New Eugenics of Power

Economist Joseph E Stiglitz, in his recent column America’s New Age of Empire, observes that, unlike the 19th-century British imperialism, Trumpian imperialism lacks any coherent ideology and is openly unprincipled. Nonetheless, he hoped that Trump’s dystopian era of kakistocracy had ‘picked’ and would end with the 2026 and 2028 elections. The question is, who are these ‘worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people’ who frame the present policies of the Trump Administration?

Donald Earl Collins of American University at Washington DC, in an analytical opinion piece, ‘From fringe to federal: The rise of eugenicist thinking in US policy’, argues that Trump’s inner circle is mainstreaming ideas that threaten the disabled, the elderly and the poor – all in the name of ‘saving humanity’. Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aimed to improve the genetic quality of a human population. The contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom to establish the supremacy of white people.

It is widely alleged that tech titans are indifferent to humanity. From Peter Thiel to Elon Musk, many are adherents of a worldview that envisions humans being replaced by digital post-humans and sees this as progress. Moral Philosopher Émile Torres argues that many Silicon Valley leaders embrace a vision of a trans-humanist future in which biological humans will be replaced by digital beings endowed with superintelligence. This vision helps explain their obsession with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and sits at the core of what Torres describes as human extinctionist preferences. In 2023, Torres and his colleague Timnit Gebru coined the acronym ‘TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence (AGI)’, to describe a constellation of ideologies — Trans-humanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Long-termism — that have become highly influential within Silicon Valley. According to them, the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the 20th century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalised groups and centralise power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability.

The new eugenics of the 21st century is long-termism- a new version of Social Darwinism’s “survival of the fittest” and the eugenics movement it hatched. Though the advocates of Long-termism are at work to save humanity from extinction by making humans better, this “betterment” comes with two caveats. One, effective altruists – white men like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos, are fittest to act on behalf of future humanity. Two, as this requires that they make decisions about whole classes of people, their use of the planet’s resources might lead to humanity’s demise. Billions of present-day humans might ultimately be sacrificed to save humanity’s distant future.

Elon Musk expressed his fundamental belief in ‘who deserves to live and die’ in a three-hour interview on the Joe Rogan podcast back on February 28, 2025. To quote Musk, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilisation, which is the empathy response.” The “they” Musk and Rogan referred to in the podcast included undocumented migrants, white liberals and progressives, Democrats, and LGBTQIA. While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society. Empathy, he said, has been “weaponised”.

In addition to Musk, Donald Trump’s inner circle also includes Peter Thiel-- a central figure in the “PayPal Mafia,” a group of former PayPal employees and founders who became hugely influential tech entrepreneurs and investors, launching companies like Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and venture firms like Founders Fund. Mencius Moldbug’s Pen name is that of American political theorist and software developer Curtis Yarvin. Sometimes referred to as Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher,” who in 2008 wrote an essay called ‘Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century’. Patchwork’s theme relies on sovereign joint-stock republics with cryptographic governance, brings the promise of clean streets, negligible crime, invincible robot armies, and world peace. The President of the United States is hugely influenced by such a tech-fuelled future of privatised sovereignty republics. He openly fantasised about putting a Trump luxury resort in Gaza.

The Tech Republics are no more in fantasy. Elon Musk just got his own private city, called Starbase, in Texas. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has urged the president to make good on his campaign pledge to build 10 so-called “Freedom Cities” on federal land. “Even military bases are in play. Palmer Luckey, founder of the defence firm Anduril, proposed turning Guantanamo Bay into “Liberty City”—a “tropical brain-drain machine that accelerates regime collapse in Havana.” He described it as the “Singapore of the Caribbean.”

These dystopian visions reflect an ideological project called “The Network State,” which seeks to create private, corporate-controlled cities that operate as “start-up nations”—places where democracy, regulations, and taxes won’t apply. Though billed as innovation, it’s really about escape: a billionaire bunker system to opt out of democracy and public accountability. These aren’t just company towns, better described as fascist cities — autocratic playgrounds where the ultra-rich and corporations make all the rules. The core concept was formalised by Balaji Srinivasan in his 2022 book, ‘The Network State: How to Start a New Country’, offering two routes to exiting democracy and entering a future where capital governs, and the public is shut out. He proposed ‘cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, start with the digital community, create a start-up society, organise it into a network union, crowdfund the physical nodes of a network archipelago, and — in the fullness of time— eventually negotiate for diplomatic recognition to become a true network state’.

Srinivasan calls this “Tech Zionism.” This ideology surged into public view on May 15, 2025, when Trump proposed a shocking plan: to effectively ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into something called a “freedom zone.” The Network State’s backers have already created a prototype, called Próspera, officially known as Próspera ZEDE, a privately run “charter city” in Honduras that operates under a separate legal system. Analysts believe that Trump sees a huge personal gain in the Network State that offers him: real estate, unchecked authority, and limitless branding opportunities. He’s already planning to sell off federal land. After calling crypto a scam, he and his family have gone all-in—with two crypto projects raising their estimated net worth by billions in months.

Thiel was one of the first Silicon Valley elites to support Donald Trump when he became a presidential candidate in 2016. Dryden Brown, one of the co-founders of Praxis Nation — the world’s first digital nation aiming to “restore Western Civilisation,” went to Greenland, a week after Donald Trump won re-election in November 2024, with the intention to buy it. Theil and Brown have had designs on Greenland as a home base since 2019, when President Trump first started talking about buying the territory from Denmark. Trump’s renewed tantrums on Greenland may be analysed from the perspective of Silicon Valley elites who helped Donald Trump to get re-elected for the second time.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is a professor of Business Administration who primarily writes on political economy, global trade, and sustainable development