In today’s polarized discourse, humanity’s future is defined by two diametrically opposed meta-narratives: the hopeful transhumanist visions of the techno-optimists and the apocalyptic warnings of an Anthropocene that is sending us towards the Sixth Mass extinctions. The newfound political power Elon Musk enjoys as Trump’s new Head of Government Efficiency, doesn’t just come with policy implications but ideological ones that will define how people envision this future. The figurehead of Silicon Valley’s techno-solutionism becoming the unelected political influencer and enforcer to the President of the United States represents a crossroads of narrative shifts: from the politicisation of tech to Musk’s own narrative shift on how climate change defines our future.
In 2024, Silicon Valley took a distinct turn for the political. The age of regulatory disinterest in Tech, a time where courts all over the country were citing Robert Bork’s ‘The Antitrust Paradox’ touting economic efficiency over antitrust regulation, is long gone. Biden elected three anti-Big Tech regulators–Gary Gensler, Lina Khan, and Jonathan Kanter–to the SEC, FTC and DoJ antitrust division, which led to an administration that targeted the cryptocurrency industry, blocked merger deals worth billions and declared Google ‘a monopolist.’ In the New Yorker, Charles Duhigg reported on Silicon Valley’s response to this–the consolidation of a political lobby of super PACs, with cryptocurrency funding nearly half of all corporate donations to PACs in the 2024 elections. With government turning on them, Silicon Valley has turned to government. As Duhigg put it, “Tech has learned how to politick.”
It is imperative we take notice of this shift—the future of Silicon’s Valley political lobby may be up in the air but its ideological groundings have always been crystal clear. Efficiency, the key term in the Government of Department Efficiency that Musk is nominated to lead, has long been the focus of Silicon Valley technocrats who consider government to be a bloated and inefficient obstacle to letting free-reigning technology improve human life. Governments are presented as slow-moving red-tape bureaucracies and tech companies as the true proponents of ‘disruptive’ change.
Musk has warned that his giant spending cuts in government will present “temporary hardship” for American citizens, a move that seems aligned with the “move fast and break things” creed originating from a Mark Zuckerberg quote. Silicon Valley ultimately advocates for a technocracy, a streamlined body of elites in government that allow it unchecked power to engineer solutions for the world. Thus, the meta-narrative of Silicon Valley is the techno-optimist one, one that treats technology as a sure panacea to the climate crisis. Adrienn LaFrance, executive editor at The Atlantic, published “The Dangers of Techno-Authoritarianism” in January 2024, warning of antidemocratic illiberal movement of techno-autocrats softened her warning with the postulation that “The main dangers of authoritarian technocracy are not at this point political.” That changed when tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz paved the way for Silicon Valley “disruptors” to funnel their money and support into Donald Trump’s campaign, orchestrating a shift away from an industry that once sought to stay as far away from Washington as possible.
Elon Musk, if given the steering wheel, would choose the meta-narrative of techno-solutionism over the one that truly acknowledges a man-made climate change catastrophe that is already in full swing. Musk, in his shift to the political right, has already abandoned his strong advocacy of climate change. In a tweet, he noted that while climate change has significant risk in the long term, in the short term, the risk was “overblown” in the short term. Earlier this year, Musk axed a proposal to create more budget-friendly Tesla cars, instead choosing to fund a purchase of chips that would maximise the AI capacities of Tesla’s luxury range cars.
Musk has endorsed the book “What We Owe the Future” by William McAskill, calling it “a close match for my philosophy.” The book advocates for longtermism, an ideology that says we have a moral priority to safeguard the interests of humanity’s future from “existential risks.” Musk’s visions of sending humans to Mars, colonising other planets and the Neuralink project connecting brains to computers all seem to easily align with the longtermist project, giving his projects an ascendant moral cover. However, the long-termist philosophy doesn’t account for non-existential risks such as climate change, which would devastate parts of humanity unequally but not compromise humanity’s long-term potential as a species. Long-termism represents a moral excuse that Musk and Silicon Valley can use to disregard real-word consequences of ‘disruptive’ tech based on the potential of hypothetical futures. The political triumph of Musk and Silicon Valley’s right-wing tech disruptors is also the triumph of a way of thinking—and we should be wary of its consequences.