Three New Pieces and a Book Update

Look I'm writing as fast as I can.

I’m nearing the home stretch on my next book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, which Bloomsbury will publish next year. It culminates in the Nov. 5 election, so I am writing a bit toward the news and will be on a sprint through November. The book is part of an ongoing effort to report on the rise of right wing politics in tech over the last 10 years and to reckon with this period of rising authoritarianism and some tech elites’ gleeful embrace of technofascism. I hope I’ll come out the other side with a book that people can enjoy and learn something about the broader, sometimes subterranean forces of money, power, political influence (foreign and domestic), lawfare, and favor-trading that help define the tech industry — and most big industries, for that matter. And there’ll be a great deal in there about the cultural resentments that have driven a new generation of geeks, programmers, and VCs to believe that their highest aspiration should be to build autonomous weapons for the US government’s next forever war.

I’m doing some freelancing again, so here are three pieces recently published, the first of which is an abridged examination of the cultural, political, and economic forces that have driven Silicon Valley’s reactionary turn. The second is about the rise of Polymarket, betting on the news, a short history of prediction markets, and the infiltration of gambling into more facets of life. The third is my rough taxonomy of the X shareholder list, breaking down the VC funds, shell companies, Swiss trusts, nonprofit foundations, family offices, and other obscure financial entities that own a piece of Elon Musk’s beloved everything app.

Thanks for reading. Links below. I’ll have more soon, including more writing on this Substack.

Silicon Valley’s Selfish Embrace of Trump
Driven by personal grievances and a misguided sense of their own exceptionalism, tech titans are swerving right and amplifying reactionary MAGA politics.
The New Republic

From Trump Convictions to Assassination Attempts: How Prediction Markets Have Turned American Politics Into a Casino
Why can’t anything be a prop bet?
Vanity Fair

All That Twitters
A Rough Taxonomy of the X Shareholder List
The Baffler