‘The Future is Techno’: How Logics of Venture Capital and the Far Right Underpin Authoritarian Tendencies in the US and Rwanda

The incoming government of President Donald Trump in the US has received substantial financial and political support from a far-right faction of tech elites that either engage in or benefited from venture capital (VC) investing in new tech start-up firms (e.g., Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen). Yet, the relation between the tech sector and political regimes in contemporary capitalism is still poorly understood. This paper argues that the logics of VC and tech entrepreneurship are increasingly articulated together with far-right politics and underpin authoritarian tendencies in Western democracies as well as in African non-democracies, manifesting in what can be called ‘Techno-Authoritarianism’. To make this argument, the paper deploys a comparative approach to identify commonalities and variations in the discourses and practices of the second Trump Administration in the US, and those of the regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda within their respective historical contexts. It draws on qualitative data from interviews, documents, and participant observation as part of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Silicon Valley (US) and Kigali (Rwanda) between 2019 and 2023. Through this comparison, the paper illustrates how both political regimes put a focus on (1) techno-solutionism via entrepreneurship and strengthening monopoly tech capital; (2) promoting hyper-individualism based on the idea of asset wealth (and against forms of social welfare); as well as (3) enabling digital infrastructures for militarism abroad and social control ‘at home’. Yet, the fact that the US is at the center of global tech where US ‘Big Tech’ firms own and control cloud infrastructure on which peripheral economies such as Rwanda come to depend puts the political agendas of both regimes (Trump vs. Kagame) on a highly unequal footing. The implementation of digital tech practices of entrepreneurship and surveillance that Kagame’s Techno-Authoritarianism promotes requires adjustments to account for Rwanda’s subordinate position vis-à-vis the US. Through the comparative analysis of different forms of Techno-Authoritarianism, the paper thereby sheds light on the intersection between technology, finance, and political regimes within global digitized capitalism.