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.