Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

this is quite similar to anyone familiar with prussia, berlin and the constituent national assembly of 1845 in the context of the historical power struggle between vichy merchant classes and their royal monarchs during the advent of the steam era.

it seems the same play is being made in 2025 at the advent of AI and Tech supremacy as it comes to a headroads with the death of traditional US neoliberalism. Tech is more interested in the monarchy, as was the feudal lords of old, and seeks a neofeudalism while the parliament of our time, the house and senate, prattle on like the Diets and assembly promulgating edicts and regulations that are either wholesale ignored, or gridlocked bike-shedding; fiddling whilst Rome burns.

View on HN

Can we drop the "tech" prefix from our neo-feudalism?

Technology is necessarily a progressive force, and feudalism is necessarily a stagnatory conservative structure. The "Tech Supremacy" group is visibly opposed to technology, and it's reflecting more and more on society as they gain power.

> Technology is necessarily a progressive force

Technology is a tool. It is not a culture or a system. In fact, I think state and corporate use of technology for things like surveillance, censorship, frankly pointless jobs that somehow attract VC money, mass propaganda and social media access, data tracking and advertising and behavior modelling to a T, hypothetical pointless-job-destroying-AGI, etc. that are currently in vogue are part of the conservative structure. Technology means moving, but is this outwards or inwards movement?

Conservative people just can't create technology. Technology is always progressive.

It can be progressive towards any amount of things, good or bad. But conservatism requires not developing it.

I think this is conflating conservatism as a political position and conservatism as an anti-development position. Conservatism as a political position has very little to do with actual developmental changes and way more to do with retaining existing political hierarchies. If a new tool came into existence to enforce a existing caste systems (race, class, whatever) then political conservatism would be for this tool.

Consider reading Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills as a great display of this difference in the context of reproductive rights[0].

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/

> I think this is conflating conservatism as a political position and conservatism as an anti-development position.

In absolutely no place in either comment I mentioned political movements, parties, or anything like that.

Your own introduction of the term was alongside feudalism, which most would say is "something like" a political movement

Well yes, the term conservatism is ambiguous as it means different things in different contexts. I'm suggesting you're conflating this.

No, because it's enabled by the tech industry and tech figures. It's not big pharma or big oil that has anywhere near as much lobbying power or money.

So... "tech industry" is the name we give to the companies investing heavily on stopping technological improvements?

And yes, I know that it is. It's just, can we drop the Orwellianism and change the name?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com