Originally Posted by Pete F.
(Post 1248166)
by Will Bunch
The newest dystopian thriller that everyone is talking about these days is a little hard to swallow, even by Hollywood standards. The supervillain is an almost cartoonish sort: The world’s richest man with a drug habit, 11 scattered kids, and a penchant for sleeping on couches (if at all). With his posse of young male tech groupies, he uses his billions to first buy the political discourse, then a greedy puppet president, and finally, through him, the levers of government.
It’s almost too late when the masses learn the villain’s real purpose: To replace the flawed humanity of democracy with machines designed by an unaccountable tech elite. And the heroes of our story — a gaggle of activists, outsider journalists and mid-level politicians who realize the truth — are running out of time.
This unbelievable plot line is our reality, now playing out in Washington, D.C., and coming soon to a closed federal office or downsized university near you. The blitzkrieg by Elon Musk and his small cult of 20-something dude-bro minions against the federal government — crushing foreign aid and consumer protection, threatening the Department of Education and seeking a chokehold over the entire federal payment system — has left everyday Americans dazed and confused. And we’re just three weeks into the Donald Trump presidency that has enabled the $400 billion man.
The rapid onslaught by Musk and his pseudo-government agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has happened in a scattershot, unpredictable way that has also left the Beltway media in the dust. Few, if any, seem to understand what Musk, DOGE, or their hands-off patron in Trump truly want. It’s true that massive cuts in the programs that empower middle-class Americans will mean more money for things that Musk, Trump and their allies want, including more tax cuts for the super-rich and a large deportation army. But a community of folks who pay attention to Silicon Valley — the new center of power, not Washington — says the bigger idea is darker and much more sinister.
“This isn’t a spontaneous coup — it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be ‘disrupted,’“ a veteran Silicon Valley executive, Mike Brock, wrote in a recent essay, The Plot Against America. He explained: ”DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes."
That’s dangerous, because most of us — voters, but also the media, Congress and other watchdogs — are much better at understanding a violent coup where cops are beaten and attacked, as on Jan. 6, 2021, than “backend migrations.” But longtime watchers say the dangerous techno-fascism behind Musk’s DOGE has a long-time patron in Musk’s ally and fellow South Africa-raised billionaire, Peter Thiel, and a key inventor: Curtis Yarvin.
A 51-year-old computer engineer and blogger with a following going back to the 2000s, Yarvin is unknown to most Americans but his radical ideas have grown deep roots in some MAGA circles. In many ways, his views are deeply problematic on issues like race — telling the New York Times last month that Black people were worse off in their freed years right after the Civil War than when they were enslaved, for example. But Yarvin’s bigger ideas about the failure of democracy and the need for a kind of monarch, or a dictator, with the value system of technological elites — cemented after the 2008 financial crisis — have gained admirers that include Vice President JD Vance.
“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” Yarvin wrote under a pseudonym in 2012. Yarvin and a circle of “thought leaders” in Silicon Valley and other far-right communities believe that democracy is a kind of inefficient mob rule, broken beyond repair, but that a high-tech-flavored “creative destruction” could replace it with a notion of better government through computer engineering.
In explaining what Yarvin has also called “turbocapitalism,” Suzanne Schneider in the UK’s New European wrote: “The engineers...represent the triumph of instrumental reason in our new century. They fetishize efficiency and understand the democratic state as an impediment to the sort of ‘progress’ they desire.” Ultimately these ideas were adopted by billionaires with the power in an age of unlimited campaign spending to change America like Thiel, who notoriously wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Ideas from this extreme-right intelligentsia spent the last 15 years morphing, remarkably, into reality. These include controlling the flow of information (Musk buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022), a Yarvin 2022 proposal called “RAGE” for Retire All Government Employees (thus, the DOGE-led push for mass resignations and firings of the federal workforce), and the more recent Silicon Valley embrace of cryptocurrency as a tool to disrupt the institutions of a comatose democracy. Now, Musk’s DOGE team is racing to replace the fired or locked-out civil servants with generative artificial intelligence in what a TechPolicy Press writer calls “an AI Coup,” because it “concentrates power with those who understand and control this system’s maintenance, upkeep, and upgrades.”
Normally, these fringe ideas would have stayed about 3,000 miles west of Washington, quarantined in their wealthy California bubble, but a perfect storm put this nightmare on the brink. For one thing, a majority of rank-and-file voters also lost faith in government as well as the institutions that support civil society, if perhaps for different reasons. Even more importantly, the anti-democratic ideas of Yarvin and Thiel found both an even wealthier ally in Musk and also a front man in Trump, the bridge with an ability to seduce MAGA voters, even as he agreed to cede enormous power to billionaires, in a Faustian bargain to gain four more years in the White House.
Trump’s “red Caesar” techno-monarchy is actually just high-tech tyranny. Government by AI isn’t more efficient, just inhumane, and it’s also a lie, because the real decisions aren’t actually being made by computers, but by the corrupted humans who program them. And their unbridled faith in Silicon Valley elites is often an excuse to govern America with the same foundations of white supremacy and misogyny that thrive in the tech world. The humans who pretend in the ethical purity of AI really just want more obscene wealth for themselves and the same impunity for their crimes that Trump has granted himself.
The masses of American people need to understand that we are already pawns in their experiment, and that a small band of billionaires and their disciples played the cruelest hoax of using a democratic election on Nov. 5, 2024, to push the start button on their program to end democracy. Humanity needs to fight back quickly, before their AI algorithm decides that on Nov. 7, 2028, your vote doesn’t matter at all.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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