From Argentina, a Warning to America’s Tech Right

JULIA KORNBERG

Picture this: a vast, windswept plain at the end of the continent, ringed by craggy mountains of snow and granite, with data centers as far as the eye can see.

This is not the stuff of some dystopian sci-fi fantasy; it is the future that Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, is proposing for his country, which he has declared will “offer the most attractive legal and fiscal environment” for artificial intelligence anywhere in the world.

Mr. Milei has been a trailblazing figure in Latin America’s ascendant right, a movement broadly characterized by free-market policies, culture war discourse, cuts to government spending and aggressive deregulation. Since he took office in 2023, he has lowered tax rates, sought to recriminalize abortion and pitched legal recognition of “nonhuman corporations” run by A.I. agents. From afar, his plans to transform Argentina into a hub for foreign capital, Big Tech and the global far right have seemed unstoppable.

Among Argentines, though, his policies are increasingly seen as favoring and catering to foreigners — and his popularity has recently taken a corresponding nosedive. There is a growing sense that Mr. Milei may be more preoccupied with currying the favor of the U.S. tech oligarchy than serving his own constituents, who have suffered under years of crushing austerity measures and who could bring both Mr. Milei’s tenure and his fantasy of turning Argentina into a nerve center for Big Tech to a screeching halt.

After decades of chronic inflation and atrocious economic mismanagement by the country’s center-left, Argentines were initially won over by Mr. Milei’s outsider status, his unvarnished style and his vows to repair the country’s shambling finances once and for all. Over the last three years, the president has made major inroads in his efforts to downsize the state and deregulate the economy, slashing funding for the country’s public health care, infrastructure and education systems — increasingly unpopular austerity measures he claims are vital to shrinking the state’s deficit.

Those measures might have curbed inflation and balanced the budget, but life has not improved for many Argentines. The cost of living remains punishingly high, and the country appears headed for a recession. Many are already struggling to make ends meet, with a perception among the country’s historically large, well-educated middle class that downward mobility is inevitable. It is not uncommon to see professors working shifts as Uber drivers or public administrators organizing weekend bake sales to supplement their salaries.

Argentines are similarly disenchanted by Mr. Milei’s eagerness to sell off Argentina’s vast natural resources, which include soy fields in the Pampas, lithium mines in the plateaus of the Andes, oil fields in Vaca Muerta, and the vast expanse of Patagonia, which in Mr. Milei’s imagination will host the data centers that lead us to the A.I. singularity. Mr. Milei has passed a series of laws aimed at exploiting these assets — including something called an “Incentive Regime for Large Investments”, which amounts to an invitation for foreign companies to integrate further into Argentina’s economy with the promise of tax cuts and other benefits.

Mr. Milei’s policies add up to a vision of Argentina as a kind of subsidiary to President Trump’s America, one in which foreign companies will have unfettered access to Argentina’s natural resources, without irksome tax burdens or job creation targets. In other words: a theme park for the global 1 percent, built on the back of a weak domestic economy and a permanent underclass.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Milei’s efforts have been enthusiastically received by the world’s tech tycoons. He is famously close with Elon Musk — indeed, the notorious image of the president wielding a chain saw against the state partly inspired Mr. Musk’s own failed DOGE project — and has allowed Starlink to set up shop in the country. Peter Thiel, the surveillance magnate, recently purchased a $12 million mansion in the historic district of Barrio Parque in Buenos Aires, where he apparently now lives with his husband and two children. The Argentine-Spanish tech mogul Martín Varsavsky has purchased land on a barren plain near the Andes to create an “anti-World War III” bunker, in which he plans to shelter the ultrawealthy from whatever apocalypse they enable.

Now, a new kind of patriotism is finding its voice. Walk around the city of Buenos Aires, and you’ll find a sea of freshly bought Argentine flags floating from apartment balconies and hanging in shop windows. The image of a young protestor, clad in a matching black-and-white miniskirt and a halter top and wielding an Argentine flag while getting water-cannoned by police during anti-government demonstrations in October — has become viral shorthand for resistance to Mr. Milei’s policies.

It is perhaps a taste of what is to come in places like the United States, where antipathy toward A.I., data centers and the like emerged as defining features of last week’s midterm elections. Voters everywhere, it seems, are deeply hostile toward the overlapping of political, economic and technological power — and are mobilizing to seize back control of their fates.

Young Argentines, especially, seem to be developing a new sense of self after three years of punishing economic measures and Mr. Milei’s alignment with foreign forces. It’s unclear what political actors will be able to capitalize on this growing discontent; the field is open to anything from right-wing nationalism to a more liberal grass-roots patriotism. But as Mr. Milei’s domestic popularity plummets ahead of the nation’s 2027 elections, his fellow travelers in the A.I.-curious far right should take notice: People don’t want a future fit for billionaire tech ghouls; they want a future in which they, too, have a place.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times