Pt.3 - Techno-Progressivism and Trump
A Normie's Guide to the Technocratic Era Pt.3
e/acc: neo-Accelerationism
During the 2000s and 2010s, the 90s cyberpunk vision of the future lay dormant for a while, hidden behind both the stylish techno-optimism of Apple products and the social turmoil of the Culture War. But in the 2020s, it came back with a vengeance.
In late 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT-3.5. It quickly gained global popularity, reaching over 1 million users within just five days and crossing 100 million users within two months. It was the first widely accessible, easy-to-use conversational AI used by the general public at scale. ChatGPT-3.5 significantly accelerated mainstream adoption and understanding of AI technology, and became widely integrated into everyday products, services, and workflows. This prompted intense public discussions about AI’s potential, ethics, regulations, and societal impacts.
The excitement around this technological breakthrough came just as Americans were becoming weary of the Culture War. The American consciousness shifted from sociopolitical concerns back to cyberpunk themes such as AI, robotics, and transhumanism. New technologies such as the Cybertruck in November 2023 and the unveiling of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus in 2024 added to the new wave of tech-hype. Mirroring the dotcom bubble of the 1990s, people jumped on new opportunities to make money using this technology of the future. A litany of “AI” startups were founded, integrating LLMs into every product — whether it was really appropriate or not.
However, many also became concerned about the destabilizing effects of the new technology. AI could not out-perform seasoned professionals, but it was able to write boilerplate code about as well as a junior developer, make cheap (although generic) art that replicated many popular artistic styles, create boilerplate copywriting, and perform other predictable tasks that newcomers in the creative and tech industries often used as a way to get their foot in the door. Now, instead of hiring a team of junior developers fresh out of university, a senior developer could produce the same output with a team of AIs. Artists who relied on $5 commissions to make ends meet before they landed their first important gig could be replaced with AI-generated art. Because these concerns were primarily coming from upper-middle class liberal industries such as entertainment, these AI restrictions became left-coded.
Others were concerned with “AI alignment,” fearing that AI could pursue goals contrary to those of humanity. Some of these were classic sci-fi scenarios in which an AI with bad alignment might pursue an objective that ultimately threatens humanity (such as the infamous “paperclip maximizer”), or that an AI with superhuman intelligence might escape from human control by outsmarting its designers. However, other alignment goals were “social justice” related, such as the potential of AI to perpetuate existing racial prejudices found in its training data. Still others were concerned about AI-powered recognition software that could be used by governments for surveillance, censorship, and anti-democratic control.
In the EU, the Artificial Intelligence act of 2024 imposed strict requirements on high-risk AI systems, including rigorous testing, documentation, and human oversight, and prohibited certain practices such as social scoring and real-time biometric identification in public spaces. In September 2024, the UK signed an international treaty developed by the Council of Europe. The treaty aimed to prevent “AI misuse” such as spreading “misinformation” and established principles to protect personal data, and prevent “discrimination.”
Under the legally binding agreement, states must implement safeguards against any threats posed by AI to human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The treaty, called the framework convention on artificial intelligence, was drawn up by the Council of Europe, an international human rights organisation, and was signed on Thursday by the EU, UK, US and Israel.
The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said AI had the capacity to “radically improve” public services and “turbocharge” economic growth, but that it must be adopted without affecting basic human rights.
— UK signs first international treaty to implement AI safeguards, Sep 5 2024, The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/05/uk-signs-first-international-treaty-to-implement-ai-safeguards)
The Biden administration, typical of the Democrat Party, followed in the steps of its European counterparts. On October 4, 2022, President Joe Biden unveiled a new AI Bill of Rights, which outlined five protections Americans should have in the AI age: 1. Safe and Effective Systems, 2. Algorithmic Discrimination Protection, 3.Data Privacy, 4. Notice and Explanation, and 5. Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback.
The White House wants Americans to know: The age of AI accountability is coming.
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“These technologies are causing real harms in the lives of Americans—harms that run counter to our core democratic values, including the fundamental right to privacy, freedom from discrimination, and our basic dignity,” a senior administration official told reporters at a press conference.
AI is a powerful technology that is transforming our societies. It also has the potential to cause serious harm, which often disproportionately affects minorities. Facial recognition technologies used in policing and algorithms that allocate benefits are not as accurate for ethnic minorities, for example.
— The White House just unveiled a new AI Bill of Rights, Oct 4, 2022, MIT Technology review, (https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/04/1060600/white-house-ai-bill-of-rights/)
Fearing threats to their new AI cash cow in the form of government regulation, Silicon Valley began to resurrect the idea of “accelerationism” as a way to justify unrestricted AI development. Due to Land’s “The Dark Enlightenment” and libertarian political beliefs, the accelerationist movement had become a right-coded belief system, which could be instrumentalized to oppose the left-wing’s interest in regulating AI.
Effective Accelerationism (often shortened to “e/acc,” pronounced “e-ack”) is a loosely organized movement devoted to the no-holds-barred pursuit of technological progress. The group believes that artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies should be allowed to move as fast as possible, with no guardrails or gatekeepers standing in the way of innovation.
The group formed on social media last year, and bonded in Twitter Spaces and group chats over memes, late-night conversations and shared scorn for the people they call “decels” and “doomers” — the people who worry about the safety of A.I., or the regulators who want to slow it down. It has moved offline, too, with parties and hackathons in the Bay Area and beyond.
— This A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go, Dec 10 2023, The New York Times (https://web.archive.org/web/20231211220106/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/technology/ai-acceleration.html)
The name “effective accelerationism” was itself a form of mockery. It was a satire of the term “effective altruism” which had become popular in Silicon Valley slightly earlier. Effective altruism was an attempt at creating an atheistic ethical system that could empirically determine the way in which someone could maximize their positive impact and “reduce harm” by using “data” and “empirical evidence.” Some effective altruists became interested in AI-alignment, applying their ideology to determine how best to regulate AI.
E/acc prefers the all-gas, no-brakes approach. Its adherents favor open-sourcing A.I. software rather than having it be controlled by big corporations, and unlike Effective Altruists, they don’t see powerful A.I. as something to be feared or guarded against. They believe that A.I.’s benefits far outweigh its harms, and that the right thing to do with such important technology is to get out of the way and let it rip.
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In a manifesto posted online last year, e/acc’s founders — all of whom used inside-joke pseudonyms like “Bayeslord” and “Based Beff Jezos” — described their goals in lofty, bombastic terms, writing that their goal was to “usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms.”
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Initially, I wrote the movement off as a fringe novelty — a bunch of Twitter-addicted techies with persecution complexes turning warmed-over Ayn Rand into edgy memes.
But a few months later, tech luminaries like Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, started showing up in e/acc’s Twitter Spaces, and proclaiming that he, too, believed in effective accelerationism. (Mr. Andreessen’s profile on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, now includes “e/acc,” and he listed Based Beff Jezos and Bayeslord as two of his “patron saints” in the techno-optimist manifesto he published in October.)
Garry Tan, the president of the influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, signaled his support for e/acc. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, replied to a Based Beff Jezos tweet and joked “you cannot outaccelerate me.” And the movement gradually broadened beyond A.I., with some leaders pushing for cryptocurrencies or nuclear fusion.
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Last week, Forbes revealed that Based Beff Jezos was actually Mr. Verdon, who now runs an A.I. hardware start-up called Extropic.
— This A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go, Dec 10 2023, The New York Times (https://web.archive.org/web/20231211220106/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/technology/ai-acceleration.html)
Of course, most of the Silicon Valley Effective Accelerationists did not go so far as Land’s total indifference towards human survival. Instead, they argued that any problems caused by technology could also be solved by it. Instead of technological development being good for its own sake, they re-framed accelerationism as a means for maximally improving society. From a business perspective, this was obviously a much more attractive sales pitch to make to the public. Not to mention that many of these effective accelerationists were not academic ideologues as Nick Land was, but rather were interested in making money.
Effective Accelerationist venture capitalist Marc Andreesen presents a softer form of Effective Accelerationism in his October 16 2023 article “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” While mentioning Nick Land by name, the article is based more around making a more generic case for how capitalism and technology benefit humanity.
Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward. Comparative advantage increases specialization and trade. Prices fall, freeing up purchasing power, creating demand. Falling prices benefit everyone who buys goods and services, which is to say everyone. Human wants and needs are endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new goods and services to satisfy those wants and needs, deploying unlimited numbers of people and machines in the process. This upward spiral has been running for hundreds of years, despite continuous howling from Communists and Luddites. Indeed, as of 2019, before the temporary COVID disruption, the result was the largest number of jobs at the highest wages and the highest levels of material living standards in the history of the planet.
The techno-capital machine makes natural selection work for us in the realm of ideas. The best and most productive ideas win, and are combined and generate even better ideas. Those ideas materialize in the real world as technologically enabled goods and services that never would have emerged de novo.
Ray Kurzweil defines his Law of Accelerating Returns: Technological advances tend to feed on themselves, increasing the rate of further advance.
We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.
We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.
Andreesen defends his techno-optimism against the “doomers” who want to regulate AI.
We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.
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Our civilization was built on technology.
Our civilization is built on technology.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.
I am here to bring the good news.
We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.
We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.
We have the will.
It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.
It is time to be Techno-Optimists.
Instead of seeing technology as an ends in itself, which we must sacrifice humanity to if necessary, he instead depicts technology as a tool that will solve mankind’s problems.
We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less.
Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.
We believe this is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us.
We believe this is why our descendents will live in the stars.
We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.
We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.
We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.
We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.
We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.
We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.
We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
Instead of indifference to the natural environment as expressed by Landian accelerationists, Andreesen’s softer form of accelerationism reassures the reader that the natural environment is not at odds with technology. Neither is it at odds with human nature.
We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Per-capita US carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power.
We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crisis. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment, a technologically stagnant society ruins it. If you want to see environmental devastation, visit a former Communist country. The socialist USSR was far worse for the natural environment than the capitalist US. Google the Aral Sea.
We believe a technologically stagnant society has limited energy at the cost of environmental ruin; a technologically advanced society has unlimited clean energy for everyone.
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We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology – both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors.
We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.
We believe in greatness. We admire the great technologists and industrialists who came before us, and we aspire to make them proud of us today.
And we believe in humanity – individually and collectively.
In addition to Ray Kurzweil and Nick Land, Andreesen also names the Extropy Institute’s “Precautionary Principle.”
Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation – the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.
Andreesen also says that Techno-Progressivism is not truly left-wing or right-wing in principle.
Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.
We are not necessarily left wing, although some of us are.
We are not necessarily right wing, although some of us are.
With the rise of Trump, and the end of the old Republican alliance between neocons and religious right which had defined the party during the Bush era, there were no longer any obvious enemies to Techno-Progressivism on the Right. This made a Techno-Progressive form of the Trump administration a tantalizing prospect.
A number of prominent “tech bros” began to throw their support and money behind the second Trump administration, including Marc Andreesen, Mark Pincus, David Sacks, and Elon Musk.
The accelerationist, techno-capitalist, Techno-Progressive philosophy of Nick Land had come a long way. Finally it had evolved from theory to practice. Finally, it had made its way into the Executive Branch.
Trump, the Techno-Progressive President
On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump passed Executive Order 14148, titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” This action was part of a broader effort to eliminate policies perceived as hindrances to AI innovation.
Earlier this year, the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 14179, which is notably more concise than its recently revoked predecessor, Executive Order 14110 from the Biden administration. The Trump Administration’s Executive Order forecasts that "It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security." The order establishes a 180-day timeline for a group of stakeholders to present the President with a strategic roadmap for achieving this policy objective.
— The Future of AI Compliance - Preparing for New Global and State Laws, Mar 20 2024, JDSupra (https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-future-of-ai-compliance-preparing-4693664/)
Executive Order 14110, titled "Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence," had been signed by President Joe Biden on October 30, 2023. It contained similar provisions to the AI regulations of its “decel” European counterparts.
Executive Order 14110 followed the ethos of the “Precautionary Principle” derided by the Extropy Institute and their Effective Accelerationists successors. It stipulated that AI must be consistently evaluated, tested, and monitored, both after AI systems were deployed and “before they are put to use” and that they must “[take] into account the views of other agencies, industry, members of academia, civil society, labor unions, international allies and partners, and other relevant organizations.”
It also contained a “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) provision stating “Artificial Intelligence policies must be consistent with [the Biden Administration's] dedication to advancing equity and civil rights…Artificial Intelligence systems deployed irresponsibly have reproduced and intensified existing inequities, caused new types of harmful discrimination, and exacerbated online and physical harms.”
The directive called for enforcing consumer protection laws to safeguard against fraud, invasions of user privacy and civil rights. It promised to work together with other international regulators, stating “The Federal Government will seek to promote responsible AI safety and security principles and actions with other nations, including our competitors, while leading key global conversations and collaborations to ensure that AI benefits the whole world, rather than exacerbating inequities, threatening human rights, and causing other harms.”
The Biden-era order required developers of large AI models like OpenAI’s GPT lineup to share the results of safety tests with the US government. It also directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards for safety testing, and it tasked other federal agencies with assessing any potential chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, cybersecurity, or critical infrastructure risks AI might pose.
Biden’s action also included measures meant to protect workers and consumers. It commissioned a report on how AI might affect the labor market and asked agencies to develop practices for addressing AI-enabled fraud and discriminatory algorithms.
Trump has made the development of new AI tools a priority for his administration. His inauguration was stacked with tech heavyweights, some of whom donated to the president’s inauguration budget. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Shou Zi Chew, Sundar Pichai, and Sam Altman were all reported in attendance yesterday.
The stage is now set for a showdown over the European Union’s AI Act that passed last year, which created transparency requirements and bars certain uses of AI.
— Donald Trump rescinds Biden-era executive order on AI safety, Jun 21 2025, The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/21/24348504/donald-trump-ai-safety-executive-order-rescind)
Biden also tried to regulate AI companies with antitrust laws.
VCs during Joe Biden's presidency have complained about how tough it's been to get deals done. The outgoing administration has been an antitrust enforcer and put many tech mergers and acquisitions on hold that it deemed anticompetitive. This is particularly galling for VCs because they rely on selling startups in M&A deals for many of their exits and returns.
Limits on tech M&A have "caused the rate of venture-capital return of distributed proceeds to fall drastically, making new capital formation near impossible," Louis Lehot, a top tech lawyer at the law firm Foley & Lardner, said. Silicon Valley is looking for a relaxing of the government's stance here "to enable exits and new capital formation, which is the cycle of innovation," he added.
For example, regulatory pressure had dampened dealmaking at Google, with the tech giant abandoning two prospective purchases this year, including of the cybersecurity startup Wiz, which would have been one of the tech giant's biggest-ever acquisitions.
The US also opened antitrust inquiries into Microsoft and Nvidia earlier this year over their dominance in the hot AI space. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft's acqui-hire of Inflection AI, and the Department of Justice is looking into Nvidia's acquisition of the Israeli AI startup Run:AI.
While some lawmakers say that allowing a few companies to influence the majority of AI research, development, and monetization poses an economic risk, many VCs have cried foul and accused the FTC's commissioner, Lina Khan — who has frequently sued to block mergers — of an antibusiness bent and say it's trickled down to fewer closings of startups deals.
— Silicon Valley is betting a Musk-inspired Trump could unleash a startup boom, Nov 8 2024, Business Insider (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-could-help-deregulate-tech-amid-a-trump-victory-2024-11)
Faced with these threats to their financial prospects, the billionaires decided to join venture capitalist Peter Thiel in supporting the Republicans. The pivotal moment for this was the selection of Thiel acolyte JD Vance in July 2024. The selection of Vance as Vice President set in stone Trump’s allegiance to this faction. After this, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and other Silicon Valley technocrats — many of them influenced by Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, and other Techno-Progressivists — threw their money and influence behind Trump.
The Rockbridge Network, a conservative political advocacy group founded by JD Vance and Chris Buskirk in 2019 was instrumental in this.
A new coalition of wealthy conservative benefactors that says it aims to “disrupt but advance the Republican agenda” gathered this week for a private summit in South Florida that included closed-door addresses from former President Donald J. Trump and an allied Senate candidate at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to documents and interviews.
The coalition, called the Rockbridge Network, includes some of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and has laid out an ambitious goal — to reshape the American right by spending more than $30 million on conservative media, legal, policy and voter registration projects, among other initiatives.
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A “lawfare and strategic litigation” effort with a projected cost of $3.75 million is intended to use the courts “to hold bad actors, including the media, accountable.” A “transition project,” with an estimated price tag of $3 million, is intended to assemble policy experts and plans to create a “government-in-waiting” to “staff the next Republican administration.”
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Arizona was the site of Rockbridge’s first summit, which was held last year. It featured a speech by Mr. Thiel, the billionaire tech investor. He and Ms. Mercer, the daughter of the hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, were among Mr. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, and worked closely together on his presidential transition team.
— Dissatisfied With Their Party, Wealthy Republican Donors Form Secret Coalitions, Apr 6 2022, The New York Times (https://web.archive.org/web/20220406175152/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/politics/republican-donors-rockbridge-network-trump.html)
Before becoming one of Trump’s largest donors and leader of DOGE, Elon Musk was seen as a left-winger of the reddit-browsing, “trust the experts,” “science believer” variety. The most obvious example of this was his company Tesla, which received government subsidies in order to create electric cars as an alternative to conventional fossil-fuel powered vehicles whose emissions were said to be bringing the world as we know it to an end through climate change.
During President Barack Obama's tenure, initiatives to promote renewable energy and advanced technologies led to significant support for companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy in 2010 as part of the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, aimed at fostering the development of fuel-efficient vehicles. Under Democratic leadership, California provided various incentives to Tesla, including tax credits and subsidies, to support the growth of clean energy and electric vehicles within the state.
Elon Musk repaid the favor by donating to Democrats. In 2010 he donated $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee. He supported Barack Obama in both terms, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020.
But in 2022, he began to support the Republicans. After purchasing Twitter around the same time, he began to make the platform more friendly towards conservative content creators. Next, he supported Trump challenger Ron DeSantis. After DeSantis lost to Trump, Musk established “America PAC” in order to help Trump get elected, becoming the largest individual donor in the 2024 election cycle. In the lead-up to the election, Musk's PAC offered financial incentives to voters in swing states, providing $100 to individuals who signed petitions opposing "activist judges" and additional rewards for referrals. This strategy aimed to boost voter turnout in favor of Trump. Musk publicly endorsed Trump and appeared at campaign rallies, emphasizing the importance of the election and aligning with Trump's policy positions.
Around the same time, Elon’s companies began to become more scrutinized by the Biden administration. Among them was a 2023 case against SpaceX which claimed that the company engaged in discriminatory hiring practices by giving preference to US citizens over refugees and asylum seekers. These charges would later be dropped under Trump. Another involved an investigation by the SEC into his purchase of Twitter.
Musk’s potential to have extraordinary clout with the new administration raises questions about the fate of federal investigations and regulatory actions affecting his business empire, of which at least 20 are ongoing, according to three sources familiar with SpaceX and Tesla operations and the companies’ interaction with the U.S. government, as well as five current and former officials who have direct knowledge of individual probes into Musk’s companies.
The inquiries include examinations of the alleged securities violations; questions over the safety of Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems; potential animal-welfare violations in Neuralink’s brain-chip experiments; and alleged pollution, hiring-discrimination and licensing problems at SpaceX.
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The Musk-related cases could languish or be dropped by Trump-appointed agency and department heads, the current and former U.S. officials said.
Trump’s DOJ picks, for example, include lawyers who defended him in criminal and impeachment trials and a nominee for FBI chief whom Musk vocally supported and who has repeatedly vowed to pursue Trump’s enemies, one current and three former DOJ officials said.
— As Musk gains influence, questions hover over US probes into his empire, Jan 2 2025, Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-gains-influence-questions-hover-over-us-probes-into-his-empire-2025-01-02/)
Although Elon was perhaps the most clear example of this, he was far from alone.
Another was Mark Pincus, a founding investor in Napster, Facebook, Friendster, Snapchat, Xiaomi and Twitter. A self-described libertarian, Pincus supported Kamala Harris in 2016 and gave the legal maximum dollar amount to support Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020. But in 2024, he also switched his allegiance to Trump, and in 2025 publicly applauded both Elon Musk’s influence in the new administration and the Effective Accelerationist movement.
In July 2024, “Effective Accelerationist” Marc Andreesen announced his support for Trump. Marc Andreesen, once named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, was the co-founder of Netscape, and an early investor in Facebook, GitHub, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter among others. Politically, he supported Democrat and establishment Republican politicians including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney. In 2016, he was a Never-Trumper who supported Hillary Clinton due to Trump’s anti-immigration stance. Yet, in 2024, he also flipped to Trump.
In July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, of the Andreessen Horowitz venture fund, made a ninety-one-minute video accusing President Biden of weakening America. Andreessen said to Horowitz, “There’s been a brutal assault on a nascent industry that I’ve just—I’ve never experienced before. I’m in total shock that it has happened.” Horowitz replied, “They’ve basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.” These and other government actions, they said, threatened to doom America’s economy, technological superiority, and military might. And Biden, by refusing to embrace various tech-industry proposals, was allowing China to leap ahead. “The future of technology, and the future of America, is at stake,” Horowitz declared. The two men were so concerned, they said, that they had no choice but to endorse Donald Trump in 2024. (They also noted that, under Biden, billionaires like themselves might have to pay more in taxes. But that issue received less airtime.)
— Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster, Oct 7 2024, The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster
David Sacks was an early employee of Paypal along with his close friend Peter Thiel, where he served as COO. He is also a close friend of Elon Musk. Although he criticized political correctness since the 90s, and donated to establishment Republicans such as Mitt Romney, he was also a Never-Trumper in 2016. In 2024, he backed DeSantis against Trump, followed by Robert F Kennedy. Finally, he began to support Trump in the summer of 2024, along with the other “tech bros.”
The new cabal of Trump supporters, with Elon Musk at the helm – reportedly Trump’s pick for a Washington efficiency tsar – includes venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks who held a high-profile Bay Area fundraiser for Trump, in June, with tickets reportedly selling for $50,000 a seat. Though the evening included a $300,000 ticket tier for donors not too shy for a photo opportunity with the candidate, Sacks said on the All-In podcast: “I know there’s going to be a lot of people who support Trump, but they don’t want to admit it.”
Vice Presidential candidate, JD Vance’s Senate seat and path to the White House from US marine, venture capitalist and successful memoirist, was said to be funded and advanced by Silicon Valley veteran investor Peter Thiel, whose brand-name successes include PayPal, Palantir and Founders Fund.
Another notable Silicon Valley Trump supporter includes US entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy who ran as a Republican nominee for President in 2023 and has since endorsed Trump and acted as his political surrogate on the campaign trail.
Trump’s support in Silicon Valley reflects a wider disillusionment with the neoliberal globalist experiment which has, nonetheless, enabled them to accumulate vast wealth. But US involvement in foreign conflicts, inflation, a global pandemic, and economic uncertainty have seen venture capital flows slow and the IPO market grind to a halt. Tough times for Valley VCs.
— US Election 2024: Silicon Valley turns towards Trump, Oct 31 2024, Verdict (https://www.verdict.co.uk/us-election-2024-silicon-valley-turns-towards-trump/)
After winning the election, Trump appointed David Sacks as “crypto czar” on December 5, 2024. President Donald Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on January 20, 2025, through an executive order issued on his first day back in office, appointing Andreesen and Musk to the new agency. DOGE was created to cut wasteful government spending, but it also seemed to give some rather sweeping powers to Elon Musk, an unelected private citizen, including access to a Treasury Department payment system that contains sensitive information about millions of Americans.
Political favors and de-regulation can be expected to be awarded to any Republican President’s donors, and these would certainly help Techno-Progressive acceleration to some extent on their own. But Trump would take things even further, making Techno-Progressivism a part of US Industrial policy by investing directly in AI infrastructure.
OpenAI and SoftBank on Tuesday said they planned to launch a massive new US artificial intelligence infrastructure project, in a move Donald Trump lauded as a “declaration of confidence in America”.
The joint venture, dubbed Stargate, is looking to spend $100bn in Big Tech infrastructure projects, rising to as much as $500bn over the next four years, the groups said late on Tuesday. It was not immediately clear how Stargate would obtain funding but one person involved in the project said they intended to bring on additional investors.
“This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” Trump said from the White House on Tuesday evening, flanked by Son, OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
— SoftBank and OpenAI back sweeping AI infrastructure project in US, Jan 21 2025, Financial Times (https://archive.is/6Lbbf#selection-2403.0-2417.245)
Other AI companies followed not far behind.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI and chipmaker Nvidia are becoming partners in a multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure fund backed by BlackRock, Microsoft and Abu Dhabi, as companies rush to build data centres and energy projects to power generative AI.
The technology groups said on Wednesday they would join the so-called AI Infrastructure Partnership, with plans to initially raise $30bn from investors and companies, with the goal of securing up to $100bn in total investment including debt financing.
The investment vehicle is aimed at addressing the staggering power and digital infrastructure demands of building AI products that are expected to face severe capacity bottlenecks in the coming years. The computing power of AI requires far more energy than previous technological innovations and has strained existing energy infrastructure.
BlackRock launched the fund in September last year alongside Microsoft and Abu Dhabi AI investment fund MGX. Nvidia, which already provides technical advice to the fund, is becoming a full partner alongside Musk’s xAI, which is emerging as a challenger to AI start-ups such as OpenAI.
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The move comes two months after SoftBank and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, launched their own “Stargate” project to build AI infrastructure, which was endorsed by Trump with plans to spend up to $100bn.
Following the Stargate announcement in January, Microsoft said that it would change the structure of its deal with OpenAI to enable the start-up to use rivals’ cloud-computing services.
— Elon Musk’s xAI and Nvidia join BlackRock and Microsoft’s $30bn AI fund, Mar 13 2025 (https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.ft.com/content/53eeadd8-8fec-4f1b-991e-642e24959e02)
The Techno-Progressive Effective Accelerationists hope to make Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of the development AGI (artificial general intelligence) by 2029 a reality. AI can then continue to accelerate until it surpasses human intelligence by 2045, leading to the runaway “technological singularity” desired by Nick Land in which technology is able to improve itself exponentially in a way that escapes all human control. In other words, the development of AGI is the key to the Accelerationist’s plans.
The fastest way to do this is to build massive data centers. The more data centers, the more computing power to develop and train AIs.
Verdon told Forbes that his vision of a technocapital future is a heavy investment in solving the social issues pressing "the culture." It echoes similar sentiments from tech bros who think that robots and AI will make the world a better place — while also making them very rich.
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For e/accs, the world is simple: AI will solve our problems because we want it to, and we're the ones programming it. Opportunity is endless, and at the end of the AI rainbow is a singularity worth more than gold.
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It's…a naive way of thinking about superintelligence, Roman Yampolskiy, the director of the Cyber Security Laboratory at the University of Louisville, told Business Insider.
"No one, even in e/acc, will suggest that they have a working superintelligence control mechanism or even a prototype for one," Yampolskiy said. "Why would anyone think that it is possible to indefinitely control a superintelligent (god-like) machine? It is like thinking that squirrels can control humanity."
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While well-developed AI has the power to help screen for cancer, increase accessibility for disabled people, conserve wildlife, combat world hunger, and even aid in the climate crisis, critics of the e/acc movement argue the current practical applications of the technology would become immediately irrelevant should AI begin thinking for itself and determining its own goals for humanity's best interest without humans to control it.
But as e/accs seek to defy the warnings of safety researchers, what about the rest of us?
E/accs want to reshape society radically, alter how we work and interact, and redefine what it means to be alive, but the general public doesn't have much of a say in AI — or enough money to have a voice.
Yampolskiy said that the attention this movement has garnered among the uber-rich is troubling and "even more worrisome if you look closely; you realize that these people are not representative of humanity, our belief and values, they themselves are not value-aligned with humans."
His vision is diametrically opposed to that of the e/accs: Pause the development of AI.
"Either we stop before we get to superhuman AI, or we all die. 'Huge AI, Inc.' should not be running dangerous experiments on 8 billion humans."
— The 'Effective Accelerationism' movement doesn't care if humans are replaced by AI as long as they're there to make money from it, Business Insider (https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.businessinsider.com/effective-accelerationism-humans-replaced-by-ai-2023-12)
Developing AGI would also require a glut of cheap labor to work at these tech companies. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump proposed granting green cards to foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. colleges, effectively "stapling" them to diplomas. He stated, "You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges, too." His tech bro donors such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have also expressed a desire to increase immigration via H1-B visas.
America’s CEO: The Techno-Progressive vision of Trump
Trump has long been a sort of Rorschach phenomenon, with everyone projecting their own hopes and fears onto him. The Techno-Progressivists, influenced by Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin, seem to have done the same.
Trump’s “strong man” image, disregard for checks and balances, aggressive use of Executive Orders, and willingness to use executive power to enforce his agenda echoes Curtis Yarvin’s “neocameralism.” Like Yarvin, Thiel, and Musk, Trump himself had been not a politician, but a CEO. Who better to enact the Dark Enlightenment into law?
This is most likely not a coincidence. As with Nick Land, many of the “tech bros” surrounding Trump have been directly influenced by Yarvin’s ideas. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a significant tech investor, has been associated with Yarvin's ideas. Thiel’s skepticism towards democracy and his interest in alternative governance models resonate with Yarvin's neoreactionary philosophy. Thiel has also reportedly invested in Yarvin's tech ventures, indicating a professional relationship that extends beyond ideological alignment. Vice President Vance himself has cited Yarvin as an influence. Yarvin was also present at the “coronation ball” held by Passage Press, which included some of Trump’s greatest influencers.
On the weekend of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Coronation Ball, a glitzy inaugural gala hosted by the ultraconservative publishing house Passage Press. The gathering, hosted in the ballroom of the Watergate Hotel, was designed to celebrate the ascent of the new conservative counter-elite that has risen to power on the tide of Trump’s reelection — and Yarvin, who has arguably done more than anyone to shape the thinking of that nascent group, was an informal guest of honor.
Even the ball’s name spoke to Yarvin’s outsize influence over the Trumpian right: For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single “chief executive” or “dictator.” These ideas — which Yarvin calls “neo-reaction” or “the Dark Enlightenment” — were once confined to the fringes of the internet, but now, with Trump’s reelection, they are finding a newly powerful audience in Washington.
When I called him up recently to talk about the second Trump administration, Yarvin told me that during his trip to Washington, he had exchanged friendly greetings with Vice President JD Vance — who has publicly cited his work — had lunch with Michael Anton, a senior member of Trump’s State Department, and caught up with the “revolutionary vanguard” of young conservatives who grew up reading his blogs and are now entering the new administration.
— Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington, Jan 30 2025, Politico (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/30/curtis-yarvins-ideas-00201552)
In an interview with The New York Times, Yarvin describes pressuring those around Trump to have the President lean into his vision of Trump as CEO-dictator.
I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway. So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did. There’s a great piece that I’ve sent to some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition…
Well, I sent the piece to Marc Andreessen…It’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior, describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. What happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, is like, Here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. F.D.R. personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, This is crap. Then at the end of the thing, everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes basically revere F.D.R., and F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.
To make a long story short, whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. “dictators,” this opprobrious word, they were basically national C.E.O.s, and they were running the government like a company from the top down.
— Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening, Jan 18 2025, The New York Times (https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html)
Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin’s vision of a libertarian, post-democratic, CEO-Monarchy accelerating the Techno-Progressive agenda and instigating the Technological Singularity through the development of AGI had gone from a little-known, subversive, cyberpunk theory to being realized by the most powerful men in the world.
Some, like Ray Kurzweil, sought escape from their own immortality; others like Land served technological progress for its own sake; still others seemed to just want to make money. But there was another motivation behind these technocrat’s political agenda — a geopolitical one. The threat from a rising China.
Next In This Series
In the next edition of this series, Techno-Progressivism and China, we will examine this rivalry between the technocratic East and the technocratic West.