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.
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 :
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.
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.
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…
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 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 deprived and have they 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 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.
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.
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.
Good piece. Squares with much of what I have long known. Next, these legends in their own minds with our white Christian nationalist, evangelical people, and it’s gonna be a total zoo.
"Following President Trump’s Executive Order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), many have been shocked by the speed and scope of changes led by Elon Musk. While DOGE in theory aligns with longstanding conservative ambitions, the reality is that Musk has not limited government or dismantled the deep state; he has replaced it with himself. Under his radical restructuring of federal power, the White House is at risk of becoming captive to Musk’s demands. This memo outlines four alarming developments that transcend partisanship.
I. Musk-aligned operatives have seized control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM),
purging career civil servants and installing loyalists with ties to Musk’s private ventures.
II. DOGE has deployed unvetted hires—many under 25 years old—who now wield de facto
control over sensitive government functions without security clearances. These individuals,
drawn from Musk’s orbit and Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary (NRx) network, operate without legal
oversight or accountability.
III. DOGE has gained read-write access over Treasury pipes and federal payment systems,
granting Musk direct influence over the financial infrastructure of the U.S. government. This
unprecedented control over money flows creates a national security risk and a personal power
lever for Musk.
IV. The congressionally mandated divestment of TikTok has been delayed, with reported
Chinese interest in Musk as a buyer. If successful, Musk would control not just X (formerly
Twitter) but also the largest platform shaping youth political discourse—further concentrating his
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.
Apparently, they haven't realized that humanity can't code our way out of the problems we face.
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. 😶
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.
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.
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.
#Technofuedalism anyone? cp Yanis Varoufakis
Had not heard of him before, thanks.
Ask any black or Latino person you know. We will all be serfs.
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…
An alternative translation of "Vox Populi Vox Dei" is:
"My God! How did we get into this mess!"
Sux, ‘eh?
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 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 deprived and have they 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 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.
I agree.
I don't know what we do to stop it. They're operating under Trump's authority as POTUS.
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.
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.
I was thinking 'Nancy McLean' when I read this, too...
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.
Good piece. Squares with much of what I have long known. Next, these legends in their own minds with our white Christian nationalist, evangelical people, and it’s gonna be a total zoo.
This is well explained, but what are the solutions?
Can you recommend people you think have the right strategies?
Message received, next steps?
one doesn't study yarvin's work. that crap is hardly 'work'
"Following President Trump’s Executive Order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), many have been shocked by the speed and scope of changes led by Elon Musk. While DOGE in theory aligns with longstanding conservative ambitions, the reality is that Musk has not limited government or dismantled the deep state; he has replaced it with himself. Under his radical restructuring of federal power, the White House is at risk of becoming captive to Musk’s demands. This memo outlines four alarming developments that transcend partisanship.
I. Musk-aligned operatives have seized control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM),
purging career civil servants and installing loyalists with ties to Musk’s private ventures.
II. DOGE has deployed unvetted hires—many under 25 years old—who now wield de facto
control over sensitive government functions without security clearances. These individuals,
drawn from Musk’s orbit and Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary (NRx) network, operate without legal
oversight or accountability.
III. DOGE has gained read-write access over Treasury pipes and federal payment systems,
granting Musk direct influence over the financial infrastructure of the U.S. government. This
unprecedented control over money flows creates a national security risk and a personal power
lever for Musk.
IV. The congressionally mandated divestment of TikTok has been delayed, with reported
Chinese interest in Musk as a buyer. If successful, Musk would control not just X (formerly
Twitter) but also the largest platform shaping youth political discourse—further concentrating his
influence over public opinion."
https://www.bettedangerous.com/p/please-share-executive-summary-of
https://america2.news/content/files/2025/02/Musk-NRx-Memo-Feb-5-2025.pdf
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 apologize. I'm not feeling very erudite or civilized. You can throw me out if you want to.
But really --- a fucking coup!!??
Now I'm going to say ‘fuck’ --- a lot.
Someone fuckin body please tell me what the mother fuckin fuck is going the fuck on in this ever loving mother fucking place!!!!???
WAKE THA FUCK UP !!! THIS AINT A FUCKIN DRILL !!!!
Milley!!!
That didn't make me feel any better. Thank you for indulging me. Sometimes I can't help myself. I'm old and from New Jersey
G