Have you heard about Donald Trump’s sudden change of heart regarding tariffs that resembles the master Miyagi style – impose tariffs, remove tariffs? Well, it seems that behind this decision, there were also protests from the big CEOs of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the famous Big Tech companies that quickly shifted from cozying up to Obama and Biden to supporting the Republican president.
“By imposing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and enemies and thus launching a global economic war against the entire world at once, we are destroying trust in our country as a trading partner, a place to do business, and a market to invest capital,” tweeted billionaire investor Bill Ackman, calling for a 90-day pause. Many tech company leaders, including Elon Musk, reportedly complained directly to Trump, with Musk even advocating for the elimination of tariffs between the US and the European Union. In response to the protests, the president suspended everything for 90 days, except for China.
Why read “Tecnodestra” by Venanzoni
To understand why Trump is compelled to listen to the demands of tech entrepreneurs, it’s worth reading the new book by Andrea Venanzoni, “Tecnodestra. I nuovi paradigmi del potere” (Signs Books), where a lucid and in-depth description of a world is provided where politics is no longer conducted in palaces but on platforms, where users, clicks, and algorithms matter more than votes in ballot boxes, and figures like Musk, Thiel, Andreessen carry the same weight as Trump, Starmer, Putin.
Venanzoni’s book is a historical and political essay on our times that refrains from repeating the tiresome lament about the demise of democracy or embracing the progressive techno-optimism that was once in vogue. Since the tech titans chose not to demonize the “bad” Donald Trump but rather supported him before and after his recent re-election, the left suddenly realized they might have had some flaws too. The visionary genius Elon Musk became a dangerous neo-Nazi in the media narrative, Mark Zuckerberg, who announced the end of fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, was seen as a hypocritical censor (but when he was censoring news about Biden’s son and Covid, he was a democracy hero), and so on.
Why wasn’t there talk of “technoleft”?
It may seem strange to those who don’t engage with social networks and see them as a waste of time for teenagers, but as Venanzoni writes, the digital network has a much more disruptive force than streets, squares, newspapers, and TV. The game of moderating messages and posts is entirely political. The left, in power almost everywhere when the social platform phenomenon exploded, rode it without understanding it. When it was overwhelmed by right-wing electoral victories in much of the West, it coined the term that gives the title to the essay: technodestra. There was never talk of technoleft when the same platforms promoted progressive ideas and policies and censored opinions in the name of woke political correctness.
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Venanzoni skillfully narrates how a new elite emerged from the chaos left by the globalization crisis, representative democracies, and twentieth-century ideologies, made up of engineers, programmers, and startup founders. In his well-documented pages, the author guides the reader into the ecosystem that produced the technodestra: from the libertarian hacker culture of the early Silicon Valley to today’s accelerationist disillusionment; from the wounded Rust Belt to the dream of platform cities; from anarcho-capitalist individualism to political trolling as metapolitical action, finding an unbeatable “troll leader” in Trump; from the end of state sovereignty to the return of feudalism, but in a digital version.
The technodestra and the new feudal order
The theoretical core of the book is the insight that digital platforms are recreating a neo-feudal order: a world fragmented into micro-sovereignties, governed by private lords, where contracts matter more than laws, and algorithms more than the Constitution. The comparison with the Middle Ages is not used in a regressive but structural key: just like then, power is broken, fluid, but no less invasive today. Venanzoni skillfully avoids taking sides but does not pretend not to see that many attacks on the technodestra are motivated not by love for freedom but by annoyance with those who dare to deviate from the mainstream thinking. Musk is hated not because he is rich but because he speaks of freedom, Thiel not because he is a monopolist but because he is not woke. Both because they stand with Trump.
“Tecnodestra” is not a reactionary pamphlet but not a libertarian diatribe either. It’s a map of tensions. There’s a need for freedom and order. The rejection of censorship and the fear of fake news. The desire to break old patterns and the risk of new oligarchies. Venanzoni doesn’t resolve them; he exposes them. And explains why political power today cannot ignore these players.
What can the irrelevant Europe do?
“The technodestra is already here,” writes the author in his conclusion, “in university halls, punctuates the pages of newspapers and editorial words, emerges in political discourse and public debate.
La prassi ricombinante non è solo una forma ideologica, ma un’azione che sintetizza modi, idee e stili diversi, sospesi tra alta tecnologia e politica, per comprendere il presente accelerato. È una tensione pragmatica verso l’innovazione, una opposizione al centralismo burocratico e un radicale rifiuto della retorica della giustizia sociale, dei “diritti” e dell’autodistruzione dell’Occidente. È un progresso che rifiuta dogmi green e decrescisti, e vede nella forza creativa e disruptiva dell’alta tecnologia la possibilità di rinnovare modelli istituzionali paralizzati e incapaci di evolversi.
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In questo nuovo scenario del potere, l’Europa sembra irrilevante non per mancanza di risorse, ma per mancanza di visione. Mentre gli Stati Uniti discutono sul futuro digitale, l’Unione Europea sembra limitarsi a tassare e normare. L’opportunità politica sta nel rifondare radicalmente l’UE, liberandosi di regole asfissianti e di una classe politica impreparata. Le piattaforme digitali offrono enormi opportunità di crescita e innovazione, aprendo la strada a una nuova era di sviluppo.
