Peter Thiel LARPs as the gay Antichrist while building a surveillance state. Sam Altman says AI will take everyone's jobs, the worst PR strategy in American history. Elon launches an AI porn bot, guts federal agencies on live television, and fathers test tube babies with various women while championing the family unit. These are the most powerful people in the country and they have the political instincts of a freshman student council candidate who just discovered Nietzsche.
The technocrats are the rising political elite in America. This much is obvious. What's less obvious, and far more consequential, is that they are the most socially inept ruling class in history.
The Value of Patronage
Every durable ruling class in history understood something the technocrats don't: economic power is not political power. Economic power has to be laundered into political power through the accumulation of social capital. The mechanism for this has always been patronage.
The old financier class understood this instinctively. After making a few billion dollars you bought some hospitals. You donated to the boys and girls clubs. You sponsored food drives, attended the opera, endowed university chairs, and created a foundation. None of this was charity. It was how you converted money, which people resent, into goodwill, which people respect. Carnegie built 2,500 libraries not because he loved reading but because he understood that a man who gives a town its library becomes untouchable in that town.
Military elites understood this for different reasons. The rank and file of any military represents such a broad cross-section of the populace that military leaders develop social fluency almost by necessity. You can't command men from every walk of life without learning to speak to men from every walk of life. When military figures entered politics, Eisenhower, Washington, Caesar, they carried with them an intuitive understanding of the common citizen that most elites never develop.
Religious institutions understood this perhaps best of all. The Catholic Church didn't dominate European politics for a millennium through theology alone. It ran the hospitals, the orphanages, the schools. It fed the poor. It married you, baptized your children, and buried your dead. The Church embedded itself so deeply into the social fabric that challenging its political authority meant challenging the infrastructure of daily life.
The pattern is consistent across centuries: accumulate economic or institutional power, then convert that power into social capital through visible, tangible contributions to the lives of ordinary people. Every ruling class that skipped this step, or did it poorly, faced a legitimacy crisis. The French aristocracy learned this the hard way. So did the Russian tsars. You don't have to end up at the guillotine, but you do pay a price.
The technocrats are skipping this step entirely.
Why the Technocrats Are So Bad at This
Take San Francisco. Home of the most powerful companies in the history of the world. Apple, Google, Meta, Salesforce, the combined market cap within a fifty-mile radius measured in tens of trillions. And yet these companies can't keep human shit off the streets of their own city. They get bullied by the district council. Can you imagine Jamie Dimon taking orders from the New York neighborhood watch? Of course not. The financial elite understood that you neutralize local politics through patronage and presence. You sit on the boards. You fund the galas. You make yourself indispensable. The tech elite just... didn't do any of that.
This isn't a series of individual failures. It's structural. The tech industry selects for high-agency, high-IQ individuals with remarkably low social intelligence. And it rewards them handsomely for it.
You can talk to literally nobody and code your way to a billion-dollar company. This is not true in any other industry that produces elites. In finance, you need relationships to get invited into rounds and funds. You need insider information that only comes through socializing. You need to take clients out drinking, win their trust over years of dinners and golf games. The financier class is socially adept because finance selects for social adeptness as a core competency.
In tech, social skills are a nice-to-have at best. The mythology of the industry celebrates the antisocial genius: the dropout in the garage, the hoodie-wearing engineers who can't make eye contact but can build products that reshape civilization. For building products, this works. For wielding political power, it's a catastrophic deficit.
So when the technocrats try to engage with politics, they do what they've always done: brute force it. Elon doesn't build coalitions, he buys Twitter and starts posting. Thiel doesn't cultivate public trust, he gives esoteric speeches about mythological figures while Palantir contracts with every intelligence agency on earth. Altman doesn't manage public perception of AI, he goes before Congress and essentially says "this technology might end your career but trust me it'll be fine." They approach politics the same way they approach engineering problems, raw power applied directly to the obstacle, and they have no idea why it isn't working.
The Consequences
Here's the thing most people miss: it doesn't matter whether AI actually takes anyone's job.
The job market could weaken for entirely unrelated reasons. Overregulation, deglobalization, the slow erosion of the dollar reserve system, the downstream effects of decades of loose immigration policy. But the technocrats have so thoroughly botched their public image that none of that matters. They are going to be the scapegoats. When people can't find work, they won't blame the complex interplay of global macroeconomic forces. They'll blame the guys who spent five years telling them AI was going to replace them. The technocrats wrote their own villain origin story and handed it out for free.
The consequences are already materializing. In Q2 2025 alone, $98 billion worth of data center projects were blocked or delayed by community opposition. 25 projects were fully canceled in 2025, up from just 2 in 2023. 188 activist groups across the country are now organized specifically against data center construction. A Democrat flipped a Republican seat in Virginia running against data centers. This is bipartisan, organized, and accelerating.
The concessions have already started. Microsoft just rolled out "Community-First AI Infrastructure," pledging to pay higher utility rates, forgo tax abatements, invest in local schools and libraries, and ensure their data centers don't raise residential electricity prices. Read that list again. That's patronage. That's exactly what the old elites did voluntarily because they understood the game. Microsoft is being forced into it after the fact, as damage control, because they never built the social capital that would have made it unnecessary.
Priced for Perfection
This is where the financial implications get serious. The market is pricing these companies for perfection. Sky-high valuations and multiples that assume smooth, frictionless scaling. But what happens when data center operators have to sacrifice 10% margins to subsidize household energy bills? What happens when AI companies are eventually pressured into permanent profit-sharing to fund something resembling UBI? What happens when every new facility requires a year of community negotiation that wasn't in the deployment timeline?
Every one of these concessions is a line item that doesn't exist in anyone's model. And the tail risks are uglier still. The Luigi Mangione incident proved that public resentment toward perceived corporate indifference can manifest as actual political violence. When 60% of Americans distrust AI, when 72% want more regulation, when 188 separate groups across the country are organizing against your infrastructure, the probability of a black swan event targeting a tech executive or a data center is not zero. It's rising. And the cost of defending against asymmetric threats like that also eats into margins, also isn't priced in, and also compounds over time.
The technocrats aren't going anywhere. AI is probably a matter of national importance and these companies will remain among the most powerful institutions on earth. But powerful and well-liked are very different things, and the gap between the two has a cost that compounds. The old elites understood that the price of power was patronage. The new elites are going to learn the same lesson. They're just going to pay a lot more for it.
