Max Weber goes to Silicon Valley: From Dogelectics to the Antichrist

Abstract: The article considers how several issues of concern to Max Weber look from the standpoint of Silicon Valley. It starts with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative to rid the US federal government of an allegedly dysfunctional bureaucracy, which is seen as a story whereby a means turns into its own end, facilitated by a civil service code that upholds a systemic loyalty that supersedes the efficiency in the delivery of state services. In this respect, DOGE is simply a more extreme version of a policy trajectory that started with the neoliberal hollowing out of the state. However, Silicon Valley is especially fearful that the state might configure information technology in the image of bureaucracy to limit the turbulence caused by an ever-freer society in the name of security. The backstory to this narrative incorporates cybernetics and includes Joseph Schumpeter’s prediction of the ultimate (non-violent) triumph of socialism, which Peter Thiel has updated and theologized as the ‘Antichrist’. This threat is most powerfully represented by China, whose merger of state and high-tech has produced the ultimate security state. Hovering above this discussion is Albert Hirschman’s classic account of the various ways that people deal with organizational dysfunction. Here Curtis Yarvin stands out as a Silicon Valley thought leader who has explored the radical prospects that a crisis provides for founding a new society.