Utopia at Any Cost: Silicon Valley’s Techno-Fascists Echo a Communist Mistake
The Parallels Between Today's MAGA Tech-bros and the Communists of the 20th Century
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The Communist Utopian Mindset: Ends Justify Any Means
In the 20th century, revolutionary communist leaders like Mao Zedong in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia pursued a vision of a perfect egalitarian society – a communist utopia – and deemed no price too high to reach it. Mao’s campaigns, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, demanded mass sacrifice and violence, justified by the higher good of the future society he envisioned. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge likewise forced Cambodia back to Year Zero, emptying cities and killing professionals in service of an agrarian utopia. The logic was brutally simple: since the communist paradise would be so glorious, any horrors along the way were acceptable. As one historical analysis put it, communist ideologues saw themselves as waging a war for utopia in which people were the lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world. In their eyes, millions of deaths were unfortunate but necessary casualties on the road to an inevitable victory over capitalism. Communist doctrine taught that history itself was on their side – Marx’s scientific laws of historical materialism supposedly guaranteed an ultimate communist triumph. Under this fanatical belief in historical inevitability, anyone opposing the revolution was, by definition, standing in the way of progress and could be eliminated without remorse. The ends justified any means, no matter how inhumane. It was this mindset that led to policies like Mao’s Great Leap Forward, where China’s peasants were coerced into disastrous experiments that caused a famine killing tens of millions, and to Pol Pot’s killing fields, where roughly a quarter of Cambodia’s population was exterminated in the name of equality. The utopian goal was everything; human lives and moral limits were secondary or even irrelevant.
Silicon Valley’s New Utopia: AGI as the Ultimate Goal
A strikingly similar logic has taken hold among a segment of today’s tech elite – a group sometimes dubbed Silicon Valley techno-fascists. These are billionaire investors and futurists who obsess over artificial intelligence (AI) and AGI (artificial general intelligence) as the key to a future paradise on earth. In their worldview, super-intelligent AI will usher in an era of abundance, solve humanity’s hardest problems, and even confer quasi-godlike powers such as curing diseases, ending poverty, perhaps even cheating death. Tech magnates like Elon Musk and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen speak in near-messianic terms about technology’s potential – and exhibit a corresponding intolerance for anything that might slow it down. Andreessen, for example, argued in a recent manifesto that “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder”. In this tech-utopian ideology, rapid innovation isn’t just good for business – it is a moral imperative. AGI must arrive as soon as possible, at essentially any cost. Just as communists once believed their revolution would “inevitably” triumph (and that delaying it only prolonged suffering), today’s AI-obsessed billionaires often speak as though the march toward super-intelligent AI is both inexorable and urgently needed for human salvation. The ends justify the means. Some go so far as to cast anyone urging caution – ethicists worried about AI risks, regulators proposing safety rules – as misguided obstacles to progress. In their eyes, slowing down to consider “sustainability” and “social responsibility” is tantamount to treason against the future. This techno-optimist crusade rests on an almost religious faith in technology, not unlike the communists’ faith in dialectical materialism. The AI revolution is seen as preordained and fundamentally benevolent, so the sooner it happens, the better for everyone – or so the theory goes.
Embracing Authoritarian Means to Accelerate Tech
Here is where the parallel to the communist mindset grows unsettling. If one truly believes that a glorious AI-enabled utopia is within reach and that any delay is intolerable, it becomes easy to rationalize extreme measures in the present. Indeed, a number of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures have openly aligned themselves with authoritarian politics as a means to their techno-utopian ends. In the U.S., this has manifested as an unlikely alliance between elite tech billionaires and the far-right political camp of Donald Trump. A decade ago, most tech titans leaned liberal, but recently many have swung behind Trumpism. Venture capitalists and executives who once extolled free markets and libertarian ideals – people like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, even Musk – now are counted among Trump’s supporters. What’s driving this shift? In large part, raw self-interest and impatience with democratic constraints. These moguls have bristled at the modest efforts by the Biden administration to tax speculative wealth and to regulate emerging tech like crypto and AI. Rather than accept any slowing of their wealth accumulation or tightening of oversight, they’ve apparently concluded that backing an authoritarian-friendly regime is preferable. As one political analyst observed, “When a progressive government gets even moderately serious about taxing capitalism or regulating its excesses, some billionaires opt for full-on fascism”. In Trump, they see a leader willing to break things – to tear down regulatory guardrails, slash taxes on capital, and bulldoze the woke bureaucratic norms that tech CEOs find so irksome.
From their perspective, Trump’s strongman tendencies are features, not bugs. He promises to clear obstacles from the path of unfettered technological development. Need environmental or labor regulations loosened for a new project? Trump’s on it. Want less scrutiny on data privacy or AI safety? Trump’s unlikely to get in the way. Even the former libertarians of Silicon Valley appear ready to abandon democratic principles if it means supercharging their ventures. Peter Thiel encapsulated this mindset bluntly when he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In other words, if democracy (with its pesky taxes, regulations, and majority will) inhibits the absolute freedom of tech oligarchs to pursue their grand designs, then democracy has to go. This echoes the communist party elites who felt no qualms about overriding individual rights or rule of law in service of their historic mission. Just as Mao placed the Communist Party above all law and institutions during China’s transformation, today’s tech authoritarians-to-be seem comfortable placing themselves above democratic accountability in pursuit of AGI and other techno-utopian promises.
The New Reactionaries: Tech Elite Against Democracy
It would be a mistake to view these Silicon Valley figures as simply traditional conservatives or pro-business Republicans. In many ways, they represent a new ideological strain – one that fuses high-tech futurism with authoritarian neo-reactionary thought. Several have been directly influenced by writers like Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land, architects of the so-called Dark Enlightenment movement that explicitly rejects egalitarian democracy. Yarvin has advocated for an American monarchy or CEO-style autocracy to replace the inefficient chaos of democratic governance. Such ideas, once fringe internet musings, have gained surprising traction among tech circles – even finding renewed relevance under Trump. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon (no technophile himself) noted with alarm that Elon Musk had become “one of the top accelerationists” in politics. Accelerationism, with parallels to Marxist thought, is the idea that society should push its internal contradictions to the breaking point faster – force the collapse of the old order so a new one can emerge. Likewise among leftists, the sooner capitalism implodes, the sooner revolution comes. An expert on this trend describes Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as aimed at: “destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top.” In their envisioned New Order, society would be run like a hyper-efficient tech company – with genius innovators (the Musks and Thiels of the world) firmly in control, and traditional checks and balances swept aside as obsolete.
We saw a glimpse of this alliance of tech titans and reactionary power during Trump’s recent political comeback. As Trump launched his bid to regain the presidency, prominent Silicon Valley CEOs and venture investors rallied behind him – not despite his anti-democratic streak, but almost because of it. They attended his inaugural events and received praise as the kind of geniuses, America must protect. Historians refer to the fusion of corporate-tech power with an authoritarian state: techno-fascism. One scholar, Janis Mimura, notes that in 1930s Japan an elite cadre of engineers and technocrats eagerly partnered with a militarist government to drive rapid industrial growth at the expense of democratic norms – a historical case she explicitly labels “techno-fascism”. It’s an eerie parallel to see American tech CEOs now cozying up to a would-be autocrat, each side looking to use the other: Trump harnessing Silicon Valley’s money and innovation drive, the tech elite harnessing Trump’s power to smash bureaucratic roadblocks. The common ground is a belief that “everything needs to be fixed, all at once” and only a radical overhaul from the top can do it. Democratic processes – slower, compromised, unpredictable – are seen as impediments to this grand project.
A Utopia for the Few? Tech Wealth vs. Public Pain
There is a final cruel irony in this march toward a supposed AI-powered utopia: it may end up a paradise only for the very elites who are selling it. The communist true-believers at least claimed to be fighting for the proletariat; in practice they often created new classes of party elites living far better than the masses. Likewise, Silicon Valley’s techno-futurists insist that advanced AI will benefit humanity at large – but it’s clear who stands to benefit immediately and immensely. When their favored candidate won, for example, Elon Musk’s personal fortune reportedly jumped by $70 billion in less than a week. Venture firms and tech monopolies anticipate windfall profits if regulations are dismantled and AI innovation is given free rein. But for ordinary working people, the picture is far less rosy. Leading economists worry that unchecked AI deployment will deepen inequality by automating work, displacing workers, and failing to create new jobs In plainer terms, AI’s bounty may flow mostly to those who own the AI – the venture capitalists and platform owners – while many who rely on labor income face job loss or wage stagnation. Even the World Economic Forum’s analysts (hardly anti-technology alarmists) have flagged “increasing inequality” as a major risk from the AI revolution. In a scenario where powerful AI systems run much of the economy, who will reap the gains? Without strong democratic institutions to set rules or redistribute benefits, the likely answer is: the same billionaires pushing for this future. It is telling that the techno-futurist crowd demonizes concepts like sustainability and social responsibility as the enemy – those concepts, after all, imply protecting the public good and environment even if it means moderating pure profit or slowing innovation. But in the - get AGI at any cost” mindset, such moderation is scorned.
So, while the architects of this new world promise a coming utopia, one must ask: utopia for whom? For the venture capitalist who becomes unimaginably richer as AI drives down his labor costs? Certainly. For the authoritarian politician who regains office with Silicon Valley money and then rules unencumbered by opposition? Quite possibly. But for the millions whose jobs could be made redundant, or who could find themselves under increasingly high-tech surveillance and control, or who might be deemed expendable in the headlong rush to upgrade civilization – the future may feel less like paradise and more like a dystopia. When Trump and his tech mogul backer’s talk of an America made great and advanced through technology, we should remember the images from Maoist China’s failed leap forward and Pol Pot’s emptied cities. Those too were grand social-engineering schemes promising a new glorious era. What they delivered was misery and death for countless ordinary people.
Conclusion: Vigilance Against the “Ends Justify Means” Trap
The saga of Silicon Valley’s techno-fascist turn is a cautionary tale about utopian thinking gone off the rails. In both the communist experiments of the past and the AI-driven futurism of the present, we see how an unshakeable belief in an inevitable utopia can justify breathtaking cruelty and folly. The individuals on the All-In Podcast and their fellow travelers reading Curtis Yarvin or singing the praises of a strongman leader may genuinely believe they are hastening a new golden age of technology. But history teaches that when elites start claiming the ends justify any means, those means tend to get very dark, very fast. Today, that could mean cheering on a U.S. president as he imprisons political rivals and throws migrants into detention camps without due process – all because he’ll supposedly clear the way for unfettered technological progress. It could mean silencing dissent and democracy in the name of efficiency and expertise. And it could mean a future where a wealthy few live in an AI-powered utopia of their own making, while majority are left struggling in its shadows.
As citizens, we should be extremely wary of this bargain. The promise of AGI does hold extraordinary allure – just as the promise of perfect communism once did. But if realizing that promise requires embracing fascists, crushing democratic norms, and sacrificing the vulnerable in society, then we are repeating the worst mistakes of the 20th century. No technological nirvana, however dazzling, can justify jettisoning the fundamental values of human rights, equality and rule of law. The lesson from Mao and Pol Pot is that utopias imposed by force tend to become hell on earth. We should not let a new breed of high-tech ideologues convince us that this time will be different. The rhetoric may have shifted from class struggle to algorithms and innovation, but the underlying proposition is hauntingly similar: tolerate the unforgivable today, for the sake of a shining tomorrow. It was a deadly lie then, and it remains a lie now.
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