When TechBro billionaire oligarchs were the darlings of "liberal" capitalist society, their homages to sci-fi literature were considered "quirky." Today, on the verge of what some call a "techno-feudalist" dictatorship in America, paid for by many of those same TechBro billionaires, a recent opinion piece in The Guardian raises an important question; was society ignoring the warning signs that these rich megalomaniacs took the wrong lessons from the stories we all grew up loving?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/14/the-big-idea-will-sci-fi-end-up-destroying-the-world
The Big Idea: Will Sci-Fi End Up Destroying the World?
"We can see this most clearly in the way the dystopian settings of so much cyberpunk fiction are seen by today’s tech leaders as prophetic visions of a world they need to try to escape – whether by colonising Mars, building metaverses or, in the case of Vance’s billionaire patron Peter Thiel, backing efforts to create new city states by buying land in developing countries. In the original novels it tended to be people like them responsible for creating the dystopias in the first place, but they’ve somehow projected the blame on to the masses.
In Snow Crash there’s something called “the Raft” – a collection of boats filled with infected, mind-controlled refugees headed for America’s west coast. It’s an image that recalls the viciously racist 1973 French sci-fi novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, in which a huge fleet of Indian refugees destroy western civilisation. It’s had a far-right fandom ever since and has been referenced by former Donald Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon. It’s a particular favourite of Stephen Miller, Trump’s lead policy adviser and close friend of Musk (Miller’s wife, Katie, is the Doge spokeswoman).
It’s not much of a jump to see the actions of Thiel and Musk, and many of those around them, as an attempt to forestall this fate, linking, as they do, the racial obsessions of the far right with their odd brand of tech-utopianism. When Thiel writes that “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible”, or when Musk makes up wild stories about the Democrats using benefit fraud to import migrants, they are unabashedly expressing this fear of being overrun. The greatest irony of all is that in their desperation to build escape routes, they risk creating the very dystopias they fear."
To answer our question above, yes society did ignore the warning signs that these TechBro billionaires were reactionary freaks with terrible ideas and increasingly, enough money power to try and make those ideas a reality; but not necessarily for the reasons the author implies in this article. I think at this point it's pretty uncontroversial to say that guys like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and even Jeff Bezos are deeply unserious thinkers whose wealth allows them to surround themselves with actual scientists, engineers, and inventors who can turn their pulp fiction fantasies into reality; so it's not really a surprise that these rich dilettante get their ideas from mass market sci-fi novels. What I think is far more instructional however, is to look at *which* science fiction ideas these folks gravitate towards; specifically the hyper-capitalist, racist, fascist, and authoritarian ideas commonly found in the sci-fi novels they grew up with.
I'm not a psychic of course, but I don't think it's an accident that billionaire TechBros who buy whole governments and seem intent on installing a technologically-enhanced form of fascism in America, gravitate towards stories and ideas about power, superiority, and the apocalypse that many critics have rightfully described as fascist in nature; nor do I think its a coincidence that these would-be "Masters of the Universe" have that in common with fascist propagandists like Curtis Yarvin, or even the Trump regime that Musk has bought outright control of. When you factor in that almost all of these same people are also interested in things like eugenics, neo-fascist corporate dictatorships, and racialized birth rates on a global scale, it becomes pretty clear that the origin story here is about powerful people looking for ideas that support their reactionary, supremacist, authoritarian beliefs; not a fascination with literary fiction.
In the end, I think that's the handle many people are missing when they're trying to understand the so-called "Dark Enlightenment." These folks don't believe in fascist ideology because they think they're right; these rich bastards are folks who have been presented with the problem of how to maintain their wealth and power on a boiling planet, even as the capitalism that grants them everything is going to kill billions, and fascist ideas are the only way they can square that circle, so they're always on the lookout for more of them. Sci-Fi stories aren't going to destroy the world; but the fascism that was so easily hidden inside many of them just might.
