There’s a Threat to Democracy — But it’s not Trump
In the 19th Century, the Western World underwent a massive change, driven by the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution.
The very fundamentals of almost every aspect of society and how it functioned were changed by the introduction of machinery, factory work and mass manufacturing. People who had lived in small villages since the days of the Romans were suddenly uprooted and living in crowded slums in new industrial towns like Manchester. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, almost everyone had been agicultural workers. Now, work would involve mindless hours in Blake’s satanic mills. The nature of economics also changed with the introduction of banking and credit.
One of the last things to change was the nature of government, but it too ultimately succumbed to the needs of the new world that the Industrial Revolution had wrought. The power of the aristocracy was crushed, to be replaced by the power of the newly wealthy.
Now, in the 21st Century, we are undergoing yet another titanic technology-driven transformation. The old industrial world is rapidly being supplanted by a world of data. The wealthiest and most powerful companies in the world don’t make ships or cars or steel. In fact, they don’t make anything you can eat or wear or drive. They make nothing you can buy. Companies like Google or Facebook or Instgram or X (Twitter) are in the business of harvesting vast reams of your personal data, packaging it and selling it to advertisers and everyone else. This is what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as Surveillance Capitalism.
And, as the Industrial Revolution ulimately changed every aspect of society, so too now is the Data Revolution effecting the same transformation of our world — from how we spend our time (8 hours a day on screens); to how we work (sitting in front of computers or phones), to how our economy functions.
The last change is going to be how we govern ourselves. And that, I believe, is really what this upcoming election is all about.
Andy Grove, founder and first Chairman of Intel said, “tech companies move fast, three times faster than conventional companies. And conventional companies move three times faster than governments. So tech companies more nine times faster than governments.”
Listen to Elon Musk as he stumps and speaks now almost daily for Donald Trump. His speeches and his postings on his X site, with its 550 million users, are all about how ‘the government’ slows down his vision of business and the future.
Elon Musk: We need to cut the strings of overregulation! (in X)
He is not alone. Silicon Valley is filled with people who feel exactly as he does. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Ben Horowitz, partner in the VC firm Andresson-Horowitz explained why he, and so many of his friends in the valley are supporting Trump.
One of his partners at Andresson-Horowitz is blunt about the future that they envision. Balaji Srinivasin has written The Network State, a book in which he clearly outlines how a tech/algorithm driven government can and should supplant and replace old and tired and largely ineffective elective democracy.
Perhaps this is coming. Perhaps this is as inevitable as the satanic mills, the crowded tenements and the rise of populist governments were to the Industrial Revolution.
Reading Yuval Harari’s Nexus in conjunction with Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, one cannot help but be astonished at the incredible power that companies like Google or Facebook have; the vast reams of personal information gathered from everything from phones to Nest to Waz and so much more.
Then, when I see that JD Vance, who once compared Trump to Hitler and now refuses to say that he lost in 2020 has a long and deep relationship with Peter Thiel, another Silicon Valley powerhouse, I cannot help but wonder if we are not seeing something here that far transcends a mere choice between Trump and Harris. Maybe, just maybe, Trump is merely the stalking horse of Vance and his tech pals?
Watching the debate for US Senate in Texas between Ted Cruz and Colin Allred, I am continually astonished at how Cruz, and extremely intelligent man, can mindlessly repeat Trump’s lies. Why does he do this, after Trump’s attacks on Cruz, his father, his wife and everyone else associated with him. How many other politicians who once warned us about how dangerous and incompetent Trump was now fall at his feet.
What has Trump got on Cruz and Graham and so many others? Or maybe we should ask, what do Musk, Thiel, Horowitz and the other Silicon Valley titans have, as they have access to pretty much everything?
Asking for a friend.
