For a long time, Silicon Valley was celebrated as the Laboratory of Progress. Hoodie outsiders, armed with lines of code, built the 12th century infrastructure. They challenged standards, invented new markets, and embodied a form of technological meritocracy. No one reproached them for getting rich: they built products, not power. But this time is over.
If finance has long embodied power, it is now the tech that will be in line with criticism. Silicon Valley has devoured Hollywood, Wall Street, and is now attacking Washington. Entertainment, finance, politics: everything goes. But instead of tanks or soldiers, she advances with servers, satellites, and algorithms. And above all, she does not take power, she redefines him.
It is no longer just a question of optimizing apps. It is a question of capturing the attention of the masses, redistributing global economic flows, installing alternative accounts to those of liberal democracy. Elon Musk does not only buy Twitter: it restructures public space. Starlink is not just a satellite network: it is a private digital sovereignty, capable of rewriting geopolitics. What the Valley code today is ideologies. And some are explicitly authoritarian.
Curtis Yarvin, figurehead of the current DARK ENLIGHTENMENTtheorizes the failure of representative democracy and advocates the advent of a “ceo-monarch” to lead the United States. Marginal fantasy? Not so marginal when you know that it is listened to by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and other powerful tech. Far from the libertarian ideal of the beginnings, Part of the technological elite now assumes a vertical, elitist, post-democratic political project. The rejection of inclusion, ESG, pluralist debate is no longer discreet: it is displayed.
The problem is not just a billionaire has a political opinion. The problem is when these opinions overlap in the tools that billions of people use every day. When the governance of a social network becomes a geopolitical variable. When the distribution of the global internet is based on the will of a single man. We are no longer in an era of innovation. We are in an era of ideological concentration.
This shift is not inevitable. But it imposes increased responsibility for founders, investors, engineers. It is no longer enough to seek scalability. You have to ask yourself what this scalability spreads. The infrastructure is never neutral. Each line of code, each design produces, each choice of financing contributes to amplify – or to brake – certain visions of the world.
We need another generation of technologists. Technos who still believe in the value of inclusion, the plurality of votes, in the general interest. Technos who code to raise, not to dominate. And they exist. But they are too little supported, too little visible, too little funded. It’s time to bring them out.
Because basically, the question is not technological. She is philosophical. Technology is a multiplier: it accelerates what is given to it. So let us ask the only worth: What is our technology amplifying? Collective intelligence or omnipotence of some? Link or control? Humanity or its liquidation?
