Ian Linden: The Pope and the Lords of Silicon Valley

Mr & Mrs Vance meet Pope Leo XIV, May 2025. Image: Vatican Media

Much has been made of Pope Leo's time in Peru and his closeness to the late Pope Francis from Argentina. Being first American Pope has been no less newsworthy. But his impact on the USA is proving more important than his outreach to Latin America. He has deplored the cruelty of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and expects the US bishops unitedly to follow his lead championing the human dignity of migrants.

On 12 November the US Catholic Bishops Conference issued an urgent Special Message on Immigration reflecting the Pope's concerns.

It looks as if he is not, like his - significantly chosen - namesake Leo XIII, going to wait years before producing a 21st century equivalent about the dangers of the "New Things", (Rerum Novarum, 1893) brought about by the industrial revolution.

Most strikingly despite its benefits, he promises to tease out the present dangers of AI lurking in San Francisco's Silicon Valley.

"A clear and present danger" is an American legal term used to define when free speech may be limited because of a threat to public safety and national security. It might apply to Trump since he won last November; he is now entering the second year of his second Presidency. As do St. Paul's words to his missionary companion Timothy: "The love of money is the root of all evil".

Growing economic and social changes caused by the digital revolution and AI, routinely described as the 'new industrial revolution', are a present, though less clear, danger. An important outcome of the original industrial revolution was that a dominant land-owning class had to come to terms with the power of the new industrialists and entrepreneurs. A progressive extension of the franchise was the result. An oligarchy with its pretensions of class and nobility saw its power reduced. Not so in today's tech revolution which has given a new oligarchy spectacularly greater wealth and unaccountable political power.

The 'information economy' has relied on technological innovation. But cyberspace is unlike the space in which the 12-year old Dickens worked in a blacking factory, Fordist assembly lines, billboards and football stadiums - other than that they were, and are, where money is made, quite literally in the case of Bitcoin.

The unaccountable lords of silicon valley, the main hub of AI, are along with Trump, the main protagonists in the compelling story of democracies entering a new epoch. How the political and the socio-economic are put together, combining to create a new political economy, is the $64 trillion question. The Greek economist and former politician Yanis Yaroufaxis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, (Penguin 2024), makes an entertaining crack at explaining how the tech giants make a fortune out of our addiction to small bright screens with their pictures and information, hoovering up masses of data in order to influence our behaviour. It is a prodigious and worrying development.

Hybrid cars run on petrol and electricity. In the US political life runs on money and social media. The tech oligarchy offer both of them in exchange for proximity to, and influence over Government. This relationship is analysed in BBC 1's November 3rd Panorama programme, "Trump & The Tech Titans", revealing the malign consequences of the US Supreme Court's 5/4 ruling in the crucial 2014 case, McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission. The five Supreme Court judges declared unconstitutional 1971 legislation which had capped political donations over two years towards federal electoral campaigning. The issue was deemed to be one of freedom of speech, bearing no negative impacts on government and offering no opening for corruption. A case which opened the way for floods of corporate and private money to enter and shape American politics.

Panorama documented how the extraordinary wealth of the tech titans had been the lubricant for their entering the circles of power. Their wealth is unprecedented: Elon Musk is worth c. $497 billion, Larry Ellison who owns Tik Tok, CBS and CNN, c. $320 billion, and Peter Thiel, around 100th in the global wealth table, at c. $23 billion, is a founder of PaypaL and Palantir. All are donors to Republican party and close to the Trump administration.

The US tech giants are far from a homogeneous group. Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang and, particularly, Bill Gates do good things with their money. But Musk in early 2025, looking increasingly deranged by money and power, offered an extreme version of Obama's 'yes-we-can', yes we-can-do-anything-we-want. Ellison was and is a great promotor of AI and a key payer in the Stargate Project, a new company intending to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI. Thiel founded Palantir Technologies with its current CEO, Alex Karp ($2.3 billion). It handles $billions in Pentagon contracts for military software.

Trump & The Tech Titans is particularly thought-provoking in its examination of Thiel's relationship with JD Vance, the hillbilly kid from the Appalachians who since 2011 fulfilled the American dream partly thanks to mentoring and financial support from Thiel. He also became a Catholic in 2019. Vance, at first anti-Trump then post-2016 pro-Trump, was endorsed by Trump for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022 with the help of $15 million from Thiel. Much of Vance's campaign money went through the Protect Ohio Values super- PAC (Political Action Committee), and Trump's Save America PAC, PACs having become the standard way of funding political advertising since the Supreme Court Ruling in 2014.

Thiel's background is evangelical. This September, remarkably, he gave a number of lectures on the Anti-Christ who heralds the end of times, (not, however, by using facial recognition software). The Anti-Christ will apparently present as an evil tyrant who seeks to get control of science - and presumably AI.

Trump seems not too bothered by what the oligarchs think and believe while he invests in their more lucrative enterprises like the cryptocurrency business. He reportedly seems equally unconcerned by the distinction between what is in the national interest and his own financial interest.

What the Panorama programme tellingly intimated is that we should be worrying more about Vance than about Trump. Since before 2016 when he was denigrating Trump, Vance has made a 180 degree turn, and now holds to the whole of Trump's extreme right wing agenda. He could even do another 180 degree turn. The tech titans - and the Republican Party - may well feel their money, influence and future are better invested in Vance than in an aging Trump. For Trump to run in 2028, he would need to tear up the clear constitutional limitation enshrined in the 22nd. Amendment that no President can serve more than two terms.

No-one knows how important abortion remains for American voters since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. But the danger of Vance, the Catholic kid from the Appalachians, is that he could pull in a large US Catholic vote behind him. Vance with the power of his backers - yes power not 'agency' - could leave AI relatively uncontrolled and normalise fascist-leaning populism. He is a clear and future danger to democracy. The Church in America is entering an interesting time.

Professor Ian Linden is Visiting Professor at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill, London. A past director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, he was awarded a CMG for his work for human rights in 2000. He has also been an adviser on Europe and Justice and Peace issues to the Department of International Affairs of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. Ian chairs a new charity for After-school schooling in Beirut for Syrian refugees and Lebanese kids in danger of dropping out partnering with CARITAS Lebanon and work on board of Las Casas Institute in Oxford with Richard Finn OP. His latest book was Global Catholicism published by Hurst in 2009.

LINKS

Ian Linden: www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/