You prove yourself to be a thousand times wiser than Noah. He is smart, no doubt; and smart people tend to associate and identify with the likes of Musk. But he exemplifies a type of small mindedness that is all too typical of political thinking under the regime that is expiring right now. It’s the small mindedness of academic economics and political science. That type of thinking is why we have so few actual leaders right now.
Yep, yep, yep! I like Noahopinion for many discussions but you articulate the “theology” on this one. If we stay muddled in elementary interpretations of what’s happening with the techbros we will be surprised when we are eventually clubbed to death in the final phases of their planned social collapse. Not even sure Trump fully grasps it. Or anticipates it.
Thank you for posting this. I know people who read Noah’s work (I also read it my self). They told me I wouldn’t like it, because it’s more “centrist”. Now I wonder if it’s not centrist, but actually a “lack of desire” to analyze the why AND the impending impact. It’s hard to acknowledge that the “great American experiment” is being actively undone.
I stopped subscribing to Noapinion or following Noah Smith when he published his piece "No, you are not on Indigenous land" last November. That post revealed the limits of his politics, and I found others who cover the ongoing polycrisis very well without throwing Indigenous justice movements under the bus.
Sorry in advance for the long response but you have touched on something that has been weighing on me quite heavily and quite constantly over the past few weeks. Namely, seeing so much of the general public and mainstream media still desperately trying to explain all of this by way of blaming the Trumpian narcissism and incompetence we saw in his first term, identifying him as the primary--and often sole--source of this threat, arguing that he must be removed. I keep trying to get the message across that removing Trump will not eradicate this problem and may, through anointing Vance as President--actually allow them to more efficiently and precisely achieve their goals.
To use Peter Thiel's language, Musk and the other technocratic oligarchs seem to see Trump as a tool--as chaotic, irrational, and reckless enough to act as the destabilizing force necessary to break the "katechon" and immanentize the eschaton--e.g., revealing the dysfunction and instability of democracy to the extent that it is pushed to the brink of collapse, allowing for Thiel's "apokálypsis"--or Yarvin/Land's "hard reboot"/"reset" they see as necessary to build their new, oligarchic/technocratic order. However, it it is not hard to see that sometimes, for the same reasons, he is a disadvantage to them and, alone, less dangerous to democracy, the US, and the free world then they are. Namely:
(a) Trump seems to have large potential for inconveniencing them: already unpredictable and reckless, he is now quite old and showing signs of losing mental acuity, making his reckless statements translate more frequently than they did in previous years to putting his foot in his own mouth, rather than purely fomenting chaos. For example, his statement during the State of the Union, that Musk was, in fact the head of DOGE mere days after the administration denied that this was the case in court, resulting in the administration and loyal media engaging in backtracking and cover-up attempts in the subsequent days; and
(b) Trump is absolutely less dangerous, independently, than they are. He does not act in accordance with any coherent world view or ideology and believes in nothing transcendent of himself. With himself being his highest value, his other values and objectives don't involve anything grander or more ambitious than maximizing publicity and attention, entertaining himself by causing outrage and throwing fuel on the flames of societal chaos, and exploiting the status and benefits that accrue from the presidency, including his clear love of having other wealthy and famous people groveling, kissing his feet, and flattering him as sycophants in a King's court. This lack of any coherent world view or end goal--indeed, his level of narcissism is such that he barely cares about how what he says will impact anything the very next day, let alone caring about the more distant future--makes it more difficult for him, independently, to cause any lasting damage or make any drastic, lasting changes. Hence why his first term--taking January 6 out of the equation--was rather anti-climatic, filled with plenty of inflammatory and outrageous statements and social media posts, but not actually amounting to many lasting, impactful changes. Most people--even his own administration--simply didn't take all that much he said very seriously and, by the time that became clear, he cared so little about the impact of his words that he had already moved on to the next thing.
For these reasons, take away Musk, Vance, etc., and Trump is what he was in his first term--a malignant narcissist and pathological liar, but who is now even older and less mentally "with it," and thus even further lacks the conviction, the energy, or the motivation to even care to put in the work to develop a cohesive world view and implement a plan for a future that he will not live to see and, therefore, about which he simply does not care.
But, on the contrary, if you take Trump out of the equation, the threat level at the very least does not change and--in my opinion--more likely, actually increases because that leaves the country with:
(1) Now VP and then President Vance: a young man with potential for a long political career, Vance is an extension and creation of Peter Thiel and for whom Thiel certainly expects a return on his investment. Vance has, many times in the past, been open about his illiberal and antidemocratic beliefs. Additionally, Vance, unlike his predecessor, is competent, calculating, and a "true believer" in those NRx/illiberal ideologies which Thiel helped inculcate in him;
(2) Peter Thiel: King-maker, Machiavellian architect, and owner of a private tech empire on which the US government has depended and for which it has paid millions upon millions in government contracts for defense and intelligence. Thiel not only shares the NRx/Dark Enlightenment ideas of Musk and the others, but has spent decades consistently and with both academic precision and chilling eschatological tone authoring essays, publishing op-eds, and giving speeches on these beliefs--about his belief that democracy is degenerative and in imminent decline, his disdain for the "unthinking demos", his theory that the Enlightenment and the institutions that were built upon it are a great historical fraud being perpetuated at the expense of the flourishing of "western civilization", and his conviction that the only way to remedy this is to "immanentize the eschaton" or hasten the "apokálypsis"--to cause civilizational cataclysm, so the technocratic "new world order" can be built in the ashes of the old. Thiel has also actively used his money and status to facilitate the spread of these ideologies amongst the younger generation of the new right through funding events, forums, etc., In short, Thiel is, so manifestly unlike Trump, a man with a single-minded, steadfast commitment to planning, coordinating, and facilitating the implementation of a decades-long plan to make his ideologies a reality;
(3) Musk: Musk holds NRx ideologies combined with his disturbing TESCREAL/accelerationist views. He also has a vast privately-owned apparatus, through X, by which he can control the narrative and "flood the zone with sh*t", exacerbating the spread of misinformation. Musk's other tech companies give him additional financial and social capital--to the polity as well as to the government--and now, in virtue of his extra-legal position of power and DOGE, has accrued additional power (more than any private citizen ever has in the US) by infiltrating the White House and, rapidly and successfully, liquidating and privatizing critical government infrastructure and public services, exacerbating instability and dysfunction while making his and his fellow technocrats' private tech/industry companies indispensable to the government for the continued administration of that infrastructure and those services and consolidating power in a unitary executive; and
(4) The other PayPal Mafia/Silicon Valley and Crypto elites who have been given cabinet positions, such as "Crypto Czar" David Sacks, and those who are more in the shadows/not in a public, governmental role--e.g., Andreessen, Srinivasan, Horowitz, etc.--who hold the same ideologies and end goals and also possess the dangerous wealth, power, and influence that comes with their successful tech/industry empires.
I fear that if people do not soon start really understanding that this does not begin or end with Trump or with Trump as an agent of the Kremlin, and seeing, instead, that there are extremely powerful, insidious sources far closer to home who have been planning and laying the groundwork for all of this for decades, who have immense private resources at their disposal, who have made many of our government's critical infrastructures and functions dependent on their technology/companies and made many of our elected officials beholden to them through their political financial contributions--establishment democrats and GOP alike--, and who have now managed to literally compromise the highest levels of our government and are now executing the more obvious and dangerous aspects of the plan through what appears to be a version of the "shock and awe" strategy--carrying out these drastic actions with such rapid speed and with such disregard for destruction (or outright intention to cause instability and destruction) that it literally incapacitates our ability, as nation, to respond and resist, or even psychologically wrap our heads around what is happening. If we continue just chalking this up to that incompetent, unstable, reckless narcissist Trump, I believe we are giving them a huge advantage. What we are up against is far more formidable and dangerous than a single 78 year old, unhealthy, lazy, narcissist.
Yes, so I get that the plan to hollow out democracy has the what and the how and needs the why, but what remains missing is the forecast for its application and its implementation. This, I believe, is critical in understanding what we’re in store for in the immediate and short term. Yes, they’ve taken the reins of power and are attempting to execute the dystopian dream you’ve described but they’re going to need a substantial amount of human resources to carry it out. How does that occur without significant buy-in by the knowledge workers and the enforcers? Where are those pieces and how ready are they in putting them into place? At best, Heritage has 50,000 goons vetted to slot into roles formerly occupied by knowledgeable people. How long before we start seeing a collapse rather than a finely tuned fascist machine relegating us to our destiny? How do market forces come into play that upset this plan? It’s going to take a lot more than tech-bros, Proud Boys and Christian Nationalists to corral 330 million people spread out over 3,794,083 square miles. Is the military going to do it? Is there that level of loyalty to a draft dodger and a Nazi Afrikaner? Intent is one thing; execution is another. I’m sure owning a casino is a good investment for many, but didn’t work out so well for Dear Leader. Why will it be different this time?
Noah is a neoliberal. He is young enough to have been educated under neoliberalism and all he knows is embedded in that way of thinking. I see neoliberalism as a type of economic culture.
I use historical cycles as one of the frames for my thinking about historical events. To learn from history one must identify period analogous to today. But how does one find an *objective* analogy. One can always find a historical analogy to support whatever policy one already supports. This is why cycles are useful. You find a collect of cycles that you have investigated and found to be valid to some degree and use them to find analogies. You look for causal agents for these cycles to see if they are operative in the same way today as a second check.
If you do that you can get an idea of what is going on and how these times worked out in the past and select from the past examples the best way to proceed. In theory of course. In practice you can never find a really close match and things are always different. Anyway our problem right now is we are at the end of a secular cycle crisis period. What Trump and Musk are trying to do a pretty standard approach to these things. Based on past outcomes from such periods we would be best advised not to proceed all these lines because all of them lead to very large numbers of people getting killed in nasty ways.
But, we are a democratic republic and in America there is another cycle that is operative. This one holds that Democrats will probably regain power in 2028 and when they do so they need to establish a dispensation, and four years later there will be someone worse than Trump and the probably of avoiding the large numbers of people getting killed goes way down.
So Democrats, liberals and leftists have to get their heads out of their asses. I would recommend people reading my substack to get familiar with these ideas and either reject them, discuss them with ideas for modification or start to use them to build a coherent Democratic ideology. I start with this post
Good stuff. I recommend "The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate" (parts 1 &2) at unlimitedhangout.com for anyone interested in looking further into what's being highlighted here.
The tension between ‘what’ and ‘why’ you are calling out here has a tertiary element: ‘who’. Focusing on the descriptive as ‘what’ is quite comfortable brushing away intent because it doesn’t really believe there is a ‘who’ acting, its all impersonal inputs and systems mushing together to create an output. That creates a clarity that is comforting. Focusing on the ‘why’ generally requires a ‘who’ because we personify intent. An ideological project requires someone who wants that ideology. As a result, ‘why’ analyses tend towards the conspiratorial- it’s a master plan of Yarvin or Thiel or project 2025– take your pick of other shadowy figures orchestrating events. Much of the ‘why’ discourse frustrates me because it just cedes far too much agency to these figures. Musk *is* pushing us in an ideological direction, but I am not convinced he thinks very hard about ‘why’.
We need a way to think and talk about institutional and systemic intent. It’s a fundamentally alien concept because we associate intent so strongly as a human characteristic. But systems exert pressure, have gradients of flow that push outcomes in ways indistinguishable from intent. It’s the only way you get masses of distinct actors to coalesce into a single project that doesn’t rely on orchestration and cabal. When that results in something positive, we often call it a movement. But in the current case, where the outcome is bad, it is too easy to focus on the individuals since they give us someone to blame. Both are wrong in part. We need to learn how to deal with the systemic ‘who’ or else both our ‘what’ and ‘why’ be stuck, unable to synthesize.
It’s been a full decade now since Nick Hanauer wrote that the pitchforks are coming. These guys saw the writing on the wall well before the masses. (Helps when you control what writing the masses get to see.)
I’ve seen it repeated recently that Americans have freedom of opinion and illusion of choice. These tech oligarchs have just destroyed the American government so “We The People” (My God that is cringy) can no longer serve and care for ourselves. Instead we need a device/app/subscription for every function of society.
I’ve always viewed the stock market as soft diffused slavery in the manner with which the owners take unearned capital off of the backs of the labor of the Less-Fortunate.
But late stage capitalism has now collapsed and we are now in Post-Fall America. Technofeudalism is not soft or escapable. They were selling monthly subscriptions for personal water-filters during the Super Bowl. Probably the same entity who lobbied to recently repeal our nation’s water protections. They would forces us to buy (RENT!) fresh air if they could.
These failures at humanity tech oligarchs see us as their cattle. Debt camps are around the corner, and not only will they use the camps for widespread labor, but also for their vanity projects. These tech oligarchs want to be pharoahs with giant monuments proclaiming their conquests and immortality.
How an ideology is described by the subject themselves, compared to how the ideology manifests in material ways, compared to how the ideology is interpreted by someone of an opposing or at least non-aligned ideology: Somewhere in this sandwich of interpretation we may find a useful framework. The shadow of the subject's belief systems, the gap between what they feel is true and what the results of their actions truly are...and the mirror vision - how their ideology becomes a warped and twisted thing when viewed by someone with a completely different foundational starting point. Musk is the subject, Noah is the material observer, and you are the alt-mirror...at least that's how it seems to me when I read your post. Each element alone is useful but has large gaping holes. All 3 elements together aren't perfect of course, but allow for a non-polarized overview at least...and a non-zero-sum, multi-polar understanding is desperately needed these days. The problem is our minds will always default to reduce things to a binary...that's why we love the debate yes/no format and yell past each other in <200 character billboard-style quotes, form red and blue trenchlines etc. We want a yes/no and an enemy to throw stones at. Our technology has evolved rapidly, but our minds & our "inner spaces" still haven't even invented the wheel yet.
This is your best work!
You prove yourself to be a thousand times wiser than Noah. He is smart, no doubt; and smart people tend to associate and identify with the likes of Musk. But he exemplifies a type of small mindedness that is all too typical of political thinking under the regime that is expiring right now. It’s the small mindedness of academic economics and political science. That type of thinking is why we have so few actual leaders right now.
Yep, yep, yep! I like Noahopinion for many discussions but you articulate the “theology” on this one. If we stay muddled in elementary interpretations of what’s happening with the techbros we will be surprised when we are eventually clubbed to death in the final phases of their planned social collapse. Not even sure Trump fully grasps it. Or anticipates it.
Thank you for posting this. I know people who read Noah’s work (I also read it my self). They told me I wouldn’t like it, because it’s more “centrist”. Now I wonder if it’s not centrist, but actually a “lack of desire” to analyze the why AND the impending impact. It’s hard to acknowledge that the “great American experiment” is being actively undone.
I stopped subscribing to Noapinion or following Noah Smith when he published his piece "No, you are not on Indigenous land" last November. That post revealed the limits of his politics, and I found others who cover the ongoing polycrisis very well without throwing Indigenous justice movements under the bus.
Sorry in advance for the long response but you have touched on something that has been weighing on me quite heavily and quite constantly over the past few weeks. Namely, seeing so much of the general public and mainstream media still desperately trying to explain all of this by way of blaming the Trumpian narcissism and incompetence we saw in his first term, identifying him as the primary--and often sole--source of this threat, arguing that he must be removed. I keep trying to get the message across that removing Trump will not eradicate this problem and may, through anointing Vance as President--actually allow them to more efficiently and precisely achieve their goals.
To use Peter Thiel's language, Musk and the other technocratic oligarchs seem to see Trump as a tool--as chaotic, irrational, and reckless enough to act as the destabilizing force necessary to break the "katechon" and immanentize the eschaton--e.g., revealing the dysfunction and instability of democracy to the extent that it is pushed to the brink of collapse, allowing for Thiel's "apokálypsis"--or Yarvin/Land's "hard reboot"/"reset" they see as necessary to build their new, oligarchic/technocratic order. However, it it is not hard to see that sometimes, for the same reasons, he is a disadvantage to them and, alone, less dangerous to democracy, the US, and the free world then they are. Namely:
(a) Trump seems to have large potential for inconveniencing them: already unpredictable and reckless, he is now quite old and showing signs of losing mental acuity, making his reckless statements translate more frequently than they did in previous years to putting his foot in his own mouth, rather than purely fomenting chaos. For example, his statement during the State of the Union, that Musk was, in fact the head of DOGE mere days after the administration denied that this was the case in court, resulting in the administration and loyal media engaging in backtracking and cover-up attempts in the subsequent days; and
(b) Trump is absolutely less dangerous, independently, than they are. He does not act in accordance with any coherent world view or ideology and believes in nothing transcendent of himself. With himself being his highest value, his other values and objectives don't involve anything grander or more ambitious than maximizing publicity and attention, entertaining himself by causing outrage and throwing fuel on the flames of societal chaos, and exploiting the status and benefits that accrue from the presidency, including his clear love of having other wealthy and famous people groveling, kissing his feet, and flattering him as sycophants in a King's court. This lack of any coherent world view or end goal--indeed, his level of narcissism is such that he barely cares about how what he says will impact anything the very next day, let alone caring about the more distant future--makes it more difficult for him, independently, to cause any lasting damage or make any drastic, lasting changes. Hence why his first term--taking January 6 out of the equation--was rather anti-climatic, filled with plenty of inflammatory and outrageous statements and social media posts, but not actually amounting to many lasting, impactful changes. Most people--even his own administration--simply didn't take all that much he said very seriously and, by the time that became clear, he cared so little about the impact of his words that he had already moved on to the next thing.
For these reasons, take away Musk, Vance, etc., and Trump is what he was in his first term--a malignant narcissist and pathological liar, but who is now even older and less mentally "with it," and thus even further lacks the conviction, the energy, or the motivation to even care to put in the work to develop a cohesive world view and implement a plan for a future that he will not live to see and, therefore, about which he simply does not care.
But, on the contrary, if you take Trump out of the equation, the threat level at the very least does not change and--in my opinion--more likely, actually increases because that leaves the country with:
(1) Now VP and then President Vance: a young man with potential for a long political career, Vance is an extension and creation of Peter Thiel and for whom Thiel certainly expects a return on his investment. Vance has, many times in the past, been open about his illiberal and antidemocratic beliefs. Additionally, Vance, unlike his predecessor, is competent, calculating, and a "true believer" in those NRx/illiberal ideologies which Thiel helped inculcate in him;
(2) Peter Thiel: King-maker, Machiavellian architect, and owner of a private tech empire on which the US government has depended and for which it has paid millions upon millions in government contracts for defense and intelligence. Thiel not only shares the NRx/Dark Enlightenment ideas of Musk and the others, but has spent decades consistently and with both academic precision and chilling eschatological tone authoring essays, publishing op-eds, and giving speeches on these beliefs--about his belief that democracy is degenerative and in imminent decline, his disdain for the "unthinking demos", his theory that the Enlightenment and the institutions that were built upon it are a great historical fraud being perpetuated at the expense of the flourishing of "western civilization", and his conviction that the only way to remedy this is to "immanentize the eschaton" or hasten the "apokálypsis"--to cause civilizational cataclysm, so the technocratic "new world order" can be built in the ashes of the old. Thiel has also actively used his money and status to facilitate the spread of these ideologies amongst the younger generation of the new right through funding events, forums, etc., In short, Thiel is, so manifestly unlike Trump, a man with a single-minded, steadfast commitment to planning, coordinating, and facilitating the implementation of a decades-long plan to make his ideologies a reality;
(3) Musk: Musk holds NRx ideologies combined with his disturbing TESCREAL/accelerationist views. He also has a vast privately-owned apparatus, through X, by which he can control the narrative and "flood the zone with sh*t", exacerbating the spread of misinformation. Musk's other tech companies give him additional financial and social capital--to the polity as well as to the government--and now, in virtue of his extra-legal position of power and DOGE, has accrued additional power (more than any private citizen ever has in the US) by infiltrating the White House and, rapidly and successfully, liquidating and privatizing critical government infrastructure and public services, exacerbating instability and dysfunction while making his and his fellow technocrats' private tech/industry companies indispensable to the government for the continued administration of that infrastructure and those services and consolidating power in a unitary executive; and
(4) The other PayPal Mafia/Silicon Valley and Crypto elites who have been given cabinet positions, such as "Crypto Czar" David Sacks, and those who are more in the shadows/not in a public, governmental role--e.g., Andreessen, Srinivasan, Horowitz, etc.--who hold the same ideologies and end goals and also possess the dangerous wealth, power, and influence that comes with their successful tech/industry empires.
I fear that if people do not soon start really understanding that this does not begin or end with Trump or with Trump as an agent of the Kremlin, and seeing, instead, that there are extremely powerful, insidious sources far closer to home who have been planning and laying the groundwork for all of this for decades, who have immense private resources at their disposal, who have made many of our government's critical infrastructures and functions dependent on their technology/companies and made many of our elected officials beholden to them through their political financial contributions--establishment democrats and GOP alike--, and who have now managed to literally compromise the highest levels of our government and are now executing the more obvious and dangerous aspects of the plan through what appears to be a version of the "shock and awe" strategy--carrying out these drastic actions with such rapid speed and with such disregard for destruction (or outright intention to cause instability and destruction) that it literally incapacitates our ability, as nation, to respond and resist, or even psychologically wrap our heads around what is happening. If we continue just chalking this up to that incompetent, unstable, reckless narcissist Trump, I believe we are giving them a huge advantage. What we are up against is far more formidable and dangerous than a single 78 year old, unhealthy, lazy, narcissist.
Yes, so I get that the plan to hollow out democracy has the what and the how and needs the why, but what remains missing is the forecast for its application and its implementation. This, I believe, is critical in understanding what we’re in store for in the immediate and short term. Yes, they’ve taken the reins of power and are attempting to execute the dystopian dream you’ve described but they’re going to need a substantial amount of human resources to carry it out. How does that occur without significant buy-in by the knowledge workers and the enforcers? Where are those pieces and how ready are they in putting them into place? At best, Heritage has 50,000 goons vetted to slot into roles formerly occupied by knowledgeable people. How long before we start seeing a collapse rather than a finely tuned fascist machine relegating us to our destiny? How do market forces come into play that upset this plan? It’s going to take a lot more than tech-bros, Proud Boys and Christian Nationalists to corral 330 million people spread out over 3,794,083 square miles. Is the military going to do it? Is there that level of loyalty to a draft dodger and a Nazi Afrikaner? Intent is one thing; execution is another. I’m sure owning a casino is a good investment for many, but didn’t work out so well for Dear Leader. Why will it be different this time?
Exhibit A: https://open.substack.com/pub/davekarpf/p/the-tech-barons-have-a-blueprint?r=4pli7r&utm_medium=ios
Noah is a neoliberal. He is young enough to have been educated under neoliberalism and all he knows is embedded in that way of thinking. I see neoliberalism as a type of economic culture.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical
I use historical cycles as one of the frames for my thinking about historical events. To learn from history one must identify period analogous to today. But how does one find an *objective* analogy. One can always find a historical analogy to support whatever policy one already supports. This is why cycles are useful. You find a collect of cycles that you have investigated and found to be valid to some degree and use them to find analogies. You look for causal agents for these cycles to see if they are operative in the same way today as a second check.
If you do that you can get an idea of what is going on and how these times worked out in the past and select from the past examples the best way to proceed. In theory of course. In practice you can never find a really close match and things are always different. Anyway our problem right now is we are at the end of a secular cycle crisis period. What Trump and Musk are trying to do a pretty standard approach to these things. Based on past outcomes from such periods we would be best advised not to proceed all these lines because all of them lead to very large numbers of people getting killed in nasty ways.
But, we are a democratic republic and in America there is another cycle that is operative. This one holds that Democrats will probably regain power in 2028 and when they do so they need to establish a dispensation, and four years later there will be someone worse than Trump and the probably of avoiding the large numbers of people getting killed goes way down.
So Democrats, liberals and leftists have to get their heads out of their asses. I would recommend people reading my substack to get familiar with these ideas and either reject them, discuss them with ideas for modification or start to use them to build a coherent Democratic ideology. I start with this post
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-proposed-democratic-economic-vision
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-a-political-dispensation
Good stuff. I recommend "The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate" (parts 1 &2) at unlimitedhangout.com for anyone interested in looking further into what's being highlighted here.
The tension between ‘what’ and ‘why’ you are calling out here has a tertiary element: ‘who’. Focusing on the descriptive as ‘what’ is quite comfortable brushing away intent because it doesn’t really believe there is a ‘who’ acting, its all impersonal inputs and systems mushing together to create an output. That creates a clarity that is comforting. Focusing on the ‘why’ generally requires a ‘who’ because we personify intent. An ideological project requires someone who wants that ideology. As a result, ‘why’ analyses tend towards the conspiratorial- it’s a master plan of Yarvin or Thiel or project 2025– take your pick of other shadowy figures orchestrating events. Much of the ‘why’ discourse frustrates me because it just cedes far too much agency to these figures. Musk *is* pushing us in an ideological direction, but I am not convinced he thinks very hard about ‘why’.
We need a way to think and talk about institutional and systemic intent. It’s a fundamentally alien concept because we associate intent so strongly as a human characteristic. But systems exert pressure, have gradients of flow that push outcomes in ways indistinguishable from intent. It’s the only way you get masses of distinct actors to coalesce into a single project that doesn’t rely on orchestration and cabal. When that results in something positive, we often call it a movement. But in the current case, where the outcome is bad, it is too easy to focus on the individuals since they give us someone to blame. Both are wrong in part. We need to learn how to deal with the systemic ‘who’ or else both our ‘what’ and ‘why’ be stuck, unable to synthesize.
Oh god. The deeper you go the shittier it gets
It’s been a full decade now since Nick Hanauer wrote that the pitchforks are coming. These guys saw the writing on the wall well before the masses. (Helps when you control what writing the masses get to see.)
I’ve seen it repeated recently that Americans have freedom of opinion and illusion of choice. These tech oligarchs have just destroyed the American government so “We The People” (My God that is cringy) can no longer serve and care for ourselves. Instead we need a device/app/subscription for every function of society.
I’ve always viewed the stock market as soft diffused slavery in the manner with which the owners take unearned capital off of the backs of the labor of the Less-Fortunate.
But late stage capitalism has now collapsed and we are now in Post-Fall America. Technofeudalism is not soft or escapable. They were selling monthly subscriptions for personal water-filters during the Super Bowl. Probably the same entity who lobbied to recently repeal our nation’s water protections. They would forces us to buy (RENT!) fresh air if they could.
These failures at humanity tech oligarchs see us as their cattle. Debt camps are around the corner, and not only will they use the camps for widespread labor, but also for their vanity projects. These tech oligarchs want to be pharoahs with giant monuments proclaiming their conquests and immortality.
How an ideology is described by the subject themselves, compared to how the ideology manifests in material ways, compared to how the ideology is interpreted by someone of an opposing or at least non-aligned ideology: Somewhere in this sandwich of interpretation we may find a useful framework. The shadow of the subject's belief systems, the gap between what they feel is true and what the results of their actions truly are...and the mirror vision - how their ideology becomes a warped and twisted thing when viewed by someone with a completely different foundational starting point. Musk is the subject, Noah is the material observer, and you are the alt-mirror...at least that's how it seems to me when I read your post. Each element alone is useful but has large gaping holes. All 3 elements together aren't perfect of course, but allow for a non-polarized overview at least...and a non-zero-sum, multi-polar understanding is desperately needed these days. The problem is our minds will always default to reduce things to a binary...that's why we love the debate yes/no format and yell past each other in <200 character billboard-style quotes, form red and blue trenchlines etc. We want a yes/no and an enemy to throw stones at. Our technology has evolved rapidly, but our minds & our "inner spaces" still haven't even invented the wheel yet.
Oof. Orwell was a prophet.