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.