The ideological rift on the tech right
What a disagreement between Joe Lonsdale and Balaji Srinivasan tells us about the effort to enhance Silicon Valley’s power
In April, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale got into a brawl with former Coinbase chief technology officer and Network State advocate Balaji Srinivasan. It wasn’t on a prominent stage or even Twitter/X; it happened in a Signal group chat that’s become a virtual gathering place for influential tech figures. Srinivasan wasn’t going along with the tech right’s aggressive anti-China rhetoric, so Lonsdale accused him of “insane CCP thinking.” “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus,” he wrote.
Before Semafor published its story on the Signal chats that led with the billionaire spat, both Lonsdale and Srinivasan dismissed any notion their exchange was anything but a friendly disagreement. Surely, such wealthy people have much more in common than they do separating them. But the exchange does expose an ideological rift that will likely only grow in the coming years as more of the tech industry openly aligns itself with the security state to pursue lucrative military contracts.
Lonsdale and Srinivasan are arguably on either side of that divide. Palantir is part of the vanguard of defense tech companies openly championing collaboration with the US government. It claims to want to defend American power in the twenty-first century, positioning China as a civilizational threat — in part to mask the commercial threat Shenzhen poses to Silicon Valley. Lonsdale was even helping staff the Trump administration. The Network State movement, on the other hand, wants to escape the authority of the United States — or any other government — entirely, and doesn’t feel it’s part of that fight.
The roots of tech ideology
The feuding billionaires are emblematic of Silicon Valley’s embrace of fascist, authoritarian politics, but the distinct forms their far-right projects take have unique historical roots. Palantir’s approach of seeing opportunity in embracing the US military and working to advance US geopolitical power goes back to the industry’s earliest days. Silicon Valley as we know it today has its origins in World War II and the vast sums of public money that flooded into technological and defense research to keep the United States ahead of Nazi Germany, and later the Soviet Union.
For several decades, those politics have arguably taken a back seat to a more libertarian strand of thinking that dominated tech circles. To be sure, it never disappeared. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has long championed collaboration with US intelligence agencies, and many prominent tech companies owe a great debt to government funding that got them started and lucrative public contracts they’ve received over the years.
That more libertarian approach to politics among those in the tech industry was a product of the Vietnam War. At the time, many in the industry became disillusioned from seeing high-tech companies collaborate with the US military as it rained carnage on the Southeast Asian nation. Fueled by the anti-war movement and the hippie ethos, they sought a different approach — one that wanted to empower individual consumers through personal technology. In their view, the government was the great evil, and technology was a path to reduce its influence — no matter how naive that might have sounded or how readily those values were made to conform with the pursuit of consolidated corporate power.
For the tech billionaires championing a new military industrial complex led by a newer wave of “tech” companies, that pivot was a mistake that has left the United States vulnerable to geopolitical foes, particularly China. In his recent book The Technological Republic, Palantir CEO Alex Karp argues the industry make a terrible mistake in focusing so intently on consumer products. Now it needs to shift back to innovating on defense technologies that can strengthen the capacities of the US military. Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey similarly wants to see US allies become like porcupines, with massive stockpiles of automated and AI-assisted weaponry that will supposedly deter attack.
Reassessing the politics of tech
Some of those openly advocating for secession just a few years ago are now openly championing collaboration. Peter Thiel is probably most prominent among them. A decade ago, he was associated with the seasteading movement that sought to create communities on platforms in international waters where they could be beyond state authority. It was actually Lonsdale who claims to have introduced him to the concept.
By 2016, Thiel was backing Donald Trump and pushing a fundamental reordering of the US government that may now be coming to fruition. At the same time, Palantir, which he cofounded, is leading the charge on remaking Department of Defense procurement practices to favor newer defense tech firms over longstanding defense primes like Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
The pivot from libertarianism to state collaboration was fueled in part by a recognition by some in the industry that positioning China and its tech industry as a civilizational threat could help protect Silicon Valley from growing regulatory and antitrust scrutiny. They argued the United States would need its dominant tech firms to face off against the increasingly capable monopolies rising in China. But it also presented a lucrative set of opportunities as the Biden administration pushed programs like the CHIPS Act to funnel billions into the tech industry. Now they hope the Trump administration’s much deeper reforms will yield even greater rewards.
Their project stands in stark contrast to what Srinivasan wants to pursue. Instead of working to strengthen the United States, he was to see a new set of city states emerge that will exist beyond the authority of existing nation states. Those cities would embrace speculative technologies like crypto and blockchain, while potentially enabling risky experiments in areas like genetic engineering. They’d effectively be zones where the tech elite are allowed to rule as they wish, with little consideration for the consequences of their decisions. Srinivasan has described his goal as a form of “tech Zionism” where those loyal to the tech industry have greater rights than everyone else.
There are certain parallels between Srinivasan’s vision for his Network States and the political program laid out by Curtis Yarvin. His arguments for the United States to be ruled by a CEO president who will gut the public service have received wide support from parts of the tech billionaire class, and clearly influenced some of the Trump-DOGE agenda. But that’s also the key difference: whereas Yarvin wants to see change in the United States itself, Srinivasan’s goal is to escape. And he’s done just that by decamping to Singapore and trying to grow his Network State movement.
Tech fascism must be stopped
There’s no denying the threat posed by the tech industry’s embrace of far-right politics. After decades of being praised as genius future-makers, they didn’t like when it was time to answer for the harms caused by their “move fast and break things” approach. But by the time the delayed accountability came, they’d accumulated enough power and wealth to make a serious effort to evade it. They propeled Trump back to the White House hoping he would save them — a bet that isn’t working out exactly as they planned.
Yet that doesn’t mean these politics aren’t still dangerous, whichever one ultimately comes out on top. Lonsdale and Srinivasan each imagine a more authoritarian world in their own way, where the powerful can do as they wish and everyone else has to suffer the consequences. One tries to realize a tech-infused version of an Ayn Randian fever dream, while the other intends to accelerate an escalating arms race to serve his sector’s bottom line — while cloaking it in the language of geopolitical rivalry and American superiority.
Drawing a distinction between the new military industry complex and the Network State movement isn’t to root for one over the other. They’re both efforts to try to push as far as possible toward a political reorientation that serves their interests. We could even see one as a hedge against the failure of the other: if the effort to capture the US government fails, then tech plutocrats could still decamp to their semi-autonomous zones where they rule with an iron fist and can do as they please. They must both be stopped, as they have horrible implications for our collective future.
Two wrongs don’t make anything right!