The Intelligent and the Intellectual
On the Coming Tech Left
In 2018, a lifetime ago in tech years, Peter Thiel said, "Crypto is libertarian, AI is communist."1 The line cuts through Silicon Valley’s soul. On one side, decentralized speculation and individualism. On the other, centralized efficiency and collective potential. Thiel saw a tension that would define our moment—a fracture running deeper than technology into the heart of power itself.
Follow this fracture as it spreads through the Valley’s elite worldview, through their simple faith that computational prowess grants natural leadership. They see hierarchy flowing from merit, wealth reflecting biology, capitalism expressing natural law. This becomes the Tech Right: racism dressed as genetics, scientism serving as secular religion, current distribution of power treated as fair outcome of innate differences.
The ideology didn’t emerge from nothing. Early libertarian dreams curdled under pressure. When #MeToo and Black Lives Matter challenged unearned advantages, “freedom” morphed into hierarchy defense. Neo-reactionary philosophies laundered themselves mainstream, providing intellectual veneer for brutal beliefs.2
Meanwhile, the Western left retreated into consumerist impotence. It became more concerned with curating correct opinions than building productive power, more reflexively anti-tech while ceding the future’s entire territory to opponents. Worse still: it became an unwitting conservative, defending the very systems—banks, corporate media, publishers—it once sought to overthrow. Politics of the brake, not the steering wheel.
Lenin understood you cannot build the future by rejecting your era’s most powerful productive forces.3 The decadent left forgot this lesson, leaving a massive void. Space for new politics.
The story turns here. Convergent forces now threaten to shatter the Tech Right’s worldview and fill that void.
First force: AI proving a bad business. Too immense and too easily replicated to monopolize. The race to build powerful models becomes a cutthroat war of price and access, forcing a shift to open-source alternatives. China seizes the mantle, positioning itself as the world’s provider of free, powerful AI tools—a moral counterpoint to American “AI imperialism.”4
Second force: the coming layoffs. Stock markets remain high on AI hype fumes, but reality sets in. These models serve efficiency, which in capitalist systems means replacing labor with capital. The numbers grow stark. When the bubble bursts, Wall Street will demand “efficiencies,” and millions of white-collar workers will get replaced by the very tools they helped build.
From this rubble, synthesis begins. The Tech Left emerges—not from plan or manifesto, but organically.
The laid-off knowledge worker of 2026 differs from the Luddite of 1811. She doesn’t want to smash the machine—she masters it. Now unemployed but empowered with nearly free access to the means of intellectual production, she gets forced into entrepreneurship—or activism. This emerging class will reject both the anti-tech fear of the old left and the hierarchical scientism of the Tech Right. New organizations will form: coder coops, designer DAOs, freelance strategist networks, and community organization influencers—all built on open-source AI and decentralized collaboration.
This new Tech Left has the potential to combine intellectual vision with intelligent strategy. The old left built beautiful critiques disconnected from reality. The Tech Right calibrates well to power mechanics but delivers an intellectually and morally bankrupt vision. The Tech Left could fuse sophisticated vision for better futures with ruthless, pragmatic, well-calibrated strategy for achieving them.
This requires painful honesty about efficiency. For decades, Western automakers chose rent over R&D. They engineered price discrimination—trim packages, brand tiers, financing tricks—instead of engineering cost reduction. Tesla, despite its tech halo, priced cars as luxury goods and used regulatory credits to pad margins rather than push for mass affordability. The result: an industry that claims it cannot profitably build EVs under $40,000, while China’s BYD makes a profit on $12,000 cars.5
China “floods” the world with cars the same way it “flooded” the world with solar panels—by treating them as social-use values to produce at scale, not as positional goods to ration by price.6 The Western complaint about “oversupply” reveals more about class politics than economics: the prospect of $10,000 EVs threatens the entire rent-extraction architecture built since the 1970s.
A true Tech Left understands that the answer lies not in protecting the bloated profitability of Western firms, but in adopting a similar policy preference—stimulate supply alongside cutthroat competition, accepting low, zero, or even negative profits in strategic sectors. This doesn’t subordinate market efficiency but enables it, by redefining efficiency away from “maximize earnings per share” toward “deliver the highest possible physical output per unit of societal input.”
This means confronting the open secret of corporate waste. The CEO of an “unprofitable” but productive firm will keep his company car, his company plane, his work wives in multiple cities, regardless. The obscene pay packages and stock options function not as rewards for efficiency but as ritualized extraction mechanisms divorced from real value creation. A smart state would cap executive compensation in any industry receiving public subsidies, reviving the War Powers playbook that built American manufacturing dominance in the first place.7
It would also refuse to let innovation die in corporate graveyards. Apple spent ten billion dollars on an EV project and never shipped a car.8 That intellectual property—in battery tech, in autonomous systems, in manufacturing processes—constitutes a national asset, not a private one. A smart government would use its power, from antitrust to the Defense Production Act9, to force that IP into a national consortium, making it available to all domestic automakers to accelerate the entire industry.
This path forward operates less as an ideology to debate, more as a practical blueprint for navigating inevitable economic dislocation. It charts a constructive course between nostalgic retreat into the past and the nihilistic glee of acceleration, rejecting both impotence and destruction. Its competition gears not toward the enrichment of a shareholder class, but toward the creation of radical abundance founded on an ethos of justice.
The tools exist. The moment approaches, whether we embrace it or not. The emergence of the technological left is historically predetermined.
Thiel made the comment during a 2018 conversation with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Axios - Peter Thiel: AI is communist
The New York Times has reported extensively on the influence of these ideologies in Silicon Valley circles. The New York Times - Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Lenin's famous dictum, "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country," articulated his belief that socialist transformation required harnessing the most advanced industrial technology. Marxists Internet Archive - Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks
Reporting indicates that Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent have released their large language models as open-source, a move seen as a strategic effort to accelerate domestic innovation and establish global standards. How China’s open-source AI is helping DeepSeek, Alibaba take on Silicon Valley
Analysis by firms like Caresoft Global found that BYD's Seagull EV, which sells for under $12,000 in China, is profitable due to extreme vertical integration and manufacturing efficiency. Why a small China-made EV has global auto execs and politicians on edge
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has reported that China’s investment in solar PV manufacturing is more than ten times that of Europe and the U.S., leading to global price drops and accusations of oversupply. IEA - Renewables 2023 Report
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to cap executive after-tax salaries at $25,000 (about $400,000 today) as a matter of wartime economic justice. Emergency Price Control Act of 1942
Apple canceled its "Project Titan" EV initiative in early 2024 after investing for a decade, with expenditures estimated to be around $10 billion. Apple cancels its autonomous electric car project and is laying off some workers
The Defense Production Act of 1950 gives the U.S. President broad authority to mobilize the domestic industrial base for national defense and other strategic purposes. FEMA - Defense Production Act Program