The Race That Never Ends

Quinn Slobodian’s “Garden, Swarm, Factory,” published in The Ideas Letter, offers a seductive narrative about the evolution of neoliberal metaphors, tracing a path from Friedrich Hayek’s cultivated garden through Silicon Valley’s anarchic swarm to today’s supposedly dominant factory model. According to Slobodian, we have witnessed a fundamental transformation in how power conceptualizes and organizes society: “In the process, both garden and swarm have been replaced by a vision of society as factory. Biology has given way to physics. The evolutionary mind has been displaced by the very engineering mind Hayek set out to critique.” 

This is an elegant story, beautifully told. It is also, I believe, wrong—not in its attention to metaphors, which do matter enormously, but in its misidentification of which metaphors actually structure neoliberal thought and practice—and how exactly they do so. By focusing on the reef-garden-swarm-factory progression and hastily introducing a number of dichotomies (e.g.  the reef vs. the garden, the garden vs. the factory, biology vs. physics, the evolutionary mind vs. the engineering mind), Slobodian obscures the deeper continuity in neoliberal thinking. 

Hayek on Gardening vs. Hayek on Engineering 

Let us begin with Slobodian’s opening pair: the reef versus the garden, the latter presented as a solution to a number of policy riddles brought on by the former. I’m not quite sure—as I’ll show later in this response—that Hayek ever abandoned polyp-like imagery of self-organization in favor of garden-like imagery of cultivation. This is where Slobodian’s own metaphor—that of metaphors succeeding each other in clearly defined Rostow-like stages — does a lot of work. Can’t these two poles, the reef and the garden, merely correspond to two overlapping identities embraced by the Austrian thinker: the philosopher of social science fascinated by emergence and complexity, and the Cold Warrior defending market competition as the only legitimate form of both social organization and state-led amelioration? 

On this reading, the reef and the garden interrelate through dialectical symbiosis, as Slobodian himself seems to acknowledge on at least one occasion: it’s precisely because society is full of reef-like emergent phenomena that Hayek wants it run by gardeners rather than central planners. Nothing in this argument puts him at odds with polyp-admirers like the late James C. Scott—which might explain why so many on the neoliberal right embraced Scott (much to his horror) as one of their own. In short, the garden is not a more elaborate or less radical form of the reef — it’s the same good old polyps but observed from two different vantage points, one of (social) theory and one of (Cold War) praxis.  

Still, I suspect that Hayek the gardener wouldn’t feel at ease in a Slobodian-run garden —that “contained biosphere where additions could be pruned or nurtured to produce optimal outcomes.” As Stefan Kolev, one of the torch-bearers of the Hayekian tradition today, points out, all that pruning, nurturing, and optimization would be antithetical to the Austrian thinker:  

Unlike the French garden which is typically understood as being about controlling each individual plant, Hayek’s state corresponds to the English garden where the gardener sets general patterns for the beds, but leaves all scope beyond those general patterns to the spontaneous growth processes endogenous to the garden. 

Thus, to speak of “optimal outcomes,” as Slobodian does, is misguided, and Hayekian “cultivation” implied nothing of the kind. In a process-driven philosophy like Hayek’s, only one outcome remains secure: the hegemony of market competition as society’s core principle of social coordination. Hayek was explicit that spontaneous order “has the drawback that it enables us to determine only the general character of the resulting order and not its detail.” 

His garden metaphor, far from suggesting active pruning and nurturing, emphasized the gardener’s fundamental inability to control or optimize outcomes. But this wasn’t a problem, because those outcomes would emerge on their own — much like reefs emerge from the self-organizing behavior of polyps. Resigned cultivation is all that gardeners could ever hope for. 

But which of the two processes — self-organization or cultivation — is more central to Hayek’s thought? For all their dialectical interrelatedness,  I don’t think there’s much disagreement in today’s Hayek scholarship that it is the former. Self-organization captures his ontological and eternal — rather than political and contingent — commitments. And now that the Cold War is over, the Hayekians have no problem distancing themselves from the gardening state — or any state, for that matter — and celebrating the commons, civil society, and polycentricity. With no more central planners to defeat, their enthusiasm for gardening has also diminished: let a thousand polyps bloom — and in whatever institutional configurations! 

However, for all his celebration of self-organization, Hayek did not denigrate physics or engineering, as Slobodian’s lumping him under “biology” and “evolution” implies. In fact, he readily drew on physics when it suited him—describing iron filings arranging themselves under magnetic influence to illustrate spontaneous order. His deep admiration for cybernetics—that halfway house between engineering and biology—further complicates Slobodian’s neat dichotomy. One of cybernetics’ most famous principles, Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, influenced not just Hayek (its influence runs through Hayek’s Sensory Order) but also Vincent Ostrom, another towering figure of (anti-statist) neoliberal thought. Such theorems, emerging from the unsexy world of control theory and neuroscience, share more with management and engineering than with biology and ecology. 

Moreover, in his most famous essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), Hayek freely tapped into engineering metaphors, writing that  

it is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement… 

Cosmos vs Taxis 

This is the Hayekian dialectic at work: emerging self-organizing order (rather than chaos) is possible precisely because its constituent parts act in a law-like—or, if you will, automaton-like—manner. This might seem paradoxical, but Hayekian theory accommodates this insight through his central distinction between cosmos and taxis: between spontaneous orders (such as economies) and designed orders (such as firms and other organizations). 

Slobodian’s fixation on the garden and gardener obscures a crucial point: Hayek never denied that firms, households, and other organizations operate according to different principles than markets or societies. In fact, that distinction is key to his mature social theory. A Tesla factory exemplifies taxis; the market economy exemplifies cosmos. In an ideal-type market economy, the CEO (unlike the central banker) could never aspire to be a gardener; at best, they remain that ignorant engineer tweaking dials in the often-vain hope that their company won’t go under.  

Elon Musk’s management philosophy would hardly surprise Hayek. But conflating Musk’s vision for taxis with neoliberalism’s vision for cosmos, as Slobodian does, yields little analytical insight. Indeed, nothing in Hayekian thought prevents an organization grounded in the taxis ethos from pursuing Musk-style efficiency or aspiring to Thiel-style monopoly. The firm, as a designed order, can and should optimize its internal operations and maximize its profits.  

Slobodian’s argument feeds off a Silicon Valley equivalent of Kremlinology — call it Siliconology — where ketamine-fueled brain dumps of its top lieutenants are pored over like tea leaves, as if these tech titans possessed the oracular wisdom their bank accounts suggest they should. Divining Silicon Valley’s Weltanschauung from such material (and yes, mea culpa, I’ve committed this sin countless times in my early work) is rather like trying to decode the Politburo’s power struggles by analyzing which apparatchik got to stand closest to Brezhnev’s left armpit on the mausoleum tribune.  

In other words, what exactly do we gain by treating Musk’s taxis discourse about running a Tesla factory as if it were some cosmos-style blueprint for civilization? The exercise only works in reverse, and for obvious reasons: you can take Hayek’s refined meditations on cosmos and extrapolate downward to specific taxis applications (as some Austrian economists have attempted  with Hayek-inspired theories of the firm). But trying to inflate a CEO’s operational manual into a theory of society is like trying to derive the principles of architecture from an IKEA assembly guide. Managerial philosophy, however boldly proclaimed between bong hits, does not a social theory make. 

In short, juxtaposing Elon Musk to Hayek is probably as intellectually fruitful as juxtaposing Henry Ford to Keynes: a category error that promises lots of contrarian insight but comes up short. 

The Factory That Isn’t 

Slobodian’s claim that Silicon Valley has embraced the factory as its governing metaphor is equally puzzling. Where is the evidence that anyone in Silicon Valley actually uses this metaphor to the extent that the gardening metaphor was used by early neoliberals? The ‘society as factory’ framing has a long pedigree—building in part on Gramsci’s analysis, from the mid-1930s, of how Fordism and Americanization extended industrial discipline beyond the factory walls, later Italian theorists would develop this into the ‘social factory’ thesis.  

However,  Silicon Valley’s discourse is saturated with entirely different metaphors: the lean startup, the platform, the ecosystem, the network, the cloud. Why does Slobodian attribute this factory metaphor to Silicon Valley when nobody there actually talks this way?  

One can, perhaps, quibble that there are some fine distinctions to be made between “metaphors,” “logics,” and “models.” Thus, a given logic might be operational even if it doesn’t tap into eponymous metaphors. But that’s not a move that Slobodian makes; for him, a metaphor is a logic is a model, and he uses these terms interchangeably. This analytical flattening prevents him from grasping how nominally distinct metaphors—e.g. the “factory” and the “platform”—could conceal remarkably similar logics (the lean startup, to take one, embodies production principles refined in Japanese factories during the heyday of Toyotism). 

Thiel, the Anti-Engineer 

The intellectual fragility of Slobodian’s comparative construction becomes even clearer when we examine his supposed exemplar, Peter Thiel. For one, he is not that keen on physics, having complained about its lack of spirituality and teleology in how it’s practiced today and repeatedly criticizing string theory for pursuing a sterile research agenda.  

But the main problem with painting Thiel as a fan of efficiency and determinism lies elsewhere. Far from embracing the factory model, Thiel is, deliciously, a full-blown gardening advocate! His consistent warnings against monoculture—one of his favorite metaphors for institutional failure—reveal someone deeply invested in horticultural thinking.  

Where exactly is the evidence that Thiel harbors an engineering mindset? To the extent we equate the engineer with the bureaucrat and the manager, Thiel profoundly hates the latter. His entire intellectual project revolves around escaping what he sees as the sclerotic managerialism of modern institutions. He is that rare breed, an anti-scientistic venture capitalist who laments that the secular, science-dominated world has lost its meaning.  

 In a 2019 debate on mortality, Thiel explicitly rejected evolutionary thinking when applied to humans: “whenever someone mentions Darwin’s theory of evolution I should reach for a revolver… we’re talking about human beings.” This venture capitalist stands in the lineage of Weber or Husserl, not that of Spencer or Saint-Simon.  

As Thiel himself acknowledged in that 2019 debate, he operates within what might be called “hermeneutic Cartesianism”—a worldview that insists on the irreducible duality of spirit and matter. There’s a body and there’s a soul or consciousness, both full of mysteries and not reducible to material properties.  

What could be less aligned with an engineering mindset than this stance? Engineers deal with the measurable and controllable; Thiel insists on the immeasurable and mysterious. His is not someone who has abandoned the spiritual for the mechanical, but someone who places narrative, meaning, teleology  and human exceptionalism at the center of his worldview. Thiel might be a hawkish materialist in foreign policy but in philosophy he is as thoroughly idealist as they come.  

The Swarm’s Genealogy 

Slobodian’s narrative about the swarm also requires correction. As I understand the argument, he claims that 

a) the swarming discourse is distinct from the gardening discourse, and is, in fact, something of a successor to it 

b) while the swarming discourse is rapidly being displaced by the factory one, it has found a second lease on life in retooling the state’s war machine.  

Both of these claims are problematic. First of all, the self-organizing dynamic at work in a coral reef is not so different from that of the swarm. Scholars of complexity would capture both via the paradigm of “stigmergy.” While Hayek did not use the term, he did write about “the abstract and more complex orders…which we find in such insect societies as those of bees, ants, and termites.”  

Thus, to say that the logic of the swarm is foreign to his thought is to commit the same categorial error as claiming that he preferred gardens over reefs. Once again: Hayek celebrated the logic of the garden as the best way to accommodate the logic of the reef – and, by extension, of the swarm. This explains why recent Hayekian scholarship has found that his (and Polanyi’s) notion of “spontaneous order” already embodies stigmergic (i.e. swarm-like) principes.  

As for the second assumption, I suspect that Slobodian gets the causality wrong. It’s not that the military needed Palantir and its ilk to teach it about swarms—in most cases, the traffic went in the other direction. In other words, Silicon Valley’s embrace of the swarming discourse has probably made little difference to its hegemony in society at large: there were always plenty of other sources. When, in the early 2000s, the Israeli Defense Forces sought tactical innovations for urban warfare, they didn’t turn to Musk and Thiel but to Deleuze and Guattari, finding their work extremely useful in conceptualizing the highly decentralized operations of Palestinian fighters. The RAND Corporation’s seminal work on “swarming” as military doctrine appeared in 2000, drawing fresh lessons from the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle.  

Digital technologies definitely shaped the emergence of this “swarming imaginary” — but and Indymedia, not those of Silicon Valley startups. What Slobodian identifies as new—the blending of military and swarming logic—predates the Silicon Valley of Thiel and Musk. And it was in the early 2000s, under Donald Rumsfeld, that the Pentagon embraced network-centric warfare, adopting a language of distributed systems and emergent coordination that predated Silicon Valley’s celebration of these concepts. 

Today, companies like Palantir and Anduril are not inventing this fusion but commercializing it—packaging for profit what the defense establishment has been theorizing for decades. They speak the language the Pentagon has been speaking for a while, translating military doctrine into venture-fundable business models.  

Market Design and False Dichotomies 

Slobodian’s physics-versus-biology dichotomy—his claim that “biology has given way to physics”—also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how the two might be at work in today’s digital economy. The rise of market design as a fertile subbranch of applied economics—applied more and more so in Silicon Valley—demonstrates precisely why this dichotomy is false. 

Market designers like Alvin Roth (who was awarded Nobel Prize in economics in 2012)  don’t choose between biological and physical metaphors; they blend engineering and gardening mentalities seamlessly. What is market design—manifested today as platform design—if not the fusion of these supposedly opposed logics? One can be an engineer when building market infrastructure, then a gardener in preventing monoculture and avoiding rigid production targets. 

Consider how platforms like Uber and Airbnb function. They engineer the conditions for markets to emerge—creating the algorithmic soil, if you will—then step back to let spontaneous order flourish within those conditions. “Spontaneous” for Hayek never meant free from structure—of institutions, reputation systems, customs. And so it is this time, only that many of these structuring conditions are now encoded in algorithms, datasets, and LLMs. This isn’t the replacement of the garden by the factory but their synthesis: engineered gardens that generate genuine market dynamics. Once created, these remain markets, not factories. They still celebrate the firm and the market over non-firm/non-market forms of social organization, even if engineering mentality proves necessary to establish them.  

But it’s not just market design. Scholars as diverse as Stuart Kauffman and Gerald Gaus—along with researchers at the Santa Fe Institute—have taken biological paradigms in directions that far transcend simple swarming metaphors.  

Kauffman’s work, including his co-authored “Against Design,” applies lessons from complexity theory to argue that legal institutions cannot be effectively designed because social dynamics are inherently creative and unpredictable. This represents a fertile research program that doesn’t always hide its neoliberal lineage (let alone its debt to Hayek) but also doesn’t reduce its “other” to crude mechanistic thinking. These scholars explore how physics and biology intersect in complex adaptive systems, offering nuanced accounts of social order that resist simple dichotomies. 

Against this sophisticated intellectual backdrop, Musk’s off-the-cuff remarks about only believing in the laws of physics appear rather glib. Siliconology aside, should we treat such utterances with the interpretive respect Slobodian accords them?  

The Race That Never Ends 

What Slobodian’s garden-swarm-factory progression ultimately obscures is the deeper continuity in neoliberal thought: the persistent centrality of competition as a race between civilizations. This becomes strikingly clear when we examine how Peter Thiel—despite rejecting Darwinism for human meaning—embraces thoroughly Darwinian metaphors when discussing geopolitical competition. 

At a 2019 appearance at the Reagan National Defense Forum, Thiel explicitly framed U.S.-China relations as a “serious space race with China” and a “serious A.I. race.” In a 2021 Nixon Seminar, he warned that “parity means the West is losing,” arguing that if China reaches technological parity, it would become the dominant global power. The language is unmistakably Darwinian: competition for survival, winner-take-all dynamics, the imperative to maintain competitive advantage. 

This contradiction—rejecting Darwinism for human meaning while embracing it for civilizational competition—reveals something fundamental about neoliberal thought. The race metaphor operates at a different, higher level than the garden or factory metaphors. It structures the overall framework within which other metaphors make sense. 

The consistency becomes even more apparent when we compare Walter Lippmann’s Cold War reflections with Thiel’s contemporary pronouncements about China. In 1960, Lippmann, whose importance in the early stages of neoliberalism can hardly be underestimated, penned a most curious essay for his syndicated column. In it, he offered a remarkable confession about the nature of the Soviet challenge: 

“the Soviet challenge may yet prove to have been a blessing in disguise. For without it, what would become of us if we felt that we were invulnerable, if our influence in the world were undisputed, if we had no need to prove that we can rise above a tranquil self-satisfaction? We would, I feel sure, slowly deteriorate and fall apart, having lost our great energies because we did not exercise them, having lost our daring because everything was so warm and so comfortable and so cozy. We would then have entered into the decline which has marked the closing period in the his- tory of so many societies.” 

Lippmann was essentially admitting that capitalism needed the Cold War—not just strategically but morally and psychologically. The external threat redirected social energies away from demands for equality, democracy, and self-fulfillment toward the imperatives of competition. And then, just like Lippmann predicted, it all came crashing down – starting with the Berlin Wall.  

No one has felt more nostalgic for another round of the Cold War than Thiel, and for precisely the reasons Lippmann thought someone like Thiel would be. Where Lippmann worried about prosperity-induced complacency undermining competition with the Soviets, Thiel warns against “epicurean hedonism” and “wokeness” undermining the spirit to compete with China. Both thinkers see internal demands for social justice—whether socialist in Lippman’s time or “DEI” in Thiel’s—as threats to civilizational competitiveness. 

This continuity matters because it reveals what really structures neoliberal thinking: not a progression from biological to mechanical metaphors, but an unchanging conviction that societies, like species, survive only by winning competitive races. Whether they invoke gardens, swarms, or factories, neoliberals remain committed to organizing society—through markets, their one and only solution—for victory in civilizational competition. The formula requires an adversary: without a rival breathing down your neck, it’s hard to justify why society must be perpetually mobilized for competition—and one that puts the imperatives of capital accumulation above all else. The Cold War provided this narrative perfectly; China serves the same function today. 

Understanding this continuity—rather than being distracted by surface-level changes in metaphor—is crucial for those who hope to challenge neoliberal hegemony today. In comparison, Musk’s occasional outbursts about physics – sandwiched between opinions about everything else under the sun – are just a distraction.  

Evgeny Morozov is the founder and publisher of The Syllabus. He is the author of The Net Delusion and To Save Everything, Click Here.