally opposes living in a country where we’re on the same footing as them.
Yet, despite years of reporting and a trove of evidence, some pundits still claim to not know exactly what Thiel, Musk, Yarvin, and their ilk want. Even as we see Musk attempt to reshape the federal government in his image and consolidate it underneath him some feign uncertainty. But these men have articulated their goals quite clearly, and the Trump administration is now acting under one of the approaches this cadre embraces to the fullest – all-out unitary executive theory. This theory declares that “The president enjoys sole authority over the entire executive branch.” Never mind that funds are appropriated by Congress for specific purposes, this thinly disguised dictatorial approach ignores the law and the Constitution, which is what we see unfolding before our eyes at this very moment.
The foot-soldiers of Musk’s techno-fascist attack, some of whom were recruited by Thiel associates, are not men with guns, they’re young coders who think they deserve to run roughshod over the rest of us. This nefarious subset of nerd is particularly easy for fascists to weaponize because they have a dangerous combination of outlooks. They think they deserve the world, and they see themselves not being given what they’re owed, by women and by society at large. As with many young men with a chip on their shoulder, these DOGE types became willing and angry cogs in the fascist machinery.
This subset is not unique, of course. The fascist movement is filled with people, especially men, who share this outlook. As Ben Tarnoff recently relayed, “Back in 2012 the editors of n+1 identified ‘the personality type and cultural style of the contemporary right-wing commentator’ as ‘Big Baby.’ Rush Limbaugh was the first Big Baby, followed by Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Bill O’Reilly. Trump sits easily in this lineage. Big Baby, the editors explained, was not merely ‘juvenile, impish, and wounded, but a devoted hater of women.” Tarnoff identified this passage in his recent piece on the babyish outlook that pervades the people who, unfortunately, lead this country. He continues:
“It is pleasurable to disinter one’s deepest resentments, to worship power, to go berserk with rage, to be floridly conspiratorial, to know nothing, to hallucinate Marxists under the bed, to picture the people you hate in tears and in chains. But the unifying principle, the rind that envelops and coheres these delights, is the abdication of adulthood’s defining obligation: to take responsibility for oneself and others.”
In lieu of responsibility, Tarnoff writes about this pursuit of an impossibly carefree life that pervades much of the country. And I would argue that our most dangerous adversaries, from Musk to Vance to Thiel, display a childish hunger for power as well. This hunger is childish in that there remains no conception of the other. Our lives do not matter to these people — in the adolescent sense of superiority that pervades the tech robber baron class we are lesser beings, therefore undeserving of say in the world they childishly believe they created.
Their sense of their own impact is so grossly underdeveloped that the world they believe they created does not, in truth, exist. They have helped create our world, but they’ve fostered massive inequality, a climate crisis, and this stage of overt fascism rather than the tech utopian fantasy that appears to persist in their heads. Nowhere do they recognize the truth, nowhere do they acknowledge that their conception of progress has not led to a better world for most people — although the investment many have made in bunkers at the ends of the Earth does tell a different story.
However they feel internally, they continue to act as greedy children, dumping billions into an AI industry that sucks up our water, backing Trump and fossil fuel extraction, and attacking any semblance of democracy. And there isn’t space for most of us in the world that will result from their actions. They’d prefer to replace workers with robots and AI, with no plan for the billions of angry people who will remain except violence.
But a few lucky class traitors will apparently be welcome in their brave new world. Coders who embrace their supremacist beliefs and are willing to participate in their attack on the rest of us are welcome. These young men must believe that they’re masters of the universe, and bow down to the real masters at the same time. They’re fueled by grievances they misdirect at women and oppressed groups, but their answer is to further isolate themselves. We see this twisted mentality from Andrew Tate to Musk’s minions at DOGE. It’s grievance that leads unto grievance, resentment and anger that leads only unto further resentment and anger. And it’s powerful fuel for fascism.
Thankfully, there are answers. Some are more immediate, but the solutions that match the scale and depth of the problem are much more long-term. We need to stand with federal unions, we need those unions to rapidly grow more radical, we need to shut down business as usual at multiple points. And we need to shift culture. We need to build communal institutions and organize with our neighbors. Ultimately, we need a societal shift. On that front Tarnoff ends his article brilliantly:
We need a society where people match agency with responsibility. Instead of the viciously individualistic and profit-driven ethos that built Silicon Valley, we need to foster both an ethos and concrete practices of communal responsibility and mutuality. We need an antidote to patriarchy where men build community and cease to let homophobia and misogyny keep us from meaningful and fulfilling relationships with other men, with women, and with our friends and neighbors. We are not islands, and to act as though we are has warped us into weapons aimed at those around us. Whether it’s programmers at DOGE or the bottomless vacuums at the top of the biggest companies, we’re ruled by people who look at the world and only see opportunities for exploitation and personal gain. That outlook is miserable, and it has brought us to the brink of destruction.
The threat posed by the gaping maw of Silicon Valley must be met with worker power and people power, and in the long run it also must be met by a deep cultural shift away from individualism and towards collectivism, away from patriarchy and toward feminism, away from thinking we’re owed the world and toward think we owe the world, toward knowing that we have responsibilities toward one another and toward this planet. That cultural shift must be made concrete in the bonds we form with our neighbors, with our coworkers, in the organizations and institutions we build to embed this shift in the world, propelling society away from being controlled by a few individuals who think the universe revolves around them and toward collective control by each and every one of us.
A few links for this struggle we’re engaged in:
First some places to get plugged in with federal workers’ unions.
Get alerts from AFSCME — https://go-afscme.org/
AFGE — https://www.afge.org/
More resources for federal workers: https://linktr.ee/fedsworkforyou
The ShutDownDC Coaltion: https://www.shutdowndc.org/
Unionize your workplace: https://workerorganizing.org/
Talk to your neighbors and form a tenant union: https://tenantfederation.org/tenant-unions/
Came for the clickbait title, stayed for the Big Baby. As always, JP, you tackle these big topics with unapologetic principles and true heart! 💜
Excellent breakdown, as always.