When startup thinking threatens democracy

Dr Edward Thomas Jones, Senior Lecturer in Economics, The Albert Gubay Business School, Bangor University

Silicon Valley turns ideas into global power — and sometimes exports radical political visions too. As Wales approaches the 2026 Senedd election, the challenge is obvious: we can be ambitious and responsive without running our democracy like a start-up.

The Silicon Valley playbook

Technology startups aren’t just small businesses with big dreams, they’re engines of growth. By turning fresh ideas into companies that create jobs, attract investment, and push industries forward, they spark the kind of innovation that reshapes economies and changes the way we live and work.

Startups may provide the spark, but Silicon Valley created the perfect conditions for that spark to ignite, to the point that the region became synonymous with the very idea of startups.

At the heart of Silicon Valley’s success isn’t just tech savviness, it’s the playbook of ecosystems and money.

Stanford University, for example, encourages its academics and students to start companies, creating a culture where innovation is commercialised. The semiconductor giant Fairchildren gave birth to a wave of spinoff companies, which seeded much of Silicon Valley’s tech ecosystem.

Venture capital wouldn’t just fund ideas; it fertilised them. Free-flowing talent across firms, and a culture that celebrates smart failure together form a self-reinforcing engine.

And these startups? They don’t stay local. Software, infrastructure, and platforms born in the Silicon Valley swiftly weave into the global economic fabric. On top of that, Silicon Valley’s ideological output, marked by a curious mix of libertarian economics and social liberalism adds flavour to its global impact, shaping the values that ride along with the products.

When startups ideals turn into political experiments

Silicon Valley isn’t just exporting apps and hardware anymore; it’s exporting ideas far beyond tech. Long regarded as a symbol of individualism and freedom, Silicon Valley is now splintering as figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg lean into right-wing populism, prompting protests from their progressive workforce.

Meanwhile, non-technological ideas are being exported into the corridors of power. It’s as if Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash‘s metaverse ideology is becoming a reality.

When published in 1992, Snow Crash imagined a metaverse ruled by corporate fiefdoms and libertarian individualism, a dystopia that now feels uncomfortably close to the Dark Enlightenment’s dream of abandoning democracy for technocratic elites and digital neo-feudalism.

The term Dark Enlightenment, popularised by British philosopher Nick Land, describes a controversial, anti-democratic philosophy that emerged in the early 21st century, advocating for hierarchical, or even monarchic, forms of governance. Its ideas found a receptive audience among some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, whose culture prizes individualism, minimal regulation, and market-driven solutions.

American software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin drew inspiration from Land, sparking a movement that calls for replacing democracy with a CEO-like leadership and dismantling what he terms the Cathedral: the network of media, universities, and bureaucracies that, in Yarvin’s view, promote a liberal, progressive ideology.

Once considered fringe, Yarvin’s ideas have found sympathetic listeners among tech elites: Peter Thiel funded his startup and is a sympathetic intellectual interlocutor, while Elon Musk has flirted with related themes in his reformist rhetoric around government structures.

Nations aren’t businesses

Curtis Yarvin and like-minded thinkers argue democracies are inefficient and prone to mediocrity, and that nations could function more effectively if run like companies – hierarchical, performance-driven, and accountable for results.

But the analogy quickly falls apart: nations aren’t businesses, and governance cannot be reduced to quarterly reports or shareholder satisfaction.

As economist Paul Krugman has noted, a country is not a giant corporation, and the mindset that works for CEOs simply doesn’t translate to national economic policy or social well-being. Unlike businesses, whose primary duty is to shareholders, governments must serve citizens, public institutions, and diverse stakeholders all at once. That complexity matters: a national economy is not a scalable business model waiting to be optimised, but a vast, interwoven tapestry of independent lives, institutions, and systems.

Corporations exist to generate a profit for their owners, but what determines a nation’s success is what it delivers to the people who live there, not how much is pocketed by shareholders. Treating citizens like customers or governments like boardrooms risks eroding autonomy and sacrificing democratic values in the name of efficiency-driven, neoliberal control. Running a country isn’t about maximising return on investment; it’s about balancing public goods, reducing inequality, fostering social cohesion, and safeguarding long-term societal health.

Ideas that advocate for CEO-style rulers or monarchical efficiency dangerously misunderstand the nature of government. Societies aren’t like the startups found in Silicon Valley, and running a nation cannot be scaled from a business plan – countries, unlike companies, carry the lives of millions, not just the bottom line.

Lessons for the Welsh Senedd

As Wales looks ahead to the 2026 Senedd election, there’s something to be said for glancing sideways at movements like the Dark Enlightenment, not to borrow its bleak prescriptions, but to remember its core warning about systems getting stuck in their own red tape.

The trick isn’t to turn the country into a start-up run by a CEO, but to keep our democracy nimble without losing what makes it ours: people, communities, and the sense of place that binds them together. If the next Senedd can strip away needless complexity while staying rooted in fairness, openness, and local voices, Wales could show that you don’t need to be “run like a business” to be effective.

Instead, we can be ambitious and responsive while keeping people at the heart of every decision – and that’s a future worth voting for.