6 ms·

Technofascism

151 points by speckx 6mo ago

AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
Business and democracy have had an uneasy relationship for a while now. It's not just due to technology. Technology is an amplifier, of course, as it always is.
- yepyoukno 6mo ago
  A functional democracy requires peace, prosperity, and well disseminated truth!
  - EvanAnderson 6mo ago
    > decimated I feel like you mean disseminated, but truth today feels, at the very best, decimated.
    - yepyoukno 6mo ago
      lol, good catch, didn’t proof read that autocorrect closely enough!
kev009 6mo ago
Always a yawn when someone is too wet behind the ears to see the two sides of the same coin. This has been going on since I've been alive to witness it.
- FrustratedMonky 6mo ago
  I'm also tired of someone saying both sides are the same, as if this justifies anything either side does. When we are obviously worse off now under one particular side. Yeah, both sides have problems. And we are caught in the same systems. The sides are not equally bad.
  - kev009 6mo ago
    They are equally bad because they are actually the same people playing both sides. Do you think Palantir is conservative and Netflix is liberal? Neither actually care about either of these things. The differences are a basic misdirection playing to natural inclinations to control the population I would argue all the way to illusions of choice. And the sooner people grow out of their public school educations, the sooner it'll change.
    - warmedcookie 6mo ago
      Indeed, how could it not have been more obvious than when Biden made it illegal for the railroad workers to strike in Dec. 2022. The sides are the same when it comes to an actual threat to the status quo.
    - FrustratedMonky 6mo ago
      Typically I would agree. Biden and Bush were nearly identical. But this time around, things seem a bit more 'near the end'. The president is taking jumbo jet sized bribes, manipulating markets. Literally doing more self harm than an enemy agent could ever accomplish. Like the country could really collapse any day. Forget free speech. I literally am a little scared just posting here. People are being rounded up. Even with a fake name, I'm sure Palantir can put the pieces together.
      - kev009 6mo ago
        Yeah, shitcoins and fake product launches are new territory. Some of the others were a little more circumspect in graft or more likely it was others driving the larger graft to more careful benefactors. This Iran tarpit really blew open the reality of Trump the man: he is a sock puppet, and I think his graft is probably something like an O(1) problem while the republic faces an O(n^m) problem including unmitigated foreign influence. It makes me ponder an interesting philosophical question about raking a pyramid scheme along proximal real vs perceived valuation. I guess the damage is all the same, but things get more flagrant the longer it goes on.
    - 6mo ago
- hackyhacky 6mo ago
  > This has been going on since I've been alive to witness it. Modern billionaires have more wealth (adjusted for inflation) and therefore more power than any human being has ever had before in history. Do you like feudalism? Because that's how you get feudalism. You're right, we've previously had enormous power concentrated in few hands. And it resulted in such a terrible society that we spent a century fighting wars to build a better system. And Thiel et al want to bring us right back to the old way, and they might succeed.
  - kev009 6mo ago
    You misunderstand my point because I probably agree with you. But feudalism in the USA goes back to the beginning, and no other country is a particular exemplar although you can find a few social democracies that are or were functional while the population was largely homogeneous. You are misinformed about the relative power. The industrialists eclipsed the current technocrats in every way imaginable, several of them had whole number percent of GDP level of wealth. Musk is the only one that comes close in modern times, yet a lot of this is in notes on largely speculative enterprises while the industrialists controlled the literal engines of society. If Palantir or Google or Amazon collapse, it will make a dent in the stock market for a couple years but it doesn't matter the same as losing your national industrial base. So they are kind of sock pupating their own stakes.
tptacek 6mo ago
This may be a nit or it may be something deeper, but I think you've jumped the rails when you attempt to associate Hindu nationalism with TESCREAL. Hindu nationalism is a much bigger (and older) phenomenon than anything happening in SFBA.
- JuniperMesos 6mo ago
  This article doesn't even consider the question of whether Meta's platforms have amplified Muslim supremacist content that incites violence against non-Muslim communities to an equal or greater degree than it's done so for Hindu nationalists in India. I don't think this is because the author is a Muslim himself; but rather that he has bought into the frame that Muslims are marginalized and Hindus are not, and therefore any technological phenomenon in the world that seems like Hindus use successfully to advance their interests is fascist, and any technological phenomenon that seems like Muslims use successfully to advance their own interests is not worth talking about in the context of fascism.
  - nyssos 6mo ago
    The relevant paragraph literally starts with "In India", where, yes, it's obviously the case that Hindus are not marginalized.
- pron 6mo ago
  I have no idea if the accusation levelled toward Meta is true or not, but I think the claim made by the article is both logical and clear: technofascism seeks to weaken democratic institutions, and to do so it exploits existing nationalist feelings that seek to do the same.
  - tptacek 6mo ago
    I think I weakly agree directionally with all that stuff, but think the post is on less stable footing when it implies how strongly these phenomenon have been determined by TESCREAL right-wingers. Those people surely exist, and technology has surely amplified all the worst things in society (some of the good too, of course). But how big a deal they are? Not as sure. What I am pretty confident of is that people like Yarvin love articles like these. It makes them seem so important!
simianwords 6mo ago
> In Zero to One, Thiel argued that competition is for losers and that the goal of a startup is to create a monopoly. Way to not understand what Thiel meant.
- dijksterhuis 6mo ago
  care to elaborate?
- mfcl 6mo ago
  You're being downvoted but you're right. I won't defend Thiel in general but that particular point is a bit taken out of context. There's a talk somewhere ont the internet where he explains that you don't want to build a do-it-all product, at least not right away. Don't compete with everyone for everything. Find a more niche market where you can have a monopoly, get comfortable, then you branch out, diversity, and tackle broader markets.
  - jackmott42 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - manoDev 6mo ago
    Many small companies focusing on their niches is the entire reason VC works — risk spread across the portfolio. It’s pretty obvious. The book indoctrinates founders to act aligned with VCs best interests, not necessarily the company/employees/customers ones.
  - hackyhacky 6mo ago
    > Find a more niche market where you can have a monopoly, get comfortable, then you branch out That's certainly a reasonable business strategy. But what is good for a business is not necessarily good for the country, which is exactly why anti-monopoly laws exist.
    - ExoticPearTree 6mo ago
      As one politician once said "The interests of the state are not always the interests of the citizens". And to your point: we have banana republics for a reason.
manoDev 6mo ago
> These politics do not stay inside the United States. In Brazil in 2022 and 2023, Musk’s platform X amplified supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro before and after an election Bolsonaro lost. When the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered X to block accounts that were inciting violence and spreading disinformation, Musk refused. > In India, Meta’s platforms have amplifyied Hindu nationalist content that incites violence against Muslim communities, while consistently applying content moderation more aggressively to criticism of the governing BJP party than to nationalist propaganda. If you think this type of interference is just “eccentric billionaires’ opinions about freedom of speech”… it isn’t. This is the exact modus operandi of the cold war era of causing turmoil on countries at the periphery of capitalism, only now executed by a state captured by techno plutocrats and amplified by the use of social media. Nations that fall for the freedom of speech rhetoric (instead of state censorship like China) will get ripped apart from the inside, stripped of its resources and not have a seat at the negotiating table.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
michaelchisari 6mo ago
TESCREAL reads like a right-wing Posadism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_International–Posadist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_International–Posadist Like Posadism, the future refusing to cooperate will burn them out along the way.
- oytis 6mo ago
  Communism (bolshevism) in general really. Communists believed they know what the future should look like and how to get there, so any dissent was deemed a distraction that should be eliminated
  - michaelchisari 6mo ago
    Posadism specifically. It's not mere historical determinism.
luckylion 6mo ago
> He funded a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan that destroyed the media company Gawker—a company that had, among other things, published unflattering reports about Thiel. Gawker-apologism to frame Thiel as the monster destroying the truth-seeking independent journalists? What a truth-seeker the author is!
- amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
  That's what you got out of the article?
- tverbeure 6mo ago
  You’re using that standard tactic of attacking a minor detail to discredit a much larger point.
- hackyhacky 6mo ago
  > Gawker-apologism Gawker had a lot of issues; they were not exactly the AP. But whether they are allowed to exist as a business should not be up the whim of one billionaire with a fragile ego.
- manoDev 6mo ago
  Doesn’t read like a defense of Gawker to me, rather a demonstration of power. Thiel didn’t sue the company directly over what got published about him, but instead funded a different lawsuit with the intent of destroying the company.
- atmavatar 6mo ago
  I see no apologia in that quote. Thiel's successful vendetta against Gawker has no bearing on whether it had any journalistic integrity or independence. It can both be true that Gawker's individual bankruptcy was no big loss but that the way in which an ultra-wealthy person was able to crush a news outlet for reporting things he didn't like set a dangerous precedent for all journalism outlets. Of course, the whole thing seems rather quaint now that nearly all media is owned by a handful of billionaires who are actively and increasingly controlling what gets released to the public.
- 6mo ago
iNic 6mo ago
TESCREAL is not a sensible grouping of people or ideologies. EAs will in general not be a fan of the Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Andreessen world. I recommend reading [1]. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/the-tescreal-bungle https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/the-tescreal-bungle
sentence26 6mo ago
[flagged]
bluegatty 6mo ago
Yes - all of that - but don't over state it. Gawker did bad. JD Vance was 'Hillbilly Eulegy' guy and firmly anti-Trump, going so far as to call Trump 'fascist' etc - at the same time TheIl was supporting him. Alternative View: these are power hungry, narrow minded egoists. It's that simple. The ideology is second. So - as long as they are in their 'CEO box' - that's fine - they should not be famous, not be giving lectures, influencing politics so much. They can make 'whatever' and want 'more equity'. We just can't have them manage society. If they are 'marginal figures, managing some companies' - then their ecclectic weirdness is not that bad, just intellectual diversity. Putting CEOs in charge of society was always a bad idea. These CEOs just 'act a bit different' than traditional CEOs or NY Banksters. They are cringe, call them that, let them have their companies, not their influence.
- manoDev 6mo ago
  > So - as long as they are in their 'CEO box' - that's fine - they should not be famous, not be giving lectures, influencing politics so much. They can make 'whatever' and want 'more equity'. Like China.
  - bluegatty 6mo ago
    No, not like China in any way.
    - manoDev 6mo ago
      No? What’s the Chinese Elon Musk/DOGE fiasco equivalent?
      - bluegatty 6mo ago
        look to WW2 industrialists.
- hackyhacky 6mo ago
  > We just can't have them manage society. I agree, but it's too late. After all, once one has firmly reached billionaire status, what is one supposed to do? Just sit around and sip martinis by the pool? As we've discovered, the billionaire class, having achieved unimaginable wealth and been convinced of their own intellectual superiority by a coterie of sycophants, have an apparently irresistible drive to meddle in affairs of state, especially when those affairs are well outside their domain of experience. And no matter how badly it goes, they will never be convinced that they are doing bad. The real argument for taxing billionaires out of existence is not that the money would benefit other people more (although that is true), but because such accumulated wealth in such few hands results in too much concentrated power without the need to care whether it's being applied well, because either way, they will still be rich and powerful. The argument for democracy is not that the "people" always choose the best leader, but that the leader must do at least something well in order to maintain their support.
acheron 6mo ago
[flagged]
shadowtree 6mo ago
[flagged]
manoDev 6mo ago
[flagged]
zombot 6mo ago
> The core claim is that humanity is approaching artificial general intelligence, and this will be either the best or worst development in history, depending on who controls it. The thing is, if it is actual intelligence then controlling it will be a pipe dream.

151 points by speckx 6mo ago

Business and democracy have had an uneasy relationship for a while now. It's not just due to technology. Technology is an amplifier, of course, as it always is.

yepyoukno 6mo ago
A functional democracy requires peace, prosperity, and well disseminated truth!
- EvanAnderson 6mo ago
  > decimated I feel like you mean disseminated, but truth today feels, at the very best, decimated.
  - yepyoukno 6mo ago
    lol, good catch, didn’t proof read that autocorrect closely enough!

kev009 6mo ago

Always a yawn when someone is too wet behind the ears to see the two sides of the same coin. This has been going on since I've been alive to witness it.

FrustratedMonky 6mo ago
I'm also tired of someone saying both sides are the same, as if this justifies anything either side does. When we are obviously worse off now under one particular side. Yeah, both sides have problems. And we are caught in the same systems. The sides are not equally bad.
- kev009 6mo ago
  They are equally bad because they are actually the same people playing both sides. Do you think Palantir is conservative and Netflix is liberal? Neither actually care about either of these things. The differences are a basic misdirection playing to natural inclinations to control the population I would argue all the way to illusions of choice. And the sooner people grow out of their public school educations, the sooner it'll change.
  - warmedcookie 6mo ago
    Indeed, how could it not have been more obvious than when Biden made it illegal for the railroad workers to strike in Dec. 2022. The sides are the same when it comes to an actual threat to the status quo.
  - FrustratedMonky 6mo ago
    Typically I would agree. Biden and Bush were nearly identical. But this time around, things seem a bit more 'near the end'. The president is taking jumbo jet sized bribes, manipulating markets. Literally doing more self harm than an enemy agent could ever accomplish. Like the country could really collapse any day. Forget free speech. I literally am a little scared just posting here. People are being rounded up. Even with a fake name, I'm sure Palantir can put the pieces together.
    - kev009 6mo ago
      Yeah, shitcoins and fake product launches are new territory. Some of the others were a little more circumspect in graft or more likely it was others driving the larger graft to more careful benefactors. This Iran tarpit really blew open the reality of Trump the man: he is a sock puppet, and I think his graft is probably something like an O(1) problem while the republic faces an O(n^m) problem including unmitigated foreign influence. It makes me ponder an interesting philosophical question about raking a pyramid scheme along proximal real vs perceived valuation. I guess the damage is all the same, but things get more flagrant the longer it goes on.
  - 6mo ago
hackyhacky 6mo ago
> This has been going on since I've been alive to witness it. Modern billionaires have more wealth (adjusted for inflation) and therefore more power than any human being has ever had before in history. Do you like feudalism? Because that's how you get feudalism. You're right, we've previously had enormous power concentrated in few hands. And it resulted in such a terrible society that we spent a century fighting wars to build a better system. And Thiel et al want to bring us right back to the old way, and they might succeed.
- kev009 6mo ago
  You misunderstand my point because I probably agree with you. But feudalism in the USA goes back to the beginning, and no other country is a particular exemplar although you can find a few social democracies that are or were functional while the population was largely homogeneous. You are misinformed about the relative power. The industrialists eclipsed the current technocrats in every way imaginable, several of them had whole number percent of GDP level of wealth. Musk is the only one that comes close in modern times, yet a lot of this is in notes on largely speculative enterprises while the industrialists controlled the literal engines of society. If Palantir or Google or Amazon collapse, it will make a dent in the stock market for a couple years but it doesn't matter the same as losing your national industrial base. So they are kind of sock pupating their own stakes.

tptacek 6mo ago

This may be a nit or it may be something deeper, but I think you've jumped the rails when you attempt to associate Hindu nationalism with TESCREAL. Hindu nationalism is a much bigger (and older) phenomenon than anything happening in SFBA.

JuniperMesos 6mo ago
This article doesn't even consider the question of whether Meta's platforms have amplified Muslim supremacist content that incites violence against non-Muslim communities to an equal or greater degree than it's done so for Hindu nationalists in India. I don't think this is because the author is a Muslim himself; but rather that he has bought into the frame that Muslims are marginalized and Hindus are not, and therefore any technological phenomenon in the world that seems like Hindus use successfully to advance their interests is fascist, and any technological phenomenon that seems like Muslims use successfully to advance their own interests is not worth talking about in the context of fascism.
- nyssos 6mo ago
  The relevant paragraph literally starts with "In India", where, yes, it's obviously the case that Hindus are not marginalized.
pron 6mo ago
I have no idea if the accusation levelled toward Meta is true or not, but I think the claim made by the article is both logical and clear: technofascism seeks to weaken democratic institutions, and to do so it exploits existing nationalist feelings that seek to do the same.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  I think I weakly agree directionally with all that stuff, but think the post is on less stable footing when it implies how strongly these phenomenon have been determined by TESCREAL right-wingers. Those people surely exist, and technology has surely amplified all the worst things in society (some of the good too, of course). But how big a deal they are? Not as sure. What I am pretty confident of is that people like Yarvin love articles like these. It makes them seem so important!

simianwords 6mo ago

> In Zero to One, Thiel argued that competition is for losers and that the goal of a startup is to create a monopoly. Way to not understand what Thiel meant.

dijksterhuis 6mo ago
care to elaborate?
mfcl 6mo ago
You're being downvoted but you're right. I won't defend Thiel in general but that particular point is a bit taken out of context. There's a talk somewhere ont the internet where he explains that you don't want to build a do-it-all product, at least not right away. Don't compete with everyone for everything. Find a more niche market where you can have a monopoly, get comfortable, then you branch out, diversity, and tackle broader markets.
- jackmott42 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- manoDev 6mo ago
  Many small companies focusing on their niches is the entire reason VC works — risk spread across the portfolio. It’s pretty obvious. The book indoctrinates founders to act aligned with VCs best interests, not necessarily the company/employees/customers ones.
- hackyhacky 6mo ago
  > Find a more niche market where you can have a monopoly, get comfortable, then you branch out That's certainly a reasonable business strategy. But what is good for a business is not necessarily good for the country, which is exactly why anti-monopoly laws exist.
  - ExoticPearTree 6mo ago
    As one politician once said "The interests of the state are not always the interests of the citizens". And to your point: we have banana republics for a reason.

manoDev 6mo ago

> These politics do not stay inside the United States. In Brazil in 2022 and 2023, Musk’s platform X amplified supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro before and after an election Bolsonaro lost. When the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered X to block accounts that were inciting violence and spreading disinformation, Musk refused. > In India, Meta’s platforms have amplifyied Hindu nationalist content that incites violence against Muslim communities, while consistently applying content moderation more aggressively to criticism of the governing BJP party than to nationalist propaganda. If you think this type of interference is just “eccentric billionaires’ opinions about freedom of speech”… it isn’t. This is the exact modus operandi of the cold war era of causing turmoil on countries at the periphery of capitalism, only now executed by a state captured by techno plutocrats and amplified by the use of social media. Nations that fall for the freedom of speech rhetoric (instead of state censorship like China) will get ripped apart from the inside, stripped of its resources and not have a seat at the negotiating table.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

michaelchisari 6mo ago

TESCREAL reads like a right-wing Posadism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_International–Posadist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_International–Posadist Like Posadism, the future refusing to cooperate will burn them out along the way.

oytis 6mo ago
Communism (bolshevism) in general really. Communists believed they know what the future should look like and how to get there, so any dissent was deemed a distraction that should be eliminated
- michaelchisari 6mo ago
  Posadism specifically. It's not mere historical determinism.

luckylion 6mo ago

> He funded a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan that destroyed the media company Gawker—a company that had, among other things, published unflattering reports about Thiel. Gawker-apologism to frame Thiel as the monster destroying the truth-seeking independent journalists? What a truth-seeker the author is!

amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
That's what you got out of the article?
tverbeure 6mo ago
You’re using that standard tactic of attacking a minor detail to discredit a much larger point.
hackyhacky 6mo ago
> Gawker-apologism Gawker had a lot of issues; they were not exactly the AP. But whether they are allowed to exist as a business should not be up the whim of one billionaire with a fragile ego.
manoDev 6mo ago
Doesn’t read like a defense of Gawker to me, rather a demonstration of power. Thiel didn’t sue the company directly over what got published about him, but instead funded a different lawsuit with the intent of destroying the company.
atmavatar 6mo ago
I see no apologia in that quote. Thiel's successful vendetta against Gawker has no bearing on whether it had any journalistic integrity or independence. It can both be true that Gawker's individual bankruptcy was no big loss but that the way in which an ultra-wealthy person was able to crush a news outlet for reporting things he didn't like set a dangerous precedent for all journalism outlets. Of course, the whole thing seems rather quaint now that nearly all media is owned by a handful of billionaires who are actively and increasingly controlling what gets released to the public.
6mo ago

iNic 6mo ago

TESCREAL is not a sensible grouping of people or ideologies. EAs will in general not be a fan of the Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Andreessen world. I recommend reading [1]. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/the-tescreal-bungle https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/the-tescreal-bungle

sentence26 6mo ago

[flagged]

bluegatty 6mo ago

Yes - all of that - but don't over state it. Gawker did bad. JD Vance was 'Hillbilly Eulegy' guy and firmly anti-Trump, going so far as to call Trump 'fascist' etc - at the same time TheIl was supporting him. Alternative View: these are power hungry, narrow minded egoists. It's that simple. The ideology is second. So - as long as they are in their 'CEO box' - that's fine - they should not be famous, not be giving lectures, influencing politics so much. They can make 'whatever' and want 'more equity'. We just can't have them manage society. If they are 'marginal figures, managing some companies' - then their ecclectic weirdness is not that bad, just intellectual diversity. Putting CEOs in charge of society was always a bad idea. These CEOs just 'act a bit different' than traditional CEOs or NY Banksters. They are cringe, call them that, let them have their companies, not their influence.

manoDev 6mo ago
> So - as long as they are in their 'CEO box' - that's fine - they should not be famous, not be giving lectures, influencing politics so much. They can make 'whatever' and want 'more equity'. Like China.
- bluegatty 6mo ago
  No, not like China in any way.
  - manoDev 6mo ago
    No? What’s the Chinese Elon Musk/DOGE fiasco equivalent?
    - bluegatty 6mo ago
      look to WW2 industrialists.
hackyhacky 6mo ago
> We just can't have them manage society. I agree, but it's too late. After all, once one has firmly reached billionaire status, what is one supposed to do? Just sit around and sip martinis by the pool? As we've discovered, the billionaire class, having achieved unimaginable wealth and been convinced of their own intellectual superiority by a coterie of sycophants, have an apparently irresistible drive to meddle in affairs of state, especially when those affairs are well outside their domain of experience. And no matter how badly it goes, they will never be convinced that they are doing bad. The real argument for taxing billionaires out of existence is not that the money would benefit other people more (although that is true), but because such accumulated wealth in such few hands results in too much concentrated power without the need to care whether it's being applied well, because either way, they will still be rich and powerful. The argument for democracy is not that the "people" always choose the best leader, but that the leader must do at least something well in order to maintain their support.

acheron 6mo ago

[flagged]

shadowtree 6mo ago

[flagged]

manoDev 6mo ago

[flagged]

zombot 6mo ago

> The core claim is that humanity is approaching artificial general intelligence, and this will be either the best or worst development in history, depending on who controls it. The thing is, if it is actual intelligence then controlling it will be a pipe dream.