An influential Silicon Valley publication runs a cover story lamenting the “pussification” of tech. A major tech CEO lambasts a Black civil rights leader’s calls for diversifying the tech workforce. Technologists rage against the “PC police”.
No, this isn’t Silicon Valley in the age of Maga. It’s the tech industry of the 1990s, when observers first raised concerns about the rightwing bend of Silicon Valley and the potential for “technofascism”. Despite the industry’s (often undeserved) reputation for liberalism, its reactionary foundations were baked in almost from the beginning. As Silicon Valley enters a second Trump administration, the gendered roots of its original reactionary movement offer insight into today’s rightward turn.
At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote the longtime technology journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s”.
Their voices were largely drowned out by the techno-enthusiasts of the time, but Malone and Borsook were pointing to a vision of Silicon Valley built around a reverence for unlimited male power – and a major pushback when that power was challenged. At the root of this reactionary thinking was a writer and public intellectual named George Gilder. Gilder was one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal evangelists, as well as a popular “futurist” who forecasted coming technological trends. In 1996, he started an investment newsletter that became so popular that it generated rushes on stocks from his readers, in a process that became known as the “Gilder effect”.
Gilder was also a longtime social conservative who brought his politics to Silicon Valley. He had first made his name in the 1970s as an anti-feminist provocateur and a mentee of the conservative stalwart William F Buckley. At a time when women were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, he wrote books that argued that traditional gender roles needed to be restored, and he blamed social issues such as poverty on the breakdown of the nuclear family. (He also blamed federal welfare programs, especially those that funded single mothers, claiming they turned men into “cuckolds of the state”). In 1974, the National Organization for Women named him “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year”; Gilder wore it as a badge of pride.
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As Gilder became swept up in his own ideas about entrepreneurship, he turned his attention to Silicon Valley. The bourgeoning hi-tech industry, he began claiming, was the purest expression of entrepreneurship in the world. It’s not surprising that Gilder would be drawn to the tech industry in Santa Clara county, California. The state had its own powerful mythologies of masculinity and power. It was the end of the vast frontier, the end of manifest destiny. And it was the place of the former gold rush, where (white) men had struck it rich in the 19th century. It was also, counterintuitively, the birthplace of much of the modern conservative movement, including Reagan’s political career.
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This rising “technofascism”, as critics of the time had called it, was temporarily staved off by the dotcom stock market crash of 2000. George Gilder’s reputation was badly damaged after he failed to predict the crash. And much of the hype around digital tech was temporarily tempered after hundreds of startups went bust. But a younger generation of aspiring tech hopefuls had already come to the valley, seeking fame, riches, and power. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others had absorbed the lessons of the 90s. At the start of the new millennium, they were ready to put their stamp on the future, guided by reactionary dreams of the past.
The Silicon Valley titans of 2025 are following the same blueprint. In January, Meta said it was ending its DEI programs and changing its platform policies to allow more discriminatory and harassing posts. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg made his motivations clear: he claimed that corporate culture had moved away from “masculine energy” and needed to reinstate it after getting “neutered”. Elon Musk has reshaped Twitter into X, a platform in large part operating as a response to claims of a “woke mind virus”– the newest iteration of “political correctness”. And Marc Andreessen himself, the “boy genius” of the 1990s, has increasingly drawn inspiration from the Italian futurists, a movement of fascist artists in the early 20th century who glorified technology while seeking to “demolish” feminism.
But the history of the valley suggests this isn’t a blip or an anomaly. It’s a crescendo of forces central to the tech industry, and the current wave of rightwing tech titans are building on Silicon Valley’s foundations.