Recent commentaries have tended to wonder at the alliances forged between self-professed libertarians of Silicon Valley and the Trump regime. A longer historical view and a more skeptical analysis of US libertarianism suggests that such alliances should come as no surprise. They are the logical merger of entities driven by profit, hubris, and a desire to create a world governed solely by contract and patent. Craib will discuss both the historical evidence drawn from his recent book, Adventure Capitalism (PM Press, 2022), and more recent material from new research.

Raymond Craib is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell University and the author of The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes, and with Barry Maxwell, co-editor of No Gods No Masters No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms. His most recent book is Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press).