Of Giants and Gods
Live from MAGA Hollywood.
Half a mile from my apartment in DC on Saturday, Peter Thiel held his pre-inauguration party. The guest list included a full range of Silicon Valley wealth: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and David Sacks, Trump’s new Chair of the Council on Science and Technology. In contrast to other parts of Trump’s coalition — from “post-liberal” religious conservatives to the pro-worker New Right — it is the pro-innovation, Silicon Valley technologists that feel ascendant as Trump takes office. A mood ripples through DC — from the gleeful Crypto Ball Friday which had both the incoming Treasury and Commerce Secretaries in attendance, to Elon Musk’s intervention in congressional budget negotiations a full month before the inauguration.
What that mood is exactly is hard to articulate. There are the clichés going around. Released frustration with liberal moralisms. A revived tech-centered “cut the government, free innovation” libertarianism. At one party this weekend, I ended up in a conversation with a young tech entrepreneur who told me that he is focused on developing “workforce replacement” AIs which could help the government swap out actual human labor, increasing productivity by “4-5x.”
But there’s something else that has felt elusive since I got back to town last week. In both mood and statistics, Trump’s victory in 2016 was fueled by American evangelicals and auto mechanics who felt frustrated about being locked out. They are here again this time. Outside the exclusive enclaves in upper Northwest, the city is full of people who have traveled from across the country in red hats, full of expectation that Trump is opening up a new age for them.
But although those voters were essential for Trump’s victory this time too, they no longer feel like the source of momentum. Instead, this broader, more populist energy has being displaced—redirected upwards toward visions of space colonies, endless digital innovation and higher beings like Musk and Thiel.
The ancient poet Hesiod tells us the great goddess Gaia was successful in taking revenge on Ouranos her lover (also her child … a wild time!) by castrating him in the night. Each drop of blood from the wound gave birth to the race of Giants “strong … with shining armor and spears in hand.” The giants only gradually take on definition. At times they seem just to be particularly strong and fast warriors, but over time they grow in proportion. The poet Apollodorus tells us they were huge bulky creatures, with massive beards and scaled feet. The Greek word “Gigantes” emphasizes the point. This is quantitative strength — like humans but more: bigger, faster, larger. And they know their power. Their size makes them capable at any moment of interrupting human life for any reason or none.
Many of the gods in Hesiod are similar. Humans, but larger, fiercer. But one also gets a hint of something else. In Gaia — Earth — herself for example: she is a goddess, but not exactly anthropomorphic. In her first mention she is introduced as having huge breasts, but also as being the “ever-firm floor for all the immortals who hold the snowy peaks of Olympus.” She has agency — conniving to castrate her lover for example — but she is not graspable as simply a bigger version of a human.
Alongside the tradition that sees the gods as bigger humans, there is another that sees the divide between humans and gods not as quantitative, but qualitative. One sees this in the book of Exodus: “you cannot see the face of God and live.” In a eerily similar story, one of Zeus’s lovers tricks him into coming to her “without disguise.” He is loath to do it, but bound by oath. He attempts to diminish himself, but even so, his very appearance, like lightning, “strikes her mortal body, incinerated by the gift of her lover.”
If the mood in DC is hard to describe, it is even harder to criticize correctly. Over the past decade, liberals have given themselves fits with the idea that Trump worships power — he’s a friend to strong men and a pawn of authoritarians. He cozies up to Putin and Orban, and is covertly encouraging new ideas of monarchy. But what is bothering me is almost exactly the opposite misgiving — how can a movement built on a moral fury to overthrow a corrupt liberal establishment end up with a vision of strength that is … so dull.
The Elon as Iron Man meme gets at the problem. Silicon Valley, more than any other institution in America, represents quantitative strength. Tech founders like Elon are human, but a bit more .. They are more clever, richer. And the visions they give are of augmented humanity. Humanity that can get to Shanghai in 36 minutes. Or implant AI assistants that are smarter than we are.
The idea of “effective accelerationism” that has come to play such a central role in Silicon Valley over the past five years argues that the best thing we can do for humanity is to develop technologies that overcome the finite limitations of human life. It’s an assertive and optimistic movement, but also a pedestrian one. As the accelerationists’ Techno-Optimist Manifesto puts it: “We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
As I have argued before, the prior liberal regime was corrupting, hierarchical, and banal. It was a society that called itself democratic and egalitarian, but was in fact profoundly managed.
But I don’t see any way out of that stifling banality in the bravado of the technologists. Giants are defined by strength, by Greatness. But they are also, in the end, pedestrian. Quantitatively strong enough to go unchallenged even as they build out the most uninspired of societies. If your vision of the world is that the world is nothing but a hierarchy of predation — that the lightning too is merely another natural phenomenon to harness — what will you do but continue to build a society of and for engineers? Perhaps under Trump, the personnel will come through the open market rather than from the Ivy League. But as with the liberal technocrats, we are still being engineered from on high.
If the post Cold War era has felt like we’ve been locked in an overly small and sterilized world, more engineers are not going to change that. Only the divine fires can do that.
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my worry is with the idea that you can own the world. There's poetry in the techno-optimists, but in a sentence like that one you get the sense that everything—no matter how elevated is just a tool for humans to usurp and utilize.
That's just power and power and power which ends up being amazingly dreary
I think this is really pretty close to the money. Trump 2.0 seems to lack vitality or vigour beyond merely 'doing more'. Doing more for more's sake is ultimately a futile pointless quest. It is precisely the problem which liberalism has encased itself in- liberal values for liberalism's sake i.e., tautology and nothing else.
I guess that's why entertainment is so key to Trump 2.0 with Musk especially the case doing outrageous stupid things so people don't look under the bonnet and find little of substance. Rarely have I been convinced by the tech bros and as someone who is friends with tech friendly people besides utility there is little of value they generally point to. It's an adding machine but as most of us know people aren't built to be calculated in such a way.