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.
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.
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 :
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Entirely plausible. In this new world, be it Utopia or Dystopia, the population are controlled the way Musk controls his employees, work hard or be deleted. Deleted isn't death exactly, just the ongoing inability to gain employment or social welfare and then death. However the ideology is underwritten by a false assumption, that systems intelligence makes one the apex type of our species. This will be the rock Musk, Thiel and co perish on. Might is right on this planet still and this lesson will be learned all over again by a new generation. They do not realize how angry they are making people, because they don't have the capacity to recognize this, hence the inane grin that is their most public face. They are not seeing that we can see what they are doing and what will be done to them when people are in real physical pain. Real life is not a video game where the protagonists are protected from the consequences of their actions by a virtual interface. The fear of ochlocracy is the real foundation of democracy. Tut tut for not reading to the end of those history books.
I once worked for a guy who lied all the time. He thought it was funny that people believed him. It’s the same grin I see on Elon. He thinks it’s funny that people believe whatever crazy BS he says or tweets. It’s funny how easy it is to manipulate people.
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. 😶
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.
We used to call it “believing your own bullshit”.
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.
You said it, when it comes to liberal arts degrees vs MBAs.
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.
I agree.
I don't know what we do to stop it. They're operating under Trump's authority as POTUS.
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.
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.
Ask any black or Latino person you know. We will all be serfs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was thinking 'Nancy McLean' when I read this, too...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
Yes. They will fail. And then what?
This is well explained, but what are the solutions?
Can you recommend people you think have the right strategies?
Message received, next steps?
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.
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/
Entirely plausible. In this new world, be it Utopia or Dystopia, the population are controlled the way Musk controls his employees, work hard or be deleted. Deleted isn't death exactly, just the ongoing inability to gain employment or social welfare and then death. However the ideology is underwritten by a false assumption, that systems intelligence makes one the apex type of our species. This will be the rock Musk, Thiel and co perish on. Might is right on this planet still and this lesson will be learned all over again by a new generation. They do not realize how angry they are making people, because they don't have the capacity to recognize this, hence the inane grin that is their most public face. They are not seeing that we can see what they are doing and what will be done to them when people are in real physical pain. Real life is not a video game where the protagonists are protected from the consequences of their actions by a virtual interface. The fear of ochlocracy is the real foundation of democracy. Tut tut for not reading to the end of those history books.
I once worked for a guy who lied all the time. He thought it was funny that people believed him. It’s the same grin I see on Elon. He thinks it’s funny that people believe whatever crazy BS he says or tweets. It’s funny how easy it is to manipulate people.