DOGE and the fallacies of techno-utopianism

Folks, it finally happened. After years of trying to “optimize” nearly every aspect of everyday life, from work to fitness to music, Silicon Valley has finally set its sights on the federal government. If you missed the bombshell story in Wired, Elon Musk is currently leading a platoon of quirked up zoomer web developers as they sift through institutional data and use AI to weed out inefficiencies like unnecessary spending, alleged corruption, and confirmed wokeness.

It’s easy to forget how we got here. For decades, the prevailing public attitude towards tech innovation has been one of near-blind optimism and acceptance — a perception of digital tech as neutral, transparent tools that are always leading us somewhere better than we are now.

The logic tends to follow that somewhere along the way, the tools themselves took a wrong turn, or just ended up in the wrong hands. But what if this perception — that emerging tech is, by default, beneficial to society — has been misguided from the start?

Writer and technologist Mike Pepi has some thoughts on that. His new book Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia pulls back the curtain on techno-utopianism, which he defines as “the idea that technology, and technology alone, will create a more egalitarian, democratic society.’ He makes the case that emerging technologies and platforms aren’t some kind of Platonic ideal, but in fact charged with assumptions and collateral consequences — a.k.a., ideology.

It’s not the tech that’s the problem — it’s the things we believe about it, and the ways that we’ve allowed that belief to overshadow, and at times completely blind us to, the actual conditions of contemporary life. The issue, Mike argues, is the impossible superpowers we reflexively attach to emerging tech and platforms — ranging from the idea that data can always point us to an objective truth, to Silicon Valley’s tone-deaf insistence that shiny new tools like AI and blockchain can solve decades-in-the-making social problems.

Mike joins us to talk about what techno-utopianism is, how it came to be the dominant mindset not just in Silicon Valley but in Western society itself, and how it both capitalizes on and fuels institutional decline. We also get into how we are seeing it play out in real time at DOGE, the disturbing phenomenon of tech companies bending the knee to Trump, the differences between platforms and institutions, and why something he calls “techno-progressivism” could be our way out of this mess.

Buy Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia.

Read Mike’s follow-up essay “The Institutional Membrane” and follow his work on Substack.