The ongoing clash of the titans, President Trump and Elon Musk, is bringing into high relief the question of whether even the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth can stand up to vast private wealth allied to the power of advanced technology. Can mere political power—the checks and balances of constitutional government—ever hope to control the apparently limitless ability of technology billionaires to alter everyone’s lives? Will Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, having created entirely new digital societies, succeed in making themselves the gatekeepers of those societies? Will the new subjects of the new generation of tech builders get a democratic veto on the future being planned for us? Or will we wake up one day to be notified that installation of a brain-machine interface (BMI) is a “required update,” without which we will be unable to make a phone call or access our investment account? Will space travel soon require no government authorization, and colonies on the Moon or Mars be founded, not by NASA, but by the wealthy few who dominate aerospace technology?
We live in revolutionary times because technology is transforming every aspect of our lives—including not only how we work, but also how we connect with each other and find a sense of meaning. Tech founders and venture capitalists—the creators of artificial intelligence, space technologies, social media, cloud, and data platforms—are becoming global power players, whose tools are not just products, but networks that influence how societies function, how people think, how wars are fought, and how peace is made.
As in the socialist revolutions of the last century, the common people have yet to be consulted about these drastic alterations to our way of life, these new directions being set for our future. Socialists justified the lack of democratic accountability by claiming that the proletariat clung to the past owing to “false consciousness.” They could not be expected to discern the Shining Path that lay ahead, so they would have to be driven along it by force. Similarly, the tech titans of today assume that the vast multitude of tech users, many wedded to outmoded ways of life, will resist but will ultimately accept a future in which tech will give them unimaginable wealth and freedom. For now, they will have to be subject to tyrannous updates. Only Elon Musk, with over 222 million followers on his X account, seems concerned about legitimizing this tech future by founding an “America Party.” How successful his latest venture will be remains to be seen.
For now, the gap between Silicon Valley’s mindset and the rest of humanity is widening. The venture capitalists who invest in the most disruptive technologies tend to be techno-optimists like Marc Andreesen or transhumanists like Peter Thiel. All our personal and social problems, such men believe, are now capable of technological solutions. Human beings no longer have to be satisfied with the traditional limits of human nature or the vagaries of democratic politics.
Many tech entrepreneurs, understandably, are done with waiting for government to solve our problems. Elon Musk believed DOGE could save us from catastrophic levels of public debt, but the politicians wrecked his beautiful dream. Why waste any more time in Washington, DC, when the real solutions will be found through disruptive tech such as generative AI or new space technologies? Why rely on faulty human intelligence when we can create a superintelligent and invisible god in the cloud that can govern us, perhaps via BMI implants, far better than we govern ourselves?
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the rest of us could do with a little less disruption as we struggle to come to grips with the tech revolution. We are having breakdowns from all these breakthroughs. We worry that the tech billionaires are more interested in their own success, measured in dollars, than in our welfare. We are alarmed when the logic of finance drives venture capitalists to prefer dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military applications. Military tech cries out to be used, which means war. As Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon’s chief diplomat, once remarked, the only thing you can’t do with bayonets is to sit on them.
What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin.
Private adventurers getting out in front of public authorities are, to be sure, nothing new in Western history. The Dutch and British empires were launched by entrepreneurs who left the political constraints of their home countries to make fortunes in foreign lands. In time, their governments found it necessary to deploy ever more military power to protect their new overseas interests. Presently, they found themselves with empires. As the historian John Robert Seeley wrote of the British Empire in 1883, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” In North America, the restless expansion of British and French colonists ended up triggering the French and Indian Wars, an extension of the European Seven Years’ War that neither the British nor the French governments welcomed. Unplanned imperial overstretch nearly bankrupted both colonial powers, creating the preconditions for two revolutions, the American and the French.
The ambition to transcend the limits of human nature is also nothing new. In the 1660s, shortly after the formation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Robert Boyle jotted down what many scholars have seen as the Society’s to-do list. This was inspired by his mentor Francis Bacon, who wanted to reorient the sciences to more practical aims, principally “the relief of man’s estate.” More than a few items in this list sound strangely familiar:
- The Prolongation of Life.
- The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
- The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed.
- The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
- Potent Drugs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.
Some items would be described today as dual-use technologies:
- The making Armor light and extremely hard.
- A Ship to saile with All Winds, and A Ship not to be Sunk.
It wasn’t called the Royal Society for nothing. Kings and princes had been sponsoring new technologies since Prince Henry the Navigator developed a new naval vessel, the caravel, to explore commercial opportunities on the coasts of Africa. Scientific advances in Renaissance Europe from the beginning were linked with military competition between rival powers.
Entrepreneurs seeking to escape the constraints of government, then, are nothing new. Inventors have been trying to transcend the limits of human nature for centuries. Dual-use technologies are as old as warfare itself. What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin. Never before have the masters of technology had such power at a time when the public has so little trust in traditional institutions. Will the tech titans soon become the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, as Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said of poets? And if so, what can we do about it?
There have been other times in history when ruling institutions were weak and distrusted, and powerful individuals, lacking political legitimacy, have stepped into their place. Another great poet, Francesco Petrarch, spotted the problem in the fourteenth century, following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the discrediting of the Papacy’s moral authority—the two great universal institutions of the Middle Ages. He came up with a solution that sparked the Italian Renaissance, among the most glorious periods of cultural achievement in the Western tradition. For Petrarch, the problems of his day could be solved by a revival of ancient virtue, meaning the lost moral, intellectual, and spiritual excellence of the ancient world. Educating the new leaders of Europe in the classics, he believed, would bring about a general reformation of society and political life. Could a similar strategy be used today?
A decade or so back, tech entrepreneurs started organizing themselves to promote what they called “Peace Tech.” The idea was not to ease consciences by investing in progressive causes, like ESG investing. Rather, venture capitalists would incubate startups that would create “dual use” innovations of a different kind. These technologies, sometimes called “triple use”, included peace as a third pillar. They aimed to build a movement of tech entrepreneurs, coders, developers, and investors committed to using technology to save lives, predict conflict, mitigate violence, mediate tensions, and support post-conflict recovery.
There are all too many reasons to fear political capture of initiatives like Peace Tech, but perhaps a similar model could be used to launch a Petrarchan reform among the new generation of tech entrepreneurs. The Renaissance revival of ancient virtue succeeded by convincing the most prestigious leaders of Renaissance Italy that they could only bring order to the chaos of the times by creating a new class of men and women. This new elite would dedicate itself to moral and intellectual excellence. The governments of that time suffered from a deficit of legitimacy, but virtue—supreme competence, wisdom, and firm moral grounding—could build a legitimacy of its own. The peoples under their rule would willingly accept effective leaders who showed care for people of all classes as well as loving custodianship of sound Western traditions inherited from the past.
A true aristocracy of virtue in tech, or even a few individuals with humanistic leadership skills of an exceptional order, could alter the worldview of the new technocracy, and place technological advance in the service of humanity and the common good—rather than the other way around. In the Renaissance, some powerful but illegitimate rulers like Lorenzo de’Medici sought the good of their peoples without sharing power with them. By contrast, the Founding Fathers, many of them virtuous men trained in the classics, took the European tradition of aristocratic republics and made it more responsive to the will of the people. As is written in the Book of Wisdom, “A multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world.”