In my previous Note, I took what I thought would be a rare opportunity to comment on UK politics. Turns out it’s not so rare, thanks to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the techno-libertarian war on democracy.
Last week, Musk announced that UK MPs “will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.” This came after Labour MP Chi Onwurah, the head of the Commons’ science and technology select committee, called on Musk to testify on the spread of online misinformation related to last August’s anti-immigration riots in England and Northern Ireland.
It seems pretty clear that social media companies like X played a role in helping propagate racist lies online, which in turn helped set in motion these horrible events. Onwurah (who, as a telecoms engineer and former chief tech officer for Ofcom, is one of the only people in the UK government with any real world tech expertise) is quite right to call Musk out.
Thank god somebody in the Labour party has the guts to stand up to Musk. As I wrote last week, Peter Kyle, the UK tech minister, dropped the ball big time when he opined that global technology companies are so large and powerful that countries like the UK must treat them like nation states. Governments should show a “sense of humility” and use “statecraft” when dealing with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Meta.
Um, not so much, especially when the aim of such companies, and the people who run them, is to create a world free from any public restraints on markets, or them. The fact that this sort of bullying is being directed at the UK just shows the Trump/Musk strategy of peeling off the weakest nations and players first in a global game of divide and conquer. Look for them to put pressure on other European nations, given what chaos the continent is in right now regarding its own future.
But back to the larger point of techno-libertarianism: one of the best recent reads on this topic is Jonathan Taplin’s The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the metaverse, Mars, and Crypto.
In it, he looks at the out-sized influence that people like Musk, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg play in our economy and politics, and the ways in which they are advancing the dream of a world without any sort of government. Doubters should take a look at this fascinating New York Times magazine article about Próspera, the unironically named for-profit city in Honduras. It’s financed in part by Andreessen, Thiel and Sam Altman. Here, businesses can create their own bespoke regulatory frameworks, entrepreneurs can run wacky medical trials free from Food and Drug Administration standards and citizens are protected from crime (though presumably not the white-collar kind) by a private firm of armed guards. Its goal says it all: “building the future of human governance: privately run and for profit,” which might also be the slogan for the Trump administration.
Our colleague Ed Luce argued in the last Swamp Note that Musk may be on a collision course with Trump, and risks being thrown out of the president-elect’s inner circle. That may well be the case, but the question is whether it would matter in terms of the long term “world without regulation” goals of this president, which will continue to be fuelled by our digital overlords. According to Taplin: “They are already in charge.”
After all, he told me last week, “These are the entities that build cloud computing and AI infrastructure for nation states, the underwater cables that power digital commerce and communication, the military drones and satellite technology that are crucial for defence, and now, the new international currency systems that may well be at the heart of the next financial crisis.”
Peter, when it comes to power in the Trump administration, are you betting on the techno-libertarians, Wall Street, oil barons, the Maga crowd, or some faction I haven’t yet named?
A programming note: Swamp Notes will be taking a short break. We’ll be back in your inboxes on Friday, December 6. Have a happy Thanksgiving.
Recommended reading
Peter Spiegel responds
Rana, your questions to me prompt me to ask one back to you: Who is John Galt?
I know that sounds slightly tongue and cheek, but I don’t mean it that way. Well, not entirely. I raise the Atlas Shrugged protagonist because this techno-libertarian utopia that Musk and his allies are advocating sounds a lot like Galt’s Gulch, the fictitious Colorado valley that was only open to the talented and the brilliant, where no government bureaucrat would get in the way of greatness.
In other words, Musk is not the first person to think that the solution to what ails society is some kind of free-range polity unshackled from the burdens of fiat currencies, capital gains taxes and fluoridated water. In fact, it seems to be a somewhat regular trope of right-of-centre American plutocrats, from Henry Ford (founder of the proto-utopian Fordlandia in Brazil) to Walt Disney (his original concept for Epcot was not a theme park but an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow).
What all previous efforts at a techno-libertarian utopia have in common is that they all failed — except, perhaps, for Galt’s Gulch, which had the benefit of being fictitious. This is why most people stop fantasising about techno-libertarian utopias shortly after sophomore year intellectual history seminars on libertarian thought. It turns out that societies actually do need things like securities regulators, speed limits and garbage collection.
So yes, Rana, I’m a sceptic. Maybe I should be more alarmed about the increasing influence of Musk and his ilk. But other than in certain circles of Silicon Valley, I see no political groundswell for these kinds of policies among Trump voters. Trump may humour the libertarians in his midst, but he’s shown no personal dedication to any of their policies — except for a newfound dedication to cryptocurrencies, which seems more like another effort to make a buck than a principled belief in the need to end central banking.
Alas, Rana, I think we’re going to have to settle for our dystopian present for a while yet.
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And now a word from our Swampians . . .
In response to “Will Musk and Trump fall out”?
“In an autocracy there can by definition be only one autocrat. Just as Trump 45 defenestrated Steve Bannon, however briefly, and Anthony Scaramucci for trying to outshine the boss, it is hard to imagine someone with as bloated an ego as Elon Musk’s taking a back seat to anyone. Prone as both Trump and Musk are to throwing temper tantrums, the split will be loud and ugly. But there can be only one winner, and for better or for worse it will be Trump.” — Charles Krakoff
Read the full article here
