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American Prestige

Bonus - AI and Silicon Valley Reactionaries w/ Becca Lewis (Preview)

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

News, History, Politics

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe now for the full episode. Danny and Derek welcome back to the show Becca Lewis, researcher of right-wing politics in Silicon Valley and online, to talk about the politics of artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley. They discuss AI as a marketing term, large language models, automation and white-collar labor, Silicon Valley’s relationship to the military, Palantir and Peter Thiel, AI targeting, Gaza and apartheid technologies, tech elites’ right-wing politics, the AI bubble, and left organizing among tech workers. Don't forget to check out our miniseries Marx Prestige. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to American Prestige.

0:03.2

To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at AmericanPestigepod.com.

0:08.3

Find the link in our show notes.

0:13.2

So, Becca, I was curious, what's the Silicon Valley ideology?

0:17.6

This is obviously something that's been written about from a lot of different perspectives. I don't think as you gestured toward earlier, it's not easily identifiable as

0:26.9

libertarian or anything like that. But is there an ideology of the valley? I mean,

0:34.8

you could probably write books about how it's changed over time, but how would you

0:37.9

characterize it today?

0:39.7

Yeah, this is like getting into the meat of my book project, actually, so I could talk about

0:45.1

this for hours.

0:45.7

But for years and years and years, the prevailing idea is that the main ideology in Silicon Valley is this thing called the Californian ideology.

0:58.1

And this was, the California ideology was an idea that was, you know, dubbed in a newsletter

1:06.3

article by two British Marxist scholars, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron.

1:12.5

And they called it a mix of left-wing counterculturalism with right-wing libertarianism.

1:21.2

And so for years and years, people said that's what the Silicon Valley ideology is.

1:25.9

Is this blend of like countercultural

1:27.7

aesthetics with libertarian economics. And a lot of what I've been working on is trying to

1:37.0

challenge the idea that that was always the prevailing set of ideas. I mean, you have a long

1:43.3

standing right-wing presence in Silicon Valley from the beginning

1:47.5

and people who explicitly believed that new technologies were a way of kind of restoring an older

1:54.4

social order, whether it be kind of maintaining, you know, patriarchal power within the family and the workforce,

2:04.8

whether it be kind of maintaining older racial power dynamics, whether it be about kind of, you

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