Tech oligarchs are gambling our future on a fantasy | Adam Becker

Musk and Bezos are the heirs to a quasi-religious belief in tech salvation. The rest of us are stuck in the real worldIt’s tempting to believe that tech billionaires’ embrace of Donald Trump and the far right is a sudden rupture with the usual political ideology of Silicon Valley. Op-eds in the New York Times and elsewhere have made this case. Even Marc Andreessen, one of the billionaires in question, claims that this is what happened – he said that it was a change in the Democratic arty that pushed him and his fellow oligarchs into the arms of the GOP.Yet this is a serious misunderstanding of the situation. There wasn’t a sudden shift in the politics of tech – it was a homecoming. While it’s true that Silicon Valley has long supported Democratic candidates for political office – and that rank-and-file tech workers still vote overwhelmingly for Democrats – the fundamental ideology underpinning the culture of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists and CEOs has always had a far-right libertarian core. This is even true for Andreessen: while he likely believed what he said while he was saying it, his own words and actions make it clear that he wasn’t giving an accurate assessment of his own motivations, much less anyone else’s. His venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has long opposed government regulation of any sort that touches on their investments; Andreessen himself posted a “techno-optimist manifesto” that, despite its claim to be politically neutral, promotes an authoritarian vision of unfettered power for tech oligarchs. He even lovingly paraphrases Filippo Marinetti, the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto. Continue reading...

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