There is a certain disorienting thrill in witnessing, over the past few years, the profusion of bold, often baffling, occasionally horrifying ideas pouring from the ranks of America’s tech elite.

Consider the heresies of Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, who, in celebrating the “network state” and seasteading have hatched an escape doctrine for digital aristocrats. Where Srinivasan conjures blockchain fiefdoms with à la carte citizenship and pay-per-view police forces, Thiel pines for oceanic platforms where the wealthy might float beyond government reach, their libertarian fantasies bobbing like luxury yachts in international waters.

Elsewhere, Silicon Valley’s solutionist overdose has inflated an ideas bubble that rivals its financial ones—a frothy marketplace where grand narratives appreciate faster than stock options. Thus, Sam Altman casually drafts planetary blueprints for AI (non-)regulation and even AI welfare (“capitalism for everyone!”), while crypto acolytes (Marc Andreessen, David Sacks), aspiring celestial colonizers (Musk, Bezos), and nuclear revivalists (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Altman) offer their own grandiose, exciting solutions to problems of seemingly unknown origin. (Who’s guzzling up all this energy we suddenly need so badly? A true mystery, this.)

But more mundane subjects, from foreign policy to defense, increasingly preoccupy them too. Eric Schmidt—a man whose personality could be mistaken for a blank Google Doc—has not only penned two books with Henry Kissinger but also regularly contributes to Foreign Affairs and other such factories of doom and dogma. And he is after big, meaty subjects, the kind that demand somber nods at think-tank luncheons. “Ukraine is losing the drone war” proclaims a piece of his from January 2024. Could this be – a pure coincidence, surely – the same Eric Schmidt, who, just months earlier, launched a drone company?

Now that the tech elites have joined the party, speculation on the future of warfare, once the cloistered domain of “defense intellectuals” mumbling into their tweed at RAND Corporation, plays as prime-time entertainment. Palantir’s Alex Karp and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey—combined net worth north of $11 billion—pose as scrappy Davids battling the spendthrift Goliaths of the Pentagon. Inevitably, Elon Musk, techno-capitalism’s own Zelig, also has strong opinions on the subject: in destroy-infrastructure-first wars of the future, he opined in a recent Westpoint appearance, “any ground based communications like fiber optic cables and cell phone towers will be destroyed.” If only someone ran an internet satellite company to save us!

Michel Foucault’s “specific intellectuals,” who earned their authority through specialized technical mastery, appear quaint next to someone like Palmer Luckey, the VR wunderkind turned defense contractor. Having swapped the tweed jacket for flip flops, cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, he struts through interviews announcing himself “a propagandist” willing to “twist the truth.” In this reordered pantheon, the sober analyst of the Cold War era yields to a new archetype: spectacularly wealthy, celebrity-conscious, and ideologically shameless.