Among Silicon Valley’s moguls, the spotlight has been hogged by Elon Musk. His ever more enthusiastic appearances at Donald Trump rallies and his vocal support for Right-wing causes on his platform X come as the Valley trades in its Democrat-aligned …
Donald Trump is a Silicon Valley fantasy
The love affair that has blossomed between MAGA and the digital visionaries of Silicon Valley has left liberal pundits mystified. Why would America’s brainiest tech bros swipe right for Donald Trump? But it seems their love knows no bounds: yesterday, …
Can Silicon Valley raise the dead?
Towards the end of September 1915, the eminent physicist Oliver Lodge heard from his son Raymond, who had gone to fight in Flanders that spring. His situation was “difficult”, but “he has got so many kind friends helping him. He …
Why RFK Jr is the Silicon Valley candidate
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr revealed that his running mate for the presidency was Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergei Brin, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects. Although Shanahan is successful in her …
The Democrat extortion racket will backfire
In a viral speech earlier this month, the newly elected Argentine president Javier Milei accused Western leaders of embracing a vision of economic “collectivism” that will lead “to socialism, and therefore to poverty”. And in many ways, he’s right.
Signs …
The curse of the scrolletariat
After years of being told that the smartphone revolution has turned us into an atomised scrolletariat, we may be on the cusp of liberation. As part of his latest project, OpenAI’s will-he-won’t-he CEO Sam Altman has set his sights on …
Was China behind Sam Altman’s ousting?
The blink-if-you-missed-it four-day drama at the tech firm OpenAI requires deep attention. On the surface it looks like power shenanigans; underneath lies a tale of humanity’s future and geopolitics.
The strange saga began a week ago, when the board of …
Can liberals save themselves from extinction?
The heroine of William Gibson’s 2003 near-future novel Pattern Recognition is a professional discerner of emerging trends, so hyper-attuned to semiotic nuance that she experiences physical discomfort if made to wear any item of clothing with recognisable branding. Cayce Pollard …
Burning Man is a capitalist lie
Marie Antoinette probably never said “Let them eat cake”. But she did provoke popular fury by building a model peasant village at Versailles, where she would retire to escape the pressures and opulence of court life, and even sometimes dress …
The billion-dollar search for immortality
In the pristine cylindrical atrium of Altos Labs’s Cambridge Institute of Science, under a skylight resembling a giant cyclopic eye, I ask the obvious question. What does the company actually do? “Cell rejuvenation,” replies the facilities manager. At least, looking …
What is King Charles hiding?
My first political memory was an epochal one: the fall of the Berlin Wall. The grainy footage of East and West Berliners in stone-washed denim, hammering at the graffitied concrete that had so long separated them, and pouring through breaches …
Tech bros are destroying weird Austin
Not so long ago, Silicon Valley was a magical land where unicorns flourished; anybody with an idea, seed capital and a little luck could become richer than all the kings of folklore. These days, things aren’t so rosy. Silicon Valley’s …
SVB and the case for chaos
Vladimir Lenin was wrong about many things, but his maxim about the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic state apparatus — “better fewer, but better” — was undoubtedly right. Perhaps more than anything, the USSR demonstrated the flaws of rigid central planning. And …
Does the Right need techno-Trumpism?
One of my informal metrics for political cut-through in our synapse-frazzled age is “could you play this sentence over a bass drop and have the crowd go wild?”.
The last time a British politician managed this was early in 2020, …
Is the psychedelic industrial complex evil?
“More real than reality itself.” This is the sales pitch made by fans of dimethyltryptamine. Otherwise known as DMT, the compound found in ayahuasca returned to the spotlight recently thanks to Prince Harry’s description of his trips, which, he says, …