The Silicon Reich (Part Two)

Six weeks since Trump's inauguration, there is less and less question as to whether or not Trump and Musk are pursuing a coup. The forces of normalization are failing in the face of the destructive and unstrategic behavior of King Leer and his Nazi speed-freak CEO. Nevertheless, the narrative around Silicon Valley's involvement in the regime continues to focus on the particularly far right figures like Musk, Andreesen or Thiel, while narrativizing the complicity of folks like Zuckerberg, Pichai or Cook as "kissing the ring" or "giving in to Trump".

Contra such explanations, this two part essay (part one here) is an attempt to show all the different ways that Silicon Valley has already been central in the construction of a fascist USA and a fascist world, through their extreme influence on consumer, affective, informational and labor practices and norms. The tech ethos has even shaped the very way we see and recognize ourselves, and undoing this deep control will require significant social, material and economic transformation.

As I wrote in the first part, I hope this serves as an overview of many of the different ways that Big Tech has produced the world they are now helping Trump turn into a thousand year reich.

Housing Crisis, Rent and Gentrification

• The role of Airbnb (and other short-term rental competitors like VRBO, Homeaway, Realtors.com, etc. etc) in gentrification has been extremely widely discussed and understood, such that scholarly articles can be found about Airbnb's effect on rent prices in almost every large city in the US, and many more around the world. With short-term rentals, everyone with a lease or a mortgage becomes a property speculator, able to transform living space into extractable value. While developers in particularly valuable urban cores like Manhattan or LA build massive condo complexes designed to sell spaces to international speculators or real-estate investment firms, never to actually be lived in, the ability of middle class tenants and landlords to turn their own living spaces into by-the-night pseudo-hotels - and the aggressively marketed profits they're told they could make from the process - drives prices inexorably up. This also leads people to see their homes increasingly as "investments", to think of their living spaces as fundamentally a marketable asset: if a major international event of conference comes to a city, even the poorest renters can get in on the action. (It's also worth remembering that this directly replaced the utopian "couchsurfing" of the 90s and early 2000s, where the connective power of the internet allowed (poor) people to travel affordably, and meet strangers around the globe, in a kind of tech-mediated housing/travel mutual aid.)
• A few years ago it was reported that landlords are using algorithmic rent-setting apps to drive up rental prices. Landlords used to have to set the cost of their rentals against the tax bill, utilities, maintenance costs, and they still managed to turn a TIDY profit. But they also priced with an eye toward keeping as few vacancies as possible, which put a slight damper on prices, for fear of "losing money" sitting on empty apartments. The extreme locality and specificity of pricing (based on a block by block evaluation of neighborhood, location location location, and extremely specific questions of apartment quality and amenities, etc. etc.) meant they operated with incomplete information beyond past performance and immediate negotiation with tenants. But the introduction of algorithmic rent apps (alongside advice and assistance through apps like Zillow) provide landlords with a mathematical and technological assurance that the market can in fact bear a higher rent, quality of the apartment be damned. And of course, as more and more landlords use the apps, more and more of them drive the rent up accordingly, creating a vicious cycle of increasing rents totally disconnected from what tenants are actually able to afford.
• Tech-driven gentrification has rendered much of Northern California, Austin, Boston, Manhattan and Seattle almost unrecognizable (and utterly unaffordable) for long-term residents. The hollowing out of these once flourishing cultural hubs (and Boston) is part of larger trends reversing decades of white flight to the suburbs with a re-whitening of the urban center, as people of color are increasingly pushed out further and further into the suburban peripheries. Still, tech (and their concomitant research arms in universities) have been particularly aggressive and direct in this process, using cities as both their test markets for their apps and products, (which, as we saw in Part One, aggressively drive down wages) and as socially-provided extensions of the "amenities" provided on their tech campuses. A great example of this kind of gentro-manipulation was the Google Bus, a private transport that would go into the gentrifying neighborhoods of San Francisco to whisk their workers away to a quiet leafy campus, incorporated conveniently outside the city limits. Rather than use their immense wealth to support local infrastructure, they built their own private infrastructures, using the promise and "pull" of high tech workers and "jobs" to manipulate and corrupt local city governments, avoiding taxes and regulation so their presence in the city doesn't actually help improve city services.
• San Francisco is one of the most expensive and gentrified cities in the US, as well as having an incredibly low crime rate, and yet it has been the go-to example for the right for the "crisis" of homelessness and crime in the US. The tech gurus, masters of the universe, have rendered the city unliveable for all but the wealthiest, and now, as they wait for their Google Bus or take an e-scooter to their local soylent store, are forced to gaze upon the human destruction they have wrought in an exploding unhoused population. So they take to LinkedIn and X to whine, where their complaints are picked up by a very sympathetic far-right media sphere. SF, the bay area, and California in general have been on the cutting edge of anti-unhoused propaganda, with Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, particularly heavily backed by tech billionaires, pushing some of the most vicious anti-unhoused legislation in American history, and gleefully participating in a photo-op where he helped destroy an unhoused encampment.

Scams, Ponzi Schemes and Financial Boondoggles

• Technology has created incredible new ways for marketers, scammers, and otherwise malicious actors to reach us at all hours of the day and in our most vulnerable places. Phone calls from Scam Likely, emails from slightly misspelled government agencies, urgent help requests from old friends on Facebook, texts from seemingly friendly wrong numbers: as a result of all these fraudulent comms you necessarily become paranoid, wary of strangers. Who picks up the phone for an unknown number anymore? Even if you never get fully robbed, what happens to your well-being when ten, twenty, a hundred times a day someone is trying to scam you, demanding your attention so that they can rob you? Many 'legitimate' businesses are only slightly less scammy: the product that arrives looks nothing like the photo you saw online, advertising content is made to appear like it's editorially evaluated, auto-resubscriptions are one click to join but hours of effort to disconnect. We are always being tricked, lied to and manipulated, over huge things and petty things and over nothing at all. Dishonesty and distrust become the watchwords of the public sphere.
• As more and more of the market has moved online, so too has more of the crime. There's catfishing, pig-butchering, ransomware, DDOS, social-engineering attacks, malware etc. etc. Where once the most profitable points of attack were banks, or corporations, or other spots of concentrated capital, the immense data collection and the almost infinite points of potential contact made possible by social media, online shopping and algorithmic surveillance makes it easier, safer and more scalable to go after individuals. But this isn't some spontaneous cruelty on behalf of criminals, this is the logic of access, data and vulnerability produced by big business and big tech. They put a premium on "seamless" shopping and purchasing experiences, leaning heavily on impulse buying, constant sign-ups and aggressive marketing techniques. As a result you're encouraged to give over more and more data everywhere you go, to connect to other users more easily and openly, to share more details, personal facts and processes. In the name of continuing to market to you, they also keep your data forever, in databases whose security is often less than a second thought. Meanwhile, banks and insurance companies make it harder and harder to get your money back after these scams, meaning even if you have fraud protection and can prove you were robbed it might be weeks or months before you're made whole again. The fascist belief that society itself is made up entirely of adversaries aiming to take advantage of us, a zero-sum competitive and violent social world, becomes increasingly accurate for more and more of our daily lives.
• First it was crypto that was going to revolutionize how we made purchases. Then, VR and the metaverse were going to completely reinvent the way we worked, met and lived online. NFTs made art fundamentally accessible, affordable, and "democratic". Robinhood and Memestocks meant everyone was a trader. Now AI is making cultural production available to everyone and revolutionizing the way we work. While Trump's election and recent announcement of a strategic crypto reserve (which, when you have control of the US dollar, is an obscene and obvious fraudulent scheme) has pumped juice into the flagging crypto market, the use of crypto schemes for corruption and theft have become so blatant that a meme-coin rug pull might literally take down the Argentine government. But the series of increasingly on-their-face unregulated securities, media-driven hype cycles, investment frauds and coordinated stock market manipulations have inflated a stock market bubble of world historic proportion, one driven by both the "Magnificent 7" tech stocks and an even wider array of the derivative products that almost exploded capitalism in 2008. The increasingly open paranoia, exploitation and fascist grifting of the tech world indicates that even they see the writing on the wall.

• The profits to be won from data brokerages have turned tech developers into masterful manipulators and controllers of human attention and affect, all in order to extract more time, attention, information and money. They have often adopted techniques and strategies from casinos, slot machines and the gaming industry to seduce, control, confuse and extort customers. The very objects and technologies we rely on for connection, community, work and creative expression become hostile addictive objects in the name of selling our privacy for pennies.

High Prices, Shake-Downs and Turning Owners into Renters

• As discussed in the previous part, the servant/app economy functions on the Walmart/Amazon "loss leader" model, whereby they burn cash to keep prices low long enough to monopolize the market. But the profitable part of that process is you then hike prices back up, often to above what the previous, competitive market would bear. Take-out prices have skyrocketed, with every order including around 20% in "delivery fees", "service fees" and the like. You can get around these fees by subscribing to the app: the app, which is just providing a list of local restaurants and menus, gets paid lavishly no matter who you order from, while pressure goes on the restaurants to lower costs in competition with one another. But the shakedown isn't just at the consumer end: these apps demand a percentage of every order from grocery stores and restaurants in order to be listed. And while the standard is around 15% (an absurd fee), the restaurants have to "voluntarily" give up higher percentages to get a higher spot in the algorithmic listing: amounts that app sales people wont tell you, probably because they're blatantly illegal. (If you just agree to the minimum, someone standing outside your restaurant won't see it until the 6th or 7th page). The end result: restaurants cut already tiny margins to the bone, becoming unable to hire their own delivery drivers, meaning jobs and wages are cut in the community. In exchange, everyone gets used to experiencing worse service and worse food for more money, making what used to be a relatively affordable treat into an overpriced and unpleasant extravagance.
• When you buy a piece of physical media, you can use it, share it, and do with it whatever you want, either now or decades in the future. With digital platforms, app marketplaces, subscriptions and Digital Rights Management (DRM), you pay for access to a private library that can be rearranged at any time. You are a renter, not an owner. We were acclimated to this via software and game updates, whereby features, aesthetics and general uses get changed, removed or just reorganized and hidden as a matter of corporate diktat. But now, if you subscribe to Netflix or Max or Prime Video for access to your favorite season of Frasier, one day Frasier might just disappear from the service, due to completely opaque legal and economic negotiations happening at the corporate level. You don't get a refund just because you didn't get what you paid for, and while you're paying more for less, as we saw in the previous part, the creative workers are getting paid less for more. And while a motorcycle company that will disable your airbags if you miss a subscription payment is an extreme and dystopian example, at the fringes we are seeing more and more subscription-based medical devices. Should the company that manages them go bankrupt, or even just a payment system fail, we will see patients with devices in their bodies that no one could operate or even know how to use.
• The networked control of the platform and product by developers facilitates more and more micro-transactions — technologically advanced innovations on an economic model that plagued the working classes in times of more explicit exploitation. (Think of the early 20th century electricity meters that apartment dwellers had to put a coin in to operate.) Free-to-play or free-to-use services that are drenched in ads, data harvesting, and microtranscations are increasingly part of our everyday lives. Paywalls, micro-purchases and fees proliferate, made possible by techno-corporate control, which makes us less and less able to anticipate costs or just receive what we think we've paid for.

Consumerist Identity, Algorithmic Individuation and Alienation

• Many people have talked about how the pleasure and joy of music fandom via diving into albums and artists has been replaced by the algorithmic music services of Apple, Spotify and Youtube. Some of this is just nostalgia, but some, as Rob Horning has tracked for years, demonstrates how much technological mediation is damaging our capacity to know ourselves. We outsource our knowledge, our taste-making, our memory and our desire to cultural algorithms that plays us what it thinks people like us on average might enjoy. We discussed the damage this does to the quality of the media and to culture workers in part one, but we also become less confident in our own capacity to know what we want, it deadens our curiosity and our pleasure. We learn to rely on massive, powerful corporate actors to define our most intimate enjoyments.
• Guy Debord argued, in 1967, that The Spectacle, the new dominant paradigm of capitalist society, was the total mediation of all human interaction by images, that the spectacle meant we only ever relate to our world and one another through commodities and commodification. Big tech has made this mediation literal. The energy, physical fabrication, commodity purchasing, communications infrastructure, state-craft and then further alienation through images, words, discourses, references and memes required just to say "thinking of you" to our friends is staggering. This extreme alienation and mediation wasn't a necessary outcome of the technological breakthroughs of internet communications, but it is what Silicon Valley and capitalism have done with that innovation. Debord's solution to this, in 1967, was to completely overthrow capitalism, to hang the last bureaucrat from the guts of the last capitalist.

• With increasingly siloed and targeted product markets and advertising, as I wrote in this essay in 2017, "the market benefits from increasingly “predictable” sub-identities. As marketing seems to become more and more targeted and “individualized,” it actually insists more and more strongly on conformity — not to a media-orchestrated liberal mainstream but to something with more and more machine-driven specificity. The end goal of this is, paradoxically, a world of perfect individuals, all differentiated from each other with measurable precision but within the exact same processes of individualization: an infinity of identically different subjects." Algorithmic marketing and culture pushes us towards becoming perfectly interchangeable yet perfectly individual cogs.

Racism, Colonialism, and White Supremacy

• With the current Trump administration trying to force Ukraine's defeat and leverage it into rare-earth contracts, it is increasingly clear that the tech economy is a major focus of basic-commodity driven colonial domination. Where Bush fought wars for oil (prices), an economy built on batteries, computers and phones with corporate mandated planned obsolescence (even if the device still works perfectly, it can't run modern programs, systems or sites) will require always increasing numbers of those devices, which in turn leads to imperialist interventions for lithium, water, minerals, and other high-tech building blocks.
• While violent imperialist intervention for control of commodities increase at the beginning of the production process, these supply chains also create horrifying scenes at the other end: billions of devices disposed of in massive E-Waste dumps in global peripheries, especially in former British colonies like India, South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and Ghana. People live atop these dumps, picking through the extremely carcinogenic and heavy-metal exuding piles, inhaling plastic and metal shavings directly into their lungs, to find scraps of metal or still useful batteries. When people talk about "recycling" e-waste, it often refers to the work of generations of non-white scavengers with life-expectancies under 3o
• As Simone Brown wrote in her seminal book Dark Matters, surveillance and technological innovation have always been a core part of the production of white supremacy and the isolation of Blackness. The normalization of extreme surveillance, constant algorithmic sorting, and technological hierarchies and markets of individuals accelerates these structural processes of racialization, ideologically and materially reproducing state and vigilante power over Black people, while also accelerating the processes of recuperation, cultural theft and erasure, as exemplified in Black tiktokers having their dance crazes turned into Fortnite emotes.
• The "just learn STEM" bullshit of Silicon Valley, the proud ignorance of history, social sciences and literature, comes from a belief that the overwhelmingly white male tech geniuses are just creating "objective" tools. But much like the white supremacy embedded in early photographic technologies which made black skin un-renderable in early film, Big tech firms re-embed racism and white supremacy in their algorithms, from producing facial tracking identification that misreads black faces, giving police technological and scientific "evidence" for their arbitrary anti-Black violence, arrests and actions; to racist blood-pressure monitors or soap dispensers that don't work for people with dark skin.

Ecological Destruction, Eco-Fascism

• While Elon Musk's SpaceX makes most of its money off of government contracts, Tesla only makes profits by selling carbon credits. The emergence of "carbon offset markets" has allowed car companies that continue to pump gas and gas guzzling cars into the market and destroy our planet to claim to be going green by...giving money to Elon Musk. While the left has often discussed the concept of the eco-fascist movement, a movement of authoritarian racism built around ecological concerns, Musk, an open Nazi monopolist whose money is built on green-washing the car industry is what real eco-fascism will look like.
• "Green" production, in batteries, solar arrays, wind farms and the like, will require so much energy, extraction and consumption that even if every economy pivoted today it would still contribute disastrous levels of destruction to the environment. The idea of replacing internal combustion engines with electric cars but maintaining the utterly ecocidal highway and road infrastructure, plasticine and metal car production and wide-spread isolated and energy intensive suburban communities in place is a perfect symbol of this false technological solution that damns us all to a high tech apocalypse.
• The energy required by Crypto mining - which has extreme local environmental destructive effects, produces local health crises and wastes huge amounts of water - is not coincidental, but the core part of its ideological function. Schemes like bitcoin pretend to cut out the vagaries of the physical and material economy, turning electricity directly into value via computer mediation. The magic of "code" somehow transforms power into value, without anything else required. This is a fraud, a bubble, just like tulips or dotcoms or joint-stock ventures, but as long as it remains inflated the world burns.
• One of the reasons investors and economists are so excited by AI is because it requires infinitely expanding amounts of energy. As the world at least claims to want to reduce emissions and green the world, the US has doubled down on gas and fossil fuel production, and, under Biden policy, became the world's number one producer of fossil fuels. AI and their data centers promised to create a market for this expanding gas production. Even if the rest of the world went green, a US AI industry promised to find a place for all that black gold. That's why energy stocks, defense stocks and tech stocks have been moving, broadly, in unison.

While any one or two or even five of the above stories might be seen as a particular mistake, or a false step or a problem to be remedied and reformed, in aggregate they reveal that Big Tech has been inexorably goosestepping towards this day for at least a decade. And I believe that they are willing to go mask-off and back Trump at this moment because the grift is in danger of falling apart. When Musk said, before the election, that if Trump didn't win he was going to go broke or to jail, he was probably right.

The tech oligarchs are Gilded-Age Monopolists attempting to freeze the economy in the current moment, because there shit is starting to slip. The bubble's about to burst. Their products are not so good, their systems disliked, their strategies increasingly moribund. They know as well as everyone that the AI gamble is doomed, that's why they blitzed everyone for two straight years with the demand that it be integrated everywhere. But as both TikTok and DeepSeek have demonstrated, they are going to be destroyed, with extreme and delicious irony, by disruptive innovators creating better products, and while they are able to stifle or buy out any competitors that emerge in the US, they can't do the same to the global market.

Everything is to use the force and wealth of the federal government to guarantee that their currently held corporate properties, Google, X, Facebook, Tesla, Amazon, remain central nodes of the global economy. And since the monopoly on the US market isn't actually going to cut it, they need to become the state. Or at least pillage it.

And once they have ransacked the state, they can become the dictators of their own corporo-state-fiefdoms, becoming the kings Peter Thiel fantasizes about.

But lest I be understood as saying that this is only about the money, or that they are insincere in their fascism, their racism and patriarchy, well, they're not. They're dyed-in-the-wool extreme right wingers. Musk probably goes without saying, but Zuckerberg doesn't love anything as much as he hates women. They all believe that they are particularly special geniuses, just daddy's most perfect little boy, but they also know and recognize, somewhere deep in their bones, that they were just lucky, right-place right-time. Such repressed self-knowledge likely keeps them up at night.

So, like so many rentier-capitalists before them, they build increasingly elaborate gendered, racialized theories of health, well-being and deservingness to support the "meritocracy" they perch atop. If those theories also happen to make it easier for them to keep making money by making huge swathes of the population disposable? All the better.

And they are absolutely furious that we peasants aren't impressed, that we hate them, laugh at them, despise these pathetic little men sitting on stages in their Casual Friday outfits with tiny felt lav-mics on their cheeks. This is clearest in Musk and Bezos, but Tim Cook is just better at it, a smoother operator, putting a tremendous amount of energy into projecting the idea that he's a genius. So they're gonna make us submit. If you can't be loved, might as well be feared.

It is no accident that the titans of tech have become open fascists. Their technologies, their interventions, and the world they were building was always-already this one. Today's revolution must be proudly Luddite: we will destroy their machines and toss them from their digital thrones, or die trying.