Yves here. I hope you’ll give this important post the attention it deserves. It presents a distressingly plausible explanation of what Musk and his fellow tech broligarchs are up to with their pillaging-disguised-as-DOGE operation.
It turns out my hypothesis, that this cabal was trying to create an economic crash so as to engage in Russia-1990s-level-asset-buying-on-the-super-cheap, was not dire enough. Thom Hartmann below explains how a new tech belief system, the Dark Enlightenment, seeks to implement authoritarianism with a combination of elite technocrats (as in the IT type, not the older notion of “high subject matter skills”) and AI in charge.
By Thom Hartmann, a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream” (2020); “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” (2019); and more than 25 other books in print. Originally published at Common Dreams
The future of American democracy isn’t being dismantled by accident; it’s being systematically replaced to prepare the way for something entirely new.
A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule.
Americans are baffled by the brutal, relentless attack on the institutions of America that they’ve launched.
Why would they destroy our reputation around the world by shutting down USAID? What’s wrong with the federal government helping poor school districts or giving college students Pell Grants? Why gut billions in scientific research that’s kept America at the forefront of the world and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives?
Paul Krugman recommends a psychiatrist weigh in; Dr. Bandy X. Lee (a frequent guest on my program) points that out, noting, “How exactly this plays out is, as I have said, a spiritual question.” Three New York Timeswriters even had a lengthy back-and-forth on the topic, under the title: “Is Destruction the Point?”
- Some speculate that Musk and Trump are both tight with Putin and they’re destroying our government at his direction, helping achieve the goal he’s had since his KGB days to destroy America from within.
- Others think it’s just a way of crippling government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and the Post Office so they can now be profitably taken over by private industry.
- Democratic politicians tell us Musk and Trump are just trying to cut government spending to pay for the $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will be introducing in the House in the next few weeks.
They’re all wrong.
The simple answer is that these people intend to replace the 240+ year “American Experiment” with a brand new governance “experiment” of their own. One that was largely developed in computer rooms around San Francisco.
There’s an actual ideology behind all this, and it isn’t the old-fashioned Ayn Rand libertarianism that was such a rage during the Reagan era.
This hot new experimental ideology, enthusiastically embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires and their “tech bros” dismantling our government, is called the Dark Enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement (NRx).
And it’s not entirely new; they believe they have proof that it works, which can be found way over on the other side of the planet. I’ve been there, in fact, and it does seem to be working just fine… if you don’t care about freedom.
Back in 1994 I published a book proposing that ADHD wasn’t a brain disease or disorder but, instead, a form of brain wiring that would be highly adaptive during humanity’s long hunter-gatherer period but can present a struggle for people in today’s factory-like school systems. Time Magazine did a cover story about it, including an article featuring my book, and suddenly I was in demand literally around the world.
One of the countries I visited during the book tour that ensued (the book’s available in more than a dozen languages) was Singapore. A parents’ group had reached out to my publisher and set up an opportunity for me to talk about my theory and ways schools could be reinvented to work for both “normal” and ADHD kids.
I gave the speech and laid out a series of suggestions, and during the Q&A that followed, one of the parents asked how to best convince schools to adopt some of my ideas. I suggested they should “become politically active,” a standard answer in most every other country I’d visited (and here in America). Little did I realize the significance of that phrase.
When I got back to my hotel, an internationally famous five-star tower with a beautiful atrium, my room had been torn apart. The mattress and box springs were on the floor, as were the contents of my suitcase. Every drawer was pulled open. My toiletries kit was all over the bathroom floor.
I called hotel security to report what I thought was a break-in or robbery, although I couldn’t immediately see that anything was missing. The head of security showed up in my room five minutes later with the hotel manager. They looked around the room with neither shock nor alarm.
The manager explained, with a hint (but only a hint) of apology in his voice, “The police were here,” as if that explained everything
“They did this?” I asked, as I recall.
He nodded and said, “Presumably.”
“Why?” I demanded.
Both men shrugged. The head of security asked me if I’d engaged in anything illegal while in Singapore, particularly bringing illegal drugs into the country, and I indignantly denied even the possibility. They shrugged their shoulders again and offered to send a maid up to help make put the room back together.
The next morning, I had breakfast with some of the parents I’d met the afternoon before and told them what happened. They explained, in a whisper, that I never should have mentioned “politics” in my speech.
“It is not allowed here,” as I recall one telling me.
Singapore has come a ways from the mid-1990s, but is still an authoritarian state. As Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein wrote for Mother Jones:
During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate libertarian economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly conservative mishmash of social and political control.
Singapore has banned all kinds of free speech; intervened in marriages and family planning; encouraged eugenics; caned people for minor crimes; created an ethnically homogeneous ruling class; treated the migrant worker population as second-class citizens; and, famously, banned chewing gum.
This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A “soft” authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. “The exuberance of democracy,” LKY explained, “leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.”
According to the philosopher-king of the Dark Enlightenment movement, the guy who woke up JD Vance, and the billionaires who support him, Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future.
As Kaiser-Schatzlein writes about Curtis Yarvin and the other Dark Enlightenment thinkers who have inspired Musk, Theil, Vance, et al.:
For a new breed of right-wing thinkers, politicians, and activists, LKY’s approach to government is appealing. Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley’s resident neo-monarchist, compares LKY to FDR—both good examples, he says, of a unilateral leader.
And Nick Land, an accelerationist philosopher, calls LKY an “autocratic enabler of freedom.”
To them, LKY is the paradigm of an illiberal ruler who created a paradise for his subjects: a freedom without rights, a prosperity without disorder.
Sure, Republicans are going to gut government spending to pay for tax cuts for the billionaires who own them. And they definitely want big Wall Street banks to run Social Security just like George W. Bush handed more than half of Medicare (so far) over to giant for-profit insurance companies. After all, both industries represent such big campaign donors.
But this goes way beyond merely making billionaires richer or giving corporations more power over our lives. The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.
And once AI reaches the ability to think with the intelligence of a genius-level human—Artificial General Intelligence or AGI—some of these guys believe that most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why.
All it’ll take is a monarchical leader who, like KLY, brooks no dissent.
Trump could be that leader—or at least the useful-idiot-frontman for the technocrats like Vance and Musk who are really running things—and the gutting of federal agencies opens up a space to replace them (and their workers) with AGI-based computer systems.
Rana Foorahar explains it in The Financial Times:
The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces, and that societies should be run like corporations, with a kind of CEO Monarch in charge.
As Yarvin has said, “If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia… One way of dealing with that is… hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution…”
And they’re much further along in the process of both gutting government and seizing total control of our political system to implement this experiment than most Americans realize.
- A new site that lays out exactly how they’re progressing toward their goal of kneecapping the federal bureaucracy is project2025.observer; according to the site, they’re about 40% of the way there, although the courts may set them back temporarily.
- And the project for billionaires to take complete control of our elected officials (and thus our government, at all levels) is also nearly complete: Fully 18% of all spending on the 2024 elections was done by just 150 billionaire families who represent a mere .00000045% of the American population.
The Dark Enlightenment has little use for democracy; openly disdains notions of equality as proposed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution (viewing them as unnatural and counterproductive); and rejects what they call “Whig historiography,” which assumes history inevitably progresses toward greater liberty and enlightenment.
Instead, like Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, and Oswald Spengler, they argue that “classical” societal structures that ruled the world for millennia (like feudalism, monarchy, or cameralism) are superior to democracy and, completely ignoring the history of the development of modern democracy, should—with a high-tech AGI twist—replace today’s democratic “experiment.”
(Ironically, a large portion of the infrastructure that this movement is using was financed by fossil fuel billionaires who simply wanted to avoid paying income taxes and to have their oil companies deregulated so they could make more pollution and thus more profit. Similar to the people who funded the rise of Hitler—including Fritz Thyssen who wrote the book I Paid Hitler after WWII as an apology—many are now surprised, and some even frightened, by the turn of things.)
They are pushing forward with the “move fast and break things” slogan of the Tech industry that Mark Zuckerberg popularized. And they are having breathtaking success, between that strategy and the billions of dollars they are easily able to spend to seize the political power to fulfill their vision. They call themselves “Masters of the Universe” without a trace of irony.
Some high-profile observers of American politics are alert to this takeover-in-progress that most of our media has completely missed. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for example, recently wrote for his Substack newsletter:
Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.
Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
He notes that these tech-bro “oligarchs of the techno-state” want to replace “inefficient” democracy with “an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.”
Rachel Maddow has similarly featured stories about Yarvin and others like him on her program, albeit infrequently. The New Yorker has written about the movement, as have multiple other publications.
Lefty intellectuals and progressive thought leaders are suddenly waking up to the Dark Enlightenment experiment that, like a glacier finally reaching the sea, has been slowly consuming the GOP as it moves along and is now—with hundreds of millions from Elon Musk buying the White House for Trump—suddenly cleaving off massive icebergs of damaged governmental institutions.
But a much wider understanding of what’s really animating Trump’s and Musk’s experimental destruction of our government is needed.
If Americans don’t wake up to the Dark Enlightenment’s creeping grip on the people who control our democracy, we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections are meaningless, the government serves only the ultra-rich, and freedom exists in name only.
Pass it along… and get into the streets!
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Crash and burn the system in place. and replace with AI governance. Musk has said the cell phone will be gone by 2030, and what will be in place then? The Neurolink implanted in human beings as a control over financial and day to day living. Total control! Musk, Gates, Bezos and the rest are all colluding in their own way to bring this about. You will be the cell phone and the battery combined. The evidence is there and do your due diligence.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s really a stretch to call these people “thinkers” with a “philosophy”. Their minds are “dark” all right.
Musk, Thiel & the ‘Dark MAGA’ Technate:
Part 1:
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/03/investigative-series/the-dark-maga-gov-corp-technate-part-1/
Part 2:
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/03/investigative-reports/the-dark-maga-gov-corp-technate-part-2/
Thank you for linking to the actual source of which Hartman for whatever reason has chosen not to mention. Namely, where the source of inspiration for his thesis comes from. Iain Davis is an amazing independent researcher.
He does, however, cite those astute political analysts Rachel Maddow and Robert Reich — which to me tips his hand as to where he is coming from.
I would also recommend going to those sources linked by Richard H. They are good. But once again, while the technology of control is growing, this threat is not a new development. It is just another phase in our half-century of neoliberal de-democratization that has steadily brought us to the brink of oligarchic New Feudalism. Upstater mentions the contributions of Carter, Clinton, and Obama in a comment below. To that I would add the neocon expansion of the National Security apparatus under Reagan/Bush I and (especially) Bush2/Cheney. The trajectory of our foreign and domestic policy, and the gutting of our (already weak) mechanisms of democratic accountability, has been steady since the late 1970s.
Let me say, once again, that I take these developments seriously. But this is yet another of the almost daily “Trump = Fascist!” pieces to scare Blue Team constituents. The true nature of this long-term bipartisan project is mystified by this sort of focus. Most of what is actually going on is an intra-oligarch factional battle for control – our current version of the “Yankee-Cowboy” war that was occurring in the 1960s. These “tech oligarchs” are the new version of the old Western oil/defense “cowboys.” But just as the “Eastern Establishment” had its own “oil barons” – the most powerful of which gave us Carter in 1976 – today’s Establishment has its own “tech bros.” There does seem to be a battle going on over who controls the “Deep State.” But none of these competing oligarchic factions is fighting to restore democracy.
Just because the boy cried wolf too often does not mean the wolf never came.
Criticizing Maddow and Reich for being Maddow and Reich is ad hominem. You need to debunk their claims. Even absolute nutters like John Bolton occasionally make a sound observation.
I have just about never reposted Hartmann because he has a pretty bad case of TDS and is regularly so amped up about it that even when he might have a valid point, his overwrought tone discredits him.
So do have no doubt about it. These guys are as dangerously nutty as you think. For instance, Peter Thiel has argued for investing in tech bubbles, even though they go bust, so as to accelerate the coming of the Singularity God. He literally argues that choosing to take on and increase tail risk is a good thing, when the Singularity basically means the end of humans. So he advocates investing in the equivalent of destruction of humanity to accelerate its arrival, and the hell with the interim costs too. See here: https://www.wired.com/2007/09/peter-thiel-exp/
I don’t disagree with anything you say here. As I say, I take these developments seriously – I hope my comment did not imply otherwise. It’s just that I believe that without historical context this type of argument mainly contributes to partisan sheep-herding and mystification.
I apologize if my reference to Maddow and Reich seemed ad hominem. I used them as short-hand for partisan hacks who focus on the dangers of a Trump while ignoring the dangers of the deep-state Russiagate operation against him (not to mention the operations against Ukraine, Syria, etc.) I hope that is not also ad hominem; I could spend all day listing the problems with these two, but I figured NC reader would be familiar with these.
Regarding Thiel and the Tech Bros, I definitely agree with you on their nuttiness and potential danger. But I would argue that such apocalyptic nuttiness is not new. Some of the right-wingers of the 1960s, including some with real power in the Pentagon, were ready for nuclear war with the Rooskies and others were just as fascistic as some of today’s tech bros. Their ideas are dangerous indeed. So, too, is the hysterical Russophobia of our current Establishment. For me, it is crucial to understand the long history of how the neocons and their worldview have come to completely dominate our foreign policy and media institutions. Similarly, the long history of our neoliberal dismantling of the New Deal, its effect on the Democratic Party, and the bipartisan expansion of our censorship/surveillance apparatus is necessary for understanding why we ended up with Trump and his pseudo-libertarian pals.
Because of the damage done to our understanding and analysis by “liberals,” I am overly-sensitive to their faults. Thus my knee-jerk reaction whenever I see something that seems to start the story with Trump, But in my defense, I’d argue that they are a big reason for why we have Trump and Musk and Vance (and Thiel).
I concur with your assessment. The extreme danger this techno- fascist oligarchy represents is very, very real. However, acknowledging the seriousness of this disease does not mean that we should swallow the snake oil cure that Maddow, Reich et al are selling. At this very moment Bernie Sanders and AOC are touring the country rallying opposition to the dangers of Trump. They are correct to do this. However, they conveniently ignore the complicity of the Democratic wing of the Neo Liberal fascist oligarchy in creating the conditions described by Hartman. In effect, they function as a “bell cow”, leading the herd of the disaffected back to the Democratic Party whom Sheldon Wolin correctly referred to as an “inauthentic opposition”. I am convinced that we are experiencing a ‘Weimar moment’. Our democratic institutions; both political parties, the courts, the legislatures, the executive, the media organizations, our universities and labor unions, have been diminished and co-opted to the point that they offer no meaningful opposition to the forces of fascism. Any opposition must come from below.
The people who go to those Sanders-AOC rallies might well meet eachother and stay in touch with eachother and learn how to become that opposition from below. And from the sides and from behind.
They might not. But they might. And without those rallies, they would never meet eachother to begin with.
Sanders is pretending to sheepdog, because he has personal experience of what the Dumb Party leadership, you should excuse the expression, is willing to do to him. I think what his farewell tour is really about, besides rallying opposition to the present regime, is warning the Dumbs that they better change their ways or his followers might organize their own party. Which is actually more possible now than in any recent year, what with the social disorder likely to be unleashed by Trump’s funding cuts to social programs. Never mind that those are a jobs program for C student middle and upper middle class Uni graduates, not to mention subsidy for real estate and agribiz; meager as they are, they are nevertheless literally keeping people alive in rural and inner-city impoverished neighborhoods.
Furthermore, Bibi has just about destroyed Jewish moral authority for at least a generation to come. It should now be possible to organize a new party without the Israeli dual citizen billionaire money, which, I might point out, Sanders has never accepted. It should now be possible to include in the platform of such a party sensible ideas like control of our borders, immigration policy based on our best interest, and a foreign policy of non-interventionist armed neutrality, and 2% of the population can scream in outrage all they want.
As for Representative Ocasio Cortez, she represents a safely blue district which cannot be gerrymandered out from under her for the foreseeable future, and she would like someday to be Speaker of the House. She therefor has a personal interest in revival and renewal of the Dumbs as a genuine working class party.
Rich, You have summarized the horrible national situation in very few words.
Excellent comment.
Yves is getting away with the double-flip ad hominem attack by belittling you regarding the Lefty twins Rachel and Reich, neither of whom have an ounce of credibility left between them. Don’t be bullied. That the author starts there, goes a long way in defining his mind set. Also don’t forget the author’s dismissal of Trump as a dimwit. This is the guy who defenestrated the Dems and left them as roadkill for the next 3 Presidential cycles, if they survive at all.
And still- who in their right mind ( the author has PTSD since his trip to Singapore in the ’90s) trusts a billionaire?
Lefty – ????
It blows me away that some still used the bastardized terms forwarded by the neoliberal authoritative right in social/economic matters. There is no left, Sanders is not lefty, Eisenhower and FDR are to the left social/economic to him and they are not lefties ….
Its as bad as starting with the political parties as the starting point to neoliberalism or necons, more so focusing on individuals like the President at any given time. Origins go way back, suffice the modern neoliberalism is post WWII. All driven by monied/Capital interests seeking not only to shape US social/economic policies but that of the whole world.Globalism was a crusade, having been taken off the table by BRICS its gone inverted totalitarianism.
Thank you for a more sober assessment than Hartmann’s. When I read things like this –
“Why would they destroy our reputation around the world by shutting down USAID?”
– I wonder if Hartmann has really been paying attention to much of anything, since the rest of the world on the receiving end of USAID’s “aid” might consider its destruction, which isn’t likely to actually happen, as a good thing.
As you noted, this is a long term, bipartisan effort. Politicians from both parties have been shoveling money at the “bad billionaires” like Thiel and Musk for years now. The “good billionaires” like Bezos (although he may have done a heel turn in the minds of the PMC) and Gates have also received their share of Uncle Sugar’s largesse. One could argue that Amazon didn’t really get going until it got those huge CIA contracts. The USPS has clowned itself doing favors for Bezos. I could go on.
Trying to solely blame Trump and those who pull his strings only lessens the threat and makes it seems like everything will be OK if we could just get the abjectly corrupt and feckless Democrats back in charge. It won’t be.
As noted in another NC post today, the EU is going to try to shove CBDC down citizens’ throats. It might work. But I suspect it will be a bit more difficult for a bunch of foreigners from South Africa to bring about a tech dystopia in the US, where guns still outnumber people.
I disagree, I’ve been following Thom Hartmann’s career since 2000 and I readilliy understood pjay’s point when he referenced Rachel Maddow and Robert Reich. Hartman moved his family from the west coast to Washington DC sometime back and then he packed up his things and moved back to the West Coast. Something happened during that transition and he went from an interesting commentator to a Democratic party hack. I think pjay’s use of Maddow and Reich was a reasonable and effective metaphor to make his point.
“Something happened during that transition…”
I’m not so sure I agree with that. Thom Hartmann moved his family and operation to Washington, DC in the autumn of 2010. I listened to him from about 2004 to 2009. (That’s how I became familiar with Bernie Sanders, through Hartmann’s regular Friday “Brunch With Bernie” segments.)
Hartmann says he is a “democratic socialist,” and he might well be, but, during 2008–2009, I never heard him criticize President Obama from the left, not even once—and there was plenty to criticize. (In fact, that’s why I stopped listening to him—he lost credibility with me.) So, whatever his personal political leanings, I viewed him as a “Democratic party hack”—or, at least, an enabler of sorts—even before his move to and back from Washington, DC—in fact, at the time I saw his relocation, fairly or not, as an opportunistic move to get chummier with the Democratic establishment. (Maybe he became even worse during that time, I don’t know.)
Readers may be more familiar with Yarvin’s pen name, Mencius Moldbug, as mentioned a ways down into Davis’ article.
yes.
he’s worth reading…if you can stomach it.
he is very long winded and generally cryptic, and obviously thinks very highly of himself.
slatestar codex, as i keep saying, has a really good deep dive, over multiple posts, of this whole movement.
hans hermann hoppe is one of yarvin’s favorite philosophers, btw.
odious and vile.
Just a mild warning:
The linked pages are both book length reads. It’ll take more than a cup of coffee, or a whole pot for that matter, to get through one. It’s worth the effort, but realize that it’s going to take some time to get through.
Exactly!! To anyone that has been paying any attention, and basically ignoring the MSM that is sane washing what is happening, this has been evident for months and out in the open. This issue with things like this by the time most realize what is happening it is long past too late to do anything.
In my view we are past too late and barring an uprising of the masses, a la general strikes, they have succeeded. (In my view the past tense is appropriate.) What seems so brazen is that they told you they were going to do this, and then proceeded to do it.
And, in the interim the rich will be bought off with tax cuts, which in the short term is all they seem to care about.
The Technate?
I came here to bring this up. I was just on a call with a former Canadian parliament member who brought this up and noted how Musk’s dad was a member before the move to SA.
To clarify: Elon Musk’s father Errol was South African born.
Musk’s mother is of Canadian ancestry. Her parents moved to South Africa from Canada in 1950, apparently admirers of the Apartheid policies. Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a follower of the Technocracy movement in Canada.
“What’s wrong with the federal government helping poor school districts”
How about starting with “No Child Left Behind”(tm) or “Race to the Top” ™? While it is great to provide funding to poorer school districts, unfortunately federal and state level funding comes with plenty of strings. Most notably are ever-more standardized testing obligating teachers and administrators to “teach to the test” and sometimes tie compensation to testing. It is the work of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
Hasn’t education bureaucracy become like this excerpt of Aurelien’s post that week:
New York State long had Regents Tests for end of year core high school subjects. These tests are challenging. But that was it, except for every 3 year tests for elementary and middle schools. Now curricula is loaded up with politically mandatory fluff, woke, and fixed methods for reading and arithmetic. Regents will become optional. Graduating illiterates and innumerates has become the norm.
Dark Enlightenment is real. I GET IT. But this has been a work in progress since Carter or the Powell Memorandum. Trump/Musk move fast and break things, but how should we characterize Carter’s deregulation, Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government or repeal of Glass-Steagall or Obama’s remake of healthcare with the ACA?
It’s only been during the NCLB/RttT era of the past twenty five years that all high school students needed to pass the Regents exams in order to graduate, as part of the Everybody Goes to College ideology that ruled secondary education. Before that, the Regents Exams were for the minority of students who’d been on a college prep path, such as students at the specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. The majority of students got either a general, non-academic diploma (though judging by newspaper and tv talk show fare of the time, high school grads were probably more informed and literate than the average college grad today) or a vocational diploma. Of course, once everyone had to be college-ready (in spite of Gates Foundation-promulgated “standards” and practices actually undermining reading and critical thinking skills), then the tests were watered down, and their scoring was gamed even more than in the past… a win-win situation for consultants, privatizers (charter schools, TFA, etc) and psycho-careerist admins, but not so much for students and teachers.
You are certainly correct about the Trojan Horse quality of much federal funding for education, at least in that era, with the attacks being bi-partisan: NCLB was co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy (book-ending his career after trucking and airline deregulation in the 1970’s), and the predations of Rahm Emanuel and Arne “Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to public education in New Orleans” Duncan under Obama. Bad times, nasty people…
Maybe regents exams as finals were a practice at my late 60s early 70s high school in suburban Buffalo; it certainly wasn’t like the selective high schools in NYC. We had them for every core subject. It is also noteworthy there was no such thing as AP courses giving college credits after passing expensive ETS standardized tests like my kids took.
I got uprooted in my senior year to New Orleans. Public schools were horrible then with regular racial fighting and cops on campus. 53 years later I still have bad dreams about it. I refused to go to private Catholic high schools; all had mandatory JROTC and uniforms. Not a vision of a senior year for this antiwar Yankee. Of course public education in New Orleans became charter schools under Payush “Bobby” Jindal.
I shouldn’t have suggested it was only the specialized high schools in NYC, since kids all over the state took the Regents exams, but they mostly were administered in schools/programs where the students were perceived as college-bound. The point was that there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all gatekeeping exam in the pre corporate school reform period.
My teaching career straddled the two eras, so I saw how the Regents exams were degraded and gamed. In my neck of the woods, recent immigrant ESL students, in order to graduate they had to pass the Regents, but many of them could barely write a coherent sentence, and were thus in danger of never graduating. That problem was solved by grading according to mandated rubrics that (for the English Regents Exam) so minimized mechanics and grammar that “essays” semi-comprehensible only to a veteran ESL teacher would earn a passing grade.
People are too quick to call everything woke. It has long been sacred that reproduction is a right and parents are allowed to raise their children as they wish. The primary function of education is to produce literate and well behaved future members of society, in the words of that eternal sage George Carlin, obedient workers. This conflicts with the idea of parental prerogative. Parents have the “right” to produce aFAMILYBLOGholes if they want. Society, on the other hand, needs well behaved citizens who don’t display racist, homophobe, and bullying tendencies.
That movement clearly goes too far at times, but the need to produce productive and civil members of society is very real. aFAMILYBLOGholes cost business and society a lot of money because they cannot play nice with others. If Musk and his tech bro cohort get their way, those people will either be locked up or sent for reprogramming.
This is why I think the CEO tech government idea will never take hold in the United States. The country is too big to control and has large numbers of disruptive individuals who enjoy their freedom to be be so.
A way out: the world has to call BS on “AI”.
Of course these types of.people think everyone else qualifies as idiots. They are getting away with selling LLMs as something that “thinks”.
“the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.” [Emphasis added.]
This sort of thing detracts from an otherwise well written article. Would Black female technocrats doing the same thing be acceptable? If not, then “white” and “male” are doing no work other than being tiresomely woke. If I recall Singapore correctly, it is run by Asian technocrats which makes the “white male” thing completely out of place.
On the other hand, I can look out my office window and see a homeless encampment. My city’s solution to the homelessness problem appears to be to allow “urban camping” in some places. I can also look at the narcan kit at my office which is there in case someone overdoses in the public facing restroom. These sorts of things start making Singapore look pretty good by comparison. When Our Democracy (TM) brings us homeless camps and opioid overdoses, we need to actually question what the hell we are even doing.
The thing with Musk and his crew, though, is that I don’t trust them to deliver on the good part of SIngapore. Sure, we’ll get the authoritarianism but not the clean environments, housing, food, and medical care. I trust the techbros to deliver Singaporean authoritarianism with zoned “urban camping” and no narcan. But hey, lets focus on Musk being white instead of the real problem.
@Christopher Smith and @Thom Hartmann: “the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people”
This never happened. Not even a little bit.
Maybe “the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by the illusion that it was ruled by its own people…”
The latter I’ll buy.
Along the same lines, this is at the end of Hartman’s afticle:
“we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections are meaningless, the government serves only the ultra-rich, and freedom exists in name only.”
That’s how the country got to the point where this variety of authoritarianism is being being discussed.
Elections so meaningless they are like PR and advertising/marketing campaigns.
Govt that serve the ultra rich. Too many ways to count from the price tag on running for office to the now ritual tax cuts for the wealthy.
Freedom exists in name only where policies like the Patriot Act exists.
And time to move to the laptop where I can see what I’m doing.
Agreed
“On the other hand, I can look out my office window and see a homeless encampment. My city’s solution to the homelessness problem appears to be to allow “urban camping” in some places. I can also look at the narcan kit at my office which is there in case someone overdoses in the public facing restroom. These sorts of things start making Singapore look pretty good by comparison. When Our Democracy (TM) brings us homeless camps and opioid overdoses, we need to actually question what the hell we are even doing.
The thing with Musk and his crew, though, is that I don’t trust them to deliver on the good part of SIngapore. Sure, we’ll get the authoritarianism but not the clean environments, housing, food, and medical care. I trust the techbros to deliver Singaporean authoritarianism with zoned “urban camping” and no narcan. But hey, let’s focus on Musk being white instead of the real problem.”
This. I presume the Singaporeans tolerate the regime’s political repressiveness because in return it provides for them many concrete, material benefits that “Our Democracy” in its Uniparty embrace of neoliberalism has over the course of more than 40 years made impossible for the citizenry to enjoy. Similar observations could be made about the CCP and how it has managed the long march out of rural poverty for millions upon millions over the same period, but this cannot even be acknowledged “because Reds.”
Branko Milanovic has some interesting thoughts about this in his Capitalism Alone — how both “liberal democratic capitalism” (exemplified by the US) and what he calls “political capitalism” (exemplified by China) face the identical challenge: how to prevent a hereditary oligarchy from establishing itself at the expense of the citizenry. Look around you — who do you think is winning?
“Our democracy” is definitely losing its luster. To your point about how “democracy” isn’t delivering as it once might have, here is a very interesting quote from the journalist interviewed in this BAR article featured in Links a few days ago about the new African Alliance in the Sahel –
“We were fully immersed in civil society. That’s the thing that we really started to see. There were people from this organization, or that trade union, this collective farm, or that political party, who had all come together, as they did in the huge protests to kick out the French that many of us saw on social media. These were not what we typically think of as a military coups because people were coming out in huge numbers to support the new leaders.
One individual who was maybe in his late 20s and spoke from the floor at the conference said he’d been voting every five years for politicians who promised to build roads, hospitals, and schools and then failed to. He said that what they need now is not to worry about the issue of formal democracy and voting, but to come together to build roads, hospitals and schools.”
My theory is Team Musk is doing a form of Extreme Programming (XP), but applying it to government.
Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s this was a software development philosophy, pioneered by Kent Beck at IBM, which could be summarized as “fail fast, learn faster”, and which eventually gave rise to the Agile methodology in common use today.
It was a development lifecycle typified by:
– Rapid iterations, frequent releases, with small team incremental updates rather than largescale, big team, overhaul projects
– Purposefully breaking things, quickly, so as to learn what works and what doesn’t
– Continuous testing and refactoring
Typical techie books representing or about the movement:
“Move Fast and Break Things” – Jonathan Taiplin (critical of Big Tech and how it attacks culture)
“Fail Fast, Fail Often” – Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz
“Move Fast and Fix Things” – Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang
“Release It!” – Michael Nygard
And there’s an informative reddit about it, which starts by observing that this is the Tesla philosophy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/18rnqd7/the_fail_fast_mentality/
Developers and techies, like myself, look at what the kids at DOGE are doing and it sure seems familiar, and the DOGE roster is all people from the corporate tech world.
No, I know techies who ran high end software firms that did XP and they would disagree with you.
Probably the most important step in XP was to get THE CLIENT to reduce his objectives to what could be written on index cards and not in itty bitty hand writing. They would execute that and then move on to next iterations (as you did say).
The idea of the client driving the show and clear and terse instructions to the programmers is missing from your account.
There is no evidence whatsover that the DOGEbags are executing for someone else, let alone have clear immediate aims. Instead they seem to be acting out a high level “I hate government” ideology, and the only aim is “Break as many things as possible.”
That is not XP or Agile. It’s a demolition.
The client is the president. The index cards and pointing/estimating of tasks come after discovery and requirements.
I agree it’s demolition but no matter what, if you need change, something needs to be broken in the process. And, actually, perhaps it has corollaries in the trades too, is not limited to tech. Are we keeping the frame of the house, the bones, or is it a complete knockdown and rebuild? Looking at the small team size, looking at the method, they’re taking a sledgehammer to the walls to peer inside, look at the structure, test the foundations, deciding what to keep, what to remove, they seem to be in discovery phase.
What is learned here now becomes the backlog for the next iteration of the project, now the team along with the product owner (the president) based on the findings defines the requirements, looks at the task list, prioritizes the list (must have, nice to have), defines release schedule, creates the team to execute. The team itself selects what can be actioned in each release and according to dependencies. Now they set their sights low, create MVP (minimum viable product, whats the minimum can be delivered in shortest release time).
But if you’re right and this is just demolition for the sake of demolition, there won’t be a backlog or task list, no team struck to (re)build anything. Or perhaps a systems architect will be brought in to redesign (or already has blueprints but will now map out or overlay a build plan according to discovery). You have to admit this Trump team has come right out of the gate with some kind fo roadmap or action plan which they’re executing and which has taken everyoneby surprise. This is not an unfamiliar feeling in my world.
Oh, come on. There is no evidence that Trump is meaningfully involved in, let alone overseeing, DOGE. This is Musk’s gig. Even a formerly very loyal team R contact is complaining about that (Trump giving Musk control of domestic policy ex immigration
In addition, if you’ve done construction projects, you know or ought to know that
1. Demolition takes no time. The serious labor and thought is in the building/rebuilding
2. You don’t do demolition until you’ve designed and costed out what comes next. The only exception might be if you are clearing a site to sell as raw land.
I don’t understand why you keep defending these locusts.
Es might be AI. They just regurgitate their unfounded assumptions and add some fluff to make them sound smart and reasonable. How can you disagree?
I hate the thought that we’re actually training these things by engaging with them, but it seems possible, I’m sure you’d agree?
What kind of weirdos are the fanboys, or the fanboys that unleash the AI’s that are fanboys? Coming to some tiny part of the internet to speak the words of The Master so that they may be heard in a wider audience, because complete domination of the media isn’t enough.
Totally agree, Trump is only there for the ego boost and grifting. He has no plan beyond tee time scheduling and making as much money as possible. Project 2025 didn’t even consultant Team Trump, he was just their safe conduct to power. Trump had to be told what all those EO’s he was signing on day 1 were.
I don’t think even th P2025 team saw Musk coming and he’d buy the power right out of
Trump’s hands.
I agree with Yves, you are totally mistaken and as ill informed as the DOGE wrecking crew.
“…they’re taking a sledgehammer to the walls to peer inside, look at the structure, test the foundations, deciding what to keep, what to remove, they seem to be in discovery phase.”
The only thing I’d agree with in that statement is that “taking a sledgehammer to the walls”.
Only an idiot takes a sledgehammer to a wall to do discovery absent a desire for total demolition. A sledgehammer implies that you KNOW there is nothing important behind the surface of the wall AND that you KNOW the wall isn’t a load bearing wall. Take out a load bearing wall without planning for it and the whole next floor could come down on your head – at a minimum you’d be lucky if you to only be add $1,000’s of dollars to your “discovery” project just to emergency rescue the load bearing supports and re-level the floor above you. Or you can smash through the plumbing in the wall and flood the space and anything below you. Yes, add $1,000’s more to fix that F-up.
Even when doing total demolition there are plans for how to do it. When doing major remodeling projects there are DEFINITELY significant efforts to understand the structure BEFORE any demolition occurs because no good contractor wants to spend a ton of money fixing a mistake. And YES mistakes happen because even in that pre-planning you might not know with certainty that there is plumbing behind the wall when you do eventually take the sledgehammer to it. That’s why competent people try to do real discovery before they decide to break things, because they don’t want to break things that maybe they can’t fix after the fact unless that is their objective.
IMHO, the Musk team’s objective is destruction of things they don’t like, or believe in, and that they haven’t been able to convince America’s political system to agree with.
It helps to understand that they also intend to be gainfully employed in replacing what they destroy with things that they say will work better, and also make them much richer.
Their plan, ultimately, is to stand in the ruble and offer their ‘expert’ help to replace what they’ve destroyed, (without permission) and insist that they are the only ones smart enough to do the job.
…and of course, they will tell us what we want, where, and how, and we will have no say in the matter.
“It helps to understand that they also intend to be gainfully employed in replacing what they destroy”
Based on the demographic that is working for him, no, they just want to destroy. I say that as a formerly 20 something male who knew everything.
I’m talking about Musk, Theil, and the ‘brains’ behind the carnage, not the true-believer storm soldiers.
Also keep in mind that Musk is perfectly comfortable holding things hostage – like Starlink and the Ukraine. Do you put it past him to have installed controls in every government system he touched? He can hold the entire government hostage.
I did not say he was a genius for applying the “Fail Fast” method to government, nor that it was the correct approach. We’re not in disagreement here.
Sorry. we are disagreeing. There is no method here. There is only ideology and hubris.
While I can’t say that I disagree with the author, I find it amazingly filled with hubris that the elite billionaires think they can so neat and swiftly convert this geographically large nation with over 300M people into Singapore. I give it better odds they crash the economy hard and as the wheels come off the bus turn this country into one hell of a civil war that looks more like Syria than our first civil war.
Sadly, that sounds like the *better* option.
Best…H
yeah,theyll enable the emergence of tech fiefdoms, but their hubris blinds them to the likely real world consequences of the chaos engine they are using to do that enabling.
one thing seemingly overlooked: americans are rather well armed….i dont think the singaporan people were,lol.
And the DOGEbrothers are counting on the police, perhaps the military as well, to defend them if the mob comes after them or a number of Luigi Mangiones come calling.
I sense that neither the police or the military are all that enthusiastic about supporting the powers that be although the more fanatical supporters of the President are likely there. However, too many Americans are already suffering, and if the economy crashes Great Depression style and the government either can’t or won’t do anything then the support and active protection of these people by the security services becomes problematic. Of course, the various agencies have favored different political factions, which is another problem, and might come into conflict with each other.
This is what happens when a country becomes a nation of men, not laws, while ruled by an increasingly corrupt and incompetent elite who use divide and conquer tactics to gain and keep power.
Yeah, comparing a dot on the map with a population of about half that of some of our largest cities to a continental super power that is largely populated by fractious social malcontents fleeing from elsewhere and their descendants does seem to be a bit of a stretch.
I did very much appreciate Hartmann’s writings on ADHD, which is something of a family trait: attentional hunter gatherers trapped in a society of those better adapted to the routines of farming and factory work. Even so, we get by.
I agree. I think the one constant of American leaders in both sides of the uniparty and the billionaires is an amazing degree of what can be characterized as live-in-their-bubble incompetence. Where I live Elon and DOGE have ignited flat out class consciousness across political boundaries. It is a blue district but the very large rural red parts of the district are up in arms with DOGE’s rando haphazard destruction of the Federal government as has been seen at all of the townhall meetings.
There is another surveillance state that our government is heavily entangled with, located on the other side of Asia, that cannot be criticized. Not sure we need to look at Singapore.
OK. Where was Musk and his gamer boys in 2016, not running the MAGA movement. The real issue is that we are seeing American democracy in action. Trump and his minions were elected by the vote of the people. If you look at the polls and squint your eyes you see that about 25% of the voters are MAGA, about 25% are progressive, about 25% are establishment republican, and about 25% are establishment democratic. This means that about 50% are uniparty and 25% MAGA, that is 75% antiprogressive. In order to prevent the predicted takeover of American government by a neo-feudal elite, the American voters are going to have to begin to care enough about their fellowman to rise up. This did not happen in the 60s when the new left was crushed with brute political force. It did not happen in the 20s when the progressive movement was crushed with brute political force. It did not happen in the late 19th century when the Jim Crow movement crushed with brute political force the movement for black rights. The MSM, political commentators, academics, and general voters spend too much energy analyzing the popularized justification system of the moment. The American voters are going to have to begin to cooperate in a movement founded on the recognition that we are all in this together. Good luck on that.
Less than half of the 340 million people in the US voted. The largest “mandate” any of them can claim is below 25%.
Oh, come on. This was a bait and switch. Even though the Project 2025 doc had been published, Trump distanced himself from it, plus it was rife with internal contradictions, so even if you believed it, you had to guess as to what items might be hoisted from it.
And absolutely no one voted for Musk as co-president., well save maybe Trump and Musk and Melania. That was never presented as an outcome.
My opinion follows – so have at it.
“hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution…”
sort of like the candidate leaders of the Dem and Repub parties with the bonus that- if -the Repubs are cast this way the Dems are full on offer “really no other solution…” vice-versa as well
Both Dems and Repubs (at least their trade mark associations or however you want to label with names so morphus / Lib/conserv/rad/left/right/woke/asleep/ etal) both have the same economic political aims. For instance, the Dems are afraid to propose or even talk of progressive ideas because they don’t want to lose personal status and jepordize “billions of dollars they are easily able to spend” for “the political power to fulfill their vision” that they have siezed.
It is all in order to bring back a Feudalism or basically the monarchial as desribed where the ruling elite, through control of resources and money control the masses by making the masses and others bond-servants via the old and new digitized forms of – load-em-up with debt and have them do what is wanted by the elite (finacializers) to pay it back or else suffer debtors prison — the new and improved digitized, homogonized, sanitized debtors prison. The alternative is “freedom” to choose bondage or prison, bondage or starvation, Bondage equals freedom and liberty so choose between liberty or death…not much difference between the two. The USA has been flexing its Money as Control throughout the world in this fashion for years and, as an ongoing project now supercharged with super-duper technology and fake I…er ah ..I mean AI… new toys to deploy new heights of vanity with bombfires ablazing…the blinding genious of it all… — sorry, went off the rails a bit
As was said years ago
There is a bright side, after watching great minds combat the recession you should be rid of your inferiority complex.
and
It is not the wickedness of predatory wealth, but the weakness of progressive economics which keeps special privilege in the saddle in the United States.
and
No financial wizard would look so much like a wizard if all the suckers didn’t look so much like suckers.
and
All the struggles that have been made for human liberties since the world began, have been made “against the protests of vested interests,” and old man vested interests is a mean boy.
About the suckers, I’ve mentioned the rather lame protest I witnessed over the weekend a couple times now, where there were equal numbers of anti-DOGE, Trump-is-a-fascist signs and “Free Ukraine or we’ll all be speaking Russian” signs. The crowd was of course not working class, but predominately the well heeled, puffy coat, PMC liberal type, judging by appearances at least.
I had the thought of grabbing the bullhorn and exhorting the crowd to cancel their AmazonPrime subscriptions if they were so concerned about the possible takeover by billionaire fascists, but thought better of it. Who wants to be subjected to the finger wagging of a bunch of holier-than-thou, self-deluded, graying liberals?
But it sure does appear that there are a lot of suckers out there who will enter the Matrix gladly once it’s on offer.
The two candidates/CEOs, whatever is nothing but the old Roman Republic system of the pair of consuls runing the place, each team, for a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_consuls
Pure, unadulterated oligarchy.
From links today:
The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism – Ed Zitron.
Will help to wash away some of the “ickiness” described in this article.
Read it, made me wonder if at least some investment in AI isn’t about immanentizing the eschaton as in Yves’ comment above re: Peter Thiel advocating investment in tech bubbles.
Zitron keeps banging on about AI’s lack of profitability and how this time it really is different because there’s no labor to exploit or efficiency of scale to be had, but I wonder now if that’s not missing the point of the thing, which is to create a mandate for universal adoption.
Yes, he still has yet to fully address the fintech bros latching on to the government spigot and services.
He thinks it has to be actually working to some perfection or true efficiency. They just have to be able to continue to market and sell enshittification. More Berneys than Einstein going into it.
He was born in London and this is his online bio-
Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public relations agency.
He seems like a fintech bro latched on to…
Funnily enough, I got into reading the Dark Enlightenment, specifically Curtis Yarvin, at the same time as I got into reading NC fifteen or so years ago, when I was looking to engagement with other conceptions of political economy.
Curtis Yarvin used to write a blog, “Unqualified Reservations” as “Mencius Moldbug” (the name being an illusion to philosophers and philosophies past, including I have always thought goldbug-gery of the Austrian economics strain)
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/
The blog is actually very good reading, if you are open-minded and like to be made to think. And Yarvin writes well – focused, pungent and funny rather than aphoristic, fuzzy and humourless like the left. The ideas range from “that’s an interesting way of looking at it” through “that’s an amusing thought-experiment” to “up his meds, please, nurse!”.
I cleaved to the light, in the end, mainly because I had discovered NC and Warren Mosley and MMT (and then a whole set of work on Wynne Godley, Joan Robinson, Shimomuran economics etc.) which offered more explanation of history and the workings of the world and more tools to improve our lives. Nevertheless, the Dark Enlightenment is, in its political tools, not so far from calls from the left for a tyrant, in the Greek sense, to end oligarchy and raise up the people, even if I am doubtful about its political ends.
Thank you for saving me, Yves!
PS I thought people were more aware of Mencius Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin but apparently not….
We banned Moldbug long ago. He showed up in comments, low-grade tried to take them over, and was toxic but quite clever in hiding that with erudite pretenses and aggressive (but often bad faith) debating.
I think your recent period of banning comments really helped in reducing toxicity. I’ve still seen a few responses that are “pushing the boundaries” but generally the quality of responses that have got through (via auto ok or moderation) have been good.
I think I can spot the bad faith types……and I’m glad you get them ASAP. It’s very tiring to wade through comments from people who have an agenda so you and your team are to be commended.
FWIW I had a private convo with NC people recently…….twas very illuminating and I’m glad that whilst I myself might have “pushed the boundaries” a few years ago, I know the rules these days and don’t try that.
Yeah, It is easy to fall in toxic not well thought reactions for whatever reason. One should routinely try to slow down her/his own horses and think twice what is going to be written, having in mind this is a site with public access. I fail from time to time to do that but once one gets used to it, it comes more easily. Another valuable NC lesson.
>Yeah, It is easy to fall in toxic not well thought reactions for whatever reason. One should routinely try to slow down her/his own horses and think twice what is going to be written, having in mind this is a site with public access. I fail from time to time to do that but once one gets used to it, it comes more easily. Another valuable NC lesson.
Indeed, the education never stops at this site for me. And boy, is it ever too easy sometimes to fall into toxic reactions and thoughts.
The older I get and more I learn, I have realized that one of the best things in life for myself is to follow the words attributed to so many wise ones:
“It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool then to speak ( or type), and remove all doubt”
Hehe. If I have even an iota of doubt about my comment I paste it into text editor (actually I do that for all comments) but I give myself a couple of hours and revisit what I wrote to check that it isn’t going to push NC boundaries or start a flame war.
Then I’ll edit as necessary before posting.
He has a full toolbox of rhetorical tricks, that’s for sure.
But he doesn’t have the Commentariat. ;-)
It seems that the Chinese are quite aware of the various (Western) attempts to return to feudalism:
This is China Discusses Feudalism & Technofeudalism
https://substack.com/inbox/post/159692149
I see an ironic meaning of “Dark Enlightenment,” as in the laws of thermodynamics are beginning to impose a literal darkness upon the modern world. Simultaneously, other consequences of reaching the limits to growth are also ushering in constraints that will, I believe, make an AI dominated world physically impossible. As natural resources become scarce and the ecological tolls on complex society unfold -what some call degrowth, which I see as a loss of complexity in our institutions- will naturally occur. I have little faith in humans to at this point address our multiple dilemmas; this means I expect nature to rigidly set the parameters for how human societies will evolve from the decline of our current status.
The silicon technocrat-bros probably know all about that decline of energy and possibilities and they plan to be the only people left ruling. It moldbuggers the mind.
At this point the only thing that those of us normals who understand this can do is to obstruct the progress of events in every way possible. We have to be the sand in their gears and the pieces of glass in their shoe. Countermusk normals should try to figure out how to make ” Blue” and “deep Blue” zones Musk-resistant and then Musk-proof. ( Musk standing for technate-bro in general).
But of course new emerging national-scale wannabe-movements can give running against Muskism a good hard try. They might reach some people. I am merely suggesting that in the Blue and Deep Blue zones that the primary effort go into building and preparing to defend Separate Survivalism, including surviving and outliving the Technate Crash-Cramdown. Local and hyperlocal food growing, shipping, preparing, consuming. Laws forcing merchants, business, state and local government to accept payment in cash and checks and money orders from whoever wants to pay that way. Stopping the support from “National Guard” forces within the Survivalist States and devoting those resources to creating new State Guards with zero federal contact and zero federal control. Because “federal” will be a cover for “technate-bro”. Moving towards a separate Survivalist States of America, getting zero food, energy, etc. from the global Federation of Technates.
Trump supporters in the field affect to support “freedom” and “liberty”. Perhaps people fluent in their language can try explaining the Muskbro Technate in language they will understand.
Also, those people who are currently focused on boycotting Tesla into extinction may be ready to understand these explanations of the the wider Technate-bro Menace. They could well be motivated to expand their mission to “destroy Musk” and then “destroy the digital Technate-bro Business Community” in overall total. If they can come close enough to exterminating the Technate-bros’ revenue-stream base, they may divide Technate-bro awareness enough to weaken Technate-bro pursuit of their American Technate-bro Shogunate.
Just thoughts for a time where “law” and “democracy” do indeed move too slowly to counter or even keep up with a fast-moving fast-evolving enemy.
I have a name for a to be launched political party in the US. The timing for it needs to be perfect. Launching the “Social Security” Party when the oligarchs manage to bring down SSA…
Every possible name should be offered to see which ones take hold. It would be good for such a party by whatever name to get started now because the Muskbro Conspiracy and the traditional Republicans-Propertarians behind Project Catfood 2025 will bring it down in such a way that there will be no standing it back up.
If we want it to stay up, we will have to keep it up, and we will need a party or movement or something for that to get active before SSA has been demolitioned.
And those people who truly believe in reconquering the Democratic Party and purging the Clintonites and Obamazoids from it will do their best work towards that goal, and should probably be left alone to pursue it. Who knows? . . . if the party can be purged and de-staffed right down to a small ” Red Gingrich” minority, that minority could regrow their numbers to become the “Red Gingrich” monopoly within the Democratic Party. And they could then weaponise the DemParty and use it as their Mighty Tire Iron of Justice to swing into the grinning teeth of all opponents of a New and Newer Deal for America.
The Singaporean model may be one on offer but it may be an older one with roots in America. And there is even a connection with it to Musk through his maternal grandfather. After the crash of the depression there was no end of schemes on how to fix the world and some of them have survived and some disappeared like the functionalists. The “technocracy movement” is one such that never went away. ‘They proposed a vision that would get rid of waste and make North America highly productive by using technology and science.’ That one sentence sounds alone like it could have come out of today’s Silicon valley. The movement grew out of a book that came out several years earlier called “Technocracy”-
https://archive.org/details/technocracyfirst00smyt/page/n3/mode/2up
But here is an article that is more readable and says that ‘(Musks) maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman was a notable figure in the technocracy movement in Canada during the 1930s and 1940s.’ But it will come in conflict with Trump’s idea of billionaire capitalists running things than any technocrats-
https://theconversation.com/a-1930s-movement-wanted-to-merge-the-us-canada-and-greenland-heres-why-it-has-modern-resonances-252587
Nothing new here.
Of course humongous piles of private money brings fresh philosophies of oligarchy. The failure of our democracy has been to back away from a 90% tax rate on extreme wealth. Both of our national political parties are utterly corrupt now, after the Citizens United court ruling, so they have joined the other side. They are both well paid to let this happen.
The GOP goal has always been to wreck democratic government, then complain that it is broken, then wreck it some more so it gets privatized for a private monopoly. The DNC has no problem with people who want do that–the DNC just wants to ‘wet its beak’ while it happens.
In 2000, Putin told his oligarchs to stay in their lane, and out of government. In the Thirties, FDR did the same with the oligarchs who asked Smedley Butler to help them overthrow the White House. No one has done that since the Powell Memo in 1970.
At the moment, only the Federal courts are telling Elon/Vance/Thiel and Friends to stay in their lane. The 310 million people who live here are not seeing any value in what these fatuous tech bros are doing, and will be saying so more and more loudly.
Organized economic progressives (I’m assuming they exist) will find opportunities arise from the contending interests and conflicts between the MAGA rank and file and the Muskotechs. Also, a whole bunch of suddenly unemployed PMC types running around with free time on their hands also presents a situation that is rife with possibilities.
Current estimate of US population is 340 million according to the census bureau.
That’s a 10% error that seems to be repeated too often and to the benefit of people trying to claim some sort of majority or mandate.
This can probably be traced back to Leo Strauss, who thought the enlightenment was a mistake and that seeing outside of the Platonic shadows was better to be kept from the commoners. Although it is difficult (for me at least) to understand what Strauss truly believed because of his rediscovery of ancient esoteric language to educate only people in the know. I suspect that the use of esoteric language is why this philosophy appears like it came out of nowhere.
Strauss is at least partially the philosophic influence behind the neocons as Wolfowicz was a student of his at University of Chicago. Scoop Jackson was just the policy maker who gave access the power.
some deeply interesting discussions going on here. i need to do my spectroscopy hw so bad (rip) but quickly some thoughts on the first article Richard H Caldwell linked (which was more in depth in a way i liked. i need to reread it but i also need to do my homework.)
1. I strongly dislike the implication that humanity knows what is best for itself. peter thiel is not odyssus and he cannot pilot the ship between the staits. like good lord. the hubris on display right there! purposefully making institutions precarious could mean they fail fast or maybe theyll just be wiped out. also having one dominant single state reduces redundancy –> less options to switch into when it fails. i know the techbros love risk but that’s a little too much risk for me. get some hedges.
2. scientifically optimizing is cool in theory but scientists are wrong all the time. a) what are u maximizing and b) what r ur data gathering techniques. if ur goals and ur data r bad, u will fail.
3. peter thiel discussing theology grinds my gears as someone who took 4 years of theology classes in high school and was really into it.
a) the two most important commandments are love your god and love your neighbor.
b) ascribing human warfare to mimitic desire i think is flawed because it ignores clan based relations. in american society it makes more sense to treat people as individual actors. but if u look at a lot of places where there is conflict, it is often ethnic groups battling it out because they both want whats best for their ingroup. and then you hurt one person from the group, then retaliation, possibly spiraling into war. peter thiel is an american techbro so ofc he has no loved ones he would go to battle for. but oh my god peter thiel get some friends you’re deeply indebted to and see how that shifts things.
c) i shant get started on thiel’s theology of passion bc i dont have the time and i would have to pull out references just know it is not what i was taught!!!
i am certain i am not explaining my points well nor am i thinking them through enough. but this discussion is interesting so i at least want to get draft thoughts out there. apologies if thats not cool i just have a lot of hw this week.
There’s a 3 Part series on Yarvin at Behind The Bastards
https://youtu.be/mYrPNvVhKLU?si=ZR2wOVn23Ic3XQ_0
if that’s your thing.
Found it interesting to learn about Yarvin’s mathematical precociousness and the suggestion that access to early internet which was, yes, a very white male thing surely from an access point of things, and that initially exclusive space being spoiled as it were by a broader participation by new and different and maybe unwelcome ‘elements’ as it spread. Still working through the rest.
Thank you for the link! Love that podcast. The first one we listened to was the series on Musk.
This aligns with John Robb’s “long night” that he has been warning us about since the beginning of the global guerrillas blog.
Seems entirely feasible unfortunately.
This is not the “long night” that John Robb was afraid of. He was afraid of a sort-of kind-of left-wing “long night” where libertarian moneybro fantasies would not be realized for a long time to come.
I haven’t read John Robb lately, but muh feelz like he would approve of Donald Trump and esPECially he would approve of Musk and DOGE. Of course that’s just my intuition.
MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Attwood will give a good flavour of what could be in store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaddAddam
However, I suggest that as a refresher, we should go to the deep roots of humanity, I am sure something can be found there:
https://annas-archive.org/search?q=The+Dawn+of+Everything
” A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is funding a billionaire led movement to gut our government, ease democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place…laying the groundwork for an experimental kind of authoritarian rule.”
A somewhat less conspiratorial outlook could focus on the underlying issue of state power and its potential for being either benign or malevolent.
There certainly seem to be a multitude of possibilities for the structuring of state power in the U.S.
I continue to ask myself the following:
Does Trump and the MAGA coalition represent a further solidification of state power or a first step in its dismantling? I’m still uncertain.
Also in play are various critiques of bureaucracy and the possibilities for genuine/organic local control.
At the present moment, I would put myself in the MAGA- Left camp–an extremely small but energetic group!
The reason Lee Kwang Yew is being praised is because he has allowed the structure of British colonial rule to survive in modern Singapore.
It would not be so different from South Africa under the apartheid regime of Elon Musk’s ideal.
As Musk and Trump dismantle the u.s. empire and work great suffering on the Populace and great exploitation of the Populace, without any meaningful push-back from anywhere within the government I am underwhelmed by this post’s urgent call for an angry Populace to “… get into the streets!” Are mass demonstrations effective at changing policy in the direction those demonstrations urge or are they more effective at increasing police budgets and providing them with military toys, more effective at giving the police freedom to injure, even kill demonstrators, while benefiting the profits of the burgeoning prison systems?
Your point about the limitations of getting into the streets is well taken. However, one might hope, and not without good reason, that these displays of sentiment, inchoate as they may be in terms of specific immediately enactable policy proposals, do strike a positive note in that they are seeds from which…I’m sure you know the rest.
Putting the cart before the horse, I’m afraid. You need an organized, disciplined movement with clear goals first. Protests are much more effective when you’re already prepared for primetime. Otherwise, they tend to dissipate public excitement much more than they direct it.
I guess the point for them is to save money by not having to buy elections any more.
I read some of the book reviews of the ADHD being the natural hunter gather state of mind which sounded a bit strange to me. There was a nurse in the reviewing of the book that found that it all was very strange too that the author mentioned that homeopathy was part of the solution to the remedy which of course is well known to be quackery! There also is a lack of references in the book or mentioned in the reviews which is another tell.. So the whole thesis seems to be phony. It is the critical reviews that I always look for as people tend to agree if if a books thesis seems reasonable. I was going to copy a part of the review but as someone earlier mentioned there is a lot to read so few likely did and it seems no one here bothered to look which is a real shame. Now as it shows there is always so many followers and everyone is distracted by their own theories so there is a group think to these topics as there is to ticktock!
Quinn Slobodian does a good job of narrating the intellectual geneology of the plutocratic yearning for “capitalism without democracy” in his book “Crack Up Capitalism”. In account, Singapore has long been a salutary example for Mont Pelerin society figures like Rothbard and Milton Friedman. Interestingly, the CCP also studied Singapore as part of their experiment with partial adoption of capitalism through the creation of special economic zones that emulate its basic structure and regulatory regime.
Two facets of the Singapore model that stick out in this context: Apparently Singapore has depended on substantial state planning, and social welfare programs for its citizens, such as social provisioning of housing. It also depends on an enormous quantity of migrant labor that comprises a significant proportion of its population at any given time.
Personally, I doubt that the proponents of the “dark enlightenment” have fully appreciated the centrality of state investment and regulation to the minimal functioning of a “market based economy”, and the importance of social welfare programs and at least the appearance of democratic accountability to maintaining the social cohesion that is absolutely essential to the maintenance of their wealth.
Caprica was a Battlestar Galactica prequel. Here’s a dark view of transhumanism:
Using Zoe Graystone’s program, we will achieve Apotheosis.
We have martyrs placed all throughout the stadium.
They’ll set off the initial blast.
The scanned avatars of our martyrs will be uploaded to our V-World Heaven.
The servants of the one true God lifted to Paradise in a grand Apotheosis.
Pilot episode:
dailymotion.com/video/x88qprx
See also:
The role of dissociation in ketamine’s antidepressant effects
nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20190-4
> Ketamine was originally synthesized as an alternative to phencyclidine (PCP)
Just keep that ketamite away from the nukes. That’s all I ask at the moment. Further demands will follow.
“If Americans don’t wake up to the Dark Enlightenment’s creeping grip on the people who control our democracy, we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections are meaningless, the government serves only the ultra-rich, and freedom exists in name only.”
1. There are no Americans, only muppets who live only to consume anything and everything.
2. Democracy? America is already an oligarchy. Has the author forgotten the circumstances leading to Biden “withdrawing” from the race and Kamala’s ascension?
3. The government has been serving the ultra rich for the longest time. K Street wasn’t built yesterday.
4. Freedom to die can never be taken from you and the billionaires absolutely believe in that idea.
Author is probably not aware that the world will be facing a severe energy crisis a couple of years from now so Emperor Elon and his delusions too will pass.
While we are at it, what is so bad about Singapore anyways? Different culture, yes, government has gross over-representation of Han Chinese, but does America really have any basis to criticize another country for having one ethnic group grossly over-represented in its ruling elite? If Singapore bad, is China bad too? How about Russia? Is it only the “West” that has everything figured out, with its “democracy,” its opposition to “oligarchy” and its “freedom”? If its the African-American immigrant and the yellow peril that are the forces that the good libs are fighting against today, maybe NPR should start selling pith-helmets and St. George’s flags?.
The problem with aspects of the American right is not that they have a favorable view of Singapore, its that the problems and benefits of Singapore are not scalable and not something that can be grafted onto a giant country with a different culture and history. And the way to criticize the American right is hopefully not through Sinophobia, although I guess the Left has gotten a long way with Russophobia. You could end up in a lot worse places than in Singapore, and they have undergone an unbelievable positive change in circumstances since the English left (and the reverse true of the English). I don’t like Trump but if the opposition is going to take refuge in orientalist tropes, well, a pox on both their houses.
As a “right-wing deviationist,” the reality is that State capitalism, whether under the NEP, or Deng Xiaoping or Singapore (more-or-less) has been a powerful engine of development, more powerful than laissez faire capitalism with its “liberal” democracy and its “free press” both for sale to the highest monopolist. Further, this is the central contradiction of the “neo-reactionary” politics–the point is to have power centralized in a state and private production subordinated to that state, and there is no means to attain that through private capitalists amassing power in a liberal state, the best you can hope for is some kind of neo-feudal scheme that protects backwards and obsolete monopolists but which lacks any capacity for forward progress or dynamism. Look at how America is consistently falling behind the Chinese in innovation in category after category.
You’ve asked a couple of loaded questions. What’s wrong with Singapore, other than the fact that it’s a money laundering center for Indonesians? Well nothing really. Lee Kuan Yew had thought that Singapore was finished when it was kicked out of Malaysia, he even cried on national television (you can see the footage on Youtube) when announcing the “separation”. But you could tell that the whole event really galvanized him into doing whatever it takes to make sure that Singapore will thrive and flourish as an independent nation with zero access to natural resources. Was LKY a moral person in the eyes of the West? Probably not, but I have always respected him because he ACTED. It’s too easy for a country like Singapore to fail because it’s surrounded by countries with much lower cost of labor in addition to ample access to natural resources and yet Singapore has survived and prospered till now. Have they always done things in an above the table manner? Probably not, but then again as I alluded earlier, what choice did LKY really have back then?
Yeah, Singapore and the US are totally different countries as you pointed out, and the Singapore experience has NOT borne out in China, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/01/business/worldbusiness/IHT-singapore-industrial-park-flounders-a-deal-sours.html.
Yeah I have said stuff before about Singapore and feel very conflicted about it, having done work for its main govt funded medical Council.
It’s very interesting that EVERY project must stratify by ethnicity (Han, Malay, Sinhalese, British) to check that the intervention doesn’t adversely affect one of those groups. Plus the Han ruling class actually never were particularly bothered about homosexuality but they knew the Malay majority WERE so (with a few exceptions) the law generally just jumped on you if you did ANYTHING overtly sexual, straight or gay, in public. There was always a thriving male gay scene in my trips there but it was definitely below the surface and Chinese mothers really wanted offspring!
Their education system is great in some ways but very very inflexible. “Will this be on the exam?” syndrome is common. Duke University has/had a centre nested within NUS and I always thought this was deliberate to get more original thinking.
Original thinking is overrated. Who is closer to civil war? Western countries or Singapore/other Asian countries? https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/. If anything, Singapore did the most forward thinking thing possible by “encouraging”/forcing people of different races to live together in public housing.
What creates problems? Solutions, with each one begetting bigger problems which then necessitate even bigger solutions, and so on and on. I’ve had enough of “original” thinking. Nowadays that sounds more like a dig towards the traditional Asian education system more than anything else, “my kid is bad at math but he’s going to be a stable genius through creative endeavors”. Sure.
Singapore and war? Ridiculous. Look at its population and get back to me.
And as for Asia…did you miss Myanmar? And lots of others?
https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts
By contrast, Latin American has only 6. Europe has 7 but the scale of the Ukraine conflict means that should probably be weighted as worth 10 of the others. Even so, that would take you up to 16 conflict-equivalents.
Singapore under LKY reminds me a little of early Terminus under Salvor Hardin in the first book of Asimov’s Foundation Series. East Asia has been and remains a dangerous place, and Singapore can not risk direct engagement in a war, its no Israel. They didn’t even have a local fresh water supply until around ~2010.
I remember once reading a William Gibson essay about his visit to Singapore and some nearby places. He wrote that at that time Singapore reminded him of ” Disneyland under Martial Law”.
He titled the article ” Welcome to ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’ ”
https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/
The key to understanding Moldbug is his background- he was a State Department brat. He grew up in various little remote hamlets which are Potemkin Peorias: pretend white-picket-fence neighborhoods in Portugal, Mongolia, the Dominican Republic. The children who grow up in these places are indoctrinated as Americans. But they come to America, look around, and say, “Who are these people? I’m not one of them!”.
At 15 he went to Brown U. His roommate was a Getty. Young Master Getty wanted a ferret (illegal in Rhode Island). A limo turned up to pick him up. A real limo, not one of those airport jobs. The limo took him over the state line to wherever they could sell him a ferret, and brought him & his new pet home.
Incidents like this helped CY’s alienation.
If this all seems weirdly specific, it’s because I used to know the guy. He was a little weird then, but mostly held it all back.
I am sorry but this is no excuse (you may not have intended this detail to amount to that but it winds up coming off that way).
I know more than a few diplobrats who had postings in what were considered to be not-great locations, like Moldbug. They also went to top unis where they were on the poorer side of the student body, which can be a bit of a shock having been in the elite during one’s childhood. Most wind up being very advantaged via their great social skills (they generally have the beautiful manners and ease in conversation that goes that community) and worldliness (being able to drop the names of some of the places you’ve been impresses generally provincial Americans).
The one I know who has self-admitted psychological issues has much better reasons: adopted in then Yugoslavia, with a Jekyll and Hyde mother (she could go from being sweet or at least normal to volcanically abusive without missing a beat and with no apparent trigger, resulting in the child being in terror most of the time) who among other things would threaten regularly to send her back to the orphanage. She still does brilliant work and is not twisted like Moldbug.
Thanks for this Yves. Though the “full story” certainly doesn’t match with my experience, I see some similarities which I strive to address.
In early 2010s all the top choice modellers (except McFadden) got together to run a course in Italy. Hugely popular. I got the highest attendee evaluation score by far. I could “read the room”. However I’m also known for having little patience with people from my original discipline (economics) who just like to cause trouble in my courses or were clients when I ran projects.
I guess I’m tired of the “progress one funeral at a time” thing.
It is difficult to convince a New Yorker who is reluctant to enter the subway for fear of screaming lunatics on every train that a technocratic American Singapore is a grave threat to freedom. The puzzling thing about U.S. politics these days is the disappearance of middle ground and the erosion of common sense. People seem to feed on the energy of polarization and demonization, reducing politics to a Punch and Judy show signifying nothing.
I can see where this plan might hit a few speedbumps, the Mormon Church for one.
The Church might like a puritanical authoritarian Government, but only if they were in charge.
HH is engaging in gross hyperbole. I and millions of other people enter the NY subway virtually every day, or at least several days a week (if you ride often enough you get some rides). I really don’t understand these scaredy cats who say they are New Yorkers.
Here is an article about Tesla withholding sick-pay from workers on sick-leave from its plant in Germany.
The article describes unpleasant working conditions there in general. This looks like an opportunity for a movement based on recurring monthly small donations to raise money to give to every worker who quits that plant and keep giving them money till they have found other work. That could help destabliize Tesla in Germany. Would that be a realistic step on the road to exterminating Tesla from existence everywhere outside of China?
https://carbuzz.com/tesla-allegedly-withholding-wages-german-sick-leave/
Here is a picture with captioned field-mark arrows called ” A cool guide for identifying undercover cops”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chaoticgood/comments/1jjxoyh/always_be_aware_of_your_surroundings_when/
And here is a post relevant to the subject of “government overthrow from within the government”. It is titled ” the most worrying aspect of this Signal shitshow”. It notes that the project 2025 people made training videos about how people in government could use Signal and other private apps without “automatic save-all-communications” features so as to take advantage of the “automatic delete” nature of the private apps. That way, project 2025 type conspirators inside government could plan their “overthrow from within” operations without leaving any traces of their communications to be found after the fact.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrepperIntel/comments/1jkenld/the_most_worrying_aspect_of_this_signal_shitshow/
And to these democratic politiicans this would make sense because the deficit matters naturally. And therefore “pay go” policy is the sine quo non of governance.
DARK ENLIGHTMENT MOVEMENT :
As Curtis Yarvin – Silicon’s Valley resident neo-monarchist noted :
“once AI reaches the ability to think with the intelligence of a genius-level human—Artificial General Intelligence or AGI—(…) most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why.
”
“Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime….”
He notes that these tech-bro “oligarchs of the techno-state” want to replace “inefficient” democracy with “an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.”
Encyclopedia Galactica (Isaac Asimov – Fondation and Empire)
Excellent article, very well written, thank you for sharing.