‘I’m from the technocracy and I’m here to help’ – how tech bros are taking over the world
The influence of billionaire tech leaders on Donald Trump may only be an early glimpse of their real intentions – the end of the nation-state concept as we know it
When I first saw the photos of all of the tech broligarchy lined up behind Donald Trump on his inauguration day something struck me as off. I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me until now.
I realised they didn’t just look like very powerful attendees, they looked much more like very powerful shareholders in government – and unelected ones at that. We can see today where that power translates directly into US government policymaking with the reductions on certain tech tariffs from China.
Let’s look at what that means for Apple alone. With 90% of iPhones manufactured in China, Apple faced potential price increases of up to $3,500 per phone under the proposed 145% tariff. In 2024, US imports of smartphones from China were valued at $41.7bn while laptops were valued at $33.1bn.
The tariff exemption therefore translates into avoided costs of approximately $60bn annually for these two categories alone. And while Apple will have only a share of that benefit, it’s a staggering return for Tim Cook’s donation of $1m to Trump’s inaugural committee – which also marked Cook’s first time attending a presidential inauguration, despite his political views often differing from Trump’s policies.
The Technocracy movement
But it’s not only tech’s influence in policymaking areas such as tariffs that directly affect their bottom line, we need to think about their broader reach in the realm of geopolitics. Where did the ideas of making Canada the 51st State, or annexing Greenland actually emerge from? If there was a policy vacuum here it was neatly filled by none other than Elon Musk drawing on the ideas of his maternal grandfather Joshua Norman Haldeman.
Haldeman was a key proponent of the Technocracy movement which started in the early 1930s in the US and then spread to Canada. It proposed the creation of the Technate of America. This would do away with borders, merging the US, Canada, Mexico, Central America and Greenland into a single nation under a regime of engineers and technicians.
Sounds familiar, right? Its essential argument was that there was no room for politics in society and that engineers and scientists were best placed to decide what was best for citizens in terms of organising resources and society. In 2019 Musk tweeted on X, “Accelerating Starship development to build the Martian Technocracy”. Except now it looks like he is not waiting to do it on Mars, he’s doing it here in real time.
The idea of the futility of the nation state and of politics in favour of new technological frontiers is echoed in The sovereign individual published in 1997. This book examined the social, economic and political implications of the coming technology on society and particularly politics and governments.
Authors James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg – father of Jacob Rees-Mogg – wrote, “Representative democracy as it is now known will fade away to be replaced by the new democracy of choice in the cybermarketplace. If our deductions are correct the politics of the next century will be much more varied and less important than that to which we have become accustomed. The 20th century nation-state will starve to death as its tax revenues decline,” Or, as Mark Zuckerberg puts it, “Companies not countries”.
The authors also predicted the impact of coming technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) when they wrote, “Lifetime employment will disappear as jobs increasingly become tasks or piece work rather than positions within an organisation. New survival strategies will evolve involving greater concentration on the development of leisure skills, sports abilities as well as providing services to the growing numbers of sovereign individuals as income inequality within jurisdictions rises.”
Bypassing money
The tome has had a substantial impact in Silicon Valley with Rees-Mogg travelling there more than a decade after the book’s publication to discuss it with students at Stanford University.
In 2014, PayPal founder and Trump advisor Peter Thiel told Forbes magazine that The sovereign individual had influenced him more than any other book.
Indeed, in recently republished versions of the book Thiel has provided a new foreword. And Thiel’s investments align with these principles where he believes that cryptocurrency ventures will bypass traditional monetary systems.
Expect further policy reach in the future in the provision of universal basic income (UBI), which many of these tech bros are very keen on. They understand more than most how many professions are under threat and how many people will be left without work. What are people to do when their labour is no longer required?
Perhaps they will spend their time in the fantasy worlds created by technologists, doomscrolling endlessly on Insta and other platforms while being paid by the government via UBI. This is what the author Jonathan Taplin tackles in his book The end of reality when he says “That is my greatest fear: that enchanted by the magic of the Technocrats’ immutable money, infinite frontiers, eternal life we will sleep through a right-wing revolution and wake up to find our democracy gone and our children being turned into Meta cyborgs”.
And if you think having Trump as President of the United States with Elon Musk as his sidekick is a nightmare, ponder if you will the dystopian prospect of Mark Zuckerberg running for the highest office.
Can you imagine the data he has amassed that could be used to further his political ambitions? What opponents might be suppressed or compromised? Yet as described in Sarah Wynn-Williams recent book Careless people, Zuckerberg has already paved the way for his political ambitions from as far back as 2017 when he finally realised how important Facebook was in the election of Donald Trump.
In her insider account, Wynn-Williams wrote, “He also had Facebook’s board approve a new stock structure that would allow him to run for office. The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission expressly allows Mark Zuckerberg to leave Facebook for up to two years without losing control of the company if his absence is ‘in connection with his serving in a government position or office’.”
Destroying democracy
These are not benign actors, scrappy startup founders who move fast and break things – they share world views that are destroying our democracies as we know it. Yet politicians are in thrall to the power that these men yield.
We may already be existing in the new technocracy for our times. They already decide how and when we should use their products, removing our choice and agency – consider the recent inclusion of Meta AI into WhatsApp, which you cannot turn off.
Ronald Reagan once said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” So if you hear, “I’m from the technocracy and I’m here to help,” you won’t be surprised if it’s our new form of government.
