Close All Tabs - The Broligarchy Pt 2: Is this Techno-Fascism?

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

The ”broligarchy” didn’t come together in a vacuum — this combination of extreme wealth, right wing leanings, and an anti-establishment point of view has been brewing  for decades. There are lots of names for this ideology coming up in the news: techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, tech oligarchy, cyber-populism, authoritarian technocracy. What does it all mean? As tech business leaders align with the president, and Elon Musk leads the dismantling of federal agencies, what is the best way to describe what is going on in our country right now? In the second part of our two-parter on the “broligarchy,” Morgan speaks with historian and University of Washington professor,  Margaret O’Mara, to discuss techno-fascism and other terms to see what really fits to describe our current reality.  Guest: Margaret O’Mara, Historian and Professor at the University of Washington  Further reading: “The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism” — Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic  “‘Techno-Optimism’ is Not Something You Should Believe In” — Jag Bhalla & Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs ‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley - Becca Lewis, The Guardian “Techno-Fascism Comes to America” - Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker  Read the transcript here Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at [e-mail] You can also follow us on Instagram Credits: This episode was reported and hosted by Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Jen Chien. Sound design by Chris Egusa. Original music by Chris Egusa, with additional music from APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard, Katherine Monahan, and Chris Egusa. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money. Star 1 Credit Union in your best interest. So good, so good, so good. Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom rack stores now and up to 60% off. Stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince, Sam Edelman, Frame and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive.

discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. From KQED. So there's this bit in Silicon Valley, the HBO show, I mean, where one of the characters, Jared gets into a self-driving car owned by this billionaire named Peter Gregory. Buckle up, please. Okay. Enjoy your ride. But then, things go all. the rails. Destination override. New destination, one Gregory drive, Aeroon. Distance to destination, 4,126 miles. Enjoy your ride. Instead of taking him home, like it's supposed to, the car ends up getting rerouted to Peter Gregory's offshore private

island. It's situated in international waters, so it's basically in the middle of nowhere. and when Jared's finally able to get out of the car, he faces another horrifying predicament. Excuse me? Can you help me? Obstacle averted, resuming operations. Please be careful. The man-made island is run entirely by robots, so there's no one around to help him. The idea of a sovereign, self-contained tech utopia island sounds like a TV satire exaggeration. But here's a thing, it's drawn from real life.

Silicon Valley's Peter Gregory is based on Peter Thiel, the godfather of the PayPal Mafia and an actual tech billionaire who funded a similar project to the one parodied in the TV show, though there's no public record of anyone actually getting stuck on one. In the late 2000s, he became a huge proponent of what's now known as seesteading, the dream of establishing these offshore autonomous ocean communities that would be hubs for innovation. The purpose of sea-studding

was to put technological progress above everything else, to build them outside the grasp of anything that could limit that progress, especially things like pesky government regulations. Teal was an early investor in the Seasteading Institute, an organization that originally planned to establish libertarian startup countries

off the coast of San Francisco. While that never came to pass, and similar VC-funded tech island projects in the years since have also faced a slew of issues, this ideology persists. The belief that innovation shouldn't be hampered by regulation or any kind of social responsibility, really, and that tech business leaders should be the ones in charge, not elected officials in a traditional government structure. And with a growing group of broiligarchs stepping out from behind their standing desks and into positions of real political power and control, it seems like they're getting closer to that goal. So what's behind this continued mingling of the tech industry and government power? This is Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world. affects our real lives. Let's get into it. Okay, so we're seeing tech business leaders aligning with the president,

Elon Musk leading the dismantling of federal agencies, and the anti-government ideologies fueling things like the seasteading movement. We've been calling this the broligarchy, but there are other terms getting thrown around in an effort to describe what's going on in our country right now. Let me just list them out. I'm going to grab my whiteboard. Okay, so we've got authoritarian technocracy, cyberpopulism, tech oligarchy, techno-futalism, techno-libertarianism. Oh, and I've seen this one a lot lately, techno-fascism.

But what do these jargony terms even mean? Are they just hyperbole? Is one more accurate than the others to describe what's happening right now? think it's time for a deep dive. You ready? All right, let's open a new tab. Is this techno-fascism? Do you know, fiscism? It's coming to get us. Is the broligarchy really driven by fiscism? Sorry, fascism as former bachelorette and TikTok icon Gabby Wendy says. To get an expert opinion, I called up Margaret Omera. She's a historian and a professor at the University of City of Washington, where she teaches about the tech economy and American politics. She also wrote a history of the modern tech industry in her book, The Code, Silicon Valley, and the remaking of America. First of all, the broligarchy is a delicious term, and I'm going to deploy it often. You know, I think, for one thing, the tech industry, Silicon Valley, has always contained multitudes, right? But it is novel to, you know, dial back to January of this year and see all of those

tech CEOs on the dais at the inauguration. John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie did not show up at William McKinley's inauguration. This is really unusual to kind of, I just have the front and center, you know, display of these are people who are, you know, so proximate to power where the president is kind of showing I have these close connections with these people. Okay, let's go back to our whiteboard. I asked Margaret about a few of our jargony terms. First, technocracy. Is that what this is? Well, it's really interesting because technocracy is a really old term. And it goes back more than a century ago.

Rather than being anti-institutional or anti-establishment, it's been, hey, let's bring expertise to these big institutions. Let's use the best knowledge and specialized knowledge we can to inform policymaking or inform whatever we're doing to, you know, whatever we're governing and however we're governing it. This isn't really technocracy. Technocracy is like bureaucracy kind of slow and kind of deliberate and very much in the institution and using people who are not partisans but just pointy-headed experts. And sometimes that's right now some of these pointy-headed experts aren't really in fashion with the prevailing administration. Right. I'm thinking of during FDR's administration, that's kind of when we saw a lot of technocrats establishing these government agencies, which Doge is currently slashing. That's right. The 1930s, the new generation. deal. The advisors around Franklin Roosevelt were known as the brains trust. They were there because

of their expertise, not because they, you know, because of who they knew or because of their political acumen, although some of them were very good at politics. But they were really, you know, they were technocrats and they believed in the power of government to steer the economy in a certain direction. Okay. Crossing out technocracy, how about techno-libertarian? libertarianism being the idea that the government should generally stay out of people's lives. You know, techno-libertarianism has always been kind of a slippery term because, you know, truly pure libertarianism in any context is a really hard thing to stick to because you really have to be comfortable with, even if it's something that I don't agree with, I believe that the government, you know, shouldn't be doing anything about it to change that status quo or change that from happening. So this is kind of different. You know, this is very specific actions that are directed at specific parts of the government.

Like, for example, and this is a priority that Elon Musk supports very vocally, is kind of getting rid of DEI or kind of quote unquote wokeism in the government. And in sort of a micromanaging way, right, like banning certain words from government documents and websites, preventing funding of certain programs and not just things that are kind of, New from the last several years, but things like the EPA's Environmental Justice Program, which is designed to address the disproportionately high levels of pollution and poor neighborhoods. And this isn't libertarianism. This is very much trying to steer U.S. society in a certain way. Got it. So techno-libertarian doesn't really describe what's happening.

Cross that off. What about techno-fascism? Historian Janice Mimera wrote about this concept. in her book, Planning for Empire, which focuses on Japan's colonization of Manchuria in the 1930s as a test case for techno-fascism. She defines it as an authoritarian regime driven by technology with technocrats at the helm. Some people also call this technocratic populism. In this example of Imperial Japan, the fascist rule wasn't concentrated behind a single leader. They still had an emperor, but the real power was in the hands of the technocrats.

They established huge bureaucracies to force industrial development in Manchuria by exploiting the people that Japan colonized. Essentially, the public and private sphere were fused into one. This is just one example, but Margaret says there is a historic link between technological progress and fascism around the world. I mean, you go back to authoritarian regimes, of the 20th century, of different political systems, whether it be Stalinism, whether it be the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler, whether it be other authoritarian regimes, communist and non-in during

the Cold War. And often technology and technological progress plays a really important role. It's something that these leaders invest in, and technologists are often, you know, favored actors in that. But, you know, you go back to Nazi Germany and the V2 rocket program of 1930s, 1940s Nazi Germany, that was the technology that was so advanced and so valuable that the U.S. allowed the rocket scientists from the Nazi regime to emigrate to the United States, and they became the people who were building NASA's own space program. Some argue that aspects of life in the U.S. right now do point to fascism, the scapegoating of minority groups, attacks on education, rising sexism, potentially illegal deportations, and that the broligarch's incursion into the government is a sure sign of techno-fascism's arrival.

But Margaret is wary of using that term. She says the current movement is too anti-bureaucratic to be techno-fascism. She says it's not technocracy and not quite techno-libertarianism either. So what is it? Maybe there isn't one fixed term to describe exactly what's happening, or maybe it's more of an amalgamation of a bunch of these things. But Margaret did bring up one more term that was not on my whiteboard. I think one thing that's kind of consistent through a through line is techno-optimism or a belief in the power of technology to do good things and that more technology is better. and that I think with that kind of is an adversarial or a suspicion of government bureaucracy,

feeling like tech is better than the bureaucrats. Tech is something that ultimately will do things better and improve things. Techno-optimism sounds honestly kind of positive. But right now we're also seeing the very real consequences of this ideology play out in government operations, people losing their government jobs, infrastructure crumbling. I mean, we could talk about that for the rest of the episode. What even are the core beliefs here? Who's pushing it? And that is another tab. Techno-optimism? So Margaret was just telling us about this adversarial relationship between techno-optimists and government bureaucracy. That sentiment ranges from, yes, a sort of

explicitly anti-government, you know, get the state out of things as much as possible, liberate currency, liberate individuals and groups from the control of state regulations and nation states. And then there's also a kind of more affirmative, hey, the government needs our help. Let's improve it and use all of these principles that we've used in developing these amazing products in the Valley and let's bring them to the government. A lot of these beliefs are laid out, the techno-optimist manifesto. It was written in 2023 by venture capitalist Mark Andresen. Here he is reading from it on the Startup Archive YouTube channel. We believe that we have been and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology.

This is a really key point today. Mark and Driesen was the co-founder of one of the early internet browsers. NetScape, which was the kind of original kind of gateway drug to the internet. This was the browser that started at all. This was also the company that, It went it went public. Fourteen months after it was established, it started the dot-com boom. You know, by the time he's 25 years old, he's on the cover of Time magazine, sitting on a throne. Andresen went on to co-found the legendary Andresen Horowitz Venture Capital Fund, that has, among other things, invested heavily in crypto. And unsurprisingly, investing in crypto, a currency that doesn't rely on a government or bank to maintain it, is, formed by his beliefs. In his 5,000-word techno-optimist manifesto, Andresen writes this.

Centralized planning is doomed to fail. The system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone. Centralization will starve you to death. Oh, yeah. That's such a fascinating document. Andresen's framing of techno-optimism and his manifesto really points the finger at, not just bureaucracy and government bureaucracy and regulation as something that's standing in the way, but also programs like DEI programs and the pressure that tech employees have brought on within companies over the last five years to diversify workforce and to create better working conditions for different types of employees. Uninization drives. You know, we've seen this activism in tech that really was unprecedented in the industry up until the last decade. I mean, not at the scale.

So these are things that are, you know, being identified as this is standing in the way of, you know, our progress. 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. This manifesto is considered extreme, even in the tech industry. In it, Andresen names what he calls enemies. Bureaucracy, regulation, academia, risk management, tech ethics, sustainability, social, social, responsibility and trust and safety. His version of techno-optimism sees anything that could hinder technological progress as the enemy,

even things that most people would agree make society better, like user safety or labor rights. In his manifesto, he also makes some very dubious claims that society doesn't need those things because the free market will only drive innovation that is ultimately good for humanity. Andresen's manifesto doesn't speak for everyone in Silicon Valley, but a lot of these broligarchs seem to espouse very similar anti-government, anti-diversity talking points. And this lines up very well with the modern Republican Party. But techno-optimism is an ideology that doesn't fit neatly into a political box. So how can we make sense of the recent political swings of the tech world? Okay, let's dig into this when we come back from this break.

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In recent history, tech industry leaders have aligned with political parties, not necessarily by ideology. They've stood by whichever party was better for business. And following the techno-optimist way of thinking, they've chosen whichever party wouldn't stand in the way of innovation. It's moved from being Republican to Democrat to back again. Even though in recent years, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area generally has been a pretty blue place, right? It's associated with Democrats, with national democratic lawmakers. And for a long time, it was the Republican Party that was just pro-business, low taxes. There were enough Californians and northern Californians in Washington, during Washington,

during the Reagan years, that there were people who could advocate for the special things that, say, the semiconductor industry needed in its competition with Japanese chipmakers, which was a really big deal in the 80s. And then that changes in the 90s. The Republican Party social conservatism becomes more predominant. And the Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton and Al Gore, kind of presented themselves as business-friendly centrist and especially internet business-friendly centrist, and really wooed Silicon Valley very successfully. And this very friendly approach to tech continued throughout Obama's eight years as president, which meant that regulations were minimal.

Very techno-optimist, right? This is also when everyone's kind of feeling that social media is basically a net good and awesome and hadn't realized that bringing humanity online would bring all the great things about humanity online as well as the not great things. In the years after Obama was in office, technology has progressed at a breakneck pace. And with that, society has realized that progress at all costs isn't always what's best for actual human beings. Remember when whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance programs? Or when the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened and news broke that your Facebook data could be mined for political advertising without your consent?

And then there's everything happening now with AI. This isn't what we signed up for. And then there's increased criticism of privacy or lack thereof. You know, these companies not doing enough to protect user privacy. That's starting to gather steam. They're starting to be criticism of the gender imbalance in VC and in companies. Still, the tech industry was doing pretty well by the end of Trump's first term. Margaret says that tax cuts and other incentives were part of it.

But there were outside forces too. Think of the state of the world back then. The COVID pandemic had just started, and online platforms had a huge growth spurt because everyone kind of just had to be online. So Silicon Valley flourished. And then Biden is elected, and his administration kind of takes a more aggressive stance when it comes to antitrust. It's kind of going back to the way things were, you know, 50 years ago. But that's after this really long time of very loose enforcement. What happened during the Biden years is this love affair between the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley started souring because there were antitrust enforcement actions and there were support of the unionization drives in some of these tech companies and some pretty tough talk from the Biden White House about tech is too big and we need to do something about it.

But for this handful of very powerful, very influential, very vocal tech leaders, they really shift. their allegiance. Yeah, I also am really curious by your thoughts on whether this shift to the right in Silicon Valley is actually like purely just about business, just about, you know, pro-capitalism, or if it's like actually ideological. I mean, I'm thinking of like you said, Mark Andreessen was once a, well, he keeps flip-flopping. He was a Republican and the Democrat, now Republican again. Elon Musk was a Democrat until a couple years ago. I mean, I'm thinking of a tweet where he was like bragging about LGBTQ equality at Tesla, which seems unfathomable now. The different world. Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk built electric cars. Like Democrats were and are his

constituency. Yeah. Yeah, this is, it's very different. I think it is both business and ideology, and it's all bound up together. That's the way I read it. I think there is kind of a core, let's protect the business. But there's also, yes, I think there's. I think there's also, yes, I think There's ideology. I think there is a lot of resentment. There is a lot of, you know, these billionaires are feeling aggrieved. They're like, all we did was we built these amazing products that you guys love so much that you can't stop using. You don't even understand how this stuff works and you're trying to regulate us. There's this real sort of disdain for Washington policymakers who legitimately have, you know, time and again, there have been many instances in which senators and members of Congress have shown their deep ignorance about technology. that is fair. And there's also a resentment of like, okay, our employees are like rising up against us. And they're not focused on building the next great thing. They're focused on, you know, other stuff that we don't think is important to the business. So we've got this foundation of resentment, ideology, and business interests.

What is it building toward? How about another tab? What's the techno-optimist agenda? At the top of this episode, we have a bit about those self-governed islands funded by tech billionaires. Distance to destination, 4,126 miles. Enjoy your ride. But it's not just a bit. These are real-life projects.

How does that play into the dream of techno-optimism? Oh, yeah. The self-funded, you know, it's all in the name of escaping from the state, escaping from the old ways of doing things. It's the ultimate disruption, right? And we can see lots of different products and projects and tools, both fantastical utopian ones that haven't come into being yet, and ones that are very, very real, like, say, the blockchain, spurred by this philosophy that the existing financial institutions, governmental institutions, fiat currency, you name it, that has failed people. It is something where, you know, nation states have too much power. And also it's been, it's kind of

this populist argument, too, that ordinary the little guy's been, you know, it hasn't been given a fair shake. While cryptocurrency hasn't reached the widespread adoption its advocates predicted, it's still doing pretty well for itself. But in practice, these techno-optimist human-built startup islands that operate outside of government oversight have fizzled out. Unfortunately for Peter Thiel's seesteading dream, the flourishing network of independent Tech Hub Islands off the coast of San Francisco still does not exist.

The Seasteading Institute has tried again and again to build floating cities in different parts of the world over the years, but those plans have also sunk. And then there's Prospera, another VC-funded libertarian city, this time built on existing land. It's on an island off the coast of Honduras, backed by familiar names like Peter Thiel and Mark Andresen. Construction started in 2021, but since then, the project has been accused of neo-colonialism, weighed down with legal battles, and embroiled in political turmoil. So instead of going through all the effort of building whole new tech island nations, it appears that some techno-optimists are shifting their focus back home. They're trying to bring it stateside, like California forever. A couple of years ago,

this company started buying up acres of empty farmland in the Northeast Bay Area. Getting some exclusive renderings tonight of a proposed new city in Solano County, California Forever. The group behind this huge plan says the community will be home eventually to some 400,000 people. They're trying to build a utopian, walkable city of tech startups and sustainable residential homes from scratch, about 50 miles from San Francisco. They've got some pretty big-name investors backing the project, like Mark Andresen and PayPal Mafia member and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. But this project is also facing a lot of local resistance. Some of these proposed cities go even further than just being startup hubs.

According to reporting from Wired, some groups have met with Trump to launch Prospero-like startup nations here in the United States, what they call, freedom cities. They want to build modern-day company towns on federal land, which would be exempt from any regulatory oversight or taxes. But it begs the question, whose freedom would be prioritized? Freedom cities would not be required to be democratically run and wouldn't be held to workers' rights laws. It isn't about a better government. It isn't about a better, you know, better delivery of government services. It's about let's get this government out of the way and let's build something entirely new and something that we

control that's driven by this engineering thinking, by this tech forward, techno-libertarian thinking, because we have made amazing things. We have been responsible for amazing progress. And if we are given the power to do it and the smartest people in the room are allowed to build these things independent of government, so it's not technocracy, it's not bringing the experts into government necessarily, although a number of Fowley people are now in the government, but I see sort of an endgame kind of feeding into this philosophy that seems kind of radical, but is something that's been percolating for a really long time, which is, you know, where we're going and where we need to go as a, humanity needs to go is beyond these old bureaucratic governmental

structures as they are now. Techno-optimism says that we don't need tech ethics or regulatory bodies or any sense of social responsibility because the invisible hand of the free market will guide innovation. But if you look at history, that story that techno-optimists like to tell is complete fiction. Okay, how about one last tab? The real story of Silicon Valley Innovation. So despite the origin story that a lot of tech titans like to claim, Margaret says that the legendary innovation of Silicon Valley exists because of government intervention, not in spite of it. There's a really interesting collective amnesia that is part of the secret of Silicon Valley, funnily enough.

So the government has played a huge, huge role in the growth of the electronics industry, the computing industry, over time here and elsewhere. But it's done in a way that's kind of been hard to see. It's indirect, right? It's contracts going to private companies or universities. It's regulations that are lowering taxes or lowering regulation. I mean, that's government action. That's government help, right? But because it has been kind of indirect and subtle, a lot of people in the industry kind of say, okay, where our success comes from government getting out of the way. Like we are so great because government has not been kind of micromanaging us or curbing our growth. And yeah, that is true, but part of this was this industry was only in the last 15 years has become as enormous as it has. Turns out that dreaded government regulation that these corporations fear so much has historically been great for the industry. Antitrust enforcement has been this really important factor in driving innovation over time. As an example, Margaret talks about the history of the transistor. The invention that started at all, the thing that is the core of, you know, every microchip, this is the digital revolution, the transistor. That was developed in Bell Labs, which was AT&T's industrial laboratory in New Jersey in 1947.

The transistor was revolutionary in electronics. It basically controls the flow of electric signals. At the time, Bell Labs and AT&T had a monopoly over the telecommunications industry. They manufactured all the parts and operated the service itself. In 1949, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into AT&T. They settled the lawsuit in 1956, and AT&T was required to grant all applicants, non-exclusive licenses for all existing and future Bell System patents, including the transistor. And so the DOJ forced AT&T.

to allow the transistor to be freely licensed by other companies. And this is how you had chip companies that emerge in the valley in the first place. We do not have silicon in the valley, if not for that Department of Justice condition, putting that restraint on AT&T. This is why this political history is really useful to be aware of, because it's legitimate to fear government interference in the innovation machine. If you think that this has been a free market miracle and if government's around, it's going to mess it up. But if you know the history and you realize, oh, the innovation machine has actually been something that the government's been part of and entrepreneurialism and government's policy have existed side by side the whole time, like, oh, okay, so maybe that isn't a bad thing.

Just the sheer presence of having, you know, regulation or having policymakers and politicians kind of in the room, you know, setting the terms of the debate, you know, that's not going to be an innovation killer. In fact, an innovation killer will be if all the power just resides in the hands of a few companies and a few people. Of course, there are so many terms that can still apply, but we can't cover all of political theory in a single deep dive. And no single ideology will explain what's happening with our government. What we do know is that beyond semantics, we can always look at history to understand why this is happening now. We are in uncharted waters in many ways right now in terms of where things will go next. But I do believe that historical knowledge is power. So the more you know, the more you know.

Okay. I'm going to cap these markers, roll away this whiteboard, and close all these tabs. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted. by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Agusa is our senior editor. Jen Cheon is KQED's director of podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by Chris Agusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard and Catherine Monaghan. Audience engagement support from Mahas Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager and Holly Kernan is our chief content officer.

Support for this program comes from Be Wrong Who and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gatoron red switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at close all tabs at kQED.org. Follow us on Instagram at close all tabs pod or drop it on Discord. We're in the close all tabs channel at discord.g.

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