Jacob Silverman on the Tech Bros’ Gilded Rage

Journalist Jacob Silverman joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He discusses the rightward shift in ideology among leading tech giants and their companies, partially attributing the change to an interest in doing business with governments, including the U.S. and Israel. He speaks about the influence of Saudi Arabian wealth on the U.S. tech industry and how Saudi Arabia uses access to cutting-edge technology to remain in power and conduct mass surveillance on its people. Silverman addresses the calculated way today’s tech leaders have taken control of the idea economy as they increasingly interfere with what information the public sees, such as Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X). He gives examples of imagined and attempted tech-utopias, discussing communities such as California Forever and Próspera and their impacts. Silverman also discusses the alliance between the tech right and discontented moderate Democrats in San Francisco, explaining their involvement in recall politics and the transactional nature of tech politics. He reads an excerpt from Gilded Rage.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Emma Baxley, Elleanora Meman, Hope Wampler, and Brianna Wilson. 

Jacob Silverman

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley • “How Shaun Maguire Became Silicon Valley’s Most MAGA Firebrand,” Business Insider • Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud • Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

Others:

California Forever • The Diversity Myth by Peter Thiel & David Sacks • ‘Go home’: Honduran islanders fight against crypto colonialists| The Guardian • Elon Musk

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH JACOB SILVERMAN

WT: Musk is in the title of the book, and his acquisition of Twitter is written about. It’s an important event. I remember people making fun of him for doing that, and it turns out, to me, that it has been a brilliant and incredibly smart move on his part to control the idea economy. It was incredible. It’s been powerful, and he’s made a lot of changes at X that you talk about, including devaluing linked articles, which is something that I didn’t know, and now I’m going to change my Twitter practices. Maybe that’s why nobody likes my Twitter posts. But you write about the way that he has, internally, specifically at times, when it pissed him off—like Biden had a tweet about the Eagles winning the Super Bowl that was more popular than his, and so Twitter or X then changed the algorithm so that Musk’s tweets would be liked more. Am I so? Not only him, but you reference Peter Thiel and David Sacks. They founded a publication called Stanford Review. They wrote a book called The Diversity Myth. They’ve been involved in thinking about news and media a lot, even though Trump always talks about fake news and the media is dying, etc. These people are really aware of the power of media. I wonder if you could talk about that?

JS: So to start with the latter part, Peter Thiel and David Sacks, in college, were co-writers and friends. They wrote a book together called The Diversity Myth, which grew out of their college writing. I’ve read it. It’s this long book length rant about multiculturalism and campus politics that—I should say it came out in ’95—but you could do a Control F now and just replace everything about “multiculturalism” with “wokeism” or “identity politics.” Peter Thiel gives a lot of public speeches and interviews. For someone who hates colleges, he goes to a lot of them and speaks to young Republican groups. And he’s complaining about the same things he was complaining about in college, he has the same examples, like having to read a book by Rigoberta Menschú, who won the Nobel Prize for her indigenous activism in Guatemala in the late 1980s. He still uses that as an example. In a lot of ways, they haven’t evolved that much, but they’ve brought other people along with them, like their friend Elon. Sorry, there was a first part of that question, I think.

WT: I was talking about the way Musk had a chance, by buying Twitter, he amplified what he wanted amplified. These things are affected by the way the algorithm works, right?

JS: I think you’re right that when Musk was first buying Twitter, a lot of people thought he was foolish. I mentioned in the book that in some ways it actually reminded me—not that I was much of a media watcher at the time, because it’s many years ago—but when Robert Maxwell bought The Daily News, a distressed media asset that a highly-leveraged billionaire was personally obsessed with. But of course, the difference is, I don’t know if Robert Maxwell was a columnist or writing all the articles. This was also a conduit for Musk to cultivate his own flock, and this is someone who has really benefited, at least in the past, from his online following, and also, frankly, allegations of online stock manipulation, and the ability of Tesla to become a meme stock on social media.

So while he paid a lot and had to be sued into consummating the deal, it actually turned out very well for him, not only because it helped get Trump elected. One thing that might be overlooked is that Twitter was the signing editor of the media at that point. It still is, of course, very influential in setting the news cycle, but even more so then. By claiming that for himself—and this is someone who already had a huge media presence and ability to set the news agenda, but now he was claiming that for himself, and as you mentioned, including when his tweets gain enough attention, directly interfering in the algorithm. That was a major and perhaps unappreciated shift that had wide effects beyond the Twitter or X platform, including what other media outlets are writing about and focusing on and what other people are seeing on other platforms. That raises important points that they are trying to dictate things on this more granular level through platform management

WT: There were writers who became stars on the early Twitter, like Roxane Gay, who were left-leaning writers. Now, people like Catturd are nationally-known figures because of the way that right wing figures are embraced and boosted by X posting.

JS: It’s really become Musk’s world. I can’t justify why I’m still in it, but I am still on there, partly because, I guess I write about a lot of these people. But the site, especially with Grok, has become a reflection of who he is and his worldview. Like I said, he sometimes intervenes at the level of telling engineers what to do or what he wants out of the site. It’s pretty widely believed that over the summer when Grok started calling itself Mecca Hitler and spilling out pretty lurid Nazi rape fantasies about the CEO at the time, Linda Ocarina, that this was probably a result of Musk meddling, and certainly a result of trying to make this thing less “woke,” a term I use in scare quotes, because of how conservatives use it. You get that kind of dysfunction because this thing is trying to imitate Elon Musk and responding to his pretty wacky commands. That is one of the disturbing parts about seeing this all laid bare, but it’s also revealing we can see the right wing radicalization playing out, that we can see who they talk to—it’s these ridiculous people like Catturd and it’s also pretty overt Nazis in some cases. So, mostly it’s disturbing but there is a little bit of transparency here, just in that we can see who these people are, and see who they talk to and whose ideas they value. That, in itself, should be pretty troubling.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: In some ways, the decimation of net neutrality is hard to see, and this is a very specific example of it. Essentially, our version of Lex Luthor has no limits on his pettiness, no limits on how megalomaniacal he’s willing to be to shift things in his direction. I was talking earlier about the notion of them having de-facto states. You have this amazing section in the middle of the book about various imagined and attempted techno utopias, places where the normal rules of society can be suspended or maybe not applied at all. Can you speak a little bit about that?

JS: As Whitney referenced earlier in the talk, these people don’t want to be governed, and they are glad to exercise power through existing politicians and political structures—that’s partly what the book is about—but there is this other side to their politics which is the more libertarian exit side—a term that Peter Thiel and some others use—this desire to exit. We’ve seen it manifest itself in anything from investments in cryptocurrencies to attempts to undermine regulation to just simply ignoring laws, in some cases, but also in the development of what are called charter cities, which had antecedents in seasteading when Peter Thiel was funding these floating communities that never seem to appear. Charter cities are attempts to hive off a real piece of land, usually from a country with poor sovereignty itself and establish basically a corporate fiefdom. They’re a startup community that is generally run like a corporate dictatorship, in some sense, and the desire, mostly, is to avoid taxes or to make money in ways that can’t be done under the laws and regulations of the United States, and also, increasingly, to do medical studies and medical testing that can’t be done in the U.S. in the name of efficiency and moving faster and developing things.

To a lot of people, that sounds scary, but to the people in tech, it’s escaping the strictures of the United States and the things that the U.S. has done to to hold back innovation. There are some very real examples of this already in motion. Probably the most prominent one is Prospera in Honduras, which is on this island called Roatan. There’s some very good reporting from there about the conflicts with locals. Right now, there is basically a corporation that owns a chunk of that island and that has been building there and has some number of residents, and that is trying to do this no-taxes, medical experimentation, innovation, free for all. It sounds so terrible, it does, but they seem very enthusiastic about it.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy.