Profit über Alles: Tech Oligarchs Revive the Spirit of Fascist Capitalism

Tech’s New Lords Take Lessons from the Old Collaborators.

There’s a certain type of rich man, the kind who thinks he’s discovered the secret geometry of history, who always ends up sniffing around the throne of some ranting strongman. It’s an error of judgment, but the error is a dangerous one, a gleaming, hubristic folly worthy of Icarus or Faust. The air is thin up here, in the penthouse suites, and it probably does something to the brain. It fosters a peculiar fantasy: that the raw, snarling id of the masses can be piped, refined, and repackaged as a manageable asset. That the beast can be ridden.

In the 1930s, it was the Krupps and their steel-plated cousins, those grim pre-WW2 industrial barons with faces like corroded machine parts, sidling up to Hitler with suitcases full of Reichsmarks and promises of endless ball bearings for the Reich’s war toys. They preferred the stiff collars of the old conservatives, but the conservatives, like today's, were spinless and weak. And here was this furious little pamphlet-peddler, this corporal with…