Donald Trump’s alliance with Silicon Valley’s Tech Right has united two fundamentally incompatible visions of the future. As AI infrastructure drives up energy costs, the contradiction between technocratic disruption and populist politics is becoming harder to ignore.

Few political marriages are stranger than the one binding Donald Trump’s MAGA movement to the newly ascendant ‘Tech Right’ – the cohort of Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists who bankrolled Trump’s return to power and whet his appetite for deregulation. The alliance fuses a backward-looking populist movement with a Silicon Valley vanguard whose guiding principle is that AI will render a great many people economically redundant.

The two sides do not merely want different things; they inhabit different worlds. MAGA’s rhetoric is anchored in a mythical past. It seeks the restoration of a lost industrial, national, and cultural order in which work, gender roles, and community life were familiar and locally grounded. Silicon Valley’s dominant ethos treats disruption as a civilisational imperative and existing social arrangements as expendable. One side pines for an idealised past, while the other strives to make the present obsolete.

Their views of ordinary people diverge accordingly. MAGA’s self-image is that of ‘forgotten’ citizens, among them manual workers, small business owners, and voters in deindustrialised interior states who have been written off by coastal elites.

The tech billionaires, by contrast, openly anticipate a semi-permanent underclass as advanced systems displace tens of millions of jobs, concentrating wealth and power........

© Pearls and Irritations