Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
It is a short speech that Peter Thiel gives at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Shortly after he begins, he allows himself a casual joke about Hillary Clinton, only to be interrupted by the cheers of the audience. Thiel smiles briefly, a little awkwardly, as if it still embarrassed him to harvest applause this way.
Then he reads, slightly impatient, his life story from the teleprompter, interwoven with that narrative he has been propagating in the Silicon Valley tech scene for years: the story of the decline of American capacity for innovation, condensed in a sentence about Twitter: „We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” To make this narrative palatable to a Trump audience, Thiel replaces the flying car with an American Mars landing and the 140 characters with another swipe at Clinton’s foreign policy incompetence. A deliberate pause follows, to give the audience room to laugh. He grins, satisfied, seems sure he has now found the right pitch.
It is the story of a rapprochement between two who were not entirely at ease with each other: Peter Thiel, the leading figure of a Silicon Valley that until then had thought almost uniformly globally-minded and socially liberal, and the MAGA movement, which wants to reduce America’s engagement in the world and roll back large parts of the internal liberalisation of recent decades.
In 2016 Thiel was still alone with his ideas; many influential investors and founders were on Clinton’s side or stayed neutral. By Trump’s second election, a loose network had formed around figures like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and of course Elon Musk, which goes by the label „Tech Right”.
The bracket that binds the two groups in practical politics is skepticism toward deep regulation of the economy. Already in 2018, the political scientist David Broockman showed in a study that the political preferences of the tech elite resemble the Democratic Party fundamentally on redistribution, global perspective, and social liberalism, but on the question of regulation differ drastically.
During the Biden years, the policy of Lina Khan as chair of the US Federal Trade Commission became the catalyst for the estrangement of some venture capital investors from the Democrats. Venture capital funds usually have an investment horizon of about eight to ten years. Historically, there have always been two ways to generate liquidity from fast-growing startups: an IPO or a purchase by another company. Under Khan’s leadership, the FTC became increasingly restrictive on approving acquisitions because of antitrust concerns. For investors this meant higher risk: their investments could remain illiquid for longer than expected. Beyond that, the Biden administration’s initial safety-oriented AI strategy was also a thorn in the side of some. The progress in artificial intelligence has, roughly speaking, formed two camps, that of the cautious and that of those for whom things cannot move fast enough.
Both the worry about over-regulation and that about stricter antitrust enforcement share that they deal with the results of economic success. Thousands of startups were sold in the US in recent decades; powerful AI models exist where questions of safety arise. The reasons for these successes are many; three are especially important: the agglomeration effects of genuine elite schools like Stanford or Harvard; the large, uniform American services market that offers enough well-paying customers for fast scaling; and the deeply developed capital market that can finance this growth.
The anger over new regulation alone, however, does not explain why the Tech Right became so strong in the United States. Among the Democrats too there were those who viewed the restrictive regulatory policy critically and are now more visible under the label „Abundance”. Often Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is blamed for this phenomenon, but that too is too simple.
Every young programmer growing into the craft feels this new sense of power when, with the code one has written oneself, the work of many hours suddenly takes only milliseconds. Building software is, for many, a proof that the world can be changed, that all this requires is access to a computer. One often speaks of „agency”, a fine English word that unfortunately only translates into German with the somewhat bureaucratic terms „Handlungsmacht” or „Handlungsfähigkeit”. Agency has certain overlaps with liberal conceptions of the human being. Hayek’s idea of spontaneous order, based on the action of individuals, is a clear parallel.
Of course, agency has its limits too, but this stance collides head-on with the impression the American left-of-centre too often produces: that the individual cannot change the world. Put polemically: either, in a modern key, because of the billionaires, in a postmodern key because of institutional racism, or, in a prosaic key, because of the system. This bearing puts off people with agency. It is no coincidence that the central project of the Tech Right in the first year of the Trump administration was, of all things, DOGE: the apotheosis of an iconoclasm directed against the symbols of a moral philosophy felt as constraining, „Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” as much as foreign aid, carried out by highly intelligent software developers who had only just come of age.
Pride comes before the fall, as is known, and so DOGE too has failed. The big goal of reducing the spending of the American federal government by one trillion euro through cutting wasteful spending, fraud, and abuse, was missed drastically; spending has even risen. People worldwide will pay with their lives for the cuts to foreign aid. DOGE has done a disservice to all who believe in the improvement of the world through the action of individuals. Here too one finds a decisive difference from Hayek’s teaching: agency that only works top down is always confronted with a knowledge problem. That does not make reform impossible, but humility toward grown systems and their knowledge has to be part of any reform agenda.
And in Europe? Measured against the wild turns and the personal drama between Trump and Musk, the European tech landscape is not especially interesting for political analysis. This is usually attributed to the fact that in Europe there are no large aggregators like Meta or Google exercising power. Perhaps the industry is also still too small overall. But in recent years the at-first somewhat docile European tech community has organised itself and formulated clear demands.
Unlike the United States, and contrary to what some here believe, Europe does not yet have a unified internal market. For European tech companies it is sometimes easier to expand into the US first than into another European country. If one wants to do a financing round in the US, one can download standardised contracts from the internet and sign digitally, since almost all companies choose a Delaware C-Corp structure. In Europe, every country has different corporate forms, so there is no standard contract for investments. In Germany, on top of that, every financing round has to be notarised, which involves high cost and effort.
In contrast to the US, however, the industry is not going on a full collision course with the system, but tries to close ranks. A campaign led by Andreas Klinger, an Austrian investor, tries with EU-INC to create a unified European legal form, which is supposed to ease this and other processes. What one notices in many supporters, though, is the same restlessness, the same intensity the Tech Right lives, even if it is here, at times, put to positive use. On one side it is obvious: anyone who does not yet have a large, uniform market with minimal, generally valid rules (of the kind Hayek too would have liked) will fight for one first. That alone may be a project for the next decade.
In the long run, however, the question arises where this restless energy flows. What happens if EU-INC, as the industry demands, becomes not a regulation but only a directive, which would have no standardising effect? After all, this attempt to shape the future from within the system follows the first political steps of the American tech industry. Against radicalisation speaks the fact that the starting point and aims of Europeans differ from those of the American Tech Right: here the problem is the missing unification at the European level. Moreover, the tech industry in Europe, unlike in the United States, is not a cultural pacesetter that gives political entrepreneurs access to new voter groups. Structurally, then, what could happen is a shift in tactics, from the grand sweep toward smaller optimisations.
Paradoxically, then, we are more likely to see phenomena like the Tech Right in Europe only once a strong internal market has actually been created and the agency arising from it is to be hemmed in again. It is not the lack of agency that radicalises, but its containment after a phase of success.
