And that feels ultimately like what these billboards-like the faceless eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg a hundred years before—are telling us about America's new Gilded Age: so much of our public discourse, so many of our vaunted institutions, so much of our collective attention, care, and heartbreak are sacrificed to the superrich conning one another. We can't understand what tech calls governing without the simple truth that it doesn't ultimately seem interested in governing us. What Silicon Valley calls governing is detached from and disinterested in human nature and normal life, even when it comes to normal life with technology and the internet. It is fixated on privilege and hierarchies for their own sake. And whatever intellectual ambition it possesses is easily seduced by ideologies that support these privileges and hierarchies.

The money of John Arrillaga Sr., whose name is immortalized in the names of these buildings, is also Silicon Valley money. However, Arrillaga didn't found any start-ups, though he sometimes accepted their shares as rent. Instead, together with Richard Peery, another real estate developer, Arrillaga began in the 196os to buy up gigantic parcels of former farmland in San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale and throw up dozens of anonymous office Parks-often without firm commitments or potential tenants. As the orchards and abandoned navy sites increasingly gave way to semiconductor factories and software companies, Arrillaga became enormously wealthy.

Together, these two incubators-the university and the research parks next door-have launched multiple generations of entrepreneurs. Surprisingly often, those generations have been understood as, and indeed presented themselves as, nouveau riche. In some cases, they were indeed that, biographically speaking. But the money that so reliably found its way to funding their sometimes bold, sometimes quixotic, sometimes fraudulent endeavors was old.

Today it comes from Saudi princes and Japanese banks. It comes from family offices that manage the real estate wealth or stock portfolios of American dynasties? It comes from the endowments of universities established by America's kleptocrats. It comes from the "friends and family" of founders, from whom every start-up raises its first round of funding. Which means that far from opening up wealth to new entrants, the funding system actually highlights the opposite development: in the United States in general, and at institutions like Stanford in particular, the wealthy are increasingly keeping to themselves. And they manage to create wealth precisely by virtue of that fact. Silicon Valley is where chthonic cash is given the veneer of eternal youth.

Silicon Valley dominates by converting power into other forms of power and by obscuring the obvious continuities between these forms. What neither Moore's law nor blitzscaling truly possess is a theory of dominance: How does dominance arise, and how does its mechanism manifest itself in reality? Kurzweil's singularity, the merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence, requires no coercion. It just happens somehow, at some point in the future. In truth, the leaders of Silicon Valley, like perhaps every nerd, did have such a theory. It was a theory of what they lacked, what they felt they were owed. As a result, it wasn't a particularly realistic one, but rather one based on science fiction and comic books. The CEOs embroidered it with their own moralism, combining power fantasies of the Muad Dib from Dune or Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series with another equally potent fictional narrative.

That narrative was Reaganism. The religious scholar Adam Kotsko has emphasized the theological aspects of neoliberal politics, pointing out that, for all its ostentatious appeals to rationality, the rhetoric of rationalization is not without its "demons. Reagan's demons were students, "welfare queens," drug addicts, and people with AIDS. Reaganism's others tended to be characterized by two things: On the one hand, the moral calculus of the 198os emphasized self-control; it was terrified of permeability, loss, and waste. On the other hand, it depended on a preestablished harmony between what the individual deserved and what they received. It was animated by a concern that someone somewhere was getting something they were not entitled to, or that someone somewhere was not getting what they were by rights entitled to, which presupposes a set of hierarchies that are understood as natural but never explicitly named. Consider that in Reagan's language games, "taxpayers" never meant everyone who pays taxes, "citizens" never meant everyone who held a passport, and even "the people" seemed to exclude certain individuals who very much looked like people. In this view of the world, moral categories and hierarchies were (and in fact still are) simultaneously assumed and concealed. This mode of explaining the world has lived on in the way our tech overlords pitch their wares. In Silicon Valley's pitches, "everyone" has meaning only because it does not mean everyone.

As the economist Tom Nicholas has pointed out, the American institution of venture capital (VC) emerged out of the attempt to ensure the persistence of capital amid economic windfalls connected to easily depleted natural resources, a monetary message in a bottle passed from one boom to the next. In an economy geared toward the rapid exploitation of immense natural re-sources, VC was the way in which quickly earned money could be transformed into capital for the next boom. The great whaling families of New England secured themselves against the inevitable depletion of whale stocks with venture funds. And the railroad entrepreneurs, who had extracted enormous sums from the state, pooled their money to reinvest it for the moment when those subsidies inevitably dried up.

Today, venture capitalists are the central drivers in what tech calls governing. They are an integral part of the ecosystem, but a part that reaches both backward and forward, into a time before Silicon Valley and a time after it. The money they invest is of dynastic, sometimes even feudal, origin. The arrangement of this money with pluralism, with free competition, with liberal democracy is entirely provisional. This is something that those who manage it seem to sense acutely. Among the CEOs of the large technology companies along the San Francisco Bay, those openly sympathetic to the Trump regime are still in the minority. Among the venture capitalists, however, especially those you hear from in media, many are right-leaning.

In 2020, the investor Paul Graham wrote an essay titled "How to Think for Yourself." One lesson: "If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to [sic], and to think of more." At the end of the essay, Graham thanks the broad panel of independent thinkers with whom he has surrounded himself: Six of the seven are men between forty and fifty-five years old. Five of the seven work at Y Combinator, a business incubator in San Francisco cofounded by none other than Paul Graham. One is the CEO of the payment service Stripe. The seventh is Peter Thiel.

A myopic perspective on the world has long characterized the tech industry, but success has amplified it. Age and wealth often inhibit contact with people whose lives and careers have unfolded in fundamentally different ways. When great fortune befalls an individual, they might ask themselves some lonely nights: "Do I really deserve all this?" But when a group collectively rushes from success to success, when truly extraordinary success has become the norm by the age of twenty-five, thirty, or thirty-five, and you are forced to then age alongside one another for decades, each constantly aware that your peak lies ever further in the past, then it helps when fellow travelers constantly reassure you that you are still relevant, that the gnawing feeling of irrelevance is, in truth, the fault of others. A concept like "vibes" allows them to understand their aging process, and the alienation that inevitably accompanies it, as identical to the course of the world.

This doesn't mean it's wrong to warn people about Palantir. But our warning shouldn't focus on what the company's tech can do. Our warning should co-cern the fact that that tech is deployed at all. It simply doesn't matter whether Palantir's newtangled systems are more scarily omniscient than the old ones.

If the people to whom this technology is applied include undocumented immigrants in the US or Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, then it is almost immaterial whether the algorithm picks out the "right" people. Those in power have already decided that there are essentially no "wrong" targets in these groups. Palantir is necropolitics, pure and simple. The data sets are merely window dressing. It's not the fact that the data miner might miscategorize someone that makes an individual a victim of Palantir, but rather the fact that Palantir is categorizing them at all.

Certainly, this ready identification with villains, often totalitarian villains, is already plenty creepy by itself-and also explains the large personal and ideological overlap with an administration dominated by online Nazis, who often like to draw inspiration from cinematic heavies. But there is also a fundamental poverty at the heart of an ideology that gets excited about fictional dystopias, villains, and totalitarianism. Not because those are evil, but because they're usually so thinly drawn. The fact that we always see these cinematic villains dominating, but rarely governing, likely strengthens their suitability as a source of inspiration rather than weaken it. We are fairly well informed about Galactic Empire's supply of fully operational battle stations in Star Wars. We know less about how the Empire handles wage negotiations or pensions.

But identification with dystopia is only one aspect of this now well-established language game among tech companies. The other is disidentification with power. One is a witness to one's own power rather than wielding it. One experiences power as an aesthetic effect in two senses—it doesn't feel entirely real, even when it is deadly real to those upon whom it is exercised. And it is, like sensation in Kant's transcendental aesthetic, something that is given rather than made in its precise parameters. Power is something that happens to the powerful.

Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts tounded a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, from which over time several other microchip companies spun off. Among the "Fairchildren" were Intel and AMD, but so were venture companies like Kleiner Perkins. Like the "PayPal Mafia" of the late 1990s, the "traitorous eight" were fairly homogeneous in their backgrounds, their age profiles, and their management styles. And they were the grandfathers of today's Silicon Valley. The VCs who funded their endeavors were very similar people: investor and inventor spoke the same language, specifically because they shared the same generational experience.

When compared to the "traitorous eight" or even the PayPal Mafia, the generation of founders and their backers that have dominated headlines and the contemporary image of Silicon Valley appears a bit more diffuse. Still, the age cohort remains a clearly identifiable phenomenon in the Valley, in particular since so many cofounders met in college. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the same age; Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who met at Stanford, were both born in 1973. Mark Zuckerberg and the entire original inner circle of Facebook were the same age, which is the same age as Instagram's founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It's not really true, as is sometimes said, that through tech our world is dominated by solitary geniuses. It is dominated by cliques of people who are more or less the same age.