*Silicon Valley’s Anti-Democratic Turn Begins at Work
*
/Silicon Valley's quarrel with democracy is not abstract — it begins in
the workplace, where unilateral authority is normalised.
/
Valerio De Stefano
16th April 2026
Peter Thiel’s recent private lecture series in Rome on the Antichrist
<https://www.reuters.com/technology/thiels-secretive-rome-conference-draws-church-attention-2026-03-15/>
should not be dismissed as another exercise in billionaire eccentricity.
In unusually stark form, it condensed a worldview that is gaining
influence across parts of Silicon Valley, the American right and sectors
of the European far right as well. Thiel routinely invokes the spectre
of a one-world government — one capable of regulating artificial
intelligence or tackling climate change — as “the Antichrist”, a framing
that casts democratic restraint and supranational authority as
existential threats while elevating exceptional elites as the true
bearers of freedom. The Rome lectures were revealing not as a cultural
curiosity but as a symptom of a broader political convergence.
This became especially clear at the end of last year. Around the same
time that Elon Musk escalated his attacks on the European Union after
regulatory action against X, and even called for the Union’s abolition
<https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-threatens-response-against-individuals-who-imposed-e120m-x-penalty/>,
the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy denounced the EU
as anti-democratic and declared that the United States should help
Europe “correct its current trajectory
<https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-strategy-document-says-europe-risks-civilisational-erasure-2025-12-05/>“.
What is at stake here goes well beyond a disagreement over
digital-market regulation or a diplomatic quarrel. It is a struggle over
private power and, more specifically, over who gets to govern the
deployment of technology in our societies.
As I argued in a recent keynote for FES – Future of Work
<https://futureofwork.fes.de/news-list/e/labour-law-technology-and-the-attack-on-the-rules-based-order.html>,
nowhere are the stakes of this confrontation between technology and
democracy more visible than in the workplace: in the employment
relationship, in managerial prerogative, and in the legal institutions
that determine whether workers remain citizens at work or are reduced to
subjects of command.
[...]
continua qui:
https://www.socialeurope.eu/silicon-valleys-anti-democratic-turn-begins-at-work
