Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Today, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the tech oligarchs — not their algorithmically-steered platforms—who present the greater danger. Their arsenal combines three deadly implements: plutocratic gravity (fortunes so vast they distort reality’s basic physics), oracular authority (their technological visions treated as inevitable prophecy), and platform sovereignty (ownership of the digital intersections where society’s conversation unfolds). Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), Andreessen’s strategic investments into Substack, Peter Thiel’s courting of Rumble, the conservative YouTube: they’ve colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld. </p><p>We must update our taxonomies to account for this new species of oligarch-intellectuals. If yesterday’s public intellectual resembled a careful archaeologist methodically excavating cultural artifacts for display in rarefied literary journals, today’s model is the demolition expert, wiring entire societal structures with ideological explosives and detonating them from the safe distance of offshore accounts. They don’t write about the future; they install it, beta-testing theories on unwitting populations in history’s largest unreviewed experiment. </p><p>What distinguishes them from previous wealth-encrusted elites isn’t avarice but verbosity—a torrential output that would exhaust even Balzac. Where industrial barons funded think tanks to launder interests into policy papers, our oligarch-intellectuals cut out the middleman. Forget steering the algorithms: oligarch-intellectuals steer the conversation itself – and they do it with philosophical meme-grenades. Dropped at 3 AM on X, they invariably become international headlines by breakfast."</p><p><a href="https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/silicon-valleys-new-legislators/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theideasletter.org/essay/silic</span><span class="invisible">on-valleys-new-legislators/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SiliconValley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SiliconValley</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligarchs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Oligarchs</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OIigarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OIigarchy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BigTech</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Propaganda" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Propaganda</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ideology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ideology</span></a></p>