Is It Too Late to Stop the Tech Bros?
Lessons from the previous Gilded Age. Plus, the latest in toy tech.
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WE HAVE ENTERED A NEW GILDED AGE. Contrary to how it sounds, this is not the sort of age most of us want to live in. The parallels between this moment and American society and politics in the late 1800s are striking, unmistakable and should instill fear.
Donald Trump’s second term is something altogether different from his first. The mix of true believers, hellbent on implementing as much of Project 2025 as they can, and techno-futurist types who follow the doctrine of Elon Musk and find the very idea of a government of and for the people is an anachronism in modern life, is attempting to fundamentally eviscerate the state.
This is not an exaggeration. Musk might not have the emotional intelligence to have an actual belief system, but he is committed to the end of government-by-human if only to further grow his extraordinary wealth. Peter Thiel, to whom JD Vance owes his entire political existence, is a true believer. Now acolytes of these two men have been inserted into key government IT roles and have a mandate to go as far as they can until the courts forcibly say otherwise.
This all started in Italy in 1909 with a man named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his work, The Futurist Manifesto. The futurists of Italy were enamored with cars, thought the past was an anchor holding society back, and looked down on women. Stop me if that sounds familiar. Listen to this episode of Book Club from Hell for a great discussion of this work and the broader futurist movement.
If the Italian futurists started this movement, the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual reinvigorated it. Written by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, the book lays out the case for the so-called “Cognitive Elite” to take over society in the wake of an undermined and delegitimized government. It takes the Italian futurist worldview and obsession with new technology and ports it to the digital communications revolution. The book posits that the rise of digital currency and mass, decentralized communications will inevitably starve and collapse the state. Thiel has run with this for three decades, including writing the preface when the book was re-released in 2020.
Thiel and Musk are the operations arm; billionaire investor Marc Andreessen is the evangelist—he even has his own manifesto—and the intellectual head of the movement is Curtis Yarvin. It’s not hard to find his thoughts online, but anyone trying to understand what’s happening right now in the U.S. government should watch this interview. The people following Musk and deploying across the federal government believe in what Yarvin is saying here.
Here’s Yarvin on how his RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) plan can be enacted:
They should simply ignore any court rulings that seek to constrain them. They should bring Congress to heel, in part by mobilizing their populist base against recalcitrant lawmakers. And liberal or mainstream media organizations and universities should be summarily closed.
The first is in-progress, the second has happened several times already and will continue for as long as Musk’s money flows, and they are working on the media and universities as we speak. It’s a dark vision, and most of us have no place in this version of the future.
The utter disregard for anything that happened more than 30 years ago is what stands out to me. History is a disease to these people. Here’s a sampling of how Andreessen describes what he calls “The Enemy” in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto:
Our enemy is stagnation. Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness. Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism. Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
For this cabal, the empty vessel of Trump has proven the perfect vehicle. Trump has said that he will usher in what he calls a “new golden age” of America, but it’s clear that none of these people have taken even five minutes to learn about the fallout from America’s Gilded Age. Musk, Thiel and company certainly fancy themselves modern-day, power-wielding industrialists in the mold of the Cornelius Vanderbilts and Jay Goulds of yesteryear.
The similarities are eerie. Just like the rail, shipping and construction magnates of the past, Musk and Thiel preach a brand of rabid, boot-strap individualism that conveniently leaves out the massive role the public played in building those fortunes. The federal land grants of the late 19th century made expansion and shipping possible, letting industrialists of the time build business empires and bend the political system to their will. Musk’s companies have collected nearly $40 billion in revenue from the U.S. government that we know of, and Thiel’s portfolio is similarly built on a foundation of government grants. Much of the wealth of these men was, of course, built on the back of the internet, a government invention.
What you don’t hear Musk, Trump and Thiel talk about is how violent the reaction was to the inequality of the Gilded Age. The reaction was not debated on the back pages of the papers of record, it came in the form of riots, targeted violence against business leaders, labor uprisings and more. As Joshua Zeitz writes in this excellent Politico piece, conservatives should worry about a new golden age for America, not embrace it.
This PBS documentary on the Gilded Age is a great way to spend your evening.
The people who possess the wealth, influence, and in some cases the knowledge needed to solve humanity’s core problems—things like poverty, climate change, hunger and disease—are choosing instead to build island doomsday bunkers and profit off the end of the social order until there are no more profits to extract and the state ceases to exist. These are the people deciding the future of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, our military, the environment, education, scientific research, and so on down the line.
It’s impossible to overstate the potential consequences of this. DOGE has already deployed at least one AI program, called GSAi, within public systems, including the Department of Education (RIP). They are rolling out government-by-chatbot right now, and there is certainly more to come.
We’ve done all of this before, none of it worked, and the process of extracting private industrialists from our social systems will be painful.
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TECH TIP | Toy Fair Embraces the Big Apple Again
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob.
Your credit card may be just cooling down from the last holiday shopping season, but if you’re a retailer looking for the next viral toy for 2025, the time to shop has arrived in the form of Toy Fair 2025.
Toy Fair made its triumphant return to New York on March 1st after a roller-coaster 16 months. The Toy Association, which produces the four-day show, first announced it would move the event to New Orleans in 2026 only to reverse course after loud negative feedback from attendees. While Toy Fair 2025 was well attended, it didn’t fill as much space in the Jacob Javits Convention Center as it did at the last show in October 2023.
Not surprisingly, it was easy to find tech toys and other products awash in artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) at Toy Fair, but many toy vendors still believe in a more disconnected experience.
At the Thames & Kosmos booth, a box of RoboRails: The Robot Monorail System sat modestly next to its “Vehicle of the Year” citation from the Toy Foundation’s 2025 Toy of the Year Awards. An internal gyroscope allows the robot to roll on a single wheel on a narrow track and remain balanced, even as it hugs tight curves.
The robot and its tracks, both of which require a bit of assembly plus a little imagination, teach young vehicle operators about concepts such as acceleration and angular momentum, according to the company. While the RoboRails manual offers a few standard track designs, users are free to create their own track layouts.
At the Duracell booth, the focus wasn’t on batteries but on Duracell-powered products like the Baby Shusher, a baby-calming device developed by a young couple “who birthed the product out of their own personal desperation.” By emitting a rhythmic “shushing” sound for 15 or 30 minutes, the unit attempts to calm an agitated baby so the child can rest or sleep peacefully.
While the hand-sized Baby Shusher uses two AA batteries, the new and smaller Firefly by Baby Shusher has an internal battery that can be recharged with a USB-C charger and a night light in addition to the shushing sound, which can be set for 30, 60 or 90 minutes.
Board games abounded at Toy Fair 2025, but Snap Circuits Snap2It from Elenco adds a little electricity into the fray. The goal is straightforward: Complete an electrical circuit between your position and a light at center of the board by snapping small connectors together.
The problem is that your opponents can steal your carefully laid wiring and complete their circuits first if they draw the right card that entitles them to the right connector piece at the right time. The game, according to Elenco, teaches basic electricity skills—including how not to cause a short circuit.
While there were plenty of far more sophisticated new tech products at Toy Fair, it was refreshing to find that quality play time still doesn’t require a screen and internet connection—just some quality down time.
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Thank you for the straight talk about what is going on. I have no idea how to stop it. I hope living in Europe will help, but they're coming for us too.
Great digest of the situation. It's so scary.