**** 12/25/25 - Dan Drezner - On Monsters, Men, and Time Horizons (wanna read something about oligarchic sovereignty?!)
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"Contemporary technology oligarchs are reshaping global power through their control over critical
Psst... wanna read something about oligarchic sovereignty?!
Daniel W. Drezner
Dec 26, 2025
To celebrate Jewish Christmas, the hard-working family that supports the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World decided to watch Guillermo del Toro’s version of Frankenstein. It was beautifully shot and featured a legitimately impressive performance from Jacob Elordi as the creature.
What struck me about this adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel was how unsympathetic I found Oscar Isaac’s portrayal of Victor Frankenstein. Perhaps that is because, as one reviewer noted, “Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro's Netflix adaptation feels so much like a modern day tech bro. He is practically their template.”
No doubt, it is easy to draw the parallels between Frankenstein’s creation of the creature and the current technologist obsession with creating generative AI — especially since del Toro has made his feelings about AI quite clear. But the parallel between Frankenstein and current technologists runs deeper than that. After all, Frankenstein wants to innovate a way to stop death. In other words, Victor is into “biohacking” — just like a lot of Silicon Valley plutocrats.
Speaking of which… my latest academic contribution comes in the form of a Review of International Studies symposium organized by the University of Glasgow’s Maha Rafi Atal. It’s entitled “Oligarchic sovereignty: Technology and the future of global order” — here’s the abstract:
Contemporary technology oligarchs are reshaping global power through their control over critical infrastructures, political institutions, and ideas. Across six essays, this forum examines the territorial, temporal, and ideational ambitions of Silicon Valley billionaires, highlighting how individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg exercise unprecedented influence over states and societies. From charter cities and network-states to cloud computing and satellite systems, these oligarchs leverage personal wealth, technological mastery, and monopolistic control to bypass traditional state authority, turning themselves into quasi-sovereign actors. The essays situate these developments within historical and theoretical frameworks, comparing oligarchic power to early modern chartered corporations and the logic of state formation, while emphasizing the novel dimensions of control unique to the 21st century. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individual technology oligarchs consolidate authority in ways that challenge traditional international relations theory, revealing a global order increasingly shaped by the ambitions and delusions of private actors.
My contribution is entitled “The winner’s intellectual curse.” It extends the argument about the technologist desire for sovereignty beyond physical territory:
[Atal] focuses on how Silicon Valley plutocrats infringe on the territorial sovereignty of states. There is considerable evidence that the Silicon Valley oligarchy desires more sovereignty not only over territory, but over time as well. An animating driver behind a lot of their behaviour is the belief that they, and they alone, possess the long-term time horizon to avert existential risks to humanity….
This mindset also causes technologists to prioritize the long-term implications of current policies in a way that even governments might not process. It enables them to brush off short-term concerns about the malign effects of their technologies by stressing their long-term benefits. Furthermore, from the technologist perspective, wealth can protect them from the particular vagaries of extreme weather and climate change, and medicine can protect them from ageing and mortality. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it, ‘this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it the Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind’. When tech companies and their founders plan for the long-term future in this way, they are tapping into one of the fundamental attributes of corporations and corporate personhood – as an entity that can outlive any individual. In this way, technologists encroach as much on the temporal sovereignty of states as their territorial sovereignty.
You’ll have to read the whole thing — which should be easy, it’s available via Open Access — to see the fuller version of my argument. Be sure to check out the contributions from Jack Taggart, Seth Schindler, Sarah Logan, Alina Utrata, and Erin Lockwood as well!