Silicon Valley Leaders Cast Their Lot With Donald Trump

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In the past week, multiple Silicon Valley billionaires announced endorsements of former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump. To dig a bit deeper into their motivations to support Trump and his new running mate, Ohio Senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance, I invited on three sharp observers of politics and technology, including:

• Henry Farrell, a professor of the international affairs and democracy at Johns Hopkins University and the recent co-author with Abraham Newman of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
• Elizabeth Spiers, a writer and digital strategist and contributing writer for the New York Times, and co-host the Slate Money Podcast.
• Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Henry Farrell:

I'm Henry Farrell. I am a professor of international affairs and democracy at Johns Hopkins University and the recent co-author with Abraham Newman of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

Elizabeth Spiers:

My name is Elizabeth Spiers. I am a writer and digital strategist and contributing writer for the New York Times, and I co-host the Slate Money Podcast.

Dave Karpf:

Dave Karpf. I'm an associate professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs.

Justin Hendrix:

I've invited you all here to talk about some of the phenomena we've seen over the last several days. Silicon Valley's tilt towards Trump and its implicit support for his MAGA agenda, including an hour and a half long podcast discussion amongst Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, when they laid out their case for why they are joining the MAGA movement or endorsing Donald Trump. And then of course, Elon Musk's notable endorsement of the former president following the assassination attempt on him on last Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.

And I just wanted to start with perhaps a quote from Ben Horowitz, which I found to be extraordinary, this kind of idea of conflating the American interest with the interest of Andreessen and Horowitz. Horowitz kind of said, why are we doing this? The future of our business, the future of technology, new technology and the future of America is literally at stake. So in other words, the fate of the entire nation is conflated with the profitability of his investment portfolio. Dave, I want to start with you. You've been following these things for many years, looking at the history of Silicon Valley's interactions with politics and its visions of the future and the ways that those visions are freighted with politics. What do you make of this most recent set of activities?

Dave Karpf:

I think it is noteworthy and not entirely surprising that Andreessen and Horowitz who made their millions, made their billions in a regulatory system that mostly just clapped for them and helped out wherever it could, has looked at the past four years where they have been rebuilding the ... Or three and a half years where they've been rebuilding the regulatory state and asking questions like, "Is your technology a scam? And hey, isn't that an unregistered security? You can't do that." It turns out that their investment portfolio doesn't do very well in that context.

If you listen to their podcast, it is very clear that the two of them are mad at Biden administration because the Biden administration didn't help crypto succeed. Crypto turned out to be a scam, and that is somebody else's fault apparently. And I guess it's the government's fault. And since Donald Trump has just injected into the Republican Party platform, "Yes, we will do whatever the crypto bros want," the crypto bros are now handing him hundreds of millions of dollars. I think we should understand this on the one level as every industry tries to buy into politics to get good policy for itself. But to me, everything else that they're putting on top of that, the sort of veneer of philosophy of we can only have a future if our investment portfolio does well, that's just them trying to sound like thought leaders when really what they want is a helping hand from the government, or at least it's staying out of their way.

Justin Hendrix:

Henry, I'll come to you. You just noted the other day on a certain alternative social media site to the one that Elon Musk operates, that your view is that the driving force is the deeply held belief that entrepreneurial disruption is the sole and only engine of human progress. And then anything that at all impedes, it is the enemy. Seems like what we're seeing from these gentlemen.

Henry Farrell:

Yes, and I think I slightly, only very slightly disagree with Dave here in that I think that a lot of this does involve the fact that there are huge amounts of money at stake. A lot of what Andreessen Horowitz has been talking about with their “little tech agenda” is really just very straightforward lobbying. But I do think that the ideas and the notion of the entrepreneur as hero is something that is really important in driving this debate. So I don't think that this is ... Bluntly put, I do not think that this is bullshit that Andreessen and Horowitz are coming up with in order to convince the world while not being convinced themselves. I think that this feeds in a certain sense back into what Dave was saying a little while ago about how these are people who have been used to decades, for decades to adulation for being the people who are declaring the future, who are bringing the future to us, and now they're finding themselves in a world where they are not able to get that.

One of the most interesting aspects I thought of the Andreessen Horowitz interview that they put out was how sad they were the Biden administration senior officials were not observed jumping to talk to them. Jake Sullivan has talked to me and Gina Raimondo has talked to me, why can't we talk to these other people? And they were genuinely, clearly quite hurt, quite upset, felt that they were not in a certain sense being taken seriously and that this broader agenda was not being taken seriously. So I think that if you want to look at this, certainly there's a lot which is about how the money flows are at stake. Certainly there is a lot about the extremely dubious political economy of crypto, but there's also this fundamental heroic myth that I think is at stake of entrepreneurialism as being this force, this incredibly disruptive force, which is a profound driver of progress, and anyone who gets in the way of this is really an enemy.

So I felt thought that one of the most revealing parts of Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto was where he says more or less that anybody who stops AI from being developed or who impedes AI from being developed is effectively guilty of murder. You are murdering all of the people who otherwise would've lived if it were not for AI. And I think that there is a very interesting ideology. Balaji Srinivasan who of course Elizabeth has much greater understanding of the do is somebody who also has some very interesting things to say in this vein. But I really think you want to look not just to the money, but to the ideological force that in a certain sense gives you a belief that profit-making is actually the single best thing you can do for the future of humanity.

Justin Hendrix:

Let's bring you in Elizabeth. You wrote in the New York Times about Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto when it was published last year. You wrote, "In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business, but keepers of the social order unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels, enemies. Social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics to name a view."

Elizabeth Spiers:

Yeah, my view is a lot darker. I think Horowitz and Andreessen and Musk to a large extent are really just, I think becoming more public with what their views have always been. A lot of them adhere to a kind of neo-reactionary-ism where they want to remake the entire social structure and they view the political structure as just one aspect of that. So it makes sense that in particular they would use a justification that really centers on crypto. A lot of the neo-reactionary movement is really rooted in the idea that we should be able to, from the ground up, build a different kind of nation-state run essentially in a way that really values technology possibly as the linchpin of what determines everything else. And it's not, as Peter Thiel would say, "Incompatible with democracy."

So to me, it makes total sense that they would gravitate toward Trump. I'm not sure what the strategic value is for them in being this public about it, but if you really believe that ... If you're an accelerationist who believes that the best way to get this sort of techno-utopia that they're talking about is to destroy existing government structures and then replace it with something else, Donald Trump is your candidate there. And I don't think it's much more sophisticated than that, to be honest.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, let me ask you just to expand a little bit on these neo-reactionaries and on this sort of, we might call it the form of intellectual foment that's been going on in the Valley for some time. Who are the other characters that are involved here? Who else do you think is important for the listener to know about? What are the ideas that you think have come together in this particular formulation?

Elizabeth Spiers:

There are two thinkers in particular, and I use the word thinker lightly, but they're very influential for Andreessen, Horowitz and Musk. And one is Nick Land who's a sort of philosopher. There are people who believe that his writings and the things that he says are largely performance art. I'm not sure they are. And then the other person is Curtis Yarvin who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug on the internet but is increasingly known as himself because he has the ear of Peter Thiel and a lot of the people that we're talking about. In fact, Peter Thiel has funded some of the things that he does. And Yarvin's idea is that he would prefer a system that's essentially a neo-feudalistic system where a CEO is the kind of monarch of the entire, state determines the social order, all those things. And it's important to note that this is also part of what J.D. Vance believes that I think people are just learning about because now that he's the vice presidential nominee, and Thiel of course is funding Vance as well.

I think some of these ideas, my sort of snarky take on this is that too many of these people are too dismissive of the liberal arts and therefore never took philosophy or history or basic political thought. And so some of these things are just attractive to them because this is, as adults, they began thinking about these things in a more systemic way, partly because a lot of these people now have a lot of money and time and deep conviction that their thought process is superior to everyone else's or they would not be wealthy.

But where it really weaves into American politics is if you look at what the neo-reactionaries believe, they don't believe in democracy fundamentally. They are all for a society run entirely by the ruling class, which they assume they would be part of. If you read some of the neo-reactionary literature, one of the sort of amazing things that was glaring to me the first time I encountered it was just that the built-in assumption of the people who are the most excited about this is that in this neo-feudalism system, they would not be the serfs. They literally can't fathom a scenario where that's true. But if you understand their aims is to basically create this techno utopian system that is unlike what we have now, and it would make sense that crypto, first of all is part of that because you're talking about a currency that exists outside the current nation-state framework and our global currency system.

And I think that was always the dream for it. Peter Thiel initially described PayPal that way. He thought that they were going to create a currency that doesn't exist now, and they just fell backwards into an actual business model when one of their executives realized that you could use PayPal for eBay vendors, and that's how they ended up actually being successful. But their original view was more like crypto.

Dave Karpf:

The thing I want to tag onto this, because I do agree with Henry that this is a real worldview here. The reason why I tend to look at the resource flows is that yes, it's a worldview, but this is not a worldview of particularly bright or interesting people. If Marc Andreessen was coming up through tech in 1975, or if he was coming up through tech in 2015, he would not be Marc Andreessen. He is Marc Andreessen because he happened to be working in a computer lab a couple of years after the World Wide Web had been developed, but before there was a browser, and he developed the browser first, and Jim Clark found him and said, "Great, let's build a business." And they built Netscape. That's where his original millions come from. And ever since then, he's had an okay track record of investing in companies that he and his buddies make work by often selling those companies to each other, even though those companies don't always actually make money in the open market, and they've been able to cycle money in through that, not get taxed on it and get more money.

We need to care about these people because of how rich they are. But I think about Elon Musk. Elon Musk, one of his biggest influences is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And if you read him ... Anytime you talk about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that's not a very complicated book, but he didn't get it. He has a worldview, but he's also really dim in an awful lot of ways. And if he was a single-digit billionaire instead of a triple-digit billionaire, I would just not care about him. I agree, we should pay attention to Curtis Yarvin since he has their ear and he believes ridiculous and dangerous things. But also Curtis Yarvin is not an impressive intellect. He's just a guy who blogs wild things that rich people like.

Elizabeth Spiers:

Yeah. And they largely like it because in these narratives, the rich people are both morally correct and they retain their power no matter what.

Dave Karpf:

Yeah ... What they want to hear. It's not that complicated.

Elizabeth Spiers:

Yeah. Your point though about how they make their money is salient because there's one thing that I think if you have not worked in finance or early stage venture capital or early stage startups in particular, people don't really understand how much luck is involved and whether someone is successful. But you only have to be successful once to get incredible returns that make you astronomically wealthy for the rest of your life. And then once you have that much capital deploying it back into early stage venture capital, it's really hard to lose money doing that if you're spread across enough early stage companies that are also backed by other big VCs. You don't have to be a genius to keep increasing your capital base there.

And so especially Silicon Valley's very hermetic and cloistered, and it's easy for a lot of these guys to look at each other and say, "We're all here because we're geniuses" and pat each other on the back. And there's just a lot of self-reinforcing rhetoric that circulates in Silicon Valley, which is how somebody like Yarvin who would at best, I think be a somewhat interesting blogger in a different reality, has become something of a cult figure.

Dave Karpf:

Yeah. Peter Thiel, one of the things he's famous for is being the first investor in Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. If I remember correctly, he was also the first person given the opportunity to invest in Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Congrats. You pitched really well there. This is not somebody who showed some grand brilliance and found a thing that nobody else noticed. He just got the first pick. And if you're in one of these big firms like the blue chip firms, you were offered an early in to all of the high popularity companies. Yeah, that's winning the game of life on easy mode. This does not mean that they are geniuses who have the world figured out. They just have so much wealth that we have to worry about when they have bad ideas.

Henry Farrell:

But I think that one of the things here that we're pushing together, these do not have to be good ideas in order to be important ideas. And I think that I completely concur. Curtis Yarvin is ... He's nearly unreadable. I've spent a lot of painful time reading through his stuff. This is partly if you've been of the internet for long enough back in the early blogosphere, he was one of the more trollish individuals in a bunch of conversations, but he is not particularly smart. I think Land is more intelligent, but is much, much weirder. I think if people actually read Nick Land and realized this is basically Marc Andreessen's software eating the world as a nightmarish H.P. Lovecraft type vision. Because more or less, his argument is because it is not a utopian vision, it is a dystopian vision in which dystopia is awesome, in which machines, they devour human individuality, they perhaps replace human beings in a world where Cthulhu is walking back down the timeline from the future and is basically gobbling up humanity, and this is fucking awesome.

One of the things that I think people do not understand, and I guess this is where I'm getting to, is how profoundly and deeply weird a lot of these ideas are and these ideas are ... I think they are a part of the business model. As Elizabeth said, the idea behind PayPal was indeed to try and create a world of being currency. And this was basically, I think people getting stoned and reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It's more or less, and sort of, Thiel says this quite explicitly and thinking that this is a profoundly awesome business plan and let's build on it.

So you have this weird concatenation of strange ideas of people who have a lot of luck. I don't think that ... I think that some people are in this world are extremely intelligent, but I think that the ways in which these things come together, this has created vast amounts of money, which of course these people still want to have a handle on, but they want to be respected as being great thinkers. They want to be respected as people who are thinking, who are shaping the world and who are effectively the visionaries. So I feel like these are people who have got fixated of the part of Dune, which is all about, they're riding on these sand worms into the city, smashing shit up, of sort of breaking up the shield and whatever. And now this is their vision of themselves. And they spent the last 10 or 15 or 20 years dealing with HR, dealing with all of this painfully, profoundly stupid, painful stuff you actually have to do if you want to run a business.

And they are yearning back for the old days, yearning for the ability to smash, to build up to creative destruction, and to be the heroes of their own story again. And they're finding themselves increasingly frustrated doing this. And so I do think that this is part of the driver that's pushing them on.

Dave Karpf:

The tech lash fits in here really well, because not only did they spend a decade dealing with HR. They also had this cluster of years where they were getting called before Congress to answer hard questions, to get yelled at throughout the 1990s and the '00s, what they were used to, what Silicon Valley was supposed to get from the rest of the world was adoration and clapping. The clapping stopped around 2017 and people started saying, "What the hell are you doing?" And they got real pissed about that. Three years ago, they weren't endorsing Trump, but they were saying, and Jason Horowitz had, I think it was two summers ago, they tried to start their own media operation called The Future because they were just so mad that outlets like Wired weren't just covering them in adoration anymore. They were actually getting hard questions by journalists. They hated it.

Kara Swisher wasn't always being nice to them, so they wanted to do their own thing. It didn't work because they didn't know how to be journalists, so it all just fell apart. But they've been splashing around for several years now throughout the Biden administration just throwing a tantrum. And some of that is because they had to deal with the realities of how do you govern? But some of it is they stopped being clapped for, and they believe that the moral order of the universe is they're supposed to be judged on their intentions, not on their results.

Elizabeth Spiers:

I think it actually predates ... It goes back further than that. I think when journalists first started covering Silicon Valley, which they weren't for a long time in the 20th century because the Valley was not a center of power the way it is now, they were just unaccustomed to being covered at all, except in trade press. And trade press tends to be laudatory and largely focuses on transactional stuff and regular press doesn't. I started a site called BetaBeat when I was at the Observer, and it was covering tech in Silicon Alley, which is, I think Silicon Alley companies are a little bit more used to being covered by virtue of the fact that they're in New York. But I remember a venture capitalist, a fairly prominent person who the first time we did a negative story said, "You just tanked your entire site. Nobody's going to talk to you anymore." And I said, "Are you kidding? We got a million new tips when we did that."

They have a sort of weird understanding of how media functions in the first place, and they even have a sort of paradigm for this. They call it The Cathedral, and it's a combination of the academic sector and media and anything else the tech bros think dominates the discourse and determines what people think. But in this narrative, me, a journalist, I have more capacity to dictate what other people believed than some of these billionaires. And this is the kind of argument that should be obvious to anybody with more than two brain cells. But again, this environment is so insular, and it has to be said, a little paranoid, this theory seems attractive because then if journalists are part of The Cathedral and they're malicious and they want to build a socialist or Marxist structure around everything, then that sort of means that these billionaires are victims. They're on the receiving end of injustice per Dave's point, it's an attractive theory for them, but I just find it ridiculous.

Justin Hendrix:

Let's talk about J.D. Vance for a moment. There's a lot of folks this week are waking up to who J.D. Vance is. A lot of folks are probably raising out to buy an old secondhand copy of Hillbilly Elegy, but he to some extent, I think has been held out as the confluence of this Trumpian economic populism and Silicon Valley interest himself, a former venture capitalist as we've already noted. Is there anything real about this confluence or is this truly just a kind of marriage of ideas in the moment that's mostly convenience to sets of people who want to break things apart?

Dave Karpf:

You can look at it as a matter of ideas or a matter of people. I think either way we have to take this seriously. But just from the people perspective, this guy was a protégé of Peter Thiel. This guy comes out of venture capital. I think his first VC firm was funded by Marc Andreessen. So in that sense, I think the question of who is J.D. Vance, the answer historically has been whoever the people in power want him to be. This is a guy who has molded himself in the direction of power at all times. And so his evolution is just chiefly him chasing where the wind blows. But that means that when the tech billionaire class says there's a set of things that we want, he's going to be a pretty strong avatar of that. First of all, because he knows them. He's going to answer their calls. He always has. That's where he comes from. And second of all, because they have an awful lot of power and we know that he will do whatever an awful lot of power wants him to do.

Elizabeth Spiers:

He fundamentally is aligned with them, and in most ways, there are even darker strains of ideology that all these people believe. Whenever you hear a tech guy talk about declining birth rates in the US, it's not just a dog whistle for misogyny and racism. You can draw those lines pretty quickly that they're anti-immigration, which would be if you really cared about the birth rate, you would want largely open borders, but not those kinds of babies. And you hear this rhetoric in Vance's speeches. We don't have to go back very far, probably the last three or four weeks to hear Vance spouting something that is really an alt-right line that you would find also on these neo-reactionary boards. And I'm not sure that Trump even is fully aware or his people are really fully aware of that aspect of it. I think they understand that he's a conduit to Silicon Valley billionaire money, and that's very important for them.

They also, I think because Trump's people tend to not be people who are from the places that J.D. Vance likes to say that he's from. They really buy his narrative that he grew up in a tiny town in Appalachia. He got out because he pulled himself up by the bootstraps, and everybody who's still there is there because they have bad judgment and they're bad character. And Justin, you can probably speak to this too. I read Hillbilly Elegy without knowing who Vance was initially, and I was excited to read it because I thought there aren't that many people who come out of Appalachia who really describe it where it looks recognizable to those of us who did grow up there. I grew up in fairly rural Alabama, and by the end of the book, I was ready to throw it against the wall.

And so I was pretty upset when it got the traction that it did, because now that's the narrative that people have of what Appalachians, and his narrative that they're basically responsible for their own poverty is particularly insidious, but very much in line with Republican policy. J.D. Vance is a sort of puzzle piece that fits into several different puzzles pretty well, and these parties don't have to actually fully understand how they fit together in order to have this synergy.

Henry Farrell:

Yeah, no, I think that's something which is really important, which is that everything ... We like to think about ideologies or at least academics do as being these clean, coherent things. And in fact, they're always messy. They're always the result of the kind of half-assed and wedging ideas together to try and build coalitions and wedging coalitions together around the ideas. And there's this weird mind morph and mind meld that builds up.

I think one other thing that we are likely to see if Vance and Trump win is the consolidation of a relationship between Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex. This is something that I think really has been happening. I've not seen as much good journalism and certainly not much academic research on this, but over the last few years we've seen a lot of people on the right in Silicon Valley really moving more and more to try and consolidate relations with the Pentagon. A lot of, Palantir obviously having been one of the early actors in this game, in part, I think bluntly because the Pentagon is willing to buy not particularly good software at a vast markup because it doesn't really know what it is doing a lot of the time. And now we've seen people like Palmer Luckey, others try to take advantage of the drone war revolution in order to try and build things up. So that is another, I think, interesting kind of quasi-ideological, quasi-financial structure that is being melded together around these politics.

Justin Hendrix:

Henry, I want to stay with you for a second on the implications of this conference, beyond just I suppose, the immediate politics. When you look at Silicon Valley's influence around the world and on questions around global tech policy or how AI may develop, what do you see with regard to just the implications for geopolitics of this strain of Silicon Valley politics coming to the board?

Henry Farrell:

It's really hard to say. I think that we're seeing some early signs of increased conflict between Europe and the US over Twitter. So a few days ago we saw the European Commission effectively saying that Twitter's approach to safety and moderation is bullshit. And in particular, calling out the way in which Twitter effectively gives blue checks to anybody who gives them, I think $8 a month and arguing that this fundamentally breaks with what a social media service should be doing, because it is saying that these people are certified. And in fact they're just ... The certification of literally their willingness to pay over a certain amount of money a month. We're going to see a lot of battles happening around that in European courts. And if we saw a future Trump administration, I think we would see a lot of very vigorous sort of pushback, of course, from Trump over this and pushback from the European Union, which is genuinely frightened about the ways in which social media actually does help to tend and to produce these tendencies towards democratic breakdown. So that's one aspect of this.

Another aspect is I think thinking through, if we see Silicon Valley really building up the drone warfare, this is clearly reshaping the ways in which war actually happens. There's a lot of power that is at stake here.

And one final thing, which again, not nearly enough attention, I think has been paid to, is the role that a different part of Silicon Valley here in particular Eric Smidt played in really setting the agenda for how it is that the United States thinks about AI right now. If you look at the United States policy towards China on AI, it's number one that you do not want to see China emerging as an AI power because this is going to be fundamentally deleterious to US interests. And on the other hand, it's a notion that semiconductors and access to particular high-powered semiconductors is the choke point that the United States can use in order to prevent China from doing this. And both of these, I think, are ideas that emerge from the Smidt extended universe. And this is another interesting and important set of connections between Silicon Valley and politics in Washington, DC that I think really has not gotten nearly enough attention because there's some pretty interesting stuff going on.

Dave Karpf:

Even if Biden gets reelected, we're seeing an assault by the courts on the administrative state, the ability to actually do regulations at all. That's going to matter for crypto, that's going to matter for AI. And part of why I think they are being so public now is this belief that they're seeing in the betting markets that Trump is a shoe in to win. And you want to be real nice to Trump because he is an authoritarian who's going to be nice to the people who are nice to him. From a narrow business sense, I get it. So if he does get elected, not only are we going to get more judges like Aileen Cannon who decide to do whatever they think Trump wants them to do, but we're also effectively going to be unable to regulate anything from an actual balls and strikes rule of law perspective. And instead it's just going to be the government helping out companies that the government thinks help them. That's definitely going to lead to more competition with China. There'll be competition with China over AI no matter what, but it will have a different texture to it.

The court cases against AI, the push from public policy scholars and from people who actually study this stuff to make sure that AI does not get misused in ways that cause deaths, harms. And I'm not talking about the robot apocalypse hit here or everyone being turned into paper clips. I'm talking about AI being used as a therapist that isn't good, and therefore we get more suicides because we shouldn't have replaced the therapists. We're talking about AI being in charge of service deliveries to people, and then it just doesn't work. And so they don't get their checks, they don't get their services.

That's a thing that happened a lot during the era of big data, which was only like a decade ago. We should expect an awful lot more of that if Trump gets elected and essentially, and he just runs the government the way he did last time, which was calling up ... Assuming that he knows a guy, calls up that guy and says, "You're in charge." And then fires the guy once he's corrupt and hires another guy. That treatment of AI and of crypto and all these other industries again, will be great for Andreessen and Horowitz's portfolio because he will listen to them and he will just give government contracts to all of their small companies. They'll make tons of money that they won't get taxed on. It'll be great for them personally. It's going to be a nightmare for all the rest of us though.

Henry Farrell:

One other thing I would add on top of that is that the relationship between crypto and US power is really complicated. There's been a lot of battles happening over the last 12 months with Binance and the Binance settlement being won where this crypto exchange was effectively forced to bring the feds in. Another has been the prosecution of Tornado Cash, which was a mixer service where the US Treasury basically said, "You cannot use a service that is sending billions of hijacked money to the North Korean state." And this caused huge fury and anger in the crypto community because it basically reaches into the way in which Ethereum works in some important ways. And so I think that we're going to see in a Trump administration, we're going to see a lot of push from people like Andreessen and Horowitz for more crypto all the way, dows are awesome, you've got to let the freak flag fly.

You're also going to see a lot of ferocious pushback within the US state because this is the fundamental basis. And here, I guess I am talking my book with Abe. This is the fundamental basis of US power is the capacity to actually control financial flows, to look at financial flows, and you cannot have the one and the other both at the same time. You cannot have a completely deregulated crypto ecosystem at the same time as you want the United States to be able to maintain power over global finance. And so I think there are going to be some pretty ferocious battles.

And I also suspect we could see a world if we saw Trump, I think US financial power is going to ... It's going to be very seriously endangered, partly because of crypto, partly because of what happens if we see a global crash again like we did in 2008, 2009. There's going to be no willingness by Trump to provide the kinds of swap lines that allow the world economy to survive going down the drain. I really think that people don't have nearly as much of an understanding as they ought to of how fragile the foundations of the US global power are to the kinds of things that we are almost certainly going to see, as Dave has said happening in the Trump administration.

Elizabeth Spiers:

These guys fundamentally do not understand how government works. Peter Thiel used to love to get up and say, "This agency is still using floppy disks." And yes, that is happening in some corners, but it's irrelevant to the idea that these agencies don't serve a purpose or the administrative state serves no purpose. And they don't understand that the government is slow and cumbersome in part because that lends itself to stability, it makes it harder to break, and they just imagine that there's a technocratic solution to everything. And if we break all of this, we'll just build something in its place, even though what we have now is not, I would say ideal, but it took a long time to build and to get where it is.

Dave Karpf:

So I've been doing all this research, reading old Wired magazines because that's what I did when I got tenure. There was a moment early in the George W. Bush administration, he gets elected, he comes in and he's all, "We're going to cut all the red tape and the government's going to get out of people's way." And one of the fights that he picked was with the National Institute of Standards and Technology just saying, "We're going to undercut this." And the Wired writers who were such proud libertarians, like tech libertarians throughout the 90s, you can see them all be like, "Wait, no, not that government. We really need that in particular because we need them to set standards that we all use. Otherwise, it's chaos." So there's this sort of weird moment like early 2001 where they all say, "No, we were kidding." I think there will be quite a bit of that.

I also want to note, even though this isn't directly on topic, but it's going to matter, the climate crisis will be getting worse over the next four years. We will have more hurricanes. We already have housing insurance markets throughout the South that are not up to the task and strained to the breaking point. If Trump and Vance get elected, not only will we not have the administrative state course because the courts, but we won't even have a government that is willing to participate in international treaties. They'll probably undercut the Inflation Reduction Act. All of that chaos on the one hand is going to lead Andreessen and Horowitz to say, "Yeah, we're all in on climate tech. Let's go, I don't know, create limitless clean energy. Maybe we can do that overnight." But all of that is going to make the realities of what government actually does so present for us in ways that end up being just a nightmare.

Elizabeth Spiers:

Also, AI and Bitcoin mining are horrific for the environment, that all of our is going to go directly to that.

Dave Karpf:

Yeah, not great at all.

Justin Hendrix:

I was shocked to read the almost direct word-for-word confluence between what the folks at Andreessen and Horowitz want, and the very few lines about tech that are in the Republican platform related to crypto. And of course that idea that we're going to secure the right of all Americans to mine Bitcoin as being a kind of part of the political platform struck me as very strange.

Elizabeth Spiers:

That's what the working class is demanding, Justin.

Dave Karpf:

Keep the old coal plans running so that we can mine Bitcoin off them.

Henry Farrell:

Yeah. I feel like we're in for a world, as Dave said, the problems, the polycrisis, as Adam Tooze has popularized the phrase of all of these intersecting problems is getting worse and worse, and we're in a world where we could well see this attitude by a Trump administration of let's get rid of government. Let's strip out all of the civil servants and the bureaucrats. This is something where very clearly Vance has learned very directly from Curtis Yarvin. He's cited how Curtis Yarvin is awesome with this idea of let's fire the bureaucrats on day one. So we're going to be in a world where we have all of these extraordinary problems and all of these imaginary solutions. Let's blockchain this. Let's turn loose the awesome power of the markets in order to solve this incredible screw-up that's happening where you can't get house insurance in Florida anymore.

And I guess if you wanted to be ‘a heighten the contradictions’ leftist, you could see this as being the prelude to people realizing what an absolute catastrophe and disaster this is. But you could see many other ways, and I think more plausible ways in which this could just make things even worse.

Justin Hendrix:

I think that may be a good place for us to end on that note of sincere pessimism, but I hope that perhaps we can come back together and talk about these things in future and certainly unpack the implications of this particular moment in time and this lurch towards Trump that we're seeing from the Silicon Valley billionaires. Elizabeth, Henry, Dave, thank you so much.

Elizabeth Spiers:

Thank you.

Dave Karpf:

Thanks.

Henry Farrell:

Thank you.