Then, of course, there’s Thiel’s mentee, vice president-elect J.D. Vance, who spent five years in Silicon Valley working as a venture capitalist before moving into politics.
As Trump’s former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney recently noted, “the level of sophistication on the issues is so far beyond what it was in 2017 … This is not going to look anything like it did in 2017. This is going to be Trump 1.0 on steroids.”
Of the 4000 political appointments to top jobs across the US government Trump is set to make in coming weeks and months, you can guarantee more will come from this world.
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These are the people who will spend the next four years deciding whether to bring antitrust lawsuits or enforce consumer protections and whether to increase or ease AI regulations. They will be responsible for settling Musk’s feuds with multiple agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission (which revoked a $US886 million SpaceX deal in 2022), and the Federal Aviation Administration, which in the past year alone fined SpaceX $US633,009.
These are the people who will decide which public projects are axed, which departments do “worthwhile” work, which social protections are of value and which are “red tape”, and how many of the 2.8 million Americans working for the federal government will be laid off.
There is value in shaking up the rusty bureaucratic machine of government to make it work better. But changes should be for public improvement, not to serve the ideological or economic interests of a handful of billionaires who believe that their genius will be the saviour of democracy.
The Silicon Valley ideology can be readily understood if you read any of Ayn Rand’s work. In this world, selfishness is a good thing; the technologies made by its adherents have the power to save the world, and anyone who gets in the way is an enemy of progress.
In this world view, democracy is a disposable byproduct. It’s nice to have, but not at the expense of technological progress. It is the kind of simplistic, doctrinaire mindset most people adopt during university and grow out of by their mid-20s.
While Trump’s first posse may have tested democracy through its sheer chaos, the new guard present a much wider and longer-term threat that expands well beyond America.
Many of the technological innovations and advances to come out of Silicon Valley are doing great things and have moved the world forward. But progress can happen at the same time as protections. Technology can be transparent and accountable. But that requires companies to do more work, and it will require establishing and enforcing regulations in the public interest.
Given that so few legislators in any country seem up to the task of understanding how major tech companies work, or the ideology that surrounds them, this seems unlikely – even less so now that those creating the programs have just been given the keys to the policy castle.
Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy. He served in the Biden-Harris administration for three years.
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