Silicon Valley eschatology — 4: Even your god shall rejoice for you

“The group sex that night was fun, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a loud beach party. The only place big enough for all of us to sleep was the mess hall; they scattered a few mattresses around for the couples and unleashed the eighteen frenzied men of Stargate on our women, who, in accordance with military tradition (and law), were docile and not particular about partners, wanting nothing more than to sleep on the hard floor.”

Joe Haldeman – The Forever War

“The fact that everyone between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five is ‘bindable to child-rearing,’ as Nim puts it, means that in fact nobody here is quite so thoroughly bound—psychologically and physically—to child-rearing as women are elsewhere. The burden and the privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male is elsewhere.”

Ursula K. Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness

As we examine the final destination of tech capital, which eagerly awaits the apocalypse, we return to the beginning, to our hero, Peter Thiel.

In his 2009 essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” published by the Cato Institute—which can be seen as a forum for libertarians—Thiel wrote that democracy and freedom were “no longer” compatible. Before sharing his views on elections and suffrage, he put forth “authentic” (a word choice reeking of Heidegger!) human freedom as his highest principle, declaring his opposition to “extortionist taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”

For Thiel, this was the meaning of being a libertarian. Our billionaire, who does not recall his years at Stanford fondly and admits he had little success in his attempts to change the university’s establishment,(1) believes that when people like him entered the business world, they retreated into their shells, or to put it crudely, they “settled for less”:

“The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics—capitalism simply was not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested as an affinity for conspicuous drinking; in contrast, the smartest libertarians were less obsessed with positive law and escaped not just to alcohol, but beyond it.”

This escape beyond positive law seems to have accelerated with the 2008-9 crisis. The date Thiel wrote this essay encapsulates the severe depression and the counter-reaction to the response of capitalism, and most importantly its leader, the US, to this depression. Thiel writes that the cries of free-market proponents like himself were drowned out by the roar of the hurricane of more government and more debt. By 2009, it had become clear to libertarians that “educating” the establishment, or reforming it, was a futile effort.

Although the financial crisis was the last straw, this pessimism has a history of over 100 years. Thiel believes the last financial crisis in American history that subsided without the state growing even larger was in 1920-21; this was a Schumpeterian moment of creative destruction, and had things continued that way, an economic boom could have occurred. But it didn’t. Why not? Thiel writes:

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in the number of welfare recipients and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Thiel later had to write another article to explain these lines. After stating that he wanted to provoke a reaction and succeeded, he noted, feigning some surprise, that his rather commonplace “statistical observation” on voting trends like the “gender gap” had received the most backlash. It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that women’s suffrage should be revoked or that this would solve the political problems that trouble us. He believed no class should be deprived of the right to vote, but he had very little hope that voting would improve the situation.

There is no doubt about the sincerity of Thiel’s views on women’s suffrage. Moreover, they are quite consistent with the issue he pessimistically raises alongside it: “the increase in the number of welfare recipients.” The Nietzschean aristocratic rebellion and its embodiment in Silicon Valley libertarianism a century later see poverty and colonial peoples, and colonial peoples and womanhood/femininity, as different manifestations of the same essence: racial/biological and geographical hierarchies are also gender hierarchies. The poor, referred to as the masses, the rabble, and so on, are “like children”; they act on emotion, not reason, and are prone to hysteria. Just as IQ, artificial general intelligence, neuro-casts, gated communities, colonized space, and cities built in the middle of the ocean are shelters for the rich while they await the apocalypse, the trinity of religion-nation-family is likewise a safe escape zone.

From the Iron Lady to ‘eastern’ values: The Singapore dream

But why and how? It has often been said that religion, nation, and family went out of fashion during the four decades of neoliberalism. Silicon Valley elites, libertarians, and the New Right think so too, and they advocate a return to these values to escape the apocalypse that this “damned” welfare state is dragging us into.

For instance, the famous American sociologist and neoconservative Daniel Bell criticized the welfare state for disrupting the proper order of family relations and expanding consumption beyond the limits prescribed by the Protestant ethic. He believed that inflation was closely linked to the degeneration of moral values. The great inflation of the 1970s was associated with the collapse of the family structure, and attention was drawn to the public assistance program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which consumed a very small portion of federal social spending.(2)

In her book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which focuses on the “moral” partnership forged between neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the 1970s, Melinda Cooper writes that until the 1970s, there was a general consensus between Republicans and Democrats on social welfare programs. However, starting in the 1970s, criticism began to emerge that the welfare state contributed to the inflation problem by “undermining the family structure”:

“It was now agreed that the redistributive welfare programs of the New Deal and the Great Society needed to be radically curtailed; there was even talk of strengthening the private family as an alternative to social welfare. Welfare reformers began to contemplate a return to a much older tradition of public assistance as an alternative to the New Deal welfare state—the poor law tradition and its attendant concepts of family and personal responsibility. In this shift, we can see the simultaneous emergence of neoliberalism and neoconservatism as mature political philosophies. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism may be diametrically opposed on many issues, but they display a surprising affinity when it comes to family values.”(3)

The awakening on the other side of the Atlantic begins with Margaret Thatcher, the symbol of Eurosceptic and neoliberal conservatism in Britain. She wants to liberate a Britain chained by a Europe corrupted by the welfare state. She turns her gaze to a former British colony: Singapore.

The ambition to turn London into a “Singapore-on-Thames,” a common theme among Conservatives during the Brexit era, emerged in the 1980s. The father of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, invented something called “Asian values” and brought back into fashion the Confucianism that the Chinese Revolution had declared anathema. Thatcher eagerly embraced these values. In this city-state, she saw the self-sufficient, industrious, conservative liberalism of the Victorian era. She looked with envy upon the ethnic Chinese who make up the majority of Singapore’s population, considering them “natural capitalists” and “born traders,” while also praising them for having adopted the values of the Anglo-Saxon world. She even once asked her Singaporean friends how they managed it, and the answer she received was astonishing to her: “But we learned everything from you, all the lessons of free enterprise… You have just forgotten them, while we have accepted them!”

In his book Crack-Up Capitalism, which I have cited before, Quinn Slobodian recounts that Singaporeans are raised from a young age with the understanding that “The world does not owe you a living.” A mandatory savings account is opened for every Singaporean at the bank, and residents use the money in these accounts for healthcare, retirement, and real estate purchases instead of “welfare state” extravagances like compulsory health services.

A critical element for our topic emerges here. Neo-Confucianism, harnessed in the service of property owners, underscores conservative family values. The supposed loving relationship between children and their parents serves a function that legitimizes the state’s abdication of its social duties.

Moreover, another academic aptly points to the role of texts produced across the Atlantic in the rebirth of Confucianism. The same article quotes a Korean academic who said that the “overnight change” in academic ideas about Confucianism was “unique” in the evolution of any modern religion or society. Arif Dirlik provides information that leaves no doubt about the extent of “organized academic activity” on Confucianism from the 1980s onwards; discussions on Confucianism and alternative modernizations became an intellectual sector.(4)

The puritanical ethic lost in the West emerges in the East. The path to economic growth and a dynamic structure is through embracing traditional values. Hierarchy, the defense of the family, and the superiority of the nation over the individual are preached. This is, of course, accompanied by low taxes, distance from voters-unions-democracy, and a reduction in public debt. Singapore’s eternal chief, Lee, shows the way:

“In the eighties, Lee expressed ‘regret on several occasions that they had not followed the example of the Japanese and kept their educated women at home,’ adding on one occasion that ‘in the long run, the most important issues were eugenics and providing children with a good education to build a strong society.’”(5)

The myth of the “eternal dynamism of the East,” as a kind of reverse Orientalism, is harnessed in the service of property owners, while the struggles of workers, nations, and women are erased from the picture as “Western decadence” in the name of a supposedly harmonious Asian society.

Tech bros and the masculine business model

In the 2000s, there was an explosion of “scientific” publications on whether financial markets and their crisis-prone aspects were related to hormones in general, and testosterone in particular. Women in the financial sector were risk-averse by nature, while men were more aggressive. There was no absolute rule that an increase in the proportion of female investors would definitively reduce market volatility, but the presence of women would decrease the frequency of market crashes. The implication was clear: our hormones were behind the 2008-9 crisis.

In Silicon Valley, which grew out of Stanford and has long been known for its close ties to the American government, especially the Pentagon, masculinity has been used as a business model since the 1960s. Yet, in the US military, which began developing the first computers during World War II, the task of “programming,” i.e., software, was mostly performed by women. In her book Brotopia, which describes the male world of tech billionaires, Emily Chang provides interesting details: at that time, “programming” was not highly regarded in the male world as it was seen as a woman’s job. Since computers were still mostly associated with typing, it was equated with secretarial work, a known female profession, and looked down upon. Later, as the industry developed, “professionalism” would come into play, programming would be presented as a kind of black magic, and it would be masculinized as an intellectual pursuit.

The Silicon Valley culture, later embodied in the “PayPal Mafia,” would declare war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies poisoned by multiculturalism and the “woke” mentality. This group, operating under the claim of meritocracy, would, as one might expect, strive for the caste-like separation of people like themselves in a welfare state world they considered apocalyptic. Chang writes:

“The members of the PayPal Mafia believed that hiring ideologically diverse people early on would explicitly slow the company down, and some still think that. All they wanted to do was move faster. [PayPal Mafia member Keith] Rabois told me, ‘I don’t think you can have debates about core first principles at the beginning of a startup. It’s better to have people who are similar rather than diverse ideologically at the beginning. Once you have alignment, I think you can have a wide variety of people and opinions and perspectives.’”

It must be said that ideas about masculinity being under threat are quite widespread. For example, Josh Hawley, one of the names Thiel pushed into the Senate, pointed to the “assault on masculine virtues” in his speech at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference. Also attending that conference was right-wing YouTuber Jack Murphy, who was trying to establish a fraternity of men with a belief in “positive masculinity,” which he named the Liminal Order. I won’t even mention the reactionary Curtis Yarvin, funded by Thiel, whose extensive profile we have previously featured.

But what is truly significant is the microphone extended to the newly minted Vice President JD Vance, also launched into the political world by Thiel, in the same Vanity Fair article:

“If what he’s doing works, he said, ‘it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity—his support for his family and his community, his love for his community—is more important than whether he works for fucking McKinsey.’”

In the previous article, I mentioned Antonio García Martínez, who wrote about his Silicon Valley memoirs in the book Chaos Monkeys. Martínez’s book appears to be a “goldmine” in many respects. The author sees most women in the Bay Area as “soft and weak, pampered and naive, and generally full of shit.” The women of the Valley have a self-important brand of feminism, but in reality, “come the epidemic or foreign invasion, and they’d be precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

Chip Huyen, who reviewed Martínez’s unforgettable work, points out that whenever a female character appears in the book, the author invariably comments on her appearance: “jaw-dropping,” “lost her way to New York Fashion Week,” “ass in jeans,” and other creative expressions… According to him, “if a woman is not ugly, her only purpose in the office is to be gazed at.” Huyen writes more:

“To make sure readers understand how much sperm he can produce, the author takes pains to highlight his sexual adventures. He recounts in disturbing detail a drunken sexual encounter with a female coworker in a Facebook broom closet. He proudly describes himself as a man who ‘flouts the rules of safe sex,’ but his Ph.D. in physics doesn’t seem to help him understand that unprotected sex leads to pregnancy … He seems unable to empathize with women’s fear of pregnancy: ‘Look, lady, unless you’ve got a screaming infant in your arms, and it looks like me, we have nothing to talk about.’”

Interlude: The ‘attack on the family’ and biologizing unequal pay for equal work

Economist Ludwig von Mises, one of the godfathers of libertarians, the New Right, and tech capital, believed that the motive he attributed to feminism—“to destroy the family”—completely misunderstood a woman’s place in society.

After criticizing “so-called-democratic” endeavors that try to eliminate “natural and socially conditioned” inequalities by decree, Mises argues that the radical wing of the women’s movement wants to make women equal to men, “just as it would like to make the strong equal to the weak, the talented to the untalented, and the healthy to the sick.”

“Anarcho-capitalist” Llewellyn H. Rockwell, in his book Against the Left, relays these views of Mises and then turns to another libertarian prophet, a regular of the Mont Pelerin Society and founder of the Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard, writing that equality before the law “does not eliminate biological differences.” Therefore, the fact that women do not earn as much as men or hold positions as powerful as men “does not mean that they are victims of discrimination.” He then returns to Mises and quotes these long lines:

“But the difference between sexual character and sexual destiny can no more be eliminated than other inequalities of mankind. It is not marriage which keeps woman from being inwardly free, but the fact that her sexual character demands surrender to a man and that her love for husband and children consumes her best energies. There is no human law to prevent the woman who looks for happiness in a career from renouncing love and marriage. But those who do not renounce them are not left with sufficient strength to master life as a man can. It is the fact that sex possesses her whole personality, and not the facts of marriage and family, that enchains woman. To ‘abolish’ marriage would not make woman any freer and happier; it would only take away from her the essential content of her life, and would leave nothing but the career.

The woman’s struggle to preserve her personality in marriage is a part of that struggle for personal integrity which characterizes the rationalist society of the economic order based on private ownership of the means of production. It is not to the interest of the woman alone to be successful in this struggle; to contrast the interests of men and women, as the extreme feminists have done, is very foolish. All mankind would suffer if woman should fail to develop her ego and be unable to unite with man as a free-born comrade and friend.”

Rockwell argues that the developing technology of capitalism has greatly lightened the burden of housework and that many wives have formed “an increasingly idle class.” The proof? Like a good liberal, he idealizes his own neighborhood, the life of the middle-class American, and observes the “oppressed” and “hard-faced” women here “donning their mink stoles to march down the street to the next bridge or mah-jongg game,” while noting that the husbands of these same women “were working themselves into an early heart attack in the garment district to support their wives.” The kind-hearted and hardworking Robinson Crusoes of Anglo-Saxon liberalism seem to have embarked on a journey from eternity to eternity.

White, Christian, mother

In Arkansas, a group called “Return to the Land” is building homes on their own land, engaging in agricultural activities, and not allowing anyone but people like themselves to join them.

Among those not permitted to enter this “bantustan” are primarily Black people, followed by homosexuals and Jews. Additionally, “members of non-European religions” are also barred. The Sky News reporter announces that a new community is being established in the Ozark mountains.

The community’s leader, Eric Orwoll, emphasizes that by returning to the land, they are trying to build a place where they can choose their own neighbors. “We’re just,” he says, “doing it to preserve our own culture.” White, American culture; our reporter asks if it sounds like “segregation.” Orwoll replies that people come there freely and voluntarily but adds: “You don’t let everyone into your home.”

About 40 people live in the community. According to the Sky News reporter, hundreds of people from around the world have also paid to become members.

The part relevant to our topic comes later. In the community, men do the physical labor, while women are tasked with bearing and raising children. When one woman is asked why they don’t allow Black people, gay people, or Jews to join, she replies, “They can have their own communities, and they do.” Sky News reports that this is vital to the Return to the Land mission, which is to “encourage strong families with shared ancestry.”

Furthermore, an online fundraising campaign is being held to “give cash rewards to parents of newborn babies to encourage population growth.” “Just before we arrived,” says the Sky News reporter, “they donated $1,000 to a family who had just had their sixth child.”

Old-new hierarchies in a “Herrenvolk” [Master Race] democracy

We return to Thatcher and Thatcherism to conclude. The British leader, who for some reason is sometimes hailed as a “feminist icon,” had no interest in women’s suffrage; instead, she focused on privatization, the free market, and a smaller state.

Just like the debate I saw in the US, her policies generally led to spending cuts in areas that traditionally benefited women. Cuts were made in health and housing. Thatcher even noted in her memoirs that she had to fight against “great pressure” to provide tax relief or subsidies for childcare. Zac Denman writes:

“Thatcher did not want to help society, she wanted everyone to fend for themselves, individuality was key. For her, it was about grit and mettle. This belief is, of course, a pleasure afforded by a life of privilege. Our society is not meritocratic, hard work can only get you so far. She also ignores the help she received; her millionaire husband paid her fees to become a barrister and bought their family home in Kent and Chelsea. She had the advantage of a full-time nanny, so she could go out and work without worrying about childcare, an advantage most women do not have. She believed women should stay at home and look after the children; she did not want the UK to become a ‘creche society’. These rules, of course, did not apply to her, only to the women below her. Hypocrisy was a policy for the Prime Minister.

In keeping with her belief that women should be mothers and nothing else, a bit of part-time work was allowed to keep the brain ‘ticking over’. Thatcher was a great advocate for the nuclear family. For her, it was a ‘call to a return to a traditional and moral way of life’. Women who strayed from traditional roles were mocked. The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp protest was mocked as ‘left-wing propaganda and the gay and lesbian militancy of some councils’. Men as breadwinners, women as housewives, and children born in wedlock were encouraged to the detriment of society. Of course, for Thatcher, this was irrelevant, as ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individuals and there are families.’ Women do not appear as individuals in this conservative vision. Their roles are restricted, their ambitions curbed. This effectively ensures that no other woman follows in Thatcher’s footsteps, unless they have the backing of a rich man.”

Rose and Milton Friedman also point out in their book Tyranny of the Status Quo that if “public opinion is moving away from the belief in big government and from the doctrine of social responsibility,” this shift will tend to “bring back a belief in individual responsibility by strengthening the family and restoring its traditional role.” The return of Christian faith and the anti-socialist and anti-state stance of Rerum Novarum (6), the escape to the family, and the re-establishment of the male-female hierarchy emerge from the instinct of declining capitalism to save itself from the apocalypse.

Moreover, we can now say that this is not unique to Thatcher or Thatcherism, but a ruling-class consensus: as early as 1987, Elizabeth Wilson pointed out that the “soft” left, by focusing excessively on Thatcherism, overlooked the “familist” tendencies within the Labour Party. According to Wilson, the reason for this could be that it is reassuring in times of crisis and that it expresses “different and sometimes very disparate hopes and fears, such as those about crime, the breakdown of law and order, sexual immorality and deviancy, and, most important but least explicit, the desire of men to hang on to the privileges of their sex.”

Therefore, the reconfiguration of a woman’s place in the home and of the family is not solely about confining women to the home, but about rebuilding class hierarchies to also encompass gender hierarchies; it is about finding ways to enable women, who also handle family affairs, to participate in the workforce.(7)

These are the solutions proposed by Silicon Valley capital and its “scientific” allies to emerge from the apocalyptic depression. They are making moves to create castes based on their biology, spaces, religions, nations, cultures, and genders to secure their own positions. They serve their own marginality to the masses packaged as meritocracy. While it’s every man for himself, they want to achieve an eternal existence by eternalizing the differences between themselves and the rabble.

(*) The reference in the title is from Isaiah 62:5: “As a young man marries a young woman, so will your Builder marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.”

(1) In 1987, Thiel founded the right-libertarian student journal The Stanford Review. The journal opposed “diversity policies” like affirmative action, defended free speech and the “Western canon,” and spoke out against “administrative bloat” and left-wing tendencies in academia. Here he found allies like Keith Rabois, David Sacks, and Joe Lonsdale, who would continue to work with Thiel later on. During his student years, Thiel also befriended Father Arne Panula, the Stanford director of Opus Dei. Opus Dei is, of course, a Spanish Catholic right-wing sect that recruits male members at universities around the world, collects large sums of money from them when they become wealthy, and uses it to support far-right political causes worldwide.

(2) Melinda Cooper points out that the AFDC, which was seen as a program for white women more than for Southern African-American women when it first started in the 1930s, over the years became a federal practice predominantly accessed by poor African-American women. Thus, for its opponents, this welfare state practice became a specter based on both gender and race.

(3) In a report written in the 1960s on the post-war Black family structure, Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan focused on the negative consequences of the disintegration of the “traditional” Black family structure, detailing this disintegration as follows: separation, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and an increase in the proportion of female-headed households where women assumed an unnaturally dominant and authoritarian role. The AFDC program was also included as a contributing factor to this disintegration.

(4) Dirlik writes that of the eight education experts Singapore invited to the country for its efforts to create a new curriculum based on “moral values” and Confucianism, all but one were from the US.

(5) The very “Western” ideas of the ethnically Chinese Lee on genetics, eugenics, and the Malay minority in Singapore are examined in detail by Michael D. Barr in this article.

(6) I will separately discuss what purpose this famous papal encyclical, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, might serve in today’s techno-libertarian world, but for now, I want to say in passing: as the founding text of Catholic social policy, Rerum Novarum is a godsend for tech capital’s myth of a return to religion-nation-family.

(7) Wilson describes this, especially in the US, as the “feminization of poverty”: “The decline of the manufacturing sector, the rise of part-time work in the service sector, changes in technology and consumption habits (for example, the proliferation of fast-food restaurants), combined with changes in family structure and especially the rise in divorce rates, have created a situation where more and more women have become wage earners, but have become an increasingly vulnerable part of the workforce.” Part-time work in the service sector plays a significant role in the formation of this new poverty for women (in the 1980s). As Wilson quotes, Joan Smith writes with great foresight, “In short, the contemporary economy has moved to center stage a workforce that must be constantly endowed with marginal characteristics.”