Gilded Rage – Why Silicon Valley went from libertarian to authoritarian

The deeper lie is that libertarianism is right wing. So-called right wing Libertarianism is fallacious - ultimately a product of the corporate neutering of political organization just like the main parties.

I certainly understand why right- "Libertarianism" is highly appealing - stick to these small core set of axioms, and you will be free, and everything that appears to be bad will actually be justified because it's merely a result of people exercising freedom. It makes it sound like we just need to simplify things. If we just perform a rewrite and avoid giving into the temptation to make bloat, don't you know we will all be free?

The fallacy is easy demonstrated, but requires the reader to suspend the mainstream indoctrination asserting a dichotomy between government and corporations (promulgated in the "Libertarian" dogma by the lemma that a corporation is definitionally incapable of exercising coercion).

In actuality - a government is a corporation, and corporations can exert coercive power like government. What we consider a corporation is merely a partial version of what we consider a government. If we're in need of a particular product or service and there are many corporations to choose from, we feel more free (just as if we could choose between multiple governments!). If there are only a handful of corporations to choose from, especially if the executives all implement similar policies in lockstep, then the dynamic feels much less free. If there is only one corporation to choose from, then we have a de facto government that can coerce us up to the limit of needing that product/service.

Essentially any authoritarian/totalitarian government can be transmuted into an axoimatic right-"Libertarian" utopia simply by reframing its government as a singular corporation with which every citizen has a lifelong contract of onerous terms. And so the only way to approach libertarianism is to set the metric as a society's constructive outcomes for its citizens having effective freedoms.

As for the original topic, the Thiel quote shows that Thiel never actually was a libertarian, or at least least as long as he's been relevant. Rather the only "freedom" he is interested in is his own "freedom" to coerce others. And as he's gained more power, that "freedom" mask has been slowly flaking off.

This is the exact shape of Silicon Valley's surveillance industry as a whole - "disrupting" the world merely to make centralized web/apps that exert fine-grained top down control. "Freedom" for their founders, not for their users. That's not freedom, it's just new systems of control. And now that this new crop of nouveau riche have entrenched themselves, they want to shamelessly start exercising their power.

I came up with this idea, too, but was beaten to it by at least 100 years.

When they see the chance to seize the government and actively punish those groups they drop their fake ideals immediately.

That is a far cry from the open corruption of the Republican party however. Allowing the CEO of ExxonMobil to become the Secretary of State. Doing pay for play and accepting lavish gifts from Silicon Valley royalty. The Trump coin grift and dishing out pardons for crypto scammers.

Both sides is a gross oversimplification.

The Democratic establishment are in favor of maintaining the status quo, which is very favorable to corporations and the wealthy.

The Republicans think even the status quo isn’t billionaire friendly enough. They want to go as far as possible as quickly as possible to eliminate even more of the middle class. Their real goal is to disenfranchise labor entirely, hence the push for “AI” and eliminating jobs.

Of course billionaires prefer one over the other. But from the perspective of the left, both are unacceptable. Neither of these options will actually pull in the other direction, tax the rich, restore the wealth of the middle class, etc.

This is a hyperbole. The two parties are not exactly the same, though they are the same on a number of issues, such as support for the military-industrial complex and Israel. Here's what Noam Chomsky said: "In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies."

The way I would put it is that there are sane billionaires and insane billionaires, though they both have the economic interests of the billionaire class at heart. The insane billionaires want to disrupt everything and eat the world, while the sane billionaires just want to keep the quiet status quo of their dominance, and so they play "nice".

> maybe the Democrats lost because they turned away from Silicon Valley and Musk pumped hundreds of millions into Trump's campaign

I doubt that Musk's money changed the election outcome. Indeed, Musk's financial meddling in the subsequent Wisconsin Supreme Court election turned a lot of people against his candidate, who lost. The purpose of Musk's contributions was to buy influence with Trump, which worked, at least for a while.

Depending on how principled you want to be about what happens to the underclass, you have a choice. Either exert control privately, by removing state protections for people and using corporate strength. Or you can co-opt the existing government to act on your behalf. You can mix and match, where you weaken parts of government which protects and strengthen that which controls.

Whether the jackboots have a national emblem or a company logo on them doesn't make a lot of difference to the necks.

Someone else might want to live were you live, who gets to decide who lives there? You both live in identical virtual copies. The goal is to sidestep politics entirely wherever it appears

Where it falls apart (aside from its total amorality) is that technological progress is secondary to scientific progress and if science says in 100 billion years the universe is over, then there is no technical solution, I don't want people increasing entropy and killing me sooner before then.

Usually clickbait to me has some attempt to deceive the reader that the point their trying to make is more salacious than it actually is.

> Silverman: I think it’s [the anger] pretty palpable. That’s one reason why I call it a “gilded rage,” it’s that you hear it from them. We do hear from these people directly on social media and these long interviews they give on podcasts—some of them have their own podcasts—or speeches they give publicly. They’re all content creators now.

> The emotion that often comes through is this sort of wounded anger, they feel victimized. Some of it is a bit in the style of classic right wing victimology, but it’s also, “the people don’t appreciate them enough and the world they’re trying to make,” whether it’s tech critics or regulators. But I think also they share a lot of the anti-woke grievances of the last few years, Musk very explicitly in his transphobia. The sense that progressive politics has somehow gone too far and has made everyone else’s lives oppressive and miserable seems to be an idea they share, despite all their wealth and power and the fact that I don’t think those left wing ideas had a major effect on tech. But, in some cases, I think it’s also personal. You hear someone like Bill Ackman say that, “Harvard turned his daughter into a Marxist,” or Elon Musk has talked a lot about his child coming out as trans. He said, “the woke mind virus killed my son.” That’s how he came up with this idea of “the woke mind virus”. He seems very angry about that.

If they leverage their property to help centralize control, they're something other than libertarian.

That's some record level grandstanding.

If Marc Andreessen wants to fund a platform that enables and allows people to call him out on his fascistic bullshit and insane disconnect with humanity, it seems like a trap to say people shouldn't use it to do just that.

"How dare this vile journalist criticize a holy god techbro, while using a Web site?!"

Incidentally, here we are on HN, the lounge of junior techbros, which still systematically posts a piracy link for every paywalled news story. Krugman came from one of those revenue-starved news organizations that oblivious techbros are kicking while they're down. If some techbros then deign to toss Krugman some peanuts, for providing "content" on the techbro's property, Krugman should be thankful, and not dare bite the hand that feeds him?

There are bad people and idiots in this story, and it's not the journalist.

And what world to we live in if that should stop him from criticising?

Or is your problem that Krugman criticized Andreessen's foray into monetizing monkey JPGs, despite Krugman presumably lacking appropriate monkey JPG industry credentials? Again, if so, it would be more helpful to outline why you think Krugman is wrong instead of substituting umbrage for argument.