Is Elon Musk’s “tech-bro Maoism” really something new? Not at all — and it’s always disastrous

During Donald Trump’s first term as president, Steve Bannon provided the administration’s MAGA ideological blueprint. His reactionary brand of “America First” nationalism entailed stoking populist skepticism of technological progress, and centering American interests ahead of what he called the emerging “globalist technocracy.”

In an ironic twist, now the South African-born Silicon Valley tech billionaire Elon Musk — perhaps the purest embodiment of that globalist technocracy — has taken up MAGA’s ideological reins in the second Trump administration. While the MAGA faithful try to square the circles of nationalist-globalism and billionaire-populism, we all struggle to understand Musk’s techno-futuristic ideology, which has been labeled everything from “neo-reactionary” and “techno-fascism” to “techno-libertarianism” and “tech-bro Maoism.” From riding roughshod over laws and institutional checks on its power to radically dismantling fundamental institutions of American politics, it is clear that neo-MAGAism is unlike anything seen previously in American history.

But it has been seen before — just not in America.

Twentieth-century world history is littered with authoritarian, techno-futuristic ideologies that span the ideological spectrum from the Nazi embrace of science, technology and pseudoscience on the extreme right, to the fetishization of industrial and technological progress in Leninism in the Soviet Union and through Mao Zedong Thought in Communist China. 

What might be dubbed “Elon Musk Thought” shares some disturbing similarities with such totalitarian ideologies. It is, in effect, a plan for the rationalization of the American social and political order based on an unwavering faith in modern technology and AI to eliminate inefficiency and waste. 

Despite their differing positions on the left-right spectrum, what these techno-futurist ideologies have in common are their ostensibly well-intentioned attempts to make human societies more “efficient.” Vladimir Lenin fetishized technology, insisting that industrialization and electrification would lead to the idealized future of a truly communist society. In the 1930s, his successor, Joseph Stalin, cited the “inefficiency” of individual farming as justification for the collectivization of millions of peasants into state farms, creating a “terror-famine” in Ukraine. In a crowning irony, even at the expense of 14.5 million lives lost,  fully mechanized Soviet agriculture was no more efficient than the system it replaced. 

In 1958, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” pushed to radically increase “efficiency” in agriculture while modernizing Chinese society, producing the worst famine in human history. Some 40 million lives were sacrificed with no long-term gains in efficiency. Even into the 1980s, sweeping villagization reforms in Tanzania and Ethiopia were zealously undertaken with an ideological goal of modernization and efficiency, leading to similarly bloody consequences.

In what should be an easy tell, in each of these cases “efficiency” was the rallying cry, though the regime’s actions and their results were anything but.

So too with Elon Musk Thought, and his Department of Government Efficiency. As Harvard emeritus professor Steven Kelman points out, it is clear that Musk has “little interest in conventional ideas of efficiency, which involve getting better organizational performance without spending more money.” Instead, the term “efficiency” is an all-purpose explanation for eliminating any program with no direct value to an imposed ideological agenda. Even as a fig leaf, it is surprisingly persuasive: who could argue against “efficiency,” that core value of free-market capitalism?

Newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon recently announced the gutting of her own department to promote “efficiency.” While noting that there are inherent dysfunctions in our education system, even nonpartisan education groups have responded that “Dismantling the Department of Education or shifting focus to privatization alone will not solve the deep-seated inefficiencies and lack of responsiveness to student and family needs.” Productive, nuanced and intelligent policy reform, they say, will produce more efficient outcomes than “division and bomb-throwing.”

While McMahon and other MAGA Republicans are happy to keep up the “efficiency” charade, others have begun to lower the mask. “You know none of this is about saving money, right?” one Republican source familiar with Musk’s behind-the-scenes push to dismantle state institutions recently told Wired.

But more important than whether DOGE’s cuts are actually efficient, is the belief that they are. As Yale political anthropologist James C. Scott suggested, techno-futurist ideology “must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term ‘ideology’ implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology.” So the fixation on, say, the infallibility of Tesla’s self-driving cars or the ability of AI to replace tens of thousands of federal jobs stems not from the technological advancements per se, but rather reflectrs a blind, quasi-religious human faith in them.

So where did this new techno-futurism come from? Some trace Elon Musk Thought to Silicon Valley’s obsession with the superiority of market-based technological solutions to everything, including the messy “inefficiencies” of the democratic process itself. This proto-ideology gathered steam in the 2010s, as tech leaders including Musk and Peter Theil turned their massive wealth into political power by bankrolling individuals and platforms promoting technological over democratic solutions.

A hallmark of all techno-futurist ideologies is that they rigidly position themselves as working toward utopia: a shining path to the “end of history.” For fascists, that was a thousand-year reich based on Aryan supremacy. For communists, it was the state “withering away” so no one could be exploited by another. Elon Musk laid out his utopian goal at a tech conference last year, envisioning a future of hyper-efficiency in which “AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want,” providing “universal high income” and rendering all human jobs obsolete. 

Such utopian — and even messianic — ideologies typically contain a “pseudoreligious quality” that elicit an unwavering passion among their followers, even a cult of personality. Unquestioning fealty often excuses autocratic leaders from frivolities such as laws, constitutional constraints or any checks on their power, since the leader is perceived not to be working for his own gain, but for the coming of the shining future. The ends justify the means. Or as Trump recently proclaimed: “he who saves his Country does not violate any law.”

While utopian techno-futurist ideologies are nothing new, why do they repeatedly end in disaster? Here, Scott draws from — of all things — forestry management. Donald Trump’s fixation on well-ordered forests as an antidote to wildfires seems like a weird obsession, but it is rooted in the same high-modernist thought.

In 18th-century Europe, scientific forestry replaced the disorder of natural forests with a monoculture of trees planted in neat, regimented rows, allowing for easy clearing of the forest floor, and greater efficiency and profitability in logging. Its initial successes, however, gradually turned to disaster.

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“A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases,” Scott explained. “An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora — which were, and still are, not entirely understood — was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.”

The lesson — which applies in everything from forestry and urban planning to radically remaking government — is that monocultures that appear more efficient are actually far more fragile, more vulnerable and weaker than polycultures. Diversity is strength and resilience. Trump and Musk’s all-out assault on “diversity, equality and inclusion” in government and education are borne of the same regimented, authoritarian monoculture that ultimately weakens a robust multicultural society.

Like forests, human societies are complex ecosystems of diverse peoples, backgrounds, experiences and opinions. What Elon Musk Thought has in common with earlier techno-futurist disasters is the attempt to shoehorn that messiness and complexity into a more “efficient” monoculture to achieve his utopian vision. But as the regime is learning with DOGE’s firing and then rehiring air-traffic controllers, nuclear safety technicians, physicians and cyber-security experts, not even AI can take the place of localized expert knowledge and human improvisation in the face of unpredictable situations.

Elon Musk Thought is a dangerous new techno-futurist ideology, which uses the language of “efficiency” to mask an authoritarian attempt to remake human societies that is ultimately doomed to failure. Or, as original MAGA doyen Steve Bannon recently said “They’re all technofeudalists, they don’t give a flying f**k about the human being. And they have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.”