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Techno‑feudal elite are attempting to build a twenty‑first‑century fascist state
- dyauspitr 8mo ago[flagged]
- d_silin 8mo agoCentrist positions are inherently unstable (think top of the hill) because they require active efforts to maintain the balance between factions prone to polarizations (left->far-left, right->far-right). It requires consistently good statesmanship or strong external challenge for opposing factions to act in united manner.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoIt depends on how the populace feels. It could also technically be a valley with the extremes on either side. Honestly though I think the centrists can never find positions people can get rabid about because by definition it calls for moderation.
- Terr_ 8mo agoWhile setting proactive centrist initiatives might be hard, centrist sentiment with passive inaction is very very easy. All you need to do is tut-tut occasional "excesses." In other words, the centrism of taking risks is very different from the centrism of avoiding them.
- fwip 8mo agoHistorically, people like that become known as collaborators.
- ares623 8mo agoWork for it.
- jacquesm 8mo agoThe bystander effect in a nutshell. You too are eventually accountable and culpable and when the wheels of fascism turn far enough you'll find yourself as part of an outgroup.
- krapp 8mo agoYou can't have centrist fascism. To have any kind of fascism, you would first need to commit to a specific ideological position.
- atmosx 8mo agoThe hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. - D.A.
- ffsm8 8mo agoFunny things about that though, if you're centrist today, you'd be considered far left in the 2000s
- dalemhurley 8mo agoThat analogy does not make sense. You are assuming political spectrum is a left to right gradient which you just move along, when in reality it is a constantly shifting multi dimensional spectrum that shifts on different issues. However if we apply today’s centerist to the end of the 1990’s they would be more a Bush conservative.
- russdill 8mo ago"I don't like the Jews and hate the Nazis."
- krapp 8mo agoPeace in our time.
- tootie 8mo agoWoke only exists in the mind of the far right.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoI don’t know, I’m grouping runaway feminism and high LGBT visibility and celebration as woke.
- thrance 8mo agoSo what's your position on trans people? Persecute them, or let them be? Persecute half of them perhaps?
- dyauspitr 8mo agoDon’t persecute them at all. Live and let live. In my opinion though I believe it is a form of mental illness. It’s not based on genetic or hormonal anomalies so it’s purely a condition of the mind. Still it’s none of my business.
- lioeters 8mo agoBeing a centrist is a cowardly position, inevitably on the wrong side of history, serving the ruling class while backstabbing your fellow workers and citizens. You'd rather pretend to be asleep and let it all happen to us than open your eyes and fight with humanity.
- seneca 8mo ago[flagged]
- d_silin 8mo agoThe article is unpleasantly accurate.
- RGamma 8mo ago> a transnational “authoritarian international” in which oligarchs, political operatives, royal families, security chiefs, and organized criminals cooperate to monetize state power while protecting one another from scrutiny. At least the crackpots now get to see what a real deep state (concentrated power behind public facade) looks like.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Gud 8mo agoThis has been going on since the dawn of capitalism, probably before that.
- tastyface 8mo agoFlagged in 3... 2... Alas, the prototypical tech "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" has become the "temporarily embarrassed lord."
- poszlem 8mo agoThe Anthropic situation with the Department of Defense is the clearest example of the application of 'Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state', a doctrine that is explicitly fascist. So if people are still not convinced it might be a good time to reconsider, maybe read a history book or two.
- alwa 8mo agoI’m glad, then, that Anthropic seem to have chosen the path outside the state. Though who knows what, if any, resemblance the theatrics bear to either the meat of the dispute or its eventual substantive outcome… I’m kind of surprised TFA made it through without a nod to Karp’s book [0]. The guy’s not shy about how hard he wants to make the power. [0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760945/the-technological-republic-by-alexander-c-karp-and-nicholas-w-zamiska/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760945/the-technolo...
- kelseyfrog 8mo agoTo add some context that I learned recently, the fascist project was specifically anti-liberal in the sense that it rejected the conception of universal natural inalienable rights as its ideology base. Rights, when universal and natural are inalienable, while rights when derived from the state are alienable. The ability of a state to make anyone a non-person is, and should continue to be, a horrific thought to entertain.
- jacquesm 8mo agoThat is precisely the key and you can already see many examples of this in the last 12 months. One group after another is stripped of their rights and mistreated and yet nobody actually does anything other than some protests. I wonder how this sort of thing would go down in France or Germany, for Germany of course the track record is sub-optimal but I would hope that they had at least learned their lessons well enough to avoid a repetition of the blackest chapters in our history. What puzzles me is how for many years it was predicted that this was going to happen and that in spite of the warnings it still did. I just don't get it.
- ares623 8mo agoLook, if a techno-fascist state is what's needed for me to continue not having to write any code anymore, then I will gladly accept it. Techno-fascism is preferable to the horrors of Agile. /s
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoIn my personal experience, an ironic statement that hits too close to home will - regardless of the irony - get downvoted. Partly because irony serves to be lost and it is lost too much. Partly because it still uncovers something uncomfortable. A lot of people really do want fascism. So you loose on both sides. Brutal.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoI guess if you get downvote for saying something ironical, then that's the loss of audience, not you. One can argue that a thoughtful irony which gets downvoted might be more interesting than thoughtful irony which gets upvoted because of the points you mention. Irony shouldn't be in a bubble of all upvotes. Funnily enough I had searched up some irony quote websites a few days back and going back on them was fun to find a relevant quote: Irony is just the honesty with the volume cracked up - George Saunders.
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoDamn that’s good quote. And I would even go as far as saying that the apparent cynicism of the “honesty with the volume cracked up” is just a mirroring of the inversion that symbols suffer while transiting Culture. In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey. This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
- etherus 8mo agoThe question is: will and or when will the response to this violence exceed levels which can be controlled by the same mechanisms? I believe there is a window here, where in most countries experiencing this shift, there are still many individuals who have the power to effect change if they accept the risk. This won't be the case forever - at some point it will be few, not many. Community is important; look after it.
- designerarvid 8mo agoWhat countries apart from the US are experiencing this shift?
- moxifly7 8mo agohalf of Europe is on the verge of shifting to parties with nostalgia for 20th century fascism and the Trump admin declared it a foreign policy goal to help bring them to power. it's red alert time.
- designerarvid 8mo agoNot to get into politics too much, but surely that is a bit different. EU right wing populism and conservative raise had been slowly happening for some 15-20 years. US for 14 months.
- moxifly7 8mo agoThe AfD in Germany scheduled their party conference in Weimar, Thuringia to take place exactly 100 years to the day after a famous Nazi rally in... Weimar, Thuringia... and they say it's a coincidence.
- RGamma 8mo agoThe US has weakened structurally a lot over the past decades. Democracy ends slowly then suddenly I guess.
- etherus 8mo ago
- deadbabe 8mo agoModern social media has only been around for maybe 10-15 years. The honeymoon phase of the 2000s and early 2010s was probably the peak of value for the individual user, but I would say in the mid 2010s the value began to tilt and now the corps extract far more value than what they deliver to individual user’s lives. Social media today has little value beyond an engine to deliver dopamine hits, increasingly more of this content is just AI slop. I don’t think this will ever be palatable for most users. I think 10 years from now, it is plausible that major social media platforms will have been completely abandoned by “real” users, in favor of private decentralized chat groups and small anti-viral platforms, where most members have only 1 or 2 degrees of separation to each other, and where the content posted is of interest, but not addicting, and not infinitely scrollable. This would do a lot of damage to the techno-fascist state, as it takes away one of the pillars upon which their control stands.
- tempodox 8mo agoIn 10 years we won’t have the devices nor the software to run such a network. We will have state-approved devices running state-approved software. There will be no escape from brainwashing and total surveillance. The time to stop this is now.
- briandw 8mo ago[flagged]
- manuelabeledo 8mo agoWe need a synonym for “fascist” because some people agree that what they do and how they do it is bad, but they are incapable of looking past the word.
- dwb 8mo agoCan you give some examples of uses of "fascism" where it is merely referring to "bad people that I don't like", and not one of the many instances of fascism in the world today? If you're unfamiliar with the detailed thinking about the subject, I recommend this list: https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
- ratrace 8mo ago[dead]
- breakyerself 8mo agoAny honest reading of the history and the scholarship around the development of fascism and its characteristics would absolutely lead any honest person to the conclusion that there is a fascistic political movement happening in the United States and elsewhere. When fascism loses its meaning it's when reactionaries describe leftist opposition to fascism as fascism. When they call antifa fascist for opposing fascism violently. That's when the meaning gets muddled.
- 113 8mo ago> sloppy thinking and sloppy arguments If you think this is the result it's probably just because you're not used to discussing political theory. Within academic spaces these discussions are very well developed and nuanced. HN people like yourself aren't very used to being left behind but there are experts that understand what you don't.
- busterarm 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- tootie 8mo agoJenny Cohn on bluesky posts a ton of stuff on technofeudalist: https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social A favorite target is Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale who was recently discussing regime change in Iran with Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah.
- busterarm 8mo agoI'm good, thanks.
- tastyface 8mo agoWhy are you here?
- busterarm 8mo agoAs the years go on I ask myself that same question more and more. The HN of my day wouldn't have boosted a site pushing XR's brand of horseshit and mostly eschewed fringe political fever dream type posting in general. I say mostly because I'm aware of the notable counterexamples, but they were relatively contained.
- tastyface 8mo agoThe HN of my day boosted the fringe political fever dreams of Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel as peak Silicon Valley intellectualism, and, well, here we are.
- 8mo ago
- metaPushkin 8mo ago[flagged]
- beej71 8mo agoYou left Trump off the list, though. Deliberate?
- metaPushkin 8mo ago[flagged]
- beej71 8mo agoI left them off because you already said them and it would be redundant. But now we know your answer to my question is "yes". We all get to choose whether or not we put party before country. Some people choose poorly.
- metaPushkin 8mo agoI am fully in favor of common sense, meritocracy, and do not associate myself with any parties. But this article is pure propaganda and brainwashing. And to be fair, an article like this, if it were of a right-wing nature, would have long been banned. Which once again shows us the truth that everyone's minds are actively being washed with a certain ideology.
- cc-d 8mo agoYep. Sounds like us. It's better than previous "fascist" states in some ways, worse in others. Please remember everybody, many past "authoritarian" states have been character assassinated relentelessly, and the world you inhabit may not be nearly as free as the illusion our very based media boys have presented to you. The very terminology provided to you to describe these power structures is a form of warfare in and of themselves.
- MagicMoonlight 8mo agoThe mistake of the perpetually online is thinking that what you wanted ever mattered. Peasants would lose half their crops to taxes, in a world where there was not a single state provided service. There wasn’t even a state really. There has never been a world where the average person doesn’t get shafted.
- artemonster 8mo agoIn the past times where Czar elite could be executed like cattle and when French kings knew their heads could fly off guillotines, the elites were *behaving*. There was an unspoked social contract that you do shit for us, and we let you do be yourselves, whatever you do. Nowadays, we have wonderful law and nobody is responsible for anything, nobody is prosecuted, just fucking nothing. Time for pitchforks?
- _DeadFred_ 8mo agoWe made the Norman nobles CEOs and gave them protection/removed responsibility from all of their actions. But let them continue to see themselves as purely 'value extractors' extracting from workers/markets/economies and doing nothing else. At least Norman lords had to nominally provide housing on their holdings and had to have some kind of care that their serfs survived. CEOs don't even do that (they literally build models on lowest wage zero hour jobs that their labor can't actually live on or move labor from one desperate overseas country to the next).
- thrance 8mo agoDon't make the mistake of idealizing the past. It took a decade of terrible winters and famine for the head of a single French king to be parted from his body. And it took one century more for a lasting Republic to be born.
- EMIRELADERO 8mo agoWhile the article points out many worrying trends which are true, I would caution against making far-reaching predictions, especially if they involve drastic, rapid change. Orwell warned about this sort of thing already: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/second-thoughts-on-james-burnham/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- paperwallet 8mo agoThis was a good read. The author makes a valid point that there is no distinction to be made between Communism and Fascism as they both represent Authoritarianism.
- mark_l_watson 8mo ago>> Drawing on the work of Robert Reich, William I. Robinson, Yanis Varoufakis, and others, alongside historian Heather Cox Richardson Good references to use! I used to enjoy the All In Podcast a lot, but since two of the 'besties' joined Team Trump, it has become clear to me just how self serving they are.
- rsp1984 8mo ago[flagged]
- busterarm 8mo agoIn those other socialist-leaning nations the spending is there just hidden in the form of jobs. A much higher percentage of labor is governmental -- usually around 25% more. The US can get away with what it's doing because we just have that much more productive economic activity going on here.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- musicsnob 8mo agoThat the highest earners pay the most taxes in nominal terms should not be a surprise, it's just basic math. 10% of $1B is still more than 20% of $1M. These self-annointed elites are still hoarding an incredible amount of wealth, with average tax rates that are often more lower than lower income brackets. Yet, they consume more services than lower income people. Social Security is more than 90% funded by payroll taxes collected exclusively for that purpose. Combining that budget item with HHS and other departments funded by more general income taxes is quite misleading. Defense is the largest single expenditure in the US budget -- even more so when factoring in the VA. Finally, more dollars can always be printed because the US dollar holds the highly privileged position of being the "world's currency", and exploiting the benefits from that, such as printing a near-endless supply of USD without causing a gallon of milk to cost $1500 (yet). Numbers aside, you seem to suggest that The Free Market could correct our path to fascism, and that pesky human services and wanton over-regulation are what are really preventing us from reaching our final enlightened form... We are all much closer to being destitute than we are to being next in line for billionaire-dom. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."
- rsp1984 8mo ago> you seem to suggest that The Free Market could correct our path to fascism, and that pesky human services and wanton over-regulation are what are really preventing us from reaching our final enlightened form... Not quite. I am merely pointing out that capitalism and free markets are not the enemy and that larger, more involved governments, which the political left (to which I'd assign the author) support, are a perfect breeding ground for sleaze, corruption and nepotism. This effect btw. can be observed in all of the states in which socialism has been tried. Each and every time, without exception, citizens are fleeing from these countries into capitalist countries and it's never the other way round.
- tempodox 8mo agoThat fascist state is already here, with Sam Altman helping them with domestic surveillance and autonomous killer robots. How long until they get deployed to U.S. streets?