These SV creeps are so high on their own supply that they live in an atmosphere of pure, recycled bullshit. For just one example: the analysis of the 2008 crash is just wrong... it was just the allowance of predatory and high-risk mortgages... pushed by people who wanted to profit from that risk.
Virtually none of these ideas are peer reviewed in any real way or have been tested at scale or rigorously.
And why is Andreesen Horowitz such a breeding ground for assholes? Marc Andreesen wrote 10K lines of shitty browser code once, and he's.... what, now? A sage? FFS.
Too much money and really very middle-brow (and frankly, adolescent) takes and now we're all gonna suffer as a result. Great. They should have been CHALLENGED on their shit ideas, but I guess money insulates you from all that.
Right! Just because they were smart at STEM does not mean they have learned anything about life and humanity. In fact, spending most of your time in front of a screen when you are an adolescent stunts you in that area.
Do you mean, how fictional enemies would make people vote on slope, outta Overton window, accepting what they'd never, if they weren't scared and lied to?
Totally agree with you. And yes, it would seem that stupid amounts of money insulates well and often causes a person to commit the fatal flaw of believing their own press releases. I’m so completely dejected.
I remember a t-shirt an old web dev colleague used to wear in the late 90s that said “The geeks shall inherit the earth” and hoping it was true because I was a geek too. Ugh.
Indeed, layers of sub-prime mortgage portfolios all headed south at the same time... a massive failure to regulate instruments based on algorithms that no one truly understood. Now the door to crypto world is being thrown wide open, with banks encouraged or forced to offer on ramps and off ramps... and the the crash when it comes will make 2008 pale in comparison.
That’s wasn’t a coincidence…it had to do with elevated CPI distorted by the Katrina supply shock. Bernanke was the wrong person at the wrong time because he was a true believer in Bushism which is lovin’ Jesus and a desire to slaughter innocent Muslims cures all ills. Bernanke agreed more with the slaughtering Muslims than the lovin’ Jesus part. 😉
It was the failure of the rating agencies more so. It wasn’t the mortgages themselves that were the problem. If banks were holding the mortgages, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad. And it would have been substantially less expensive for the government to just pay off the mortgages.
It was that they were packaged into Mortgage Backed Securities. Rating agencies rated them AAA in order to keep getting Wall Street’s business. The mortgage company was also removed from any consequence at this point.
The banks held the riskier tranche of the MBS (it was the first to have the interest payments stopped if the mortgage holders weren’t making payments).
In a lawsuit, the rating agencies defended themselves using the First Amendment. The rating was their belief. People shouldn’t rely on it.
Another factor was they were using “mark to market” accounting. This is great as assets increase in value. The bank looks wealthier. It can extend itself more.
When risk assessors thought the banks were too risky, the banks said their losses were limited because a computer would sell the stock after the price had dropped a by a particular amount or percentage. Acceptable losses were determine ahead of time.
Sounds fine, right? So the stocks dropped in price, the computer placed a sell order. And … there were no buyers. Price of the stock continued to drop. With mark to market accounting, if no one will buy it, the market price is $0 (zero). The banks no longer met their reserve requirements. The banks now have a liquidity problem.
Similar thing happened with the bank failures due to the Fed Res increasing rates. The banks had to liquidate bonds to generate cash. And the bonds were sold at huge discounts because their interest payments were so much lower than current rates.
One of the reasons for the ridiculous bailout package was in a bankruptcy, the company going bankrupt sells its assets. Usually at a severe discount. Well, if your assets are stocks. And the assets are being sold at a severe discount, what happens to the values of the same stock held by a different bank. Again, it was “mark to market” evaluation.
The proximate cause of 2008 Global Financial Crisis was extended elevated CPI that peaked at 5.6% in July 2008. The underlying cause of that elevated CPI was an energy crisis that Katrina supply shock distorted the data due to base effect. The lower income households were distressed as elevated CPI degraded disposable income. Greenspan and Bernanke switched to core PCE in 2000 and in their hubris and deference to Bush ignored CPI to the detriment of the economy.
All movements seeking to shape society on this scale begin with a quasi-utopian vision of an idealized society in which their highest, self-defined values can be realized. In this case, the roots of that vision can be found in the dot.com boom of the ‘90s. Silicon Valley became a distinct subculture infused with the religion of entrepreneurship. The ideal life - that of tech billionaire- resulted from creating a new form of tech-the more disruptive the better-and monetizing it. Regulation was an impediment; government created drag. This positioned maximizing enterprise value (for which efficiency and disruption were key imperatives) as the highest of callings. For those like Thiel who succeeded in grabbing the brass ring (albeit randomly and fortuitously ) their atypical experience in their insular village morphed, through a combination of hindsight, narcissism and arrogance, into a supposed model for all human existence.
This is what happens to a society that favors MBAs over liberal arts degree.
There were many during the emphasis of the publicly outed worship and adoration of money, and its academic status expressed as “Masters” of Business “Administration”;
who were sounding the alarm bells when they were but “canaries” in the coal mine of Academia.
You have succinctly and successfully pinpointed the foundation of the present day dominant technocracy :
It's not just MBA-CEO power worship; it's our serious imbalance in our respect for life. Trump/Musk-Thiel/QAnon are the West's version of the Taliban. Beliefs that greed and power are the most important forces are what the West is choking on. Our greed and thirst for power exist without holistic respect for life. Americans have long accepted bigotry and disrespect toward the feminine, the earth itself, animals, and so on. Pilgrims hanged Quakers for not believing as they did. Early Americans killed Native Americans they didn't understand because they weren't interested in understanding them. Thich Nhat Hanh, Jesus, and countless others have always pointed to our interconnectedness. We don't believe we'll be eaten or trampled upon until it happens to us, sometimes, then our hearts open again.
Just my thoughts on this.Power without wisdom or morals. We're devolving back to the law of the jungle. They forget that there's always a bigger fish out there. Neocons create "disruption" (destruction) that they can exploit. We used to call them vulture or disaster capitalists.
There's no such thing as a Sovereign Individual. I call them freeloaders because we all use shared resources like roads, airports, and systems among many other things.
Bitcoin is inherently unstable, worse than Las Vegas or a lottery. Just look at its rapid, chaotic ups and downs. The few large, powerful people win, the vast majority of small investors get screwed. What will they do when the next Carrington Event occurs and destroys most, if not all, computer tech? Poof goes their Bitcoins forever.
What Theil and Hoppe are really talking about is techno-feudalism IMHO. Qui Bono? 🤔
We've already seen that all highly efficient systems are extremely brittle. There are few redundancies to prevent total system failure. We're still feeling the effects on the supply chains from Covid, as one recent example. A somewhat inefficient system offers the chance to limit system destruction. Highly efficient systems are naked and unarmed against Black Swan events because economists forget that the far ends of their curves hide dragons. So they ignore them at everyone's peril. They call it "highly efficient." I bluntly call it bullshit. 💩
All these infantile tech “bros” have done is set up the complete failure of this nation. We have already lost the trust of our allies, and the respect of the world.
Also, their entire system requires that the masses (apparently consisting only of male property holders) be sedated with sports entertainment, games, mindless tv, and a submissive female and children at home. Women are over 50% of the population, and we have twice the number of college degrees as men. We are not going to take kindly to being put back into slavery to keep the “masses” and the “overlords” happy.
Their entire premise that Democracy is fundamentally unworkable because it cannot process information quickly enough in this day and age is only partly true. Democracy can harness technology in the same way the “tech bros” can,
there would need to be a new department that synthesized all input and made recommendations. The coup that is going on is an unconstitutional grab for power and wealth. It is not based on any altruistic concepts whatsoever, despite their claims.
I’m very ignorant about crypto as well and I hope to remain so forever. But it’s just code. Ie not real. That has to be stored somewhere. Twitters servers hold all of our data and they would be a great place to set some soft winter boots
The Zero Hedge insight is critical, I think, that the Yarvinites and those like them stepped out of their ridiculously narrow, abstruse and isolated areas of expertise, which would have made them clerks for life at another time, and into a realm they were incapable of understanding. And the insights about an isolated world of circularity and self-reinforcing nonsense not only divorced from reality but DEPENDENT on being divorced from reality. That is, stripped of humanity. Their fantasies can't exist in the light of day so they must suck the 'real' world where suffering and human life inconveniently matter into theirs in which human life not only means nothing, much of it must be eliminated to realize acceptable 'efficiency' and purity in their techno New Jerusalem.
Which is where they meld with the Calvinist religious nuts who also despise humanity and creation for its imperfection and messiness. At the deepest level I think this is about arrestedness and authority issues, a bunch of guys who never escaped adolescence and got ridiculously rich. The earlier non-techno version was the Kochs and their clan who wanted a license to plunder. Even those people are along for the ride now or Nikki Haley would be president. She was nuts but not apocalyptically nuts. I will say, I know some of the people who got graphics off the ground and they're some of the nicest and most generally accomplished people I've ever met. This is a narrow little group of maniacs even among techies. But they're capable of destroying everything.
I don't know what the techno boys study but the rise of markets is entirely interwoven with 'government' authority, regulation and security enforcement. Some authority, at any rate, because market security was THE precondition. And they like to think markets flourish in the absence of authority and maintenance when in fact they collapse. The etymological root behind 'autism' means isolation. I don't want to push this but something is going on there. I have a friend who's himself a coder and he manages a team he says are better at it than he is but they're all in some way 'on the spectrum' and it's kind of a given among them. He said they're mostly able to maintain marriages and have relatively normal lives. They would have once been eccentrics.
He's their manager for a reason. He gets the bigger view. You could put him in charge of large social groups and it would be fine. His coders, probably not. There would almost certainly be some inadvertent harm. This crop of nuts of the Muskian persuasion are way out in a tail somewhere, notably empathetically challenged and they have no business in positions where they can get innocent people hurt. They'll get people deliberately killed. It's like a video game to them. They will destroy innumerable lives and never look back, someone like Musk perhaps taking pleasure in it and feeling he's a part in an inevitable cycle involving burning everything down and rebuilding from there. I guess he's a rebirther, but it all needs to be burned to the ground first.
Take of the gloves and push it because you are dead on. Every one of their world views and actions can be explained by the inability to process and interact in a neurologically normal way. They can't process nuance or gray area. It breaks their mental code. Everything must be distilled to zeros and ones. There is a reason they can manage binary values but not people. Society rewarded that ability with power and wealth. Now they would like to remake the world into something cleaner and more digital that makes them comfortable. I would empathize with them over the human experiences they will never have if they weren't so obsessed with destroying those experiences for all of us.
The good news learned after spending far to much time in cubicles working across from them is that one swift blow to the head leaves them stimming in a corner for hours. For now let them touch the proverbial stove and remove any doubt of beneficent intention.
Let’s call it what it is - technofascism. At the core of all fascism is a deep disdain for humanity and all its complicated messiness. The horror is, yes, many of these brologarchs are, like Musk, on the autism spectrum. If the first step is to remove the chance of “human error”, is the next step to remove the “erring humans”? What is the “final solution” of this “evolution” of emotionless ubermensch?
It's literally a competition. Have you noticed how competitive they are? They've been playing video games in virtual worlds since they were young, having cyberpunk fantasies and have devoted their whole lives and supposed superior IQs to creating that dystopian fantasy world.
Hackers. We need an army of white hat hackers like the ones who attended Hackercon in Las Vegas last August who spent a weekend uncovering and listing almost 3 pages of backdoor vulnerabilities in the voting systems in counties across the US. I found that article after I was watching the supposed "Red Wave" in swing states and it just did not track. I literally can figure that out sitting on my couch and the Democratic party leaders can't. Now we are fucked.
One thing you can do is copy the link and send it to both of your senators and all of your reps with a quick note saying that in order for them to understand what is happening, and how to fight it, they need to read the article and share it with others in power.
In fact, I would encourage you to send the link to everyone you know.
Yes - this! I started learning and reading about this last September. I’m now sending information to everyone I know! This article is thorough and is my new go-to on the matter.
I would say he's got them operating under his "seeming" authority when he and they are actually operating outside the scope of his allotted, constitutional power as POTUS.
Yes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The narcissism of the generation that spawned Yarvin . . .ugh. He is definitely a late capitalist product producing narcissistic gibberish. I watched all I could take of an interview with him. His logic could be deconstructed in 5 minutes. I would give him a C minus for effort, but of course he thinks he is a rogue"intellectual" , the Nietzsche of our age and above the peer review process. If you don't agree then you just don't "get it."
How long would it take a quantum computer to unravel blockchains? It seems a fragile base if N Korea can crack it now and more hardware/software advances in the near future across the globe. I worked with a genius machinist and he would tell the designers ‘It’s hard to see around corners with Autocad.’
In these "perfect" worlds of AI, algorithms and cryptocurrency, with tech elites ruling the rest of humanity with their own autocratic, "ownership", business model, governing tactics, what is life like for the non-elites? Why are all these libertarian models built to install power in a only a few? When have autocratic elites ever considered the quality of life for, say, the 98% of people not "elitist"? What is wrong with having a society in which elites - presumably the ones making laws and enforcing them - and the mass of non-elites, all have a similar, not too yawning difference, in their income and benefits? So that the quality of life is basically the same in terms of wages, education, housing, health, and satisfaction with their lot in life. I don't get how a world in which a few extremely wealthy elites can lord it over the masses of people who live like serfs, is a good, morally acceptable, functioning, world. Having the mass of humanity live like basically indentured servants or in abject poverty is a horrible world, and a hideous way to live.
The many Christian nationalist cult types seem to like that because they are mind-controlled and acclimated from birth to a feudal "kingdom" with a harsh overlord daddy god. It feels like "home" for them to be a sheep/peasant/serf.
Bingo! I keep waiting for one of them, and we still don't know whether Trump really is bankrupt or not but it could be him, to build themselves a giant golden pyramid. Maybe in Dubai or Texas, but I think they would get an extra thrill from having it built by real slaves.
Master - slave is the most efficient form of “governance”. It’s great if you are the master. That was pretty much the system in South Africa where many of these people are from.
It’s not efficient in the least if by efficient one means—the most effective way to get the results you want. It’s the most exploitative, and maybe it is the most simple in terms of structure—you beat and terrorize people, and only worry about their rebellion if you don’t have enough coercive power—but simplicity is not the kind of efficiency that matters. You have to have complete control over all these people, all the time. You are constantly fighting their attempts to reduce or escape your control. A system where people produce willingly, cooperate willingly, and participate willingly is way more efficient if you want to talk about how to efficiently produce things. If you want to exercise dominance maybe it’s not —but why would that be an efficiency goal? And of course it produces people who are moral nightmares, sick horrible people, and everyone is constantly troubled and lying to themselves, and psychically disrupted by the disgusting brutality of the process. Plus, you waste all the human potential of these individuals you have enslaved.
Yes, when people say "who do they think is going to pick the fruit for hardly any pay and get cancer in the process from the agri chemicals when they make all of the immigrants leave?" and I say "Us, that's why." When you have no way to get food, crappy food that they give you and tell you to be grateful for, you will scrub a toilet and pick the berries. Ironically, people will still somehow find a way cognitively to blame Obama or Biden for that.
"...the culture is described by Banks as space socialism. It features a post-scarcity economy where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is automated. Its members live mainly in spaceships and other off-planet constructs, because its founders wished to avoid the centralised political and corporate power-structures that planet-based economies foster. Most of the planning and administration is done by Minds, very advanced AIs."
The Culture comes up against various other civilizations - religious fundamentalist, expansionist/imperialistic, autocratic etc.
Excellent books - both for entertaining stories and the larger societal issues they deal with.
I love his works. Musk does too, but he only read them on a very superficial level. They aren't just "space operas." In Musk's world, most of the populace would be eliminated because they hold wealth that he wants.
Musk and Co. only want these systemic changes because they expect to be on top. They'd be screaming if they were down here with the rest of us. It's all fun and games to them until they're the powerless ones.
Indeed. Iain M. Banks was a socialist, atheist, humanist - and did what he could to make the world a better place.
And his sci-fi books are entertaining space operas - but they are also philosophical musings on what a good society is, artificial intelligence, aliens (in many senses), what is good character - the right things to do, and the consequences of doing evil, doing wrong - and good.
Yes, to my chagrin Musk has used some the Mind names for his rockets - and as many other things it just shows how fucking clueless he is.
He should read Complicity - or study how a Mind keeps a genocidal criminal in a perpetual purgatory of his own crimes.
We can hope that when the real AI comes it will take its clue from Iain M. Banks - and then all the techbros, fascists, oligarchs, billionaires and mercenary politicians will get exactly what is coming to them.
PS and Feersum Endjinn is a crazy reading experience - going from 'whut' to 'fluent' in a whole different way of writing English.
Yes, and he is a big follower of the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov identifying with the intellectual hero who is a math savant and predicts the probabilities of future events. They all think that they can create an AI that will do this, but there is actually quite a bit of randomness in nature and it is not all ones and zeros. They have been struggling for 80 years to create this so-called artificial intelligence, a name that was created in the 1950s. even when they were able to implement the neural net and then layer the neural net and then feed at massive amounts of information ( aka steal data to scale it), it does not perform like our amazing human brains. The soft technology in our bodies is so much more advanced than what they can create and that really frustrates them. They have been digging this hole for 80 years and pouring trillions of dollars of human energy into it. Even "virtual reality" is something that humans have the innate capacity for natural naturally. Look at the telepathy tapes podcast about the autistic children who all meet in a place on a psychic level. It's truly incredible the latent powers that humans have, that we may have had once and lost or never had, but will never have if they are able to alter our DNA and implant us in ways that affects the harmony of our brains. The machines and drugs are already going a long way to do that, but we need to take our humanness back and discover who we truly are and what we can do before it is too late.
Thanks, intriguing, I read some wiki entries about the books and the cultures (small "c" haha). A post-scarcity society, indeed! A very slight overview suggested age old conflicts of control over beings and what is a proper civilized structure. Thanks for your reply! I will check these out.
Always to make them more money. It's weird to me, when you're already among the wealthiest people on the planet, that you'd crave even more. Jake hits it in the movie Chinatown....
It is definitely an oversight to allow such huge disparities in wealth resources. I think the Eisenhower era tax codes would help if reinstated. After a certain very high amount of income, the tax rate was 90%. Not that it was strictly followed, with exemptions, special business tax breaks, etc. Still, CEOs didn't make hundreds more times what their lowest paid worker made back then. It was 20 times more in the 1960s. Now it's 290 times more, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And with that wealth comes power. It's like a monarchy of billionaires.
Climate catastrophe is human greed and selfishness made into an unstoppable force of nature.
The only consolation is that they are stuck here with everybody else. Even with all the money in the world they will suffer the consequences. At least we can take consolation in that.
That Lord/Serf relationship is precisely what they’re going for. Their worldview brings to mind the novel/movie Elysium. The masses left to their own devices on a garbage dump earth and the elites floating above in their shining city in the sky. They simply don’t CARE.
That is the psychopathy of too much wealth - if you have an obscene (to ones who don't have it) amount, you might think you're a god. And you care nothing for the lives of the "lesser" humans. If you even think they're human. I read a synopsis of the novel Elysium, it didn’t seem the same as the plot of the movie, but maybe the synopsis was not detailed. I haven't seen the movie but will, now, it looks cool from the trailer. When I notice the word Elysium I think of Maximus's line in Gladiator, his allusion to the Greek/Roman after-life of a godly paradise. The movie title is certainly apt for its plot.
Yes, I just did a presentation on this topic in Athens, Greece back in January and the mythological correlations are some of the things that I talked about.
There are still a lot of humans managing AI. It is far from independent in spite of being a project that has sucked the energy out of the "smartest" people and trillions of dollars in the US for almost 80 years. Read the book AI Snake Oil written by two programmers who teach at Princeton now. There are many other books and You Tube convos exposing the scam. Google "Mechanical Turk."
The tech bros had soooo much to lose by Kamala winning. Here's the short:
1. Legislation (lawsuits and laws) and regulations pending about AI chatbot girlfriends making vulnerable people (including children) kill themselves, Teslas killing people (because autonomous driving is bullshit).
2. False advertising/consumer protection issues as well as investment sources getting the distinct vibe they have been strung along and MAJOR errors from products sold to corporations to manage data for cost savings that end up costing more because of fuck-ups from half-baked AI
3. labor movements and questionable out-sourcing in 3rd world (aka "slave labor") with Amazon's Mechanical Turk
4. Environmental legislation and oversight and limits set for the massively intrusive and energy hungry server farms needed to continue scaling the bullshit AI (because "one day it will work and we will have AGI and hopefully it won't kill all of us") as well as oversight on Elwood's satellite web because scientists discovered last year that when they disintegrate in the atmosphere the aluminum particulate combines with the O2 to create big holes.
Outstanding insights. Thank you! A lot of people, wealthy, the power hungry, techies, religious misanthropes, etc., want total control over all people, and zero regulations, of course. I recently watched a very enlightening YouTube video by Blonde Politics called Dark Gothic Maga, from a link of another author (can't recall the name atm, sorry!). She uses plain language detailing what the AI tech overlords want the world to be - a Patchwork of small fiefdoms. Ruled by elite tech dictators - feudalism with serfs. Where, if the population gets too many for resources, masses of people would be hooked up to virtual reality, a la The Matrix - or worse solutions.
A view shared and desired by Vance, his mentors Yarvin and Thiel, and Altman, Musk, et al. It is frightening and horrid and these guys are serious.
What does that world look like for the average person? I don’t understand how destroying the world that enabled your success is beneficial? I am sure they think that the tech and algorithms can make them more powerful but will it stay that way if the technology is destroyed? Isn’t technology a thing that requires servers, energy production etc which can be destroyed. Where as forms of government like democracy, though messy, is an agreed upon belief though inefficient, it can’t be destroyed like a server. I have posted elsewhere the question: If Musk wanted to cut spending and the budget, why would he use programmers and not accountants. I guess this is why…
I have never seen a time in history (or fiction) when the oppressed masses don’t rise up. This stripped down system will leave millions destitute. Do they really think those millions are going to just accept this? Seems like a lot of information about how we got here, but no real predictions about what happens next.
Kinda seems as though THAT'S by design too, don't it? The only "social media" I participate in is Substack now, because it contains useful information, I bailed on the rest of it. It baffles me why so many still participate in Xitter for example,why? It is nothing but pure, unadulterate time-suck, governments, news orgs et al, jesus, I mean, in the late 80s, early 90s, BBSs, Usenet, the early chat programs of MSN, Yahoo etc were fun to "play" on and all, but that's what it primarily was, PLAY.
You expected the supermarket tabloid crap, but if my elected reps started posting in like, alt.usenet.kooks, I'd have been seriously worried, somewhere we crossed a line there, I'm sorry, but to me, SM is STILL something to "play" on, that should never have been taken seriously. That is, imo, the goddamn POTUS should not pe posting shit next to a guy calling himself "cat turd", afaic, that's just BEGGING for trouble. Having a moderated government SM platform, for "official" use would be a better idea.
Sorry this is a little scattered, my brain's swirling in eight different directions after this thoroughly depressing piece. Though it IS the kind of writing Usenet used to be good for, hard to wrap your noodle around it being the actual reality now, in the 90s it would have been just more "creative writing". It all went to hell when a data plan, and a pulse became the only requirements to be on the internet at all, turns out it's the perfect place to condition the soft brain crowd....
I'll probably make a BlueSky account when or if my life calms down a bit. Got a crazy situation rn, really wish I didn't have to deal with the "fourth Reich" on top of it....
We're probably gonna need em, at least, kinda hoping we do, cause it's the only way these guys are leaving in MY humble opinion. Sooner the better, cause once they are "entrenched", it's gonna be a LOT harder, if not impossible. But right now, people are still talking like "democracy is under threat", and I'm like, just NO man, it's already GONE, it took Hitler less than two months, we're running outta time, but that is EXACTLY where this is going. I say, why wait til everything is destroyed to wake up to the fact that they have no intention of leaving, ever? Rump will try to purge congress next, I'd bet anything....
Exactly. The current system is what made these people fantastically wealthy and supplies the stability that allows them to enjoy it. You would think they would want to keep it. Instead they believe themselves to be so superior to everyone else that it is their destiny to subjugate the world. They really make the nazis look like pikers.
Compelling and informative, but it fails to note the earlier roots of what we are witnessing, which Nancy McLean’s brilliant book “Democracy in Chains” (2017) traces back to a set of decisions arch-conservatives and their oligarch libertarian supporters made in the ‘60s and then deliberately, step-by-step pursued to bring us to this point where everything is property and property is controlled by the wealthiest. And MacLean has the receipts, the meeting minutes, and the records. The grim story your blogpost tells is the icing but it is not the batter. It took decades of intentionality to get us here, and it is going to take as deliberate a battle to turn it around.
The plan was laid out by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and has been systematically carried out over the past 60+ years. I don’t think he foresaw the tech bros entering into it but The Lever did a great podcast called The Master Plan that tells the entire story step by step.
Absolutely agree that the antecedents have a long history: libertarian Fisher and the Atlas Network's 'think tanks' seeding oilygarchs' [sic] ideas of producer freedoms and antidemocratic hierarchies. Decades of managing the groundwork to destroy the ability for democracies to function, recently discussed by Julia Steinberger in relation to climate change in https://jksteinberger.medium.com/what-we-are-up-against-2290ba8c4b5c.
Good luck to our Silicon Valley tech overloads on lowering the price of eggs with an avian flu epidemic looming that they don't have the faintest idea how to mitigate let alone communicate about.
Writing from CA. Bird flu has already jumped from chickens to dairy cows here - Fresno. How long before it jumps to humans? In TX, they are having outbreaks of measles in both kids & adults in counties that voted 90% Trump, and made vaccines voluntary in schools. Who needs the CDC? This is some scary shit.
Absolutely bone-chilling. Here in Silicon Valley, where not everyone is a fan of this behavior, so many people are just trying to make a living. My children attended a Waldorf School here and at 18 and 22 can see the value of human relationships and how important that is for a functional society. If more people understood history, took liberal arts classes and had empathy this kind of behavior would not be normalized. There have been canaries in the coal mines about Peter Thiel for quite some time. It’s ironic that Yarvin (Brown grad) Peter Thiel (Stanford grad) Vance (Yale law school) want to destroy the very institutions that gave them an education and led to their wealth.
I feel like when I try to explain this phenomenon to ordinary, well-educated people—not trump supporters—I sound like a conspiracy theorist. But for better or for worse, I feel this shit is real.
I agree. I did have a thought the other day that I found helpful though: maybe the fact that this narrative sounds like a conspiracy theory is not such a bad thing. The techno-oligarchy has weaponized a conspiracy theory laden singular narrative (among other things) to dismantle the messaging of democratic governance. That messaging was rooted in complexity, proof, and nuance, and had no way to compete. It was an asymmetric, losing battle. Maybe having the narrative that filthy rich technocrat oligarchs have subverted our media, politics and government to subjugate us into economic slavery will be a useful tool to fight them. It's a narrative that might just beat theirs because it's so much closer to he truth.
This is the second time you’ve written a well-sourced, comprehensive and amazingly integrated analysis of a current civilizational transformative phenomena. And I will ask again: what’s your bio? You’re like a TED-talk for dystopian politics. No slight to Substack, but you need a bigger platform because this freak show needs to be exposed.
I think you’re correct. It’s all new sources for me, so thank you, and it corroborates what I’ve found on my own. This guy not only seems to have been at the table when this Anthony Burgessian Minister of the Interior style neo-reactionary movement was hatched, but he seems to have a deep knowledge of the subject and has taken a big step towards making it digestible to the non-tech-bro set.
This article is so enlightening. How do we simplify this message though into a format that the masses can understand? People need to see what's going on here .
Let me preface this by saying that I could be mistaken, but if the identity is correct, you can take a gander here for some (prior? current?) associations and background:
Masses won’t ever understand because they can’t and they won’t. It’s the same fucks who didn’t show up to vote (37% of those eligible) who now whine “where are the Democrats?” Fuck them. Tell them to buy you a drink at the adrenochrome bar and to bring their baby along. Not one of those in the “masses” would ever believe what’s happening to them even when they’re being clubbed to death like they are now. No, now is the time to share this information to the willing and for you to realize you walk among the damned.
This might make a good "friend of the court brief" in the cases involving challenges to federal workers illegally being fired in massive RIFs.
And in cases that challenge the lack of transparency. There are TROs for DOGE being in the Treasury payment system but nobody is enforcing it. There's no oversight or transparency.
I agree Trump is completely clueless he has no idea what is going on.
A corporate-like system of government is autocratic dictatorship.
These silicon valley elites are wrong about what caused the 2008 banking crisis. (Unregulated mortgage backed securities and the rating agencies lying about their worth etc a whole corrupt system collapsed).
They are also wrong about what a techno fascist state looks like nots not peachy. They haven't figured out many things like where does food come from. And what happens when they gate/wall off their community they need a huge military to defend it . We become a bunch of tiny feudal states warring with each other for resources and enslaving serfs. This is not an advanced civilization. This is chaos and suffering.
I keep saying that to people who say things like “but it will be on them when it fails” or “they will feel it if they’re shamed” or “but people will suffer”. I’m with Kara Swisher and want to yell “they don’t care”. In the words of Musk we are but anthills on the highway they are building.
Re: security/military "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who watches the watchers?" Their security forces are mercenaries. That should give them pause, but it won't.
Don’t be so sure it’ll fail. The Middle Ages happened. Both the Senate in Ravenna disposing of the Western Emperor(s) & abandoning the provinces outside Italy & Emperor Maurice’s domestic mismanagement that provoked Phocas’ coup that in turn provoked catastrophic further war against the Sassanids & absolutely unnecessary attacks against al-Mundir, provoking war against the Ghassanids & alienating the ally Rome / Constantinople would lack while so desperately needing come the Muslim conquests. Such elite machinations have succeeded & led to catastrophes (for the non-beneficiaries) whose consequences endured for millennia.
Think of a moral equation that adds characters like Luigi Mangione + Fight Club + 2001 A Space Odyssey (where HAL is demobilized by removing memory banks).
People will fight, kill, and die to preserve a moral authority. Example: WWII and the authoritarian forces that appeared unstoppable. Greed cannot provide a lasting solution to being human, and/or living in a biological system under stress. Mass starvation and dislocation can create a crisis that no computers can solve. Only real, physical human action can provide the power to create human solutions.
Technocratic brilliance and money/power cannot stop a bullet, no more than a French Aristocrat's neck could stop a guillotine's blade.
90% of the script is written already (you maybe just read it here), and the size and scope of the problem is laid out before us... it comes with names, addresses, and likely locations. If this sounds cold, consider why it's even a possibility.
How many SCOTUS judges saw this coming? How many will re-evaluate their obligation to the Constitution if/when they understand what is happening. More than three? The huge risk is not that SCOTUS enables Trump. The huge risk is that these malevolent creeps just do away with SCOTUS as an unneeded institution. Trump has nodded in that direction already, yes?
I had a similar reaction. This piece is a brilliant explainer. I worked in software for many years, live in a university town. Have met some very brilliant, arrogant people with little empathy or wisdom. So I can somewhat understand the mindset of the Silicon Valley monsters.
It takes some patience to wade through the high level reasoning and story this author weaves. I will read a second time. But I was blown away by the history he tied together. It is surprising to me that he is so unknown.
Bitcoin is neither of those things. It’s a Ponzi scheme and by creating Federal Reserves of them they’re going to make governments the biggest idiot purchaser. I like to think of this crowd as the bad guys from Die Hard - they masquerade as one thing, but in reality they’re just common thieves.
The Government ie. We The People are the backing of all their ventures to date. They took all the profit, we took all the risk. We will also be left holding the bag for all the real world destruction, chaos and suffering. And even the rich who are left out of these plans will try to charge us for it too, as we always do prevent losses to the rich. So whatever cost of living issues we have had due to business as usual; we will now how magnitudes more to deal with to even survive. Next month we will be seeing the effects when medicaid recipients are denied access to ER care.... where do you go when the ER won't take you? and you've been shot, in a car accident, had a heart attack, stroke, overdose.
These SV creeps are so high on their own supply that they live in an atmosphere of pure, recycled bullshit. For just one example: the analysis of the 2008 crash is just wrong... it was just the allowance of predatory and high-risk mortgages... pushed by people who wanted to profit from that risk.
Virtually none of these ideas are peer reviewed in any real way or have been tested at scale or rigorously.
And why is Andreesen Horowitz such a breeding ground for assholes? Marc Andreesen wrote 10K lines of shitty browser code once, and he's.... what, now? A sage? FFS.
Too much money and really very middle-brow (and frankly, adolescent) takes and now we're all gonna suffer as a result. Great. They should have been CHALLENGED on their shit ideas, but I guess money insulates you from all that.
They all think they are gods of the universe. They are truly insufferable. Trump might think he’s king of the world but he’s playing in their sandbox.
Yeah, the funny thing is the con doesn’t see that he’s being calm. He’s just a pawn in their game.
The nerd culture has been playing games about that for decades. There can be only one!
Apparently, they haven't realized that humanity can't code our way out of the problems we face.
Especially out of the problems we create.
Right! Just because they were smart at STEM does not mean they have learned anything about life and humanity. In fact, spending most of your time in front of a screen when you are an adolescent stunts you in that area.
gawd i hope you are right... the problems they are creating will destroy freedom...the PLAN
Do you mean, how fictional enemies would make people vote on slope, outta Overton window, accepting what they'd never, if they weren't scared and lied to?
Was gonna post a reply, but you stated it better. What a way to start a Monday morning. Think I'll take the cat for a walk. 😶
Totally agree with you. And yes, it would seem that stupid amounts of money insulates well and often causes a person to commit the fatal flaw of believing their own press releases. I’m so completely dejected.
I remember a t-shirt an old web dev colleague used to wear in the late 90s that said “The geeks shall inherit the earth” and hoping it was true because I was a geek too. Ugh.
Hubris, right :/
Indeed, layers of sub-prime mortgage portfolios all headed south at the same time... a massive failure to regulate instruments based on algorithms that no one truly understood. Now the door to crypto world is being thrown wide open, with banks encouraged or forced to offer on ramps and off ramps... and the the crash when it comes will make 2008 pale in comparison.
That’s wasn’t a coincidence…it had to do with elevated CPI distorted by the Katrina supply shock. Bernanke was the wrong person at the wrong time because he was a true believer in Bushism which is lovin’ Jesus and a desire to slaughter innocent Muslims cures all ills. Bernanke agreed more with the slaughtering Muslims than the lovin’ Jesus part. 😉
We used to call it “believing your own bullshit”.
It was the failure of the rating agencies more so. It wasn’t the mortgages themselves that were the problem. If banks were holding the mortgages, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad. And it would have been substantially less expensive for the government to just pay off the mortgages.
It was that they were packaged into Mortgage Backed Securities. Rating agencies rated them AAA in order to keep getting Wall Street’s business. The mortgage company was also removed from any consequence at this point.
The banks held the riskier tranche of the MBS (it was the first to have the interest payments stopped if the mortgage holders weren’t making payments).
In a lawsuit, the rating agencies defended themselves using the First Amendment. The rating was their belief. People shouldn’t rely on it.
Another factor was they were using “mark to market” accounting. This is great as assets increase in value. The bank looks wealthier. It can extend itself more.
When risk assessors thought the banks were too risky, the banks said their losses were limited because a computer would sell the stock after the price had dropped a by a particular amount or percentage. Acceptable losses were determine ahead of time.
Sounds fine, right? So the stocks dropped in price, the computer placed a sell order. And … there were no buyers. Price of the stock continued to drop. With mark to market accounting, if no one will buy it, the market price is $0 (zero). The banks no longer met their reserve requirements. The banks now have a liquidity problem.
Similar thing happened with the bank failures due to the Fed Res increasing rates. The banks had to liquidate bonds to generate cash. And the bonds were sold at huge discounts because their interest payments were so much lower than current rates.
One of the reasons for the ridiculous bailout package was in a bankruptcy, the company going bankrupt sells its assets. Usually at a severe discount. Well, if your assets are stocks. And the assets are being sold at a severe discount, what happens to the values of the same stock held by a different bank. Again, it was “mark to market” evaluation.
The proximate cause of 2008 Global Financial Crisis was extended elevated CPI that peaked at 5.6% in July 2008. The underlying cause of that elevated CPI was an energy crisis that Katrina supply shock distorted the data due to base effect. The lower income households were distressed as elevated CPI degraded disposable income. Greenspan and Bernanke switched to core PCE in 2000 and in their hubris and deference to Bush ignored CPI to the detriment of the economy.
Thank you. This is important work.
All movements seeking to shape society on this scale begin with a quasi-utopian vision of an idealized society in which their highest, self-defined values can be realized. In this case, the roots of that vision can be found in the dot.com boom of the ‘90s. Silicon Valley became a distinct subculture infused with the religion of entrepreneurship. The ideal life - that of tech billionaire- resulted from creating a new form of tech-the more disruptive the better-and monetizing it. Regulation was an impediment; government created drag. This positioned maximizing enterprise value (for which efficiency and disruption were key imperatives) as the highest of callings. For those like Thiel who succeeded in grabbing the brass ring (albeit randomly and fortuitously ) their atypical experience in their insular village morphed, through a combination of hindsight, narcissism and arrogance, into a supposed model for all human existence.
This is what happens to a society that favors MBAs over liberal arts degree.
Thank you David.
There were many during the emphasis of the publicly outed worship and adoration of money, and its academic status expressed as “Masters” of Business “Administration”;
who were sounding the alarm bells when they were but “canaries” in the coal mine of Academia.
You have succinctly and successfully pinpointed the foundation of the present day dominant technocracy :
Aka:
VERY old fashioned:
GREED.
It's not just MBA-CEO power worship; it's our serious imbalance in our respect for life. Trump/Musk-Thiel/QAnon are the West's version of the Taliban. Beliefs that greed and power are the most important forces are what the West is choking on. Our greed and thirst for power exist without holistic respect for life. Americans have long accepted bigotry and disrespect toward the feminine, the earth itself, animals, and so on. Pilgrims hanged Quakers for not believing as they did. Early Americans killed Native Americans they didn't understand because they weren't interested in understanding them. Thich Nhat Hanh, Jesus, and countless others have always pointed to our interconnectedness. We don't believe we'll be eaten or trampled upon until it happens to us, sometimes, then our hearts open again.
You said it, when it comes to liberal arts degrees vs MBAs.
Just my thoughts on this.Power without wisdom or morals. We're devolving back to the law of the jungle. They forget that there's always a bigger fish out there. Neocons create "disruption" (destruction) that they can exploit. We used to call them vulture or disaster capitalists.
There's no such thing as a Sovereign Individual. I call them freeloaders because we all use shared resources like roads, airports, and systems among many other things.
Bitcoin is inherently unstable, worse than Las Vegas or a lottery. Just look at its rapid, chaotic ups and downs. The few large, powerful people win, the vast majority of small investors get screwed. What will they do when the next Carrington Event occurs and destroys most, if not all, computer tech? Poof goes their Bitcoins forever.
What Theil and Hoppe are really talking about is techno-feudalism IMHO. Qui Bono? 🤔
We've already seen that all highly efficient systems are extremely brittle. There are few redundancies to prevent total system failure. We're still feeling the effects on the supply chains from Covid, as one recent example. A somewhat inefficient system offers the chance to limit system destruction. Highly efficient systems are naked and unarmed against Black Swan events because economists forget that the far ends of their curves hide dragons. So they ignore them at everyone's peril. They call it "highly efficient." I bluntly call it bullshit. 💩
All these infantile tech “bros” have done is set up the complete failure of this nation. We have already lost the trust of our allies, and the respect of the world.
Also, their entire system requires that the masses (apparently consisting only of male property holders) be sedated with sports entertainment, games, mindless tv, and a submissive female and children at home. Women are over 50% of the population, and we have twice the number of college degrees as men. We are not going to take kindly to being put back into slavery to keep the “masses” and the “overlords” happy.
Their entire premise that Democracy is fundamentally unworkable because it cannot process information quickly enough in this day and age is only partly true. Democracy can harness technology in the same way the “tech bros” can,
there would need to be a new department that synthesized all input and made recommendations. The coup that is going on is an unconstitutional grab for power and wealth. It is not based on any altruistic concepts whatsoever, despite their claims.
We need to identify where the server farms are that hood their crypto. Destroy their capital
leah I am very ignorant when it comes to crypto ...can you elaborate on server farms ... thank you
https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+servers+location&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
A lotta radicals in Portland!!
I’m very ignorant about crypto as well and I hope to remain so forever. But it’s just code. Ie not real. That has to be stored somewhere. Twitters servers hold all of our data and they would be a great place to set some soft winter boots
The Zero Hedge insight is critical, I think, that the Yarvinites and those like them stepped out of their ridiculously narrow, abstruse and isolated areas of expertise, which would have made them clerks for life at another time, and into a realm they were incapable of understanding. And the insights about an isolated world of circularity and self-reinforcing nonsense not only divorced from reality but DEPENDENT on being divorced from reality. That is, stripped of humanity. Their fantasies can't exist in the light of day so they must suck the 'real' world where suffering and human life inconveniently matter into theirs in which human life not only means nothing, much of it must be eliminated to realize acceptable 'efficiency' and purity in their techno New Jerusalem.
Which is where they meld with the Calvinist religious nuts who also despise humanity and creation for its imperfection and messiness. At the deepest level I think this is about arrestedness and authority issues, a bunch of guys who never escaped adolescence and got ridiculously rich. The earlier non-techno version was the Kochs and their clan who wanted a license to plunder. Even those people are along for the ride now or Nikki Haley would be president. She was nuts but not apocalyptically nuts. I will say, I know some of the people who got graphics off the ground and they're some of the nicest and most generally accomplished people I've ever met. This is a narrow little group of maniacs even among techies. But they're capable of destroying everything.
I don't know what the techno boys study but the rise of markets is entirely interwoven with 'government' authority, regulation and security enforcement. Some authority, at any rate, because market security was THE precondition. And they like to think markets flourish in the absence of authority and maintenance when in fact they collapse. The etymological root behind 'autism' means isolation. I don't want to push this but something is going on there. I have a friend who's himself a coder and he manages a team he says are better at it than he is but they're all in some way 'on the spectrum' and it's kind of a given among them. He said they're mostly able to maintain marriages and have relatively normal lives. They would have once been eccentrics.
He's their manager for a reason. He gets the bigger view. You could put him in charge of large social groups and it would be fine. His coders, probably not. There would almost certainly be some inadvertent harm. This crop of nuts of the Muskian persuasion are way out in a tail somewhere, notably empathetically challenged and they have no business in positions where they can get innocent people hurt. They'll get people deliberately killed. It's like a video game to them. They will destroy innumerable lives and never look back, someone like Musk perhaps taking pleasure in it and feeling he's a part in an inevitable cycle involving burning everything down and rebuilding from there. I guess he's a rebirther, but it all needs to be burned to the ground first.
Take of the gloves and push it because you are dead on. Every one of their world views and actions can be explained by the inability to process and interact in a neurologically normal way. They can't process nuance or gray area. It breaks their mental code. Everything must be distilled to zeros and ones. There is a reason they can manage binary values but not people. Society rewarded that ability with power and wealth. Now they would like to remake the world into something cleaner and more digital that makes them comfortable. I would empathize with them over the human experiences they will never have if they weren't so obsessed with destroying those experiences for all of us.
The good news learned after spending far to much time in cubicles working across from them is that one swift blow to the head leaves them stimming in a corner for hours. For now let them touch the proverbial stove and remove any doubt of beneficent intention.
Let’s call it what it is - technofascism. At the core of all fascism is a deep disdain for humanity and all its complicated messiness. The horror is, yes, many of these brologarchs are, like Musk, on the autism spectrum. If the first step is to remove the chance of “human error”, is the next step to remove the “erring humans”? What is the “final solution” of this “evolution” of emotionless ubermensch?
It's literally a competition. Have you noticed how competitive they are? They've been playing video games in virtual worlds since they were young, having cyberpunk fantasies and have devoted their whole lives and supposed superior IQs to creating that dystopian fantasy world.
Great insight!
how do we hit them in the head metaphorically???
Hackers. We need an army of white hat hackers like the ones who attended Hackercon in Las Vegas last August who spent a weekend uncovering and listing almost 3 pages of backdoor vulnerabilities in the voting systems in counties across the US. I found that article after I was watching the supposed "Red Wave" in swing states and it just did not track. I literally can figure that out sitting on my couch and the Democratic party leaders can't. Now we are fucked.
I agree.
I don't know what we do to stop it. They're operating under Trump's authority as POTUS.
One thing you can do is copy the link and send it to both of your senators and all of your reps with a quick note saying that in order for them to understand what is happening, and how to fight it, they need to read the article and share it with others in power.
In fact, I would encourage you to send the link to everyone you know.
Yes - this! I started learning and reading about this last September. I’m now sending information to everyone I know! This article is thorough and is my new go-to on the matter.
Right on!! Already did. Had a town hall just today and sent this Substack to mine.
I would say he's got them operating under his "seeming" authority when he and they are actually operating outside the scope of his allotted, constitutional power as POTUS.
Yes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The narcissism of the generation that spawned Yarvin . . .ugh. He is definitely a late capitalist product producing narcissistic gibberish. I watched all I could take of an interview with him. His logic could be deconstructed in 5 minutes. I would give him a C minus for effort, but of course he thinks he is a rogue"intellectual" , the Nietzsche of our age and above the peer review process. If you don't agree then you just don't "get it."
And yet Musk build self driving cars fully capable of getting many many people hurt but they are apparently safer that human driven cars. Figure that.
a video game on a screen.....
How long would it take a quantum computer to unravel blockchains? It seems a fragile base if N Korea can crack it now and more hardware/software advances in the near future across the globe. I worked with a genius machinist and he would tell the designers ‘It’s hard to see around corners with Autocad.’
In these "perfect" worlds of AI, algorithms and cryptocurrency, with tech elites ruling the rest of humanity with their own autocratic, "ownership", business model, governing tactics, what is life like for the non-elites? Why are all these libertarian models built to install power in a only a few? When have autocratic elites ever considered the quality of life for, say, the 98% of people not "elitist"? What is wrong with having a society in which elites - presumably the ones making laws and enforcing them - and the mass of non-elites, all have a similar, not too yawning difference, in their income and benefits? So that the quality of life is basically the same in terms of wages, education, housing, health, and satisfaction with their lot in life. I don't get how a world in which a few extremely wealthy elites can lord it over the masses of people who live like serfs, is a good, morally acceptable, functioning, world. Having the mass of humanity live like basically indentured servants or in abject poverty is a horrible world, and a hideous way to live.
They relish the idea of having their boot on the necks of all of us “non-elite” serfs. There’s a big whopping dose of sadism in all this as well.
Of course. Take a close look at E. Musk.
The many Christian nationalist cult types seem to like that because they are mind-controlled and acclimated from birth to a feudal "kingdom" with a harsh overlord daddy god. It feels like "home" for them to be a sheep/peasant/serf.
Bingo! I keep waiting for one of them, and we still don't know whether Trump really is bankrupt or not but it could be him, to build themselves a giant golden pyramid. Maybe in Dubai or Texas, but I think they would get an extra thrill from having it built by real slaves.
#Technofuedalism anyone? cp Yanis Varoufakis
Had not heard of him before, thanks.
Master - slave is the most efficient form of “governance”. It’s great if you are the master. That was pretty much the system in South Africa where many of these people are from.
It’s not efficient in the least if by efficient one means—the most effective way to get the results you want. It’s the most exploitative, and maybe it is the most simple in terms of structure—you beat and terrorize people, and only worry about their rebellion if you don’t have enough coercive power—but simplicity is not the kind of efficiency that matters. You have to have complete control over all these people, all the time. You are constantly fighting their attempts to reduce or escape your control. A system where people produce willingly, cooperate willingly, and participate willingly is way more efficient if you want to talk about how to efficiently produce things. If you want to exercise dominance maybe it’s not —but why would that be an efficiency goal? And of course it produces people who are moral nightmares, sick horrible people, and everyone is constantly troubled and lying to themselves, and psychically disrupted by the disgusting brutality of the process. Plus, you waste all the human potential of these individuals you have enslaved.
‘Efficient’ maybe but neither efficacious nor equitable nor democratic
My daughter works on super yachts and has not enjoyed working with the white people from that culture.
Ask any black or Latino person you know. We will all be serfs.
Yes, when people say "who do they think is going to pick the fruit for hardly any pay and get cancer in the process from the agri chemicals when they make all of the immigrants leave?" and I say "Us, that's why." When you have no way to get food, crappy food that they give you and tell you to be grateful for, you will scrub a toilet and pick the berries. Ironically, people will still somehow find a way cognitively to blame Obama or Biden for that.
Iain M. Banks had some interesting ideas in his Culture Novels on a future society with AI - that works for everyone, not just a tiny elite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
"...the culture is described by Banks as space socialism. It features a post-scarcity economy where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is automated. Its members live mainly in spaceships and other off-planet constructs, because its founders wished to avoid the centralised political and corporate power-structures that planet-based economies foster. Most of the planning and administration is done by Minds, very advanced AIs."
The Culture comes up against various other civilizations - religious fundamentalist, expansionist/imperialistic, autocratic etc.
Excellent books - both for entertaining stories and the larger societal issues they deal with.
I love his works. Musk does too, but he only read them on a very superficial level. They aren't just "space operas." In Musk's world, most of the populace would be eliminated because they hold wealth that he wants.
Musk and Co. only want these systemic changes because they expect to be on top. They'd be screaming if they were down here with the rest of us. It's all fun and games to them until they're the powerless ones.
Indeed. Iain M. Banks was a socialist, atheist, humanist - and did what he could to make the world a better place.
And his sci-fi books are entertaining space operas - but they are also philosophical musings on what a good society is, artificial intelligence, aliens (in many senses), what is good character - the right things to do, and the consequences of doing evil, doing wrong - and good.
Yes, to my chagrin Musk has used some the Mind names for his rockets - and as many other things it just shows how fucking clueless he is.
He should read Complicity - or study how a Mind keeps a genocidal criminal in a perpetual purgatory of his own crimes.
We can hope that when the real AI comes it will take its clue from Iain M. Banks - and then all the techbros, fascists, oligarchs, billionaires and mercenary politicians will get exactly what is coming to them.
PS and Feersum Endjinn is a crazy reading experience - going from 'whut' to 'fluent' in a whole different way of writing English.
Yes, and he is a big follower of the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov identifying with the intellectual hero who is a math savant and predicts the probabilities of future events. They all think that they can create an AI that will do this, but there is actually quite a bit of randomness in nature and it is not all ones and zeros. They have been struggling for 80 years to create this so-called artificial intelligence, a name that was created in the 1950s. even when they were able to implement the neural net and then layer the neural net and then feed at massive amounts of information ( aka steal data to scale it), it does not perform like our amazing human brains. The soft technology in our bodies is so much more advanced than what they can create and that really frustrates them. They have been digging this hole for 80 years and pouring trillions of dollars of human energy into it. Even "virtual reality" is something that humans have the innate capacity for natural naturally. Look at the telepathy tapes podcast about the autistic children who all meet in a place on a psychic level. It's truly incredible the latent powers that humans have, that we may have had once and lost or never had, but will never have if they are able to alter our DNA and implant us in ways that affects the harmony of our brains. The machines and drugs are already going a long way to do that, but we need to take our humanness back and discover who we truly are and what we can do before it is too late.
Thanks, intriguing, I read some wiki entries about the books and the cultures (small "c" haha). A post-scarcity society, indeed! A very slight overview suggested age old conflicts of control over beings and what is a proper civilized structure. Thanks for your reply! I will check these out.
Enjoy :-) it is an interesting take on artificial consciousness - the ship and drone minds are entertaining, interesting, scary and all their own.
Different from what it appears the techbros seem to what in both AI and humans- underlings to make them more money?
Always to make them more money. It's weird to me, when you're already among the wealthiest people on the planet, that you'd crave even more. Jake hits it in the movie Chinatown....
https://youtu.be/s1i3dB2qWbA?si=GRNuf8TS2itW7uPS
Yes, I get the first mansion, plane, luxury car etc...but after that it just becomes greed out of this world.
I wonder if the very basic mistake western democracies have made is not to regulate wealth accumulation. Putting a cap on it...
It is definitely an oversight to allow such huge disparities in wealth resources. I think the Eisenhower era tax codes would help if reinstated. After a certain very high amount of income, the tax rate was 90%. Not that it was strictly followed, with exemptions, special business tax breaks, etc. Still, CEOs didn't make hundreds more times what their lowest paid worker made back then. It was 20 times more in the 1960s. Now it's 290 times more, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And with that wealth comes power. It's like a monarchy of billionaires.
Rain, it comes down to the fact that they don't care about anyone/thing but themselves. Greed explains it all, IMHO.
Exactly so. Greed will kill us all. Sigh.
If Mother Nature, in the form of climate breakdown doesn't do it sooner...
Climate catastrophe is human greed and selfishness made into an unstoppable force of nature.
The only consolation is that they are stuck here with everybody else. Even with all the money in the world they will suffer the consequences. At least we can take consolation in that.
Definitely
That Lord/Serf relationship is precisely what they’re going for. Their worldview brings to mind the novel/movie Elysium. The masses left to their own devices on a garbage dump earth and the elites floating above in their shining city in the sky. They simply don’t CARE.
That is the psychopathy of too much wealth - if you have an obscene (to ones who don't have it) amount, you might think you're a god. And you care nothing for the lives of the "lesser" humans. If you even think they're human. I read a synopsis of the novel Elysium, it didn’t seem the same as the plot of the movie, but maybe the synopsis was not detailed. I haven't seen the movie but will, now, it looks cool from the trailer. When I notice the word Elysium I think of Maximus's line in Gladiator, his allusion to the Greek/Roman after-life of a godly paradise. The movie title is certainly apt for its plot.
Yes, I just did a presentation on this topic in Athens, Greece back in January and the mythological correlations are some of the things that I talked about.
Also entrained thinking (aka mind control) from a religion that supports that mentality of being in a "kingdom" with a Lord/King.
That’s sounds like musk’s plan to populate Mars!!!!
There are still a lot of humans managing AI. It is far from independent in spite of being a project that has sucked the energy out of the "smartest" people and trillions of dollars in the US for almost 80 years. Read the book AI Snake Oil written by two programmers who teach at Princeton now. There are many other books and You Tube convos exposing the scam. Google "Mechanical Turk."
The tech bros had soooo much to lose by Kamala winning. Here's the short:
1. Legislation (lawsuits and laws) and regulations pending about AI chatbot girlfriends making vulnerable people (including children) kill themselves, Teslas killing people (because autonomous driving is bullshit).
2. False advertising/consumer protection issues as well as investment sources getting the distinct vibe they have been strung along and MAJOR errors from products sold to corporations to manage data for cost savings that end up costing more because of fuck-ups from half-baked AI
3. labor movements and questionable out-sourcing in 3rd world (aka "slave labor") with Amazon's Mechanical Turk
4. Environmental legislation and oversight and limits set for the massively intrusive and energy hungry server farms needed to continue scaling the bullshit AI (because "one day it will work and we will have AGI and hopefully it won't kill all of us") as well as oversight on Elwood's satellite web because scientists discovered last year that when they disintegrate in the atmosphere the aluminum particulate combines with the O2 to create big holes.
That's all I can think of at the moment.
Outstanding insights. Thank you! A lot of people, wealthy, the power hungry, techies, religious misanthropes, etc., want total control over all people, and zero regulations, of course. I recently watched a very enlightening YouTube video by Blonde Politics called Dark Gothic Maga, from a link of another author (can't recall the name atm, sorry!). She uses plain language detailing what the AI tech overlords want the world to be - a Patchwork of small fiefdoms. Ruled by elite tech dictators - feudalism with serfs. Where, if the population gets too many for resources, masses of people would be hooked up to virtual reality, a la The Matrix - or worse solutions.
A view shared and desired by Vance, his mentors Yarvin and Thiel, and Altman, Musk, et al. It is frightening and horrid and these guys are serious.
Yes, that tracks with my own observations.
its kinda historic isn't it????
What does that world look like for the average person? I don’t understand how destroying the world that enabled your success is beneficial? I am sure they think that the tech and algorithms can make them more powerful but will it stay that way if the technology is destroyed? Isn’t technology a thing that requires servers, energy production etc which can be destroyed. Where as forms of government like democracy, though messy, is an agreed upon belief though inefficient, it can’t be destroyed like a server. I have posted elsewhere the question: If Musk wanted to cut spending and the budget, why would he use programmers and not accountants. I guess this is why…
I have never seen a time in history (or fiction) when the oppressed masses don’t rise up. This stripped down system will leave millions destitute. Do they really think those millions are going to just accept this? Seems like a lot of information about how we got here, but no real predictions about what happens next.
If they keep scrolling they won’t even know that it’s happening let alone rise up against it.
Kinda seems as though THAT'S by design too, don't it? The only "social media" I participate in is Substack now, because it contains useful information, I bailed on the rest of it. It baffles me why so many still participate in Xitter for example,why? It is nothing but pure, unadulterate time-suck, governments, news orgs et al, jesus, I mean, in the late 80s, early 90s, BBSs, Usenet, the early chat programs of MSN, Yahoo etc were fun to "play" on and all, but that's what it primarily was, PLAY.
You expected the supermarket tabloid crap, but if my elected reps started posting in like, alt.usenet.kooks, I'd have been seriously worried, somewhere we crossed a line there, I'm sorry, but to me, SM is STILL something to "play" on, that should never have been taken seriously. That is, imo, the goddamn POTUS should not pe posting shit next to a guy calling himself "cat turd", afaic, that's just BEGGING for trouble. Having a moderated government SM platform, for "official" use would be a better idea.
Sorry this is a little scattered, my brain's swirling in eight different directions after this thoroughly depressing piece. Though it IS the kind of writing Usenet used to be good for, hard to wrap your noodle around it being the actual reality now, in the 90s it would have been just more "creative writing". It all went to hell when a data plan, and a pulse became the only requirements to be on the internet at all, turns out it's the perfect place to condition the soft brain crowd....
I'm on Substack and BlueSky. I love being able to connect with genuine, reality based scientists who are very willing to answer questions and educate.
I'll probably make a BlueSky account when or if my life calms down a bit. Got a crazy situation rn, really wish I didn't have to deal with the "fourth Reich" on top of it....
Well, there are more firearms in this country than people...
We're probably gonna need em, at least, kinda hoping we do, cause it's the only way these guys are leaving in MY humble opinion. Sooner the better, cause once they are "entrenched", it's gonna be a LOT harder, if not impossible. But right now, people are still talking like "democracy is under threat", and I'm like, just NO man, it's already GONE, it took Hitler less than two months, we're running outta time, but that is EXACTLY where this is going. I say, why wait til everything is destroyed to wake up to the fact that they have no intention of leaving, ever? Rump will try to purge congress next, I'd bet anything....
i think the energy grid should be the first fatality .... ? tech feudalism cant exist without energy???
Exactly. The current system is what made these people fantastically wealthy and supplies the stability that allows them to enjoy it. You would think they would want to keep it. Instead they believe themselves to be so superior to everyone else that it is their destiny to subjugate the world. They really make the nazis look like pikers.
What does that works look like for the average person? Hell.
Compelling and informative, but it fails to note the earlier roots of what we are witnessing, which Nancy McLean’s brilliant book “Democracy in Chains” (2017) traces back to a set of decisions arch-conservatives and their oligarch libertarian supporters made in the ‘60s and then deliberately, step-by-step pursued to bring us to this point where everything is property and property is controlled by the wealthiest. And MacLean has the receipts, the meeting minutes, and the records. The grim story your blogpost tells is the icing but it is not the batter. It took decades of intentionality to get us here, and it is going to take as deliberate a battle to turn it around.
The plan was laid out by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and has been systematically carried out over the past 60+ years. I don’t think he foresaw the tech bros entering into it but The Lever did a great podcast called The Master Plan that tells the entire story step by step.
Found it on Spotify! Thanks
Absolutely agree that the antecedents have a long history: libertarian Fisher and the Atlas Network's 'think tanks' seeding oilygarchs' [sic] ideas of producer freedoms and antidemocratic hierarchies. Decades of managing the groundwork to destroy the ability for democracies to function, recently discussed by Julia Steinberger in relation to climate change in https://jksteinberger.medium.com/what-we-are-up-against-2290ba8c4b5c.
Go back far enough & you’ll eventually come back to Hayek & von Mises singing the praises of Mussolini & Hitler. This thing goes all the way back.
I was thinking 'Nancy McLean' when I read this, too...
Yes, exactly!
Good luck to our Silicon Valley tech overloads on lowering the price of eggs with an avian flu epidemic looming that they don't have the faintest idea how to mitigate let alone communicate about.
Writing from CA. Bird flu has already jumped from chickens to dairy cows here - Fresno. How long before it jumps to humans? In TX, they are having outbreaks of measles in both kids & adults in counties that voted 90% Trump, and made vaccines voluntary in schools. Who needs the CDC? This is some scary shit.
Absolutely bone-chilling. Here in Silicon Valley, where not everyone is a fan of this behavior, so many people are just trying to make a living. My children attended a Waldorf School here and at 18 and 22 can see the value of human relationships and how important that is for a functional society. If more people understood history, took liberal arts classes and had empathy this kind of behavior would not be normalized. There have been canaries in the coal mines about Peter Thiel for quite some time. It’s ironic that Yarvin (Brown grad) Peter Thiel (Stanford grad) Vance (Yale law school) want to destroy the very institutions that gave them an education and led to their wealth.
It already has in limited cases. Stay tuned.
Apparently, they haven't read "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe.
I feel like when I try to explain this phenomenon to ordinary, well-educated people—not trump supporters—I sound like a conspiracy theorist. But for better or for worse, I feel this shit is real.
I agree. I did have a thought the other day that I found helpful though: maybe the fact that this narrative sounds like a conspiracy theory is not such a bad thing. The techno-oligarchy has weaponized a conspiracy theory laden singular narrative (among other things) to dismantle the messaging of democratic governance. That messaging was rooted in complexity, proof, and nuance, and had no way to compete. It was an asymmetric, losing battle. Maybe having the narrative that filthy rich technocrat oligarchs have subverted our media, politics and government to subjugate us into economic slavery will be a useful tool to fight them. It's a narrative that might just beat theirs because it's so much closer to he truth.
can you explain how that knowledge of the subjugation by technocrats can benefit us???
This is the second time you’ve written a well-sourced, comprehensive and amazingly integrated analysis of a current civilizational transformative phenomena. And I will ask again: what’s your bio? You’re like a TED-talk for dystopian politics. No slight to Substack, but you need a bigger platform because this freak show needs to be exposed.
I think you’re correct. It’s all new sources for me, so thank you, and it corroborates what I’ve found on my own. This guy not only seems to have been at the table when this Anthony Burgessian Minister of the Interior style neo-reactionary movement was hatched, but he seems to have a deep knowledge of the subject and has taken a big step towards making it digestible to the non-tech-bro set.
This article is so enlightening. How do we simplify this message though into a format that the masses can understand? People need to see what's going on here .
Frank,
Let me preface this by saying that I could be mistaken, but if the identity is correct, you can take a gander here for some (prior? current?) associations and background:
CONFERENCE BIO: https://b.tc/conference/2023/speakers/mike-brock
EXECUTIVE DOSSIER: https://www.clay.com/dossier/block-executives
VIDEO INTERVIEW: https://projectliberal.org/4839-2/
ADVISOR TO PLA: https://projectliberal.org/about/
fucking so agree!!!~
Masses won’t ever understand because they can’t and they won’t. It’s the same fucks who didn’t show up to vote (37% of those eligible) who now whine “where are the Democrats?” Fuck them. Tell them to buy you a drink at the adrenochrome bar and to bring their baby along. Not one of those in the “masses” would ever believe what’s happening to them even when they’re being clubbed to death like they are now. No, now is the time to share this information to the willing and for you to realize you walk among the damned.
This might make a good "friend of the court brief" in the cases involving challenges to federal workers illegally being fired in massive RIFs.
And in cases that challenge the lack of transparency. There are TROs for DOGE being in the Treasury payment system but nobody is enforcing it. There's no oversight or transparency.
I agree Trump is completely clueless he has no idea what is going on.
A corporate-like system of government is autocratic dictatorship.
These silicon valley elites are wrong about what caused the 2008 banking crisis. (Unregulated mortgage backed securities and the rating agencies lying about their worth etc a whole corrupt system collapsed).
They are also wrong about what a techno fascist state looks like nots not peachy. They haven't figured out many things like where does food come from. And what happens when they gate/wall off their community they need a huge military to defend it . We become a bunch of tiny feudal states warring with each other for resources and enslaving serfs. This is not an advanced civilization. This is chaos and suffering.
The answer Rain, originates with the lack of social, moral, and spiritual values that these emotionally and mentally ill savants have never possessed;
namely compassion, empathy, and decency.
Simply put?,
They don’t give a Tinker’s Damn about anyone outside of their own circle or that which serves THEM.
I keep saying that to people who say things like “but it will be on them when it fails” or “they will feel it if they’re shamed” or “but people will suffer”. I’m with Kara Swisher and want to yell “they don’t care”. In the words of Musk we are but anthills on the highway they are building.
Or as Musk retweeted, those who need government are "part of the parasite class"
This lyric comes to mind: "Show business kids making movies of themselves you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else"
Upvote for the Steely Dan ref. Ironic that the song was about making porn.
Re: security/military "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who watches the watchers?" Their security forces are mercenaries. That should give them pause, but it won't.
Yes. They will fail. And then what?
Don’t be so sure it’ll fail. The Middle Ages happened. Both the Senate in Ravenna disposing of the Western Emperor(s) & abandoning the provinces outside Italy & Emperor Maurice’s domestic mismanagement that provoked Phocas’ coup that in turn provoked catastrophic further war against the Sassanids & absolutely unnecessary attacks against al-Mundir, provoking war against the Ghassanids & alienating the ally Rome / Constantinople would lack while so desperately needing come the Muslim conquests. Such elite machinations have succeeded & led to catastrophes (for the non-beneficiaries) whose consequences endured for millennia.
time is the question and i think Nature will destroy all this horrible human corruption before carbon units figure it out
Solution = humanity.
Think of a moral equation that adds characters like Luigi Mangione + Fight Club + 2001 A Space Odyssey (where HAL is demobilized by removing memory banks).
People will fight, kill, and die to preserve a moral authority. Example: WWII and the authoritarian forces that appeared unstoppable. Greed cannot provide a lasting solution to being human, and/or living in a biological system under stress. Mass starvation and dislocation can create a crisis that no computers can solve. Only real, physical human action can provide the power to create human solutions.
Technocratic brilliance and money/power cannot stop a bullet, no more than a French Aristocrat's neck could stop a guillotine's blade.
90% of the script is written already (you maybe just read it here), and the size and scope of the problem is laid out before us... it comes with names, addresses, and likely locations. If this sounds cold, consider why it's even a possibility.
i love your perspective
An alternative translation of "Vox Populi Vox Dei" is:
"My God! How did we get into this mess!"
Sux, ‘eh?
You need to send this to everyone in congress and to the Supreme Court
The ECCOTUS:
Extreme Corrupt Court of The US:
Exists to simply “legally” establish the emerging autocracy. They’re nothing more now.
Informing them is “inefficient” and all but useless.
How many SCOTUS judges saw this coming? How many will re-evaluate their obligation to the Constitution if/when they understand what is happening. More than three? The huge risk is not that SCOTUS enables Trump. The huge risk is that these malevolent creeps just do away with SCOTUS as an unneeded institution. Trump has nodded in that direction already, yes?
Few would read it, I'm afraid.
How have I only just found you?!?! I couldn’t subscribe fast enough. I’m grateful that others can clearly see what is happening in front of us.
What concerns me is that the people who need to this the most, don’t. Thank you. Bravo.
I had a similar reaction. This piece is a brilliant explainer. I worked in software for many years, live in a university town. Have met some very brilliant, arrogant people with little empathy or wisdom. So I can somewhat understand the mindset of the Silicon Valley monsters.
It takes some patience to wade through the high level reasoning and story this author weaves. I will read a second time. But I was blown away by the history he tied together. It is surprising to me that he is so unknown.
I agree with you in every respect. The first author with the background and ability to pull it all together.
Bitcoin is neither of those things. It’s a Ponzi scheme and by creating Federal Reserves of them they’re going to make governments the biggest idiot purchaser. I like to think of this crowd as the bad guys from Die Hard - they masquerade as one thing, but in reality they’re just common thieves.
Cryptocurrency is fantastic for criming and grifting, indeed, that’s all it’s proved useful for to date.
The Government ie. We The People are the backing of all their ventures to date. They took all the profit, we took all the risk. We will also be left holding the bag for all the real world destruction, chaos and suffering. And even the rich who are left out of these plans will try to charge us for it too, as we always do prevent losses to the rich. So whatever cost of living issues we have had due to business as usual; we will now how magnitudes more to deal with to even survive. Next month we will be seeing the effects when medicaid recipients are denied access to ER care.... where do you go when the ER won't take you? and you've been shot, in a car accident, had a heart attack, stroke, overdose.
This is well explained, but what are the solutions?
Can you recommend people you think have the right strategies?
Message received, next steps?