The techno-political history of the late 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century may well be divided into two distinct technological epochs, the "instrumental phase" and the "White House phase." For decades, we lived in the former, an era where Silicon Valley acted as the high-tech scaffolding for the post-World War II liberal order. In this phase, technology was a set of tools, social media platforms, search engines and global supply chains that facilitated the flow of information and capital, theoretically empowering the individual while shrinking the world into a, in Marshall McLuhan’s words, “global village.” But as the dust settles on the 2025 U.S. presidential inauguration, it has become hauntingly clear that we have entered the White House phase. In this new era, technology is becoming the state itself. The disruption that once targeted the hotel industry and the taxi medallion is now refactoring the very code of sovereignty.
To understand this seismic shift, one must look beyond the gleaming screens and examine the intellectual architecture being erected in the corridors of power. If Silicon Valley was the laboratory, the White House is now the cockpit, and the pilots are a new breed of ideologues who view democracy not as a sacred covenant, but as a legacy operating system riddled with bugs. At the center of this transition is a profound realignment of power that merges the “winner-takes-all” ethos of venture capital with the raw, unilateral exercise of executive authority. This is the dawn of global techno-politics, where the boundary between corporate interests and national security has vanished.
When I completed my Ph.D. thesis in 2023, titled “The Age of Techno-Politics: Theoretical Analysis of State-Corporation Relations and the Construction of Security,” I had, almost by chance, correctly anticipated the direction in which the U.S. was heading. Yet I could never have imagined that the transformation would unfold this rapidly. After November 2024, events accelerated dramatically, and the U.S. has now assumed the mantle of a state poised to export and globalize techno-politics on an unprecedented scale.
The bridge between these two worlds is personified by the relationship between U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and his long-time mentor, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Vance is not a standard-bearer for traditional Reagan-era conservatism, nor is he a classic libertarian. He is the first true product of the Silicon Valley political machine to reach the inner sanctum of the executive branch. His critique of the “administrative state,” the sprawling federal bureaucracy that governs everything from environmental safety to intelligence, is a demand for a “CEO-style” rule that prioritizes speed and security over the messy deliberations of democratic pluralism. Behind Vance stands Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who famously declared that he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” For Thiel and his circle, the goal is “exit”. It is the ability for the elite to opt out of failing democratic institutions and build something more efficient in their place.
This skepticism toward democracy finds echoes beyond Thiel’s circle, resonating with the work of libertarian philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In his book “Democracy: The God That Failed,” Hoppe argues that democratic systems incentivize short-term exploitation and time preference over long-term stewardship, ultimately eroding both liberty and property. While figures like Vance and Thiel do not explicitly cite Hoppe, their shared preference for elite-driven, accountable governance over populist deliberation carries unmistakable parallels to his critique.
This pursuit of efficiency finds its most radical intellectual source in the writings of Curtis Yarvin, the blogger-philosopher known as Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin’s “Neoreactionary” (NRx) philosophy has moved from the fringes of the internet to the center of policy discussions. His central thesis, that modern democracy is a failed experiment managed by a self-serving “Cathedral” of journalists and academics, proposes a startling alternative, the “patchwork,” a world of sovereign states run like corporations by a single, accountable executive. When we hear echoes of “Red Caesar” or witness the aggressive dismantling of federal agencies under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we are witnessing the implementation of Yarvin’s “RAGE” protocol (Retire All Government Employees). This is a hard reboot of the constitutional order of the U.S.
However, a technological state needs more than just a philosophy of disruption. It needs the “hard power” to enforce its will. This is where Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, enters the frame. Karp’s recent metamorphosis from a self-described progressive to a champion of Western “domination” signals the end of Silicon Valley’s neutral, “connect the world” pretenses. In his vision of the “Technological Republic,” software is the ultimate weapon. Palantir’s integration into the gears of national security, from mass deportation logistics to AI-driven battlefield targeting, represents the “ontology layer” of this new phase. As data analytics replace red tape, the citizen is increasingly viewed not as a person with rights, but as a data point to be categorized, monitored or expelled. This is a vision of sovereignty defined by compute power and the mastery of information flows, creating a new “Industrial-Intelligence Complex” that makes the hardware of the Cold War look primitive by comparison.
Yet, this White House phase is not a monolith. It is a coalition of convenience that contains the seeds of its own conflict. The rise of the “techno-oligarchs,” led by the ubiquitous Elon Musk, has created a friction point with Steve Bannon’s ideas. While both factions agree on the necessity of destroying the “Deep State,” their end goals are worlds apart. Bannon’s populism is rooted in a traditional, almost spiritual, defense of the worker and the nation-state against globalist forces. He views Musk’s “accelerationist” agenda, the push for transhumanism, human-AI symbiosis, and the colonization of Mars, as a techno-feudal threat that turns citizens into digital serfs. For Bannon, the survival of “Homo Sapiens 1.0” is the priority. For Musk, the future belongs to those who can upgrade their biology and exit the constraints of Earth entirely.
This internal rift between the “Trads” and the “Rads” will likely define the volatility of the coming years. But for the rest of the world, the consequences of this techno-political fusion are already stark. Internationally, the shift toward “techno-sovereignty” is straining long-standing alliances. If the U.S. treats AI and advanced semiconductors as strategic assets to be hoarded rather than shared, partners like the EU face a grim choice: either accept a state of digital vassalage or embark on a costly path of technological independence that risks alienation from Washington. Furthermore, as the U.S. critiques its own democratic foundations, it loses the soft power that once made it a beacon for pluralism.
The historical parallels are as instructive as they are chilling. We are reminded of the “techno-oppression” of early 20th-century powers, where an elite class of engineers and bureaucrats sought to apply technical rationality to human society, resulting in a state of total mobilization and alienation. Today, the tools are different, chatbots instead of tanks, cloud servers instead of steel mills, but the underlying logic of absolute executive supremacy remains the same. When the state begins to mirror the architecture of a tech platform, it inherits the platform’s lack of accountability. You cannot vote on a platform update. You can only accept the new terms of service or find yourself “deplatformed” from the benefits of citizenship.
In this context, the “administrative state” that the current ideologues seek to dismantle was, for all its flaws, the only structure designed to protect the public from the unbridled power of both the state and the corporation. By replacing it with an agile, data-driven operating system, we risk removing the guardrails that prevent efficiency from becoming the oppressor. For the Global South, the stakes are even higher. Will the move toward networked freedom cities and corporate-led fiefdoms widen the digital divide into a permanent chasm? Will nations without their own AI infrastructure be forced to outsource their governance to Silicon Valley firms, trading their sovereignty for the promise of high-tech order?
The global order is being coded a new one, and for the first time in history, the ink is made of proprietary algorithms. If the instrumental phase was about how tech could help us communicate, the White House phase is about who holds the power to dictate reality. We are witnessing a heist of the social contract, orchestrated by men who believe that the future is a prize to be won by the most accelerated, not a shared responsibility to be debated by the many. As power concentrates in these techno-sovereign hands, the fundamental question for the 21st century is not whether the map changes, but who holds the pen. In the sleek, high-performance future being promised, the bugs they seek to eliminate might just be the very things that make us human. These are empathy, deliberation and the right to disagree. If we do not recognize the ideologues behind the code, we may find ourselves living in a republic that functions perfectly, yet has no room for the people it was meant to serve.
