I am going to build a little on Cassandra’s excellent post yesterday about JD Vance by writing about his Silicon Valley connection, and my own experience working in the tech world.
My intro to this world was working for an Internet startup during those halcyon days of the late 1990s/early 2000s also known as the Dot-Com Bubble. I was going to be rich, with all my stock options which quickly became worthless. I also got a brief glimpse into the weird views held by some in the tech world, such as the guy who told me at a conference that he believed that making a lot of money was a true spiritual endeavor.
Look, making lots of dough is fine, just don’t tell me it’s a path to enlightenment or a sacrament. That’s a bit strange.
After our company crashed and burned, I worked at a private weather company and then entered the educational technology world, landing a job at Penn State. The ed-tech world is different from the enterprise tech world, much less greed. But I did run into some odd ideas, such as people who so worshiped Steve Jobs that they believed Apple’s main goal was not profits but making the world better. Of course, this is naive because any company’s main goal is profit.
So, while I wasn’t in Silicon Valley-style enterprise tech, I did become more and more aware of their weird, often repulsive ideas. So the strange statements by JD Vance didn’t surprise me.
Vance is part of a broader political and ideological shift involving tech billionaires and their growing alignment with right-wing ideals. Vance, once a critic of Donald Trump, has embraced Trump’s nationalist agenda and positions himself as a bridge between Silicon Valley elites and the MAGA base.
Imagine Vance as the middleman in the world’s weirdest tech-political sitcom. He started out as the darling of the centrist punditry set when he was the Hillbilly Whisperer but now finds himself as the Senate darling of Silicon Valley overlords like Peter Thiel. In this plot twist, Vance went from being a Trump critic to his hype man, standing on the sidelines cheering for a future where billionaires run “Network States” (think private fiefdoms with WiFi). It’s like The Hunger Games meets LinkedIn, with Vance as the guy explaining why authoritarian tech bros are actually just misunderstood disruptors.
This alliance between Vance and Silicon Valley wingnuts is a troubling trend. Now, instead of tackling opioid crises or income inequality like he once promised, he’s peddling the idea that authoritarian-leaning billionaires might actually be the saviors we need. Because who wouldn’t want their country run by tech bros with too much money and even more ego? Like, perhaps, Elon Musk running something called the Efficiency Commission.
Silicon Valley has always had a dark side, often with ideas that sound like they are from a dystopian novel. Ideas such as creating artificial islands in international waters to avoid paying their fair share of taxes made the news about a decade ago. But Vance has gone all in with some of the worst thinkers, including some nutcase named Curtis Yarvin.
You might be tempted to roll your eyes and say “uh, WHO?” and dismiss him, but he is a dangerous person, given he has sway with a lot of powerful people. This is who he is, from a Vox article about him in 2022:
In September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.
To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things…”
Nearly a decade earlier, a Stanford law student named Blake Masters, asked by a friend for reading recommendations for a book club, emailed a link to a set of blog posts. These posts made an argument that was quite unusual in the American context, asserting that the democratically elected US government should be abolished and replaced with a monarchy. Its author, then writing pseudonymously, was Yarvin.
This is the basis for Vance’s worst statements, including the absolutely horrifying views on women as vessels to produce and care for children. This is the world he marinated in for years. Fortunately, I believe that this has also blinded Vance to the concept that a lot of Americans outside this inner circle find their ideas to be ridiculous and even disturbing.
But I believe that not enough people take this connection seriously, or even know about it. But given a man who would be a heartbeat away from the presidency, held by an 80-year-old man who is overweight and prone to rage outbursts, is a follower of this shit, we probably maybe possibly kinda should – right?
The last word goes to Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton.