Episode 41: George Gilder and the Birth of Right-Wing Silicon Valley

Hello, I'm Adrian Daw.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in Edward the Right.

So, Adrian, I don't know if you've noticed, but there's something kind of weird going on in Silicon Valley.

Oh, this is new?

Well, all of the tech guys, all of the tech entrepreneurs, the tech billionaire class,

they're kind of weird about gender.

I read some reporting in the New York Times last week that said Elon Musk is straight up just like walking up to people at parties and offering to inseminate them.

He is also doing that to Taylor Swift and seemingly every woman who works for him.

Oddly enough, Mrs.

Swift has not taken him up on it.

The Russian founder of Telegram claims to have fathered 100 children.

There is all kinds of weird gender, sex, reproduction, marriage, eugenics-y shit coming out of these guys.

And they are all just true freaks.

And I didn't really understand like what was going on with that or why, you know, on a superficial level, quite liberal cultural positionings had yielded these really reactionary gender politics, especially around sex and gender issues.

And that leads us to our guest today, who is actually the expert in how these freaks became such freaks.

who's going to walk us through the story of how it happened.

Welcome, Becca Lewis, to the podcast.

Thank you so much for being on Bid with the Right.

Thanks so much for having me.

Yes, we're really excited.

And

we should preface this by saying

we're tackling a big question here, but we're going to tackle it using a guy that I'm guessing compared to most of the people we discuss on the pod,

most of our listeners will not have heard of.

So do you want to introduce our freak of the week, basically?

Who are we talking about about here today?

The hero who made all of Silicon Valley go wildly red-pelled.

Yes, that's right.

So I have spent the better part of the past few years researching the history of right-wing influence in Silicon Valley, and particularly in the 80s and 90s, kind of in the first, you know, Web 1.0 era.

And the guy that really brought right-wing politics to the valley in the way that we know it today is a man named George Gilder.

And as you said, I think most people probably haven't heard of him today.

But if you look at coverage of Silicon Valley in the 1990s, he was everywhere.

He was one of the primary evangelists of Silicon Valley, kind of as mythology, as key to the American future.

And so he really has faded from our memory, but he was a crucial guy.

Yeah, exactly.

So I should say that you finished a dissertation based on your your research into this nexus of conservative ideology and Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurship just recently.

Yes.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

And you start that dissertation by pointing out that in some way there is this kind of media narrative that tech is now turning to the right.

Like we keep being surprised by this.

And I'm wondering if you could maybe, before we get into Mr.

Gilder himself, you can give us a sense of why you think that is.

Why do we keep being surprised by the fact that a fairly male-dominated bunch of rich dudes might eventually develop, you know, slightly reactionary politics?

Like, I mean, have you met older rich dudes?

Like, why are we, why culturally are we sort of primed to be like, oh, really?

reactionary in Silicon Valley?

Why?

I never.

No, that's exactly right.

That I did like a little mini analysis of media coverage of Silicon Valley and it seems like every four years each presidential election news media writ large rediscovers that there are reactionary politics within Silicon Valley and it is treated as a new thing so we've had it this summer people discovering kind of Elon Musk and J.D.

Vance but if you go back you know in 2016 it was a big deal when Curtis Yarwin yeah exactly Homer Lucky was a big Trump supporter back then.

Larry Ellison has been a big Trump supporter,

the CEO of Oracle.

And as I kept going further and further back in time, I kept finding that this was a long time phenomenon.

And in fact, all the way back into the 1990s, people were kind of warning of techno-fascism, as one writer called it.

So why that might be the case, I have a couple of theories.

One is that we know one side of the history really well.

And, you know, our colleague Fred Turner at Stanford has written kind of the definitive work on this history.

And it's a history of libertarianism that emerged actually out of the counterculture in the 1960s and how that has really influenced Silicon Valley.

And

that has been a very important force.

But I think it leads a lot of people to assume that that is the only force that has been kind of guiding, you know, this Californian ideology, although that was not Fred Turner, but this idea that there's kind of a countercultural hipness matched with a wish to not have government intervene.

Um, and then I think more generally, there's a tendency to assume, and this is something I know you've challenged a bit as well, Adrian, a tendency to assume that technology is somehow inherently progressive.

Yeah, so I think that people are really resistant to this idea that people can and do embrace the most cutting-edge technology for the purposes of restoring older social systems.

Yeah.

I should say there might be listeners who are thinking, well, yeah, it makes sense that maybe Mr.

Gilder started out as a died-in-the-wool libertarian and eventually got a little more crotchety with age.

No, no, no, no, no.

We're going to find out that he's a dight-in-the-wool social conservative.

I'm going to read you a passage about

Silicon Valley that I just came across today and it melted my brain.

This is from Men in Marriage.

In the hothouse cruises of many male homosexuals, short-term, intense, violent, abandoned to the rule and worship of the most worthy phallus, moving from body to body to hungry body with scarcely a glint of human recognition beyond the beckoning flesh, repeatedly coupling and climaxing, all beneath clinging, beating, and lubricating blanket of anonymous steam, pulsing in the rhythm of the hunt and the chase with no fear of procreation or entanglement, and usually no expense, these men can enact for free the ultimate male fantasies of hedonistic hedonistic and ecstatic sex.

So, not a libertarian, I would say.

Like, this is

the most Christian right-coded like insanity of like someone

imagining a bathhouse who I think has not been to a bathhouse.

Do you think it was hard for him to type that with one hand?

Yeah, I was like, I was wondering about that.

I was like,

it does have that sort of telltale conservative thing where it's like, that's a lot of detail, man.

Yeah,

I had not,

it's like, yeah, yeah, the hot oil rub down.

Okay, okay.

So if you say so, man.

I think we might be getting ahead of ourselves because we're deep in George Gilder's psychology already.

But I think maybe our listeners don't quite know who he is.

He is, yeah.

But I mean, I guess the point, the only point I was trying to make is that we really are looking not at a pipeline from, as you say, the California ideology to...

sort of more reactionary politics.

We're really looking at someone who's going from backlash social conservatism to being like, yay, the internet.

You know, it's very, very weird.

That's exactly right.

He, well, actually, he started out his career as a moderate Republican who felt that people like Barry Goldwater had taken Republicans way too far to the right.

And his first book, which he co-authored with his friend, was called The Party That Lost Its Head.

And he was really criticizing conservatism.

But then he actually ended up meeting William F.

Buckley, kind of godfather of social conservatism, and became a mentee of William F.

Buckley's and then became part of the conservative movement that he had really critiqued.

And starting in the 1970s, he decided he wanted to become America's number one anti-feminist.

And gender politics really were at the heart of his entire worldview.

And he wrote that the differences between the sexes are kind of the single most important thing in the structure of society.

He, you know, wrote a couple of books that were these like deeply, deeply pessimistic laments.

You know, sexual suicide was the name of the first book.

Sexual suicide is where I know George Gilder from as a student of anti-feminist backlash.

I had a conversation with friend of the pod, Jeet Here

of the Nation,

who in his very adorable Canadian accent was like, you have to read sexual suicide.

And it is a trip, man.

It really is.

It is a weird, weird book.

Yeah.

And I think because it's so weird, it's really easy to purely pathologize it.

Yeah.

He has even said, like, I was in a weird place when I wrote this.

Could you tell our listeners a little bit about this like wild anti-feminist crazy book, Sexual Suicide?

Because that was his first political book, you said?

Well, so his first political book was the one claiming Republican.

Oh,

This was his first sort of like anti-feminist awakening book.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

And it was published in 1973.

And basically, his argument in this book was human progress is procreation.

And so procreation is the most progressive thing that humanity can do.

And we need to be centering our society around kind of the nuclear family structure that can facilitate procreation.

And his argument argument is, you know, essentially that women need to be first and foremost stay-at-home mothers and don't belong in the workforce.

And his argument for that is that women's sexuality kind of through menstruation and childbirth and breastfeeding, that it takes place over this like much longer time scale.

than men's sexuality, which he says really only takes place over the course of kind of buildup and ejaculation.

And so he says that the process of civilizing society is the process of kind of taming male sexuality to extend into this longer time scale horizon so that they can kind of like appreciate looking to the future and what it means to be a father and you know extend humanity.

And so basically he says, well, women already have this natural orientation to the future through their biological processes, which are long scale, but men have to go to work, compete in this kind of marketplace to prepare them for this role of fatherhood.

So it's this kind of convoluted way of saying men belong in the workforce, women belong at home.

Yes, it's a kind of sexual long-termism, isn't it?

We might sort of point out to our listeners that

Gilder is clearly drawing on a couple of things there.

There is clearly a kind of reaction to the sexual revolution there, right?

Clearly, not little anxiety about the invention of the pill.

And there is a kind of Moynihan report style fixation on especially black men's

sexuality.

And I think when he's thinking of sort of this short-term male sexuality, very, very frequently he has non-white people in mind.

So he really, it's a greatest hits of sort of like post-LBJ kind of conservative stalking horses.

And it's not no shocker that Bill Buckley would be like, hey, do you want to come on firing line?

And that's right.

he, you know, the name of the book, Sexual Suicide, he basically claims that, you know, feminists and gay people are leading humanity to kind of commit suicide as a species because they are making it so humans are no longer prioritizing procreation.

And as you say, Adrian, he is putting a lot of blame as well on the welfare state.

He says that welfare is causing black poverty because, as he he puts it, it turns men into cuckolds of the state because black women could be supported as single mothers through welfare programs without kind of a male breadwinner in the house.

Yeah.

Gross.

This shit's just so gross.

Like it's a, it's reductive, myopic, like really dehumanizing view.

of love and family.

It's quite shocking to read.

And it was even shocking to people in the 1970s.

I mean,

he was kind of like particularly trying to be a provocateur at the time.

So I think it was very purposefully shocking.

And he succeeded to a degree.

You know, he did like the late night television show rounds.

He went on the Dick Cavett show.

He did go on Firing Line.

He loves to brag that he got named the, you know, National Organization of Women's Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year.

And that, dear listeners, is while Norman Mailer was still alive.

I think he says that Norman Mailer was the year before.

I have yet to actually confirm this with now,

but I think he tried to position himself directly next to Norman Mailer.

Yeah.

But then the funny thing is, you know, he became this kind of, you know, I refer to him as kind of a forest

figure in conservative politics because he shows up in all of these different places.

And what happened was, you know, in the 1970s after this book got published, he got married, he started going to church more, and he kind of took all of his pessimistic ideas about gender and humanity and retained all of the misogyny, but flipped it on its head and made it a really optimistic vision.

And he said, oh, what is actually going to save us is the restoration of the male breadwinner role through entrepreneurship.

And he became a really big proponent of supply-side economics.

And his next big book, he had a couple in between, but his next big book was called Wealth and Poverty.

And it was essentially a supply-side economics book that still drew on all of these gendered ideas to justify kind of cutting taxes on the wealthy and cutting the welfare state.

And it became, it was referred to as the Bible of the Reagan administration in the first term

because a couple of Reagan administration members kind of bought copies for everyone and it was on everyone's desks.

So when we think about Reagan and austerity and, you know, welfare and supply-side economics and all of that, Gilder was actually a big voice, you know, one of several, but a big voice influencing that.

So actually they gave a copy to everybody in the Reagan administration?

That is wild.

Yeah, at least I believe it was in the Office of Management and Budget.

The quote was that you would see a copy on everyone's desk.

So it was pretty pervasive.

And, you know, Reagan took it up quite a bit.

This is partly because Gilder's cousin ended up being a speechwriter for Reagan and would take a lot of George Gilder's ideas and rhetoric and kind of put them directly into Reagan's speeches.

So you have a lot of Reagan throughout the 1980s

talking about entrepreneurship in these kind of mythological heroic terms.

And now entrepreneurship, of course, like we have the ideal of the entrepreneur is everywhere.

But this was kind of the first moment, you know, it was always a bit of a mythology, but I would say there was a real resurgence and expansion of it in the 80s in no small part because Reagan talked about it a lot.

And he, you know, Reagan said, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that entrepreneur is another word for America.

And Gilder was one of the big inspirations behind that.

And it's not surprising that that would eventually find its way or that he would find his way to the tech industry which really did sort of start in the 1980s really becoming kind of almost a proving ground right it became the place where you could sort of tell these just so stories and in most of the country it ended up being you know these these fables of neoliberalization were largely connected to massive job loss and like you know loss of status etc etc well in silicon valley it could actually look creative and fun and and exciting and overall very pippy and positive whereas Whereas largely everyone else is like, I got some bad news.

We can't save the plant.

You're all going home unemployed, right?

Silicon Valley is the place where the entrepreneur would show up and you wouldn't sort of run for the doors, but where he showed up and it's like, you're all getting free burritos.

You know, not quite then yet, but like,

that is the, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think, you know, Gilder says that he discovered Silicon Valley through his research on entrepreneurship.

So it was through this kind of ideal of the entrepreneur as a male breadwinner, kind of heroic male savior figure.

He was writing a book called The Spirit of Enterprise, was researching a bunch of different cases of entrepreneurship and ended up getting really involved in writing about Silicon Valley and particularly the microchip industry.

And I think for people who are not directly within Silicon Valley, obviously kind of the biggest names emerging out of Silicon Valley in the 80s were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

But just before that, there was a generation that was really the generation that Gilder got inspired by.

And these were the guys who

developed and sold the microchip.

And it was a group of eight men who left a semiconductor company.

Trader is eight.

The Trader is Eight.

And they created their own, you know, startup and eventually developed the microchip and started selling it.

And it was two of them that split off and founded Intel.

And not for nothing, there is this really well-known within Silicon Valley, quote-unquote, family tree of different startups that emerged from the Fairchild semiconductor Traitorous 8.

People call them the Fair Children, all of these startups that emerged from this.

So there really is this kind of patrilineal

thing

that Gilder was latching onto.

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting, right?

On the one hand, this is a guy who is so interested in, as you say, sort of the long-termist view as opposed to sort of male impulse.

It's funny because, of course, the Fair Children, there's a ton of Oedipal energy in it, too, right?

Like,

they all split off from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, partly because Shockley is just kind of an asshole, right?

He has this like very East Coast, very kind of strict management style.

And these people are young West Coast socialized engineers who don't really truck with that which is so interesting that gilder can read that as like a a tale of sort of like orderly intergenerational transmission when in fact what it is is just like a series of pretty rough betrayals right i mean like it's i guess the fact that everyone independent of like betrayal or fealty just gets fucking filthy rich helps but no one's being super nice to each other right well famously nobody's that nice to each other in actual families either.

I mean, like, it's interesting to me that like any hierarchy of power in Gilder's imagination is metaphorized as a family relation.

Yeah.

Like anything where there's any impulse is a petrilineal impulse, you know, any relation is the relation between a father and son.

You know, there's one way that you could metaphorize the entrepreneur, one way that like a lot of listeners might be more familiar with is to analogize the entrepreneur to like the quote-unquote pioneer, right?

Make a colonial analogy.

And it's interesting to me that in Gilder's imagination, it's rather it's a family analogy.

He's a daddy who's bringing home something for you.

And I'm glad you bring up the pioneer thing because I do think that that was appealing to him to a degree because, you know, it meant that Silicon Valley already came with all of these mythologies, right?

It had the mythology of California.

It was already bucking kind of the East Coast establishment.

It came with this pioneer mythos.

But you would see him and some of his research assistants throughout the 90s kind of experimenting with homestead metaphors because they would try to kind of bring the like pilgrim family metaphor into the pioneer in the West metaphor.

So they would try to bring that father role back.

And I think you do see this push-pull of, you know, he started out as this provocateur figure, kind of a troll, and then he remade himself as this kind of like wise guru.

But you still often had this underlying troll troll energy that was kind of looking to piss people off.

And I think you see that impulse going back and forth throughout his career and throughout the men that he's writing about careers.

And it goes hand in hand with this impulse to like

constantly have this family unit at the center of it while also kind of leaving women behind.

I mean,

he's excited about the microchip because he says it kind of will allow people to leave behind the like world of messy material realities.

And he says that men will be able to essentially kind of leave behind their bodily sexual impulses as they enter into this space of like the pure information mind realm.

And so there's the real fantasy of escape.

Yeah, I mean, famously, the internet has nothing to do with sexual release.

So, you know, we're,

I guess, the point goes to George Gilder there.

It's the great divide between like masculine, cold reason and

feminine, messy liabilities of nature, right?

It's also interesting to me that you say he kind of stays a troll, right?

And that strikes me as very well suited to the ethos of Silicon Valley, which has this self-mythologizing, like impish, defiant,

dare I even say disruptive

model, right?

But it's also like he can't decide which side of the Oedipal conflict he wants to be on.

Like, is he as the guru daddy or is he the defiant son?

That's exactly right.

He wants to be both.

That's exactly right.

And I feel like you continue to see that time and time again with kind of big name Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, right?

That I mean, that is Elon Musk, that he wants to be the visionary genius.

He also wants to be the guy posting 69,420 anti-woke mind virus memes.

Yeah.

So we should say that

in the 1990s, Gelder, I guess, is most sort of influential by by doing the least trollish thing possible, which is start a newsletter.

Would a troll start a newsletter?

The Gilder Technology Report.

That's right.

It's a really interesting one.

I remember the parts of your dissertation talking about that, pointing out that like part of where this kind of pioneer spirit can be lived out is in this newly open space, right?

It's this question of like, we have now, we have cyberspace.

And what,

how are, who's going to decide what goes where in that space?

And that's a really wonderful place to start reinvesting gender roles with their kind of totemic power.

The other thing, of course, that it does increasingly in the 1990s that you point out, and I'd love to hear you say more about, there's clearly a vision here that a family computer might mean that women won't have to leave the house quite as often, which

is prescient in its own way, having lived through COVID, but like that that's clearly part of the appeal for him, that like maybe instead of going to their silly jobs, ladies ladies could you know do the normal thing and log on to the internet right can you say a little bit more about about how kind of the new frontier of the internet and i mean new frontier here and with all this metaphorical baggage sort of becomes a way you know as maura was saying to reinvest the nuclear family with all this mythological power

yeah absolutely so by the late 1980s he had fully put his attention on microchips.

He published a book called Microcosm.

And then he became really enamored with the idea of networked computers as a new communication system.

And at this point, the internet was out there, but it wasn't used in a widespread way yet.

And the web was just being invented.

But he really identified that the internet could be a really powerful communication tool for conservatives.

And he specifically saw networked computers as a way of attacking these kind of secularizing feminist or feminized forces in society, especially mainstream media and public schools,

and of restoring the nuclear family and the home as a site of productivity and society.

And so, you know, a couple of things that he

identified, for example, was, you know, there was already the growing Christian homeschool movement that was pulling kids out of public schools or schools altogether because they weren't sufficiently religious, Gilder said networked computers are going to make it possible for the Christian homeschool movement to absolutely explode.

And that means that, again, mothers can stay at home with their children, be their teachers, and their stay-at-home mothers, right?

He also alluded sometimes to the fact that if men could work from home, that it would also continue to keep the father role incredibly present.

So he was very focused on the way that like physically computers and networked computers would allow kind of this

recentering of the home as a site in society.

And we should say maybe for our younger listeners who have always had computers in their pockets that there was this institution of the family computer for really the first 10 years of the internet where you had one computer connected to the internet and you took turns.

It made a screaming sound when you tried to get on the internet, which should have been a warning.

Exactly.

You kept getting AOL disks that promised you oddly specific number of hours, like 1,072 hours of free internet.

And you're like, okay.

But

the idea that that could function as a hearth around which the family unit constitutes itself is not as crazy as it might sound to someone who thinks of the internet mostly of like four people looking at four four screens while eating dinner, right?

Like they're still very much working in a paradigm where the home kind of gets centered around a shared computing space.

No, that's such a good point.

And I think there was another element too, which is that the paradigmatic media technology at the time was the television.

And I think there was widespread concern with the idea that you know, televisions were kind of dumbing us down.

You know, people called it the boob tube.

People talked about couch potatoes.

And Gilder was a really big advocate for networked computers and eventually, you know, the World Wide Web because he said, no, computers are interactive.

They force people to kind of become these more active agents rather than passive absorbers of information.

You can kind of go and be entrepreneurial on a computer.

And so he kind of...

folded that into his idea and mythology of entrepreneurship.

And of course, it allows you to do your own research, I guess, is how we would put it today, right?

So there is an element, right?

Part of his dislike of cold media, basically, of media that you're more in a more receptive mode towards, is that they're all dominated by liberals, right?

Like people like Gilder, I know, did push Republicans onto the internet quite early

because it was like it was felt to be a space that was more congenial to their message than perhaps what we today would call legacy media.

That's exactly right.

You know, he may not have been prescient about porn on computers, but he was very prescient about the ability of the internet to kind of provide opportunities for people that hadn't necessarily had widespread audiences to gain audiences.

He knew, he said, we will be able to use the internet as conservatives to attack our enemies in the media to an extent that we've never been able to before.

So he understood that as early as like 1990, 1991.

He was really, really an early adopter.

Just to clarify a little, like the character of Gilder's thinking, because now I think Republican or right-wing critiques of the liberal media have implied or quite explicitly like a populist message, right?

Like, you guys are the elites, and that's why you're out of touch, and that's why you're liberal.

Was that contained in his thought?

Was it like a vox populi kind of a thing?

Or was he more of like, I am the elite who is going to instruct the people in the correct way to live via these new technologies?

It was a little bit of both.

So what he would say was that he was opposed to hierarchy when it was imposed from the top down.

And so he opposed kind of the big federal government.

He opposed mass broadcast media with kind of the three big networks.

But once you tear down those overarching, you know, unjust systems, then the natural hierarchies of the universe naturally emerge.

And those are the startup founders.

Those are the entrepreneurs.

Those are the new media figures.

And that was the hierarchy that he believed was justified and beautiful.

The natural, appropriate, dare I even say perhaps divinely ordained hierarchy that always has those guys at the top somehow.

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right.

I'm glad you bring that up actually because he did, he spoke of computers in explicitly Christian religious terms really he was so taken with the microchip because he believed that you know the microchip what it does is it it takes all of this computing power that used to be on these massive mainframe computers that took up you know entire buildings and it shrinks it down so that you can have the same amount of power running on a small personal computer and so what he said is the the microchip overcomes the limits of time and space and in that way kind of brings men closer to their creator and kind of allows men to enter into this quasi-spiritual world of information.

And that's when, you know, when he talks about leaving behind the material world of kind of women's bodies and poverty and all of these things, it's a very Christian message that he's delivering.

And we should say that among the heterodox ideas that he champions on the internet early on is intelligent design.

So it's it's really quite explicit.

He was a founder of the Discovery Institute, I believe, right?

Yeah, that's right.

The Discovery Institute, which went on to be kind of the leading think tank trying to get intelligent design into public schools.

And in fact, they were not the first or only, but some of the biggest proponents of intelligent design writ large as this new form of creationism.

And I remember very online, very like when I first went on the internet, like they were were there.

Like the creationists were like surprisingly good at digital.

I don't know.

I don't know how, but like, you know, you got there and like you're like, there's like Coca-Cola and then like, hey, you think dinosaurs are real?

Think of that.

No, that's right.

In fact, in my dissertation, I end up tracing some of those early, you know, part of the point that I try to make is there's a lot of things that we currently kind of fixate on as scholars around like, this is a problem of social media you know what different conceptions of the truth and disinformation and polarization and all these things being downstream of social media and algorithms and in fact if you look back to kind of the early web in 95 96 Yeah, creationists and the Discovery Institute were really strategic early adopters and they made use of the good old-fashioned hyperlink, which at the time was the newest technology that they would link out to all of different quote-unquote studies claiming that the theory of evolution had been debunked and that sort of thing.

If it's on the internet, it has to be true.

That's also very common of

this moment of technology.

Yeah, yeah.

So maybe we now need to introduce another man who might be an unlikely shaping influence of the early internet in the United States.

And I'm going to try and get through it.

I'm hearing his name is Newt.

I'm so sorry.

I'm going to try again.

Newt.

Oh, my God.

It's Newt Gingrich.

Tell us about George, Newt, and the net.

Yeah, so

while George was already evangelizing the internet, and meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., you have a few different groups really starting to advocate for different versions of the young World Wide Web and kind of the future of telecommunications regulation and deregulation.

And Newt Gingrich himself was also a big technology guy.

He was so psyched about space travel.

That was actually the main one.

He loved, in his books throughout the 80s, he loved writing about the possibility of kind of colonies on the moon and stuff.

Oh my God, this is all so old.

I'm sorry.

It's just Elon Musk isn't even like an original creative dip shit.

He's just taking this crap from Newt Gingrich.

He's stolen from Newt.

He's a copycat dipshit.

So yeah, in the early 90s, a bunch of

guys from kind of the world of right-wing think tanks built on Gilder's ideas and they formed a right-wing think tank with Newt Gingrich kind of being an unofficial spokesperson for it and ended up advocating for a deregulated web.

And weren't the only people advocating for that.

There were a lot of these kind of left-leaning libertarian groups advocating, the most famous being the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.

But you ended up getting these strange bedfellows of people on the left and people on the right who all believed that the internet should be deregulated for different reasons, but they ended up kind of forming this political coalition.

So on the left, and this is what Fred Turner and some other people have written about, the idea was, oh, the internet is naturally going to bring about a democratized world.

It's naturally going to,

you know, topple hierarchies and bring us into unity with each other.

It was this countercultural vision.

And, you know, these old hippies kind of said, computers are the new LSD.

They'll transform our minds and our societies.

And so they thought any government intrusion into that was kind of messing with the natural work that that the internet was going to do to bring about a more beautiful world.

And among the right, it was much more the Gilder vision that it was going to restore natural hierarchies and restore the nuclear family and attack mass media and the schools.

And so, for that reason, they didn't want government involved either.

And these two groups kind of joined up and were able to put a lot of pressure on Congress.

And in 1994, Newt Gingrich became the Speaker Speaker of the House for the first Republican House in decades and helped usher through the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which did, well, it took a couple of court cases to get it fully to its current state of deregulation, but eventually led to a largely deregulated internet.

I mean, this is where we can sort of draw the broad swaths between Section 230 of the Internet Communications Decency Act that Gingrich helped make a reality,

You know, George Gilder's claim that welfare makes people cuckolds of the state, and the fact that Ted Cruz then liked a bunch of cuckold porn on Twitter in 2020.

So, you know, it's really, it's a, it's, it's an epic of our time, if you will.

Truly.

What about Gilder's influence on Silicon Valley, right?

Like, who were the people who are reading his books and meeting with him and being like, yes, this is how I want to build my company, or yes, this reflects my worldview, right?

Because I assume he has a lot lot of proteges.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

There were a few different groups that became real acolytes of Gilder.

And in fact, there's a really great memoir from...

I think it was published in the year 2000 called Cyber Selfish by a former Wired magazine writer named Paulina Borsuk.

And she refers to a group that she calls a group of Gilders because she says that it was a whole group of guys that kind of followed him around and took his word as gold and went to events that, you know, there were all sorts of conferences that he would be speaking at and they would follow along and talk to him.

And at this point, mostly when he would speak to Silicon Valley, he was mostly speaking about new technologies he was excited about.

He was mostly being a techno evangelist.

He wasn't giving his men in marriage spiel to these guys,

but he was also simultaneously simultaneously still publishing in National Review where he would say that, you know, women were fundamentally unsuited to be entrepreneurs, things like that.

And of course, if you actually look into what he's saying in Silicon Valley, it still very much is built off of this like masculine mythology of capitalism and entrepreneurship.

So you had the Gilders, and then you have kind of an emerging Silicon Valley press at the time that

both featured him and also also promoted a lot of his ideas.

And so, for example, he was on the cover of Wired Magazine when that was like the big thing in 1996.

And in fact, the head of Forbes magazine for a while started a kind of quarterly version of Forbes magazine that was basically an outlet for Gilder to publish long-form ideas about technology.

And so he kind of ended up having this massive pulpit to share his ideas.

And what he started to do, and this is what Adrian alluded to before is he started to

promote certain technologies over others based on which he felt kind of aligned with he called it his paradigm but essentially it was his ideological vision and in addition to all of this he started his own newsletter and it essentially became an investment newsletter but he always claimed like i'm not I'm not making a case for what you should invest in.

I'm making this case that was almost kind of this christian predeterminist case of like these are the technologies that will win out or faded by god oh my god yes so it's not just that the the hierarchy of men over women is natural it's that the hierarchy of some tech companies over other tech companies mirrors that like quasi-divine select status.

Yes.

Becca, this shit is crazy.

I'm sorry.

I feel like I'm discovering fire.

Your reaction is very validating because I've just been in a room for the past three years looking at this all saying this all the time.

He's like the providential superiority of stonks.

Yes, yes.

And in fact, what happened was his newsletter became so popular that it started creating what became known as the Gilder effect.

This is in the late 90s, where he would list the companies that he felt were the best companies that aligned with his paradigm, and it would cause a rush on those stocks.

So people would be waiting, waiting, waiting for the newsletter to drop.

It would drop, and immediately people would rush to invest in the stocks he had listed, thus driving up the cost of those stocks.

So he ended up having a great deal of economic power in Silicon Valley throughout all of kind of the first big web 1.0 dot-com era.

This feels like a truth social kind of pump and dump style scheme, doesn't it?

I'm thinking about like so many federal fraud and insider trading charges that could arise from this situation.

Yes.

Well, it's funny you should mention that because one of his big people that he loved to praise throughout the 1990s was Michael Milken, who had been the junk bond king in the 1980s.

Oh my God, Dakota.

Who got arrested for insider, arrested and convicted of insider trading.

And Gilder loved to say that he was a misunderstood, heroic entrepreneur and that he was a visionary because a lot of the junk bonds he had invested in were telecommunications companies.

And so basically what Gilder said is, you know, entrepreneurs should have more information than the general public because

they need it to make these decisions.

And so he was a defender of this guy who had been convicted of insider trading.

And then Gilder went on to write this newsletter that, you know, had its own questionable ethics around this stuff i love this guy what a crank what an unflagging crank just like determined yeah to be a nut job at every turn we can't steam out of him i know i mean we can but i am obsessed with him

he's not dead i googled thinking sure he's not

yeah he is alive somewhere if we ever make it to episode 100 more let's have him on and that guy who wrote the the swole christianity book uh because that guy is also still alive they probably know each other they're they're hanging out somewhere right now they're arm wrestling right now

they're trading stock chips like in a smoky lounge somewhere in like reno sparks area

the other thing is i think that he um

you know obviously his influence has waned significantly over the years but he ended up being a big proponent of crypto of course how would he not be on

crypto

exactly so you'll see his name crop up on a lot of crypto blogs.

Like that's where you see his influence in recent years.

We promised our listeners that we're going to talk a little bit more generally about this, but I think that the resonances with today are abundantly clear.

But I do want to point out, it is really interesting, right?

That the kind of beat that Gilder made for himself sort of at the intersection of National Review and Wired magazine, where on the one hand, you could be a...

pretty tough as nails political actor who had a very clear and as Bora points out, very weird political philosophy.

And on the other hand, you're like, could be on the cover of Wire and be like, yay, computers, right?

Like, and people are like, well, that seems like a very neutral thing, right?

This is still how a lot of people look at Silicon Valley.

I can't tell you how many times I give interviews and people are like, well, you know, Sam Altman says AI can do that.

I'm like, he's selling UAI.

It's not shocking that he says it can do that.

He is trying to get funding.

Like, it's like the same way that, like, well, the man said the snake oil would work.

It's like, well, yeah, he was selling you the snake oil.

Right.

But like the way somehow we rely on the tech press, the Silicon Valley court press, as kind of a straightforward representation of reality, not understanding that like the massive valuations produced in and around Silicon Valley depend on the way these people talk about these businesses.

Gilder is an early pioneer of that too.

That he's like, oh, wait, these people will let me say anything.

Yes.

Like he was so invested in myth-making making about entrepreneurs.

And then he kind of was able to become an entrepreneur who did myth-making about himself and profited off of it.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And I think that so many people have continued to do that, where, as you say, with like Sam Altman, who was able to both be like the number one expert spokesperson about AI while also being the person selling you AI.

Yeah.

Part of Gilder's project was saying, you know, these tech entrepreneurs are the key to our future.

We need to be trusting them.

I mean, essentially, they were kind of, you know, quasi-godlike figures for Gilder.

There was a real Christian spirituality to them.

And he loved to attack, you know, feminists and their credentials and attack schooling and all of this stuff.

And there is this real sense of like, no, entrepreneurs are the new experts in society.

These are the people we put our trust in.

Yeah.

The other person that I can think of who thinks of the CEO as, well, either God or Jesus, depending on when you ask him,

and who also has kind of very strong, I mean, more so than Elon Musk, for instance, religious convictions clearly undergirding his business investment is Peter Thiel.

Do these hang out?

Are they, you know, are they buds?

What's going on?

So they appear together sometimes and like they've done a debate together.

Gilder still has a yearly tech conference that he hosts that Thiel has keynoted at.

When Gilder was at the height of his influence in Silicon Valley in the 90s, Thial hadn't become a startup founder yet.

So he's kind of the next generation,

but at that time, he and his friends were starting a right-wing newspaper at Stanford

and were themselves becoming anti-feminist, anti-multiculturalism provocateurs and really.

Anti-gay.

Anti-gay, yeah.

And came up in the right-wing think tank space before then pivoting to tech.

And as Peter Thiel's biographer Max Chefkin has written, seeing startups as the new think tanker publication, kind of startups as a way of doing politics.

It's interesting that like sometimes it feels to me from as somebody who is not an expert in this field that the misogyny and the sort of like gender politics can sort of advance and recede over the course of Silicon Valley, right?

Like it's obviously always been a very male male space.

And as you say, it's always been animated by these myths of masculinity.

And it feels, at least from an outsider's perspective, that they sort of remember women every couple years

and decide to make a case against women's equal rights.

Yeah.

What do you think prompts these occasional returns to questions of reproductivity and the family in the sort of like Gilderite Silicon Valley world?

I have started to think about it a bit in terms of kind of, you know, you continually have the two sides of the masculine Silicon Valley coin.

On the one hand, you have that visionary, optimistic masculinity of the entrepreneur.

On the other hand, you have kind of the pessimistic, trolling, openly misogynist persona or mindset.

And it feels like at moments of

threat to the power of these entrepreneurs, you get this kind of lashing out, perhaps.

Or I should say that's kind of my working hypothesis right now: is that throughout the late 2000s, early 2010s, there didn't really need to be overt technology because everyone was handing the keys to the kingdom to these founders, anyways, right?

Right.

Zuckerberg was ascendant.

The PayPal Mafia was ascendant.

Everyone thought that Elon Musk was going to save the world.

Was Elon Musk misogynist in his private life?

Absolutely.

We have a lot of accounts of that.

But people in mainstream media weren't really critiquing that.

And it wasn't until that became kind of post-2016, a big part of our conversations around tech that bit by bit you're having more of that provocateur, openly misogynist piece coming out.

But again, that's that's my working hypothesis right now.

I need to actually get into the data and see what's going on.

Well, I think there's something to that.

I mean, it also helps, right, that like

Gilder is sort of like one of these presences that sort of is behind the scenes for quite some time but i think it also is helpful that silicon valley's protagonists just keep shifting and changing and they tend to be quite young and i think we have a lot harder time especially i think with nerds to really credit their deep misogyny when they're young where they go well you know you just haven't lived enough yet or whatever right and like it it is just like a very different thing whether like you know 70 year old banking ceo is like here's how i feel you know or it's like this 25 year old in the hoodie where you're like, oh, come on, kid, it's fine.

Like, kid doesn't know what he's saying, you know?

And so I do also think that part of why they're getting called on it now is that Silicon Valley is aging.

Silicon Valley is, we're aging with its products and with its protagonists.

And, you know, it's a familiarity that really breeds contempt that we're like, oh my God.

Yeah.

You're not just uncool.

You're retrograde and sort of a Nazi.

Yeah, right.

This reminds me, Adrian, of what we've talked about in our three models of conservative masculinity, the pervert, the preacher, and the creep, Silicon Valley really relies on the creep, who is somebody who perceives themselves as an outsider, even as they are accumulating status, right?

But the creep's masculinity, and we also talked about this with Jordan in our episode on sci-fi and sci-fi fandoms, conservatism.

The creep masculinity that you see from so many of these Silicon Valley figures, like Elon Musk, like Peter Thiel.

I think George Gilder might be now their paradigmatic example, at least in my mind, is a sense of like wounded status, of a rightful ascendancy and a rightful domination that has been denied, right?

Yeah.

I think that might be a harder masculinity to embody or to stick to in those, you know, flush years when everybody is just shoveling you cash and nobody's asking too many questions about what your products actually do.

Yeah, that's a good point.

I love that breakdown of the three masculinity.

I would say maybe the dichotomy that I'm articulating is a dichotomy between the preacher and the creep, that they kind of yo-yo between those, although it's a preacher of technology.

And also literally God in Gilder's case.

Right.

Don't forget there's God.

He's there.

That's true.

Watching over us all and shaking his head in dismay.

What have you done to my beautiful hierarchies?

I was so clear about who was on top and then y'all went in and fucked it up.

Yeah.

it's this interesting thing right and this is a little bit my own bailiwick these figures in silicon valley often do look to older men as their as their guides and mentors right like which often stay out of view this is true for gilder in the sort of um ideological sense it's also true for a lot of vcs who who really shaped uh you know what the what the valley looks like without really being the household names that you know sam altman or mark zuckerberg are uh you know for people who don't have to run into these people at parties

But the problem, of course, is that with these very young generations, right, with these people who really made their money sort of at the very beginning of the second dot-com boom, that we're now watching kind of their aging process.

And

that is a trick that Silicon Valley was very good at, like not having us watch these motherfuckers age, basically.

And it feels like now it's all out for us to see what that looks like.

If the most significant thing you've done in your life, you did at 25.

And now you get to play tennis and be weird on the internet.

Right.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, this is a digression, I suppose, but Mark Zuckerberg continuing to attempt to rebrand himself, you know, first through Meta.

And then when that hasn't taken off, now he's doing kind of like an influencer rebrand.

So it's like less about the product and more about what he's wearing and what fighting he's doing and, you know, how he's working out and stuff.

And that's been interesting to me, too, because at the end of the day, these guys are celebrities as much as anything else.

Right.

Doing a midlife crisis into our phones that we all have to see.

Yeah.

It's like, yeah, it is like you peaked in high school, but they didn't peak in high school.

They peaked when they dropped out of Stafford or Harvard and then got that IPO.

Yeah.

You know, I think if Silicon Valley were to have its way, there would be yet another younger generation coming in and kind of sweeping aside the, as this other generation ages.

but that younger generation kind of grew up in the age of Silicon Valley excess and so it's people like Sam Bankman Freed right or dare I say Elizabeth Holmes the turtledecks and all right on this podcast we stand at Ponzi Queen

yeah it's nice to see women in male-dominated fields like scamming

Silicon Valley scamming but yeah I do think it's interesting that like even as you have this new AI kind of push that the biggest face is actually kind of you know someone from the previous generation still Sam

yeah

and that to me is what makes your work and what makes the focus on Gilder so fascinating because in some way the story that you know someone like Fred Turner tells is that of a generation that helps birth the ethos that we all sort of associate with Silicon Valley today but that then kind of fades into the background and I think you really are laying hold of structures that have stuck around for really a shockingly long time given the short the quick succession sort of flow of time in silicon valley generally that's what we're living with now is like silicon valley that sort of doesn't reinvent itself every five years but that where we really have to live with the fact that you know these people are as maura saying these are celebrities these are now public figures these are politicians really yeah uh and we we now have to live with them It's George Gilder's world.

We're just living in it.

So real.

So real.

Becca, I learned so much from you and I had so much fun.

You were a delightful guest.

We have to have you on again and I'm really glad that we were able to share this with you and learn from you because it's a fucking crazy story.

Thank you so much for giving me the chance to chat about this.

It is so therapeutic to chat about it with

others.

So

this has been a real delight.

I can't wait to see it in book form.

If we have any editors listening, reach out to Becca and get this book in front of people.

I think it's going to be a story of Silicon Valley that not only hasn't been told, but that hasn't been told for some very important political reasons.

And I think it's great that you're doing that.

Thank you.

Becca Lewis, thank you so much.

You've been listening to In Bed with a Right.

In Bed with a Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.