Tools: Powerful Technocracy 2.0

Norman Saunders, Cover for the Technocrats’s Magazine, 1933.

In September 2025, President Trump held a dinner with over two dozen leaders from Silicon Valley. Easily one of the wealthiest gatherings ever held in the White House, the guest list included tech CEOs, venture capitalists, and administration officials. The topic of the dinner was investment and state alignment, as every individual present jockeyed for Trump’s approval. Government contracts and less regulatory oversight were the prizes for those companies which promised the most funds. Mark Zuckerberg, when asked, abruptly made up an investment number to get in Trump’s good graces, “600 billion dollars.” Only to be caught on a hot mic moments later saying, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.”1

There has never before been such a close association between tech capital and the American state. Previously less MAGA-friendly, tech industry leaders have virtually all turned toward Trump since his 2024 victory, eager to gain favors and position themselves as kingmakers in the market. In the global race for AI dominance, the Trump administration views Silicon Valley as an extension of itself, from Palantir working openly with the US military for surveillance and defense systems to OpenAI seeking government aid guarantees on its debt.

Buoyed by previously unthinkable stock valuations, tech capital and political power have formed a symbiotic relationship. It is an arrangement that has been in the works for some time.

As Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, argued in his book The Technological Republic (2025), for too long has it been “taboo” in Silicon Valley to openly want to affect politics. The only lasting future for the United States, he says outright, is the merging of tech and the state. Karp cites the Manhattan Project as a precedent, a model that is now to be applied to virtually every lever of power.

While Karp and other technocrats like him may not know it themselves, this idea has deep roots in American political culture, going back a century. Technocracy, or “rule by technical experts,” once had a strong, cult-like following in the United States. In the throes of the Great Depression, a mass movement for technocracy quickly became the “most discussed topic in America.”2 Elon Musk’s grandfather was once even part of its Canadian branch. The movement was among the first to organize itself around the idea that technology, not workers or nations, is the main

Source: HackerNews