I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM. In the nineteen nineties, a small group of men in Silicon Valley imagined a world without governments or rules, a world run by code. They called themselves the cipher Punks, and they believe technology could replace politics entirely. Those ideas didn't stay online. They shaped the culture of the tech industry, which in turn has shaped Western civilization itself, and the billionaires behind it all are now trying to make democracy
in their image. Today writer and contributed to the monthly Almo Keep on how Silicon Valley's most dangerous philosophy escaped the Internet and entered the real world. It's Saturday, January. Three millions of Americans on a personal computer.
If you're one of them, you can now glimpse the future.
With nothing more than.
A modem, a phone line and a few dollars, everybody can have their own homepage. Companies are there the latest information. It's wild, what's going on. It sounds pretty grand, but it all comes down to computers communicating, and in fact, that's already happening on something called the Internet that anyone now.
I take us back to the nineties, to this strange corner of the Internet called cipher punks. Who were they and what did they actually believe they were building?
Well, if we go all the way back, it's a really quite obscure bunch of people who just had a private mailing list, and this was confined to a small number of Bay Area software engineers and mathematicians pretty much exclusively dudes in the early nineties.
Encryption particularly is what they were very very.
Passionate about and treating it as essentially like the human rights to privacy from the government being able to see what we're doing. It was a very libertarian bent to their ways of thinking, which is the government can stay completely out of every aspect of our lives.
And then they.
Discussed a lot of what became very influential ideas.
Connected to encryption.
So being able to write programs that would stop your telecommunications company from being able to intercept your email and read it. If there was pretty good encryption that no
one could crack them, that was good enough. So this was like a really big thing for people to be able to feel secure online with our information being privately held, which is where the irony of when we come to today, where we have like willingly brought into this surveillance culture that has been built around us by like the descendants of those people who've been working over the last twenty
years in Silicon Valley. Their nightmare would have been that you could see what they're doing all the time.
What kind of people were drawn to these communities and how did their politics shape early Internet culture?
You know, kind of on the fringes.
They were no doubt extremely intelligent, Like these are people with like you know, PhDs in maths and physics, and they are in those ways incredibly intelligent, but also bred this real contempt of an outsider mentality where they sort of self reinforce this idea that they are so much smarter than everybody else.
Everybody else is so behind on this.
If you don't do what we say, all of your rights will be taken away from you. Everybody is a sheep who's blind to what's going on. So it attracted people who were on the fringes of society who wanted to live there. They wanted to be there, they didn't
want to be a part of mainstream society. So there was always a very strong and shared outside of mentality, and you know, you had to be invited into the group, and the meetups where people met in real life were like quite secretive about where they were going to be held, and it was quite a coveted space to be admitted into because you know, you had to provide mathematical proofs, you had to share your work, you had to be assessed by your peers as you know, brilliant enough to
be part of it. So it attracted a certain kind of person who did not care for social norms really of any kind.
Tell me about the way they viewed the very idea of government.
So this is the main obsession of engineering thinking. It's like, the only way for something to be valuable is for it to be efficient. That is how you program, That is how code works. Does this efficiently execute this command?
When I build this branch?
Is that the most mathematically sound all of those things, those are rules based systems that.
Either are right or wrong.
And if you then try and transpose that idea onto society, you will slowly come to realize why we had developed the enormous number of rules that we have. It's a not pro personally loved living in a world of complexity. It's because the world is complex, because we're complex, and
there's so many of us. But libertarianism again and again, it's like, if we just can start our own society where all the government does is make sure that no one can kill anybody or steal anybody's stuff, those are the only two rules, then everything else will just fall into place because no one will be scared of those things happening to them, and so everything else will just figure it out ourselves. In some ways, it's this kind of utopian idea, but it's also incredibly naive.
And at what point do their early ideas around the dream of total privacy of perfect efficiency start to become the DNA of the tech industry as we know it today.
So when social networks first emerged, you know, a social network is what we came to call it, but that's something that was revolving around software would end up involving billions of people just as an everyday part of life that everybody became just completely normalized too. I think that that's when it went to another level of those corporations becoming so valuable to investors. The bigger they got, the more government wanted to regulate them, the more influence they.
Wanted to have.
So you know, you saw Facebook buying up media companies like the tech industry moving into trying to take over the media purely is about being able to influence policy decision making that isn't going to impede their efficiency, isn't going to impede their continued growth, even if they are like trampling on all of our privacy rights and consumer rights on the way to doing that.
Coming up how Silicon Valley's obsession with efficiency became a weapon against democracy, You draw a line from the Cipher punks to figures like Julian Osange, Peter Thiel, and eventually Elon Musk. What connects them all?
I think that you know, WikiLeaks would be probably a bit a ghast to think that they share DNA with Elon Musk, but they do because their project is the same, like these beliefs are we need to topple existing structures because these existing structures just don't work.
Look at it all, look at how much.
War is going on, look at all of this political corruption, and then the Emo muskway of looking at the world, it's like, well, you could just be saving so much more money if you didn't have all these public servants, which is a whole different way of having a dismantling of government, but it's also the belief that the way that things are being done is not working.
The Trump administration has tapped Palenteer, the data mining company founded by the billionaire tech investor Peter Tiel, to compile data on people in the United States for a master database, including a new thirty million dollar contract with Ice to provide near real time visibility into migrant movements.
As it sees.
Peter til then is even beyond the right where he very infamously has said that he doesn't believe that democracy is compatible with capitalism, capitalism being the thing we need to preserve, not democracy. So he is such a hypercapitalist that he doesn't see any problem with essentially a fascist regime controlling people because they can't be trusted to make democratic decisions in their own best interests.
There is a lot in this runaway science technology that's pushing us towards something like armageddon. And then there is the natural pushback on this is we will avoid armageddon by having a one world stage.
And Peter Tiel has led directly into this more recently, which is it's actually a religious belief more than it is a political project. It's like he is going and delivering lectures about the Antichrist is coming.
The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about armageddon NonStop, you talk about existential risk NonStop, and this is what you need to regulate.
The Antichrist is going to be this person who stands in the way of technological adoption that will accelerate us past this present that we've been stagnated, according to him for decades.
So these are ideas.
When Masque launched his Department of Government Efficiency, we saw a real world experiment in technolo libertarian politics. What did it look like?
Oh, it just went great, didn't it. Would you do doge again? Knowing what you know now?
I mean no, I don't think so. I mean the thing is, I think instead of doing doorge, I would have basically worked in my companies essentially, so and the cars they wouldn't have been burning the cars.
This is again where this idea of efficiency is the only measure by which something is of value to society. There's a very well known phenomenon called engineer's disease, which is when people who work in these fields where they are phenomenally good at solving equations, they're phenomenally good at writing software. They've become convinced that they will therefore be phenomenally good at reorganizing society, or phenomenally good at how we should govern ourselves?
Or how hard can it be to write a novel?
I will just feed every novel every written into a machine and it will spit out the most statistically perfect novel. Or why do I need to pay an artist to draw cartoons when, like what just happened, Disney is giving a billion dollars to open AI, to let open AI
train everything on every Disney movie ever made. So we're going to start seeing films, animated films that are made completely untouched by people because this mindset is well, I don't understand why you'd pay thousands of people when you could just get the program.
To do it.
That's the only way that this mindset can calculate if something is valuable or not. And if something isn't valuable in monetary terms, then it has no other value either.
And finally, mate, how do you think this type of politics plays in Australia?
Man?
Are we set to see this type of nihilism brought here into our politics.
I think absolutely not. Thankfully, I don't think that any of this flies in Australia. We have lived for since, you know, federation of the colonial state. In Australia, we have had essentially an egalitarian society where we have a strong social safety in it.
And yes, these ideas at the global.
Level have chipped away at that over the last two decades, but it still is something that is held dear to Australian society, the idea that you deserve to be able to be looked after if you fall into hardship.
The responsibility of society is to try and not let that happen. But when it does, and it does.
For that to not completely destroy you, that you have gotten cancer, like the number of people in America who survive a cancer diagnosis only to be bankrupted, even though inequality in this country is growing as badly as it is anywhere else.
But also someone who lived for eight years in the.
United States and coming back to Australia seeing stark difference between how much people don't let other people fall into society's cracks in quite the same way, I can't see those ideas taking hold here. And when Peter Dutton tried when he was you know, Tiamot Trump, and I can't whoever came up with that.
I just Amory Makis, who are friend of the show.
So perfect exactly like trying to do that just didn't work here because our culture is not their culture, thankfully, and I think that that's something that we absolutely should preserve. America is a crazy experiment that sometimes turns wonderful things out and other times just destroys people. And I don't think it is an experiment that we need to see replicated.
Well, it's a fascinating READOLM. Thanks for taking the hit and running it for us, and thank you for coming on seven am.
Oh it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for asking me.
You can read my keep's essay Barbarians inside the Gate at the monthly dot com that are you or in the summer edition of the magazine. Before we go, we have some big news and I'm joined by my co host Ruby Jones to tell me all about it.
Hey Ruby, Hey Daniel, thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure. So do you want to share your news with us?
So I am about to take some time off from seven am just a few months because I'm going over to the ABC to Four Corners to report out a story for them, and I'm pretty excited.
Well, we're excited for you because that is thrilling news. We know that you love long form reporting and having the time to sink yourself into a story. What can you tell us about your plans?
So I'm leaving the show now. Things are already underway at Four Corners. I'm getting pretty deep into it, actually, and I'll be back in March when I'll be able to tell you about everything that I've been working on and share some of the investigative leads that I've hopefully uncovered by them.
And in the meantime, I'll be sharing hosting duties and we'll have more to announce about that soon. But to celebrate Ruby, we decided that next week we're going to bring you some of the most interesting episodes Ruby made over the past year, so you can get a big dose of her before she leaves for Four Corners duties. We'll be back on January twelfth with regular programming, new original episodes covering all the bigger stories Ruby, good luck.
Thank you so much.
I'll let you know how it goes, and we'll be back next week with fresh episodes, see you then,