In a long-form article for Politico Magazine, Calder McHugh interviews Jacob Silverman, author of a new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. It is an interesting interview (not behind paywall), it hits a lot of tech-oriented topics, like bitcoin, AI, and indirectly utopianism.
What I didn't expect is that Silverman believes most of the leaders in tech, the top people, are firmly on the MAGA team. I'm not surprised they experience our current society as more than a little icky.
There are some practical things they are trying to do, like various attempts at charter cities and securing actual physical sovereignty over a piece of land.
These are all attempts at what’s sometimes called “exit,” a way to secure your own sovereignty by making your own currencies with crypto, to escaping the education system, to ultimately securing land and creating your own communities.
I think that their vision for the kind of escape that they want is unrealistic to a great degree, and I think it’s one of the ultimate flaws with the people my book is about. They seem to have become rather anti-social and almost xenophobic; they don’t really want to be among the rest of us.
Some of this, I argue in the book, came out of the perceived social failures and political failures of San Francisco, the city for tech, where a lot of them came from. They see the city as a failure and irredeemable to some extent, and that has also fed into this idea that “We need to get out of here. We need to build our own sovereign communities.”
Elon Musk's fascination with colonizing Mars is the most dramatic version of this escapism. Oddly, it is not noted in the interview.