BroliArchs

Created: 2025-01-21

[Source: Sigal Samuel](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration-broligarchs-musk-zuckerberg-bezos-thiel)

[See Also](https://theweek.com/articles/570977/how-nietzsche-explains-rise-donald-trump)

"Theres a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires
are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and
Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nations capital for
the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely
acquiesced to Trump because they think hell offer lower taxes and
friendlier regulations. In other words, its just about protecting
their own selfish business interests.

That narrative is not exactly wrong  Trump has in fact promised
massive tax cuts for billionaires  but it leaves out the deeper,
darker forces at work here.  For the tech bros  or as some say, the
broligarchs  this is about much more than just maintaining and
growing their riches. Its about ideology. An ideology inspired by
science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen,
and supermen should not be subject to rules, because theyre doing
something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

Its this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs,
who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists
Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Thats because MAGA is all about
granting unchecked power to the powerful.

Its a sense of complete impunity  including impunity to the laws
of nature, Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at
Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told
me. They reject constraint in all of its forms.

As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that
worldview. Hes a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted
on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said
in reference to sexual assault, When youre a star, they let you do
it. You can do anything.

So, what is the anything that the broligarchs want to do? To
understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy
goes well beyond simple libertarianism. Its not just that they want
a government that wont tread on them. They want absolutely zero
limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments,
by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.

The broligarchs vision: Science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality

The broligarchs are not a monolith  their politics differ somewhat,
and theyve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when
Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage
match?  But heres something the broligarchs have in common: a
passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped
their vision for the future of humanity  and their own roles as its
would-be saviors.

Zuckerbergs quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so
immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky
goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the
sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined
the term metaverse in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend
a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg
seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia;
instead of viewing it as a warning, hes viewing it as an instruction
manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a
commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High
Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. ONeill, which informs his
plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living
in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended ONeills seminars as an
undergraduate at Princeton.

Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to save humanity from a dying
planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac
Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who
must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after
a massive galactic empire collapses.  The lesson I drew from that
is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to
prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and
reduce the length of a dark age if there is one, Musk said.

And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for
aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired
by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto
that we should become technological supermen whose Heros Journey
involves conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our
community.

All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in
their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a technological
superman  or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
would say  is that youre above the law.  Common-sense morality
doesnt apply to you because youre a superior being on a superior
mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though
his is an extremely selective reading of the philosophers work.

The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs disturbing
gender politics. The bro part of broligarch is not incidental to
this  its built on this idea that not only are these guys superior,
they are superior because theyre guys, Harrington said.

For one thing, they valorize aggression, which is coded as male.
Zuckerberg, who credits mixed martial arts and hunting wild boars
with helping him rediscover his masculinity (and is sporting the
makeover to prove it), recently told Joe Rogan that the corporate
world is too culturally neutered  it should become a culture that
has more masculine energy and that celebrates the aggression.

Likewise, Andreessen wrote in his manifesto, We believe in ambition,
aggression, persistence, relentlessness strength. Musk, meanwhile,
has jumped on the testosterone bandwagon, amplifying the idea that
only high T alpha males are capable of thinking for themselves; he
shared a post on X that said, This is why a Republic of high status
males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only
for those who are free to think.

This idea that most people cant think for themselves is key to
Nietzsches idea of the ubermensch. What differentiates the ubermensch,
or superman, is that he is not bogged down by common-sense morality
(baseless) or by God (dead)  he can determine his own values.

The broligarchs  because they are in 21st-century Silicon Valley
and not 19th-century Germany  have updated and melded this idea
with transhumanism, the idea that we can and should use technology
to alter human biology and proactively evolve our species.

Transhumanism spread in the mid-1900s thanks to its main popularizer,
Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British
Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the contemporary futurist Ray
Kurzweil, who predicted that were approaching a time when human
intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably
powerful.

The human species, along with the computational technology it
created, will be able to solve age-old problems  and will be in a
position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological
future, Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in turn, has influenced
Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose company Neuralink
explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence.

For many transhumanists, part of what it means to transcend our
human condition is transcending death. And so you find that the
broligarchs are very interested in longevity research. Zuckerberg,
Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups that are
trying to make it possible to live forever. That makes perfect sense
when you consider that death currently imposes a limit on us all,
and the goal of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.

How the broligarchs and Trump use each other: Startup cities, crypto,
and the demise of the fact

If you dont like limits and rules, it stands to reason that youre
not going to like democracy. As Thiel wrote in 2009, I no longer
believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. And so it shouldnt
come as a surprise that the broligarchs are trying to undermine the
rule of democratic nation-states.

To escape the control of democratic governments, they are seeking
to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form
of space colonies, a la Musk and Bezos. But it can also come in the
form of startup cities or network states built by corporations here
on Earth  independent mini-nations, carved out of the surrounding
territory, where tech billionaires and their acolytes would live
according to their own rules rather than the governments. This is
currently Thiel and Andreessens favored approach.

With the help of their investments, a startup city called Prospera
is already being built off the coast of Honduras (much to the
displeasure of Honduras). There are others in the offing, from
Praxis (which will supposedly build the next America somewhere in
the Mediterranean), to California Forever in, you guessed it,
California.

The so-called network state is a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,
journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these
building projects, told me. The idea is to build power over the
long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.

Crypto, of course, is the broligarchs monetary instrument of choice.
Its inherently anti-institutionalist; its appeal lies in its promise
to let people control their own money and transact without relying
on any authority, whether a government or a bank. Its how they plan
to build these startup cities and network states, and how they plan
to supplant the traditional financial system.  The original idea
of crypto was to replace the US dollar, but since the US dollar is
intimately bound up with global finance, undercutting it could
reshape the whole world economy.

Trump seems to be going along with this very cheerfully. Hes now
pro-crypto, and hes even proposed creating Freedom Cities in America
that are reminiscent of startup cities. His alliance with the
broligarchs benefits him not only because theyve heaped millions
of dollars on him, but also because of how theyve undermined the
very notion of the truth by shaping a post-truth online reality in
which people dont know what to believe anymore. Musk, under the
guise of promoting free speech, has made X into a den of disinformation.
Zuckerberg is close on his heels, eliminating fact-checking at Meta
even though the company said it would be scrupulous about inflammatory
and false posts after it played a serious role in a textbook example
of ethnic cleansing.

Even more pernicious is the fact that these guys can control the
algorithms, so they can decide what people actually see, Duran said.
The problem is not so much that people can lie  its that the system
is designed to favor those lies over truth and reality.

Its a perfect setup for a president famous for his alternative
facts.

But the underlying ideology that unites MAGA and the broligarchs
is contrary to the aims of most ordinary Americans, including most
Trump voters. If the US dollar is weakened and the very idea of the
democratic nation-state is overthrown, that wont exactly make America
great again. Itll make America weaker than ever. "

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