The Persistence of the Old Regime

One of the more dispiriting developments following Donald Trump's election as 47th President of the USA is the return to prominence of Carole Cadwalladr and her hyperbolic style of reportage. It's not that she ever went away, but her regular beat of Russian disinformation and the role of social media in fomenting small town riots has been, well, small potatoes in comparison to her preferred narrative of how the liberal international order is being subverted from within by the "techbros" of Silicon Valley. Though she sees this as a collective threat, she is also happy to personalise it, in time-honoured liberal fashion, by focusing on Elon Musk as a malevolent actor threatening democracy. With his elevation to Trump confidante, she is now firing on all cylinders, happily introducing herself as a main character: the canary in the digital coalmine who correctly espied democracy's enemies at work in the 2016 EU referendum and Trump's election campaign later in the same year.

In her first major article in The Observer following the election result she erected a notable dichotomy between traditional news outlets and newer media: between "clean, hygienic, fact-checked news" and "the information sewers", as she puts it. She characterises the old order as "[T]ruth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times." Unfortunately for Carole, this came around the same time that the NYT, along with most of the Western media, eagerly published ridiculous claims of a pogrom in Amsterdam, and after months of passive-voiced reports on deaths in Gaza following unattributed air-strikes. Despite admitting that 2016 didn't in fact spell doom for truth, Carole is convinced that this time it is for real: "The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied."

In evidence she cites a hardening of attitudes among the figureheads of Silicon Valley: "These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed." The idea that "the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite" is some sort of novelty in Western democracies will surprise many, from historians to former Observer journalists like Anthony Sampson, but the more useful idea here is the parallel with Russia in the 1990s. It would be easy to point out that the chaos was as much the work of Western advisers from the Chicago School of Economics as of Russian nomenklatura, or that the rise of Putin and the Siloviki was a reaction to that chaos, but the more telling point is the importance of certain industrial sectors, notably oil and mining, in the power struggles of the era.

Carole's belief is that technology companies are now the dominant power in the US, defining the culture and thus the politics, and that the leaders of these companies constitute an elite that will shape policy in Washington for years to come. The older politico-economic establishment, based on oil companies, manufacturing, retail and the like, will presumably be marginalised under the new order. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale and importance of technology companies to the US economy, let alone their cultural reach, and that's without considering that she is only really concerned with a narrow slice of the technology sector itself: she isn't bothered about IBM or Dell, let alone General Electric, and Apple as usual gets a pass. This is perhaps to be expected of a journalist who sees everything through the self-important prism of traditional media, but it also highlights a longstanding failure of the journalistic profession to understand the variety to be found among those she lumps together as "techbros", or even to take seriously the sociology of the wider capitalist class.

For all the emphasis on bleeding-edge technology, Elon Musk is tied to traditional industry sectors, notably car manufacture (Tesla), transportation (SpaceX) and telecommunications (StarLink). His shift to the conservative right, and his purchase of a media company, is what you would expect from such a background: simultaneously berating the state for its interference in the free market while being reliant on it for contracts and sympathetic regulation. Mark Zuckerberg, who has felt aggrieved by both Democrat and Republican administrations in the past, remains on the fence politically simply because Meta hasn't expanded beyond a business dependent on the goodwill of a broad cross-section of the population, leaving Carole to critique him for his choice of haircut. In preventing the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris, which it probably would have done as the voice of the Washington establishment, Jeff Bezos wasn't hedging his bets with Trump so much as indicating that he wants Amazon to be considered politically neutral, as befits the "everything store". 

The broader shift in political allegiance among Silicon Valley luminaries, from the fuzzy libertarianism of the 90s to the increasingly authoritarian conservatism of today, reflects material changes in the industry, notably the rise of abusive mediation and monopoly - what Cory Doctorow has polemicised, from the perspective of the consumer, as enshittification. This has led to greater antagonism between the state and technology companies, e.g. the recent ruling against Google's near-monopoly on search, but that in turn has simply made it more necessary for those companies to exert political leverage. Initially that was achieved through the Democratic Party, in combination with the banking interests that have long dominated it and with which the industry had an obvious synergy during the IPO mania, but more recently it has led to alliances with the Republican Party as the focus has shifted away from the proactive design of regulation to resistance against attempts to impose the costs of externalities on it, whether hate-speech or climate change. But far from supplanting traditional industrialists as political power-brokers, the technology company leaders have simply joined the club.

This is not to suggest that capitalist business-as-usual means there is no threat to democracy. Capitalism and democracy are inherently antagonistic, and managing capitalism for its own good (social democracy) or managing democracy to defend capitalism (neoliberalism) are both fraught with contradictions, which leads to a ceaseless quest to find new justifications for the maintenance of the hierarchies that democracy threatens. What remains distinctive about the Californian Ideology is its reactionary modernism, which combines social accelerationism with a supersession of democratic accountability. As William Davies described one of its current luminaries, "Figures such as Peter Thiel explicitly straddle the worlds of wealth management and ethnonationalist politics, proposing at the overlap of these two spheres a form of revolutionary reaction, in which capital breaks free of liberal democracy so as to restore some primordial past in the future." It's easy to be distracted by the wacky natalism, the revival of "race science", or the aristocracy of taste that is effective altruism and forget that this is ultimately about preserving wealth.

Donald Trump's picks for office have prompted much horrified pearl-clutching, but what has been less remarked upon is how many, beyond the usual rich industrialists and think-tankers, have been TV personalities or gossip column regulars, not the very online guys of Carole Cadwalldr's nightmares, which emphasises that Trump himself is an analogue president, a product of the TV and tabloid age. Similarly, the liberal press remain stuck in an imagined past of civility and decorum circa Lou Grant (forgetting the more pointred lessons of Network). As in 2016, they thought that Trump would self-implode by saying something offensive, then to women, this time to Puerto Ricans. Like Talleyrand's Bourbons in exile, they have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. In the aftermath of this month's defeat, the Democrats have oscillated between blaming the brutish mass for their stupidity and blaming the left for alienating the solid citizenry. Leading neoliberals are already happily parroting conservative lines about pronouns and politicised academia. What we're witnessing is not a new era but an old one. This is the Restoration not the Revolution.