President Donald Trump’s White House is heavily influenced by Silicon Valley oligarchs, and for this reason one might think the tech titans would be deep thinkers. Yet according to an in-depth analysis by an expert on the digital world, both Trump and the tech bros with whom he rolls are about as deep as a sheet of tissue paper.
“As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below,” writes The Nation's Elizabeth Spiers, a digital media strategist and writer living in Brooklyn. “What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn. In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example—has little or no inherent value.”
Spiers added, “Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.”
Trump has delegated unprecedented power to the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley, at least those who openly hew to his far right political views. These include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who created the Department of Government Efficiency; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who frequently meets with the president; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who began turning The Washington Post in a more pro-Trump direction; Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, who works heavily with Trump in the military-industrial complex; former Netscape CEO Marc Andreessen, who regularly advised Trump on AI; and former Zenefits CEO David Sacks, who serves as artificial intelligence and crypto czar
“The examples are everywhere” of their anti-intellectual tendencies, Spiers explained. “Peter Thiel’s crusade against college attendance and his program that subsidizes high school students who want to forgo it, Marc Andreessen’s boasts that he actively avoids introspection, the gleeful prediction of Thiel’s Palantir colleague Alex Karp that AI will hurt educated women the most. That all of these scourges of learning for learning’s sake are themselves beneficiaries of privileged educations doesn’t matter: As ardent monopolists, they’ve managed to believe they’ve cornered the market on critical thinking. Everyone else needn’t be troubled by the rigors of learning, since they exist solely to serve as drones in the tech regimes of the future.”
Yet despite their arrogant assumptions about their own intellectual capabilities compared to the rest of the world, Spiers noted these tech bros do not demonstrate the basic cognitive skills displayed by true intellectuals.
“Our tech lords have long made a practice of outsourcing their thinking to the many people (and technologies) devoted to digesting difficult material and summarizing it for them,” Spiers wrote. “In their working lives, they then proceed to surround themselves with yes men and peers who affirm everything they say; the beta version of the cringy displays of great-leader sycophancy that break out in every Trump cabinet meeting was perfected in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.”
Perhaps most scathingly, Spiers observed that “there’s almost no sector of American life—with the notable exception of the tech world’s political retainers in the Trump White House—that is less welcoming to rigorous thinking than Silicon Valley. The apostles of algorithmic dominance cheerlead chatbots and technocratic shortcuts for thinking and reasoning, and use them extensively themselves, even though the models hallucinate and have a baleful tendency toward sycophancy.”
She then quoted an MIT Media Lab study which found “that LLM users ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.’ The tech oligarchs have somehow managed to enshittify thinking.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2020, Dr. John Gartner — a psychologist, psychoanalyst and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School — also quoted the historian Hofstadter, observing that “there has always been a strain of [anti-intellectualism] but we’ve never had it in a president. . . . And this president has a very powerful model this to propagate it and push it through social media thousand times a day, until finally it’s become more of a mainstream view for half the country.”
He continued, “It is very frightening. It’s a real regression. We’ve gone from being a more information-based society to a more fantasy-based society, from pro-science to anti-science, from reality to fantasy. He’s using his bully pulpit to brainwash people.”
Even some in the MAGA movement disapprove of Silicon Valley’s growing influence. In November Trump adviser Steve Bannon complained that “the tech bros are out of control. They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy." Meanwhile in September Wired’s Laura Bullard observed that Thiel is influencing the religious beliefs of Trump and his inner circle, specifically by insisting that he will hunt the Antichrist.
"Peter Thiel's Armageddon speaking tour has — like the world — not ended yet," Bullard wrote. "For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers…. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world — in politics, technology, and the fate of the species."