J.D. Vance has tailored his political image to suit an all-American, blue-collar model. There’s just one problem. While the Yale-educated Vice Presidential candidate may be from Appalachia, his journey has also taken him under the patronage of the decidedly elite Peter Thiel, who helped launch Vance’s venture capital career. Thiel has been a longtime supporter of Donald Trump, and over the years, other Silicon Valley billionaires have come around to sharing the PayPal founder’s outlook. The GOP now counts David Sacks, Elon Musk, the Winklevoss brothers, and possibly even Mark Zuckerberg among their supporters. So why is Big Tech aligning behind the Trump ticket, and what does Vance’s inclusion have to do with it? In a special discussion with author and tech critic Paris Marx, we dive into the labyrinth of shady political dealings and patronage relationships undergirding the new covenant between Silicon Valley and the GOP.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back, my friends, to The Real News Network Podcast. My name is Mel Buer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m Maximillian Alvarez.
Marc Steiner:
And I’m Marc Steiner.
Mel Buer:
And we’ve gotten important and timely episode for you this week. Before we dive into it, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you, our listeners, for your continued support. Whether you’ve got our shows on while you’re making coffee in the morning, put our podcasts on during your commute to and from work, or give us a listen throughout the workday, The Real News Network is committed to bringing you ad-free independent journalism that you can count on.
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Maximillian Alvarez:
Silicon Valley and its league of extraordinary big tech billionaires have long maintained a self-fashioned image as the more liberal, even progressive side of the capitalist class, the purveyors of a cooler, more conscientious capitalism than your typical oil exec or Wall Street investment firm.
But today, with just three months until the 2024 general elections here in the United States, you’ll find some of the loudest voices and largest sums of money supporting Donald Trump and the neo-fascist politics of the far right coming from Silicon Valley itself.
Mel Buer:
As Paris Marx, prominent tech writer, host of the award-winning podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, and our esteemed guest today, recently wrote for their newsletter, Disconnect, For the better part of a year, prominent tech figures cycled through potential presidential contenders they hoped would defeat Joe Biden, finally reaching the inevitable embrace of Donald Trump. Elon Musk met with him back in March.
David Sacks recently held a major fundraiser for him in San Francisco, and far more have been quietly backing and donating to his campaign. But that support became much more public after the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on July 13th. Despite previously saying he wouldn’t be donating to any candidate this cycle, Musk publicly endorsed Trump after the shooting and has pledged $45 million a month to a pro-Trump Super PAC.
Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have informed their staff they’ll be making donations to help elect the Republican candidate. Among Trump’s other supporters are Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, and the Winklevoss twins. They all have deep pockets that will help fuel a Trump candidacy, which already has momentum heading into the fall.
Marc Steiner:
As someone who’s been covering the rise of the right for some time now, the rise of these new big tech oligarchs and the roles they’re playing in fueling far-right politics today is particularly ominous. Figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, the gargantuan sums of money they and their networks possess and all the tech platforms they control have the weight and power to back the right wing in their push to win electorally.
It reminds me, in some respects, of the German election of 1933 or the end of our Reconstruction Period in the 1870s. There’s a real threat to the future of democracy at the hands of these 21st century digital robber barons, and they must be stopped.
Mel Buer:
With us today to discuss the troubling rise of Silicon Valley funded PACs and Trump’s Thiel backed VP Pick is tech critic Paris Marx, host of the Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast and author of Road to Nowhere:What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Paris.
Paris Marx:
Absolutely. Always excited to join you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, we are beyond excited to have you because we got a lot of shit to discuss and you are the perfect person to help us break it all down. And I’m just going to jump right into the big meaty question here that’s on everyone’s minds, which is like what role is big tech and these big tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, what role are they playing in electoral politics right now?
Because it’s clearly not just campaign donations and your typical lobbying support for their industry. What are people seeing and what are they not seeing when it comes to the long arm of Silicon Valley and the influence that it’s having on our electoral politics in general and this election specifically?
Paris Marx:
Yeah, it’s huge, right? And I think if people are thinking about Peter Thiel, they might be thinking back to the 2016 election and how he was a very vocal and public figure supporting Donald Trump. He spoke at the Republican National Convention. He was very clearly putting money behind Donald Trump and a number of other Republican candidates. This cycle, he has been more in the background, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that his money is still at work.
That even though he said he’s not actively supporting Donald Trump, it seems quite clear that he is, especially now that J.D. Vance has been chosen as his running mate. J.D. Vance is, of course, someone who is very much within Thiel’s network, has received a lot of money from Thiel over the years, and owes a lot of his career to Peter Thiel as well. So if we look at this cycle, what is happening now, sure, we don’t see Thiel as publicly and vocally supporting Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but we see a lot of other tech figures picking up that mantle.
So David Sacks, who has a long relationship with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk going back to PayPal, has been trying to take up that more public role that Peter Thiel held in 2016, holding fundraisers, speaking at the Republican National Convention, trying to encourage other folks in the valley to get behind Donald Trump and to get behind the Republican Party. Elon Musk obviously has become very vocally supportive of Donald Trump. Said so after the assassination attempt that he was going to back Donald Trump.
There were reports that he was giving up to $45 million a month to a Super PAC in support of Trump. He is called that into question. We don’t know how much he’s actually giving, but we do know that he has started a PAC called America PAC that has received a lot of donations from a lot of other people in Silicon Valley that is claiming to register people to vote, but actually using that sort of a tool in order to get people’s voting information in swing states.
And there are Secretaries of State in Michigan and I believe North Carolina looking into that at the moment. But then, of course, the other aspect of this is social media. Elon Musk owns Twitter or X and has made a lot of changes to that platform to elevate right-wing voices by unbanning really far-right figures, by changing the way that the algorithm works so that you see more right-wing content in your feed.
And even over on Facebook, which I feel like we don’t talk about as much anymore, but Mark Zuckerberg has been taking the limits off of say Donald Trump’s accounts. Mark Zuckerberg has not officially endorsed anybody, but Donald Trump has said that Zuckerberg called him, said that he was basically backing him even though not publicly endorsing him and called Donald Trump a badass after the assassination attempt.
So there are many different ways that the tech industry is really getting behind the Republican Party and Donald Trump as they hope to basically use his presidency to serve their own interests.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just to follow up on that, just one more layer, Paris, how much of this is behind the scenes and how much of it is up front? I mean, because we’ve got Musk’s public persona, but then we’ve got these Super PACs, and we’ve also got these right-wing networks through which someone like J.D. Vance could be absorbed and groomed and supported his political career launched by these networks that may not seem as obvious and in fact may feel a lot more opaque to your average voter than most things.
Paris Marx:
Yeah, absolutely. And it happens on both fronts. And I think after the assassination attempt in particular, we saw a lot of that public support. A lot of these people in Silicon Valley, a lot of these investors, billionaires, CEOs saying, “We back Donald Trump. We’re backing the Republican Party. We want them to win.” But we know that there has been a much longer campaign happening more in the shadows, more behind the scenes, especially when you think of how someone like Peter Thiel and his network operates.
Peter Thiel was not often… 2016 was the exception. He’s not often the person who is out front, who you’re seeing doing all these interviews, who you’re seeing tweeting a lot or something like that. He is someone who operates in the background. He is someone who moves money around and who gets his network to do the same thing in order to serve these broader goals that people like him have. And as you’re saying, that’s exactly what you see with J.D. Vance.
Vance is someone who first ran into Peter Thiel in 2011 when Thiel was speaking at Yale Law School and felt really inspired by what he was saying. In 2016, when he published Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling book, was when he really officially entered Thiel’s network, working at Mithril Capital first and then founding his own venture capital firm later called Narya Capital, which was funded by $100 million from Thiel and his network to get it started.
And then, of course, when Vance ran for Senate, he received $15 million from Peter Thiel, which was most of the funding he needed for his campaign. So you can see very clearly how there is this linkage there. And there are reports that apparently when Donald Trump was at a fundraiser in San Francisco before he had chosen his vice presidential candidate, it was co-hosted by David Sacks, he was sitting down with a bunch of these tech figures, very rich people, and basically saying, “Who should I choose as my vice presidential candidate?”
And they were all saying J.D. Vance because they wanted him in that position because he is very much a product of their network. And they know that if he is in the White House, if he is the vice president, they will have a lot of influence over the policy direction that the Trump administration or a second theoretical Trump administration will take.
Marc Steiner:
So take off from what you just said and what I said in the intro here that Peter Thiel is infatuated with Hitler. He’s infatuated with 1930s Germany, and he’s talked about it a number of times, written about it, covered Newsweek. And so when you think of that part of Silicon Valley and the politics that they support and what they’re pushing, I’m curious what you think the danger we’re facing, what the possibilities are if they actually win and Thiel and the very far-right Silicon Valley money investors have their way politically?
I mean, it seems that it’s a situation most people don’t know about and I think it almost takes us to an edge of a cliff, politically speaking. So what’s their end game?
Paris Marx:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And Thiel is someone who’s from Germany, and obviously not all German people are bad people.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, I didn’t go there.
Paris Marx:
I think you could very reasonably ask what his grandparents were doing back in the 1930s and 1940s. We won’t say anything particular because we can’t confirm, but those are questions we can have. But going back to Peter Thiel, he has been very open and very clear for a very long time, going back to his time in Stanford University, that he has very right wing politics influenced by certainly right wing Christian ideas, but also anti-democracy ideas as well.
He’s opposed to democracy. He said that very clearly. He thinks it’s a bad form of government. He also is just generally opposed to minority rights. Even though he’s a gay man, he’s spoken out against gay rights. He’s spoken out against women’s rights and the rights of other minorities in society.
We also saw back in 2016 when Donald Trump was first in the White House that Peter Thiel was pushing for him to make appointments that would have severely reduced say medical regulations and the way that the FDA regulates medicines within the country, pharmaceuticals, so that more tech companies could get involved by just throwing stuff out there and getting people to use them.
So there are many aspects of society where he would like to see a lot of deregulation, meaning the reduction of regulations and laws that actually protect the environment, protect consumers and things like that. And so if we’re looking at what a potential Trump administration would look like with the influence of these people from Silicon Valley, they have been quite clear about it.
Peter Thiel does want to see a more authoritarian state, the reduction of democratic rights, which is something that we see Donald Trump saying very clearly that he is supportive of in his recent rallies. So that’s not a big surprise. But even if you look at the things that other billionaires in Silicon Valley have been saying, people like Elon Musk, but also people like the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, they’ve been very clear that they want to see deregulation.
They want to see the government putting more money into defense technologies and making sure that those contracts are going to companies in the tech industry, not the traditional defense contractors. They also want to make sure that this push to do antitrust enforcement to stop mergers and acquisitions be ended. They don’t want to see taxes go up on people like them.
And ultimately, they want to position themselves as being key to the continuation of American power and American hegemony into the 21st century by saying that the way that we defend American power is not just with a strong economy and a strong military, but also the technological superiority that the United States is used to having. And that means being very close to Silicon Valley, giving a lot of money to Silicon Valley, listening to its policy priorities, and ultimately giving it a much more powerful role in the actions that the state takes.
Marc Steiner:
It’s a very dire picture given the power they have and the power they will have in the coming four years, eight years, whatever that is. I think until I read all that you wrote, I think most people are not aware of what’s looking under there in this country, which is people are not aware of these things in a larger scale and they need to be aware of what we potentially face.
Paris Marx:
Oh, absolutely. The tech industry is really good and has been really good for a long time at using its marketing arm to make people have a certain picture of what the tech industry is rather than paying attention to what it’s actually doing and what these billionaires are promoting and what their personal politics are.
Certainly we have seen that transformation or realization over the past few with someone like Elon Musk where he was treated as a liberal darling for a long time, as someone who was supposed to be fixing climate change and doing all these great things in the world. And now people are like, oh, he had this transition to the right wing. He’s promoting all these far-right groups.
He’s frequently meeting with far-right heads of states and politicians from around the world, is frequently tweeting in support of these causes in many countries, not just in the United States and the UK or places like that. And people act like that is a shift. It’s something that is completely new, and certainly aspects of that are. He wasn’t so outspoken about these things.
But it doesn’t take long to go back into this history and what he’s been saying to see that these ideas have been around for a very long time, especially someone like Peter Thiel, going back to his college days, his days at Stanford University where he was saying very similar things to what he’s saying today. A lot of these tech figures promoted themselves as libertarians for a long time.
That they were okay with the rights of minorities, that they were okay with certain rights in societies being improved as long as there was deregulation, as long as they were allowed to do what they wanted, as long as taxes were low. But now that they have reached the pinnacle of society where they are some of the richest and most powerful people, not just in the United States, but the world, their demands are growing.
And as the regulations being applied to them and as the scrutiny being applied to them has increased because of the power and wealth that they hold, they’ve been very clear that they’re not okay with that, that they do not want to be held accountable, that they do not want to be taxed, that they do not want to be regulated, and that they will interfere in the political system to ensure that that’s the case.
Mel Buer:
You’ve touched on this a little bit I think just as a point of clarification. So you would say that this right-wing, anti-democratic philosophy is pretty standard for most of the folks that you would find in Silicon Valley. Is that a fair assessment?
Paris Marx:
I think generally yes. And I think some people would probably maybe question that a bit more than I would feel. But I think that when you look across Silicon Valley, what you see is even the people who would be more supportive of say the Democratic Party or more liberal politicians is that a lot of these people still do not want to be taxed. They still want to see a lot of benefits going to the tech industry.
They don’t want to see a lot of these antitrust investigations and ends to mergers and acquisitions. And they certainly want to be able to use their power and wealth to increase their influence on society. Even if you think of some of the big philanthropists like Bill Gates or Melinda French Gates or people like that, these are ultimately still people that have vast hoards of money, that campaign to ensure that they don’t have to pay effective taxes on that money.
That they can use that money to have vast influence on policy, not just in the United States, but around the world, and they do not want to see those levers of power choked off. So even the people who would say we’re supportive of minority rights, of gay rights and things like that, they still want the economic power and they don’t want the democratic rights of the broader public to restrict that.
Mel Buer:
So I know that we’ve touched on J.D. Vance as being the Silicon Valley darling in the GOP side of the current election. Are we seeing some of the same pressures on the left with Kamala Harris’ campaign as well?
Paris Marx:
So there are pressures. They just take a bit of a different form. I don’t think we’re going to see a tech industry chosen VP candidate becoming the person who supports Kamala Harris, but there are different forces at work there. And so we already see that as Kamala Harris has taken over the nomination from Joe Biden, that she has pushed out some of Joe Biden’s campaign officials and added her own. Among those are Tony West, who is her brother-in-law, but also Uber’s chief legal officer.
And David Plouffe or Plouffe, I’m not sure the right pronunciation of his surname, but he worked with Barack Obama, was very key to his campaign and early time in his presidency, but also joined Uber as head of strategy or something like that and was also on their board and did a lot of work campaigning for Uber with government officials because of the relationships that he had from being in the Obama administration to help Uber move forward its goals of ensuring that it did not have to treat its workers as employees, that it could continue to break the rules in a lot of countries around the world.
And so he was actually found to have done illegal lobbying in Chicago with the Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He was known to have built a relationship between Uber and the Obama administration so that the Obama administration would rely on Uber and give it preferential contracts and things like that, and also help to speak to American diplomats in certain European countries as European governments were trying to crack down on Uber to say, “Can you go talk to your counterparts in these European governments,” saying to these American diplomats to help this American company Uber.
So he was really using those relationships in that way. So now these are two of the key figures in Kamala Harris’ campaign. And so that obviously brings a lot of concerns about the influences that’s going to have on the types of policies that she might pursue. But then the other piece of this is on the donor side. Donald Trump has a ton of donors coming from the tech industry, but so does Kamala Harris. She’s a politician who is from California. She’s used to going to these people for money.
People like the former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda French Gates, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, as well as the former Netflix executive Reed Hastings are all supporting her, as well as many others. Reid Hoffman, in particular, the LinkedIn guy who’s currently on Microsoft’s board, as well as the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla are explicitly demanding that if she becomes president, that she remove Lina Khan in exchange for their support and the support from a lot of these Silicon Valley figures.
Lina Khan is, of course, the head of the Federal Trade Commission who has been moving forward a lot of these antitrust cases and a lot of pro-consumer measures in her tenure there. And that is obviously something that I think a lot of left and progressive forces would not want to see happen, because even though she hasn’t moved everything through and even though antitrust is not like a silver bullet to solving the problems that exist in the United States, what she has been doing has still been very important.
And so to see the influences of these tech billionaires over the potential Harris campaign and a potential future Harris administration is certainly a concern, because of course, her campaign has been asked about her stance on Lina Khan and they have not really defended her other than to say that they haven’t looked at replacing her at the moment. So I think we’d want to see a bit more of a defense of Lina Khan and what she has been doing over the past few years to ensure that that tech money is not influencing the policy direction that Kamala Harris would be pursuing.
Marc Steiner:
The wealth want to protect their wealth.
Mel Buer:
Well, just as a small point of clarification, just a reminder to listeners, we are talking about a tremendous amount of money coming out Silicon Valley in these various pressure campaigns and direct support campaigns through PACS. We’re talking, what, millions, billions of dollars perhaps in pushing the needle or attempting to move the needle in either direction on both sides of this election.
Paris Marx:
Absolutely. And Reed Hastings, who’s formerly at Netflix, was one of those people who was withholding millions of dollars until Joe Biden was removed from the ticket. Then there were questions after that as to whether he would actually support Kamala Harris or become one of these donors who was saying, “We don’t want Harris as well. We’ll withhold our donations until there’s someone who we prefer even more.” Ultimately, he did. I think it was $7 million that he provided to a PAC.
I guess it was in support of the Democrats and Harris after Joe Biden announced that he was going to step off the ticket and that people coalesced around Kamala Harris. And so these people, as you’re saying, have a lot of money in order to influence what is going to happen. And certainly I think that there has been a lot of focus on the relationship that the tech industry has to the Trump campaign because of J.D. Vance, because of the very public support of someone like Elon Musk.
But I think it’s important not to lose focus on the fact that, okay, while yes, it would be better to have the Democrats in office, there still needs to be a fight there to ensure that the Democrats are going to do good things and not just give in to all this corporate pressure that is going to come from the many millions of dollars that are going to come from many industries. And because of all the wealth that exists in the tech industry, they are going to be one of the major players here as well.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So as we’ve been teasing out over the course of this conversation and as you have shown on your amazing show that everyone should listen to, Tech Won’t Save Us, it’s not so much that this is a extreme rightward shift in Silicon Valley, and it’s more revealing of who Silicon Valley and what Silicon Valley always was. That being said, in terms of the right-wing politics that were maybe more latent that have become much more explicit and had been articulated more vocally by big tech figures like Elon Musk, the “war on wokeness” has played an outsized role here.
And the culture war attacks on what is called wokeness, which could be anything from the outfit that your postal worker wears, to what you can buy at a Target, to having pronouns on your social media profile, wokeness, much like political correctness before that, has become a catch-all term for the right to articulate everything and everyone that they have a cultural grievance against. But it has enabled big tech figures to really capitalize on this extreme right wing shift that’s happening in the nation writ large.
I wanted to ask if you could just say a little bit about what the “war on wokeness,” what role that has played in everything that we’re talking about here. What license does that politics give Silicon Valley to push its own self-interested capitalist a big money politics while also creating a much darker political scene in the country thing?
Paris Marx:
Sure thing, and I think it’s an important question to ask. And I think part of this exists on a personal level, but part of it is much bigger than that. You can see people like Elon Musk or Bill Ackman, of course, who have embraced some of this stuff. In part it seems because of not supporting what their own children are doing. Elon Musk, of course, has been very vocally transphobic toward his own transgender daughter.
That has seemed to help inspire part of his more open embrace of these really extreme right politics that we’ve seen him embrace in the past couple of years. He, of course, said that she was brainwashed in school by communists and neo-Marxists and all this kind of stuff. Bill Ackman has said something similar about his own kids going to universities and being brainwashed by Marxists and things like that. So you can see this piece of it.
But I think if you zoom out even further, you can see how this broader supposed war on woke, which is really like a war on minority rights and basically anything that they think threatens their own political project or their own power or influence or what have you, is very beneficial to people like billionaires in Silicon Valley just as it’s beneficial to billionaires anywhere.
Because it helps to say the problems in society are caused not by the power and the influence that is wielded by billionaires, by people who have hundreds of millions of dollars like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or pick your massive billionaire there, but rather the problems in society are caused by the refugees that are coming in who have no power in society and are escaping from the worst conditions that you could possibly imagine, or because transgender people are gaining a few more rights now that they didn’t have in the past, or gay people can finally get married.
It’s like these are apparently the reasons why society is falling apart, not because of four decades of neoliberalism and the massive power of wealth that has been accumulated by these incredibly rich and powerful people who are fighting tooth and nail to ensure that they don’t need to pay much tax on that wealth, that they will not be held to account for the harm that they cause toward their workers, toward the environment, toward the broader society.
And so it’s very much in their interest to say, look, it’s all this woke-ism that’s causing all these problems, not us and everything that we are doing to have this power and wealth and to protect it at all costs. And you can very clearly see that playing out day to day. Elon Musk is frequently pointing to refugees and to migrants as threats to American society, but also European society.
We see that playing out right now very clearly in the UK with the far-right mob riots that are happening based on, again, lies around a stabbing, saying that it was done by a Muslim when it was not. So you can very clearly see how this is whipping up these broader tensions in society and how that helps to distract and even empower these increasingly far-right forces that the tech industry and these massive tech billionaires are very much aligned with.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now, you’ve touched on this a bit already, but I want to flesh it out even more. Because this is something that connects even to the reporting that Marc, Mel, and I do in other parts of The Real News Network. Marc, you were recently down in Austin, Texas, in San Antonio where Tesla is moving because of this “Texas miracle” that we were hearing about.
And what we saw there through your investigation is that the right, led by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is following the playbook that we’re discussing here, using anti-woke right wing politics to push through what is ultimately big business-serving policies and stripping away people’s ability to regulate companies, to self-govern, to concentrate power in the hands of a few in the statehouse, to unburden companies like Tesla and so many others of pesky things like workers’ rights and environmental regulations, yada, yada, yada.
And of course, there are examples all over the place. In California, my native California, there was the giant Prop 22 campaign a few years ago where these supposed big tech competitors were pooling their money to launch the largest misinformation campaign in state history to pass a ballot measure that forever enshrined a third category of worker who could legally make less than minimum wage. So that is just one of many tangible examples to pick up on what Paris was saying of how the big business policies are ultimately at the bottom of this.
But there’s a larger philosophy here in which big tech is creating the society it needs to supplement its own business model. And so I wanted to pick up on that, Paris, and ask, what does Silicon Valley’s philosophy on technology and capitalism actually tell us about Silicon Valley’s philosophy on democracy and American society? And in the reverse way, what does that philosophy regarding the future of society tell us about the future of tech that they want to create?
Paris Marx:
It’s a really important point. They’re very clear about it and increasingly clear in that they see technology as being very separate from politics, in the sense that when we have all these problems in society, we’re facing down a climate crisis, we see that we have a housing crisis, there is an affordability crisis, all of these other problems that we’re dealing with, if you ask someone in the tech industry how you address that, they will explicitly not say, “Okay, the government needs to do something about this. They need to change some policies. They need to build public housing. They need to do certain things so that we reduce emissions.”
No. They will say, “Okay, we need to develop new technologies that will address this problem developed by some private tech company in Silicon Valley. That maybe we’ll get some public funding because that’s always great.” But ultimately, the power and the solution is a technological one, not a political one. And so it carves these problems out and reframes them not as political problems, but as technological problems.
The reason why we’re not hitting our emissions goals is not because our governments have been captured by fossil fuel companies and other commercial interests and are making sure that they serve them above the broader public, regardless of the climate consequences of that, but rather because we haven’t developed the right technologies fast enough.
And so if we only let Bill Gates and these companies decide our future, then we’ll just put it all in the tech industry and let them decide what this future is going to be, how we’re going to solve these problems. And of course, the technologies will be developed if we’re going to give them free rein to do it in order to solve this problem, when that is very clearly not the case and not clear. And a lot of these technologies tend to make big promises and then not actually deliver on the benefits or the emissions reductions or what have you.
So there’s that piece of it where any problem that we face needs to have a technological and not a political solution so that the power and the ability to solve those problems is one that is held in Silicon Valley and is not in the hands of politicians or a democratic public. And so then that links to a broader issue there where you think of, okay, well, what does politics look like in a society like this? And you can very clearly see that it’s a very technocratic one.
The decisions around how society develops, around the decisions that we make around what technologies get rolled out, around how we address problems are decisions not that are made by a democratic public deciding what society we should live in and how we should collectively deal with these problems, but are rather decisions that are made by venture capitalists, by CEOs, by these very powerful people in Silicon Valley because this is the way that you address the problem.
And that very much links to say the ideas that Peter Thiel has around being opposed to democracy thinking that it is something that holds us back. He has explicitly talked about how giving women the vote was a mistake and that that should not have happened. And so these are the ideas that these tech industry folks are dealing with and are pushing out into the world. And certainly not all of them will explicitly feel that way, but they will still feel that tech is the way that you solve these problems.
They will still feel that the tech industry itself is something that we need to put our faith in order to deal with these things or else society will fall apart or whatever. But I think that that is the clear dividing line there. You have these powerful people in Silicon Valley who don’t want to be held to account, who don’t want to be taxed, who don’t want to be regulated, and who want to decide what the future is going to be, and to set that path in such a way that benefits them over everybody else at whatever cost.
And then of course, that leads us with a situation where democracy is imperiled, where democratic rights are being increasingly attacked, and where the power that the state has to actually do anything is being continually degraded as it has been for four decades to ensure that the government can never effectively hold these people to account.
And as you’re talking about in Texas is effectively captured by the tech industry anyway, so they’re going to do what they want. So it’s a very dangerous and scary future that is in store for us if the power and wealth of these tech billionaires is not reined in.
Marc Steiner:
So as we conclude, let me just throw this out, picking up what you just said, and earlier you talked about the head of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan, and it’s interesting you raised her issue because as I was preparing to think about this program today, I was looking at some stuff about Lina Khan and the tech industry, and both Vice President Harris and Kahn spoke with the AFT.
And Kahn said, which is applicable here, “Americans didn’t overthrow a monarch to be ruled by technology tyrants.” And then one of those technology tyrants, Reid Hoffman, gave $7 million to the Democrats and said, “The first thing you have to do is to fire her,” to fire Khan. This release sets up to me the real dilemma of the election just symbolically and also in realistic ways.
A woman who’s trying to hold big techs’ feet to the fire through regulation is now being confronted by them, giving money to the Democrats as well saying, “We want you to get rid of her.” That really shows the danger of this kind of money in politics and the power that they wield. So I’m curious your analysis of all that.
Paris Marx:
Oh, absolutely. I’m sure it will not be any surprise to hear looking from abroad based in Canada, the way that money is deployed in the American political system is always a bit shocking. And the way that it’s talked about is not outright corruption all the time. So yeah, that’s always something interesting to observe. But I think you’re entirely right.
You can very clearly see, especially as the tech industry has gained this wealth and this power over the past decade in particular, that it is now deploying that very clearly to shape political outcomes, to shape the political system. And this is not to say that the political system in the United States has not long been friendly to Silicon Valley and to the tech industry.
Silicon Valley exists because of government funding back in the Second World War and through the Cold War. And of course, even in the internet era, the Clinton administration was very friendly to Silicon Valley. The Obama administration was very friendly to Silicon Valley. Even the George Bush, his administration was very friendly to Silicon Valley. What they wanted, they would provide.
Deregulation, funding, whatever it was. Clinton privatized the internet to allow this commercial boom to really take off. So they have long had these relationships to government, these very favorable, very positive relationships to government that have benefited the tech industry a lot, that have allowed these people to accumulate all of these billions of dollars.
But for a long time, they frame themselves as Libertarian, as being separate from government, as being a bit unsure about what the government would do and wanting to rein in its power. But really they were working with government the whole time. At certain moments that was more explicit. In other moments, it was a bit more behind the scenes.
And I think that what we’re seeing right now is this much more explicit embrace of government in order to ensure that government serves the priorities of the tech industry. And I think you can see that in many ways by trying to influence, of course, the policies of various government officials, by trying to get rid of Lina Khan through donations on the Republican side, but also on the democratic side to try to shape the way that these politicians think about this.
But I think even bigger, like when we kind of zoom out from that, we can see very clearly now that the United States political system has this bipartisan effort to defend its geopolitical power against China in particular. And the tech industry is right at the center of that and has made sure that this geopolitical fight is framed as a fight over technology and technological supremacy.
And that means that regulations need to restrict what the Chinese tech industry and other foreign tech industries can do in order to defend and protect the power and at least the regional, if not global market share of American tech companies. And so I don’t think that that can be lost either.
The way that the tech industry has become very central to one of the defining things that the American government is doing right now and how that has led billions of dollars to flow into Silicon Valley, whether it’s through the CHIPS Act or through a much greater focus on defense tech and modernizing or trying to use AI and stuff like this in the military.
And so the Biden administration has basically just continued and accelerated the policies of the Trump administration in that area. And I think that doesn’t get enough focus as well, because that is another way that the tech industry is exerting a lot of its power and ensuring that by making itself key to American geopolitical power, it makes it much harder to try to rein in its domestic power, let alone its global power as well.
Marc Steiner:
This is this century’s battle against the robber barons and breaking up monopolies, but tech is that reflection at the moment.
Paris Marx:
Totally. Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just to hop in here to round us out, I’m going to put my Marc Steiner hat on for a second and ask a question that Marc asks all of his interviewees, how do you fight this? And that’s a question for Marc and for Paris.
Paris Marx:
Yeah, I think it’s always a difficult question because you’re looking at the power and the wealth that these people have accumulated, and it’s massive. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying to fight it and we shouldn’t be thinking about the avenues to do that. I think organizing against these companies is essential, whether that is the union organizing that we’ve been seeing growing in the past number of years.
We’ve been seeing a lot of unionization in the video games industry in particular in recent months and over the past year. We’ve also been seeing organizing at a lot of major tech companies over the past number of years now fighting their collaboration and cooperation with defense department, with say the border services with a number of other aspects of not just the American state, but also say the Israeli military and militaries in other countries.
And I think we’ve been seeing that grow even as the power and the influence of these companies has grown as well. And I think that we also see that these companies are not immune to backlash, to criticism, to the very organizing that these workers are doing, because certainly the tech industry a few years ago tried to force cryptocurrencies onto us and remake the financial system around that. And that very clearly didn’t happen.
They’re currently trying to make AI the next big thing, and I think that we’re going to see that bubble collapse as well. And so I think that is also where part of their frustrations are rooted in that they are trying to transform the world and to remake the world in the way that they want to see it, but they keep being pushed back at these different junctures and these different avenues.
Certainly they have a lot of power and wealth, but they’re in some cases finding it hard to deploy that power on wealth and remake the world with that power and wealth in the way that they would want to see. And so the more and more that that kind of pushback grows, the better it is that we can combat these major powerful figures. But I don’t think any of us should ignore the fact that it’s obviously going to be a big fight. It’s going to be a difficult fight.
And I think wielding the power of the state where we can is going to be very important to that. And that’s why the fight over the state is also a very important piece of this as well, because we’ve already seen what say someone like Lina Khan in a very key position can do, even if other aspects of the government or state governments are even working against those things. So yeah, there’s a lot of fighting to do. But yeah, I think that there are avenues that we can take to try to reduce their power.
Mel Buer:
Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about this, Paris. Before we let you go, we’d love to clue in our listeners into how they can contact you, maybe check out your book or your podcast. What are some places where folks can see what work you’re working on?
Paris Marx:
Sure thing. I’m on most of the text-based social media, @ParisMarx. You can find me on Twitter/X, Mastodon, Bluesky. I’m sure there’s probably a couple more I’m forgetting. I also host a podcast called Tech Won’t Save Us. I have a newsletter called Disconnect as well, which is at disconnect.blog, and I wrote a book called Road to Nowhere:What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation.
Mel Buer:
Thanks so much for coming in. Hopefully you can come back on the show again soon.
Paris Marx:
Absolutely. Great to speak to you.
Mel Buer:
That’s it for us here at The Real News Network Podcast. Thank you to our wonderful guest, Paris, for coming on the show to talk about this important topic. Once again, I’m your host, Mel Buer. And on behalf of us here at TRNN, we are so grateful for your support and listenership.
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