Tag: Philip Dru

From Fictional “Looking Backward” to Nonfiction Silicon Valley: Will Technologists Crown the New Philosopher‑Kings?

More than a century ago, writers like Edward Bellamy and Edward Mandell House asked a question that feels as urgent in 2025 as it did in their era: Should society be shaped by its people, or designed by its elites? Both grappled with this tension in fiction. Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) imagined a future society run by rational experts — technocrats and bureaucrats centralizing economic and social life for the greater good. House’s Philip Dru: Administrator (1912) went a step further, envisioning an American civil war where a visionary figure seizes control from corrupt institutions to impose a new era of equity and order.  Sound familiar?

Today, Silicon Valley’s titans are rehearsing their own versions of these stories. In an era dominated by artificial intelligence, climate crisis, and global instability, the tension between democratic legitimacy and technocratic efficiency is more pronounced than ever.

The Bellamy Model: Eric Schmidt and Biden’s AI Order

President Biden’s sweeping Executive Order on AI issued in late 2023 feels like a chapter lifted from Looking Backward. Its core premise is unmistakable: Trust our national champion “trusted” technologists to design and govern the rules for an era shaped by artificial intelligence. At the heart of this approach is Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and a key advisor in shaping the AI order at least according to Eric Schmidt. 

Schmidt has long advocated for centralizing AI policymaking within a circle of vetted, elite technologists — a belief reminiscent of Bellamy’s idealistic vision. According to Schmidt, AI and other disruptive technologies are too pivotal, too dangerous, and too impactful to be left to messy democratic debates. For people in Schmidt’s cabal, this approach is prudent: a bulwark against AI’s darker possibilities. But it doesn’t do much to protect against darker possibilities from AI platforms.  For skeptics like me, it raises a haunting question posed by Bellamy himself: Are we delegating too much authority to a technocratic elite?

The Philip Dru Model: Musk, Sacks, and Trump’s Disruption Politics

Meanwhile, across the aisle, another faction of Silicon Valley is aligning itself with Donald Trump and making a very different bet for the future. Here, the nonfiction playbook is closer to the fictional Philip Dru. In House’s novel, an idealistic and forceful figure emerges from a broken system to impose order and equity. Enter Elon Musk and David Sacks, both positioning themselves as champions of disruption, backed by immense platforms, resources, and their own venture funds. 

Musk openly embraces a worldview wherein technologists have both the tools and the mandate to save society by reshaping transportation, energy, space, and AI itself. Meanwhile, Sacks advocates Silicon Valley as a de facto policymaker, disrupting traditional institutions and aligning with leaders like Trump to advance a new era of innovation-driven governance—with no Senate confirmation or even a security clearance. This competing cabal operates with the implicit belief that traditional democratic institutions, inevitiably bogged down by process, gridlock, and special interests can no longer solve society’s biggest problems. To Special Government Employees like Musk and Sacks, their disruption is not a threat to democracy, but its savior.

A New Gilded Age? Or a New Social Contract?

Both threads — Biden and Schmidt’s technocratic centralization and Musk, Sacks, and Trump’s disruption-driven politics — grapple with the legacy of Bellamy and House. In the Gilded Age that inspired those writers, industrial barons sought to justify their dominance with visions of rational, top-down progress. Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires carry a similar vision for the digital era, suggesting that elite technologists can govern more effectively than traditional democratic institutions like Plato’s “guardians” of The Republic.

But at what cost? Will AI policymaking and its implementation evolve as a public endeavor, shaped by citizen accountability? Or will it be molded by corporate elites making decisions in the background? Will future leaders consolidate their role as philosopher-kings and benevolent administrators — making themselves indispensable to the state?

The Stakes Are Clear

As the lines between Silicon Valley and Washington continue to blur, the questions posed by Bellamy and House have never been more relevant: Will technologist philosopher-kings write the rules for our collective future? Will democratic institutions evolve to balance AI and climate crisis effectively? Will the White House of 2025 (and beyond) cede authority to the titans of Silicon Valley? In this pivotal moment, America must ask itself: What kind of future do we want — one that is chosen by its citizens, or one that is designed for its citizens? The answer will define the character of American democracy for the rest of the 21st century — and likely beyond.

David Sacks Is Learning That the States Still Matter

For a moment, it looked like the tech world’s powerbrokers had pulled it off. Buried deep in a Republican infrastructure and tax package was a sleeper provision — the so-called AI moratorium — that would have blocked states from passing their own AI laws for up to a decade. It was an audacious move: centralize control over one of the most consequential technologies in history, bypass 50 state legislatures, and hand the reins to a small circle of federal agencies and especially to tech industry insiders.

But then it collapsed.

The Senate voted 99–1 to strike the moratorium. Governors rebelled. Attorneys general sounded the alarm. Artists, parents, workers, and privacy advocates from across the political spectrum said “no.” Even hardline conservatives like Ted Cruz eventually reversed course when it came down to the final vote. The message to Big Tech or the famous “Little Tech” was clear: the states still matter — and America’s tech elite ignore that at their peril.  (“Little Tech” is the latest rhetorical deflection promoted by Big Tech aka propaganda.)

The old Google crowd pushed the moratorium–their fingerprints were obvious. Having gotten fabulously rich off of their two favorites: The DMCA farce and the Section 230 shakedown. But there’s increasing speculation that White House AI Czar and Silicon Valley Viceroy David Sacks, PayPal alum and vocal MAGA-world player, was calling the ball. If true, that makes this defeat even more revealing.

Sacks represents something of a new breed of power-hungry tech-right influencer — part of the emerging “Red Tech” movement that claims to reject woke capitalism and coastal elitism but still wants experts to shape national policy from Silicon Valley, a chapter straight out of Philip Dru: Administrator. Sacks is tied to figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a growing network of Trump-aligned venture capitalists. But even that alignment couldn’t save the moratorium.

Why? Because the core problem wasn’t left vs. right. It was top vs. bottom.

In 1964, Ronald Reagan’s classic speech called A Time for Choosing warned about “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol” deciding what’s best for everyone else. That warning still rings true — except now the “capitol” might just be a server farm in Menlo Park or a podcast studio in LA.

The AI moratorium was an attempt to govern by preemption and fiat, not by consent. And the backlash wasn’t partisan. It came from red states and blue ones alike — places where elected leaders still think they have the right to protect their citizens from unregulated surveillance, deepfakes, data scraping, and economic disruption.

So yes, the defeat of the moratorium was a blow to Google’s strategy of soft-power dominance. But it was also a shot across the bow for David Sacks and the would-be masters of tech populism. You can’t have populism without the people.

If Sacks and his cohort want to play a long game in AI policy, they’ll have to do more than drop ideas into the policy laundry of think tank white papers and Beltway briefings. They’ll need to win public trust, respect state sovereignty, and remember that governing by sneaky safe harbors is no substitute for legitimacy.  

The moratorium failed because it presumed America could be governed like a tech startup — from the top, at speed, with no dissent. Turns out the country is still under the impression they have something to say about how they are governed, especially by Big Tech.