Yesterday I asked, “What if the TechBros are right?”
There’s a lot I didn’t ask. It’s time to continue the discussion. (The picture is from the same input I gave ChatGPT yesterday, only from Perplexity.)
Central to the idea of the TechBros being right is the idea of abundance. Men have lived in a world of scarcity since civilization began. Scarcity is how we set prices and create profit. But scarcity is disappearing in our time.
The War Against Oil is being won. Harvesting the power of the Sun and the wind is now cheaper and easier than bringing fuel up from the ground and burning it. Creating more power just means manufacturing more turbines, more solar panels, more batteries, both large and small, and building networks around them. The enormous hunger for electric power created by AI abundance is obscuring this reality and building markets for more expensive power sources. But it’s not changing the equation.
If the TechBros are right, if technology soon delivers enough mental acumen and willing labor to go around, the question becomes how we distribute that abundance. What’s its purpose?
We answer that through politics.
The TechBros view this the way labor leader Samuel Gompers did, more than a century ago. “More.” They want more. More money, more power, more control over society for longer.
To do that they want to become society’s sole authority, the only source of legitimacy, and truth. To do that they’re systematically tearing down other sources of truth, and the ability of ordinary people to search for it.
They’re destroying American leadership for their own purposes.
Ultimate Authority
The TechBros and this Administration seek to replace democracy with a new feudalism. We’re not just talking about going back to the 1950s here, or even the 19th century. We’re talking about overthrowing the entire enlightenment, all the way back to Spinoza in the 17th century.
But we know how this ends. If reform fails, revolution follows. Destroying the elasticity of society, tearing down the structures that enable adaptation to change, for capitalism alone to flourish, is a recipe for disaster.
The TechBros’ authority springs from software, from money, from a government monopoly on violence installed by the current Administration. All that can happen here, it is happening here, we allowed it to happen here and endorsed it happening here. We did it for the same reason Amsterdamers endorsed replacing de Witt’s republic with the monarchies of England and France.
We did it because we fear ourselves just as they fear one another. Accomplishing anything in this life means overcoming that first fear. Progress demands overcoming the second fear, of uniting with others in search of common purpose. The TechBros are small, fearful men, despite their wealth, despite their power. Their avatar, Trump, resembles them in no small part.
This is why the TechBros won’t have it all their own way. When technology becomes politics, and politics becomes power, multiple power centers arise. China and its governing model will be heard from. So will India, and so will Europe. Other powers, like Japan, the Saudis, and the global south, will be making alliances, and building the same abundance as the TechBros. The result won’t be determined by the minute advantages of one program or another, but by the power of competing governments and systems.
It’s going to be a bumpy night.
