The Long Roots of Technofascism
By 
One of my beliefs about the current moment is that there really isn’t anything new about what is happening. Rather, it’s the culmination of a concerted effort over a long time to repeal the 20th century and return us to the 1890s that has finally found its successful interpreter in Donald Trump. This is why I think all the fascism stuff and references to the 30s are really off base–these people aren’t after Nazi Germany, they are after the Fuller Court, which does plenty to commit the nation to racism and corporate control without the organization of fascism. Basically, I think liberals have spent too much time watching Nazi and World War II documentaries and not enough time studying Loewe v. Lawlor, just to mention one of an endless number of Gilded Age examples. This is not to say that people such as Thiel and Musk aren’t fascists–they are. But it is to say that their goals are different than what most of us are thinking and that there are more useful and relevant lessons from American history than what we are usually comparing these people to.
Anyway, here’s one piece of it–Silicon Valley has been horrible politically ever since it began and here’s a review of this place in the 1990s.
An influential Silicon Valley publication runs a cover story lamenting the “pussification” of tech. A major tech CEO lambasts a Black civil rights leader’s calls for diversifying the tech workforce. Technologists rage against the “PC police”.
No, this isn’t Silicon Valley in the age of Maga. It’s the tech industry of the 1990s, when observers first raised concerns about the rightwing bend of Silicon Valley and the potential for “technofascism”. Despite the industry’s (often undeserved) reputation for liberalism, its reactionary foundations were baked in almost from the beginning. As Silicon Valley enters a second Trump administration, the gendered roots of its original reactionary movement offer insight into today’s rightward turn.
At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote the longtime technology journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s”.
Their voices were largely drowned out by the techno-enthusiasts of the time, but Malone and Borsook were pointing to a vision of Silicon Valley built around a reverence for unlimited male power – and a major pushback when that power was challenged. At the root of this reactionary thinking was a writer and public intellectual named George Gilder. Gilder was one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal evangelists, as well as a popular “futurist” who forecasted coming technological trends. In 1996, he started an investment newsletter that became so popular that it generated rushes on stocks from his readers, in a process that became known as the “Gilder effect”.
Gilder was also a longtime social conservative who brought his politics to Silicon Valley. He had first made his name in the 1970s as an anti-feminist provocateur and a mentee of the conservative stalwart William F Buckley. At a time when women were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, he wrote books that argued that traditional gender roles needed to be restored, and he blamed social issues such as poverty on the breakdown of the nuclear family. (He also blamed federal welfare programs, especially those that funded single mothers, claiming they turned men into “cuckolds of the state”). In 1974, the National Organization for Women named him “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year”; Gilder wore it as a badge of pride.
At the turn of the 1980s, Gilder celebrated the links between capitalism, entrepreneurship and the nuclear family. He claimed that entrepreneurs were the most moral and benevolent people in society, because they put products into the world without a guarantee of return – and then reinvested the profit back into the economy.
For Gilder, entrepreneurship was also a route to rejecting the welfare state and restoring the male breadwinner role in society. He insisted that men were biologically and socially more suited to entrepreneurship than women, and that a societal emphasis on entrepreneurship could thus help restore the traditional nuclear family structure with its rigid gender breakdown. Drawing on religious language (Gilder himself was a devout Christian), he wrote that entrepreneurs are the humans who “know the rules of the world and the laws of God”.
I know I am biased on this point, but I think the real failure here is the devaluing of the humanities by higher education administrations and then everyone else around the world. If you aren’t reading good fiction (not fantasy shit that reinforces authoritarian impulses, a huge problem through that whole genre), you really don’t have the ability to think about or relate to people. Sure, forcing everyone to read good novels in college wouldn’t solve the whole problem, but it sure as heck wouldn’t hurt. Otherwise, everyone ends up an amoral engineer.