King Donald, JD and the Silicon barons
“A clear and present danger” is an American legal term, used to define when free speech may be limited because of a threat to public safety and national security. It might apply to Donald Trump since he won last November. He will soon be entering the second year of his second presidency. As do St. Paul’s words to his missionary companion Timothy: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Trump’s influence on international relations and on the American political system, and its attendant transformation, are demonstrated daily. But growing economic and social changes caused by the digital revolution and AI, routinely described as the “new industrial revolution”, are also a present, though less clear, danger — despite the benefits they bring.
An important outcome of the original industrial revolution was that a dominant land-owning class had to come to terms with the power of the new industrialists and entrepreneurs. A progressive extension of the franchise was the result. An oligarchy with its pretensions of class and nobility saw its power reduced. Not so in today’s tech revolution, which has given a new oligarchy spectacularly greater wealth and unaccountable political power.
The “information economy” has relied on technological innovation. But cyberspace is uniquely unlike the space in which the 12-year old Dickens worked in a blacking factory, or Fordist assembly lines, billboards and football stadiums — other than that they were, and are, where money is made, quite literally in the case of Bitcoin.
The unaccountable barons of Silicon Valley, the main hub of AI, are, along with Trump, the main protagonists in the compelling story of democracies entering a new epoch. How the political and the socio-economic are put together, combining to create a new political economy, is the $64 trillion question. The Greek economist and former politician Yanis Yaroufaxis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Penguin 2024), takes an entertaining crack at explaining how the tech giants make a fortune out of our addiction to small bright screens with their pictures and information, hoovering up masses of data in order to influence our behaviour. It is a prodigious and worrying development.
Hybrid cars run on petrol and electricity. In the US, political life runs on money and social media. The tech oligarchy offers both of them in exchange for proximity to and influence over government. This relationship is analysed in BBC 1’s November 3rd Panorama programme, “Trump & The Tech Titans”, revealing the malign consequences of the US Supreme Court’s 5/4 ruling in the crucial 2014 case, McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission. The five Supreme Court judges declared unconstitutional 1971 legislation which had capped over two years political donations towards federal electoral campaigning, “the aggregate contribution limits”. The issue was deemed to be one of freedom of speech, bearing no negative impacts on government and offering no opening for corruption. The case cleared the way for floods of corporate and private money to enter and shape American politics.
BBC Panorama documented how the extraordinary wealth of the tech titans had been the lubricant for their entering the circles of power. Their wealth is unprecedented: Elon Musk is worth $497 billion; Larry Ellison, who owns Tik Tok, CBS and CNN, $320 billion; and Peter Thiel, around 100th in the global wealth table at $23 billion, is a founder of Paypal and Palantir. All are donors to the Republican party and are close to the Trump administration.
The US oligarchs are, of course, far from a homogeneous group. The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang and, particularly, Bill Gates do good things with their money. But Musk in early 2025, looking increasingly deranged by money and power, offered an extreme version of Obama’s “yes-we-can”: “yes we-can-do-anything-we-want”. Ellison was and is a great promotor of AI and a key player in the Stargate Project, a new company planning to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI. Thiel founded Palantir Technologies with its current CEO, Alex Karp ($2.3 billion). It handles billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts for military software.
“Trump & The Tech Titans” is particularly thought-provoking in its examination of Thiel’s relationship with JD Vance, the hillbilly kid from the Appalachians who since 2011 fulfilled the American dream, partly thanks to mentoring and financial support from Thiel. He also became a Catholic in 2019. Vance, at first anti-Trump then, post-2016, pro-Trump, was endorsed by Trump for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022 with the help of $15 million from Thiel. Much of Vance’s campaign money went through the Protect Ohio Values Super-PAC (Political Action Committee), and Trump’s Save America PAC — PACs having become the standard way of funding political advertising since the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2014.
Thiel’s background is evangelical. This September, remarkably, he gave a number of lectures on the Antichrist who heralds the end of times, and how to identify him (not, however, by using facial recognition software). The Antichrist apparently will show up as an evil tyrant who seeks to get control of science — and presumably AI.
Trump himself seems not too bothered by what the oligarchs think while he invests in their more lucrative enterprises like the bitcoin business. He reportedly seems equally unconcerned by the distinction between what is in the national interest and his own financial interest.
What the Panorama programme intimated, though never came right out and said, is that we should be worrying more about Vance than about Trump. The tech barons – and the Republican Party — may well feel their money, influence and future are better invested in Vance than in an aging Trump. For Trump to run in 2028, he would need to tear up the clear constitutional doctrine, enshrined in the 22nd Amendment, that no President can serve more than two terms.
Since before 2016 when he was denigrating Trump, Vance has made a 180 degree turn, and now holds to the whole of Trump’s extreme right-wing agenda. He could even do another 180 degree turn. Vance and the power of his backers — yes, power not “agency” — would mean relatively uncontrolled development of AI. He could also normalise fascist-leaning populism as the MAGA masses tire of Trump. JD Vance is a clear and future danger to democracy.
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