Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Is a Tech Utopia a Dystopia for Everyone Else?

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Meet the powerful centimillionaire who dreams of a sovereign San Francisco where tech millionaires wear gray T-shirts to signal their allegiance and progressives are locked out. Balaji Srinivasan is one of the most infamous, yet lesser-known, figures in Silicon Valley. Journalist Gil Duran, who reports on tech fascism and billionaire extremism, joins Taylor to discuss Balaji’s ideas, background, and why you should take him seriously. Full video of this episode will be available on Taylor's YouTube channel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If I were writing this as a science fiction novel, it would seem unbelievable, but this is apparently a real thing. Hi, welcome to Power User. I'm Taylor Lorenz, and this week we are doing a deep dive on one of the most infamous yet lesser known figures of Silicon Valley. Maybe you could literally have like the sovereign city of San Francisco and secede effectively or something like that. If you have true total great control of the city, maybe, right? And now you start rolling up the map. that worked there and then it works elsewhere. That's Balejee Srinivasa, a powerful centimillionaire who wants to transform San Francisco into a militant tech dystopia. He's ranted about the media, progressivism, encouraged the doxing of journalists from

quote-to-quote vulnerable groups, and the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, venture capitalist Mark Andresen, and CEO of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Gary Tan, are all huge fans of his. My guest today is Gil Duran, who reports on tech fascism and billionaire extremism. He wrote a fantastic piece about Bologi recently for the New Republic. Thanks so much for joining us, Gil. Thanks for having me. As somebody that covers tech, I have to say, I don't even cover Silicon Valley,

but Bologi is so inescapable. He's become this figure online, I feel like, where we keep hearing about him. Where did he come from? Where did he grow up? And what's his backstory? Well, as far as I can tell, he comes from Long Island. I didn't really dig much into his childhood or where he grew up, but then he seems to have spent a long period of time at Stanford University where he got a BA, an MA, and a PhD before emerging into the usual kind of startup world of, you know, the post-Standford life, being a venture capitalist, starting different companies. And it seems like for the most part, he was just your usual everyday centa millionaire at a young age type of VC, people who come out of Stanford and have some idea that seems,

very obscure to the rest of us, but it's worth a lot of money to people who have money to invest. And I think he first kind of comes on the radar as a thinker, as a person with a philosophy or a movement he's pushing, in 2013, when the New York Times ran a story by a non-Juridahattis about a speech that Bologi gave at Y Combinator. And in that speech, he depicted the United States as sort of an outdated company like Microsoft and saw a kind of post. post-American, post-democracy world that would be ruled very differently than what we have today. We're going to talk about today is something I'm calling Silicon Valley's ultimate exit. What do I mean by Silicon Valley's ultimate exit?

It basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology. So this kind of puts him on the map, this 2013 speech. I think also, I mean, you mentioned this in your story too, but to me it also seems like the rise of crypto really accelerated his prominence. He was really early into the crypto world, and I feel like developed this big online audience because of that. And as crypto values were sort of rising throughout the 2010s, I feel like he became more well-known. Was he also at Andreessen Horowitz for a minute? Yeah, he was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz for a while, then went to Coinbase as CEO,

did seem to make a lot of money in crypto. And then about a year or two ago, he got kind of worldwide notoriety for making a million-dollar public bet that crypto would surge past a a big point. It didn't happen. So he paid the million dollar bet, but clearly has a lot of money, a lot of wealth, and has become increasingly strident about his belief that there's going to be a post-democracy order and that tech people have to now plan to be the ones who rule in that post-democracy order. Yeah. It seems like the tech world, especially the Silicon Valley tech world, has gotten increasingly authoritarian in the past couple years. And you've done, such a great job covering this. But it seems like a lot of these figures, Mark Anderson being one of

them, Peter Thiel, obviously, and other billionaires, tech billionaires, have really moved to the far right. They seem to kind of want this tech-driven authoritarianism. Bologi has talked about something called the network state. Can you kind of explain what that is and what his political philosophy is? Sure. According to Bologi in his book, The Network State, which is free to read online, In one sentence, a network state is a highly aligned community with a capacity for collective action that crowds, funds territory around the world, and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states. Put even more simply, the billionaires create their own countries and rule their own countries. And we see some efforts to do that all around the world, including here in Northern California. And that's what really got my interest.

I wasn't paying attention to these things. It was a vague noise. I do cover those San Francisco politics, which is a place where suddenly all these venture capitalists, white combinator folks are making a huge surge to really seize power, to seize control of City Hall in the next election. And this sort of started bubbling up slowly a few years ago, but now it's become like a full mask-off movement. And this is what really got my attention because it felt to me that they're writing books about this stuff and they have a whole philosophy behind it. But no one reading a newspaper in the Bay Area would have any idea of that. It's all a very superficial story about, you know, tech moderates getting involved. And I felt someone had to say the quiet part loud, as Bologi does, and say this is actually

about a bigger idea. And they're doing it all over the world. And it's not moderate. It seems like not a very moderate ideal at all. It seems pretty extreme. I mean, Bologi has talked about tech Zionism. Is that sort of part of this network state philosophy? Yeah.

Well, there are two main ideas in the network state. One is you create an entirely new city that you govern, hopefully located in a country where the government's kind of weak or corruptible so you can buy independence or sovereignty. They've tried this in Honduras, a town called Prospera that they built. They're trying to build something called Praxis in the Mediterranean. There's a project here in Northern California called California Forever that's an effort by a lot of these same Balaji connected people to create a new city here. So one of them is create your own country, create your own territory, rule it, a city or a state. The idea of biology favors less is you take over existing governments through election. This is called voice.

So creating your own country is called exit in the lingo of the network state. And voice is when you stay and you fight and you take over a government. And that's what we see Gary Tan and White Combinator trying to do right now in San Francisco, which is take over the city. And in a podcast in September, a six-hour-long podcast cut into two segments, I might say. Oh, God. biology laid out a vision of a future San Francisco in which tech-aligned citizens adopt gray uniforms, T-shirts with tech logos like Elon or White Combinator or what have you, and they buy up and take over entire blocks of the city.

And the blues, those are the Democrats, the grays or the tech-aline citizens, are kept out of the gray areas. They're pushed out. Blues who live in the same city in San Francisco don't share your values. They're a different tribe, right? They want to get paid by the government to get poor people addicted to drugs. They want chaos and poop on the streets to stick a thumb into the eye of these tech guys. They want to ban self-driving cars but allow car break-ins, right? Basically, blues don't share gray values.

The grays, the tech-aligned citizens, also bribed the police department with banquets and jobs for their relatives to serve the tech-aligned grays. and the police and the grays, once they have amassed enough power and prominence, will march through the streets in a gray pride parade with anderil drones flying overhead and the police marching shoulder to shoulder with the grays. I mean, like a huge win would be a gray pride parade with 50,000 grays. That would be massive. That would start to say, whose streets, our streets, right? You have the AI flying spaghetti monster.

You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead and formation with, you know, whatever song you want, right? That's a pretty nightmarish authoritarian vision. It's so dystopian. Yeah, that sounds like a black mirror episode. You shouldn't even say that kind of thing at a bar, much less on a six-hour podcast that's posted on YouTube. So I took a big interest in that because a month after the podcast appearance, biology holds something called the network state conference in which all kinds of normal seeming tech people went to Amsterdam to speak about their own. of the project that they're trying to build all over the world, including in San Francisco,

where tech-aligned groups are now trying to create a one-square-mile zone of the city that is tech-dominated. They're calling it city campus. And lo and behold, I discovered one of the investors and one of the companies pushing for this is Balagis Srinivasa. So these are some pretty insane ideas, pretty nightmarish and crazy. And I just feel that people should know that this is something being talked about proposed. And there's a vision here that goes beyond just clean streets and a sense of community. It's sort of, you know. I mean, it's so dark. We mentioned actually previously on the podcast this idea of a city campus. And some of it sounds very idealistic, right? Like this community care and everybody living together, working together,

maybe shared resources. Like that all sounds actually quite progressive and positive maybe for people looking to kind of build community in San Francisco. But this sounds like almost like the bizarro world negative version of it. How much traction are these ideas getting in San Francisco politics? Well, I think we're going to see that in November. There was a recall of the district attorney and some members of the school board two years ago. And a lot of that was funded by people like David Sachs, another right-wing tech figure, Gary Tan, threw in $100,000. But I don't think at that point they had made so clear their ultimate goal. And so I think we'll see the mayor's race is going to be very tight. And there are two tech-supported right-leaning candidates who have a chance of winning,

or at least candidates who used to be Democrats, but now are willing to sort of talk tough and act Republican because that's where the tech money is flowing. I think they'll have a harder time capturing the board of supervisors because San Francisco is pretty progressive. There's been a long-standing tension between the people who live here, the people who are artists, the people who are struggling, to make a living and keep San Francisco as has traditionally been, and the influx of tech people who were new to town and try to change things around, you know, what they're proposing now, there's always been a degree of gentrification taking place because of tech, but it's sort of gentrification on steroids and at the speed of AI is what they seem to be envisioning. And I think they'll have a

harder time with that, because I think that's how people, even if you can strip away all of the authoritarian Twilight Zone stuff that biology talks about, people still have. People still have. have a really hard time with outside force coming in and trying to buy up neighborhoods that already exist. There's already community here. When I first moved to the Bay Area, I lived in a communal housing. It was a former frat house where he shared a bathroom in a kitchen because it was cheap. I'm still in touch with those people. I just ran into one of their kids last night at a bar randomly, who haven't seen since they were a baby. There's a thing called community and exists. There's a thing called getting out of college and having to share housing until you can afford to

get your own place. A lot of us ended up in the outer mission or the East Bay because it was too expensive in Noe Valley. So they seem to be rediscovering that, wow, there are some really expensive popular neighborhoods. And we just have to buy them up and make them a tech campus. And I don't think you really build community by excluding people who are not working in the same industry, the same company that you are. So again, like we see with many things, they're trying to reinvent things that already exist, but in a pretty horrible and nonsensical way. Yeah. And super like just hyper-capitalists of just pledging your loyalty to a corporation, which by the way, these tech companies do layoffs constantly. I guess what happens if you're a gray and you get laid

off by meta? I mean, you just get cast out of the tech, you know, I don't know, cast out of your neighborhood. Yeah, if you don't make it up into the VC range, if you're just, you know, a lot of people, and I want to make it clear, I love tech, I've got friends in tech, I use tech all the time, we're surrounded by it. I don't think tech is inherently bad. I think what's happening is that some people are getting too rich and getting off way into a bizarre land of where they think that society needs to go. The plan seems to be that if they are able to capture enough power in San Francisco, you're just going to push out all the poor and push out all the problems to somewhere else and call that success. And that's not really going to solve the problem. And it's really weird

to me that these are problems of poverty. And the more billionaires and centa millionaires we have, the more poverty we seem to have. And their only solution seems to be to put on gray uniforms and march with the police and keep everybody out. If I were writing this as a science fiction novel, it would seem unbelievable, but this is apparently a real thing. When we come back, we'll be talking more about Bology and his impact in and outside of Silicon Valley. Let's talk about this movement's relationship to the police, because I feel like there's been this sort of tight alignment between this ideology and this kind of goal for a police state. They're very pro-police. I think when you mentioned, you know, the recall of Chesa Boudin.

I remember one big critique was like, oh, you know, he wants to defund the police or whatever. I think crime had actually gone down that year in San Francisco. But why is this movement so tightly aligned with the police? And, you know, is there evidence that the police are, I guess, amenable to this vision? We do gray red dual meetups. Policeman's benevolent union. Okay. All of the police who are gray sympathetic in the city should come to,

And you have to go and look at the legalities of this and so on and so forth, because Blue will be trying to attack this with lawfare the entire time. I think in any political context, when people bring a lot of money, they're going to make a lot of friends. I'm actually writing a piece right now about whether the Democrats who align with tech are really moderate Democrats or whether they've become more like Balagis-Gie's Gray tribe. Because they certainly are sounding like Republicans and even opposing criminal justice reforms that were supported by major police groups and are still supported by Gavin. Newsom and Rob Bonta, who were pretty mainstream Democrats who were not considered far left in California. You also see a nexus with the technology, things like Palantir and Roll. There's this whole, you know, the surveillance AI stuff that they're pitching as a solution to crime. There's a billionaire who funded an entire network of surveillance cameras in San Francisco.

So I think you do see an alignment there. They seem to think that because crime has been perceived as a growing problem here, that that's a good place to explain. exploit for maximum political effect, right? If we just create more polarization and anger and align with the police. The problem is, as someone who spent 15 years in politics, working for big city mayors like Jerry Brown, like Antonio Villagosso, like Dan Feinstein, we tried all this tough on crime stuff before. And we tried putting maximum numbers of people in prison. And it created more crime. We learned a lot in the decades of that. So what scares me about their alignment with these tough on crime police alliances is that for all of their supposed intelligence

and access to AI and the best thinking, all they're pushing are retrograde policies that we already know will fail. You can do short-term suppression by flooding the streets and going after parolees or whatever, but over the long-term, that doesn't solve the problem. And you don't hear them talking about a long-term solution. And so while they may have zillions of dollars and done something brilliant in some computer code or crypto, they're idiots compared to someone like me who knows these. I was 20 years ago I was working on these problems. You know what?

20 years ago I thought maybe tough on crime would do it and that it was a moral imperative. And so you learn things in life. And I think a big problem with these folks is that they, and this is not unusual, people with a certain amount of wealth start to think they know everything and that they're smart about everything.

And they're not. So it's not clear what the end game is, even if they were to seize up all the power in the city, I don't think in five years you have a situation where there's no crime because tech was just that smart. I mean, most of them don't even live in San Francisco. That's the irony is they live in these rich suburbs and maybe only go into the city for meetings. And they live in many places. And so it's weird that they've decided to focus. And Gary Tan of White Combinator has this whole line that, oh, startups fail for not in San Francisco, we have to be here. Absurd.

Yeah. Even if you strip away all of the, again, the weird gobbly gook of biology, I think you would, still have a story about a plan to take all this wealth that's in the cloud or that's in volatile crypto and buy real estate, which is that lasting and growing value. And with real estate comes power, political power, power on the land. Once you start buying those buildings, gray is now win or die. They need to win. See, actually, historically, guys who've held local real estate have been influential in local politics for that exact reason. They don't have exit. They must win local politics. So turning grays into landowners going from the cloud down to land, it's sort of like Israel itself, right?

They went from scholars and merchants to farmers and soldiers. They actually descended from the cloud onto the land and built a modern country. This is a workable strategy. And Bologi spells all of this out too in it. And so anybody knows that the price of property right now in San Francisco, especially commercial buildings, is lower than it's been in a long time because of the supposed doom loop. And so this idea to crowd fund and go into the price. property and landlording business at a massive scale, both using billionaire VC wealth and crowdfunding from all these young people who want to be a part of something and think they're

going to get to the top as well. It's probably what they think of people like, you know, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase and Novel Rabakunt and Andresen think of biology as a genius because he's spelled out with got to take the money out of the cloud to the land by real estate, which is the lasting asset. and with it political power to start changing things to the way we want them. And so I think that's an important part to keep in mind. It might be superficial enough for the general press to grasp. Yeah.

How did this narrative of America being an obstacle to Silicon Valley come to fruition? Well, I think there's a massive lack of gratitude. These are folks who at a certain point forget that it's this country and it's our collective investment in this country that makes all this success possible in the United States. And in this way, it's very much like the old school Republican, well, I did it myself. I pulled myself by my bootstrapped. Yes, they all bootstrapped their billion dollar companies, you know, 100%, not like it was a massive transfer of wealth from other VCs. I mean, the irony is that so many of these tech companies are VC backed themselves. Totally. And, you know, this country has become a haven for these kinds of companies and creations because of what we built here.

That's it's a collective thing. But they realize, wait, I've got all this. money now. I don't want to pay taxes. I don't want to get prosecuted by the SEC if I did something wrong. Well, we should just create a place where I don't have to pay taxes and where there is no SEC. And wherever I get away with anything is the law. And so in that way, this emerging ideology resembles old school Republican ideology of no taxes, no regulations. But instead of putting sort of religion or God at the top of the hierarchy, it's really about tech and founders being at the top of the hierarchy. And it's a specific type of founder because I feel like this group, especially led by Bollogy and Andreessen and all of David Sachs, right, it's like they've almost gotten

more extreme. It seems to me like they want to hold control, like they want to maintain control over the tech landscape. And so that's why they're so focused on backing these like San Francisco founders and the specific sort of like cult of young men that worship them. Yeah, definitely. I use the word cult a lot. There's a lot that does it really make sense with what they're proposing. It's like get outside of your circle, talk to real people, meet people who are not wealthy, see what their problems are, you know, get out of the bubble. They seem to be really in a self-reinforcing bubble and to really view themselves as superior and headed towards some kind of history-making, epic-defining greatness. I'm not really sure that's going to be the case. Some of their political efforts here in San Francisco

are floundering. They seem to get some kind of low-quality characters who have a lot of problems and everything blows up and gets disorganized. There's some problems brewing for some of, they've created a bunch of little political organizations in San Francisco, and those have been having some big trouble in the press recently. So I take them seriously because they do have enough money to be very dangerous for a long time. But at the same time, when I go around the Bay Area, I think it's really hard to get all these individual people to go along, with your weird thing because they're going to catch on to what you're doing. And I think there's going to be a pendulum swing the other way at some point.

Yeah. But in order to catch on to what they're doing, I feel like you need a critical press. And that's one thing that Bologi especially has sought to dismantle. I mean, there was that great Cade Mets story in The Times a couple years ago where you, you know, got that email where Bollogy is talking about doxing, unfriendly journalists. Bollagie has led a doxing campaign against me, many other women in the tech world. journalists and stuff. Can you talk about this movement's relationship to the press? Because it seems like they're very heavy on alternative media. David Sachs obviously has this tech podcast that he's part of now called The All In Podcast that I think puts out a lot of this messaging. What is this

movement's relationship to the media? And why are they so hostile to the press? Again, I go back to the words of Bology. He spells it out in the six-hour podcast. He goes on an extended rant against Ida Tarbill, a muck-breaking journalist who's been dead since 1944. What did Ida-Tar Darbel do Ida Tarbell exposed the monopoly and the corrupt practices of the Standard Oil Company and resulted in the breakup of the Standard Oil Company and resulted in laws that created the SEC, that the terror of a lot of these tech folks, the dreaded SEC. Tarbell, she doggedly pursued Rockefeller and demagogued him and the rise of, quote, what we call mainstream media out of yellow journalism, the neutral seeming media,

this is how they busted the trusts, and this is how they built the consensus for essentially, you know, later, you know, regulated industry. And so the press is there to witness, to expose, and to balance out the power between these oligarchs and plutocrats and the people and to be a watchguard for democracy. And part of the network state idea, in addition to building your own currencies and cities and states and countries, is to build your own parallel media and political organizations. And so they really favor a version of media that most of us would consider disinformation or lapdog media. Only positive things that they want put out, basically a press release with a byline is the idea of that. And often, or an attack on the people they don't like because while they don't like the press being critical of them, well, they love it if the press goes on the attack against a progressive politician.

Oh, absolutely. It's a one-way street, right? Then they'll share all the New York Times stories in the world if, you know, they're critical of progressives. Totally. And it's clear. People have always wanted that sort of thing. But there's been a real concerted attack. And I wrote about this in my piece for the New Republic on journalists here, like young journalists getting piled on or picked on by Gary Tan, just constantly chiseling away at the media, trying to make it seem like it's not credible or no longer reporting the news. And I mean, The Chronicle's been here since what, the Civil War. So this is a paper with a long established record in this town. There's a new publication, The Standard, which is owned by Michael Moritz, a tech billionaire. And they even attack the standard, although most progressives consider the standard to be very pro-tech. The standard has real journalists doing real stories, and sometimes those stories are critical of tech people or not attacking a progressive.

And they get very upset by anything that appears to be fair, critical coverage. And so, sadly, as you know, the media is being hollowed out. The newspapers are not what they used to be. And so even as the revenue has been sucked out of journalism by these massive tech companies, there's now an attack from the top on the credibility of these companies. And it seems to me that the newspapers largely want to stay out of it. And I don't really think they can. Well, exactly.

I think these newspapers, I actually just think they don't know what's coming for them. I mean, I am just remembering when I was at the New York Times, and Bologi was coming after me, they're just so woefully underprepared. I think the tech people, my editor, the amazing tech editor that I had, of course, understands who Bology is. I think that the people at the top of these news organizations are completely in the dark,

or they're somewhat, you know, they share maybe a similar political ideology that actually aligns with him because these are also billionaires and rich people that run a lot of these mainstream news organizations. I find it very ironic that Bologi loves to champion what he calls citizen journalism. But he doesn't actually support any independent journalists doing real work. As you mentioned, he kind of likes to champion these disinformation agents, basically people reprinting whatever talking points he's trying to push whether or not they're factual.

Definitely. And he definitely came after me after I wrote the piece. I saw that. Can you talk a little bit about the reaction? Sure. at first he reacted by saying, you know, he had been ethnically cleansed out of San Francisco. Then he issued this massive essay that accused me of working for the Democratic Party, which is hilarious because anybody who's read my stories knows I'm someone who worked for the Democratic Party who became a critic of the Democratic Party, albeit also a critic of the Republican Party. So not one of these weirdos who goes from being a Democrat to being a suddenly can't say anything bad about Trump, but has a lot to say about Kamala Harris.

So I've been very a journalist seeing both sides in California. We have all democratic governance. So you have to criticize Democrats here. Said that I was the new Stephen Glass, that I had falsified information without really going into detail on that. And sort of said I had been fired from my job at the examiner, which is completely not true. And then after accusing me of being paid by the Democrats, quoted a piece I wrote for the New York Times criticizing the Democrats. So my response was, if that's true, if I'm being paid by the Democrats, how am I? You're also quoting what I wrote for the New York Times very critical of the Democrats.

So it was not meant to convince anybody rational. It was only for his audience. And all these little blue checks came on the attack. Someone threatened to suggest that I might be Peter Thieled without due process, whatever that means, sounds kind of scary. But ultimately, it was a lot smaller than I expected. It was, you know, a day and a half, a few hundred people. Elon did not jump in. It was clear he wanted Elon to jump in.

and retweeted or boost it. Well, you're lucky about that. I will say mine went on for about a year and still get, you know, crazy people coming. I mean, yeah. And that's the idea is to bully and silence you. It's like, is it worth it, right, to take it on? And you'll note that, yeah, and I think that this movement as well often goes against women and young journalists as well. I mean, I've seen them attack sort of reporters that are just starting out really trying to

cut off their career opportunities to report critically on tech. I was talking to a young female journalist in her 20s recently about sort of some of these efforts. Can you talk a little bit more about the vision for the future that these people have? You know, if they were able to successfully take control of San Francisco through real estate purchases and alternative media and political power, what would life be like for the residents that are currently there who are not billionaires? Well, it sounds like they want to create a gated city where a lot of the people, who are not billionaires or tech aligned would not really be allowed. But that hinges on using the police as this force to align with tech and keep them out. And there are laws and there are rules.

And there are a lot of reasons why that wouldn't work in the world we have today. Now, if we have some authoritarian second Trump era that we can't yet foresee or plan for, they, you know, whether with the Supreme Court that'll rubber stamp anything, maybe that's the world they're planning for. But I think you'll see a lot of pushback from people. that San Francisco isn't already largely a zoned owned by very wealthy and privileged people where the poor are not allowed in certain areas is kind of ridiculous. If you've ever been to Pacific Heights, the Presidio, there's a lot of wealthier. There's a lot of people who already have done that.

But again, you're using it as a recruitment tool for these young people to buy into this kind of cultish idea and to maybe buy into crowdfunding this property accumulation. So if they get their way, the future is very scary and dark. But I think they underestimate the level of resistance that they'll receive here in the Bay Area. I don't think people are really going to tolerate that. And I think people just don't know yet about some of these ideas. Well, I think also because these ideas are not covered very consistently. I mean, when you see Bologi or Mark Andreessen or these other people covered in the press,

they're often covered sort of neutrally in a way that I think sort of obscures their true intentions. Like you mentioned, you know, these are quite extreme ideas. And yet when you read about them, often the way that they're written about is kind of like laundered. Like, oh, a proponent of the police, right? He wants to create a police state. Like, to me, that seems like kind of a difference of, you know, just in the way we talk about it. But then the answer, the defense, and I saw this in response to my piece, There's a gaslighting defense that nobody listens to Bology. Nobody takes him seriously.

This is just a guy trying to get clicks. But I'm like, well, then why is Musk always boosting him on Twitter? Why did Gary Tann go to his network state conference and say that Y Combinator is a network state project? Why are Andresen and Horowitz and Peter Thiel and Brian Armstrong of Coinbase investing in his ideas in praising them? I mean, Peter Thiel tried to get Trump to name Bology as head of the FDA. So don't tell me these, people don't take this guy seriously. You take him more seriously than they take most people. In fact, one guy Benedict Evans, who writes some kind of tech newsletters, said, Balaji's not a big, important guy. He's a shaman. Well, I come from a culture with shamanic practices. A shaman's a very, very important character. Shaman's tell the future. Shaman decide great matters for the people,

for the tribe. So that's scared the hell out of me even more that you're saying he's the shaman, like this sort of religious figure almost. And so I think that the more people find out, the more they will be shocked and dismayed by this. And I think one place to look at Solano County where this group called California Forever, backed by Andreessen and several other billionaires with ties and links to Bologi, is trying to create a new city that's been depicted in the media as a tech utopia. They want to build from scratch in the middle of farmland that they snuck around for five years spending $900 million to buy up like 60,000 acres of land. And then the New York Times finally out of them as this group of billionaires trying to do this.

And the reaction from the voters of Solano County who have to approve the project for it to go forward has really been amazing and has given me a lot of hope. They see right through it. They are absolutely opposed to what polls show 70% of voters will vote against this thing in the fall. And I've been watching their online groups and Facebook groups and they're on top of everything. So much so that the California Forever has had to close all of it. Facebook comments has canceled on public forums. Their entire strategy consists of getting supposedly real Solano people to give a testimony of why they support it. And then the opponents go and dig up that person's connected to this real estate company. So basically they can't get

anybody who's not connected to some real estate concern to say positive things about it. And this is United Republicans and Democrats in 2024. Yeah. And I love that. And I think that that is such a positive example of pushback, I don't think that you will necessarily see that on a wider scale. I guess I'm more cynical about this because I've seen this movement go from extremely fringe to increasingly powerful and increasingly mainstream and gain more followers and more popularity and more wealth. And I do think that we're seeing a marked effect, you know, not just getting the DA recalled, but like you mentioned, there's just there's these political candidates, Democrats who were previously very liberal.

I mean, Silicon Valley used to be this bastion of liberalism are now leaning further and further to the right. Yeah, I think the most dangerous thing in politics is when people decide to remain quiet. And we saw this back in January when Gary Tan, the head of white combinator, tweeted, die slow at seven progressive supervisors. And this caused a major uproar, obviously, from the progressive supervisors, from people in the community. But there were some politicians from the mayor on down who normally, if this had been a progressive saying it or someone else would have said something, there was a tremendous amount of silence from people when Tan did something completely outrageous and unacceptable for which he ended up apologizing and going dark for a few weeks

until he got a glowing profile in the New York Times and now he's back at it. But I think there's a lot of people, again, it goes back to the money. Here's a major new money source in politics here. And there's a longstanding battle between the actual moderates in San Francisco and the progressives. And if you suddenly have all this help and all of this money flowing in, it's tempting to throw in with these tech guys. But I'd say the moderates are going to have to do some moral reckoning and figure out whether they can really call themselves Democrats, much less moderates, if this is the track they're going to be on. Because it seems to me that they're sort of like selling their souls in order to win what, not clear, but for power, for the money that comes with it. And so I consider it dangerous.

I don't think that what's happening in Solano is necessarily representative of what will happen everywhere. But it gives me hope to see that the Republicans are even more opposed to it there than the Democrats. It doesn't help that California forever is suing a group of farmers who won't sell their land for $510 million. Yeah. To make friends in a rural county. If you wanted to be in a place in California that's more like the Midwest, it'd be Solano.

Yeah. And so while I do think there's hope, I do think people will resist. I don't think we want techno feudalism to be our future. But I think there's going to have to be a lot more work done by journalists to excavate and tell people what's going on. And that has been the purpose of my pieces. My audience here is anyone who wants to read it, but it's especially journalists. I was in politics for a long time. There are very few journalists in California who know as much about politics as I do from the inside.

This is a scary new development and people need to know about it. I couldn't agree more. One thing I just want to touch on before we log off is I feel like there's also a lot of sort of racial and gender undertones in this movement. Can you talk about that? Because when I look at this movement, it's largely driven by white men. Obviously, Bologi is Indian, but he sort of aligns himself with this extreme group that it does not feel very inclusive. I definitely think it's very melanchentric and always will be. I do think that they're willing to overlook racial differences as long as you're completely aligned with their ideology.

Of course, there will be fewer of those people making it to the top of the funnel because that's just the way things work. And, you know, we'd be considered woke to worry about things like diversity and people having opportunities and being in rooms where it's not all just one person. I think there was a CNBC reporter. We did a interview with Gary Tan. There was a picture on the wall. And she was like, hey, everybody in this picture is a guy, you know. And like that's a big problem they have. It's not clear who they're going to.

There's like no. What women are even involved in this movement, honestly. There's a couple, but generally it is that sort of back to like the George Lakoff's conservative hierarchy. It's always going to be men over women. It's always going to be white over others. It's always going to be Western over others. It's, you know, there's a hierarchy to it. And on top of that, of course, is wealthy over everyone else.

And in this case, it'd be the billionaires over the centimillionaires over the everybody else. What is woke capital? It's something that you mentioned in your piece. Can you kind of explain that term? Yeah, well, that's what he calls the New York Times' main ideology. It's not really clear what he means by that, except I think it's this progressive idea of freedom and equality that we have considered essential to the American project for the past century or so. We're really since getting rid of slavery. The idea that we move forward to time, more people have rights, more people have an equal chance at things, and that we don't do bad things once we understand them to be bad. It's a winner-take-all mentality. and a might makes right mentality or wealth makes right mentality. So I think woke capital is seen as the enemy of really tyranny and despotism, right? Because everyone has rights. If everyone has rights and we have to worry about things like not oppressing people, then you can't do anything you want to do.

We see the same thing with Elon Musk has kind of been the leader of this whole movement. And also the movement to be really loud and aggressive and outrageous on Twitter and to make your company brand a political weapon, which a few years ago, I mean, companies have always been involved in politics, but the CEO of Exxon isn't on Twitter tweeting racist memes, right? That's all changed now. That is now the modus operandi, and I think a lot of that flows from Musk. So while they have a lot of power and they're making good effort, they also make some pretty big mistakes. It'd be much more terrifying to me if they were quietly doing this and I was only assuming this is what they were up to, as opposed to them spelling it out in again six hour long podcasts, which I would encourage

everyone to hear. Which, but six hour long podcasts that only their accolades will probably listen to, you know? Well, I think the listenership went up considerably after that new republic piece, but who even speaks that long besides like Fidel Castro? I know. Well, Gil, thank you so much for breaking all of this down. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me.

All right, that's the show. Power User is produced by Travis Larcuk and Jelani Carter. Our video producer is Brandon Kiefer. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Our executive producers are Zach Mack and Nashat Kerwa. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.