Is Silicon Valley Turning Fascist?

04/03/25 • 37 min

Silicon Valley’s traditionally Democratic tech leaders are turning toward President Donald Trump, but are the reasons as straightforward as lower taxes and favorable regulations? Perhaps not, if we consider the influence of a convoluted political philosophy called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Washington and Silicon Valley power players, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, have all cited the philosophy’s ideas and one of its leading developers, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin was reportedly present at Trump’s inaugural gala as an informal guest of honor.

In a nutshell, Dark Enlightenment rejects liberal democracy as an outdated software system incompatible with freedom and progress. Instead, it argues for breaking up the nation-state into smaller authoritarian city-states, which Yarvin calls “patchworks.” These patchworks will be controlled by tech corporations and run by CEOs. The theory is attached to another idea called accelerationism, which harnesses capitalism and technology to induce radical social change. In fact, Yarvin proposed a plan he called “RAGE”—or “Retire All Government Employees”—as far back as 2012.

So, how did this obscure and oxymoronically named philosophy reach the highest echelons of business and political power? Bethany and Luigi trace the theory from its origins to its practical manifestations in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Silicon Valley’s race to develop artificial intelligence, and the growing push for “Freedom Cities” unfettered from federal regulations. Are the people embracing Dark Enlightenment espousing its ideas because they genuinely believe it is the way forward for humanity? Or do they believe it because it's a way for them to make money? What does it mean for capitalism and democracy if the administration runs the federal government like a tech company?

Previous Episode

Why Trump Is Deregulating In The Wrong Way, with Sam Peltzman

In President Donald Trump's recent joint address to Congress, he said, "To unshackle our economy, I have directed that for every one new regulation, ten old regulations must be eliminated." Elon Musk, whom Trump has assigned to execute this vision, has argued that it is time to get rid of all regulations, or as Musk said, “regulations, basically, should be default gone.”

Joining Bethany and Luigi to discuss this intensified commitment to deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism is Sam Peltzman, perhaps the leading living expert on the economics of regulation. Peltzman is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and director emeritus of the Stigler Center, which sponsors this podcast and is named after his mentor, Nobel-Prize laureate George Stigler. Together, the three of them chart a historical perspective on regulation, from Stigler’s ideas of regulatory capture to the unintended consequences of deregulatory efforts over time to today’s “chainsaw” approach to gutting federal agencies. To understand the costs and benefits of regulation, they discuss how federal agencies have recently intervened in markets, if the private sector could not have accomplished these interventions more efficiently, and if these interventions did more harm than good. Their case studies include the funding, testing, and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, the regulation of cryptocurrencies, the management of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the role of the government in addressing climate change. In the process, they answer the trillion-dollar question: Are Trump's deregulation efforts actually efficient?

Episode Notes:

Revisit our recent episode with Federico Sturzenegger, the Argentinian Minister for State Transformation and Deregulation
Read the op-ed Bethany mentions writing in the wake of the financial crisis: Who Wants a 30-Year Mortgage?
At the end of the conversation with Peltzman, Luigi asks him about his recent academic papers tracing marriage and happiness. Read these papers on the Stigler Center’s Working Paper archives: The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness (2023) and The Anatomy of Marital Happiness (2025)

Next Episode

Profit or Purpose? OpenAI's $300 Billion Question, with Rose Chan Loui

All too often, capitalism is identified with the for-profit sector. However, one organizational form whose importance is often overlooked is nonprofits. Roughly 4% of the American economy, including most universities and hospital systems, are nonprofit.

One prominent nonprofit currently at the center of a raging debate is OpenAI, the $300 billion American artificial intelligence research organization best known for developing ChatGPT. Founded in 2015 as a donation-based nonprofit with a mission to build AI for humanity, it created a complex “hybrid capped profit” governance structure in 2019. Then, after a dramatic firing and re-hiring of CEO Sam Altman in 2023 (covered on an earlier episode of Capitalisn’t: “Who Controls AI?”), a new board of directors announced that achieving OpenAI’s mission would require far more capital than philanthropic donations could provide and initiated a process to transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation. This process has been fraught with corporate drama, including one early OpenAI investor, Elon Musk, filing a lawsuit to stop the process and launching a $97.4 billion unsolicited bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit arm.

Beyond the staggering valuation numbers at stake here–not to mention OpenAI’s open pursuit of profits over the public good–are complicated legal and philosophical questions. Namely, what happens when corporate leaders violate the founding purpose of a firm? To discuss, Luigi and Bethany are joined by Rose Chan Loui, the founding executive director of the Lowell Milken Center on Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA Law and co-author of the paper "Board Control of a Charity’s Subsidiaries: The Saga of OpenAI.” Is OpenAI a “textbook case of altruism vs. greed,” as the judge overseeing the case declared? Is AI for everyone, or only for investors? Together, they discuss how money can distort purpose and philanthropy, precedents for this case, where it might go next, and how it may shape the future of capitalism itself.

Show Notes:

Read extensive coverage of the Musk-OpenAI lawsuit on ProMarket, including Luigi’s article from March 2024: “Why Musk Is Right About OpenAI.”

Guest Disclosure (provided to The Conversation for an op-ed on the case): The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article. They have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.