In the shadow of fitness influencers, biohacking forums and the self-optimization rhetoric of bro culture, a fundamental restructuring of our social infrastructures is taking place with the body at the center. The obsession with testosterone levels, datafication of the body, fertility and life extension is no longer a marginal phenomenon of self-absorbed male communities, but part of a strategically charged investment policy by actors such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

This materializes in very concrete terms in investments worth billions: in reproductive technologies, DNA platforms, but also in surveillance software and state healthcare infrastructures. The boundaries between state control, military security and private body technology are becoming blurred. This connection can be seen, for example, in companies such as Palantir - financed by Peter Thiel - which simultaneously manages NHS data in the UK while supplying AI systems for the military, police and intelligence services in its traditional business: Health data becomes a political weapon.

These entanglements are an expression of a technopolitical ideology in which bodies are not only optimized, but also ordered, selected and geopolitically charged. What is unfolding here is far more than just market logic, but the rise of a biotechnocracy in which questions of reproduction, health and viability are increasingly being determined by economic interests and the intense connections between capitalist and political interests.

In addition to economic factors, these investment patterns are driven by ideologies in which bodies become the interface of issues around power and control. Libertarian and technocratic visions are thus promoted by means of controlled, monitored bodies. Elon Musk propagates a selective pronatalism, which he negotiates in the context of an impending population collapse of white, rich societies. He sees the solution to this problem, which he believes is more serious than climate change, not in migration or global redistribution, but in the targeted production of white babies. This view ties in directly with narratives and images from the Manosphere and Tradwives. Musk does not act with romantic Instagram posts, but with hard-hitting investments: His numerous investments in IVF technologies or the settlement of Mars (including the development of artificial uteri) serve to establish techno-elitist control over reproduction. It is clear that these technologies for optimizing reproduction and ensuring healthy, white and preferably male children are not suitable for the masses, but reserved for a privileged class of modern gentlemen.

Peter Thiel's investments have also been focusing intensively and increasingly on the control of human bodies for years. Palantir's above-mentioned involvement in the British healthcare system is just one example of this. Thiel both directly and indirectly finances companies that want to extend lifespans through research and technology, in apps for menstrual cycle monitoring and in companies that want to “revolutionize” the development of medication. Jim O'Neill, the current Deputy Head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is a longtime Thiel confidant and was head of the Thiel Fund and co-founder of the Thiel Foundation, which awards grants to people under 20 who are developing potentially disruptive technologies (and many of whose current or former grantees were involved in DOGE). According to the department’s announcement, he wants to “harness cutting-edge AI, telemedicine, and other breakthrough technologies to deliver the highest quality medical care for Americans”. Silicon Valley logic has reached the White House.

In this combination of technosolutionism, AI covetism and disruption, one thing becomes clear: In these ideologies, the body should not be managed by doctors, but controlled algorithmically. Fertility is regulated normatively, death is to be “overcome” through biotechnological developments and drug development is to be “de-bureaucratized”. The state-private, AI- and data-supported technocracy is creating an infrastructure in which medical care, power and control are merging: bodies are being standardized with the help of apps, reproduction is becoming a geopolitical strategy and health data is becoming political currency.

What we are currently experiencing is a profound restructuring of social order towards a logic of biotechnocracy, in which the body is the central arena and object of negotiation for interlocking currents and interests. The investments and political activities of actors such as Musk and Thiel mark a new biopolitical phase in which health, fertility and even the end of life are increasingly orchestrated by economics and ideologies.

These developments are taking place within a political climate in which actors, technocratic elitism and libertarian capitalism are forming increasingly open coalitions, turning the body into an interface for data extraction, standardization and domination in the hands of technocratic billionaires.