January 22, 2025

In Silicon Valley, and in US political life, the times are changing. Many have noted the incredible optics of this week’s presidential inauguration, where tech CEOs, in a display of solidarity, sat front row in the US Capitol Rotunda. Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg said Donald Trump’s reelection represents a “cultural tipping point.” Perhaps — but cultural explanations of surface phenomena (cancel culture, DEI, etc.) elide the material changes that have been gestating within the tech sector since well before the most recent presidential election. 

For the last fifty-some years, the “counter-culture libertarianism” of Silicon Valley — a belief that technological progress empowers individual freedom — was buoyed by a broader neoliberal climate of deregulation, free markets, and financialization. That political landscape is disappearing. With unparalleled power, Big Tech is reconstructing the entire system from the top down. Longheld assumptions about industrial organization, surplus value distribution, state coercion, and the usefulness of markets are up for renegotiation.

To chase new and ever more staggering heights of power, Silicon Valley is driving structural changes to the political regime of accumulation. It’s not simply that tech leaders are openly embracing reactionary and right-wing politics (though many are). It’s that they are seeking a change to the underlying system by which firms accumulate capital and wield power. All that to say: This is not business as usual.

To identify the nerve center of the new political order, we need to sketch, even if in rough shape, its emerging features. The observations below do not hold the answers to our predicament, but they offer lines of inquiry, directions, at most very tentative explanations. If they are correct, or even partly correct, they hold implications for how civil society engages on matters of “tech policy.” The challenge will be not only to understand the sociotechnical implications of ever more invasive technologies, but to make out the shape of the world being built by the tech oligarchs. 

The tech industry craves state power, not simply government influence. 

Others have astutely observed the coming merger between the tech industry and state power. For the tech elite, politics offers what overtapped markets can no longer guarantee: new returns. 

Theorizing a new stage of “political capitalism,” Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner have suggested that US firms are increasingly seeking returns “not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour, and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.” Corporate activity in the political arena is nothing new, of course, but it usually complements the fundamentals of companies’ business models. What emerges today is a picture where direct access to, and control of, government decisionmaking is the business model itself; the astronomical lobbying records set by the crypto industry are a telling sign. It’s political activity, rather than sound business management, that increasingly determines the rate of return on capital. Given the immediate proximity of the tech oligarchs to the Oval Office, we are looking at a project of economic power turned to political domination. 

The tech sector’s political objectives likely differ from the usual agenda of tech policy, e.g. technicalities of algorithmic accountability, privacy, civil rights compliance. Instead, they may constitute — contra the Valley’s libertarian bona fides — a rather robust fiscal program: to quote Riley and Brenner, “an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation — and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population.” 

For all the techno-austerity appeals to “government efficiency,” the tech industry’s real play is betting on massive federal intervention: to steer lucrative procurement contracts to their bids, to reward asset ownership over innovation, and most especially to prime the pump for dominant technology. The AI race between nations is a market maker. At a time of nationalist discord, the fusion of economic and political power is a means to engineer demand for GPUs, cloud computing, and data centers. 

Political authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug. 

If new accumulation opportunities reside in powerful governments, authoritarianism is a desirable (not merely tolerable) political arrangement. As the political theorists Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron understand in their Brexit analysis, it is a mistake to think of authoritarianism only as an aberration to the “rational” choice of liberal democracy. Authoritarianism is an affirmative choice made by those whose material interests are supported by such an arrangement. So what motivates the Valley’s increasing techno-authoritarianism? 

The simplest answer may be that authoritarianism offers a break from the existing state of affairs and a path to pursue new rights of data extraction and revenue generation. Silicon Valley is reaching the outer limits of the current regime’s usefulness; contemporary authoritarianism provides new degrees of individual glorification, collective negation, and attacks on the common good — all of which are conducive to profit. The erosion of liberty and social rights may not be the goal of all the tech libertarians, but it is a practical consequence of their project. 

Geopolitical competition unlocks new horizons of infrastructure financialization. 

Under a Silicon Valley-Washington alliance, the immediate future of technology policy lies in infrastructure. Not to be outdone by China’s rise, the Trump administration’s main tech concerns will revolve around US data centers, chip fabrication, and the sources of energy needed to power the technology stack. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman is correct when he writes that “infrastructure is destiny,” but not entirely for the reasons he thinks.

The push to build new tech infrastructure is unlocking new horizons of speculation. The newfound importance of energy and telecommunications infrastructures, on the level of national security priority, is already driving investment and financial speculation. One alternative asset manager has estimated the aggregate capital expenditure demands of “digital infrastructure” at $15-20 trillion over the next ten years. But as basic infrastructure becomes financialized, short-term investment returns take priority over the careful custodianship of public goods. Considering the exclusive nature of the private-equity asset class, an irony emerges: past the visible construction of the real assets (say, the data centers being erected across places like Ohio and Virginia), the ownership and control remain largely in the shadows, unaccountable to public demands. 

With the twin drives of military preparedness and private financial reward, industrial buildouts of tech and energy infrastructures stand to be almost entirely disconnected from people’s material needs. As the geographer Deborah Cowen has remarked, such infrastructure rollouts, yoked between private investment and the state, threaten “to harden a future of colonial governance, fossil fuels, and finance capital.” 

Cynicism about climate change is driving Silicon Valley’s new accumulation mode.

Finally, Silicon Valley’s new era may not be “about” climate, but it cannot be understood in climate’s absence. To be sure, tech leaders generally “believe the science” of climate change. Big Tech does not feature systematic climate denial. Instead, the core logic may be something closer to climate cynicism: capitalize on green tech where it’s profitable; reject political solutions that hinder growth; accumulate as much wealth as possible; and plan exclusive escape routes for when things really get bad. 

The tech kings may be better understood (sometimes literally) as people who are “out of this world,” a phrase coined by science and technology studies scholar Bruno Latour to describe those whose material interests are incompatible with political solutions to climate change. They have abandoned the possibility of foreclosing environmental collapse, except insofar as it provides new ways to build dynastic wealth. “For the first time,” Latour describes, “a large-scale movement no longer claims to address geopolitical realities seriously, but purports to put itself explicitly outside of all worldly constraints, literally offshore, like a tax haven.” 

The implications of this group — which also includes power players from the finance and energy industries — ascending to the highest echelon of US politics are clear. The results are playing out not only in fossil fuel production and environmental deregulation, but in an agenda to shelter the wealthy from the concerns of the masses. Going “out of this world” doesn’t only mean rocketing off to Mars; it means rejecting a shared existence. Politically, expect yawning inequality, escalating labor-management strife, fraying employment structures, and the importation of a culture of unaccountability into office. From the perspective of political ecology, the warming planet is shifting power arrangements in favor of the “out of this world” class, explaining why those who stand to profit from green tech advancements are partnering with a president who, once again, is withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement.

What we are witnessing today will have profound consequences for democracy, political institutions, and the role of civil society. Rather than prognosticate, now is the time to prepare our collective response.