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 masculine virtue that feminism threatened to extinguish. He gave speeches at tech conferences throughout the decade and was treated as a prophet. The tech executives who listened to those speeches and then funded campaigns against “political correctness” were early versions of what Silicon Valley would become.

The ideological cluster that now dominates the most politically active corner of the tech industry is called TESCREAL, which stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. This rather awkward name was coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru to describe a cluster of beliefs that are often found together and reinforce each other.

The core claim is that humanity is approaching artificial general intelligence, and this will be either the best or worst development in history, depending on who controls it. From this claim follows an unusual politics. Longtermism holds that the most important thing a person can do is ensure the long-run future of civilization. That future potentially involves trillions of humans spread across the universe, which means that any policy that causes harm now but increases the probability of that science fiction future is justified.

According to this reasoning, democratic institutions are a liability. They are too slow, too responsive to short-term preferences, and too controlled by people who do not share the vision. According to TESCREAL’s advocates, people who do share that vision should not be constrained by those institutions.

Peter Thiel is the clearest (and ugliest) example of what this politics looks like in practice. In Zero to One, Thiel argued that competition is for losers and that the goal of a startup is to create a monopoly. In a 2009 essay for a libertarian magazine, he wrote that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and that the extension of voting rights to women had made this worse.

He funded Yarvin’s writing through grants channeled via a nonprofit. He funded JD Vance’s rise from a struggling podcaster to the Vice President of the United States. He funded a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan that destroyed the media company Gawker—a company that had, among other things, published unflattering reports about Thiel. These are not the separate hobbyist interests of an eccentric billionaire. They are the consistent application of a single worldview: democratic institutions are an obstacle to the people who should be running things, and the people who should be running things are people like Peter Thiel.

More recently, Thiel has been giving invitation-only lectures about the Antichrist, but he is not alone in having wandered into the weeds. In October 2023, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, published a “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that listed the intellectual heroes of the movement. Among them was F.T. Marinetti, the Italian futurist who wrote in 1909 that war is “the world’s only hygiene” and that civilization should be cleansed of feminism, democracy, and weakness. Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto directly influenced Benito Mussolini, the founder of Fascism; Andreessen’s citation was presumably not accidental.

Andreessen’s manifesto attacked anyone who thought technology should be regulated, that its risks should be weighed against its benefits, or that workers and communities affected by technological change should have a say in it. It was published by one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, despite having the intellectual depth and writing style of something a freshman would throw together in a caffeine-fueled frenzy after binge-listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast.

The manifesto also listed among its “patron saints” Nick Land, a British philosopher whose work is the intellectual foundation of the neoreaction movement that argues democracy, equality, and human rights are mistakes that must be reversed if civilization is to progress. Land’s followers take pains to distinguish their preferred governance structure (corporations rather than nation-states) from conventional fascism; the distinction is less comforting than they seem to think it is.

These politics do not stay inside the United States. In Brazil in 2022 and 2023, Musk’s platform X amplified supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro before and after an election Bolsonaro lost. When the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered X to block accounts that were inciting violence and spreading disinformation, Musk refused. He complied only after the court threatened to block the platform entirely and fine its Brazilian executives personally. Musk framed the court’s demand as censorship, clearly believing that wealth put him above the law.

In India, Meta’s platforms have amplifyied Hindu nationalist content that incites violence against Muslim communities, while consistently applying content moderation more aggressively to criticism of the governing BJP party than to nationalist propaganda. These decisions about what to amplify, what to suppress, and whose laws to follow have a direct impact on whether democratic institutions survive.

Corey Robin’s history of reactionary politics argues that reactionary movements consistently emerge from newly-powerful economic groups who feel that existing social arrangements threaten their position. They are not nostalgic in the sense of wanting to restore the past. They want to restore a hierarchy in which their own power is unchallenged, dressed in new language suited to new circumstances.

The TESCREAL billionaires fit this pattern precisely. Their argument is not that the old aristocracy was better than democracy; it is that they, and they alone, can lead us into a brighter future. Every authoritarian movement tells this story; what makes their version distinctive the fact that much of the world’s communication takes place through platforms they control.

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Andreessen2023

Marc Andreessen: “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen Horowitz, 2023.

Robin2018

Corey Robin: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Oxford University Press, 2018, 9780190692001.

Thiel2014

Peter Thiel and Blake Masters: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business, 2014, 9780804139298.

TorresGebru2023

Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru: “TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence.” First Monday, 29(4), 2024, 10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636.