The Tech Right Is Over

On the end of exit

In April, Peter Thiel moved his family to Buenos Aires. He bought a twelve-million-dollar mansion behind wrought-iron gates and held closed-door meetings with Javier Milei and his presidential advisers. Milei’s government proposed a legislative package whose investment provisions offered foreign companies minimal taxes and thirty-year guarantees against regulatory change, with AI datacenters solicited by name. Opponents called it the Peter Thiel law, although no evidence has established that Thiel drafted or directly advocated it. By September, protesters in white masks were standing outside his gates holding signs that read “Peter Thief.” The man who helped finance the dream of escaping democratic government had found another government willing to offer investors protection from future political decisions. The people who would have to live with those decisions were outside, objecting.

Exit was supposed to be the proof that these men owned the future. They would take their capital, their technology, and their superior understanding of the world somewhere the rest of us could not hold them back. But the destination still needs a government to recognize their property, enforce their contracts, and keep the electricity on. A thirty-year guarantee against regulatory change requires a state strong enough to bind its successors and willing to privilege an investor’s preferences over whatever its citizens might later decide. The dependence on political authority survives the flight. What the investor hopes to escape is the obligation to negotiate with people who have equal standing to say no. And the people outside those gates suggest a difficulty that the doctrine never adequately considered: wherever you move, somebody already lives there.

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DOGE, the operational centerpiece of the project to retire and recompile the government, announced the end of its official work over the July Fourth weekend, having failed to deliver the promised trillions in spending cuts. Reuters had reported it defunct as a centralized entity the previous November, eight months before its scheduled end. Many of its functions had moved to the Office of Personnel Management, and its personnel had taken posts elsewhere in the administration. The formal end came on the timetable set for the temporary organization; the failure was in the promised transformation, not the arrival of an expiration date.

Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School had its business license revoked by a Malaysian city council in July, with the backing of Johor’s state government. A project in the network-state movement had been ordered to cease operations by an ordinary licensing authority. Srinivasan responded by signing a five-year agreement with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, promising a new campus with expedited visas and streamlined redomiciliation. Whatever becomes of that campus, the route to it runs through a government ministry. The sovereign future has a licensing department.

Milei’s Argentina, the proof-of-concept for chainsaw libertarianism, is meanwhile encountering the familiar problem of people disliking the results. An Explanans survey conducted in September recorded 58.2% negative assessments of his government, the worst reading in that firm’s series. The same poll still put Milei first in a fragmented first-round presidential field, with 38.5%. He has a constituency, and an unpopular government can survive a divided opposition. But the supposed demonstration that democratic bargaining could be replaced by superior economic intelligence is now subject to exactly the electoral arithmetic its admirers imagined they had transcended.

Curtis Yarvin, whose blogging supplied the movement its vocabulary and its self-regard, called the Trump administration “a tragedy” that “has already lost” as the new year began, less than twelve months into the term, with JD Vance in the vice presidency. His complaint was that the administration had squandered its revolutionary opportunity, and he entertained “some kind of very sharp conflict or crisis” as a way to recover it. That qualification matters: a disappointed authoritarian can want escalation. I debated Yarvin in Las Vegas this spring, and the man’s dialectical agility has always depended on an unexamined audience assumption that the regime he describes might someday exist. Watching him now is watching a composer assigned to his own piece, complaining about the tempo.

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The alliance with MAGA has produced its own record of disappointment. Trump’s antitrust enforcers continue pursuing the platforms in court, although judges have repeatedly rejected their breakup efforts. In August, Forbes, citing Bloomberg, reported a Justice Department investigation into Andreessen Horowitz over potential antitrust violations involving board representation at competing companies. The investigation had reportedly been running for nearly a year; no prosecution was announced. Political access had apparently failed to buy the firm an exemption from scrutiny.

Steve Bannon has been waging open war on AI, calling it “the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind” while Trump promises to accelerate its development. In June, the president publicly floated government equity stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, saying, “You make them a partnership in this revolution.” Bernie Sanders had separately proposed a much more sweeping public ownership scheme, while Sam Altman had reportedly pitched government ownership himself. Public investment can be a subsidy as readily as a constraint. Between Bannon’s opposition to AI and Altman’s interest in public money, the industry’s relationship with MAGA has become a negotiation over what the state should finance, permit, and own. The men who promised to make government obsolete are bargaining for their preferred version of it.

What remains after the slogans date is the state as a revenue event. The Guardian reported that Trump’s disclosures showed more than $2.2 billion in payments during 2025, with more than $1 billion generated by his family’s crypto ventures. The president’s family is collecting money from an industry whose rules his administration helps determine. The political authority remains public; the token proceeds belong to the business. A movement selling independence from political power has attached itself to this arrangement and called it liberation.

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I have been writing about this pipeline since before it was fashionable to name it, and I will take the good news seriously because I took the threat seriously. The romance of the tech right, the story it told about destiny and cognition and the obsolescence of the rest of us, is over. The network-state project needs another host government. DOGE’s promised transformation ended in bureaucratic dispersal. The court philosopher wants another revolutionary opening because the first one disappointed him. And the sovereign individual has moved behind a gate, where he still depends on a government’s willingness to protect his arrangements.

Their remaining power deserves a fight conducted with the same seriousness as the original warning. Government contracts can entrench private influence long after a revolutionary brand has expired. Proposed investment guarantees can constrain future voters. Administrative systems can outlive the people who installed them. None of those arrangements becomes harmless because its architects look ridiculous, and none becomes inevitable because they once described it as the future. The people outside Thiel’s gates have identified a political demand being made on their country, and they are contesting it. We can do the same with the demands being made on ours.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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