Techno‑feudal elite are attempting to build a twenty‑first‑century fascist state
collapseofindustrialcivilization.com
collapseofindustrialcivilization.com
it's red alert time.
and they say it's a coincidence.
You must be joking.
By any measure, and in every poly sci department, Nixon is viewed as moderate or even slightly left wing.
He created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, created OHSA, signed NEPA, monkeyed with wage and price controls, signed a breath-taking number of anti-discrimination and affirmative-action orders, pushed school desegregation in the South...Nixon would be called a "progressive" today.
I know. Your baby boomer grandparents thought anyone who wasn't McGovern must be Hitler, but...Nixon was pretty liberal. Regan ran against him in the 1968 primaries just for this reason.
This is important because if Nixon's administration wasn't ideologically liberal, why pass liberal policy? The reason has to do with the political environment of the 60's and early 70's, which had enough populist solidarity that it could effectively pressure the administration. Compare he Privacy Act of 1974 - what the was in response to - to the insane privacy violations going on today, yet we aren't capable of passing an updated privacy act because we lack populist solidarity on the issue. The populism of today is apathetic and fragmented compared to the movements of the 60's and 70's, so consequently it exerts less political pressure.
At least the crackpots now get to see what a real deep state (concentrated power behind public facade) looks like.
Alas, the prototypical tech "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" has become the "temporarily embarrassed lord."
Orwell warned about this sort of thing already: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
So if people are still not convinced it might be a good time to reconsider, maybe read a history book or two.
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.
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.
Let's say that there are twelve doughnuts in the box. You see someone eat one, and there are 11, 10, 9... and when there are six, you make a prediction: we're going to run out of doughnuts.
A few minutes later, after a late burst of doughnut-grabbing (putting the exhaustion of the box ahead of schedule), it happens. What's the best way to understand this experience?
A) People were removing doughnuts from the box without knowing what would happen. You were the only one who understood how to count in reverse (a skill not ordinarily taught in public schools), and revealed a truth they might not have even understood - until it occurred before their eyes.
B) You revealed a consistent desire to eat doughnuts and a social norm that permitted it, which held true minute after minute, both before and after you published. That's excellent science. They knew they were eating doughnuts, and they wanted them. Their knowledge of the running-out effect, possibly discovered earlier in internal studies, drove them to accelerate the process at the end, rushing to grab the last one before the competition did.
I would suggest, (B).
We've seen responses ranging from "You're overreacting. That won't happen," to "It's not going to get worse." Somehow it does and yet they continue the same lines.
There's obviously something else going on, perspective-wise or psychologically. I've always wanted to follow with them and understand what exactly the dynamic is.
But what precedent does that set? A very dangerous one imo
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-technolo...
They couldn't even pull it off when they had a mandate and some people with actual talent in the first admin.
Act accordingly.
As incompetent and stupid as they are, the dunking just never seems to stop. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares, and nobody who cares has any power.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.