Introduction
Maha Rafi Atal
In 2021, Steve Sisolak, the then-governor of Nevada, proposed that technology companies establish their own governments. To jumpstart the economy, the state would allow technology companies who purchased at least 78 square miles of land and invested $1 billion to impose their own taxes and form their own school districts and courts. The governor described these ‘Innovation Zones’ as delivering an ‘alternative form of local government’, but the plan invited instant blowback and the governor soon backed down.Footnote 1
The Nevada proposal was the brainchild of cryptocurrency millionaire Jeffrey Berns, but the idea is much older. In 2010, the economist Paul Romer argued that developing countries should lease land to foreign corporations to administer as ‘charter cities’, and even persuaded the government of Madagascar to strike such a deal with South Korea’s Daewoo.Footnote 2 Romer had been inspired by 20th century Asian ‘economic zones’, which had attracted investment because they exempted firms from many national regulations. Such enclaves are also heirs to the colonial ports governed by chartered corporations like the East India Company.
The model has particular support among technology entrepreneurs, for whom it promises the possibility of ‘political exit’ or escape from the regulatory authority of states.Footnote 3 Elon Musk has initiated plans to incorporate the area surrounding the operations of SpaceX as a company town, ‘Starbase’, to house employees and their families.Footnote 4 SpaceX already benefits from a permissive regulatory regime in Texas, which has among the weakest labour laws and lowest taxes in the United States, but local NGOs accuse it of polluting the water supply with industrial waste.Footnote 5 Documents promoting ‘Starbase’ note that a company town would appoint its own environmental regulators and insulate company operations from lawsuits filed by non-residents.Footnote 6
Alongside such instrumental benefits, however, charter city advocates advance a substantive vision of global order built around themselves as a new kind of sovereign. Some have adopted the term ‘network-state’, coined by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, to describe their ambition to replace the sovereign state with the sovereignty of corporate oligarchs.Footnote 7 This ambition builds on (but perverts) John Perry Barlow’s 1996 techno-futurist manifesto, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which envisioned ‘a place where the Governments of the Industrial World … have no sovereignty.’Footnote 8
Network-staters claim ‘sovereignty’ in the sense that they claim the authority to govern others without outside interference.Footnote 9 On this basis, network-staters assert that technologies can solve problems – from hate speech to privacy – for which public regulation was previously necessary, enabling technologists to govern communities ‘better’ than states can do, without answering to external control. When SpaceX clashed with government regulators, Musk’s friend and fellow entrepreneur Sam Altman told the New Yorker, ‘Elon desperately wants the world to be saved, but only if he can be the one to save it.’Footnote 10
Technologists’ account of themselves as benevolent dictators depends on a double blurring of public and private authority. In contemporary social science, states and corporations are often understood as paradigmatically public and private actors, respectively. Businesses acquire political power, in this formulation, when they cross from the private to the public realm.Footnote 11 While this literature often draws analogies between contemporary corporations and early modern ‘company-states,’Footnote 12 early modern theorists drew a different boundary – between a personal sphere of individuals and a political sphere of organizations. In that political sphere, private actors like corporations were assumed to compete as equals with public ones like the state. Meanwhile, some people – monarchs – were understood as incorporated entities rather than as private individuals.Footnote 13 When oligarchs assert that they can save the world with technology so long as they remain unaccountable to anyone other than themselves, they position both their firms as corporate sovereigns, and themselves as latter-day kings.
These visions of oligarchic sovereignty are deeply territorial, beginning with the territories surrounding corporate operations. In California and the Pacific Northwest, new towns have been chartered to house Amazon warehouses and their workers. In these towns, Amazon collects its own taxes from residents, and denies that it owes any back to the state.Footnote 14 Facebook is building a 59-acre city near its Menlo Park headquarters, with apartments and retail spaces, while offering a salary bonus to employees who live there. Facebook partially funds the Menlo Park police, in a deal that requires the police to maintain an extra substation near the corporate campus and seek corporate permission for policing decisions elsewhere in the city.Footnote 15
Technology financiers have also sought territorial enclaves in which to extract the critical minerals necessary for renewable energy production. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz have backed KoBold Minerals, which is developing copper, cobalt, and nickel mines on Greenland’s coastline. Marc Andreessen and Peter Theil’s Pronomos Capital have also backed Praxis Nation, which governs enclaves from Nigeria to Honduras. Since 2019, Praxis has been seeking – so far, unsuccessfully – to purchase and govern Greenland. KoBold’s founders describe their mission as follows: ‘to power a clean-energy future [using a] mix of cutting-edge scientific computing and old-school bravado’.Footnote 16 Andreessen writes, ‘We believe in adventure, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.’Footnote 17 Network-staters argue that their advanced technology and lack of regulatory constraint will deliver faster, bolder results for the climate than states can achieve.
The territorial ambitions of oligarchic sovereignty stand in contrast to our tendency to imagine corporate power as ephemeral and slippery, floating above states on a ‘global’ plane. International relations canonically conceives of state power as depending on territorial borders. As Robert Sack has argued, states engage in ‘territorialization’, exercising control over people ‘by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area’, in order to both build and retain sovereignty.Footnote 18 Scholars including Joshua Barkan, Dirk Matten and Andrew Crane, and Glen Whelan have argued that corporations threaten states precisely because they operate across these territorial borders.Footnote 19 John Ruggie famously posited that globalization represented an ‘unbundling of territoriality’ in which territorial states would be subordinated to ‘de-territorialized’ actors like corporations.Footnote 20 Corporations grow more powerful, this argument runs, because unlike states, they do not require territory to hold power.
The oligarchs who would be kings see it differently, positioning territorial sovereignty as essential to their broader political project. This claim to territorial sovereignty on a par with that of states is related to but extends beyond the everyday territorial control that many companies enact over workers and communities in the places where they operate, where political power is derivative of economic power.Footnote 21 The ambitions of technology oligarchs more closely resemble those of the early modern company-states that achieved sovereignty through territorial political conquest and were treated as sovereign by both European and Asian states.Footnote 22 Indeed, Srinivasan’s definition of a network-state includes ‘diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states’, a criterion of sovereignty in international law.Footnote 23
Oligarchic sovereignty cuts across the public/private divide. Network-staters seek territorial sovereignty through private property ownership: Praxis founder Dryden Brown exemplifies this ambition, explaining that he ‘went to Greenland to try to buy it’, only to find that ‘they do not want to be bought’.Footnote 24 Unlike colonial companies who maintained their own armies, however, technology oligarchs use the state to turn their property into territory, even as they assert that their territory should be independent of state control. Praxis and KoBold encouraged the Biden administration’s use of public climate funds to subsidize private mining for critical minerals.Footnote 25 Technology oligarchs donated nearly $400 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, and encouraged the Trump administration to acquire Greenland.Footnote 26 Trump has adopted the language of private property to describe state conquest, arguing that the USA should have ‘ownership and control’ over Greenland in ‘a large real estate deal’.Footnote 27
Where international relations scholarship often treats corporate power as opposed to state power, the technology oligarchs exercise power through state capture. Technology oligarchs are more able to effect such capture than other corporate leaders, because of the two-tier shareholding structure popularized by technology firms, in which the controlling stakes of founder-CEOs cannot be easily diluted.Footnote 28 This increases the power exercised both within and through the firm by executives, enabling these firms to pursue the political agendas of their founders at the expense of profitability. Technology founder-CEOs from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel are using wealth funnelled through the two-tier corporate structure to political action committees (PACs) to promote the rise to power of governments they – as individual oligarchs – control. In the process, oligarchs become ‘rule-makers over large populations’. That power is ‘conditional upon … their power to usurp public authority and to privatize the legislative order’.Footnote 29
Such concerns are not new. In the early modern period, critics of the colonial corporations argued that they threatened to capture the state and force it to make policy in private rather than public interests. Thomas Hobbes warned that they would become ‘lesser Commonwealths in the belly of the greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man’.Footnote 30 Edmund Burke and Adam Smith saw corporate power as parasitic on both state sovereignty and individual rights.Footnote 31 This kind of parasitism animates the private asset-stripping of the US government that is currently underway. Despite the sometimes libertarian rhetoric espoused by technology oligarchs, their efforts to dismantle state services should be understood not as an effort to transcend or ‘exit’ politics, but to consolidate it – redirecting the state’s legitimating authority towards the consolidation of private (corporate and personal) empire.
The essays that follow map the contours of these empires. They probe the claim advanced here – that technology oligarchs are not merely powerful corporate executives but aspirant sovereigns – by testing its historical, geographic, and theoretical limits. Taggart and Schindler reveal how technology firms are often conscripted by the state into projects of national security, suggesting that corporate power may be better understood as instrumental to rather than independent from state sovereignty. Logan and Utrata, by contrast, explore the infrastructural bases of digital authority, interrogating whether control over platforms and data constitutes a new form of ‘corporate-over-state’ power or simply extends older patterns of regulatory capture. Lockwood examines how personal and corporate power intertwine in figures like Musk, producing hybrid forms of domination that are also sites of vulnerability. Finally, Drezner turns to the temporal horizon, situating oligarchic rule as an effort to exercise sovereignty over time itself. Collectively, this forum asks whether we are witnessing a novel fusion of private and public authority, or the refraction of older histories through new technologies and terrains.
Tech oligarchs and the second Cold War: Reconfigurations of the transnational capitalist class
Jack Taggart and Seth Schindler
In January 2025, Sam Altman appeared at the White House to launch ‘Stargate’, a $500 billion OpenAI initiative to realize so-called ‘democratic artificial intelligence’ by providing countries ‘allied’ with the USA with access to advanced AI and US semiconductors.Footnote 32 This weaponzation of private technology infrastructure in the service of national strategic goals is not unprecedented, but its recent intensification raises questions about the relationship between tech oligarchs and the US government. For four decades, the transnational capitalist class (TCC) has been a foundational concept in critical IR. Here, neoliberal globalisation gave rise to a class whose interests are disembedded from particular nation-states, and whose hegemonic power stems from an expansive ideational project that portrays particular TCC interests as universal.
Yet developments like Stargate complicate depictions of a unified and hegemonic TCC. Intensifying USA–China competition for dominance over strategic transnational networks has been described as a ‘Second Cold War’, marked by a resurgence of techno-nationalism, state–capital hybrids, and protectionist industrial policies to reassert national control over technologies such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.Footnote 33
How, then, should we understand the status of the TCC in this shifting conjuncture? By examining how tech firms and oligarchs align with US geostrategic aims, we highlight reconfigurations and reassertions of US state sovereignty, and assess its implications for TCC coherence.
A unified transnational capitalist class?
In 1974, Stephen Hymer was the first to argue that the ‘spread of capitalist social relations to a world level’ was giving rise to ‘an international capitalist class … whose interests lie in the [expanding] world economy’.Footnote 34 He anticipated the structural basis for global class formation via the expansion of corporate capital beyond national borders. The collapse of Keynesianism validated this analysis as neoliberal institutions expanded globally: national and regional production systems were ‘unbundled’ and offshored, generating unprecedented economic integration and the globalization of production networks.Footnote 35
Robert Cox further proffered that whereas ‘social classes [had hitherto] been found to exist within nationally-defined social formations’, the transnationalization of production had made it ‘increasingly pertinent to think in terms of a global class structure alongside or superimposed upon national class structures’. Cox identified a transnational managerial class – ‘both a class in itself and for itself’ – as possessing ‘its own ideology, strategy, and institutions of collective action’.Footnote 36 William Robinson offered the most assertive view; the worldwide fragmentation of production was taking place ‘alongside the centralization of command and control of the global economy in transnational capital’, subordinating national modes of accumulation to a new ‘globalist’ historical bloc and ‘transnational phase of capitalism’.Footnote 37
Yet this vision of a de-territorialized, unified TCC has since been challenged. Carroll argues that the TCC is regionally concentrated, anchored primarily across the North Atlantic. Burris and Staples similarly caution against assumptions of global class cohesion, noting that ‘the regional locus of transnational class formation is more accurately described as the North Atlantic [i.e. USA and Europe] region[s]’.Footnote 38 Even where scholars identify ideational coherence, this does not necessarily translate into coherence at the empirical and material level of class formation.
Events since 2008 have nevertheless undermined the conditions that made the formation of a TCC seem plausible, if highly uneven. The collapse of the US securitized mortgage market threatened to bring the global economy down with it. The US Treasury embraced ‘quantitative easing’ and opened swap lines to friendly governments to stabilize markets and maintain liquidity.Footnote 39 Cheap capital and persistently low interest rates fuelled an investment boom in Silicon Valley and a shift from publicly held companies to private funds. It also meant that tech entrepreneurs were under little pressure to be profitable. Instead, they borrowed heavily – and cheaply – to ‘hyperscale’ and secure monopoly positions before competitors could respond.
Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory deepened shifts in US policy towards China. The 2017 National Security Strategy identified great powers, rather than non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda, as the primary security threat. USA–China rivalry is now shaped by two interrelated dynamics. First, China and the USA pursue mutually exclusive national projects of renewal (respectively, ‘National Rejuvenation’ and ‘America First’). Second, given deep economic interdependence, competition no longer takes the form of hard decoupling, autarkic isolation, or wholesale containment. Instead, it plays out through struggles to gain control over the connective tissue of the global economy, namely transnational infrastructure, production, finance, and digital networks.Footnote 40
Bidenomics aimed to foster the renewal of deindustrialized communities by using industrial policy to reshore geostrategically significant manufacturing. This put Silicon Valley front and centre, as the USA and China competed to control tech sectors such as semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, cloud computing, and digital platforms. Tech firms now face a radically altered opportunity structure – one shaped by the imperatives of geopolitical strategy over the logic of global market efficiency. No longer securely ensconced in the ‘commanding heights’ of the global economy superimposed upon national formations, tech elites are now subject to demands imposed upon their operations by national-industrial strategies.Footnote 41
Several strategies are emerging in response. Some firms are attempting to hedge against geopolitical competition and maintain access to both US and Chinese markets. Apple, for instance, seeks to remain above the geopolitical divide. While asserting neutrality, it has shifted elements of its supply chain towards India and Vietnam in response to rising tensions. The success of this strategy is in doubt, as the Trump administration has reprimanded and disciplined the company for not shifting its supply chain to the USA directly.Footnote 42
A second strategy sees firms leaning into geopolitical rivalry in the hopes of obtaining subsidies, patronage, and strategic support. Intel, for example, has struggled in core markets, particularly high-end AI chips and smartphone processors. Yet, with the hope of reversing its fortunes, the company embraced the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, which offers major incentives to firms willing to relocate to or expand production within the USA. For such companies, alignment with geostrategic priorities offers not only material support but a potential pathway to market revitalization. As US defence spending increases, other firms such as Anduril, Palantir, SpaceX, and OpenAI seek lucrative partnerships with the Department of Defense. Intensifying geopolitical rivalry and expanded defence budgets may also offer a solution to the profitability challenges facing AI firms.
These developments point not only to a fragmentation of interests within the ostensibly unified TCC, but a struggle over the (re)composition of elite power and state-oligarchical sovereignty. As Jamie Merchant argues, a nouveau riche cadre of right-wing tech oligarchs has aligned with private fund managers to challenge the dominance of Wall Street incumbents and asset management giants like BlackRock. Themselves critical of transnational liberal managerialism, they seek both lucrative governance contracts and to harness the Trumpian state towards shifting control from regulated funds and state-linked finance to less regulated tech capital.Footnote 43 Tech oligarchs are not seeking mere inclusion within the old order. As Merchant suggests: ‘this is not the takeover of government by oligarchs; it is an aspiring oligarchy overthrowing an old one by seizing government power’.Footnote 44
This rearticulation and entanglement of tech oligarchical and state power is exemplified by Elon Musk’s brief leadership of the Department of Governance Efficiency (DOGE), a body tasked with ‘streamlining’ public institutions but closely aligned with the regulatory interests of Musk’s corporate empire, including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X. His threats to restrict Starlink access in Ukraine unless a favourable mineral agreement was reached demonstrates the fusion of private tech capital with geopolitical strategy.Footnote 45 What emerges is not the transcendence of politics by capital, but the re-embedding of transnational operations of capital into national geostrategic strategies: a reconfiguration of oligarchic tech power through its direct coupling with the machinery of the state. This has profound impacts on class formation.
Under this geostrategic globalization, markets remain global yet fragmented; capital must now navigate a web of national-security logics and is increasingly dependent on national governments. What is ending, to the extent it ever fully existed, is the era in which a TCC could operate above the national-political. In this context, tech elites are enmeshed in the apparatuses of state power as strategic national assets. Moreover, although the principal axis of geopolitical rivalry remains between the USA and China, the resurgence of techno-nationalism in the USA does not necessarily align with the interests of European-based firms. As American industrial policy becomes more assertively national – through tariffs, subsidies, export controls, and reshoring initiatives – tensions are emerging within the North Atlantic bloc, hitherto the most integrated TCC fraction.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, has sought to reassure Europe, stating ‘we as a company need to be a source of digital stability during a period of geopolitical volatility’, and promising to shield its European operations from Trumpian measures.Footnote 46 It is unclear – and, given Apple’s experience, perhaps unlikely – that Microsoft will be able to do so. EU policymakers are also attuned to the threat posed by their dependence on US tech firms, and are seeking to cultivate alternatives to US-dominated cloud infrastructures. As Joakim Öhman, CEO of Elastx, observes: ‘from the Europeans’ perspective … the US is maybe not on the same team as us any longer’.Footnote 47 Europe nevertheless remains vulnerable, reliant on both US digital services and China’s mineral processing, while its relatively modest high-tech investment risks leaving it ‘a permanent supplicant’ to one or both superpowers.Footnote 48 In this context, we can no longer assume that class and firm-level alignments within the USA will mirror European trajectories. These developments point to a deepening fragmentation of the TCC, one that is likely to generate intra-core tension and divergent strategic outlooks.
Rethinking capitalist class power
Whether the Biden-era industrial policies and Trump’s tariffs will achieve their reshoring aims remains uncertain. Yet the political recalibration they have triggered is transforming the global economic landscape and eroding the notion of a coherent, hegemonic TCC that operates beyond geopolitics. Notwithstanding the fallout between Trump and Musk, tech oligarchs are falling into line. Dubbed the ‘broligarchy’, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Pichai were front and centre at Trump’s inauguration.Footnote 49 Recent events have demonstrated that they are anything but independent from the US state.
This raises questions about the analytical utility of the TCC concept; neoliberalism, the superstructural scaffolding of TCC power, is in visible decline. Yet the realignment of capital with the state remains uneven, creating openings for both cooperation and confrontation between corporate actors and state apparatuses. There will be winners and losers in this emerging order. Critical scholarship must shift its focus from analyses of ‘transnational’ class hegemony to more contingent constellations of state-aligned capitalist power, shaped by geoeconomic fragmentation, geopolitical rivalry, and state-driven aspirations towards network centrality.
The broligarchy: Informational capitalism and the state
Sarah Logan
Record-breaking campaign donations by tech oligarchs and the dominance of their products in American public and private life have cemented their positions close to the seat of American power. Their pamphleteering espouses varieties of right-leaning libertarianism, including calls for the retreat of the state to the most minimal protection of personal and property rights. The so-called ‘broligarchs’ are broadly anti-democratic in their transactional approach to politics, and some of their number explicitly so.Footnote 50 But as a group their political vision is unevenly held and chaotically implemented. What distinguishes the broligarchs, aside from their extreme wealth, is the extractive logic of informational capitalism, which has political effects by accident if not always explicitly by design.
I approach the impact of tech oligarchs on international politics via the literature on historical state formation, which has long emphasized a role for capital in the development of territorially defined, centralized authority which underpins the modern state system.Footnote 51 Tilly, for example, argues that the state was the most efficient provider of protection, because it could most effectively extract rents to fund warmaking, leading to its ascendancy as a form of political organisation over voluntary groups.Footnote 52 For neo-institutionalists like Douglass North and Robert Thomas, shifts in the nature of production altered the relative power of groups possessing land, labour, and capital. The state’s ability to extract rents, allocate property rights, and provide social goods efficiently maximized the revenue both of society at large and of the individual ruler, consolidating power centrally.Footnote 53 These are fundamentally materialist explanations, in contrast to those of scholars who have emphasized the relationship between revolutions in economic and scientific ideas and the purpose of political authority.Footnote 54 These debates offer a framework within which to understand the relationship between informational capitalism and political authority.
As defined by Julie Cohen, informational capitalism is the ‘data-driven multidimensional commodification of economic and social resources’ engaging in ‘scaled up extraction and appropriation of intangible resources’ such as data, datasets and algorithms, portfolios of patents, and copyrights.Footnote 55 This process is driven by a logic of extraction and accumulation whereby data is treated as capital rather than as a commodity.Footnote 56 Fourcade and Healey describe this as the ‘data imperative’ – the drive to extract data from all sources at all times and by any means possible.Footnote 57 This includes the datafication and commodification of human activity, including social activity, on an international scale. Human social life is thus the source of US tech oligarchs’ wealth.
This extractive process problematizes the legitimate authority of territorialised states. As intimated by calls for ‘network-states’, colonisation of space, and ‘seasteading’, tech oligarchs seek to avoid the extraction of rent, largely in the form of tax, by states.Footnote 58 This in turn challenges the capacity of states to collect revenue from the globe’s wealthiest corporations. Rationalist accounts of state formation have historically emphasized the relationship between a state’s capacity to extract rents and its capacity to provide social goods which buttress its authority. The size and monopoly status of American tech companies limit the ability of even developed states with sophisticated bureaucracies to extract rents from these organizations.
This capacity has been further diminished by the close relationship between American tech companies and the Trump administration. The OECD Global Tax Deal, finalized in 2021, was designed to reterritorialize American tech companies such as Amazon, Google, and Meta by curtailing their ability to engage in tax shifting.Footnote 59 While the Biden administration had been broadly supportive of the deal, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew in early 2025. Tax shifting by multinationals is not a new problem, nor is the US government supporting US multinationals, including tech companies, in maximising revenue. The Trump administration’s instigation of retaliatory tariffs for tax and other regulatory measures affecting US tech companies is similarly rationalist, if chaotic. Both moves seek to reterritorialize profit within American boundaries.
But the rationalist account does not explain what it means for other states, including American allies, that these companies’ champions are now sitting at the table of American government. Informational capitalism requires us to go beyond conventional accounts of political contestation over rents. Recent debates in regulatory theory offer a guide.
Platforms, defined as both the products and services provided by technology companies and the companies themselves, are socio-technical constructs which shape social, political, and economic life.Footnote 60 The process of platformization inserts platforms into the reshaping of labour and capital that underpins informational capitalism. The network effects inherent in platformization and the vast wealth afforded by the early mover status mean that platforms are more often than not monopolies. Platformization underpins the wealth of tech oligarchs, whose American tech companies dominate the information marketplace globally, driving and cementing American influence.Footnote 61 Their dominance also has domestic political effects, with the Biden administration warning that monopoly platforms pose ‘risks for consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy’.Footnote 62
These monopolies also problematize the process of contestation which shapes the balance of public/private authority in the extraction and allocation of rents, and thereby the centralization of authority stemming from rent collection. Culpepper and Thelen, for example, have shown that because many tech companies occupy a particularly privileged and central position in the quotidian conduct of everyday social life, tech firms can lobby for regulatory exemptions by mobilizing citizens.Footnote 63 They can shape ideas about what government is for, and about the relationship between citizens and governments. Others argue that the extent of the monopolies involved reshapes corporations’ threat of exit, changing the balance of public vs private authority.Footnote 64 As in the recent case of Australia’s media law, US tech companies can simply threaten to exit and gain leverage because their exit would substantially reshape the way citizens communicate with one another.Footnote 65
The role of tech oligarchs in the collection of rents and the centralization of authority is usefully demonstrated in the context of cloud computing. Cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, pool and share computing infrastructure on a massive scale and provide the ‘nodes’ through which data flows are ‘managed, processed, stored and channeled’.Footnote 66 The cloud service providers use this vast infrastructure to offer scalable storage and computing power. Because only US tech firms have, at present, enough cloud computing capacity to act as ‘hyperscalers’, American cloud computing services are now integral to the delivery of state services across the globe. AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have 63% of the global cloud market, with AWS dominating at 30%.Footnote 67 For example, Indonesia has recently migrated its entire immigration service to AWS, and the Philippines National Police has done the same with its licensing services. Even relatively powerful states, like Japan and the United Kingdom, are dependent on US companies as cloud service providers for government services.
In the process of providing cloud services to governments, cloud hyperscalers collect data as capital and engage in what legal scholar Fleur Johns refers to as data governance.Footnote 68 In this reading, data governs by: shaping social and legal relations; expressing new modes and repositories of power; and constituting and modifying social and legal agents. Cloud computing is thus a type of governance infrastructure. The data governance in play here is a ‘transformation in political rationality, in which data affordances increasingly drive policy strategies’.Footnote 69
In response, European states have been seeking to develop a sovereign cloud infrastructure to shift away from the dominance of US hyperscalers.Footnote 70 These moves have as yet been unsuccessful.Footnote 71 Indeed, Kemmerling and Trampush show that the dominance of US cloud service providers shapes European firms’ preference for using US hyperscalers, against state preferences for developing domestic cloud sovereignty.Footnote 72 Even European states are not committed to an EU-wide cloud sovereignty. Instead, European cloud-provision initatives enable individual European states to negotiate better bilateral deals with American hyperscaler incumbents.Footnote 73
The imperative to extract data-as-capital from human and social life underpins the wealth of American billionaires and unsettles the centralizing relationship between authority, territory, and power indicated by the historical state formation literature. It is here that their political effect lies, not necessarily only in a coherent political project. In their seat so close to American power, and unburdened by fundraising limits, tech oligarchs’ drive and ability to extract data from humans globally is unmatched. This power is heightened by American dominance of Internet infrastructure and governance mechanisms.Footnote 74 As the Trump administration incorporates market access for US tech companies into tariff negotiations, the power of the broligarchy is compounded – not only abroad, but also at home.
Old innovations: Computers and corporate capture
Alina Utrata
Silicon Valley’s belief in innovation, as laid out in the opening note, has spurred a cascade of political projects to create autonomous territorial enclaves.Footnote 75 These political exit projects are supposed to be a new innovation in politics – a new type of political entity that will spur competition in an otherwise stagnant international state system.Footnote 76 If the argument is that ruling over a territory eventually allows individuals or corporations to claim a form of private sovereignty, however, then these projects are hardly innovative. Even the most shocking headlines, such as the attempt to ‘buy’ Greenland, resemble old colonial politics.Footnote 77 From the British East India Company to James Brooke – a British citizen who purchased the right to rule as the ‘White Rajah’ of Sarawak, a private sovereign, from the Sultan of Brunei – commercial or merchant enterprises often bleed into or become political power.Footnote 78 Micro-nations are a derivative, colonial, and unoriginal idea: the attempt by a commercial or merchant class to gain ruling power, an historical trope.
What is truly ‘innovative’ about contemporary tech companies? It is not their unique ability to exit the state, but to capture it – and often through computer systems.
One prominent example of how Silicon Valley corporations have enabled a new kind of state capture is, as Atal notes, the case of the Starlink satellite system in Ukraine. In 2022, Musk disabled access to these satellites in order to deliberately thwart a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive, turning himself into a de facto geopolitical actor.Footnote 79 Of course, here too, the corporate–state partnership has historical echoes. As Swati Srivastava has argued, sovereignty has always been the result of public–private hybridity. Both state and non-state actors work to enact sovereign power, whether aligned or opposed to one another.Footnote 80 Silicon Valley’s corporate capture is different in one key aspect, however: the attempt to take over control of state computer infrastructure.
There are two primary International Political Economy typologies for corporate capture. The first emphasizes ‘structural’ power, or the use of campaign donations or lobbying to further a political agenda, whereas the second emphasizes ‘instrumental’ power, or the ability of business or capital to control investment and thus local economies.Footnote 81 Both forms of capture depend on being able to influence a representative of the state to undertake an action. As Culpepper and Thelen have argued, however, ‘The classic tools of regulatory capture and the threat of disinvestment … do not capture the type of political influence today’s dominant platform firms wield in modern capitalism.’Footnote 82 Instead, as the Starlink example demonstrates, Silicon Valley’s corporate capture occurs through its infrastructural power – it can control or turn off a computer system upon which a state or its citizens depend. Musk did not need to influence or persuade any Ukrainian officials to exert his power; he could simply (and perhaps literally) press a button.
This type of computer capture does not have to only rely on outsourced communication infrastructure but can extend to the internal computer systems of the state itself. Indeed, the first few months of the second Trump administration saw Musk as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attempt a hostile takeover of the computer systems of numerous federal agencies, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Health and Human Services. Musk’s behaviour in government followed the blueprint of his corporate takeover of Twitter: recruiting a handful of young computer programmers who were loyal to him personally and seizing control of company servers, locking potentially ‘disloyal’ employees out of critical systems.Footnote 83 As at Twitter, staff at federal agencies found that they were unable to access emails or internal systems after Musk suspended their login credentials. Musk and his team repeatedly turned up at agency headquarters demanding that employees give DOGE access to sensitive computer systems, placing those who refused on administrative leave. At USAID, Musk even threatened to call US marshals to take the data at gunpoint.Footnote 84 According to court documents, DOGE affiliates had ‘read-and-write’ access to Treasury code which controls the payments infrastructure for Medicaid, social security, and tax refunds.Footnote 85
DOGE’s actions helpfully demonstrate the ways in which power over digital systems has enabled a new kind of corporate capture. Computer capture aims to secure a kind of political power that can bypass human or bureaucratic decision-making. In the case of the Treasury, the Trump administration was likely hoping to seize technical control of systems which distribute funds to other agencies in order to freeze spending which had already been legally appropriated by Congress.Footnote 86 Musk might have similarly hoped to turn off payments to programmes he disagreed with – he has long-standing hostility to USAID programmes in South Africa – or tax rebates owed to those who criticize him. The ‘computer coup’ enabled the suspension of funds without needing to lobby or persuade members of Congress to vote for any particular legislation.
While DOGE’s actions demonstrate how a hostile takeover can achieve a computer capture, many state agencies – both in the USA and elsewhere – have deliberately outsourced internal critical infrastructure to corporate actors through cloud computing contracts. In 2020, for instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) claimed to host cloud computing services for over 6,000 government agencies. In the USA alone, this included the National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).Footnote 87 Outside the USA, contracting with American tech giants to host the most sensitive infrastructures of state has, understandably, raised concerns about national sovereignty. In 2021, then British Home Secretary Priti Patel came under fire in Parliament for the decision to choose AWS as the cloud computing provider for British spy agencies.Footnote 88 Contracts between the UK National Health Service and Palantir, too, have been the subject of protest and concern in the UK.Footnote 89
With their control over critical digital infrastructure, technology corporations and oligarchs have a significant tool of political power, one which they do not have to build a charter city or territorial enclave to wield. In this current political moment, it is not impossible that other technology firms might threaten to dismantle or disable parts of governments’ cloud infrastructure to gain leverage.
Is this kind of corporate capture always bad? Many activist campaigns have called for technology companies to wield their infrastructural power against states in support of human rights. This has included employee protests against Google’s plans to partner with Project Maven, the US military’s AI project, or protest actions against Google and Amazon contracts with Israel’s Nimbus Cloud that enable the Palestinian genocide.Footnote 90 Indeed, as David Ciepley has pointed out, the ‘moral valence’ of capture ‘depends on the kind of corporation doing the capturing.’Footnote 91 Historically, guilds and municipal corporations were often the ‘principal carriers’ of democratic or republican values. In medieval Europe, corporate capture of monarchical or absolutist governments – such as by the cities and merchant groups during the Dutch Republic – and the imposition of their corporate values resulted in increased democratic practices.
Ciepley argues that since the 20th century there has been a ‘Great Inversion’ in the role of corporations. Where previously absolutist monarchies chartered republican corporations, such as guilds, towns, and universities who subsequently elected their leaders, today’s democratic states largely charter authoritarian corporations whose members have no votes.Footnote 92 It is these tyrannical corporations, whose only enfranchised demos are their shareholders, that allow figures like Musk and Zuckerberg to behave like petty autocrats. The appeal of charter cities is thus less about who is running things but how they are being run. For the tech oligarchs, the purpose of micro-nations is not for power to be located in corporations for its own sake, but that corporate rule allows charters to adopt corporate norms of dictatorial governance, rather than democratic ones.
The core problem with corporate capture is thus not corporations as such, but a lack of democratic governance. Although in modern terminology ‘corporation’ has come to be associated exclusively with business firms, in reality our modern world has a plethora of corporations – from cities to universities to guilds – that are governed democratically for collective purposes or social good, with structures beyond mere shareholder democracy. Revitalizing the tradition of political pluralism, such as G. D. H. Cole’s guild socialism, has proven a fruitful framework for reckoning with technology companies.Footnote 93 With this broader definition in mind, corporations have the ability to both act as handmaidens to state oppression or act against the despotic power of the state to protect democratic, civil, and human rights.
‘Burn a Tesla, save democracy?’
Erin Lockwood
After Elon Musk cut off the Ukrainian military’s access to Starlink satellites in autumn 2022, a senior Pentagon official recalled, ‘We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this … It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something.’Footnote 94 Rather than follow the Pentagon’s usual contracting channels, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy got on the phone with Musk, who also claimed to have spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This incident was part of a broader pattern of Musk engaging with heads of state and policymakers at the highest levels, stymieing conventional processes of accountability.
If this episode raised serious questions about one private individual’s influence over foreign affairs, these questions became more urgent during the early days of the second Donald Trump administration, when Musk assumed an unelected role at the head of DOGE. This position meant that when Musk wanted to expand Starlink’s international reach, he did not have to convince Pentagon officials to foot the bill. Through his proximity to the president and authority over DOGE’s cuts to foreign aid, he had direct leverage over foreign countries’ contracting and licensing policies.
How should we understand this kind of ‘double blurring of public and private authority’, as Atal terms it? In this essay, I examine Musk’s role in US policy and how it was contested. Musk’s case, I argue, has profound implications for the politics of accountability and responsibility while illustrating both the power and limits of corporate oligarchy.
In his position at DOGE, Musk’s personal business interests were imbricated with US foreign policy. Facing increased competition from Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which sells a similar satellite to Starlink, Musk leveraged his influence over US foreign aid and diplomacy – and by implication, US tariff policy – to pressure states to approve Starlink licences. For example, the US ambassador to the Gambia pressured the head of the Gambia’s communications ministry to approve Starlink’s licence against the threat of cuts to foreign aid by DOGE, with Starlink executives and State Department officials working together to ‘coax, lobby and browbeat’ Gambian government ministers to approve Starlink access.Footnote 95 This appears to have been part of a broader pattern of tying aid and other beneficial foreign relations to Starlink licences in low- and middle-income countries. US officials directly linked helping Starlink with good US relations in diplomatic cables. This dynamic was so widely known that some countries offered up approval proactively. For example, a State Department memo commented approvingly that Lesotho had assured the USA that it would grant Starlink an operating licence in exchange for goodwill.Footnote 96
In the face of increased tariff pressure from Trump, states including India, Somalia, and Vietnam were eager to proactively extend assurances of Starlink licensing in the hope of better trade deals.Footnote 97 While states have long offered advantageous conditions to American investment to curry favour with the US government, Musk’s disproportionate influence over US foreign policy ties together personal, private, and state interests in a new way. Musk did not directly control US trade policy, but his role in DOGE, combined with his retained business interest in SpaceX, gave him other leverage. Both Lesotho and the Gambia were on a list of embassies that the Trump administration, in DOGE’s haste to dramatically cut federal spending, hadproposed closing, according to an internal State Department memo.Footnote 98 State Department officials noted that pressure to accommodate a private business in exchange for diplomatic recognition was an ‘alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice’.Footnote 99
One way to understand Musk’s power is through the power of his corporations. In this sense, Musk’s outsize role in the US government represents familiar, if heightened, dynamics of regulatory or state capture.Footnote 100 Firms have long sought to influence the state to enact favourable regulation (or deregulation) and to secure lucrative government contracts. Corporate leaders have cycled between private firms and state regulatory bodies in a ‘revolving door’ that blurs the line between private and public interests.Footnote 101 As Culpepper and Thelen argue, platform firms in particular secure favourable regulatory and policy outcomes not via conventional lobbying channels or threats of exit, but rather from the allegiance of their broad consumer base.Footnote 102 We can understand modern corporate power as a form of what Michael Mann calls ‘infrastructural power’.Footnote 103 Although Mann developed this concept to describe the power states accrue through the provision of centrally organized services, it is easy to see how contemporary tech firms have assumed control over many infrastructural channels.
But Musk’s power is distinct from the power of his companies, and goes well beyond regulatory capture. Musk did not just seek to stave off higher taxes and more stringent regulations of his firms, but rather to leverage the power of US diplomatic recognition and foreign aid to secure more profitable investments for his active private financial interests. This speaks to Atal’s observation about contemporary oligarchs’ desire to harness state power, rather than escape it. Moreover, while Musk’s governmental role is an extreme example, many oligarchs have privileged access to state power through elite networks, are called upon as experts by Congress, and shape global economic governance through bodies like the World Economic Forum.
It is perhaps more appropriate to view corporate oligarchs through the lens of Kenneth Waltz’s first image of world politics: as individual actors who shape world politics in their own right. While recent scholarship in the first image tradition has focused on individual political and military leaders,Footnote 104 and while corporate oligarchs do not enjoy formal diplomatic recognition, they nonetheless have far greater access to foreign policymakers than nearly any other citizen. Both in his capacity as SpaceX CEO and as a senior adviser to President Trump, Elon Musk has met with foreign heads of state, including Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim. Moreover, while corporate oligarchs formally lack territoriality, their promotion of charter cities and company towns adds to their state-like attributes.
The platform corporation’s infrastructural power, with an oligarchical CEO at its head, has equipped modern firms with the capacity to cause large-scale harm, across fields such as data and privacy, the environment, and communications and financial networks. As Atal notes, two-tier share structures allow contemporary tech founders and CEOs to retain disproportionate power over even publicly held corporations. When harnessed to the power of the state, corporations’ capacity for inflicting damage is all the greater, as we have seen in 2025 with defunded federal programmes, firings, cancelled contracts, the articulation of new priorities, and deregulation. While some of these harms can be adjudicated through conventional legal institutions, others cannot. Corporate oligarchs’ hybrid role as head of firm and head of (network-) state thus constrains their accountability for the harmful consequences of their disproportionate power.
Oligarchs do not face the same mechanisms of accountability as heads of state, who are accountable to the public whether through elections or through the threat of removal from office via impeachment, a coup, or a mass uprising.Footnote 105 While oligarchs may be formally accountable to shareholders and bound by regulation governing fraud or other misconduct, their accountability is limited to financial decision-making.Footnote 106 Because the range of stakeholders impacted by the actions of corporations is considerably wider than their shareholders, corporations can also be targeted by boycotts and other forms of consumer activism, though these methods lack formal institutional patterns of accountability.Footnote 107
There is, in sum, a mismatch between the narrow models of responsibility in corporate governance and corporate oligarchs’ capacity to cause harm through their tremendous power over populations, infrastructure, and daily life. But at the same time, the blurring of their private and public authority creates novel – if limited – points of leverage. In their discussion of platform power, Culpepper and Thelen observe that when events cue citizen, rather than consumer, identities, platform companies can become vulnerable.Footnote 108 We can read political opposition to Musk’s role in DOGE as just such an event, sparking the public to relate to him as citizens rather than as consumers. In the USA, in the spring of 2025, 60% of respondents in a Marquette University poll reported an unfavourable view of Musk himself, and 58% disapproved of his work at DOGE.Footnote 109 As Musk neared the end of his 130-day term as a ‘special government employee’, a Data for Progress poll found that 62% of voters said that the Trump administration should ask Musk to resign.Footnote 110
In response to Musk’s visible and gleeful axing of foreign aid and the administrative state, activists took aim not at his official role in the government, but at his business interests. What became known as the ‘Tesla Takedown’ protest movement urged the public to boycott and divest from Tesla to leverage power over his otherwise unaccountable governmental position, a strategy captured in protest signs reading ‘Burn a Tesla, save democracy.’ As activist Valerie Costa wrote, ‘The intention of the Tesla Takedown movement is to make a strong public stand against the tech oligarchy behind the Trump administration’s cruel and illegal actions, and to encourage Americans to sell their Teslas and dump the company’s stock.’Footnote 111 Activist Alex Winter similarly identified the protests as ‘anti-Elon Musk’ rather than anti-Tesla.
One the one hand, the Tesla Takedown movement can claim a measure of success in drawing attention to Musk’s role. The protests expanded to 250 cities, attracted participation by Democratic lawmakers, and convinced at least one public pension fund to divest from Tesla stocks.Footnote 112 By early April, Tesla’s stock valuation had fallen by nearly half since its peak in December 2024, and Tesla sales fell through the first half of the year in both the USA and Europe.Footnote 113 JPMorgan analysts directly attributed the fall in Tesla sales and stock valuation in spring 2025 to Musk’s ‘more divisive new role in government’.Footnote 114 Musk faced international backlash as well, with Cameroon, Namibia, and South Africa all placing regulatory restrictions on Starlink in 2024, citing national security and antitrust concerns.Footnote 115 Musk finally left his governmental role in May 2025 after a public feud with President Trump. Musk’s vulnerability to both the personalist whims of the president and to attacks on his business illustrate the limits of concentrating political power in an individual corporate leader.
On the other hand, by targeting an individual who was not just the head of a corporation but also had the tools of state power at his disposal, the protests met an unusually repressive response. They attracted attacks from Musk on X, and US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the administration would classify the vandalism of Tesla cars and trucks as domestic terrorism, and brought federal charges against three people.Footnote 116 This leveraging of state violence to protect an individual business interest illustrates the asymmetries of power inherent in corporate oligarchy. In contrast, there was little the government could do in the face of the transnational boycott of Tesla and the company’s falling stock prices during Musk’s tenure in government. Months after Musk had left DOGE, European Tesla purchases were down 40% from the previous year.Footnote 117
Ultimately, the Tesla Takedown protests and denial of Starlink licensing agreements are a paltry substitute for holding Musk accountable for his disproportionate individual influence over global politics. Much of the damage from Musk’s time at the helm of DOGE has already been done: it is estimated that the cuts to US foreign aid will cost 14 million lives over the next five years.Footnote 118 Moreover, Musk did not – and does not – require an official governmental role to directly intervene in foreign affairs, as his disruption of Starlink in Ukraine shows. Corporate oligarchs’ position at the top of platform companies imbues them with state-like capacities but without state-like mechanisms of accountability. While the blending of public and private power may create novel forms of leverage over otherwise unaccountable corporate oligarchs, marching with a ‘burn a Tesla, save democracy’ banner is a weak weapon against this merging of infrastructural, platform, personal, and political power.
The winner’s intellectual curse
Daniel Drezner
As per usual Maha Rafi Atal has done yeoman work delineating the ways that tech entrepreneurs have encroached upon traditional notions of Westphalian sovereignty. As she writes, ‘When oligarchs assert that they can save the world with technology so long as they remain unaccountable to anyone other than themselves, they position both their firms as corporate sovereigns and themselves as latter-day kings.’
Atal’s provocation inspires two responses. The first is to consider whether she has understated the sovereignty encroachments of technologists. She focuses on how Silicon Valley plutocrats infringe on the territorial sovereignty of states. There is considerable evidence that the Silicon Valley oligarchy desires more sovereignty not only over territory, but over time as well. An animating driver behind a lot of their behaviour is the belief that they, and they alone, possess the long-term time horizon to avert existential risks to humanity.
The second response is to consider the ways in which the behaviour of these technologists cannot be explained entirely by material self-interest. The default assumption in political economy is that actors are seeking to maximize their own material self-interest. This overlooks the ways in which plutocrats aspire to be taken seriously as producers and promulgators of ideas as well. It turns out that wealthy technologists are different from everyone else – in their intellectual as well as their material lifestyle.Footnote 119
The sovereignty of time
Despite the realist emphasis on the precarity of states in an anarchical world the power of the private sector has been more ephemeral than that of sovereign states. For example, none of the ten largest corporations by market capitalization in 1980, and only one of the largest in 2000, are on that same list in 2025.Footnote 120 A similar exercise for countries as measured by GDP reveals an 80% overlap between the 1980 and 2025 lists and a 100% overlap between 2000 and 2025. Indeed, one logic behind sovereign wealth funds is that they can make risky investments that will pay out over the long term, because the power of states endures longer than that of private-sector actors.
Perception and reality can diverge, however. The animating beliefs of Silicon Valley reveal a culture obsessed with, as Adam Becker phrases it, ‘the ideology of technological salvation’.Footnote 121 Many tech plutocrats – including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Palantir’s Peter Thiel, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman – have invested significant resources into ‘biohacking’. For some this means extending their lifespan, for others it offers the hope of defying death altogether. As one recent assessment noted, these moguls ‘are investing substantial amounts in the longevity and immortality research as a means of either denying or defying their own death’.Footnote 122
Whether biohacking actually extends one’s lifespan is not relevant for our purposes; what matters is that many technologists believe it to be true. They therefore perceive themselves as possessing a considerably longer shadow of the future compared to most individuals. The ‘temporal turn’ in international relations theory would suggest that possessing such a long time horizon is a source of power in and of itself.Footnote 123 In the case of Silicon Valley technologists, the elongated shadow of the future has manifested itself most obviously in investments in space exploration. Both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have funded space exploration companies, and both moguls have frequently discussed the merits of colonizing other planets – despite the seemingly insurmountable barriers to space colonization for the rest of this century.Footnote 124
The technologist long-term world view also informs a willingness to fund think tanks and research centres that focus on existential risk. For example, Musk and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz helped to fund Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. Skype founder Jaan Tallinn co-founded Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which Musk also advises. Tallinn and Musk, along with Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, also helped fund the Boston-based Future of Life Institute.Footnote 125
One commonality to these centres is the emphasis placed on low-probability existential risks at the expense of higher-probability calamitous risks that would not necessarily destroy all life on the planet. The technologists’ world view weights future utility equally with present utility. For example, many of these institutes have prioritized the threat posed by artificial intelligence over that posed by climate change. The logic is that if AI goes rogue it will lead to the complete extinction of humanity, whereas climate change might be more likely but will not lead to an extinction-level event.Footnote 126 Even if it were to reduce population by 75% over the next century, longtermists would posit that this is just a trickle of humanity over the long term.Footnote 127 Technologists are therefore more concerned with threats that might have low odds of occurrence but would be literally Earth-shattering.
This mindset also causes technologists to prioritize the long-term implications of current policies in a way that even governments might not process. It enables them to brush off short-term concerns about the malign effects of their technologies by stressing their long-term benefits. Furthermore, from the technologist perspective, wealth can protect them from the particular vagaries of extreme weather and climate change, and medicine can protect them from ageing and mortality. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it, ‘this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it the Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind’.Footnote 128 When tech companies and their founders plan for the long-term future in this way, they are tapping into one of the fundamental attributes of corporations and corporate personhood – as an entity that can outlive any individual. In this way, technologists encroach as much on the temporal sovereignty of states as their territorial sovereignty.
Weird ideas for wicked problems
Another commonality lies in how technologists navigate the marketplace of ideas. Most political economy research assumes that an actor’s preferred policies lie downstream from their material incentives. However, this overlooks the independent role that ideas can play in determining policy outcomes. Whether serving as focal points or triggering the recalibration of preferences, ideas can matter more than just as reverse-engineered hooks in policy discourse.Footnote 129
This holds with particular force for technologists. Silicon Valley plutocrats are genuinely interested in ideas; even sceptics of technologist thought leadership acknowledge ‘the core of genuine idealism at the heart of these movements’.Footnote 130 Many of them participate in big ideas conferences such as the World Economic Forum, Milken Insitute Global Conference, and South by Southwest; some of them, like Marc Andreessen, publish lengthy manifestos articulating their world view.Footnote 131 Others, like Peter Thiel, deliver private lectures to like-minded acolytes.Footnote 132
Furthermore, technologists possess a particular ideational skew when it comes to thinking about politics. As noted in The Ideas Industry, ‘Silicon Valley elites were less likely to view political conflict as an entrenched problem so much as a piece of faulty code that needed to be hacked.’Footnote 133 Technologists have embraced thought leaders espousing effective altruism, effective accelerationism, longtermism – all variants of a rationalist approach to policy problems that lacks introspection about risk calculations or risk perceptions.Footnote 134 These approaches can lead to some bizarre philosophical outcomes.Footnote 135 For example, in his manifesto Andreessen declares ‘we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.’ This is, to say the least, a severe calculation that discounts a variety of systemic risks. It is, however, consistent with the precepts of effective accelerationism. Even the intellectual forebears of this kind of thought leadership have disdained it. Economist Robin Hanson noted of the rationalists, ‘they decided they were more rational than other people [;] they trusted their own internal judgment’.Footnote 136 Similarly, Tyler Cowen remarked, ‘it turns out many of the real sources of existential risk boil down to hubris and human frailty’.Footnote 137
The irony of the Silicon Valley embrace of rationalist thought leadership has been how vulnerable these technologists have been to groupthink and the fallacy of inductive generalization. Much of what passes for Silicon Valley intellectual culture is merely an attempt to generalize from the business precepts of disruptive innovation and start-up culture to politics and philosophy. The problems with this analogical reasoning are legion.Footnote 138 As Henry Farrell has observed, ‘business plans and contemporary political spats are insecure foundations for grand theories of the deep future of human civilization and politics’.Footnote 139 This approach to thought leadership has also led technologists to elevate and embrace fringe thinkers. For example, many of them have embraced the historically illiterate musings of Curtis Yarvin, a former coder who argues in favour of transforming the United States into an autocracy run like a Silicon Valley start-up.
Why do technologists persist in promoting this world view? In part it is because they are self-insulating from contrary viewpoints. Like all plutocrats, technologists are less likely than others to encounter intellectual criticism as they navigate the marketplace of ideas. If speaking truth to power is hard, speaking truth to money is next to impossible. As David Frum has pointed out, ‘one of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong’.Footnote 140
On the occasions on which technologists have invited contrarian voices into their circle, there has not been much in the way of an intellectual vibe shift. For example, Andreessen has organized a variety of group chats among technologists to facilitate conversation. He created one group chat to invite signatories of the famous 2020 Harper’s letter of liberal intellectuals to participate in dialogue with more conservative technologists. It did not last long. According to one account, ‘The Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an “illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech.’ One participant in the chat noted, ‘I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality. If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently – and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other.’ Even more sympathetic voices have acknowledged that the group chats have served as a ‘vehicle for groupthink’.Footnote 141
Atal warns that despite the seeming libertarianism of the technologists, their recent political forays should be viewed ‘not as an effort to transcend or “exit” politics, but to consolidate it’. This essay suggests that her argument applies not only to territorial sovereignty but temporal sovereignty. Silicon Valley plutocrats want control of the long-term policies of the state because they believe they possess the longest shadow of the future. Their calcifying groupthink will make it difficult for outside experts to disabuse them of these preconceived worldviews. The result will be a steady stream of discourse and policy actions centred on the dubious intellectual whims of technologists.
Conclusion
Maha Rafi Atal
Across these essays runs a common thread: contemporary technologists are not simply inventors of tools, but claimants to forms of sovereignty. Whether through the cultural logics of Silicon Valley that reproduce colonial hierarchies, the manipulation of temporal horizons that cast them as stewards of humanity’s future, or the infrastructures that render states dependent on private networks, technology oligarchs increasingly position themselves as rivals to the state.
This sovereignty is asserted across multiple dimensions. Informational capitalism reconfigures authority through the extraction and privatization of data. Infrastructural capture embeds firms as indispensable governors of daily life. Territorial projects like charter cities and network-states revive colonial precedents, grounding corporate power in land and resources. Temporal claims, meanwhile, allow oligarchs to justify exceptional personal and corporate authority in the present by appealing to distant futures.
Taken together, these strategies collapse the boundary between public and private, as oligarchs present themselves as benevolent and unaccountable visionaries. What emerges is not an exit from politics but its redirection: away from democratic contestation and toward oligarchic empire. Just as early modern critics warned of company-states hollowing monarchies from within, today’s technology titans are hollowing out modern democratic states – repurposing their legitimacy, resources, and futures for private ends.
This raises pressing questions for the future: Can democratic states reclaim autonomy over the infrastructures on which they now depend? Can law, labour, or collective mobilization meaningfully constrain private empire? In the short term, renewed antitrust enforcement and efforts to reassert state oversight over critical infrastructure can curb corporate autonomy, but these measures last only as long as particular elected administrations. In the medium term, coordinated international regulation – of data flows, tax liability, or capital mobility – may be crucial to limiting the cross-border power of transnational tech elites.
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