MAGA’s techno-utopian turn

“We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars” Donald Trump stated in his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States. Trump’s return to the White House marks a new era of American exceptionalism — one that mixes belief in the god-like power of tech with the nationalism of America First — but instead of expanding west, America will look up. Indeed, he both promised to put the American flag on Martian soil and to deliver a new “Golden Age” for America. As the new administration gets underway, the US President is clearly burnishing his techno-utopian credentials. 

Trump’s utopian desire for expansion into space is not new. It stretches back to his first term when he signed Space Policy Directive 1, reinvigorated NASA’s Moon-to-Mars programme and made the US Space Force the sixth branch of the US Armed Forces. Now, Trump wants to have Americans on Mars before the end of his term in 2029. 

Pursuing these utopian visions of reaching Mars benefits Trump in several ways, namely helping to bring once unruly tech elites under his wing and harnessing their resources to reassert America’s dominance on the world stage. It also goes some way towards explaining his relationship with tech titan, Elon Musk, who has been interested in Mars colonisation at least since founding SpaceX in 2002. Indeed, Musk views the colonisation of Mars as key to safeguarding humanity against extinction on Earth. So, Musk has been wooed by Trump’s techno-utopian rhetoric.

The ideology of techno-utopianism holds that technological advancement will bring about an “ideal” society, where humanity will become masters over nature; live in a state of post-scarcity and even triumph over death. This vision not only involves us transcending our human bodies, becoming a blend of human and machine, but also transcending our world altogether by, say, colonising Mars. 

Importantly, techno-utopianism is both popular among Silicon Valley elites and has strong connections with the libertarian right. For instance, John Galt, the main character from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, who invents a society-changing technology while rallying against left-wing statist ideals and over-regulation, has been described as the “patron saint of Techno-optimism.” This anti-government streak to techno-utopianism makes its fusion with Trumpism a far easier task — Silicon Valley is certainly no friend of regulation and government intervention. 

As such, Trump’s emphasis on Mars missions both appeals to techies seeking interplanetary expansion and signals his “move fast and break things” approach to technological innovation. This is a carrot to entice more Silicon Valley elites to adopt additional aspects of his thinking — namely, MAGA’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion and pro-free speech agenda. Trump’s sales pitch to Silicon Valley is simple — drop all the woke stuff and you can benefit from far looser regulation and in the process take society closer to your desired tech wonderland. It is a neat blend of economic opportunism and ideology, which chimes with Trump’s faith that technological advancement (under his guidance) can bring about a stronger America.

Trump’s sales pitch appears to have pulled it off — the tech sector’s rightward shift is palpable. For instance, in the lead up to Trump’s first term, PayPal’s Peter Thiel stood as an outlier in his support for MAGA politics, now Trump has a vanguard of powerful tech figures on side, as shown by their appearance at Trump’s inauguration. Indeed, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, as well as Elon Musk — tech giants who have not always gotten along  — were seen side-by-side  during the ceremony. The most blatant conversion has been Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg who went from having Trump threaten to imprison him for life to praising Trump as a “badass”. 

Evidently, techno-utopianism has become a useful tool to tackle so-called “wokeism” and also for Trump to reshape the American elite in his own image.

Gone are the days when Silicon Valley tiptoed around Trump, wincing at his harsh rhetoric and brash behaviour, while appealing to notions of using “technology for good” and “improving the human condition.” Now, tech giants are progressive only in the sense that they desire the triumph of tech — placing scientific and technological advancements over once popular social justice initiatives, with the latter now viewed as an obstacle to technological progress. 

This may sound like no bad thing to many conservatives, however, as the outgoing President Joe Biden rightly warned in his farewell address, Trump’s alliance with Big Tech is enabling the further concentration of “extreme wealth, power, and influence.” This should be a deep concern. It should be a concern for those worried about the effects that social media is having on us, especially on children’s health; for the quality of public discourse and for those who think that we need to develop emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, with at least some safeguards in place. 

MAGA’s techno-utopian turn is already merging visions of national and technological supremacy

Worryingly Trump is not simply “leaving Silicon Valley alone” to innovate. He is giving Big Tech “carte blanche” to develop its wildest vanity projects. For instance, Trump’s $500 billion Stargate project aims to dramatically accelerate AI development, towards the creation of “artificial superintelligence”, where AI can outdo its human creators. Such an initiative combined with the rollback of Biden’s AI executive order, which established safety testing requirements for high-risk AI systems, displays that Trump’s approach to tech advancement is at once fantastical and reckless. While Stargate may not necessarily lead to the creation of robot overlords, tellingly, the project is named after a science-fiction show about portals to other galaxies and has also been dubbed the “Manhattan Project” for AI. As such, Trump is not only feeding the egotistical fantasies of powerful elites, but is minimising the need to develop tech safely. So, he could be leading the US towards an Orwellian rather than an “ideal” society.  

While some have argued such warnings are overblown, highlighting that the Trump, Musk, Silicon Valley, “Triumvirate” may soon implode. This is far from inevitable — techno-utopianism may yet be the glue that binds them to Trump and to each other.  

MAGA’s techno-utopian turn is already merging visions of national and technological supremacy; creating an increasingly powerful pro-Trump elite willing to disregard practical and moral considerations for the relentless pursuit of technological progress. So, to paraphrase the essayist, N.S. Lyons, the future of America could centre on “the Faustian spirit of techno-optimistic dynamism”.