Crypto-militarism comes to Columbus

In July, the Financial Times reported that a group of tech billionaires would soon launch a new crypto-currency-focused bank headquartered in Columbus, aiming to replace the role Silicon Valley Bank once played for startups prior to its 2023 collapse. The bank’s name is Erebor, a reference to The Lord of the Rings – an increasingly popular trend of Silicon Valley companies taking their names from J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories. Both Palantir and Anduril, which in Middle Earth are an indestructible crystal ball and a sword, respectively, have been adopted in modern times as two central names in the new wave of military and surveillance contractors. 

Politically blue cities have increasingly become safe havens for people who prior to Trump’s second term were considered Silicon Valley’s political misfits. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir, set up shop in Austin. Alex Karp took Palantir to Denver. And Palmer Luckey is making Columbus home to Anduril and Erebor. With Intel’s incoming massive semiconductor plant in New Albany and the state offering bountiful tax abatements to tech companies, Columbus is increasingly becoming a new frontier for right-wing finance capitalism, or what local blogger D.J. Byrnes of the Rooster calls “Nerd Fascism.”

Both Peter Thiel and Lonsdale are backers of Luckey’s companies; each is also rather up front in expressing convictions that extend beyond personal economic interests, their calls to defend Western capitalism resulting in positions that appear to be pro-war. Thiel famously said that Google’s relationship with China was “seemingly treasonous.” Lonsdale subsequently defended these statements made by his mentor, saying on CNBC Squawk Alley that “Google clearly needs to evaluate what it’s doing. Peter and I built a very patriotic company. Google is clearly not a patriotic company.” 

Luckey himself has claimed that “everything that Anduril is working on on the [research and development] side is oriented towards [Taiwan and China].” Anduril has multiple contacts with Taiwan and the U.S. Military for weapons and surveillance technology.

This wave of companies is ideologically charged, specifically against the rise of China’s economy. Reflecting Cold War era politics, they advocate for more privatization, fewer social programs, crackdowns on dissent, and, in the case of Thiel, express a distrust in democracy as a form of governance. Their excessive referencing of Tolkien is more than cosplay; it reflects his simplistic ethical binary of good versus evil – in their co-opted case, a defense of “Western values” against the evil of the “CCP.” (In Archaeologies of the Future, the late critic Fredric Jameson observed that Tolkien’s use of feudal nostalgia and simplistic ethical binaries appeals to the “know-nothing American fundamentalisms.”)

“It’s tempting to try to retreat to this simple good vs. evil narrative rather than acknowledging some of the ambiguities of where they are,” David Fullerton, Stack Overflow’s chief technology officer, said in an interview with CNBC. “They want to go back to the good old days of when tech was good.”

Transcending this fantasy landscape, the real-world consequences of this ideology will be unfolding on the ground in Columbus in the coming years. A city already grappling with a housing crisis and gentrification now finds itself at the center of authoritarian billionaires’ ideologically-driven ventures. 

In his 1988 book Super Profits and Crises: Modern U.S. Capitalism, Marxist economist Victor Perlo coined the term “military-industrial-financial complex” to describe the merging of finance capital and weapons manufacturing. In 1985, financial institutions held approximately 75 percent of the shares of Lockheed Martin. Today, that number is roughly the same with the three largest shareholders being State Street Corp., Vanguard Group Inc., and BlackRock Inc. Erebor and other asset management firms will continue the legacy of marrying war and finance, armed with venture capital, anti-Communist rhetoric, and imperialist ambitions. 

While longstanding financial institutions once invested heavily in anti-Soviet Cold War efforts, this century marks a new age – one in which reactionary venture capitalists are directly founding their own military contractors. And much like the industrialists in post-World War I Germany, these individuals fund whatever political movement will get them the biggest contracts, which, in the case of weapons manufacturing, means starting the largest wars. 

Palantir and Anduril have already landed massive defense deals for developing technologies rooted in war and surveillance. If and when Erebor and Anduril open in Columbus, residents and policymakers will have to ask what kind of future these right-wing capitalist ventures will usher in at a local level and whether it should be accepted so willingly.