It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It's Not Democracy, Either

New York Times

18-03-2025

The Trump administration has enabled a small network of high-tech oligarchs to determine a vast proportion of federal spending and regulatory policy.
Much of the attention, understandably, has fallen on Elon Musk, but he is not working alone.
Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned.
There is, Andreessen argued in a Jan. 28 exchange with Lex Fridman, a podcaster and research scientist at M.I.T.:
No way to fix American higher education without replacement, and there is no way to replace them without letting them fail. And in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time. What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? It fails and another company takes its place. That's how you get progress. Below this is the process of evolution.
These places have cut themselves off from evolution at the institutional level and at the individual level, which is shown by the widespread abuse of the tenure system. We have just stalled out, we have built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system.
Andreessen is a member of a tech elite that stands to benefit from Trump administration policies, which are set to accelerate the ascendance of America's technology oligarchs still further by lifting government restraints on digital, social media and cryptocurrency companies, allowing the untrammeled pursuit of libertarian goals and control over the flow of information.
Another potential beneficiary is Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor who was a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund, as well the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel has been Vice President JD Vance's guardian angel, getting him started in venture capital, arranging an initial meeting with Donald Trump in 2021 and putting $15 million into Vance's successful senate campaign in Ohio.
Like Andreessen, Thiel is no stranger to controversy.
In 2009, Thiel sent shock waves through Silicon Valley when he published an essay, 'The Education of a Libertarian,' in which he declared: 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,' adding
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron.
Thiel's solution: abandon democracy in favor of technology, including the exploration of cyberspace and outer space:
Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
Since taking office, President Trump and his appointees have supported the interests of conservative tech elites who in 2024 backed Trump and his fellow Republicans with hundreds of millions of dollars.
On his first day in office, Trump rescinded a 2023 Biden executive order that required AI systems developers to share with the government the results of tests determining whether any innovation poses a risk to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.
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