Why Are They Doing It?

Why are the super-wealthy tech-elite working to imprison humanity in a totalizing control system instead of using their power for the good?

Last night I watched this disturbing, depressing, must-watch (and must-share with everyone you know) video on Palantir with a friend:

The video, featuring a brave whistleblower, reveals what DOGE is doing and what the obvious purpose of the whole operation is: Working with the data stolen by DOGE, Palantir is building a new “operating system” for an AI-based government able to control all of us through seamless integration of our personal data on one platform. This is, in fact, the all-seeing “Deep State” which the MAGA faithful dreaded.

While watching this, I had what seemed a helpful flash of insight…

I have struggled to understand why the tech broligarchs decided to embark on this tech-fascist project to overtake our government from the inside. After all, such a project could backfire on them and eventually destroy them. As The Atlantic recently documented, the Nazi regime did not end well for many German financiers and CEOs who signed on to it. Many were eventually executed. We now see Tesla, for instance, in free fall, having lost 71% of its value in a few months. Many of the tech-feudal elite (although not Peter Thiel, the principle architect) were on the side of the Democrats — or at least democracy — until recently.

These are people who maximally benefited from the “rules-based order” of Neoliberalism that Trump and Project 2025 is dismantling. All of their wealth and privilege derive from an absurd amount of government largesse. As Ben Tarnoff writes in Internet for the People, the government took the Internet, which was built by taxpayer money, and gave it over to private companies with no reciprocal obligations required of those companies. The catastrophic Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave the major tech platforms freedom from copyright laws, allowing them to rip off content creators and traditional media for their benefit.

By supporting Trump, the tech broligarchs — Elon Musk, Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, David Sacks, and their cronies — root for the destruction of the government’s funding of science and research in many areas including technology. They root for the elite universities to be dismantled to fit a twisted ideology. They seek a reduction in social services for the poor and disadvantaged to give them tax breaks. Wearing their “Trump Was Right About Everything” MAGA hats, they seek to exacerbate racism, sexism, demonization of immigrations, and other despicable projects as long as it promises to extend their regime of control. They support the wrecking of the Constitution, which they believe constrains their “freedom.” They are happy to give Trump the power to deprive all of us of any rights — so he can throw anyone into foreign concentration camps for life, with no legal recourse, terrorizing people into submission. The game they are playing is a kind of inverted Lord of the Rings quest for total control over society, and they are addicted to it, enjoying it.

What seems clear, beyond any rational calculation, is that the tech broligarchs are pursuing this not out of any need, but for their entertainment: They enjoy playing a high-stakes, winner-take-all game on a global scale. As men in their fifties with jaded appetites after decades of getting whatever they want, they can only experience more of a thrill by upping the ante. Like any poor crack head or pathetic street junkie, they seek the dopamine hits that comes from working together with a transnational oligarchic mafia to build a techno-fascist planetary prison where they and their cronies get to do whatever they want while everyone else has to grovel and beg. They don’t give a flying shit if the ecological collapses, the majority of species die, while mass migrations and genocides erupt across the planet as a result of ecological overshoot. Let them eat software!

But even all of this will, ultimately, not satisfy them.

It will, eventually, only deepen their nihilistic existential wound. Fascism is a black hole that devours everything around it until it eventually collapses into itself once it has inflicted grotesque levels of damage and can no longer sustain itself. Pasolini’s dark masterpiece, Salo, based on the Marquis De Sade’s One Hundred Days of Sodom, reveals that a regime based on control and cruelty has no limit. Inevitably, it consumes itself.

What Trump offers to any influential person or major institution who seeks to maintain independence against him is a literal “devil’s bargain.” They can either face constant attacks and reprisals or, at any point, they can submit to him and “bend the knee.” Once he has their loyalty, he can demand more. We are seeing most of our institutions and public figures — “60 Minutes”, Bill Maher, white-shoe law firms, Columbia University — easily buckle and collapse, like seemingly imposing monuments made from plywood and Scotch Tape. To accede to Trump’s extortion racket is to give over your independence to a diabolical project that accelerates the destruction of the planet, choosing amoral collapse for short-term benefit.

Two nights ago, I was watching the demented spectacle of Pete Hegseth standing behind Trump and to the right of him as they announced some new, super-exciting futuristic fighter jet that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to manufacture. There is a massive rebellion underway at the Pentagon right now against Hegseth’s incompetence, with many resigning and others demanding his firing. Hegseth looked very uneasy standing there, like a little kid bully hiding behind his deadbeat dad. But for Trump, Hegseth’s fealty to him trumps all other issues. That was the point of the spectacle, as far as I could understand it.

I have also been trying to understand why there is such a hatred of liberals among the tech Fascists. As I wrote yesterday, Balaji Svrinivasan, who calls himself a “tech Zionist,” envisions zoning areas of cities like San Francisco — or building new “freedom cities” — for the “Grey Tribe” of tech fascists and the “Red Tribe,” forbidding people from the “Blue Tribe” to even enter these enclaves. This seems fully dystopian and a last step before internment and genocide of anyone who disagrees with you.

Meanwhile, in a series of bizarre talks and interviews, Thiel loves to present his convoluted thesis that the “Anti-Christ” is actually liberal humanism and any form of progressive society that offers social services to the poor, old, sick, and underprivileged.

Thiel is an odd kind of Christian: Not only because he is gay, but also because he is a hyper-rationalist control freak with zero empathy for people who don’t belong to his social milieu. I suppose that makes him a traditional Christian, like the imperialists and conquistadors of the past who believed God was on their side.

Thiel somehow has convinced himself that we must get rid of all forms of social welfare before the Messiah can return. This is now happening: For instance, HHS is planning to eliminate a national suicide hotline for LGBT youth. Perhaps these are kids like Thiel himself, long ago. The hotline gets over 2,000 calls a day. But Thiel needs more tax breaks, so kill it.

On a deeper level, my suspicion is that Thiel keeps talking about Anti-Christ because he guiltily wonders if he might be, in fact, the Anti-Christ. Similarly, Musk likes to identify with Satanic forces, calling himself “Dark Gothic MAGA.” He used an image of himself in Baphomet costume with an inverted cross on his chest as his profile picture on X, until recently. I admit I do put these guys high in the running for the role of Antichrist.

Anyway, my point is that if you have dedicated your life to amassing wealth, power and control through corporate structures and hyper-rational calculations, the ultimate — or at least next-level — thrill is extending that control across the planet as a whole, which means taking governments over from the inside. Sadly, I do not know how we interrupt this process at this late date. Most people are still detached and asleep. But I think it helps to understand how, for the techno-feudal elite, this is a pure power game. They can’t stop themselves because they are addicted to it.