I created Peter Thiel, who gave us JD Vance. Sorry about that.

Notes on the origins of the fascist theocrats of Silicon Valley

Précis

Some interesting writing has been appearing recently on the emergence of ‘technofascism’ among monied men tainted by the Silicon Valley strain of libertarianism. This topic has taken on new urgency as several prominent technobillionaires with roots in Silicon Valley have endorsed the neofascist Donald Trump’s plan to turn the United States into a crypto- and oligarch-friendly Christian-nationalist theocracy.

The Silicon Valley techno-fascist <—> Christian-fascist connection is made manifest in the elevation of the faux-hillbilly opportunistic schlub and paleo-Catholic JD Vance — first to the U.S. Senate, and now to heir apparency of the MAGA diadem. Vance’s rise can largely be attributed to the intercession of the archetypal Silicon Valley evil-genius so-called libertarian and transhumanist billionaire Peter Thiel.

In this post I direct your attention to some recent essays that examine these phenomena and offer a few observations on how current events seem to be recapitulating stuff that I’ve been writing about, both fiction and nonfiction, for a quarter-century.

Monty Meekman über alles

I got this email a little while ago from

Chris J. Karr

a subscriber to & occasional commenter on Sundman figures it out!

I’ll assume that you know who Peter Thiel is; if not you can easily look him up.

Monty Meekman, as some readers of this ongoing autobiographical meditation are aware, is the evil Silicon Valley genius/billionaire and would-be messiah who made his first appearance in my 1999 novel Acts of the Apostles and turned up in various guises in my subsequent books, most notably in The Pains, where he’s a shape-shifting, reality-warping metamonster who sometimes goes by the name Templeton Cheney.

Over the 25 years since Monty first appeared I’ve seen some speculation here and there online about who he was modeled on and/or resembled. Readers have compared Meekman to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, Brian Johnson, Marc Andreesen and Craig Venter, among others. Lately Peter Thiel’s name has been coming up with some regularity.

Although none of those men were in fact explicit models for Monty Meekman, still they all seem to embody to a greater or lesser extent his intelligence, arrogance, sociopathy and fervent technophilia, and readers familiar with the lore of Silicon Valley seem to like that.

Indeed some readers, at least, have called Acts of the Apostles the best novel ever written about Silicon Valley. So perhaps I should say a little bit about my own connection to the place.

Bonafides

When I got my first job as a junior technical writer at computer-maker Data General, in April, 1980, I had essentially no qualifications for the job. I had no formal training in computer science and laughably little experience as a programmer. In fact when I commenced my career in ‘high tech’ it was less than 18 months since I had returned from a nine-month stay the Senegal River Valley on the edge of the Sahel, a part of the world where I had spent three of the prior five years living and working with peasant farmers, doing famine relief and rural development. I had lived for years without access to electricity or running water, much less advanced computer technology.

How I ever talked my way into that job at DG in 1980 is a mystery, but by the time I made my first trip to Silicon Valley, arriving well past midnight one night in January, 1986, I had written about a dozen hardware & software programming manuals. By the time of my first layoff, from Sun Microsystems, in 1994, my title was Senior Manager of Engineering. Like many a hacker and/or geek I’m an autodidact. Everything I know about hardware or software I learned either on the job or on my own time, studying past midnight while my wife & young children slept.

Between that first trip to Mountain View in 1986 and my last work-related trip to the area in 2017, I made at least 130 round trips between Boston’s Logan Airport and San Francisco’s SFO. I’ve stayed at least one night in every hotel on El Camino Real between Burlingame and San Jose — not to mention the one year that my family and I lived in Fremont. I worked at Sun Microsystems — the one-time darling of Silicon Valley — for nearly nine years, and I also worked, for periods of various durations, at close to two dozen hardware and/or software startups in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Boston/Cambridge, and NYC.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the Silicon Valley/startup/hacker/libertarian-geek mindset, but my experience is legit. I’ve met these people — not just worker-bees like myself, but some of the millionaires and billionaires too, the kind of people Barrack Obama has on speed-dial.

I don’t deny the seductive appeal of Silicon Valley, the thrill of working flat-out beyond exhaustion on sexy technology that will be known and used by millions of people all over the world. It can be genuinely soul-stirring — addictive, almost. I know it. I wrote a novel about it.

Yet in all my years as a high tech drone I never really shook the sense of alienation I felt on that first trip to Palo Alto, the Mecca of technology, driving a rented car down Highway 101 at 3 AM — with memories of so many, many days I spent in hot African fields, working with my friends whose net worth was 3 pots for cooking food, one change of clothes, a teapot and 3 glasses — where ‘technology’ meant a hand-made hoe — playing in my head.

I was never able to reconcile it.

I haven’t reconciled it yet.

I think that’s why I became a novelist.

A Painful Inquiry

My illustrated dystopian phantasmagoria The Pains tells the story of a decent man trying to survive in Freemerica, a once-democratic land now run by an unholy cabal of transhumanist libertarian techbros and fascist theocrats. I wrote it in 2008 but it’s about today.  Illustration by M.F.D. Hemming, working as Cheeseburger Brown. 

Meekman rising

I got a note last week with the subject “Seems your Meekman character isn’t wild enough?” The content of the email was a link to this essay in The New Republic:

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas

Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator’s benefactor. But they’re both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society.

Here’s the opening paragraphs of that essay:

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

This does, indeed, sound like something Monty Meekman could have said in one of my novels.

The essay Vance-Thiel-Yarvin 2024: The Neoreactionary Dream Team by

Melissa Ryan

is another good backgrounder on this stuff.

The crypto angle & libertarian bullshit

It goes without saying that billionaire libertarian techbros are big into crypto (that is, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin & the Ethereum ecosystem).

They will tell you that their reasons for loving crypto are moral, philosophical, political, blah blah blah. They probably won’t tell you that, big picture, all of crypto is a wealth transfer mechanism from the little guys to the big guys, and that they are the big guys.

That’s a topic for another time & place (and one you’re very unlikely to see me take part in). Our topic here is the connection between ‘crypto,’ at large, and fascism/fascists.

Here’s a backgrounder in Rolling Stone.

Crypto Giants Want to Buy Washington. They’re Bankrolling Trump to Make It Happen

The former president said at Bitcoin 2024 he will make America "the crypto capital of the planet," and appoint industry-friendly regulators

Until recently Kamala Harris had been a crypto skeptic, taking the (quite reasonable) position that the only proven use cases for cryptocurrency were crime and speculation. Recently, under incredible pressure, she’s taken the more open position that there can be some kind of ‘productive dialog’ between presidential candidates and the so-called crypto industry.

Meanwhile Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz have backed candidate Trump, who is running on a platform of ending democracy and creating an all-powerful techno-theocratic state to monitor and control all aspects of our lives — women’s menstrual cycles, for just one example. No I’m not joking.

The company Andreesen/Horowitz has made billions pushing crypto onto naive investors using what amounts to a not-so-subtle pump-and-dump machine. So of course they’re looking for ‘industry-friendly’ regulators, wink wink, nudge nudge. Of course they are. Oligarchs can never get enough.

Scott McNealy, the once-charismatic founder & leader of Sun Microsystems — with whom I met on a few occasions during my nearly nine-year tenure there — is another self-described libertarian with a long history of supporting Trump.

Libertarianism supposedly ‘contends that the scope and powers of government should be constrained so as to allow each individual as much freedom of action as is consistent with a like freedom for everyone else,’ but ‘libertarian’ Peter Thiel, for his part, is all about empowering governments with advanced technology to surveil and control everyone.

The venture capitalist, who co-founded big data firm Palantir, said [. . .] that on the path to AGI [augmented general intelligence], you get surveillance AI, which he described as a “communist totalitarian technology.”

Those that are worried about AGI aren’t actually “paying attention to the thing that really matters,” Thiel said, adding that governments will use AI-powered facial recognition technology to control people.  

His comments come three years after Bloomberg reported that “Palantir knows everything about you.” Thiel has also invested in facial recognition company Clearview AI and surveillance start-up Anduril.

Palantir, which has a market value of $48 billion, has developed data trawling technology that intelligence agencies and governments use for surveillance and to spot suspicious patterns in public and private databases. Customers reportedly include the CIA, FBI, and the U.S. Army.

These development illustrate the bullshit nature of Silicon Valley libertarianism. Like Russian oligarchs, Andreesen, Horowitz, McNealy, Thiel and their like are betting that once the republic falls and the rule of law becomes a quaint memory, they’ll still be on top with their super-yachts and post-apocalyptic bunkers.

If the price for free markets and unregulated crypto is that all women must have their menstrual cycles monitored by the government from puberty through menopause, well, says Marc Andreesen, says Peter Thiel and Scott McNealy, that’s just the price of freedom.

About crypto itself, I pretty much said everything I have to say in this SFIO! essay:

Christofascism, Christian nationalism, reactionary Catholicism

Now that we’ve covered the Silicon Valley tech half of the cabal, let’s look at the Christian nationalist half. It’s not my purpose to explain here what ‘Christian nationalism’ is, or how deeply entrenched this movement is within the Trumpist mob that calls itself the Republican Party, but merely to give a few pointers. You might start with the Christian Trumpism section of the Wikipedia entry on Trumpism, and then read Time magazine’s overview of The Christian Nationalism of Speaker Mike Johnson.

When Trump recently reiterated his intention to end democracy in America, he announced his plan not to all of us, but to a group of evangelical Protestants at a “Believers’ Summit”:

“I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

In the minds of many people, Christian nationalism is associated with the U.S. South and a form of megachurch religion popular there that’s light on theology¹ and heavy on patriarchal hierarchy, community, conformism and charismatic preachers. White supremacy is implicit in many evangelical strains. As a fan of pluralism and tolerance, I admit that these people scare me.

But there’s another branch of Christian nationalism scares me even more, and that’s a form of reactionary Catholicism that harkens back to the time of fascism in Spain under Franco, and even back to Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition.

Yes, I said that.

If you want to get freaked out, read this deep dive by Jim Stewartson²

Catholic Coup: JD Vance, PayPal Mafia, Opus Dei & Knights of MaltaIt’s not Dan Brown, it’s real life, and it’s time to get serious about it.

In it you’ll find names like William Barr, Antonin Scalia, Leonard Leo, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Erik Prince and yes, JD Vance and Peter Thiel — people actually or potentially every bit as powerful as as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Their flavor of Catholicism is so ‘out there’ that Pope Francis has excommunicated some of its proponents. They are fabulously wealthy, very organized, deeply fascist and serious as hell.

You think I’m exaggerating? Well then, what do you think of the recent supreme court ruling by conservative Catholics Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett that Trump cannot be prosecuted for crimes he committed in his “official capacity;” that he is to be regarded, that is, as a king, ruling as if by divine right?

But I understand; it is a bit rich. So if all that deep conspiracy stuff seems a bit too hyperbolic for you, you can start with this more tame article in the decidedly unhyperbolic New Yorker:

J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion

How might the Republican V.P. nominee’s conversion to conservative Catholicism influence his political world view?

Project 2025

I expect you’ve heard of “Project 2025,” in which Trumpists at the Heritage Foundation considerately spelled out their plans for turning the United States of America into an authoritarian theocracy of the kind I’ve been describing in this essay. The entire 900 page volume is easy to find online if you want to see for yourself. But I’ll just leave these two BlueSky posts as a succinct summary:

The Sexton Summation

For several years,

Dispatches From A Collapsing State | Jared Yates Sexton

Jared Yates Sexton has been monitoring developments like those I’ve tried to call out here in his newletter “Dispatches from a Collapsing State.” Here’s his post dated July 23rd:

What's Actually At Stake: MAGA and Tech Fascism

The most important story of the 2024 Election isn't being told.

[. . .]

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are not just facing the threat of Donald Trump and JD Vance. They are standing in a moment where the unregulated and unchecked power of the Tech world has coalesced and merged with the worldwide authoritarian movement. That fact is being largely missed right now. And, for all of our sakes, it cannot be misunderstood or unseen any longer.

Mea culpa, cheerio

I’ve mentioned my novels in passing, and how they prefigured so much of what we’re seeing around us today — how Monty Meekman whom I created in Acts of the Apostles in the late 1990’s is the essence of Peter Thiel today; how The Pains might just as well have been called The modern techbro-theocrat’s commonplace book.

But I haven’t yet mentioned, nor have I room to do so now, how throughly the Christian mythos, especially Catholicism, pervades my fictional worlds.

So there you have it: the monomaniacal fixation on immortality; the genius; the indifference to human connection; Silicon Valley; a funhouse-mirror Catholicism. They’re all right there in my novels. It’s pretty clear that Peter Thiel must have gotten a hold of my novel Acts of the Apostles and somehow mistaken it for an instruction manual. Not only that, the Heritage Foundation evidently got its hands on a copy of The Pains and used it as a blueprint for Project 2025.

Space doesn’t allow me to go into how my Cheap Complex Devices was demonstrably the inspiration for Sam Altman and the out-of-control OpenAI project.

Look, I was only trying to write a few novels, amuse myself, and make a few dollars. It was never my intention to destroy civilization.

All I can say is, I’m sorry.

And won’t you please buy one of my books? Or if that’s too much, won’t you at least ‘like’ this post, or, good heavens! share it with a friend?

Cheerio!

Postscript, October 8, 2024

I have posted a companion essay:

1. As a friend explained to me long ago when I said to him, “I try and I try, but I just don’t understand their theology,” “You fool. They don’t have a theology. They have a dress code.”)

2. I am aware that Stewartson is a problematic guy. But pretty much all of what he pulls together here is easily verifiable.