Does authoritarian admiration influence founders?

Happy Halloween all. I got into the spirit by catching up with the horror flicks I’d been sleeping on (28 Years Later was surprisingly good) and, more importantly, chatting with the great tech journalist Jacob Silverman, author of GILDED RAGE: ELON MUSK AND THE RADICALIZATION OF SILICON VALLEY, a book about some very scary people who hold immense sway over our politics and our lives.

Before we get into that, for anyone interested, I wanted to bump my list of best-ever ‘luddite horror’ films I wrote up last year. It was a fun one, I think:

OK! Onwards.

2025 has in many ways been the year of the tech oligarch. It marks the moment that many of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most powerful figures openly embraced an antidemocratic regime and publicly pledged support to authoritarianism. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I for one will not forget the image of tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos standing in the front row and applauding at Donald Trump’s inauguration, or their multiple trips and photo ops at Mar-a-Lago, or Elon Musk’s central role in the early months of the administration.

They’re still there, too, even if they aren’t making as many headlines. David Sacks, Elon Musk’s compatriot, is the White House’s AI and crypto czar. Executives from the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, are in advisory roles. JD Vance, whose mentor was Peter Thiel, owes his career to Valley operators. And not only are they in power, but they’re angry. They practice a politics of pitched persecution and extreme resentment that can be baffling to those of us who’d kill to simply not have to worry about paying the rent for a year. As Silverman puts it in his book, these tech titans “had the world at their fingertips and they couldn’t stand the touch.”

So *why* are they so mad? What are these world-beating centibillionaires so furious about? Why is it that they “swung right” so hard in the 2020s, if that’s in fact what happened? How did we get here, in other words? And what can we do about it?

Silverman’s book tackles all of the above and more. It argues that we shouldn’t view the tech billionaires as a collection of eccentric elites, but as a class; a group that, whether they publicly present as liberals or conservatives, share a distinct set of ambitions and goals: Slashing regulations and oversight, lowering taxes, extracting value from the state, and concentrating power.

We get into all of the above in our conversation, which you can check out here or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is officially the second installment of BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: The Podcast, after the inaugural episode with Karen Hao a bit back. There are still warts aplenty; for instance, I thought I would be able to edit the audio and video after I uploaded it, but no! Not allowed in Substack’s player. There’s only a weird “AI enhancement” option that is supposed to trim the dead air but instead cuts right to me talking about some technical difficulties. Alas! Future episodes will be seamlessly intro’d I’m sure—like the one next week with Cory Doctorow, which will be recorded on Tuesday, November 4th at 7 PM EST / 4 PM PST for those who’d like to join the live chat.

Speaking of live chatting, thanks to everyone who joined the fray with Silverman, and to all those who left questions and thoughts in the comments, we had time to answer some at the end.

Let me know what you think of this newish Blood in the Machine audio enterprise in the comments, and whether you’d like me to keep doing them. I’ll add the obligatory note here that it takes time and resources to plan and prep for such things, and I’d appreciate your support so I can continue doing them. Thanks as always to everyone who already chips in.

Finally, I’ve been doing a bunch of Spanish and Italian language interviews since BLOOD: The Book just published in those languages, and I got one particularly fun request about Frankenstein—which figures into the book as BITM readers who’ve stuck with it till the end will know—in light of the release of the new Guillermo del Toro film. (Which I cannot wait to see, by the by.) A reporter from El Pais asked me the following, and I thought I’d share my answer here for anyone interested.

EL PAIS: What is your interpretation of the novel Frankenstein in these times of AI, of the quest to prolong life, and in which powerful technologists such as Thiel, Musk, Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and Bezos permeate every aspect of our working, social, and personal lives, as well as the future to come?

ME: I could write a whole essay on this question!

Frankenstein is just as relevant today as it ever was. A story about a careless founder recklessly unleashing a dangerous new technology without considering who might suffer as a result? I could just as easily be describing Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg as Victor Frankenstein.

It’s a testament to Mary Shelley’s power of observation about how men attempt to harness technology for their own power and profit that her work is just as cutting in the age of AI as it was in the age of the automated loom.

Scholars have read Shelley’s treatment of the monster—who is neglected, misunderstood, and intelligent—as a comment on the way that industrialists like Richard Arkright treated the working people of the day. That is, they were willing to make them suffer in their experiments with using technology, and vulnerable human workers, to maximize production and profit. Yet again, it’s scarcely different today: With AI, Altman, Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are running large-scale experiments on society while aiming to deskill and immiserate workers. All with regard for little but how it grows their own power and lines their pockets. Some things never change.

Pretty relevant to my chat with Mr. Silverman, if I do say so myself.

OK! That’s it for today, thanks everyone. Once again: Happy Halloween, and hammers up.