Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.

1. Ideology

Silicon Valley’s ideology is this: Libertarianism for me. Feudalism for thee.

In more detail:

• Surveillance, manipulation and coercion; at first, just for profit, later by necessity, and ultimately for the hell of it

• Disruption and capture, not competition; monopoly or at least duopoly in each industry it envelops.

• Oligarchy to begin with, creeping autocracy for the win. Overseas autocrats the best of friends.

• Pick me or China wins.

• Ever-increasing inequality and the concentration of capital within a small, interconnected group who back each other’s companies and public moves.

• There is no such thing as human rights. There is only identity politics and culture war, which are profit centres.

• Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else.

• A series of bullshit dark utopias designed to drive the hype and private equity cycles, distract and dazzle gullible politicians and policymakers, and convince everyone else that there is no alternative. E.g. crypto-currencies, Facebook’s Metaverse, AI and, of course, Mars.

• Systematic racism and misogyny in the workplace, the destruction of organised labour, the ever-worsening of working conditions, extreme inequality.

• Denigration of human agency and creativity, beginning with writers, artists and musicians. Systematic destruction of their ability to earn a living and suggest alternatives.

• Obsessive optimisation along narrow spectrums; externalisation of risks and costs to others, i.e. workers, ‘data subjects’, the public sector.

• Gutting of independent media, hatred of journalism in particular and accountability in general. Buying out or shutting down all opposition.

• State subsidies and tax dodging. Hollowing out the state. Making private – both in terms of ownership and secrecy – what used to be accountable and universal public services.

• The spoils to the strong, the costs to the weak. Might is right. Winner takes all. The state is an enforcer, not a support. Let the long tail starve.

Silicon Valley ideology is a master-slave mentality, a hierarchical worldview that we all exist in extractive relation to someone stronger, and exploit and despise anyone weaker. Its only relations to other humans are supplication in one direction and subjugation in the other, hence its poster-boys’ constant yoyoing between grandiosity and victimhood. Tech bros like Thiel, Musk and Andreesen are the fluffers in the global authoritarian circle jerk. Putin is the bro they’d be tickled to receive calls from, making them feel they’re on the geopolitical insider’s inside track. MBS is the bro they envy but tell each other scary stories about. Like most of them, MBS inherited his head start in life. He has all the money, all the power, a nice bit of geo-engineering on the side, and he dismembers uppity journalists without consequence. A mere billionaire like Thiel can only secretively litigate them out of business.

Silicon Valley ideology is organising economic, political and social relations into a zero-sum hierarchical chain in which democratic accountability is irrelevant, where beta politicians suck up to the alpha tech-oligarchs, offering their citizens as tribute.* To wit, the thoroughly interchangeable Matt Hancocks, Rishi Sunaks, Wes Streetings; all selling out UK citizens’ data and life chances for pennies on the pound and a glint of northern California’s reflected glory. (Grant Shapps is unusual in having had the initiative to craft and run his very own internet-based get-rich-quick scheme long before he became a government minister.) Most politicians just beg for scraps from big tech’s table, enacting the same alpha-beta hierarchy of the incels, but in power poses and slightly better suits. (The early, motivating animus of the Tories’ Online Safety Act was envious rage at Nick Clegg’s escape to become a tanned and wealthy Facebook lobbyist.)

Silicon Valley ideology is using private equity to buy a new marketplace, flood it with capital to flush out competitors, and use economic dominance to eviscerate working conditions and the cost of labour before jacking up the prices again, this time with the surplus all going to investors. It’s hyping specific technologies as universal, structural game-changers in accelerating hype cycles designed to fleece their marks quickly enough to drive growth and cash out before most people realise the technology simply doesn’t work as they were told. Bonus points for damaging trusted institutions (crypto) or labour (AI) along the way.

Silicon Valley ideology valorises disruption in the board-room but crushes it in the increasingly digitised and surveilled classroom, and grinds its face into the concrete floor of the Amazon warehouse. Disruption is for CEO’s and funders, not for people who protest pipelines or strike to limit labour exploitation. Disruption is something that is done to us. It is not something open to us to do.

Silicon Valley ideology is robbing states of tax and taking over the wrecked public services that result. (I write this from a country whose public tender for health data was bespoke tailored for Palantir. Soon my most private information will sit on Peter Thiel’s servers and there is nothing I can do to stop it. Meanwhile, I can’t get an appointment to see a GP.)

Silicon Valley ideology blames others for its harms. Its titans built the machines currently dismantling democracies. So, to absolve themselves of responsibility, they’ve come to see democracy itself as flawed and weak. Silicon Valley ideology quietly admits (its) freedom is not compatible with (our) democracy. So it wrecks it, destroying our information systems, gutting our infrastructure and essential services, and gathering digital lynch mobs to hound women and people of colour out of public life. Then, like the violent abuser who stands back, momentarily awed at what he has wrought, it says in a moment of startled vulnerability; ‘Look what you made me do.’ Its tools are beloved of autocrats and authoritarians, and as these tend to be the kind of men it most admires, Silicon Valley ideology has come to more publicly align itself with fascism. It claims the only fix for the violent disorder it foments is more surveillance, more control, at a significant mark-up.

Silicon Valley ideology worships ‘intelligence’, defined narrowly as mathematical and engineering capability, with all its IQ-related ties to racism, misogyny and eugenics. The worship of ‘intelligence’ drives ideologues’ obsession with billionaire fecundity and longevity, white natalism, space colonisation and the alleged existential threat of AI. The dark futures that set human mathematical intelligence against machine intelligence work not only to recast the grubby scrap for economic dominance as an epic battle against species extinction; they expand the horizon of Silicon Valley’s harm from the present, where its built-in biases increase inequality to cause harm and death every day, to the far future, when planetary super-brains might turn people into paper-clips. Their technology reflects this displacement. So, the most important harms are not harms, but risks, and the people best placed to address those are those building the machines that create them.

Silicon Valley ideology is split on this point, however. Its more radical cult, long-termism, centres the omnipotence phantasy of future AI risks, but rather than use these drummed up extinction scenarios to lock in control and economic dominance, the true believers speculate about which AI geniuses to assassinate, to avoid Armageddon. Other devotees fight theological battles similar to the number of angels who could fit on a pin-head, but about just how few survivors will be needed to re-seed humanity, after the nuclear war they believe necessary to forestall artificial generalised intelligence. It’s really something to see Silicon Valley’s more zealous children turn the trolley problem back on the founders.

Silicon Valley ideology says safeguarding intelligence in the future is more important than its systems systematically crushing and killing black and brown people right now. Long-termism grabs attention back from people being harmed, who were beginning to make too much noise. When confronted with his silence about AI and inequality researcher, Timnit Gebru, who was sacked when she criticised the built-in racism and misogyny of Google’s AI systems, British AI star Geoffrey Hinton told Rolling Stone that Gebru’s ideas “aren’t as existentially serious as the idea of these things getting more intelligent than us and taking over.” This tracks with the only critique of technology that Silicon Valley ideology permits – and amply funds via organisations like the Center for Humane Technology – the concern that algorithmic distraction hijacks smart people’s attention and time. Silicon Valley’s extractive systems are only a real problem when they come after what the tech bros most value, their own brain function and autonomy. Racism, for them, is not ‘existential’. Misogyny is a matter of indifference when your goal is to ‘extend the light of consciousness’ across the solar system.

It’s only when you look straight at Silicon Valley’s leaders you realise its core beliefs aren’t an ideology. They’re a personality disorder.

2. Personality disorder

Silicon Valley’s most famous funders and CEOs veer strongly into sociopathy, narcissism, and abiding Daddy issues. They are thin-skinned, vicious, gormless. Now middle-aged men, their emotional development ended when they made their first hundred million.

They talk about ‘community’ but cultivate slavish fandom and sic their fanboys and lawyers on anyone who disagrees, especially if they’re female, nonbinary, queer, black or brown.

Friendless because they’re incapable of acting as anyone’s true friend, they make a doctrine of misanthropy.

They fear laughter because they’re unfunny.

They fear contempt because they’re roiled by self-loathing.

They prize displays of masculinity because they are cowards.

Optimisation culture masks the abusive and bizarre relations with the human body, primarily their own. Dorsey’s eating issues. The penis electric shock guy. The one who transfuses the blood of his teenaged son. Musk’s compulsive reproduction with multiple women via scientised surrogate.

Partly, they just want to extend their own lives to match the two-century death-grip they plan for their companies. But the body-hacking and transcendence-drive express their horrified bafflement that mortality applies to them, too. Most of us have no choice but to come to terms with physical frailty and with what can be done to us because of the kind of body we’re in. Sick, disabled, fat, queer, black and brown people don’t get to opt out of their bodies, because society doesn’t let them forget for a moment. You might expect such people to wish most to be a brain in a jar or a ghost in a machine orbiting Mars, because of the micro and macro hurts they experience daily. But no, it’s those who won the lottery behind the Rawlsian veil – the wealthy and well, the white and male – who most fervently wish to discard their winning ticket. This tiny group of men self-isolate and self-optimise to excise the messiness of humanity from themselves, and now work diligently to exit from human concerns entirely. There is something fundamental about the human condition that they cannot, will not come to terms with. They require planetary levels of wealth to fuel their death drive to escape velocity.

These are terrible, terrible people. Damaged and cruel, vain and venal. I get why they came to power – by lying, cheating, bullying and stealing, same as any robber baron that ever existed. What’s curious and indefensible is how tightly packed in they are by concentric circles of mostly men who worship them; men who are powerful in their own right, but who accept a subordinate position in the implied pecking order of power. What’s going on with that?

3. Silence of the Sensibles
Individually, the Silicon Valley brats are nothing special. I’ve worked in tech for over two decades, and each arbitrarily made billionaire is as interchangeable an extrusion of post-war, northern Californian high-tech capitalism as was each identical food delivery app it produced. Brats will be brats, and capital is always gonna capital, but it’s the legions of merely moderately powerful enablers who maintain the tech billionaires’ status and ensure their untouchability.

The fawning regard of sovereign wealth fund managers, newspaper editors and senior journalists, industry-funded professors and think-tankers, tame NGO leaders, politicians and SPADs, and the whole masturbatory ourobouros of technology’s own influencer economy, insulates the tech billionaires from accountability. I’ll never get what these men see in Silicon Valley’s boy-kings. I don’t mean that rhetorically. There’s clearly an itch the tech oligarchs scratch for those who brush up against them, but looking at the exact same person, my brain clocks ‘predator’ at a thousand paces, and theirs seem to switch into a purring, excited mode that’s wholly unavailable to me.

(The silent and often determining role played by corporate PR should never be under-estimated. Let’s pause for a moment and think of how many individual PRs used to be journalists, before tech ate media, too.)

The sensibles identify with the aggressor, align themselves with money, flutter like fangirls in the face of power. They never say ‘far right’ or ‘fascist’. They pat themselves on the back for occasionally calling Silicon Valley’s titans ‘controversial’. They refuse even to acknowledge the intentional far right zone-flooding tech companies spray all over their prized values of civility and reason. Their craven servility seems to be based on a misapprehension that the fawning regard for the boy emperors of tech is reciprocal, that the sensibles represent, to those they serve, anything more than somewhat above averagely useful tools.

I read a paper copy of the Financial Times six days a week, and through all the business reporting of Twitter’s (“X”) travails this year, I’ve seen hardly anything about Musk’s insidious but growing antisemitism and overt white suprematism, the NDAs of assaulted women and his hounding of female public figures, the systemic racism in his factories, his illicit drug usage and emotional volatility, compulsive lying, personal amplification of Nazi content, and the conspiracy theories he now feels at total liberty to spread. (And no, FT, taking Musk’s tame biographer out to lunch isn’t journalism.) The silence of the sensibles lets business reporting live in a magical universe where politics doesn’t intrude, at least when the politics is on the right. There’s a consequence-free sweet spot where billionaire bootlicking and centrist civility co-exist. The merely influential are rarely the first to say the Emperor has no clothes (or is a Nazi in plain sight).

4. We are all very, very tired.
I, quite frankly, am tired. I find myself yet again in a conversation dominated by beneficiaries of a dirty system while the conscience, critique and force of collective action for alternatives are provided by women, and women of colour, predominantly.

Observer columnist John Naughton wrote two pieces a while back, pointing out that Silicon Valley’s most able critics are nearly all women or nonbinary. Of course, not all men, etc. etc. and, for damn sure, not all women either. But we – I speak as one of Naughton’s “formidable female tech critics” – have our own ideas and dreams, too. We didn’t grow up yearning to pen exquisite critiques of shitty ideologies. We’d like to build our own things, too, you know?
When one moderately powerful person steps up it emboldens others to act. It would signal to Musk’s shoulder-shrugging supporters inside US government – and especially the DoD – that you cannot run critical communications and defence infrastructure while being a far-right stooge sympathetic to foreign powers.

So, to the moderately powerful men who prop up and benefit from Silicon Valley’s ideology, and leave us the real work of fixing what it breaks, here is some of what we’ve learned and hope you might use:

Silicon Valley’s ideology and personality carry within them the seeds of its destruction. Its thin-skin means it can often be rattled and made to back down. (The trick is watching for the same bad act to be done again later, just more quietly.) Policymakers are rattled, too. And so, but only a little, are university VCs who still accept donations and suborn research. The social licence of Silicon Valley is now just a provisional permit, at risk of cancellation each time a new outrage is revealed or new legislation produced.

Silicon Valley’s totalising concentration makes its companies run increasingly afoul of competition authorities, who’ve belatedly come round to broader notions of economic harm and the possibilities for transatlantic cooperation.

Silicon Valley’s titans are so far removed from reality they can no longer distinguish between whims and crimes. The criminal lens is resisted by regulators, prosecutors and commentators alike, but it increasingly pulls systematic harms into focus.

The security lens is stricter again, as certain billionaires’ behaviour clearly flouts the requirements for security clearances they need for all those defence contracts. And their companies are far more brittle than they appear.

It’s not a lot, but it’s a start. Get to it.

• About the politicians sucking up to tech oligarchs, I just want it out there that I wrote this six weeks before Rishi Sunak’s toe-curling AI Summit “fireside chat” with Elon Musk, where Sunak looked like some rich guy’s kid on work experience, mortifying the few people left who saw the UK as a serious country.