When Salesforce’s chief executive Marc Benioff publicly called for the National Guard to be deployed in San Francisco, many residents expressed disbelief that a billionaire who claims the city as home would invite military force against it. Yet such incredulity only reveals our distance from reality. Their instinct toward control is not new, nor apolitical. What we are witnessing is the natural convergence of ideology and power — the moment when San Francisco’s billionaires complete their decades-long transformation from technocrats to theocrats of a new American order.

If there is a gospel of this new order, it begins on Sand Hill Road, headquarters for the venture capital firms that bankroll Silicon Valley startups. Marc Andreessen, from his Menlo Park headquarters, published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, declaring technology “a violent assault” through which “we are conquerors.” His firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has raised $37 billion, pouring that money into companies that promise to privatize public life: Policing, education, housing and even medicine. On the manifesto’s enemies list — “sustainability,” “ESG,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics” — he names not policies but values. What must be eliminated, in his words, is constraint.

Andreessen cites as his “patron saints” figures like Filippo Marinetti, who wrote the Futurist Manifesto (later plagiarized by Mussolini), and Nick Land, whose “Dark Enlightenment” spawned the neo-reactionary movement. These are not ironic citations. They are his canon. And his admirers — Elon Musk in the city’s south industrial corridor, Ben Horowitz in his own Marin estate, Michael Moritz from his San Francisco townhouse — echo it in every interview that treats democracy as a bottleneck and the billionaire as humanity’s proper steward.

At Stanford, the Valley’s intellectual core, Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan developed The Network State, a treatise that proposes replacing nations with private, “founder-led” digital states connected by cryptocurrency and ideological purity. Srinivasan is not a fringe theorist. He was the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, and a frequent presence at Stanford’s Hoover Institution — where libertarian economics and authoritarian “efficiency” have been married for half a century. His book’s premise is simple: Secede from democracy, build homogeneity, measure loyalty through mass surveillance data. 

The most explicit of their lineage, Curtis Yarvin, still lives in San Francisco. Under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug he proposed “neocameralism” — a state run as a corporation, citizens as shareholders, headed by a single sovereign, the chief executive officer. His early blog was hosted here, read by the same engineers who now populate a16z’s portfolio companies and the tech salons of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, a wealth fund with a staggering $17 billion in holdings. Yarvin has since lectured to Thiel Fellow gatherings in the bay and appeared on podcasts recorded blocks from City Hall. His followers treat him as a prophet, his slogan — “the Cathedral must be burned” — expressed as holy doctrine, and represented in practice as the expulsion of all compassion from governance.

All three men live or work within a fifty-mile radius of each other. All three are funded, read, or admired by the same pool of San Francisco money. Andreessen supplies the theology of hierarchy, Srinivasan, the administrative model, Yarvin, the theory of rule. Together they articulate the worldview that animates the region’s elite: Democracy as inefficiency, equality as weakness and domination as progress. Trumpism is not their opposite — it is their reflection. One wears the flag; the other wears a Patagonia vest. Both are, in essence, differing denominations of the same American fascist faith.

Ideology never stays theory for long in San Francisco. Here, it builds itself into processes and calls the result reform. The same faith in hierarchy that Andreessen, Srinivasan, and Yarvin articulate in their manifestos has been rewritten in the civic tongue and folded neatly into the programs of Blueprint for a Better San Francisco, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, and the Lurie administration. These are not local adaptations of a distant creed. They are its chosen vessels.

Blueprint’s own language betrays its origin: A call to run the city like a startup, to favor “outcomes over ideology.” Every one of those phrases carries the same genetic code as the Techno-Optimist Manifesto: Democracy as drag, deliberation and difference as disease and hierarchy as salvation. Its white papers on “governance modernization” repeat, nearly verbatim, Andreessen’s insistence that “regulation kills life.” 

The money animating it — Moritz’s $5 billion Sequoia fortune, Sacks’s Thiel-era capital, estimated at  as much as $2 billion, Benioff’s philanthropy of image — circulates through these nonprofits to perform what Srinivasan promised in The Network State: An exit from democracy without leaving the nation. They have not seceded from San Francisco; they have privatized its functions instead. Boards with significant power over our lives that once held open meetings to the public are replaced with “advisory partners,” corrupted metrics replace real votes, and the moral vocabulary of government is rewritten wholly in the name of the investor. When Blueprint argues that the city must be “unshackled” from process to achieve “velocity,” it is echoing Srinivasan’s plea for “founder governance” — the state as personal enterprise, citizens as users.

Lurie, whose family fortune is about $4.7 billion, did not invent this theology; he simply administers its firm implementation. His office speaks constantly of “modernization,” “efficiency” and “results,” but beneath this purposefully sanitized jargon is the same conviction Yarvin preached from his San Francisco apartment blogs: That democracy is too slow, too compromised and too sentimental to survive. Every policy decision — budget reallocations toward police and “operations,” consolidation of contracting power, the quiet sidelining of commissions — serves that conviction. The mayor has become the city’s CEO not by title but by design. His speeches about “fixing dysfunction” are indistinguishable from Andreessen’s sermons about “builders conquering entropy.” Where the manifesto celebrates “violent creation,” Lurie’s San Francisco brings it into being bureaucratically: the destruction of public process as proof of progress.

The same theology governs Blueprint’s campaigns. Its consultants talk of “rebuilding trust through execution,” of “discipline,” of “realignment.” They do not mean moral discipline; they mean obedience to the managerial order. Their politics is not reactionary by accident—it is the literal civic implementation of the Bay Area’s fascist metaphysics: A hierarchical world purified of its complexity. Every “streamlining” measure, every “efficiency task force,” every claim that compassion must yield to purported competence is an act of worship toward that god. 

What unites the billionaires of Sand Hill Road with the mayor of San Francisco is not merely class interest but theology — the belief that creation grants dominion, that those who build must rule, and that the governed exist to be optimized. The authoritarianism of the Bay is seemingly polite by nature; it is more procedural, written in contracts and charter amendments, but it is authoritarianism nonetheless: A religion of order whose rituals are targeted audits and budgets, whose priests are venture partners, and whose altar is the city itself.

Exavier Morrison Wells is a legal fellow at the Phoenix Project, where he investigates how authoritarian systems cloak themselves in law, nonprofits, and procedural legitimacy. He writes about American fascism, political compliance culture, and the slow, quiet collapse of democratic infrastructure. To read more of Exavier’s writings, subscribe to his Substack: Substack.com/@exaviermorrisonwells