Former President Donald Trump recently gave his most extensive public comments to date on artificial intelligence not to a major national newspaper, or even a friendly right-wing outlet, but… Logan Paul, the infamous social media influencer turned professional wrestler turned hit podcaster. “It is a superpower, and you want to be right at the beginning of it, but it is very disconcerting,” Trump said to Paul, before recounting that he struggled to discern whether a deepfaked commercial of himself was real. Trump also mentions receiving $12 million for his campaign from unnamed Bay Area “super-geniuses,” a subtle marker of his emergence as the standard-bearer of the right-leaning, crypto-loving wing of Silicon Valley. The evidence is suddenly everywhere: Not just Trump’s interview with the erstwhile crypto shill Paul, but a glowing argument that “Trump is the best choice for bitcoin” from his former deputy White House press secretary Brian Morgenstern. Trump cheerleader Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) tethered crypto to the global right wing, writing on X that Bitcoin-loving El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele “has converted El Salvador from the murder capital of the world to a vibrant, stable partner for security,” part of “the era of great AMERICAN rejuvenation!” When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. picked Silicon Valley fixture Nicole Shanahan as his running mate, observers suggested he was making a play for voters on both the right and left who were hungry for the tech world to shake up the political snow globe. By comparison, Trump isn’t a clean fit for those voters. He hasn’t consistently been a booster for Silicon Valley, or crypto for that matter: As president, he called cryptocurrency "highly volatile and based on thin air" and tried to ban TikTok. He’s done a 180-degree turn on both, touting Bitcoin on Truth Social and defending TikTok as Congress moved to force its sale or ban it. Given how often Trump flip-flops, it’s worth focusing on what’s most consistent about his relationship with Silicon Valley: His status as a walking embodiment of the “move fast and break things” venture-capitalist ethos. To understand how that could resonate beyond Sand Hill Road, consider Trump’s relationship with another, non-tech celebrity: Kanye West. In 2018, at the dawn of their bromance, West wrote of the then-president, “We are both dragon energy. He is my brother.” The two seemed to be part of the same cultural tradition, embodied by West’s promise that “new ideas will no longer be condemned by the masses. We are on the frontier of massive change.” The point of view recalled “Manifesto of Futurism” author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who more than a century ago wrote “We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.” In other words, “move fast and break things.” This philosophy is alive and well today, and goes a long way toward explaining Trump’s appeal to a contingent in Silicon Valley whose entire existence is defined by a dissatisfaction with the status quo. Citing right-wing thinkers from the conservative economist Thomas Sowell to the “neoreactionary” philosopher Nick Land, kingpin venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year that the “enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing — blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.” On the other side, he writes, stands “the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life,” presumably represented by the startups in Andreessen’s portfolio, or techno-optimist “patron saints” like Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, polymath celebrity inventor Buckminster Fuller and Marinetti. It’s easy to understand why Silicon Valley titans, whose livelihood depends on laissez-faire economic freedom to build the tools that would degrade or “disrupt” legacy institutions, would sign on for Trump’s norm-wrecking, yet still identifiably Republican, political project. But what about the rest of America? This year, unexpectedly, first-time voters are starting to lean to the right, including young and diverse people whom Democrats had assumed were in their column. That has the party on notice. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said on the POLITICO Tech podcast that Democrats need to figure out how to be both “the party of entrepreneurship, and also the party that engages people who differ with us with respect” in order to capture these dynamism-first voters without abandoning core liberal principles. But that may be impossible for voters who crave change itself. In 1992, the critic Neil Postman predicted a coming form of social organization that he called “technopoly”: government by the developers of technology, in accordance with their aims, with the democratic consent of a public that’s deeply internalized their values. “Those who feel most comfortable in technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved,” wrote Postman, channeling Andreessen more than 30 years prior. “It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose.” In that world, anything that stands in the way of American technological supremacy is a threat to the nation’s very existence. When it comes to Trump and AI, China’s threat as a geopolitical competitor, as real as it might be, is just a convenient political justification for this position. More importantly, Trump, Andreessen, West, and even Paul appeal to the politically homeless because they appeal to the values of renewal, breakage and disruption that Silicon Valley has installed at the center of America’s civic life and imagination. Trump might be this cycle’s “crypto candidate,” but he brings together a motley crew of tech-friendly figures and causes by serving as, above all else, the disruptor-in-chief.
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