Patrick Casey is a columnist and host of the Restoring Order podcast. He joins me to talk about the rise of the tech elite under President Trump, and the role of a neo-reactionary philosopher who has a lot to do with it.
00:02:14.560I mean, obviously, Curtis Yarvin talks about the CEO monarch, right?
00:02:20.160And a lot of people could look at someone like Trump, who is himself, of course, a very successful businessman, or the support, obviously, of someone like Elon Musk, one of the richest men, or the richest man in the world, depending on the day.
00:02:32.520You know, this is obviously a scenario that Yarvin wrote about.
00:02:37.500However, he doesn't spend a lot of time on technology.
00:02:40.600He doesn't focus on that aspect of what is happening.
00:02:44.760And the fact that Trump has really promoted guys like Sachs, guys like Andreessen, guys like Musk to very important spots, you know, these are guys who are assisting him and, in many cases, directly advising, obviously, he's got other guys like Bezos and Zuckerberg lining up behind him.
00:03:05.340This is obviously there's something about his presidency that really incentivizes the tech industry to be behind him.
00:03:13.680We see the big push for artificial intelligence as part of Trump's presidency.
00:03:19.800What aspects of that do you feel play into Lance's philosophy?
00:03:25.820So I think, first, we've got to be very upfront about the fact that the tech right, this phenomenon of all of these tech guys, a number of the ones you've mentioned, some you didn't, joining up with Trump, if you go back to 2016, that would have been unthinkable.
00:03:40.520So this is an incredibly, I would say, historic, certainly significant phenomenon.
00:03:46.940It's a big counterfactual, but I don't know, Aaron, if Trump would have won the 2024 election if he didn't have Elon's money, if Elon Musk's buying Twitter didn't, you know, free up some of the dissemination of information and also the money and support from other people in the tech world.
00:04:03.060So it's not the only factor, but one of the main factors, and it's a huge shift.
00:04:09.920So what does Nick Land have to offer there?
00:04:11.820Well, there are a few ways you can look at these tech elites moving rightward.
00:04:15.740You can look at it on an individual level.
00:04:18.060You can say, OK, these guys are, you know, just individually kind of thought, well, I'd be better off with Trump.
00:04:23.340You know, I'm getting harassed by the government.
00:04:27.780I mean, these are individuals making decisions.
00:04:29.860OK, well, you could zoom out a little bit and see things from somewhat of a bigger picture perspective, maybe a Burnhamite, James Burnham perspective, and say, OK, this is a class kind of almost like a class struggle.
00:04:41.300I know it sounds a little bit Marxist, but, you know, the billionaire class versus the managerial or perhaps more accurately, the bureaucrat class.
00:04:49.400You know, one thing Burnham got right was over the course of the 20th century, there would be more and more government oversight over business.
00:04:57.000One might even refer to that as the total state.
00:04:59.560I hear there's a great book on the subject, of course, referring to yours.
00:05:04.560And that's that's a valid perspective as well, because if you look at Elon Musk, just as one example, the government was launching all of these investigations into him.
00:05:11.740He got hit with civil rights lawsuits.
00:05:13.420You know, some guy at Tesla claimed that he was the victim of racism, not like from Elon Musk directly, but you have this whole thing called hostile work environment.
00:05:21.020OK, next thing you know, Elon Musk's company is shelling over hundreds of millions or whatever it was.
00:05:25.440So and, you know, Zuckerberg being dragged in, getting harassed from both the right and the left over, you know, censoring too much, too little.
00:05:34.080I think you did have a lot of tech people that just kind of decided, like, as a class, like, OK, our interests are not really aligned with with this managerial regime.
00:05:44.860We don't have the freedom to do what we want.
00:05:47.320So that's the kind of the class way of looking at it.
00:05:50.080And I think that's that's that's very valid.
00:05:52.000Now, there's the Landian perspective, which is what I've been thinking about lately.
00:05:55.780And I haven't seen a lot of other people discuss.
00:05:57.760I'm sure someone who's as familiar with his work as you are is probably I'm sure I'm going to be preaching to the choir.
00:06:02.880But I think the audience will hopefully get a lot out of this.
00:06:06.000So what Nick Land's big thing is when he talks about accelerationism, he's talking about a process that was kind of almost like a monster that was unleashed during the Renaissance.
00:06:16.080A number of things happened during the Renaissance with the rise of capitalism somewhere around that time.
00:06:23.420You know, you had double entry bookkeeping, the joint stock exchange, some of these sorts of things.
00:06:28.760And there was it was almost like all of these these guardrails on this process were removed.
00:07:11.380So the point is, is there is this process that was kind of unleashed during the Renaissance of technological and capitalistic growth.
00:07:19.480And it's really a battle between deregulation and the state where you have the state kind of a lot of what the state does is try to inhibit or redirect that process of growth.
00:07:31.920And I think there's from a Landian perspective and I'll leave off here for now.
00:07:36.580There's no way you can look at the 2024 election and not conclude that this was a huge victory for that process.
00:07:44.540Right. This acceleration is process that is totally restructuring society that is taking us in land's view closer to the obsolescence of human beings.
00:07:54.720Right. He has that famous quote that I'm probably going to butcher.
00:07:57.640But, you know, nothing human makes it out on the other side, something to that effect.
00:08:01.020The idea that eventually we will reach the singularity, man will be phased out.
00:08:05.360It will just be AI and robots or something of the sort, which is a future I find horrific, just to be clear.
00:08:11.740I'm interested in land from like a descriptive, how can we understand this process kind of perspective.
00:08:16.860I don't really share the same values as him beyond that, though.
00:08:20.580When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners?
00:08:29.480Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag.
00:08:50.820Yeah, and land has softened that language in recent interviews, so it's difficult to know how much he still holds to some of that.
00:09:01.500But as you point out, the descriptive aspect of his work is really the most interesting.
00:09:06.800I think it's really important there that you layered in the comparison between Burnham's analysis and land's,
00:09:13.540because I think they actually intersected in a very interesting way in this process.
00:09:18.140So I had this thought, and I shared it with land, and the nice thing about the modern era is your favorite philosopher will just pop in on Twitter and comment on things that you're talking about.
00:09:29.820But, you know, I floated this idea to him that the managerial elite were kind of the last piece of human safety software on technology, that they were kind of this final barrier, this last-ditch effort to try to recapture the capital process.
00:09:48.860And when you talk about that tension between the venture capitalist class, the tech right, and the managerial class, what we're seeing in a way is the fact that the managerial class, while they're very inhuman in a lot of what they've done,
00:10:05.080they have become so in an effort to capture what is going on, to re-territorialize it, to bring it back into the interests of specific people, specific groups, specific ones, you know, material interests, these kind of things.
00:10:19.160And the fact that these two things are at war, and, you know, Burnham talked about this, and Francis talked about this later on, Sam Francis, that these two classes were at war with each other, that the capitalist and the managerial, even though we, you know, and especially the left, thinks of these as like the same thing, right?
00:10:38.920Oh, it's just all the rich people, it's all the capitalism. But there's actually a real tension between the managerial part of the apparatus, and those that are founding these organizations, making the money, the CEOs, these are very different interests, which creates a lot of the dynamic we see today.
00:10:56.780But another step in that is that if guys like Elon, guys like Andreessen, many of these other people want to free themselves from many of the restrictions that the managerial class places on them, the kind of things that are very human, even if they are a warped version of humanity, like wokeness, they need to find ways around the existence of that current interest group.
00:11:20.880And I think this is one of the reasons that AI is such a priority for these guys, I think they want to replace the managerial class with AI, allowing them to scale and make these big, interesting advances in technology without having to answer to a whole bureaucratic morass that enables all the things that allow them to launch rockets.
00:11:45.800You need a lot of civilization between nothing and rockets. And the civilization is great, but it also hinders a lot of what Elon wants to do. So wouldn't it be great if I could just automate all that civilization, so I can get back to launching rockets?
00:12:01.020I think that is actually a big part of what is happening here. And so the fact that land in many ways kind of predicted this movement, this desire of capital to free itself from these very particular human interests, and we're kind of seeing that in a way play out in the way that the tech right is pushing forward, I think is pretty fascinating.
00:12:23.600Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. I couldn't agree more. So one angle, one thing that I wanted to touch on here, and it's relevant to what you were saying, you mentioned Mark Andresen.
00:12:33.860So he was on Joe Rogan, it was a pretty interesting interview. And one of the things he said was, look, there used to be kind of this arrangement between Silicon Valley tech elites and the kind of liberal regime that, you know, they get their sandbox, they get to the play there, they get to do their thing, they get to innovate, whatever, as long as they, I forget exactly what he said, but donate to charities, you know, as long as they do kind of like the bare minimum that the liberal regime expected.
00:12:59.680But over time, over time, the expectations and requirements of the liberal regime became, they grew, and both in like, you know, number and intensity, to the point where, you know, they don't really feel, tech elites don't really feel like, okay, we just got to, you know, play nice with society, and we get our, you know, you don't get your sandbox anymore, right?
00:13:20.020The total state has infiltrated the sandbox. And so that's a big part of the reason why they obviously chose to do this. Now, again, that's looking at it as the individual perspective.
00:13:29.680The Landian perspective is there's been this process that's been happening for hundreds of years, the acceleration, this positive feedback loop, technology, capitalism, working together.
00:13:40.160And that that, like any attempt to stifle or restrict that is going to be, it's going to be a battle. And in that sense, sure, you are, you know, if you're trying to restrict that, you are going to run up against human beings whose interests are aligned with that force.
00:13:58.620But you are fighting a force, right? This process is perhaps a better way of looking at it that's been around for, since the Renaissance, at the very least.
00:14:08.100So that's, that's how I view that, that sandbox quote is, okay, so you had this process, it was allowed to continue.
00:14:13.680But it just got to the point where there were too many restrictions on it. Yeah.
00:14:17.740One thing you were saying about, which was really important here is about, you know, Nick Land is always talking about, he's talking about the people, he has these futuristic, what was it?
00:14:28.140Cyber revolution was, was one of the chapters in Fang Numino, one of the essays. And it's, it's the one in which he, he puts forward, like it's, it's like a dialogue.
00:14:38.460They're talking about a future in which these K revolutionaries, like cyber revolutionaries are going to war with like people that are consciously seeing themselves aligned with this process of, of acceleration.
00:14:51.020And they're like straight up going to war with, with the government, which represents, it's like the, the pro tech side and the pro human side.
00:15:00.000And, uh, you know, I don't know if things are exactly going to play out that way. I certainly hope not, but the pro human side, that's, that's what Nick Land says that that's basically what leftism is.
00:15:09.380And you mentioned that even though these people are, or they're pro human in like a demented way, right? Not in a way that, that we would as, as actual right wingers.
00:15:17.180Um, but that's, that's worth considering because a big part of the, uh, of, of what this managerial elite stands for, at least claims to stand for some people promoting this or doing it cynically is, is right.
00:15:30.420Obviously that there are differences that inequality, the idea that capitalism and they're correct. Capitalism creates a lot of inequality.
00:15:37.000I would also argue that it raises the standard of living overall. So you're not going to have a totally equal society, but everyone overall, like it's better to be poor in, uh, America than it is to be, you know, in most cases than it is to be middle class.
00:15:50.760And, you know, some like total third world country, right. Um, you know, middle class people from those countries would love to be, uh, live existing at the bottom strata of our society.
00:15:59.580So the point of that is that that is like a very pro human perspective. Um, but just kind of a, an egalitarian one, they're saying, Oh, capitalism and technology and these rich billionaires, you know, they're not doing enough for inequality.
00:16:13.480Um, well, you know, that we saw how things played out, uh, that didn't, uh, they, this has been a huge win for the process of acceleration and for the billionaire class.
00:16:23.420So it's, and it's in the short term, it's been a win for us. Uh, I guess I'll leave it there for now, but it is worth considering maybe some of the long-term ramifications of this, of this new alliance.
00:16:35.940Well, and speaking of, of course, we both know that we have had a little bit of a knockdown and drag out with some of the tech right here in the last few months.
00:16:45.500Many people who are, uh, more nationalistic people who, uh, are more traditional, uh, religious, uh, these are forces that, well, as you point out, the tech right is incredibly important.
00:16:59.020I, uh, I very much agree with you that Donald Trump probably would not have been elected if Elon had not bought Twitter, just, just that act alone, everything else, you know, the money, all that stuff is also helpful.
00:17:10.120But just the fact that all of the news could get to the people unfiltered, uh, was such an amazing change in the dynamic, the American electoral dynamic that I think that kind of completely, uh, changed the game.
00:17:25.000It completely shook up the board and allowed Trump to get that second victory.
00:17:29.500So obviously these are people who are key to this coalition.
00:17:32.880Um, we're, we're not blind to that fact.
00:17:35.480And I'm very happy that Elon ultimately has made those moves.
00:17:39.020Even if I disagree with him, but disagreements we have, and many of those disagreements are centered around the fact that the tech right, um, doesn't seem very pro human in the sense of, uh, worrying about say protecting a nation, protecting the actual people of the nation, seeing the United States as not a sports team, not a business, not a,
00:18:02.700economic zone, economic zone, but as a real place where people live, where they raise their children, where they create generations of, uh, tradition and habit and custom that bind them together and make a real people.
00:18:16.680They don't see the world that way, the world.
00:18:19.940And it has to be when you're, when you're operating at this level, but for them, the world is just a set of pieces to rearrange, right?
00:18:26.760It's how, how do I move the world around so I can launch the next rocket?
00:18:30.840How do I move the world around so I can make the next advancement, you know?
00:18:34.400And, and that's how you have to think when you're doing great things, but it also means that you're, you say things out loud, like we need infinite HP one visas because Americans are too stupid to program computers.
00:18:46.740Like, you, you, you, you kind of vomit rhetoric like that.
00:18:50.100And so we have this, uh, you know, kind of standoff between these forces, which you're right to point out, even though both of us recognize the importance of land's work and, uh, you know, the predictive power that we're kind of watching unfold.
00:19:03.720It also points us to a possible conflict of interest in a future that ultimately we aren't moving towards.
00:19:11.100Again, that's kind of the value of real philosophy.
00:19:13.240You can read Plato without wanting the state to take children from people at seven years old and, you know, train them, train them to brainwash them.
00:19:21.260You know, you can, you can read Nick land without ultimately being like, well, I want to replace every part of my body with a, you know, cyborg, whatever.
00:19:27.660Uh, and so, uh, you know, his, his, uh, philosophy is very useful, but it does point us to a, a conflict inside the MAGA coalition that is probably only going to continue to grow.