Introduction: Don’t ask permission, don’t ask forgiveness
In the aftermath of Balaji Srinivasan’s now infamous speech ‘Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,’ given to affiliates of Y Combinator’s Startup School in 2013, commentators were quick to emphasize what appeared to be its most politically overt and incendiary proposal: that Silicon Valley,Footnote 1 and the technology industry it represents, should consider seceding from the United States to avoid allegedly innovation-stifling federal governance (see Y Combinator, 2013; Giridharadas, Reference Giridharadas2013). Appropriating Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Srinivasan likened secession to an economic ‘exit’ option, the situation in which a social actor, when confronted with a suboptimal product or service, opts to find an alternative elsewhere. In Hirschman’s (Reference Hirschman1970) work, exit is contrasted with the political ‘voice’ option, employed when exit is unavailable and the only course of action for a social actor to persuade a provider (e.g., the government) to improve. Consistent with Srinivasan’s (and others’) broader mission to economize social life and the political sphere – as outlined, for instance, in his manifesto, The Network State – his speech appeared to argue that technology was the means by which Silicon Valley elites should and could demonstrate their economic power to the political bureaucrats operating in Washington D.C., and all it represents (Srinivasan, Reference Srinivasan2021).
Focusing on Srinivasan’s potentially tongue-in-cheek suggestion, however, misses the more concrete political point buried in his presentation. Beyond the hyperbole, Srinivasan had enumerated practical strategies for undermining the state, including ‘spending unregulated digital currency, sleeping in unregulated hotels and manufacturing unregulated guns’ (Giridharadas, Reference Giridharadas2013), and just four years later, historian Raymond Craib observes, ‘Bitcoin and Ethereum, Airbnb, and 3-D printing were commonplace, and an emerging generation of exiters were predicting social singularity, a postpolitical world, exit through encryption, and off-planet colonization’ (Craib, Reference Craib2022: 193).
At first glance, Srinivasan’s rallying call – embraced by his audience and many in Silicon Valley – invokes the Silicon Valley mantra ‘don’t ask permission, ask for forgiveness.’ Yet analytically, this strategy aims less at forgiveness than public legitimation. As Srinivasan himself remarked:
Silicon Valley is reinventing all of the industries … [including] government regulation … not just DC: it includes local and state governments. Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Square, and the big one, Bitcoin… all things that threaten DC’s power. It is not necessarily clear that the US government can ban something that it wants to ban anymore. (Y Combinator, 2013)
In short, rather than avoiding politics, Srinivasan’s celebration of exit amounts to disruptive innovation directed at the political sphere. By acting in the zone of exception – between, and sometimes in complete violation of, legal codification – Silicon Valley innovators repeatedly produce social, legal, and regulatory norms, pressuring the state to ratify socio-economic transformations already considered a fait accompli via what legal scholars (Edelman and Talesh, Reference Edelman, Talesh, Parker and Nielsen2011) refer to as legal endogeneity.
This article explores these themes through what I propose to call the Silicon Valley Consensus (SVC) – an ideological and institutional formation through which repeated exceptions are rendered intelligible and stabilizable, and an unspoken political and social pact has emerged around venture capital-driven hypergrowth.Footnote 2 The SVC underpins Silicon Valley’s attempts to challenge sovereign competence and authority while presenting disruptive innovation as apolitical and inevitable. As such, I treat the SVC as a hegemonic alignment of ideas and institutions that recodes ‘innovation’ as common sense and renders techno-capitalist solutionism the obvious remedy to nearly all social maladies.Footnote 3
I refer to the practical effect of the SVC as political necessity: the imperative for governing bodies to adapt to rapid changes introduced by disruptive innovation, rather than leading and regulating its outcomes. ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ wrote Carl Schmitt (Reference Schmitt2005: 5), in effect defining the essence of political freedom. Yet as Lukes (Reference Lukes2005: 22–23) argues, focusing solely on overt behavior misses power’s subtler, all-encompassing dimensions: non-decision, the elimination of overt conflict, agenda setting, and most importantly, shaping the interests of agents, are all equally consequential. On this view, we must ask: what happens when the sovereign power to decide is reduced to rubber-stamping decisions already made? What happens when the state finds itself in a field of political necessity, and society the object of private manipulation?
Adopting a broadly Schmittian frame of analysis that situates the concept of the political and the locus of sovereign power in the capacity to demarcate its own dominion, I treat sovereignty as the competence to decide the exception. My claim concerns a reallocation of this competence: crucial decisions are increasingly determined upstream of formal political governance. This invites a conceptual frame in which sovereign power may be exercised beyond the state, even as the state retains sovereign office.Footnote 4 Power does not leave the state, but SVC processes and structural conditions increasingly constrain the manner in which states can competently respond.Footnote 5
At the heart of my analysis, as the principal institutional mechanism through which these upstream constraints are produced and scaled, is the role of US venture capital (VC) in facilitating ‘hypergrowth.’ Accordingly, I focus on ecosystems that promote startup-led disruptive innovation and rely on VC for formation and scale (Saxenian, Reference Saxenian1996; Zukin, Reference Zukin2020; Klingler-Vidra, Reference Klingler-Vidra2018). My argument is that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond, facilitated by VC-fueled hypergrowth, increasingly operate in a zone of exception. More conceptually, however, I distinguish the structural power of VC as a process (and subsystem of capitalist accumulation) from the instrumental power of particular funds, firms, and investors.Footnote 6 Structural power, on this account, lies in VC’s allocation pipelines, growth mandates, and standards – mechanisms that shape agendas and options ex ante; instrumental power, on the other hand, refers to discrete and purposive interventions by identifiable actors.
Within SVC discourse, governments are portrayed as struggling with bureaucratic inefficiencies, while VC-backed hypergrowth is said to produce a widening gap between private actors expanding the innovation frontier and the public sector’s ability to keep up (see Marchant, Reference Marchant, Marchant, Allenby and Herkert2011; Thierer, Reference Thierer2020; Wallach, Reference Wallach2001). The cumulative effects of ‘combinatorial innovation’ (Varian, Farrell, and Shapiro, Reference Varian, Farrell and Shapiro2004) suggest that policymakers who delay innovation-related decisions quickly fall behind, while the accelerating pace of innovation ensures they never catch up (Rejeski, Reference Rejeski, Marchant, Allenby and Herkert2011). It is telling, then, that for Schmitt (Reference Schmitt2005: 11), the power to decide the exception is rooted in competence: ‘it is always asked who is entitled to decide …who is competent to act when the legal system fails to answer the question of competence.’ In practice, competence is eroded when structural power, facilitated through legally ambiguous disruptive innovation, shapes the decision space faster than the state’s executive-operational or regulatory capacities can respond. When competence erodes, so too does the foundation of sovereignty, and it is precisely the competence of sovereign office that the SVC calls into question.
Throughout the paper, I distinguish between several analytically distinct social positions: VC refers not to a homogenous class actor but to a structured investment logic embodied by funds, governance instruments, and portfolio strategies; entrepreneurs function as intermediaries who enact this logic, but do not uniformly benefit from it; policymakers and public authorities are actors structurally constrained by electoral accountability, legitimacy expectations, and continuity requirements; and ‘society’ designates not a unified public subject, but a field of differential exposure, reliance, and constraint shaped by infrastructural dependency. The argument does not presume consensus across these groups, but explains how VC-driven dynamics produce convergent pressures that reconfigure political competence amidst persistent asymmetries of power and risk.
Methodologically, I pursue an immanent critique of prevailing VC discourses, treating VC as a materialist ideology that, following Hall (Reference Hall1980; Reference Hall and Hall2021) and Althusser (Reference Althusser2014), articulates practices that reproduce accumulation through institutions and technical forms. Using an abductive approach, I draw on an ‘alternative archive’ (Cheikhali et al., Reference Cheikhali, Higazy and Howard2024) of memoirs, manifestos, reports, talks, interviews, and lobbying materials, and triangulate it with scholarly literature and historical evidence. Practitioner and media materials are treated as ideological artifacts that organize belief, normalize exception, and convert ‘innovation’ into political necessity.
The argument proceeds in three stages: part one introduces and makes the case for the SVC concept as a frame for the exception; part two examines hypergrowth and VC-driven monopolization as mechanisms that normalize the exception; part three advances the argument that VC functions as an anti-politics machine, translating the exception into non-decision. I conclude with brief reflections on the contemporary political situation.
The Silicon Valley Consensus
The politics of venture capital (VC) begins and ends with what I propose to call the SVC: a material and ideological alignment that casts innovation as common sense while privileging particular social futures. The SVC disrupts exception decision making by normalizing departures from public rules and making state ratification appear politically necessary.
In describing innovation as ‘common sense,’ I do not intend to suggest a complete ideological consensus or the wholesale internalization of a singular worldview across all social groups. Rather, following Hall’s account (Hall, Reference Hall1980; Hall and Massey, Reference Hall and Massey2010), ‘common sense’ is understood here in a thinner, practical register: as a set of taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in everyday routines and material dependencies, rather than as explicit belief or conscious assent. The SVC operates at this level by normalizing reliance on VC-backed infrastructures across domains such as communication, transport, work, education, health, and social coordination. In this sense, innovation becomes common sense not because it is universally endorsed, but because it increasingly shapes the background conditions through which social necessities come to be articulated and reproduced in contemporary life.
We can trace the SVC’s origin to California’s long-standing prohibition on employee non-compete agreements, which offered Silicon Valley engineers an unusually easy path to leave incumbent firms and launch competing startups. By the mid-twentieth century, this legal arrangement had helped produce a local pattern of turning technical expertise into equity ownership and of recycling capital and know-how through successive ventures (Nicholas, Reference Nicholas2019: 192–93; Mallaby, Reference Mallaby2022: 24, 38–39). Around the same time, Cold War procurement and federal R&D was channeling money into Northern California, with Stanford a crucial conduit for transforming public science into private firms. Federal funds drew pools of human capital into the region, clustering suppliers and labs around the university, forming a repeatable pipeline of expertise and capital formation. Beginning with the NVCA’s 1976 publication of Emerging Innovative Companies – An Endangered Species, sustained lobbying was followed by capital-gains tax cuts (1978, 1981) and a 1979 reinterpretation of ERISA’s ‘prudent man’ rule that allowed pension funds to invest in higher-risk assets such as VC. These moves expanded the investable pool of capital and institutionalized the limited partner (LP)–general partner (GP) model that remains standard today (Nicholas, Reference Nicholas2019: 3–9, 185–87; O’Mara, Reference O’Mara2019: 26–32, 170–71; Saxenian, Reference Saxenian1996: 22–39).
What has changed since then are the cultural and social norms supporting Silicon Valley and the world it sought to reshape. In 1980, Genentech’s IPO normalized ‘growth without profits’ and popularized staged finance, with milestone-linked tranches as VC governance, while Apple’s IPO showcased an emerging ‘venture network’ of referrals, coaching, and reputation, cementing Silicon Valley’s role as a local hub despite its growing global influence. The 1990s internet boom pushed this logic further still: Yahoo’s Sequoia-backed ‘growth without monetization’ approach notably demonstrating that investment success can be achieved in lieu of durable revenue, via hypergrowth and winner-takes-all dynamics – an approach that has become de rigueur for products built on ownable network effects (Mallaby, Reference Mallaby2022: 78, 81–85, 153–54; O’Mara, Reference O’Mara2019: 179–80).
Like the Washington Consensus (WC) before it, the SVC prescribes a one-size-fits-all basket of political-economic reforms in response to all political, social, and economic problems, while ignoring historical and geographical context. Whereas the WC’s reforms were informed by neoliberal political rationality and what Sparke (Reference Sparke2013: 6) refers to as its ‘ten commandments,’Footnote 7 the SVC is informed by techno-optimism: not only capitalist markets, but capitalist technology are necessary for human prosperity. As VC investor Marc Andreessen (Reference Andreessen2023) puts it:
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress … We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends … Human wants and needs are endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new goods and services to satisfy [them].
The SVC thus aligns with what critics refer to as a ‘tech solutionist outlook’ (Greene, Reference Greene2018: 172–73; Morozov, Reference Morozov2013), mirroring the WC’s reliance on universal remedies for a diverse range of socioeconomic ills.
In pursuing this approach, the SVC differs from other evolved forms of the WC, such as the Palo Alto Consensus (Munger, Reference Munger2019) and the Wall Street Consensus (Gabor, Reference Gabor2021). Unlike the former, the SVC extends well beyond exporting ‘American-made internet communications technologies … globally’ or discouraging governments from restricting speech online: financial institutions are supplanted by decentralized blockchain platforms (e.g., Bitcoin); overworked teachers by AI-led courses; excessive medical waiting times by telemedicine; climate change by electric vehicles or carbon capture; food insecurity by AI-managed farming; traffic congestion by e-Scooters or autonomous vehicles; and so on.
Unlike the Wall Street Consensus, on the other hand – the effort to reorganize state and interstate-led development interventions through global finance – the SVC seeks to guide economic development (and ‘progress’ more broadly) from outside those institutions. Compare, for example, Andreessen’s (Reference Andreessen2023) claim that ‘any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder,’ with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva’s (Reference Georgieva2024) warning that it will be ‘crucial for countries to establish comprehensive social safety nets and offer training programs for vulnerable workers.’ What is striking is not merely the contrast, but the reversal it signals: after a half-century in which the WC prescribed privatization and the retrenchment of social protection, it now reintegrates social safety nets in response to technological disruption. This turn marks a demonstration of political necessity. The SVC thus rearticulates neoliberal common sense as technology-driven market initiatives rooted in Silicon Valley–style disruption. In the new narrative, techno-capital becomes the remedy for everything.
The institutional structure of a political rationality
While the WC is often treated as a synonym for neoliberalism, it is better understood as an institutional framework prescribing policies that promote neoliberal political rationality (a framing the SVC adapts rather than abandons). That rationality, first described by Michel Foucault (Reference Foucault2008) and later developed by Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2015), denotes a reordering of social life whereby politics and social action are subordinated to market calculus. The SVC similarly pursues the economization of social and political life, subjecting it not simply to the logic of markets but to market-mediated technology.
The SVC can, as such, be interpreted as a technologically-infused form of ‘mutant neoliberalism’ (Held and Hsu, Reference Held and Hsu2019). Read in this way, Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberalism’s late embrace of right-wing authoritarianism helps contextualize Silicon Valley’s recent ideological shift away from its centrist commitments (Brown, Reference Brown, Held and Hsu2019; Farrell, Reference Farrell2024; Broockman, Ferenstein, and Malhotra et al., Reference Broockman, Ferenstein and Malhotra2019; Murphy, Acton, and Morris, Reference Murphy, Acton and Morris2025; Griffith, Reference Griffith2024). While Silicon Valley’s countercultural origins have long put it at odds with large-scale bureaucracies (Turner, Reference Turner2008), its stance is increasingly marked by a cynicism towards state institutions and their ability to regulate innovation – a turn some observers have read as a novel not-quite-libertarian, not-quite-neoliberal worldview (Sandbu, Reference Sandbu2025; Murphy, Moens, and Acton, Reference Murphy, Moens and Acton2025).Footnote 8
Understanding the WC and the SVC as institutional apparatuses distinct from their underlying political rationality raises questions about the institutional structure of the latter. It is through the functional role of VC that this structure becomes legible. Analytically speaking, I treat VC as a complex structured whole formed around a processual logic – that is, as the institutional practice that operationalizes the SVC. While VC remains a subsystem of capitalist accumulation, it is analytically useful to treat it as internally coherent in this sense. VC is not a social totality equivalent to capitalism as such, but rather a processually integrated formation whose internal logics, governance mechanisms, and temporal imperatives operate with relative autonomy while remaining articulated to broader dynamics of capitalist circulation.Footnote 9
Clarifying this analytic move requires distinguishing between the concrete ‘secondary’ institutions pertaining to each consensus – the IMF, World Bank, and WTO in the case of the WC; firms such as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, a16z, Greylock, and Benchmark in the case of the SVC – from the more abstract ‘primary’ institutions that inform and emerge from them (Youde, Reference Youde and Youde2018). Interpreting the VC process as a primary institution entails reflecting upon its status as cultural and practical norm for social action, just as the WC institutions function as the vehicle for (and collective expression of) a market-oriented culture of governance.Footnote 10
Just as WC institutions provide financial support to states in exchange for legally binding political economic reforms, the ceding of authority to arbitration, and the understanding that a noncompliance risks economic ruin (collectively known as structural adjustment plans, or SAPs), so VC investment firms provide financial support to firms in exchange for legally binding incentive structures (term sheets and definitive agreements), preferred shareholder rights that deliver board control despite the semblance of equal representation, and the understanding that failure to meet milestones may result in a funding cutoff (a figurative death sentence for firms prioritizing growth before profits). Beyond financial capital, furthermore, WC institutions and VC alike provide social and cultural capital to support their beneficiaries in furthering institutional aims. For states, this includes international legitimacy, access to free-trade agreements, and membership in institutional forums; for startups, privileged access to a ‘venture network’ (Mallaby, Reference Mallaby2022: 81) of universities, law firms, potential recruits, and VC investment firms, plus the reputational accreditation that startups often lack. Finally, each institution, representing the interests of an elite class, is incentivized to push support recipients toward near breaking point to maximize risk and reward. And in each case, the risks are asymmetrical: recipients bear most losses, while providers and their constituents reap at least some rewards in every scenario.Footnote 11
The promise of unfulfilled desire
Todd McGowan (Reference McGowan2016), describing what he refers to as ‘the promise,’ argues that capitalism’s ideological force lies in its future-oriented discourse: the future will be better and will reward those who subscribe to its demands in the present, however impoverishing they appear (McGowan, Reference McGowan2016: 12–13). Innovation – conceptually understood as the commercialization of invention (Godin, Reference Godin2020: 70) – makes a homologous claim: it casts the status quo as unsatisfactory and change as necessary; and like any political-strategic discourse, does so to further vested interests.
The promise thus seeks buy-in for a future portrayed as both necessary and desirable. But to do so, it must first denigrate the present. Its underlying basis is a critique of actually existing conditions – a declaration of dissatisfaction that renders the future desirable by offering fulfillment for what the present appears to lack (Howard, Reference Howard2024: 10–11). This structure underpins the techno-optimism of the SVC: veiled pessimism concerning actually existing conditions. Consider again Andreessen’s (Reference Andreessen2023) manifesto:
We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution …
We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.
We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
Most striking is Andreessen’s orientation towards the past as past; as if starvation, isolation, pandemics, and poverty are historical curiosities. Techno-optimism thus signals its privileged class perspective, a key characteristic of both the WC and SVC.
In this regard, the SVC replicates neoliberalism’s appeal to common sense through a rhetorical move comparable to the neoliberal TINA (‘there is no alternative’) doctrine. As Stuart Hall notes, ‘“[m]arket forces” was a brilliant linguistic substitute for “the capitalist system”, because it erased so much, and, since we all use the market every day, it suggests that we all somehow already have a vested interest in conceding everything to it’ (Hall and Massey, Reference Hall and Massey2010: 64). If SVC techno-optimism represents an evolved form of neoliberalism, then ‘innovation’ in the former fulfils the same role as ‘the market’ in the latter.Footnote 12
The question remains, however, as to whom this promise is addressed and among whom it is finding consensus. In this respect, three broad constituencies stand out: investors, policymakers, and society.Footnote 13
It is self-evident that investors (in both private and public equity markets) subscribe to the SVC. VC funds targeting Silicon Valley-type firms have frequently outperformed public market equivalents (PMEs) (Nolting, Reference Nolting2023; Kupor, Reference Kupor2019: 54; Langley and Leyshon, Reference Langley and Leyshon2017: 24), and as of early 2025 formerly VC-backed firms comprise seven of the world’s ten most valuable public corporations (Table 1).
Table 1. Top 10 global companies by market capitalization.
Source: Companies ranked by market cap, n.d. (accessed 27 January 2026).
Nevertheless, a more telling validation comes in the shape of global policymakers seeking to emulate Silicon Valley’s success. This desire reflects a frequently overlooked feature of Silicon Valley: its inherently glocal orientation, shaped by a dependence on VC. While VC-backed firms are invariably global in ambition – driven by VC portfolio ‘power law’ dynamics requiring outlier returns – the operational relationship between VC investors and their portfolio firms remains inherently local (Cumming and Dai, Reference Cumming, Dai and Cumming2012; Stross, Reference Stross2006). As Klingler-Vidra (Reference Klingler-Vidra2018: 1–3) demonstrates, scores of governments worldwide have introduced policies to foster local Silicon Valley-style hubs, often on the premise that a thriving VC market is essential. Policymakers, especially in emerging markets, pursue these initiatives to escape the ‘middle-income trap’ by positioning themselves within high-growth innovation sectors that demand VC investment.
At the same time, my argument here rests less on the success of national venture capital ecosystems outside the United States (even if this remains a potentially relevant factor) than on the global diffusion of US-based, VC-backed firms whose infrastructural reach and market dominance confront states under broadly similar conditions of political necessity.
While there is visible social demand for the products of innovation – e.g., generative AI, smart wearables, autonomous vehicles, and so on – alongside a growing mistrust of excessively large ‘Big Tech’ corporations, a more consequential shift in the social sphere is an emerging consensus among younger generations that ‘tech entrepreneurship’ is the key to a better future. Recent data indicates that young adults (18–24) are starting (and planning to start) businesses at increasingly higher rates than older cohorts (Brush et al., Reference Brush, Corbett, Daniels, Kelley, Majbouri and Shay2024). Whereas in the past, aspirational young minds might have sought change through politics and social justice, many now see fulfillment in entrepreneurial innovation (Bandinelli, Reference Bandinelli2019: xii; Opsomer et al., Reference Opsomer, Chen, Chang and Foley2021; Karp and Zamiska, Reference Karp and Zamiska2025: 214). In this view, disruptive innovation is cast as a means of challenging concentrated power – and not just legacy industries or entrenched capitalist monopolies, but also what is perceived to be a stagnant state that might have otherwise attracted their sympathies.
Universities, the center of gravity for many Silicon Valley-style innovation clusters, reinforce this trend. Institutions face irrelevance and dwindling enrollments if they fail to offer programs conducive to careers in innovation and entrepreneurship (Brown, Reference Brown2015: 183), while patent-driven revenue produces strong financial incentives (Zukin, Reference Zukin2020: 175–76).Footnote 14
If the young do not choose this path for themselves, then parents (who often finance their children’s education) are increasingly choosing for them (Adams, Reference Adams2013; Inside Higher Ed, 2013). Who, after all, facing their own increased living costs, would want their children to pursue a low earning career in social justice or public service, oriented around causes that look increasingly futile, when they could instead earn $350k plus as a software engineer with equity options worth millions and a fast-track ticket into a class of elites (ZipRecruiter, n.d.-a; ZipRecruiter, n.d.-b; Mann, Reference Mann2024; Chang and Singh, Reference Chang and Singh2024; Murphy, Acton, et al. Reference Murphy, Acton and Morris2025)?
Hypergrowth: Accelerationism operationalized
Having traced the SVC as a form of mutant neoliberalism in which the hegemonic logic of market reforms is supplemented with market-mediated technology, I now want to situate its technological bias within the broader category of disruptive innovation, and to illustrate the role that VC plays in drawing each element together. Hypergrowth and VC-driven monopolization, I will argue, normalize the exception, transforming temporary disruptions into enduring social facts. As such, I begin with political theories of accelerationism, which similarly combine principles of hypergrowth, disruption, and strategic intent.
A benevolent heresy?
Mackay and Avanessian (Reference Mackay and Avanessian2014: 4) describe accelerationism as a political heresy: ‘the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.’ If accelerationism implies an amplification of the tensions inherent to capitalism (Noys, Reference Noys2014: 9), then VC functions as an agent of its operationalization.
While almost any account of accelerationism is to a degree an account of technology, one current known as effective accelerationism (e/acc) has been explicitly tied to techno-optimism.Footnote 15 As Andreessen (Reference Andreessen2023) writes:
We [techno-optimists] believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development … To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.
While many right-accelerationist accounts predict or embrace a cyberpunk future, e/acc wraps that energy into a veneer of positivity, combining pro-techno-capitalist bias with declarations of altruistic intent. E/acc is thus infused with dialectical tension: its techno-capitalist dimension fits the right-accelerationist drive toward increasing capital concentration and social hierarchy, while its altruism proclaims a coming world of universal benefit and prosperity, if not the flattening of social hierarchies.
The contradiction is resolved by recognizing that any suggestion e/acc will be of universal benefit to humanity is only superficially true, as is its altruistic purpose. The reality, as with any capitalist-driven process, is that there must be both winners and losers, and that the benefits will be distributed inequitably (a disproportionate amount ironically accruing to an elite class of ‘equity’ owners). As VC investor Reid Hoffman concedes:
Yes, disruption produces losers as well as winners, but, as a whole, it is a vital source of growth and opportunity … those who extoll the virtues of disruption tend to be – coincidentally enough – the ones in the winners’ circle. (Hoffman and Yeh, Reference Hoffman and Yeh2018: 13)
Strategic aspects of disruptive innovation
The book from which Hoffman is quoted, Blitzscaling, is a testament to Silicon Valley’s accelerationist culture. It prioritizes speed over stability for the explicit purpose of wiping out competitors to secure a monopoly-like hold over a market. It is presented as a do-or-die approach.
Blitzscaling is one among several cultures of practice for pursuing what VC investors and VC-backed entrepreneurs refer to as hypergrowth, commonly defined as annual growth exceeding 40 percent (Izosimov, Reference Izosimov2008; Ricard, Reference Ricard2020):
20 percent annual growth, which would delight Wall Street analysts … isn’t enough to transform a start-up into a multibillion-dollar company fast enough. Silicon Valley venture capitalists want entrepreneurs to pursue exponential growth even if doing so costs more money and increases the chances that the business could fail, resulting in a bigger loss. Dropping below even 40 percent annual growth is a warning sign for investors. (Hoffman and Yeh, Reference Hoffman and Yeh2018: 46)
Hypergrowth demands that growth supersede all other aims, a dynamic that makes it symbiotic with VC investment. By enabling firms to defer profits (and sometimes revenue), VC reduces accumulation frictions, including the dependence of growth on capital realization and the drag of corporate taxes; it also allows the pursuit of uncertain value opportunities without compromising existing offerings.
The result has been the emergence of unprecedentedly massive public and private firms. While VC-backed firms dominate the public equities market (Table 1), VC-backed private valuations have also skyrocketed (Table 2). In 2021, the term ‘dragon’ was proposed for private firms worth $12 billion or more, because ‘unicorns’ (private valuations over $1 billion) had become so common; now, ‘decacorn’ (multiples of $10 billion) is frequently required (Primack, Reference Primack2021). Growth is not just growing; it is accelerating.Footnote 16
Table 2. Top 10 VC-backed private firms by valuation.
Source: Pitchbook data, n.d. (accessed 6 February 2026).
Hypergrowth is a strategic aspect of disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen, who coined the term, identifies its essence as value innovation; its opposite, sustaining innovation, resting on value iteration (Christensen, Reference Christensen2016: 30). Put differently, if consumer desire and satisfaction are constructed from a lack-fulfillment proposition, sustaining innovation alters the mode of fulfillment while leaving the structure of lack intact. Disruptive innovation, by contrast, redefines lack – expanding, narrowing, or redirecting the problem – then fulfills for that new definition. Impossible Foods, to give an example, addressed the problem of how to produce desirable meat alternatives such as ‘veggie burgers’ by redefining the problem as one in which alternatives should be indistinguishable from meat. They thus compete with both veggie and meat burger products. Lack is thus redefined through the fulfillment offered by a disruptively innovative product.
Sustaining innovation is typically practiced by incumbents with established value offerings; it cultivates established supply-demand relationships. According to Christensen (Reference Christensen2016: 53–56, 82–84), these incumbents face two difficulties with disruptive innovation: (1) redirecting resources to uncertain disruptive innovation diverts them from the protection of existing value offerings, and (2) disruptive innovation risks self-cannibalization that might undermine existing value. On this view, established entities have incentives to avoid disruptive innovation.
Incumbents cannot, of course, stop other entities from practicing disruptive innovation, and this poses a perpetual threat to established power. If the strategic essence of disruptive innovation is a lateral approach (i.e., assault on the unfamiliar ‘terrain’ of a newly defined problem), then combined with hypergrowth it becomes a ‘sneak attack’: hypergrowth amplifies disruptive innovation’s ability to blindside incumbents that lack the agility to mount a defense. In this scenario, a new value domain can be pursued, at least initially, without the challenges of competition, and can grow relatively uncontested until it is ready to mount a direct challenge to, or has already eclipsed, the incumbent it seeks to make obsolete.
Big tech versus the Silicon Valley Consensus
It would appear, then, that disruptive innovation and hypergrowth are, if not a direct product of VC, at least uniquely suited to it as a mode of investment and production. By altering patterns of shared social desire, disruptive innovation becomes not merely technological, but social, cultural, and potentially political. As Hoffman and Yeh (Reference Hoffman and Yeh2018: 283) muse: ‘[S]uccessful blitzscalers often reach a point where they are more than just a business; they actually affect the fabric of the society in which they operate.’ The question is to what extent VC is causally responsible for such impacts.
The difficulty of addressing this question lies in what appears to be an ontological distinction among VC investors, VC-backed firms, and formerly VC-backed (i.e. post-exit) firms – a distinction that, on inspection, fades away. Treating VC as a process, these labels become positions along a single circuit that organizes capital, governance, and ideology into distinct moments articulated within a complex structured whole – a materialist ideological formation linking the structural power of ideas and institutions to the instrumental power of concrete action (see Hall, Reference Hall and Hall2021). VC investors occupy the investment and control moment; VC-backed firms the moment of venture governance; and post-exit firms the moment in which the venture imprint lingers (Cooiman, Reference Cooiman2022).Footnote 17
Consider first the relationship between VC investors and VC-backed firms. VC is constitutively dependent on VC-backed firms; without investees it is idle capital. VC as VC is thus, in this sense, a species of entrepreneurship. Moreover, VC-backed firms, due to term sheet provisions and the preferred shareholdings of VC investors, are, by virtue of their status as VC-backed firms, compelled to adopt investor incentive structures. Failing to prioritize growth and the valorization of a firm’s equity risks down rounds (selling a greater proportion of the firm for less capital) and investor abandonment (failure to receive follow-on funding). VC-backed firms are thus organizationally dependent upon VC during the moment of governance.
The argument that post-exit firms are ontologically distinct from VC is more complex but also problematic. While Table 1 alone suggests a strong relationship, informed estimates find that three quarters of all US public firms established since the 1970s are attributable to VC (Gornall and Strebulaev, Reference Gornall and Strebulaev2015) – a pattern that VC scholar Ilya Strebulaev (Reference Strebulaev2024) argues implies causal influence. Cooiman (Reference Cooiman2022) explains this as ‘imprinting,’ whereby the structural power of VC imprints a specific logic upon VC-backed firms.
One of the most impassioned objections to this view comes from VC historian Sebastian Mallaby, who contends that while post-exit Big Tech firms have a dark side and ‘are legitimate targets for regulators,’ this is nevertheless not an indictment of VC. During the VC investor’s ephemeral involvement, he maintains, these firms were ‘helping to create products that were good for consumers,’ and it cannot ‘be argued that VCs somehow programmed irresponsibility into these companies … If anything, the opposite is true’ (Mallaby, Reference Mallaby2022: 380).
Mallaby’s reasoning underplays VC’s growth doctrine by treating scale-related harms as a contingent outcome of success rather than as the result of an investment model structured around hypergrowth. It also overlooks the extent to which VC often remains involved well beyond firms’ emergence as dominant market actors (Table 2). Organized at the portfolio level, VC demands maximal fund-wide returns, requiring individual firms to pursue winner-takes-all markets where survival hinges on achieving dominance. Yet Mallaby ultimately resolves this tension not by reconsidering VC’s role, but by reframing it. While acknowledging that ‘the goal of the blitzscaler is to establish market power – something approaching monopoly,’ he insists that ‘the right answer … is to regulate monopolies when they arise, not punish venture capital,’ since VC is ‘all about disrupting entrenched corporate power: it is the enemy of monopoly’ (Mallaby, Reference Mallaby2022: 385).
This resolution collapses under scrutiny. In arguing that ‘the challenge to Amazon comes from younger VC-backed firms,’ Mallaby ignores that Amazon – a retail monopoly with no historical precedent – was itself built through VC finance and the blitzscaling method. It was once precisely one of those ‘younger VC-backed firms.’ Thus, while it is rhetorically appealing to portray VC as a perpetual engine of disruption, the historical pattern is one in which successive monopolies grow more powerful and more adept at neutralizing future challengers. In such conditions, the ladder is not merely kicked away, but incinerated.
Heroes and tyrants
On one hand, hypergrowth uses speed and scale to build monopoly-like global market positions, on the premise that short-term losses in winner-takes-all markets translate into long-term gains in capitalist monopoly; on the other, VC-backed disruptive innovation is less about creating value than capturing it – a fact Peter Thiel and others claim makes Silicon Valley historically distinct, and justifies the consensus surrounding it (Minds of Business, 2021; Karp and Zamiska, Reference Karp and Zamiska2025: 211).
To understand this point, it is necessary to distinguish between demand-side and supply-side forms of monopoly. The latter is what political economists commonly associate with the term monopoly; it pertains to economies of scale, structural distortions, and barriers to entry that hobble competition ex ante. Demand-side monopoly, by contrast, has its basis in consumer desire. Fostered by convenience, price, security, or habit, its essence is to appear as ‘that which we cannot live without’ and – consistent with techno-optimism – to devalue existing models of fulfillment.
Demand-side monopolies are fragile and pursue hypergrowth as a means of expanding their dominance until they can become supply-side monopolies. What begins as convenience soon, if successful, becomes a necessity. Thus, while disruptive innovation is often framed as a David and Goliath style engagement, VC-driven hypergrowth complicates this narrative. The aim is less to slay the incumbent beast using innovation in the name of justice, than to usurp the tyrant and take its place. Failing that, a smaller monopoly can be sold to a larger established monopoly, negating the threat of competition and reinforcing established power. This is, in fact, the most common form of exit for VC-backed firms (Harrison, Reference Harrison2023; Tamaseb, Reference Tamaseb2021: 236). When Facebook (now Meta) bought Instagram, it was only a potentially threatening rival (though already a demand-side monopoly in image-centric social media); today it reportedly generates more than half of Meta’s advertising revenue (Reuters, 2024). While almost everyone cheers for David the usurper, few would do so if David became a new tyrant or sold his slingshot to Goliath.
This, then, is the contradictory crux of the SVC and helps to explain why VC investors and VC-backed startups and entrepreneurs are often admired (especially among Gen Z) (Soloman Reference Soloman2024), while Big Tech institutions are widely feared and criticized (Anderson, Reference Anderson2024; Kiley and Kiley, Reference Kiley and Kiley2019; Smith, Reference Smith2018). On the one hand, society has come to depend on and reap benefits from the products of actual or potential Big Tech firms; on the other, few in liberal societies have a stomach for concentrated power. Disrupters, by positioning themselves as challengers to such power, appear to possess noble purpose. Hence, even though most of Elon Musk’s firms (e.g., Tesla, SpaceX, X.com) could be described as Big Tech, he remains seemingly popular: he has cultivated his image as a disrupter (Soloman, Reference Soloman2024; Burfield, Reference Burfield2018: 284–85). Likewise, VC, despite its role in producing every firm worth the label Big Tech, is frequently celebrated: in appearance it finances disrupters, not incumbents. Less noticed is that VC also fuels incumbent expansion through M&A and remains actively involved in financing massive firms such as SpaceX, OpenAI, and Stripe.
Venture capital: An anti-politics machine
I have argued that VC plays an institutional and constitutive role in driving startup hypergrowth, which has, in turn, fostered the SVC oriented around techno-optimism. The SVC makes economic and political promises – regional development, wealth accumulation, and the disruption of entrenched power – and, when successful, demonstrates the capacity to produce widespread, and even global social disruption. What remains is to examine the extent to which we might consider VC – ostensibly an apolitical economic force – an agent of political action. This can be examined through at least three analytically distinct forms of political interaction.
Direct engagement with the machinery of the state
While it is tempting to point to the presence of VC-affiliated figures such as Peter Thiel, JD Vance, David Sacks, and Elon Musk in and around the first and second Trump Administrations, or to the political ambitions of VC investors such as Chamath Palihapitiya (Garofoli, Reference Garofoli2021), strictly speaking, there is no VC in government, only actors who have risen to power through wealth. Put differently, such visibility is an instance of instrumental power, unlike the structural power of the VC process’s agenda-setting through finance, scaling, and infrastructural control.
A more appropriate lens for VC’s engagement with government is through the role of lobbying, pursued by VC trade associations and VC-backed firms in different ways. In the former case, organizations such as the NVCA (US), BVCA (UK), and the EVCA (Europe) lobby on behalf of the VC industry, typically promoting favorable antitrust and tax policies for VC funds (see, e.g., Farrah, Reference Farrah2021). The NVCA in particular is often credited with enabling the extraordinary expansion of US VC investment (and thus VC-backed entrepreneurship) over the past half century (O’Mara, Reference O’Mara2019: 170–71). As the Wall Street Journal observes: ‘Carried interest’s ability to survive the constant bipartisan barrage [is] a testament to the outsize political strength of the relatively tiny fund-management industry’ (Brown, Reference Brown2025).
Lobbying by VC-backed firms, on the other hand, focuses on defining and negotiating regulations for novel products and services, particularly those involving legal ambiguity or outright illegality. Framed as uniquely equipped with the expertise to produce and control cutting-edge innovations, these firms often begin with self-regulating practices that, as demand-side dominance becomes supply-side monopolization, harden into de facto industry norms that may eventually, through legal endogeneity, be codified into law.Footnote 18 Lobbying thus becomes the final step in a process of political legitimation, whether this occurs during or after VC investment.
In both VC and VC-backed lobbying, then, a discourse surrounding the social utility of innovation-promoting enterprise creates a structure of knowledge – techno-optimism – that tends to justify action on its own terms (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson1994: xiv). For VC, this appears as ‘apolitical’: the will to get government out of the way. For VC-backed firms, by contrast, the impulse is overtly political: the will to gain favorable dispensations from the state. Taken together, the SVC’s instrumental power recalibrates the tempo of public decision, while its structural counterpart circumscribes the bounds of that decision. Beyond the US, the same logic reappears through local legal-administrative arrangements.
Influencing and determining patterns of social order
A second way that VC engages in political action is by providing the means by which hypergrowth firms produce today what will be socially obligatory tomorrow (Howard, Reference Howard2024). Many societies already depend on social media, search engines, ride-hailing services, digital maps, mRNA vaccines, and video conferencing; proponents contend we will soon say the same of generative AI, autonomous vehicles, drone delivery, and advanced robotics. Through these developments, capital extends its influence over what Braudel called ‘the structures of everyday life,’ aspects of material being that, based on his historical analysis, he deemed beyond the penetrative power of capitalist monopolization (Braudel, Reference Braudel1982: 229). VC looks not to history, however, but the future.
This has political implications: social necessity implies the curtailment of social freedom, the balance of which underwrites social and political order. Yet we typically look not to private markets but sovereign power to determine social and political order. Indeed, it is arguably canonical in Western political philosophy to say that sovereignty is defined by the capacity to determine necessity and freedom; if this power weakens, so does the sovereign’s capacity to act as sovereign.
And yet it is increasingly in the private sphere, through disruptively innovative VC-backed firms, that this balance is being set. Winner-takes-all hypergrowth strategies, pursuing first demand-side and then supply-side monopoly positions, are both subjectively and objectively eliminating social alternatives. As Langdon Winner (Reference Winner1980) argues, technological artifacts have politics because they produce patterns of social order and society itself produces these artifacts; their politics derives from the capacity of one part of society to impose order on the rest.
The point is not simply that power is being relocated from the state, but that the competence to govern is being reconfigured: the state remains constitutive of the field (e.g., funding basic research, procuring services from VC-backed firms, regulating IP and antitrust policy), while VC-backed hypergrowth shifts agenda-setting upstream and reorients the state’s role towards downstream authorization. In short, the SVC functions as a form of structural selectivity (Poulantzas, Reference Poulantzas2014): VC-driven shifts in system imperatives narrow the field of politically feasible action, converting disruption-led pressures into acts of political necessity. Structural power generates internal exceptions that stabilize as de facto norms, while instrumental power crystallizes them through (1) forbearance and enforcement discretion (e.g., COVID-era HIPAA relaxation for telehealth startups); (2) experimental permission for pilots, waivers, and sandboxes (e.g., the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s regulatory sandbox for live testing of new fintech products); (3) procurement and contracting that locks in and scales private standards (e.g., state contracts for Anduril, SpaceX, and Palantir); and (4) codification by rulemaking or statute (e.g., the creation of new labor and business categories for Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb) as acts of political necessity (see Shachar, Engel, and Elwyn, Reference Shachar, Engel and Elwyn2020; Prasad, Reference Prasad2021: 336; Schwarz, Reference Schwarz2025; Alba, Reference Alba2015; Tusk, Reference Tusk2018).
In electoral systems, market uptake is often read as a political signal: officials frequently treat adoption, usage, and popularity as proxy evidence of public will, tightening the perceived mandate to authorize accomplished exceptions (Pollman and Barry, Reference Pollman and Barry2016). Thus, here again, ‘common sense’ refers less to explicit endorsement than to the narrowing of imaginable alternatives, through which infrastructural dependence converts innovation into political necessity. By political necessity, then, I mean a structure of public obligation in which governments authorize accomplished exceptions as the safer course for order, competitiveness, or legitimacy – the political inverse of the social necessity VC organizes in demand. VC-driven hypergrowth resets system imperatives faster than many state apparatuses can adapt. Political necessity therefore names the compulsion to authorize new norms so that practices conform and delivery is maintained, averting (at least temporarily) a legitimation crisis.Footnote 19 On this account, the state retains sovereign office while private actors exercise sovereign functions by shaping the decision space ex ante; the exception is increasingly recognized rather than originated by the sovereign authority.
Thus, while classic accounts (e.g., Poulantzas, Reference Poulantzas2014; Hirschman, Reference Hirschman1970) of the structural power of capital emphasize the state’s dependence on private investment and the threat of capital flight, VC’s structural position rests on a different asymmetry. Organized at the portfolio level, VC institutionalizes tolerance for failure, enabling repeated departures from prevailing norms without immediate legitimacy costs (see Howard, Reference Howard2025). Democratic states, on the other hand, operate under conditions of electoral exposure and legitimacy constraint, wherein visible or repeated failures carry institutional penalties. It is this asymmetry that permits VC-backed actors to operate in the zone of exception upstream, while states remain structurally oriented toward continuity and compelled to stabilize outcomes they could not otherwise themselves afford to experiment with.
Depoliticization and delegitimation
A third way to read the politics of VC is through depoliticization as a means to power. To paraphrase Lawrence Freedman (Reference Freedman2013: xii), strategy is the art of creating power – and in this sense depoliticization is a strategic maneuver.
To understand how this occurs through the VC process, we must return to techno-optimism and the SVC’s tech-solutionist approach to diagnosing and resolving social problems. James Ferguson, in The Anti-Politics Machine, describes a parallel dynamic in international development:
By uncompromisingly reducing poverty to a technical problem, and by promising technical solutions to the sufferings of powerless and oppressed people, the hegemonic problematic of ‘development’ is the principal means through which the question of poverty is de-politicized in the world today. (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson1994: 256)
By proposing technical, innovation-centric solutions to a wide range of social problems, the SVC similarly depoliticizes its own actions even as it wields the political power it claims to reject (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson1994: 226).
Shifting these political considerations into the private sphere, the SVC’s economization rhetoric obscures its political impulse – even if biases periodically surface. Reid Hoffman, for example, recently justified the accelerationist and monopolist impulse behind generative AI in moral terms betraying adversarial East-West geopolitical objectives, while Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska of Palantir call for Silicon Valley to pursue political objectives tied to national purpose (Jin and Hagey, Reference Jin and Hagey2023; Karp and Zamiska, Reference Karp and Zamiska2025).
By depoliticizing its actions and framing economic decision-making as more benign than political power, the SVC leverages eroding public trust to delegitimize the political sphere’s role in determining social order. On the one hand, the state is depicted as unable to match the pace and intensity of hypergrowth-fueled disruptive innovation, ostensibly evidenced by its declining share of R&D output and patents filed (OECD, 2024; Deitz and Freyman, Reference Deitz and Freyman2024). On the other, VC-amiable scholarship casts the state as an ineffective bearer of entrepreneurial finance capital, unable to fulfil the VC investment function (Leleux and Surlemont, Reference Leleux and Surlemont2003; Lerner, Reference Lerner2002; Reference Lerner2009; Reference Lerner2010). Either way, the state is positioned as a reactive negotiator vis-à-vis private innovators rather than as the locus of initiative (see Schwarz, Reference Schwarz2025: 17).
In the SVC narrative, the state cannot deliver social progress and prosperity at the pace and scale attributed to private actors – and if it attempts to rein in innovation through regulation, then it is recast not only as an inefficient but as innovation’s discursive enemy. Crucially, if the state is the enemy of progress, then VC-backed entrepreneurs are positioned to be its friends.
Consider the debate around ‘Operation Chokepoint 2.0.’ While the original Operation Chokepoint referred to an Obama-era initiative to investigate and sanction banks serving undesirable entities such as firearm dealers, ‘2.0’ is a Silicon Valley narrative – popularized by VC investors Nic Carter, Andreessen, and others – alleging a covert government effort to deny banking access to the crypto industry (Carter and Campbell, Reference Carter and Campbell2024; a16z Crypto Editors, 2024). Illustrating how such narratives activate claims of political necessity, Members of the Committee for Financial Services held a public hearing in February 2025, inviting expert testimony exclusively from the industry it supposedly targets. Predictably, the testimony emphasized an injustice perpetrated by the state, and the denial of social benefits only their businesses could deliver. Coinbase’s Paul Grewal warned that ‘any legal American industry could be next [and that] regulators have taken a decidedly hostile stance … we must not allow these efforts to stifle our progress,’ while Fred Thiel, CEO of Mara, argued that ‘despite the positive impact and promise of this technology … unprecedented [regulatory] actions’ represent ‘an existential threat to American leadership’ (House Financial Services, 2025).
Inverting the concept of the political
Echoing Schmitt’s concept of the political – understood here in terms of the friend–enemy distinction and the sovereign capacity to decide on the exception – my analysis thus argues that the SVC’s discourse makes friends of those who support its goals and characterizes the contemporary state as an enemy.Footnote 20 Three dynamics are forming a consensus around this theme.
First, as above, there is an emerging consensus that the state is becoming incompetent in matters tied to the technology-mediated future of progress and prosperity. SVC advocates argue that the novelty of hypergrowth business models, coupled with technological complexity, grants firms unrivaled expertise relative to regulators (Thierer, Reference Thierer2020: 8–9). Caught in a ‘competency trap’ (Rejeski, Reference Rejeski, Marchant, Allenby and Herkert2011), they argue that even if the state developed this expertise, it would quickly fall behind again given the accelerating pace of disruptive innovation. There has always been a pacing problem (Wallach, Reference Wallach2001: 251), but the intensity of VC-fueled acceleration is unprecedented. Moreover, because skilled professionals increasingly favor private sector careers (see above), the state struggles to acquire this expertise except via ad hoc private sector consultation (Nicas and Wakabayashi, Reference Nicas and Wakabayashi2020; O’Kane, Reference O’Kane2020; Annear, Reference Annear2015). Is it any surprise, then, that when disruptive innovators flout the law and act sovereign unto themselves – Uber, DraftKings, 23andMe, Palantir, Airbnb, and so forth – consumers often cheer them on (e.g., Kelly, Reference Kelly2015; Conger, Reference Conger2020; R. Khan, Reference Khan2017)?Footnote 21
A second emerging consensus portrays the state – discursively framed as a corporationFootnote 22 – as grossly mishandling its ‘assets’ (public lands, infrastructure, services) through incompetence. In this view, government is just another monopolist incumbent ripe for disruption (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2021), whether in part – via private platforms for municipal waste management (Rubicon Global), smart highways (Valerann), parking management (ParkMobile), or automating public budgeting (OpenGov) – or in its entirety, as is the goal of the charter city movement (Pronomos Capital, n.d.) which aims to disrupt Westphalian sovereignty itself.Footnote 23 The reality, of course, is that the state is not just any incumbent, but the ultimate incumbent, holding both political power and the common wealth (public goods). Like the enclosures movement that inaugurated modern capitalism, disruptive innovators seek to convert public goods and common wealth into private goods and private wealth, framing this process within a discourse of justice.
Finally, building on this narrative, the SVC advances a third claim about the political: expert disrupters possess a superior understanding of social needs and should act sovereign to pursue them. Adam Thierer (Reference Thierer2020) of the Cato Institute calls this ‘political entrepreneurship’ and likens disrupters (‘evasive entrepreneurs’) to civil disobedients (see also Pollman, Reference Pollman2019). Invoking the notion of a legitimation crisis, he argues that ‘dissent and disobedience are … useful correctives when laws and the regulatory system become untethered from new realities and begin to lose their sense of legitimacy with the public’ (Thierer, Reference Thierer2020: 55, 112–14).
To build a consensus around this view, acting in disregard to prevailing norms and regulations is not enough; the general will must be aligned to the disrupter’s worldview. If existing laws can be depicted as unjust, the public may press the state towards a supposedly more just order. Mobilizing that pressure, however, requires the intervention of so-called political or ‘regulatory’ entrepreneurs – innovators who ‘are in the business of trying to change or shape the law’ and are ‘strategically operating in a zone of questionable legality or breaking the law until they can (hopefully) change it’ (Pollman and Barry, Reference Pollman and Barry2016: 392, 399; Thierer, Reference Thierer2020: 54). This has spawned a specialist industry (e.g., Invariant, Washington Office, and VC firms such as Tusk Ventures), and has been distilled in a doctrine frequently referred to as ‘Travis’ Law’ (after Uber’s former CEO, Travis Kalanick). As one VC explains:
Develop a disruptive product or service, launch quickly without asking permission … use early success to stack up an obscene amount of capital … blitz your way into new markets and quickly develop a massive army of loyal users, and use those armies to topple the walls of regulators, monopolies, and special interests. (Burfield, Reference Burfield2018: 17)
In this playbook, the goal is straightforward: hypergrowth-fueled VC-backed disrupters act in the zone of exception, transgressing the law if necessary, until their view of the world is normalized by the people first, and public authorities second. Seen in Schmittian terms, this dynamic implies less the disappearance of the state than a reconfiguration of political competence. The state retains formal sovereignty while being increasingly compelled to authorize exceptions socially normalized through hypergrowth-driven demand. By granting regulatory forbearance, exemptions, and post hoc legalization, public authority actively creates the space of its own absence as a matter of political necessity; it decides less whether an exception should exist than how it might be stabilized. Sovereignty thus persists, but increasingly in the form of compelled nonintervention.
Conclusion
In late February, 2025, barely a month into his second term, President Trump posted ‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’ (Trump, Reference Trump2025). Generally attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, and quickly endorsed by Trump’s so-called ‘disrupter-in-chief’ Elon Musk (The Economist, 2024), the line was read by many to signal a shift in how power is being wielded within the world’s most powerful state institution. The contemporary strategy of ‘blitzing’ the state – testing legal boundaries, challenging the status quo, and forcing a response – echoes Silicon Valley’s culture of neither asking for permission nor seeking forgiveness.
It is no accident that both Trump and Musk are businessmen, and that the latter exemplifies the SVC. Each has imported capitalist methods into governance: Trump’s proposal for a Sovereign Wealth Fund (e.g., to acquire TikTok) (Hunnicutt and Schroeder, Reference Hunnicutt and Schroeder2025); Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) plan to slash services, mirroring his cost-cutting strategies at Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla (Toh and Liu, Reference Toh and Liu2023; Isaacson, Reference Isaacson2023). But what this transposition of methods suggests is that ‘disruption’ is about more than technological novelty – technology is the means; the end is a reconfiguration of power. In these high-profile cases, disrupting government appears less about harnessing the state’s authority for its own sake than channeling that authority (and the wealth behind it) into private hands.
A Schmittian reading helps illuminate deeper political stakes. First, Schmitt’s (Reference Schmitt2007) concept of the political hinges on a friend-enemy distinction – on a community of people united against a perceived threat. In the SVC era, that threat is often framed as the state itself, particularly when it refuses to legitimize disruptive ventures or stands in the way of hypergrowth. The SVC thus re-situates the concept of the political beyond the state: it mobilizes entrepreneurs, consumers, and producers in support of Silicon Valley’s aims, casting public authorities as potential adversaries if they impose regulatory or legal restraints.
Second, Schmitt’s (Reference Schmitt2014) notion that a dictatorship becomes justified when it speaks on behalf of the people resonates, in this interpretation, with how SVC-aligned figures tend to consolidate power. Various agents of the SVC have endorsed this position, arguing that founders should act like despots (Karp and Zamiska, Reference Karp and Zamiska2025: 30–31) and startups organized as monarchies (Masters and Thiel, Reference Masters and Thiel2012). By rallying a mass of consumers, fans, or ‘disrupters’ who demand legal sanction for new products or platforms, SVC-backed entrepreneurs and politicians alike claim to embody the general will. Their actions – whether defying local laws (Uber, Airbnb), skirting regulatory frameworks (crypto), or downsizing public institutions – are justified as what ‘the people want’ (Stone, Reference Stone2025), even in the absence of democratic deliberation.
Third, VC itself is not merely a funding mechanism, but a defining feature of the Silicon Valley approach to entrepreneurship. VC shapes how startups operate – prioritizing hypergrowth, championing ‘move fast and break things’ strategies, and incentivizing founders to flout existing norms. By providing not just capital but networks, legitimacy, and an incentive toward winner-takes-all market dominance, VC fuels a strategic culture in which the normal boundaries of legality become malleable. In this sense, VC can facilitate the creation of a private zone of exception in which entrepreneurs can act first and seek legal and political legitimation later.
From ‘there is no alternative’ to ‘this is the only future’
The logic animating this new wave of disruption echoes the neoliberal refrain ‘there is no alternative,’ but with a twist: whereas the WC placed its faith in capitalist markets, the SVC harnesses technological innovation. Techno-optimism – rooted in the promise that Silicon Valley’s creative destruction can solve any social or economic ill – leads many entrepreneurs, policymakers, and segments of society to view the state as an outmoded bureaucracy that cannot keep pace with private-sector innovation. The result is a growing consensus (consistent with neoliberalism) that government should: (1) create the space of its own absence – the domain of free enterprise (free from state intervention, not from domination by other social actors); and (2) guarantee protections for that free enterprise, whether through military force or the legal enforcement of private property claims.
Far from being a universal or harmonious acceptance of the SVC worldview, this is better read as a discursive environment in which innovation is portrayed as both necessary and neutral. States that try to regulate or restrain disruptive enterprises risk being labeled enemies of progress. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs behind these ventures portray themselves as speaking for the people, even when the public is uncertain or divided.
Looking ahead
According to Poulantzas (Reference Poulantzas2014), the state is neither universal nor autonomous but the material condensation of shifting class and social forces organized through institutions and apparatuses. In a Schmittian frame, sovereignty turns on deciding the exception – determining which norms can be transgressed for a higher good (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt2005). VC-backed entrepreneurs often operate in precisely that zone: by pushing legal and regulatory boundaries, they compel the state to either ratify their actions or risk popular backlash. VC itself remains behind the scenes, enabling this process without overtly wielding political power. In this sense, it functions as an anti-politics machine, appearing to provide neutral financial support while accelerating – and often predetermining – political outcomes. VC power enacts structural conditions that prefigure and delimit the instrumental interventions of specific funds or firms.
It may be objected that corporations have always sought to influence the state. Yet the VC model of hypergrowth changes the speed, scale, and scope of that influence. As legal scholars note, ‘well-funded, scalable, and highly connected startup businesses with mass appeal’ can circumvent or overwhelm traditional policy processes by litigating in the court of public opinion before regulators can respond (Pollman and Barry, Reference Pollman and Barry2016: 383). That dynamic is the essence of political necessity as described here: lacking the agility and expertise to keep up, the state is increasingly drawn into a reactive posture, often legitimizing what was initially pursued outside or in defiance of the law.
Ultimately, disruptions in the White House under Trump and Musk are but one spectacular moment in a long-gestating process. The SVC is a post-neoliberal formation that extends market dominance while adding the leverage of technological innovation. States remain the power of last resort, but their capacity to shape social life is being reweighted by private actors whose legitimacy rests on claiming that they represent the general will – and on making that claim a fait accompli by moving fast enough to pre-empt effective opposition.
If, with Schmitt, sovereignty resides wherever the power to decide on the exception is found, then the SVC has pushed significant elements of that power into private hands. Public authority is compelled to ‘gradually remake itself in the image of Silicon Valley’ (Schwarz, Reference Schwarz2025: 17) and to legitimize its disruptions. What is presented as innovation-led freedom culminates in necessity: under reconfigured structural selectivities, accomplished exceptions are authorized not as preference but because little else remains politically feasible. Whether this is the inevitable next phase of capitalism or a drift towards rule by ‘founder-kings’ remains to be seen. What is certain is that VC – and the hypergrowth it fuels – now sits at the center of any account of how political authority and social order are being remade in the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgments
I would like to offer thanks to this paper’s peer-reviewers for providing extraordinarily robust and constructive feedback on several iterations of this manuscript. The paper is unquestioningly better as a result of their suggestions and critiques. I would also like to thank the Finance and Society editorial team for their ongoing support and patience throughout the process.
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