Broligarchy Watch

The growing debate over the future of intellectual property law in the age of AI took a wild turn in the past few days when Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Block, and initially a leading figure at Bluesky, declared he would like to see all IP law eliminated.

“Delete all IP law,” Dorsey wrote on X on Friday (April 11).

Elon Musk, owner of X and head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chimed in by saying “I agree.”

...

Ed Newton-Rex, a former VP of Audio at Stability AI and now a leading campaigner for the protection of intellectual property, described Dorsey and Musk’s assertion as “tech execs declaring all-out war on creators who don’t want their life’s work pillaged for profit.”

Pushback also came from Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, patent specialist and lawyer who served as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in the 2024 election.

“Actual IP professional here – NO,” she wrote in response to Dorsey’s tweet. “IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations. If you want to reform it, let’s talk!”

To which Dorsey responded: “Creativity is what currently separates us, and the current system is limiting that, and putting the payments disbursement into the hands of gatekeepers who aren’t paying out fairly.”

Notably, Dorsey is Chairman of Block, Inc., the company formerly known as Square, which owns music streaming service TIDAL.

Dorsey’s tweet likely doesn’t reflect official TIDAL policy on the issue of IP. The company’s CEO, Jesse Dorogusker, told MBW a few years ago that he views music as being “undervalued and underpriced.”

One can only imagine what the value of music would look like if copyright protections were to disappear altogether. It would not be a stretch to imagine that its value would fall close to zero, along with the value of other commercialized cultural products, and the value of labor carried out by artists and other creators.

Responding to Dorsey, some on social media pointed out that Dorsey’s own businesses have benefited from IP protections.

“Very easy to say after you’ve made billions off your IP,” one commenter wrote.

The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.

Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.

Yet they paid an average 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the US, according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF), which said the Silicon Six had “hardwired” tax avoidance into their business models.

Analysis by the not-for-profit organisation found that if one-off repatriation tax payments in the US connected to historical tax avoidance were excluded, the average corporate income tax contribution of the six firms fell to 16.1% over the past decade.

The companies had also inflated their stated tax payments by $82bn over the same period by including contingencies for tax they did not expect to pay, the report claimed.

Paul Monaghan, the chief executive of the FTF, said: “Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hardwired into corporate structures. The Silicon Six’s corporate income tax contributions are, in percentage terms, way below what sectors such as banking and energy are paying in many parts of the world.”

Monaghan pointed to “aggressive tax practices” such as the contingency tax positions, while the companies also exerted “enormous political influence as well as economic power”, spending millions of dollars on lobbying governments.

The report comes as the US tech companies’ influence has been highlighted by the presence of their bosses including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg at Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

A significant tax cut for such companies has reportedly been at the heart of discussions with the UK in its attempts to secure lower tariffs on its products exported to the US.

Analysis: As a new book shows, growth and success has turned optimistic tech startups into corporate cesspits of greed, manipulation and contempt

In the early days of Google, the phrase 'don't be evil' was both its motto and part of its Code of Corporate Conduct. By 2018, that phrase was history and so was the sentiment that that inspired it in many peoples' eyes.

For many tech giants, growth and success has seemed to morph what were once benevolent and optimistic startups into cesspits of greed, manipulation and contempt. Descriptions of the inner workings of companies like Google, Facebook (now Meta), and Twitter (now X) portray dystopian hellscapes in which employees are treated like disposable cogs in an ever-grinding machine and competitors are squeezed out of the market by means fair and foul. It is a world where corporate leaders tell us that the biggest failing of civilization is that we have empathy for one another.

In Careless People, a new exposé of corporate life at Facebook/Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams describes her seven years in the executive suite of that company. As a former diplomat from New Zealand, she joined Facebook believing that the internet could make the world a better place by fostering connections between people and communities.

But the corporate world she describes is one in which the internet was consciously used to spread hate, fear and division. It's a book where the behaviour of top executives involving ongoing patterns of sexual harassment, exploitation and fawning worship of power-mad leaders reads like something from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

...

While I agree with many of the points Carolan raises, I believe her analysis misses a major factor in the development of toxic cultures in so many tech giants, namely the lionisation of CEOs and top executives. Leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have accumulated immense wealth and power, and they are sometimes treated like demi-gods in the business press.

“Our economy should be judged on how well it cares for working people, rather than the number of billionaires it produces daily,” stated the leader of an economic justice organization.

Amid warnings from economists that President Donald Trump’s trade war could increase living costs for millions of American families and potentially trigger a recession, the economic justice group Patriotic Millionaires introduced a “bold, surprisingly straightforward economic strategy” on Monday. This plan aims to curb the growing power of the oligarchy and “permanently stabilize the economic lives of working people.”

The strategy, named America 250: The Money Agenda, was presented during an “expert town hall” event called “How to Beat the Broligarchs” and comprises four critical pieces of legislation:

• The Cost of Living Tax Cut Act, which exempts federal taxes up to the median living cost for a single adult without children—$41,600 annually—shifting the tax burden from the working class to the millionaire class through a surtax;
• The Cost of Living Wage Act, which increases the minimum wage to $21 per hour, aligning it with the living costs for a single adult without children;
• The Equal Tax Act, which synchronizes the tax rates for capital gains and incomes over $1 million and seals the “stepped-up basis loophole” that reduces the tax responsibilities of the ultra-wealthy; and
• The Anti-Oligarch Act, which imposes substantial taxes on the transfer of wealth across generations, on large trust-held fortunes, and on the real economic income of the ultra-rich to prevent further wealth accumulation at the top, including through a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

According to Patriotic Millionaires, the last proposal is a “long overdue response to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ century-old warning: ‘We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.'”

Cross-posted from "Elon Musk’s xAI allegedly uses 'illegal' generators to power Colossus supercomputer facility" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Cross-posted from "A Strange Stain in the Sky: How Silicon Valley Is Preparing A Coup Against Democracy" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

The first, and also the most futuristic techno-utopian one, is the colonisation of Mars. Elon Musk founded Space X in 2002 (Peter Thiel was the first outside investor) with the idea of re-founding humanity. It’s all there: the call to save humanity by turning it into a multi-planetary species, the desire to start from scratch without the legal constraints of Earth, and the will to break with the established order. As you can read, half-hidden, on the terms and conditions page of the Starlink service owned by Space X:

The parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.

Elon Musk’s X stands to benefit financially if the government pulls an £800m tax on US tech firms as part of an economic deal with Donald Trump, as a prominent tax campaigner indicated the social media platform qualifies for the levy.

Dan Neidle, the head of the non-profit organisation Tax Policy Associates, said the social media platform was eligible for the digital services tax, which is on the block in negotiations between the US and the UK.

“Technically it’s fairly clear X should pay the DST,” he said.

Ministers have been discussing dropping the DST as part of negotiations with the US in exchange for the Trump administration granting the UK a carve-out from tariffs which would otherwise be levied on 2 April.

The technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said on Monday that “nothing was off the table” when it comes to the tax, which was first imposed by the Conservatives in 2020 to stop international technology companies avoiding tax by hiding their profits offshore.

...

Labour MPs have voiced their concern about the prospect of the government dropping the DST under pressure from the Trump administration. Rachael Maskell said this weekend: “I would be concerned if relief was granted in what would be seen as a dash to let the US tech companies off the hook, while at the same time as making disabled people pay for the revenue loss, with their lifelines being cut.”

Another Labour MP said: “This would be the very worst optics: dropping a tax on big tech companies in the same week we announce more departmental spending cuts and give the details about our welfare cuts.”

...

According to the National Audit Office, 90% of DST revenues in its first year of operation in 2020-21 came from five businesses. Amazon, Google, eBay and Apple have publicly acknowledged paying the tax, and Facebook’s parent, Meta, is widely presumed to have done so.

The tax is expected to raise £800m this year, rising to £1.1bn by the turn of the decade, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Yet implementation of the Online Safety Act is now in question because Donald Trump’s government has identified it as a symptom of wider European infringement of free expression. As the Guardian revealed this week, US state department officials expressed their concern in a meeting with Ofcom, the regulator responsible for enforcing new digital regulations.

That intervention should be seen in the context of an aggressive trade policy that cannot tolerate any foreign restriction on the extension of American economic interests overseas. That explicitly includes regulation that “incentivises US companies to develop or use products and technology in ways that undermine free speech or foster censorship”.

...

Mr Trump’s power is bolstered by alliance with tech industry oligarchs. The unwritten deal is that the president’s cause is boosted on social media and the platforms’ commercial interests are driven by the president. That is why US trade policy is being deployed against European regulators that have tried to make the internet – or the part of it over which they have legal jurisdiction – less lawless.

Yielding to that pressure would cede control of the digital information space to people who actively subvert it for the cause of American ultranationalism. It would mean accepting that a vital part of the digital infrastructure for a free society operates according to rules set by companies that are poisoning the wells of public discourse.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20304106

Local organizers say they have less of a chance at making climate reforms in the majority Black city than Musk does at imposing environmental harms

“There should be no way a $5 billion project can move forward without a single community [meeting],” Pearson said, noting that the decision reinforced the community’s feelings of being ignored and disenfranchised, and confirmed suspicions that official discussions were taking place behind closed doors. “This is literally what corporate colonialism looks like.”

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/1997571

TL;DR: Self-Driving Teslas Rear-End Motorcyclists, Killing at Least 5

Brevity is the spirit of wit, and I am just not that witty. This is a long article, here is the gist of it:

• The NHTSA’s self-driving crash data reveals that Tesla’s self-driving technology is, by far, the most dangerous for motorcyclists, with five fatal crashes that we know of.
• This issue is unique to Tesla. Other self-driving manufacturers have logged zero motorcycle fatalities with the NHTSA in the same time frame.
• The crashes are overwhelmingly Teslas rear-ending motorcyclists.

Read our full analysis as we go case-by-case and connect the heavily redacted government data to news reports and police documents.

Oh, and read our thoughts about what this means for the robotaxi launch that is slated for Austin in less than 60 days.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27463109

Nearly two months ago, Elon Musk went on a public crusade against Reddit.

On X, he said it was “insane” that subreddits were blocking links to the platform in protest of him ~~appearing to give a Nazi salute~~ giving repeated Nazi salutes. A few days later, he posted that Reddit users advocating for violence against Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees had “broken the law.”

As it turns out, Musk wasn’t only using his X platform to call out content on Reddit. He was also privately messaging Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, according to people familiar with the matter.

Shortly after the two CEOs exchanged text messages, Reddit enacted a 72-hour ban on the “WhitePeopleTwitter” subreddit that hosted the thread about DOGE employees, citing the “prevalence of violent content.” The specific thread Musk shared on X was also deleted, including hundreds of comments that didn’t call for violence or doxxing. (So far, Reddit doesn’t appear to have intervened in any moderator decisions to ban X links from the subreddits they oversee.)

When asked about Musk and Huffman’s correspondence, Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini sent the following statement: “We take any report of Reddit policy violations seriously, whether on Reddit directly or through other public or private means. We will evaluate content reported to us and take action if violating.” Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The news of Musk’s outreach to Huffman quickly made its way to some of Reddit’s moderators, who discussed it together on Discord. After one wrote, “Musk is coming for /r/Comics,” which was one of the subreddits that was banning links to X, another responded by calling him a “giant baby,” according to screenshots of the conversation that were shared with me.

EDIT: minor correction up top after y'all gave the text a SolidShake

A billionaire tech entrepreneur who used his wealth and influence in Silicon Valley to help Donald Trump win the presidency has deep connections to the new administration’s efforts to remake the government.

His name? Peter Thiel.

While Elon Musk and a crew of longtime employees and young acolytes have been fanning out across Washington under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, more than a dozen people with ties to Thiel — including current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefitted from his investments and charitable giving — have been folded into the Trump administration.

Some Thiel allies have held high-ranking government posts before, while others are heading to Washington for the first time. Thiel himself has no formal role in the Trump administration.

Musk and Thiel have been intertwined since the early days of PayPal, which Thiel helped found and where Musk briefly served as CEO. Since then, Musk, who leads Tesla Inc., SpaceX and other companies, has become the world’s richest person, while Thiel has built a multifaceted empire ranging from software firm Palantir Technologies Inc. to investment offices with stakes in top Silicon Valley startups.

...

While links between industry and government have always existed, the current state of play is “unprecedented in the modern era,” said Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University.

“The ambition seems to be more than just working at an arm’s length and profiting from state contracts,” Slobodian said. “There is an ambition for a bottom-up renovation of how the government operates.”

Archive

It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017.

...

If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there. While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)

Still, in the context of what we know about Meta already, nothing Wynn-Williams says about the company’s actions and inactions is shockingly new. Careless People is not an investigative work, but a memoir, with the narrative thread being the observed callousness of the company’s leaders.

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

This week represents a hinge of history. Everything has changed. America and Russia are now allies. Ukraine has been thrown to the dogs. Europe’s security hangs in the balance. On the one hand, there’s nothing any of us can do. On the other, we have to do something. So, here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting a conversation. I’ve recorded the first one - a scrappy pilot - a podcast I’ve called How to Survive the Broligarchy and I’ve re-named the newsletter too. This first conversation (details below) is about how we need a new media built from the ground up to deal with the dangerous new world we’re in. That can only happen, in partnership with you, the reader. The days of top-down command and control are over. Please let’s try and do this together.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/23256007

When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.

But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.

In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa.

He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.

Some draw a straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump’s side today.

The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.

Others are sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.

But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.

The story of Elon Musk, the way it's usually told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero - or supervillain. He's the world's richest man, and now an adviser to the US President. He uses X - his social media platform - to berate politicians he doesn't agree with around the world.

He plans to put chips in people's brains, and to save the world by colonising Mars. Musk's visions of the future seem to stem from the science fiction that has fired his imagination since he was a boy. But what's the real story, the true history, behind the comic book? Back in 2021 Harvard History Professor and New Yorker Writer Jill Lepore became fascinated by this question.

So she made a Radio 4 podcast which tried to explain Musk through the science fiction he grew up with - tales of superheroes with origin stories that seemed to influence how he understands his own life. So much has happened since then that we decided to update that series - and add three new episodes, too. Because Musk keeps changing, and so does what Lepore calls 'Muskism' - his brand of extreme capitalism and techno-futurism. And strangely, his origin story keeps changing, too.

How can understanding these fantasy stories - some of them a century old - help us understand the future Musk wants to take us to?

Well worth a listen, especially episode 2:

Musk is reinventing himself as a kingmaker for the United States and the world. He wants to shape the future. But in this episode, Lepore goes back to his past - to his childhood and family history. As a boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, Musk developed a fascination with science fiction - especially Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of Musk’s grandfathers was the leader of a strange sci-fi inspired movement known as Technocracy. Technocrats found democracy in adequate to modernity, and wanted engineers and scientists to run governments. Lepore argues Technocracy bears an uncanny resemblance to some things going on today in Silicon Valley and Washington today: from de-regulation of the economy to the rise of crypto-currency.

Observing the emergent broligarchy’s elaborate conspiracy to extract as much wealth and power as they can from Donald Trump’s second coming, it is justifiable to feel sick in the stomach. Men of tremendous wealth, with a history of treating the mothers of their children sadistically, of endorsing books justifying torture and the elimination of human rights, of making zillions from government and military procurement while tirelessly working toward disbanding government programs that offer a sliver of protection to the poor, have decamped at Mar-a-Lago kissing Trump’s ring and preparing for direct government power.

From their perspective, the deal they cut with Trump is an incredible bargain with a rate of return that no conventional business can hope to emulate. For a few hundred million dollars that they invested in Trump’s re-election, within minutes of his victory they amassed extra wealth to the tune of hundreds of billions. To be precise, the value of Peter Thiel’s Palantir shot up by 23 percent while Musk’s Tesla saw its stock rise by 40 percent to a capitalisation level higher than most of the rest of the global car industry combined.

For a few crumbs off their table, that they ploughed into the Trump campaign, the Big Tech brotherhood are in the process of receiving three amazing gifts: Gargantuan government contracts. A tremendous goldrush following the elimination of regulations that will allow them a gloves-off onslaught against the public’s concerns over their ways and wares (e.g., autonomous vehicles, rogue AI bots and drones, massive increases in electricity consumption). And, lastly, immense state-sanctioned bargaining power in their dealings with workers, suppliers, competitors and the rest of us.

And then there are, of course, the non-trivial concerns about their broader ambitions. Thiel’s favourite book is, reportedly, The Sovereign Individual. Its authors, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, literally and without the slightest hint of irony liken the broligarchs to the Olympian gods before going on to argue that it is only right and proper that they dominate the world. “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies,” they proclaim. As for Thiel himself, his explanation of why he likes this shoddy book so much is that it offers an “accurate” prediction of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today.” What Thiel neglected to say, of course, is that his dream is not one in which exorbitant power has withered but, rather, that it is a dream in which men like him monopolise it. At least he is honest enough to acknowledge that his version of freedom is incompatible with democracy.

But is any of this truly novel? However reprehensible the broligarchs’ practices and convictions might be, is it not possible that we are surrendering to a recollection of the past that is so recklessly optimistic that, by contrast, the present looks like a deterioration, when it is nothing but a recapitulation of our past?

...

That’s all true. However, there is a superpower, a hyper-weapon, that the broligarchy possess today that their Big Business and Wall Street predecessors did not. It is a form of capital that never existed until recently: cloud capital which, of course, does not live up in the clouds but down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest.

Unlike traditional capital, from steam-engines to modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce commodities. Instead, it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. These produced means of behavioural modification train us to train them to determine what we want. And, once we want it, the same machines sell it to us, directly, bypassing markets. In this light, cloud capital performs five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, what it made us want. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us to sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour: As we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants and photos, we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs while, in the factories and the warehouses, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us are deployed – usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists – to make them work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time.

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.

That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.

...

The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors.

Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton.

Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said.

And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.

...

If you don’t like limits and rules, it stands to reason that you’re not going to like democracy. As Thiel wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the broligarchs are trying to undermine the rule of democratic nation-states.

To escape the control of democratic governments, they are seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, a la Musk and Bezos. But it can also come in the form of “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — independent mini-nations, carved out of the surrounding territory, where tech billionaires and their acolytes would live according to their own rules rather than the government’s. This is currently Thiel and Andreessen’s favored approach.

With the help of their investments, a startup city called Prospera is already being built off the coast of Honduras (much to the displeasure of Honduras). There are others in the offing, from Praxis (which will supposedly build “the next America” somewhere in the Mediterranean), to California Forever in, you guessed it, California.

The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25502522

A look into how the tech leaders may be using the new administration to achieve their own agenda. Looking specifically at Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andressen, Ben Horotwitz, Brian Armstrong, and David Sacks as well as their relationship with figures like JD Vance, Balaji Srinivasan, and Curtis Yarvin. There is a focused discussion on how a shaping of the government might take place based on convergences between the ideas of Yarvin, who influences the tech libertarian right, and Project 2025, who have authored a playbook exclusively for President Trump to help with his transition to power.

No, the emails aren’t from a Nigerian prince, but whoever is writing them seems to use the same style, cajoling and repetition. The sad thing is, these aren’t from some poor guy in an internet cafe circa the 2000s, no–these emails have been pummeling the inboxes of federal workers from their own government. These workers have had their email inboxes flooded with bizarre imperatives to basically go away. They’ve been insulted in the emails, being encouraged to leave and find “higher productivity” jobs in the private sector. They’ve had carrots dangled in front of them, saying they can take a second job or go on awesome vacations. They’ve been demoralized, and most are likely very confused, of course, by design. What we have here is the Grover Norquist quote coming to life, the: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it in the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” For those too young to have heard this, the quote is from one of the OG architects of this current bile-filled situation. It’s always been their fervent desire to implement this bathtub murder–they’ve been patient and have all the plans in place. Now they are in the stage where they’ve drawn up the water, telling you they have some nice lavender bath bombs and beckon you through the steam.

Of course, Grover Norquist types still have good versus bad government notions. They will never try to drown the missing dollars of the defense budget. You are only “federal bad” if you are someone like a physical therapist at the VA working with the mangled bodies of veterans–or someone working to keep food safe for consumption. You are incredibly “federal bad” if you were serving in some manner to keep illness counted and mitigated. You are “federal good” if you are a part of the massive military, ICE, or a teenager with a cross married to an old man, spouting nonsense for a federal paycheck. I think you understand. And, of course, it is crazy-making. That’s baked in and a very real part of how this is all designed to work. The few of us still trying to follow the blitzkrieg that is the real-time attempt to remake the entire government are probably in the minority. Mainly, it’s chaos and confusion to the vast populace, and this is often what causes a brain to simply shut down. It’s too much and we aren’t wired for it. It’s the plan, to bring in so much rapid damaging change that it will be near impossible to stop. It seems the goal of the broligarchy is to reshape all of it in some fashion that they seem to believe will become their new utopia (but of course, almost everyone else’s BAD PLACE).

...

One interesting thing I’ve come across in trying to parse out the philosophy of this Business-Plot-Come -to-Fruition is that they seem to consider city-states to be an excellent form of government. These smaller entities can work more in line with their idea of states working as corporations. Everything stems from that idea that top-down, it all needs to be private and what they consider nimble. They love private schools, gated communities, tiny principalities with their own rules……..often with the right to be racist, sexist or any other ist they enjoy. But overall, they want it all to be like a myriad of corporations, slipping into a locality as they see fit to extract resources in the most “efficient” manner. No common good, simply commerce and extraction. Of course, they will need to keep the military to enforce their notions of masculine energy and conquest, but they seem to have a soft spot for fluid locales they can swing in and out of, taking advantage of the best tax breaks etc. I am hoping this leaves an opening for some areas to simply slip out of the noose during this chaos. Places like California who contribute more to the federal economy than they get back might consider simply walking backwards like Homer in the bushes. But seriously, this craziness will not be efficient in the long run, and I don’t think it’s illogical to consider a fracturing of the US might take place, whatever that might end up meaning.

It’s a cliché, but I’m sure that perhaps Sun Tzu might have a book or something about maneuvering in times of chaos. If that guy ever got published, that is. Even smaller areas like left leaning cities might be able to find a modicum of independence if they are annoying enough to try to manage. We have to look for hope– what’s the alternative? I think of places like New Orleans that have so little in common with the rest of their state. The ample money they take in from visitors gets funneled to places that decide the Ten Commandments should be on their school walls……on the walls that is, not actually obeyed by those in power. This is just one notion I think of when I try to consider what might happen in the setting of this truly abhorrent time. Managing a bag of cats might be disruptive to the end goal for them, however. Can a city or state do an Irish Goodbye to the US government when things get more unhinged? They are creating true chaos; I certainly hope individuals of good intent are looking for ways to benefit others in this situation and looking for exit strategies. The current state of affairs is a dead-end.

...

At this point, though, we do have to realize we are stuck on the path with grade-A psychopaths. We need to be furtively darting our eyes in every direction like a character in a bad movie, looking for workarounds, escape paths and allies. In short, we need to fight the Bathtub Stranglers and all the chaos and hate they bring with them.

A document authored by an anonymous group of whistleblowers accuses Elon Musk of attempting to spearhead a private hostile takeover of the US Government on behalf of an extremist anti-democracy philosophy known as the ‘neo-reactionary’ movement, by effectively hijacking the Republican Party.

The group, who are withholding their identity for fears of being targeted, includes former Silicon Valley and US technology leaders. They describe themselves as former followers of the neo-reactionary movement, also known as the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ – a burgeoning Internet philosophy which seeks to abolish the drive for greater equality and the very existence of democracy itself.

...

“Elon Musk’s unchecked consolidation of power over government infrastructure, financial systems, AI governance, and digital media does not serve the interests of the Trump administration or the broader conservative movement”, warns the memorandum. “While some may view Musk as a useful instrument in dismantling the bureaucratic state, in reality, his actions demonstrate that he is not working for Trump or the Republican Party, but rather for his own power and the broader neo-reactionary agenda.”

...

The neo-reactionary movement traces back in particular to the online writings of Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer who has received investments from billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and set up the data behemoth and Pentagon contractor, Palantir.

Musk, the memo warns, is moving rapidly to take control of the apparatus of US Government power on behalf of a core network of interests who subscribe to Yarvin’s ‘ Dark Enlightenment’ ideology. Other leaders in the US technology oligarchy aligned with Musk who subscribe to Yarvin’s ideas include Marc Andreessen (partner at venture-capital firm A16Z and author of the Techo-Optimist Manifesto), Balaji Srinivasan (former chief technology officer of Coinbase and author of the Network State), David Sacks (who co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel), and of course Thiel himself.

...

According to the memo, “Despite this open disdain for the President, Yarvin recognizes the President’s utility—not as a leader, but as a tool… Yarvin even rejects the revolutionary impulse among the President’s supporters. He derides January 6 as ‘the last lame breath of mobocracy in America’ and scoffs at the idea that Trump’s base—’used-car dealers, general contractors, small-town investment advisors’—could ever rise up and install a new ‘Trumpenreich.’”

The memo reveals that Musk’s actions fit alarmingly well with Yarvin’s prescriptions for how a Trump administration can be exploited by the neo-reactionary movement to install a new faction of elitist Silicon Valley technocrats at the helm of a hollowed-out US Government. It highlights the following paragraphs from Yarvin:

“In a world where voters elect Trump with a mandate to just take over the government—as completely as the Allies took over the government of Germany in 1945—he will probably screw it up, anyway. Yet he doesn’t have to screw it up. (The only way to not screw it up, for Donald Trump, is to be the chairman of the board, and delegate to a single executive ready to be the plenary CEO of America.)”

...

The end goal of this movement is shocking. The memo notes, for instance, that the neo-reactionary movement advocates a form of “techno-monarchism” where the CEO-ruler uses “data systems, artificial intelligence, and advanced algorithms to manage the state, monitor citizens, and implement policies. Yarvin’s vision for society is chillingly explicit; he suggests that unproductive members of society should be dealt with through a ‘humane alternative to genocide’—one that removes ‘undesirable elements’ from the public sphere without ‘any of the moral stigma’ of mass murder. His proposed solution? A VR prison where individuals are ‘waxed like a bee larva into a cell.’”