Last month, I interviewed Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and leading figure of the nascent tech right, for the "Matter of Opinion” podcast; And soon after, I interviewed Steve Bannon, the vintage MAGA populist. Both conversations contain enough material for several newsletters, but both are especially useful for illustrating a point I pressed in a recent column: that there is a surface unity in U.S. President Donald Trump’s coalition on the issues of this executive-order-dominated moment, from anti-wokeness to deportations to reshaping the administrative state, but profound philosophical tensions underneath.
And the tech-populist tension is potentially one of the deepest, with implications that extend far beyond one presidential administration. To Andreessen, joining with Trumpism and the right is an opportunity for Silicon Valley to slip free of both the ideological shackles imposed by woke progressivism and, more important, the regulatory shackles that the Biden administration wanted to impose on rapidly advancing frontier technologies, artificial intelligence above all.
To Bannon, the idea of Silicon Valley unbound is, first, a variation on the kind of neoliberal globalism that Trump campaigned against in 2016, and second, a potentially dystopian path to a post-human future, where the elite aspires to a cyborg existence and machine intelligence makes ordinary human beings increasingly obsolete.
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