Bruno’s Newsletter #3

It happened, most clearly, during Covid. Many of the same people that started the pandemic by calling for a scientific approach to public health ended up supporting all kinds of conspiracies about an organised betrayal of the nation and the need to overthrow the existing order. What happened? More recently, there have been a number of cases showing the dangerous liaisons between powerful people in Silicon Valley and “intellectuals for hire” whose job is to voice the forbidden thoughts they are too afraid to express in their own name.

To be sure, as you go down the food chain, you still find many people in the tech industry who take out their Adorno or Marcuse to read on the train commute, a phenomenon full of irony since those authors remain useful to understand what is happening with some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. In any case, emulation is such a powerful force in the tech industry that I fully expect the new ideas to generalise.

I confess to some puzzlement. It was easier for me to think Silicon Valley would be dominated by a bland kind of rationalism devoted to, well, solving problems, the way you look for bugs in lines of code. Sometimes it still sounds like that. And when it comes to the daytime work, it mostly sounds like that. The problem emerges when the technologists and venture capitalists turn their eyes to politics.

Here some serious pathologies quickly coalesce. First, many of these people only recently developed a taste for politics and political ideas. They have a great thirst for it, but the effect tends to be that of alcohol on an empty stomach. For many years or decades, the industry grew completely outside politics. For the first time, a new industry entirely based on science and knowledge rose to world domination without much need for political experience. When politics arrived at its doorstep, by means of greater political attention and regulation, it was necessary to develop an approach, even an ideology. The approach was that of the engineer who looks at political societies like physical entities subject to final, objective and reductive formulations designed for maximum control. It is easy to see how this story would conclude. When science is imported wholesale into the political realm, when the search for natural facts replaces the search for justice, the outcome is almost always catastrophic.

I have written in the past how the tech billionaire, more than any other type, is bound to capture the spirit of the age. In politics, particularly in America, we see already how many of the most common ideas about political leadership are being shaped or corrupted by the concept of the tech “founder.”