We Need to Map this New World, and Fast

The techbro elite are reshaping our world, and we need our journalists to step up

We need to radically and urgently rethink how we regard the nexus of politics, technology and business, and as journalist to rethink how we cover each. These vital layers of the world are being recast, remodelled and folded together in a way and at a speed we haven’t seen since the Industrial Revolution. At stake is much more than mere institutions or norms: we are at danger of allowing a few rich and powerful people fundamentally transform our world.

Dudley, West Midlands, ground zero of the Industrial Revolution, by Neil Moralee

As long-time readers will know, I prefer to look at technology optimistically, and dig out tools and practices that I think might help us be more productive, happier and in harmony with gadgetry and software. I had hoped to refocus Loose Wire on such topics, but the historian, political journalist and concerned citizen in me require I lay that to one side for the time being. I apologise to readers who preferred that material, and ask for patience. Bigger things are happening around us that require our attention.

The past few months have seen seismic changes in the way our world works, and it would appear that this is just the beginning. I’m not here to take sides, except insofar as I see an erosion of things I’m passionate about: fairness, objectivity, the rule of law, a robust fourth estate. I see all these things under serious attack, and of course, I’m not alone.

There’s not much I can do about that, but I do think I can offer this: an attempt to clarify what is happening and what is needed. I believe we are at an inflexion point that is not well understood. We need to quickly get to grips with it if we care.

Here’s how, and why.

Three bedfellows of the apocalypse

Let’s start from a high level and work our way down. Politics, business and technology are the three major bedfellows which define our world. Politics is how we decided who leads us, and how the machinery of that works. Business is how money is made, and its interplay with politics determines the rules of that game. Technology is the mechanism by which the world around us works, how we love, how things are made, how we organise ourselves, and how in theory life gets better.

There are other bits but that’s the main stuff. You could think of them as corners of a triangle, shifting endlessly within the limits of the structure. Each requires the others to function. Only fundamental shifts leave a deep historical mark and realign our world.

The most notable one for our purposes was the Industrial Revolution (circa 1760–1840), where technologies such as the steam engine sparked a transition from agrarian economies to industrialised production. Economies of scale shifted production from artisanal workshops to centralized factories and mass migration from the countryside to the city. The capital required concentrated economic power in the hands of industrialists.

While some democracy floated along in its wake, the reality was that political power had to accommodate these new forms of wealth — and to adapt to their demands and world view. Wealth became a force multiplier for political power, and set the pattern we are still dominated by today: political parties and leaders rely on finance to get into power, and are either in hock to those who provide it, or are themselves wealthy enough to buy their way there.

The Industrial Revolution in short recast these three engines in the way they connected with each other — technology was suddenly about scale, which changed the way that businesses were set up and run, even redefining what a business was, and politics, which had been largely led by a few elites with access to land and therefore people to subjugate and mobilise for agriculture and wars, shifted to a more complex, urban-centred affair, where politics meant controlling and mobilising an urban mass.

Today’s industrial revolution

Now, with a new technology-based elite from Silicon Valley and elsewhere demanding a role in reshaping, dismantling and reinventing the modern state, and its levers of power and support, we see a fundamental shift similar in impact to that of the Industrial Revolution.

Trump 2.0 is the crucible in which this experiment is flaring.

The administration has several strands to it. The one that seems key, and least understood, is that driven by Elon Musk and vice-president JD Vance. The two are not in lock-step, but they share a world view, which in turn overlaps with the broader ideas of Silicon Valley’s techbro elite, which subscribes to a mishmash of theories and yearnings that internet politics professor at GWU Dave Karpf has called a blueprint drawn in crayon. They range from Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State to Curtis Yarvin’s “patchwork” political system, under the umbrella of a Dark Enlightenment where a powerful sovereign — a king, elected not by citizens but by a worthy collective/elite — leads us to safety, and to a future where humans bind with AI to colonise the universe.

This might all sound a little hifalutin. And until January it may have been. But now we’re in the thick of it. The blueprint may have been drawn in crayon, but it’s now being used to crash history’s greatest, most powerful, richest single country. We may snigger at Tesla’s woes, but Elon Musk has moved onto bigger things. His DOGE-driven cuts are haphazard only in the details: in terms of purpose and objectives he’s well ahead of schedule. That’s because the overall blueprint doesn’t require a strong central government, indeed it requires the opposite. Network States are small, autonomous units — a federated archipelago of authoritarian economies where only a technocratic elite get to make the decisions.

While Musk is busy levelling the terrain, others are busy terraforming. Freedom Cities, corporate controlled zones that are the beloved brainchildren of techbros like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, are finding their way onto the agenda, from the Mediterranean to San Francisco. It’s too early to say any of these are functioning entities, but by now we hopefully have learned that things no longer move at a conventional pace.

There’s method in the madness

All this concerns me. I’m sad that the Internet age, once so full of promise, has been hijacked by men (and they are, almost exclusively, men) with such a sour, elitist vision of the world. I look back at my years as a mostly evangelical technology columnist with some regret and self-pity. But what makes me much more agitated is that I don’t see a lot of mainstream journalists or publications digging sufficiently deep to try to cover what is happening in a way that informs the rest of us.

I feel we’re trapped into making the same mistakes as during the first Trump term. It’s clear now what we should have been writing about back then: the rising anger of an unheard populace that could elect leaders like Trump, instead of looking for excuses (Russiagate etc); the long-term challenge this rising tide posed to the traditional political processes of countries like the U.S., by seriously acknowledging and addressing those grievances before the system itself was threatened. Instead we made fun of his tie, the toilet paper stuck to his shoe, the theatrical farce of White House comings and goings.

And now again we’re consoling ourself with tidbits: a silly White House spokesperson, Vance’s name-changes, Musk’s Tesla woes. Very few of us seem to be concentrating on the bigger picture, the Dark Enlightenment that is fuelling this destruction of institutions, lives, norms, values, checks and balances. Why do we not see these stories? It feels as if we are journalists in 1930s Germany, outraged by the 1933 book burning, gleefully pointing out that one over-eager functionary threw some copies of Mein Kampf into the conflagration by mistake. Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t, as Polonius would say.

Crayon or blood

So to bring it back to the triangle of politics, business and technology. All three sides of the triangle are tighter than they ever have been. The dizzying wealth of the techbros has captured the presidency of the most powerful country of the world. Technology has driven that, and will continue to drive it, as these barons leverage their dominance of artificial intelligence, propulsion and communications to further their goals. Musk of course sits at the top, or near it, for each of these technologies, promising AI would surpass human intelligence by the end of this year, that humans would be on Mars by the end of the decade, and that brain-computer interfaces will replace phones.

There’s a story here of infinite depth, where people who have promised or threatened scary things are now carrying them out. It’s all happening in broad daylight. But we’re somehow preoccupying ourselves with little bits of it. Journalism is not catching up. It’s still covering politics, technology and business as (mostly) separate legs of the stool. I get it: there’s a lot going on. This stuff (still) sounds whacky. Serious journalists don’t like to be thought of as conspiracy theorists. And if as a journalist or media outlet you haven’t covered this perspective before, you feel kind of silly covering it now. And perhaps readers might be turned off (I’m expecting some blowback to this piece, to be honest)? And perhaps some journalists find it a tad complex (there’s lots of read, I agree, and that’s not really time-consuming). And lastly there’s the chilly climate: lawsuits fly about, and when having a tattoo or having written something rude about the administration is enough to get you thrown into a detention centre, I’d quite understand being cautious.

But the problem goes deeper than that. This is a topic that straddles several beats and would take a far-thinking editor to adjust newsroom configurations to tackle a beast so large. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. To me it doesn’t matter whether some of it is good, some of it bad, some of it inconsequential. We are seeing the implementation of a far-reaching plan, the likes of which none of us have seen in our lifetimes.

And whether it was drawn up in crayon or blood, it needs to be covered with the seriousness it deserves.

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Footnote

I would recommend any of the following writers, all of whom I’ve leaned on heavily here (these are all links to their X profiles; some are more active on Blue Sky etc, and most have newsletters.) They each deserve credit for their work.

Dave Troy

Gil Duran

Emily Mills

Émile Torres

Cory Doctorow

Quinn Slobodian