Even during the election campaign, Donald Trump was unexpectedly supported by IT magnates - the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, the founder of the PayPal payment system, investor and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and many others.
Unlike the "old Trumpists," they are clearly not associated with traditional conservatives, but it was the money of the techno-oligarchs that is believed to have ensured the Republican victory. Now they are clearly hoping for certain preferences from the new administration in order to realize their plans and dreams. At the same time, Trump's inner circle is clearly not enthusiastic about these plans and opposes them as much as possible.
(Does this gesture remind you of anything?)
Nevertheless, Elon Musk became chairman of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Jay Dee Vance, associated with Peter Thiel's companies, was elected vice president.
In the media, IT entrepreneurs are directly called "technofascists", indicating that they want to radically restructure not only the economy, but also the social structure around the world.
The tech moguls who have become part of the Trumpist coalition are not conservatives at all. They are by no means the core people of America.
Techno-oligarchs are usually immigrants themselves, such as Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, who calmly look at practices unacceptable to conservatives, such as homosexuality.
Tech moguls import a large amount of labor, which is also unacceptable for real Trumpists.
Now, in fact, Donald Trump has two cores of support. On the one hand, these are tech moguls. They are a minority, but they have money and a future in terms of technological progress. On the other hand, these are tens of millions of voters from the so-called Inner America.
And it is very, very difficult for tens of millions of ordinary voters from Inner America to understand why they should admire Elon Musk, Peter Thiel or Sam Altman.
(American entrepreneur Peter Thiel speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, July 21, 2016).
Donald Trump is always on the side of money. His whole life tells him: "Follow the money."
It is clear that he is much more attracted to billionaires than people from South Carolina, Indiana or the Appalachian Mountains.
At the same time, he basically cannot do without these people from Inner America, because they elected him. However, they elected him not because of the tech moguls, but in order to reduce prices, increase life chances, improve infrastructure, and further down the list.
Donald Trump even chose the vice president conditionally from this environment. J.D. Vance is a wealthy lawyer from Silicon Valley, but he comes from this very Inner America. Perhaps it was thanks to the vice president that he demonstrated that every person has a chance for success, for some achievements.
(SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the inauguration of Donald Trump, Washington, USA, January 20, 2025).
Even during the election campaign, J.D. Vance was actively sponsored by Peter Thiel and other representatives of Silicon Valley...
He's still a mystery. "A riddle wrapped in mystery," as Winston Churchill once said about Russia.
I read his interview about his book "Hillbilly Elegy". And in my opinion, the vice president is more likely to be on the side of the very simple man he describes. They are also his constituents.
It's easy and pleasant to be on the side of billionaires, but on the side of ordinary people with their problems — drug use, work, and low incomes — it's much harder.
I think that it is J.D. Vance who has a chance to reconcile the interests of the common man and the techno-oligarchs. After all, with all the support from the tech moguls, he still came out of the common people himself.
President Trump initiates projects such as Stargate, cancels the regulation of artificial intelligence introduced by Joe Biden. He is clearly doing this for the techno-oligarchs.
On the other hand, for ordinary people, Donald Trump performs all sorts of symbolic actions. This is the expulsion of several hundred thousand migrants to Latin America or the approval at the legislative level of the existence of only two sexes in the world.
It must be understood that no matter how many genders there are in the world and no matter how many migrants are sent from the United States, this will not affect the basic problems of these very ordinary people.
(Supporters of Donald Trump at a rally on the eve of his inauguration to the presidency in Washington, USA, January 19, 2025).
The issue of migration is only in fifth place among the topics that Americans are concerned about. The first four places are occupied by the cost of housing, the cost of food and other economic problems.
It is obvious that Donald Trump is not able to influence the cost of living in any way with his first steps. I think ordinary people will ask what they voted for in the first place. They voted to lower the cost of gasoline and mortgages, but that never happened. And the voters will start to get offended.
This is the most important challenge for Donald Trump. He still pleases the oligarchs, but he doesn't do much for ordinary people, his voters.
The term "technofeudals" has a specific author: He is the former Finance Minister of Greece, a prominent leftist thinker Yanis Varoufakis. He wrote a book with that title, and it was published a year ago.
The idea is that today, platform owners and digital entrepreneurs are no longer traditional capitalists.
They don't live in a competitive world, they don't believe in it, and they don't want this competitive environment at all.
At the same time, tech moguls have huge power and huge resources, and their activities affect the entire society in one way or another. And their companies are valued not by revenue or profit, but also by the degree of political influence.
Techno-oligarchs are not really businessmen, they are owners, "feudal lords" over their users.
Of course, these new entrepreneurs don't ride horses in armor, but as real feudal lords, they use their "subjects", their data, as their property to become even richer. Even if users don't particularly agree with this.
(SpaceX founder Elon Musk and US President-elect Donald Trump during the SpaceX Starship rocket test in Brownsville, Texas, USA, November 19, 2024).
I think that the administration of Donald Trump is the first major victory of the technofeudals.
In the United States, they became holders of power, gained the upper hand not only over society, but also over the state.
But that's only in the United States. In the European Union, for example, tech moguls are limited on all sides. There are strict rules for controlling the use of data. However, almost every day there are articles in various European newspapers claiming that these restrictions allegedly destroy European progress and the chance for a progressive technological existence.
In China, tech moguls are, of course, subordinate to the party. In Russia, too, they are subordinated to political power.
But in the United States, it can indeed be argued that technocorporations have come to power.
At the same time, Donald Trump looks up at them, right with admiration. Of course, he doesn't understand very well what exactly they are doing, the president is still not young, he is a man of the past.
But he sees how, for example, his children earned a billion in one day on memcoins. It's money out of thin air. And for him, as a businessman, there is something magical about this, something that at least needs to be listened to.
(Vice President of the United States Jay Dee Vance at the inauguration ceremony of the 47th President of the United States Donald Trump, Capitol, Washington, USA, January 20, 2025).
Of course, the main idea of tech moguls is that they have technological progress on their side. They are able to move the world forward, supposedly the future belongs to them. Something similar was claimed, for example, by steel manufacturers at the end of the 19th century or machine manufacturers at the beginning of the last century.
Tech moguls endlessly talk about using artificial intelligence to come up with cures for cancer. And they write in the media from morning to night that such a medicine will save humanity today or tomorrow.
People believe in progress. It seems that everything progressive related to technological development is good, but everything that supposedly pulls humanity back, on the contrary, is bad. The political power of the tech moguls is based on this.
Interestingly, in general, people believe in tech entrepreneurs in the field of artificial intelligence much more than deputies of the parliament of any country.
However, we must understand that the day is not far off when it turns out that it will not be possible to invent a cure for cancer using artificial intelligence. It will become clear that the only thing that techno—oligarchs strive for with the help of artificial intelligence tools is to make a profit.
This will be the moment of truth. People will become disillusioned with progress, because this progress for them brings nothing but poverty.
(Queues of migrants at the US-Mexico border, Huehuetán, Mexico, January 26, 2025).
Elon Musk's intentions: he wants to make something effective out of the big bone marrow of the bureaucracy. However, so far no one in the world has managed to do this...
At the same time, it has already become known about the Stargate project, which will allocate a record $ 500 billion for the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.
Donald Trump allowed companies to allocate these funds for infrastructure development. You need to understand that this is not government money. This is the money of private investors, which is backed by the financial support of Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies.
At the same time, the project actually boils down not to some technological advances, but to the construction of a large number of electricity-generating stations. After all, artificial intelligence requires a lot of energy.
This is not a project in the field of technological progress, it is related to the construction of data centers and power plants serving them.
(White House, Washington, USA, January 26, 2024).
The co-founders of the project like Sam Altman say that it will completely change the United States, everything will blossom and transform. However, it is not yet very clear what the emergence of many megawatts of new generation and data centers means.
The fields will have to be cultivated anyway. You'll still have to work with pens in factories. It is not very clear how the tech moguls are going to make humanity happy with the advent of data centers, although they promise a lot.
I think they won't succeed. It will soon turn out that they can show off on the cover of Fortune magazine, but they will not be able to solve at least some of the problems of humanity.
I am interested in watching the experiment that is currently taking place in the United States. But, in my opinion, it will end with the global disappointment of the voters of all mankind in the ideas of technological progress offered by the tech moguls.
In fact, they offer not progress, but an easier existence.
(US President Donald Trump signs the first executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington, USA, January 20, 2025).
It is very important to understand the difference between real achievements of technological progress and "services" that allow them to be used with greater ease and accessibility. And this is now — and quite consciously — mixed up.
At the same time, it is the service that is put at the forefront and presented as the "greatest step forward of civilization".
Now the important thing is the "food deliverer" with a mobile phone app, and not those who grew, produced, or made this food in the kitchen. Farmers, logisticians, cooks — it's so boring. Is it the case of an "application", the owner of which takes a third from everyone along the production chain, so that a migrant on a bicycle brings a brightly colored bag right to the entrance?
This is essentially "digital feudalism." The feudal lord takes part of the results of the labor of those dependent on him, arbitrarily assigning his share, and uses it to expand the number of dependents and the degree of this dependence. It actually "enslaves" labor, which produces real products rather than "digital solutions."
At the same time, there is a sad tendency to present "IT solutions" in the field of healthcare, from the organization of hospital document management to the AI analysis of X-rays as evidence of progress.
Artificial intelligence today helps to pack old knowledge into a new wrapper. It also increases labor productivity when working with the entire vast body of knowledge accumulated by mankind, and facilitates many labor-intensive processes.
This is very good given the objective decline in the working-age population and the reluctance of younger generations to engage in labor-intensive work. But don't expect too much from the AI revolution.
After all, techno-oligarchs do not create "human happiness", but profit for their companies.
Only you can draw conclusions.
Be healthy and please take care of yourself.
