When tech CEOs are like grumpy ducklings

An interview with Le Grand Continent

[Picture courtesy of the Met, which has just made lots of art available in high res form for free]

A weekend bonus - a little while ago, Louis de Catheu interviewed me for Le Grand Continent, a European magazine of ideas. The interview - which focuses on Trump and Silicon Valley - is available in French, Italian and Spanish, but was actually conducted in English. So here is the original interview (very lightly edited for transcription mistakes and infelicities). If you read me, you’ll have seen some of these arguments before (but not the grumpy duckling comparison).

Louis de Catheu - Something that is quite striking with the second Trump administration is the part taken by the Tech Bros in his entourage and his coalition. To you, what are the causes of this new alignment between the MAGA movement and Silicon Valley active bosses?

Henry Farrell - There are a number of areas where they share common interests. One thing, which is always very important to remember, is that they have common enemies. Many people on the Tech right are very much opposed to some of the measures that the Biden administration was associated with.

The Tech right also harks back to a particular vision of the politics of technology. This line of thinking goes back through people like the authors of the The Sovereign Individual, building on notions from science fiction — Snow Crash and other science fiction dystopias. It more or less suggests: wouldn't it be incredible if we lived in a world in which we did not have to worry about government anymore?

That vision is very clearly part of the animating vision of Peter Thiel. You also see it in people like Balaji Srinivasan, who wrote a book called The Network State, which suggests that we are going to see a possible breakdown of government and currencies, and the replacement of these by a much less traditional political system organized around technology firms. This will be a new world order in which technology founders will effectively be treated almost as the God Kings of these micro communities. People would be able to move back and forth between these communities according to Albert Hirschman’s logic of exit.

I think that a pretty strong extreme right libertarian vision has always been a part of the Silicon Valley community — albeit until relatively recently a subordinated part.

The second thing that is important is a much more immediate set of political tensions, some of which are purely and simply due to people in the Silicon Valley right feeling that they did not get sufficient recognition from the Biden administration. For example, Elon Musk was not invited to the Electric Vehicles Summit in 2021, where people were congratulated on building electric vehicles. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have also complained that they were not able to get access to the decision makers — they were fobbed off with second level officials rather than talking to Biden himself and to other people in command. There's a feeling among Silicon Valley elites that they did not get the respect that they purportedly deserve.

The third thing is that there is an extreme hostility towards unions in Silicon Valley, which goes across the far right through to moderate left Democrat leaning people among the founders. The research of Neil Malhotra, David Broockman, and Gregory Ferenstein, suggests that in many ways Silicon Valley founders and funders are pretty left wing when it comes to a variety of social issues. They are more left wing than you might expect with respect to certain kinds of distributional issues, such as, being more favorable to basic income or to the distribution of welfare. But they are virulently hostile towards anybody who tries to tell them how to do their business. If you read Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen in the New York Times a couple of months ago, that comes through very clearly.

Opposition to woke is a significant part of the new way of thinking about things, but this is not because people have opposition to individual lifestyles, to people getting gender alteration surgery or any of these things. On principle, many people in Silicon Valley often tend to be radically libertarian when it comes to people's lifestyles. What they really objected to was the possibility that other people could tell them what they could or could not do to shape the workplace of their firms. These three forms of opposition helped to explain why you saw the Big Tech and Trump coming together.

So, they’re ideologically motivated ?

Yes, but that's not all. If you want to understand the glue that joins the two together right now, I think that you need to look beyond ideology.

The real glue at the moment has, on the one hand, fear as an important ingredient. It's very clear that the Trump administration is much more willing to intervene on behalf of its temporary friends and against its enemies than previous administrations have been.

On the other hand, there is a sense of self interest. For example, at the events in the Gulf a few weeks ago, you saw all of these Silicon Valley CEOs trailing behind Donald Trump, like little ducklings trailing after their mother duck — looking to see where they go next, or what they do next. You saw one grumpy little duckling, Elon Musk, who was not part of the main entourage, and was extremely upset because Sam Altman seemed to be getting all of mommy’s love.

The current blend of self-interest is probably more important than ideology, with both the desire to be cut into whatever deals are happening, and the fear that if you are not part of the core group, you're going to be cut out of them.

You just spoke about God Kings and the need for respect. That make me think about your writings on the Silicon Valley canon. Some founders in Silicon Valley seem to have very specific views on history, the great men and their own place in history.

When I said that there was a lack of respect, I think that this involves changes in the broader conversation. Over the last number of years, Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists have been treated with a significant degree of worship by the United States press — until around 2015-2016.

If Silicon Valley people wanted to pronounce on something, their grand statements were treated with enormous respect by the press. They had entourages, as if they were presidents. Mark Zuckerberg and other people were deemed by many to be world historical figures.

That, unsurprisingly changed the sense among Silicon Valley people about what their world historic role was. Here, one of the key essays for me is Marc Andreessen's piece, from 2011, called “Why Software is Eating the World,” which suggests that he and his colleagues are going to bring through a fundamental transformation in the way of things. They're going to replace all of these sclerotic, dying industries, these protective cartels, with a new vision, based on ruthlessness, on software and on efficiency — and this is going to be absolutely awesome.

Some people begin to think in these ways, and begin to read in some very interesting ways as well. When you talk to Silicon Valley people, you get the sense that they either read a lot or —which is in some ways nearly the same thing— they pretend to read a lot, because being well read is viewed as being part of the culture.

That is very different from 15 years ago. When my friend Aaron Swartz was alive and was still part of the debate, he used to be extremely grumpy about the lack of intellectual curiosity among Silicon Valley people. Now Silicon Valley people at least feel that they are obliged to pretend to read — and some of them actually do read. I think Patrick Collison is an example of somebody who actually does read and is in the world of ideas in some quite interesting ways, even if I personally would not agree with many of his arguments or his current politics.

I think that the reason why Silicon Valley leaders read is because they are looking for models of how to act in the world as great men. If you look at this so-called Silicon Valley reading list — which Collison gave out on Twitter/X in response to a conversation, claiming that these were not necessarily the books that he would recommend, but the books that he felt were a part of a so-called Silicon Valley canon — these books have a heavy preponderance of biographies of tech founders, but also feature a number of interesting biographies of other so-called great men.

Instead of Louis Napoleon, you have Robert Moses, with this famous book by Robert Caro, The Power Broker, which portrays Moses as a somewhat ambiguous character: who really made New York in the way that it is, who shoved his way through a lot of opposition to make things happen that need to happen; but on the other hand, also rode roughshod over a lot of local opposition.There clearly was a fair amount of self-interest and a fair amount of ego in his actions.

We're in a world now where Silicon Valley people really began to identify with the idea that they were great men. This is not to say that great men are perfect, but they are people with very large virtues — and very large flaws as well. Silicon Valley founders were going to be world historical colossuses, bestriding the stage, reshaping the world in their image. The appropriate emotions towards them could be terror, could be awe, could be worship, could be hatred, but could never be not taking them seriously.

Therefore one of the problems that Silicon Valley has had is people not taking them particularly seriously.

I do wonder what is going to happen to this after Elon Musk's failed experiment with DOGE, because that really was great man politics in the most fundamental sense— the idea that you could go into the federal government, that through tough, ruthless action, a small cadre of dedicated people could rip out the inefficiencies and transform the federal government over a period of months. Of course, that ended in miserable and abject failure. And I think that is going to have some interesting consequences in Silicon Valley.

Do you think that Musk's departure will be the end of the tech accelerationist influence and the DOGE efforts?

You can think about DOGE as trying to do two or three different things at once.

First of all, there's DOGE's official goal, which is to achieve efficiency in the federal government. Indeed, there were probably a couple of people attached to DOGE for whom that was actually their primary goal.

A second goal was to effectively eliminate large chunks of the federal government. Of course, if you look at where DOGE acted, very often it was acting in those parts of the federal government, which were left coded rather than conservative coded. It had a much harder time getting into the US military than it did into, for example, USAID or the US Institute of Peace or other such places, let alone the notoriously inefficient and bureaucratically unwieldy Department of Homeland Security.

Finally, you could argue that a significant part of DOGE and efforts associated with it involved Elon Musk looking to position his own people in places of power. There were many fights between Musk and Bessent and others over who should be in charge of which particular position.

The first part, the efficiency part, I think never really took off in any very serious way. Perhaps under different Republicans or under Democrats, you might begin to see that take off again seriously. I don't think that was ever really a serious part of the project, as opposed to an ideological justification for it.

The second part, trying to rip away large chunks of the US government, I think is going to continue because it does not just involve DOGE, but is also about the people associated with Project 2025.

The final part - Musk installing his own people into the government - is obviously now unlikely to succeed. A lot of people are probably not going to continue on in the same way, or they will be asked to sign different loyalty oaths than the one that they felt that they were signing when they first came in.

DOGE is going to continue in some way, but it will be much more aimed around the objectives of other people than Elon Musk.

Equally, I think that there is still going to be continued interaction between other Silicon Valley actors and Trump — in particular thanks to some of the crypto people, like David Sachs, so-called AI and crypto Tsar. We're going to see those people continuing to try and hustle and to mediate. J.D. Vance is the key interlocutor between the Silicon Valley right and the current administration.

At the end of the day, both the Silicon Valley right and the Trump administration see opportunities together. So I think we're going to see this continuing to happen, but this is not going to center on a single individual like Elon Musk.

Instead, it will be much more like the world that Trump feels comfortable with, in which there are various courtiers with their different desires and ambitions, vying for his favor. It really is like Louis Quatorze, with the Baron de whoever, who asks him, “can you possibly find some place for my idiot nephew in the government,” and he responds, “I'll be able to do this.” There are many different barons, who are competing for attention, and Trump and a couple of people around him are dispensing favors and playing people against each other.

My personal theory is that if you really want to understand the Trump administration, read the autobiography of Cardinal de Retz or similar people who worked in these courts. The modern equivalents don’t have titles of nobility - perhaps they might like to - but they are engaged in the same squalid intrigues based around personal advancement, sex, rivalry. All of these things are going to be part of the Trump administration in a way that they were not part of the Biden administration — which of course had its own rivalries, but they tend to be much more technocratic ones.

So the Silicon Valley right will still have an influence. What is the impact on the US government and Administration policies on technology?

There are a number of things happening that are important in this domain. It's quite different from the Biden administration.

The Biden administration was really dominated by ideas about AI safety. Some, such as Alondra Nelson, worried about the consequences of AI for society, and the radical disruptions it might bring. Then there were others who were more focused on national security.

They were more worried on the one hand about the issues of what AI would look like after AGI (artificial general intelligence) and what kind of risks that would involve, and were secondarily interested in making sure that if AGI happened, it would be US dominated AGI rather than Chinese dominated AGI.

We're now in a different world. It is very hard to say exactly how the Trump administration thinks about AI and AGI. It has not come out with any explicit documentation. But from what we can tell, this is much less of a coherent vision that the Biden administration had — whether you liked it or not — and much more a question of convergence between the interests of particular powerful companies and the national interest of the United States, which is defined in a somewhat flexible way.

The deals that were done in the Gulf a few weeks ago, or the apparent deal that has been done between the United States and China, which we have not seen the details of, suggest a much more flexible approach to AI. The United States still wants to be the country which really dominates the AI debate and discourse, but it also wants to take full advantage of the opportunities to do deals around AI, which will cement not simply US power, but also the power of particular people within the administration and of particular business interests which have strong connections with the administration.

We will see what will happen over the next few years, but I expect that there will not be much interest in AI safety. That is absolutely clear. The incentives will all be to let AI rip. We will see willingness to do deals on a bilateral basis with individual countries, to provide them with access to AI in exchange for concessions — which might be concessions towards US national security policy, but also be concessions towards well-connected US firms.

Throughout all of this we will see a perpetual opportunism in place of planning and strategy. I think that this is going to be a world of deal-making, rather than a world of the United States trying to fulfill a grand vision as it has in the past.

That goes together with a secondary set of questions, which are important for Europe as well: the platform economy.

It is clear from the last couple of weeks that the United States sees platform governance as a wedge that it can use to try to reshape places like the European Union, where the Digital Services Act and other such measures are intended to make it less easy for the extreme right and for various forms of disinformation associated with the extreme right to get embedded in the discourse. JD Vance and the State Department under Marco Rubio are making it clear that they are willing to punish Europe if it looks to reshape the platform economy in ways that Europeans might see as defending their particular model of democracy.

The US administration took aim at universities, the National Science Foundation: don’t you think it is weird given the influence of tech oligarchs? Isn’t it a major threat for Silicon Valley and its ecosystem?

Yes, and it is an interesting tension which may come to the fore more over time.

It's very clear that not only people who are on the moderate left side of the spectrum in Silicon Valley — such as Reid Hoffman, a well-known investor and was the founder of LinkedIn — but other people are extremely unhappy at the willingness and indeed the enthusiasm of the Trump administration to divest itself from investment in basic science. This is upsetting a lot of people in Silicon Valley.

Equally, while you've seen grumblings even from Elon Musk about this, you have not seen any organized resistance or willingness to say: we are going to take a stand on this. This perhaps resembles what is happening many other sectors of the business community. On the one hand, there is fear that if you criticize too strongly, you will be singled out and you will be punished for what you say. On the other hand, there is a belief that there are opportunities in the short term to take advantage of, and even if things look bad in the long term, you want to deliver your quarterly results and your quarterly results are going to look pretty bad if you are not part of this big deal that has been done in Qatar or Saudi Arabia or wherever, and your competitor is.

Many in Silicon Valley, who are not stupid, see that this is fundamentally a bad idea for the United States. But there is not, as of yet, any coherent opposition or willingness to do more than grumble on the sidelines. There is no real effort to try and push forward. Instead, they're interested in other things, like getting the GENIUS Act, this crypto bill through as quickly as they possibly can.

We spoke a lot about tech accelerationists, but there are other parts of the Trump coalition. What is your typology of the different kinds of Trumpists?

It depends on how deep you want to go, because of course there are many different factions, and the relationships between these factions are not particularly coherent or visible.

In a certain sense, there is less incentive for them to be coherent or visible because ideology comes second in the current administration. In previous administrations, it might be that you wanted to attach yourself to a particular ideological faction in order to achieve power. In this administration, I think it is more plausible that you want to attach yourself to a particular interest group, or to a concatenation of compatible interests, in order to achieve power.

Ideologies are important in explaining what people want to get, and also in explaining who is comfortable working with whom over the longer term. But in terms of short-term policy, as best as you can tell from the outside — and I am completely outside these debates, of course — the administration is really much more around these questions: are you a member of the right assemblage of interests? Then, as a secondary question: do you have the right ideology?

But if you look at ideologies, there clearly splits to be identified.

There are the Trad Caths or the traditional religious conservatives. There are perhaps some differences between Protestant fundamentalists and Catholics, albeit also a lot of shared interest. There's also a bunch of strong nationalists who are arguably a more important part of this, people represented by the ideas of Yoram Hazony and others who have argued for a return of the sovereign nation state.

You can also look at a smaller, but I think quite influential group of dark accelerationists, people who are really committed to a fundamental remaking of the world around the principles of AI and other things, which they see as being fundamentally incompatible with the continuation of democracy.

There's an industrial policy group. It unites people at the American Compass, and others who are interested in this, a couple of US senators such as Josh Hawley.

All of these different ideological groups are milling around. Many of them are looking at Trump as a kind of idiot Messiah who, even if he doesn't understand the details of the policies or of the positions, might be the historical man on a horse who is somehow going to bring their agenda through. But all of them, of course, are perpetually nervous because they know that Trump's policy would likely depend on who he talked to last.

I am not even getting into the economic splits. There clearly is a more traditional Wall Street crowd, centered around Bessent. There is Howard Lutnick, who also reflects of a particular group of financial interests, but one that is much more enthusiastic about crypto.

I haven't seen anybody trying to draw an ideological map of the different factions, but I think it would be an amazingly complicated diagram. There used to be a show called Homeland, where you had Carrie, this former analyst who had these crazy diagrams with connections going in 30 or 40 different directions: I think you would need something like that or some five-dimensional hyper-hyper cube in order to actually map out the particular complex relationships between these groups as they shift over time.

To simplify a bit, what are the main glues that stick all the groups together? And on the contrary, the main tension points that you see?

The main glues that stick them together are number one, shared enmity to the Democratic Coalition. They may not be sure about who they love, but they're very sure about who they hate.

Secondly, a substantial amount of material self-interest. In every group, in every political party, this is always something which is quite important and explains many things that may seem ideologically strange.

The final glue is the belief that with Donald Trump there is an opportunity perhaps to really remake things. That this is a moment where a lot of assumptions that people have made about the way that U.S. politics work are being demolished. Donald Trump is not somebody who sees himself as being particularly hemmed in by any of the usual constraints, so this might be an opportunity, a once in a lifetime opportunity, to get your vision implemented on a scale that could never have been implemented before.

I think that these are the main things pulling people together.

Equally, as I say, there are tensions. In particular, if you want to see evidence of them, the speech that JD Vance gave at the American Dynamism Conference back a couple of months ago, where he starts off more or less by saying: “There is a journalist who says that there are tensions between the Silicon Valley folks and the conservatives. Let me tell you again that there are no tensions.” You get the sense that there i tensions, as if there weren't tensions, JD Vance would feel no need to actually mention or to try and conciliate across them.

If we look at the actions taken by the Trump administration, if feel like they read your book: there is some kind of weaponization of the US government against law firms, universities, migrants. What do you think they want to achieve with this use of government power and finances against these parts of U.S. society?

I think that they want to destroy the opposition. Again, people will vary, but I think that their ideal world is a world like Orbán's Hungary.

That is a world in which there are still nominal institutions of democracy, but in which the opposition finds fundamentally playing on a playing field where it becomes impossible for them ever to prevail.

If you look at the universities, this is very clear. People like Chris Rufo in particular, who is quite influential with the Trump administration, have identified universities correctly as a major source of opposition and disagreement to many of the values that people in the Trump administration would like to achieve. They have effectively looked to try to pick different universities off.

Their initial approach was to do this one by one. They were going after Columbia, which has had an absolutely disastrous experience with the Trump administration, and then going after Harvard, which is the biggest and the strongest. They thought that if they go after Harvard, then everybody falls perhaps into line along with Harvard. But Harvard didn't do this. In fact Harvard would have been quite willing to have reached a deal with the Trump administration, but then realized, thanks to some not particularly adept management of communications internally within the Trump administration team, that there wasn't really a deal on the table — that is that if they made concessions, it would become a platform for asking for yet more and yet more until they found themselves in an impossible position. That may change - Harvard still has incentives to strike a deal so that it isn’t being attacked on multiple different fronts. One of the great weaknesses of the U.S. system is the power of the government to target civil society actors through repeated investigations - and if the courts clear you on one issue, another investigation, on a slightly different version of the same charge may begin. Effectively, there is a clear willingness to weaponize the systems of the US government against people and institutions who might be perceived as opposing it.

This is something which gives the Trump administration quite a lot of strength, because it's very easy to launch investigations, to deny money, and to try and push back against this requires lawsuits, which take time to work. It gets very messy and very difficult.

Equally if you're trying to do this in a situation where the other side really believes that there is no incentive to give in and to cooperate, then the other side is going to hold out as long as it possibly can.

Weaponization, on the one hand, has serious consequences. On the other hand, it's a very strong weapon adopted by a weak set of actors.

The reason why they're doing this is because many Trump officials do not want a deal. The only plausible deal that they're willing to accept is complete domination. And the more that becomes clear to other actors, the less willing those actors are going to be to go along with it.

You see this in particular with respect to the law firms. One law firm which notoriously crumbled very quickly, decided that its interests were best served by reaching a deal with the Trump administration, and a few others followed in the weeks after. Then it became clear that the law firms which had said yes were going to find themselves being pushed to do all sorts of things that they had not thought were part of the deal, and would no longer be autonomous agents anymore. Other law firms, including some which have been directly targeted, are pushing back in court. The law firms which gave in early on are being weakened significantly as they begin to lose partners and clients.

In a sense, the Trump administration is opting for strong measures because for it, victory has to be total. To the extent that this is true, it means that the other side, which perhaps over the longer term can coordinate, has very strong incentives to resist and to push back and to do whatever they can to maintain their autonomy. To the extent that the administration can strike deals with individual institutions to break up the opposing coalition, it may prevail.

Do you think there are ways for Democrats, states, universities, maybe some companies, US citizens to protect themselves against the weaponization by the Trump administration of the federal budget and other federal powers?

Yes, and this is one of the things that is really important to understand about the United States. It is an extremely complex political system and a lot of things happen at the state level.

The universities which are under threat are the universities which rely on a lot of federal funding. That is the most immediate and obvious way in which pressure can be applied. The Trump administration has also looked to apply other forms of pressure, and indeed has actually used weaponized interdependence in the classic sense. Some Trump officials have asked OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, to investigate Harvard for having breached sanctions law by organizing events that allegedly included some Chinese actors who were designated under sanctions authorities.

There are many aspects, including research spending, where the federal government is the most important actor. Those are the aspects where you can see any institutions which are subject to those pressures likely to be greatly threatened.

But there are other aspects where it is more uncertain. For example, the Trump administration has told the relevant accreditation institution, which is a private authority, that Columbia should lose its accreditation as a university, but it is not clear that it is going to go ahead because accreditation is a somewhat decentralized system.

There are also different aspects of the economy which are centered on the 50 states and state regulated, where it is going to be more difficult for the Trump administration to get in.

Equally, the parts of the US educational system — and of other systems that are the most successful and dynamic, almost by definition — are the parts that are most likely to be playing on the national rather than on the state or the local level. So it is going to be much easier to target the big actors, at least initially, but with the counter problem that these big actors also tend to have a lot of resources — including financial resources, but also social capital, because they are deeply embedded in networks of American power in ways that provide them with opportunities to push back.

The Trump Organization has a long history of dubious schemes, the last one being the meme coin. Is that a big part of the appeal of Trump? And, is the US becoming a scamming economy under the Trump Administration?

Yes, I think there is a lot of that, but it’s a complicated story. On the one hand, there clearly is an enormous enthusiasm on the part of the Trump administration to take advantage of the scam economy. On the other hand, the scam economy is not just limited to Donald Trump.

If you look at the so-called GENIUS Act, which is supposed to provide means for these stable coins, it had a lot of Democratic supporters in the Senate. A lot of the financial system has already bought into this.

But more importantly, there also are a lot of people who are bought into this as well, because the United States has much fewer opportunities for economic mobility than it used to

It used to be much easier for people who came from working class backgrounds, from lower middle class backgrounds if they were hard working to do really well. That has become more and more difficult. You've begun to see a segmentation of the US economy into people who are upper middle class professionals who have a pretty good life — even though it's not as good as it used to be — and who have a lot of opportunities for them; and people who are from working class or middle class backgrounds who do not have the same kinds of chances or opportunities and who live effectively in a wilderness of scams.

There is less social contact than there used to be between different classes in the United States. One place where you still get it is when you get a Uber or a Lyft. You get in the car and you talk to the drivers or you listen to the radio shows the drivers are listening to. Nearly invariably, when they are listening to the radio, there are lots and lots of ads for sketchy financial opportunities, for dubious law firms who are saying, “you're in trouble with the taxman, I can get you out of this trouble.” There is a whole grift and scam economy, which to me is quite deeply integrated into the United States.

So on the one hand, this is the result of some people, including some very well connected people politically, who are benefiting directly from these scams. But it is also an indirect result of how the upper middle classes - people like me - have succeeded in occupying the niches that will allow them and their kids to succeed. There aren't many ways for other people to actually get ahead, ex luck. Under these circumstances, yes, if they make some random investment in some cryptocurrency, there's a 95% chance that they lose their money, but a 5% chance of winning big.

There's a famous story in the United States about a poker player. He goes to a game, and somebody asks him: are you playing this game? Don’t you know that the dealer is crooked? And the guy shrugs and says: yeah, that may be so, but it's the only game in town. I think that “the only game in town problem” is a big aspect of the US political economy and is also part of the reason why the Democrats have difficulty in actually getting their message across. As far as I can tell from the trailer, Edgar Wright’s new The Running Man movie seems to be about exactly this problem.

In a sense, Democrats are catering more and more to the people who already have a pretty good position in society. Therefore, it is complicated and difficult for them to actually tackle the problem at root, which would not just involve them pushing back against the scams, but also opening up the broader space of opportunities so that people don't feel drawn into these various hustles and con-jobs.