Technofascism

In July 2016, Peter Thiel walked onto the stage at the Republican National Convention and told the crowd three things. First: “I build things.” Second: “I’m proud to be gay.” Third: “I’m proud to be a Republican.” What he did not say was that he had spent years funding a blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin argued that democracy is a mistake and that the United States should be governed by an unelected, unaccountable CEO-like executive. Silicon Valley has always had a reactionary streak. In the 1990s, the technology industry’s favorite intellectual was George Gilder, who believed that entrepreneurs were the driving force of civilization and that feminism was a catastrophe. He wrote that the male breadwinner was the natural order of the household and that women in the workforce disrupted a social arrangement that had evolved over millennia. For Gilder, the entrepreneur was explicitly male, and his willingness to take risks was a specifically…