Science fiction, fantasy and the apartheid system

 

Donald Trump
Science fiction, fantasy and the apartheid system
The tech barons behind Trump – this shaped their world of ideas

Karin Pettersson

This is a culture article that is part of Aftonbladet's opinion journalism.

Published 05.00

Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance. Photo: Stephanie Scarbrough / AP

As a child and teenager, I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, the first adult book I read from cover to cover was "The Lord of the Rings". In my early teens, I devoured all the sci-fi classics I could find; everything from Heinlein to Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Books about space colonization, humanoid robots and immortality, where brilliant men and the struggle between civilizations were often at the center.

Little did I know then that this child's reading would become a useful school for understanding the world's political landscape a few decades later.

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States for the second time. At his side on the podium in Washington DC, he will have some of the world's most powerful men: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. These are the feudal lords of the tech world, who increasingly dominate both the economic and political landscape.

For anyone who has followed their careers, it is clear that Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are primarily opportunists, without strong ideals of their own. But behind and around them is an intellectual environment that is important to understand.

The person who perhaps more than anyone else has influenced the dark turn of the tech world in recent years is Peter Thiel. Thiel is the founder of Paypal and one of Silicon Valley's most influential people. He invested early in Facebook and has often acted as a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg.

Thiel has long had a dark cult status in tech circles, but his views have been considered too extreme to be taken seriously. He has clearly stated that he does not believe in democracy, and believes that brilliant business leaders should be given a special status, with special rights.

One of Thiel's favorite books is the political pamphlet "The Sovereign Individual," a cyberlibertarian manifesto that predicts the end of the nation-state and urges rich people to arm themselves, refuse to pay taxes, and start new countries where none of the old world's rules apply. Thiel himself wrote a foreword to the book when it was reissued in 2020.

Thiel has a fanatical fan base in Silicon Valley with young people seeking his favor

Thiel has said that he has memorized the entire first part of “The Lord of the Rings,” and he has named many of his companies after names from Tolkien's universe. The most famous is the software company Palantír, whose name comes from the all-seeing crystal balls used for communication in Middle-earth. The stones can only be used by those with the power to control them; they are not necessarily in the service of good but rather linked to strength and power.

Thiel has a fanatical fan base in Silicon Valley with young people seeking his favor. The excellent biography “The Contrarian” by journalist Max Chafkin describes how an entire literary canon has grown up in those circles. This includes predictable authors like Ayn Rand and Tolkien, but also the cult Russian fan fiction version of “The Lord of the Rings”, “The Last Ringbearer”, where Mordor is described as a peaceful, stable and high-tech feudal society and Gandalf as a dangerous warmonger who wants to cause chaos.

Paypal founder Peter Thiel is the man behind the dark turn in the tech world in recent years. Photo: Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Elon Musk himself says that the books he was shaped by are classic science fiction such as “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. The first is a humorous depiction of the end of the Earth and the search for the meaning of life. In the latter, the mighty Galactic Empire is on the verge of collapse, and a small group of conspiring mathematicians led by the genius Hari Seldon make a plan to shorten the period of chaos that the world is facing. In the book, Seldon has developed an algorithm-based supermodel that can predict the future, and he lets a small, select elite group colonize a planet far away in the galaxy. Does that sound familiar?

Beneath the literary references, there is another common denominator between Musk, Thiel, and another of the tech world's most influential people, David Sacks. He is the venture capitalist who, together with Thiel, co-founded Paypal and is now set to take on the heavy-handed job of head of AI and cryptocurrencies in the Trump administration.

The common thread between these three is that they all have a background in apartheid South Africa. Elon Musk grew up in the country before democracy broke out in 1994 and only moved to the United States when he was 17. Peter Thiel spent several years of his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father held a management position in a mining company that mined uranium as part of the apartheid regime's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. As Max Chafkin describes in his biography, the company was a feudal, strictly racially segregated system where white employees had access to top-notch healthcare and recreational activities, while blacks lived confined to barracks.

There are several testimonies that Thiel defended the apartheid system into adulthood

Thiel was shaped by an upbringing where the white elite had a clear right to colonial domination and exploitation, where the black majority population was considered both biologically inferior and a dangerous force that needed to be controlled by force. There are several testimonies that Thiel defended the apartheid system into adulthood, even though he denies it today. David Sacks also comes from a white South African family, although they moved to the United States when he was little.

The breakthrough of democracy came in South Africa in 1994. The following year, in 1995, Thiel and Sacks, who had met at the elite Stanford University, wrote the book “The Diversity Myth,” in which they pit multiculturalism against what they believe are Western values.

As journalist Simon Kuper, himself of white South African parents, wrote in the Financial Times last fall, it was impossible to avoid being influenced by the apartheid system for anyone who grew up in it. Above all, the central idea that inequality between races (and in general) was not a result of the political system, but part of the natural order. Even Trump’s former confidant Steve Bannon has reacted: “Why should white South Africans, the most racist people in the world, have any say in what happens in the United States?”

Thiel’s protégés and friends are almost exclusively men

There is another

aspect of the ideology and culture that Musk, Thiel and the other tech oligarchs create that is central, but often overlooked or downplayed. It is that their worlds – intellectual, social, cultural – are almost entirely male. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation, but it was also based on traditional gender roles, and ultimately the system rested on violence and strength. Thiel’s protégés and friends are almost exclusively male, Elon Musk uses women’s bodies as production devices for his new species (he has twelve children with three women so far). Mark Zuckerberg recently said in a podcast with 

Joe Rogan that he thinks the corporate world needs more “masculine energy”. Listening to these men often feels like reading a dated sci-fi book from the 1960s. Maybe by Robert Heinlein, maybe something with a strong violent hero and an inferior race and a struggle between civilizations.

In the era

we are now leaving, the central promise was that democracy and markets would reinforce each other. That is not how it happened. Instead, we have an escalating concentration of both political and economic power that is now concentrated in the hands of a few white, middle-aged men who are not only convinced of their own brilliance but also that the rest of us, the majority, are inferior to them in various ways. You could call it fascism, if the word didn’t sound so old-fashioned.

I personally plan to spend Trump’s inauguration day reading another of the giants of the fantasy world, the feminist visionary

Ursula K Le Guin

. Maybe her book “Always Coming Home” which takes place in a California far in the future, after the apocalypse. Where another new civilization has emerged, with myths and songs that feel both completely new and strangely familiar.