American Emperor?
The necessity is for a figurehead to put a gracing aspect on a trillionaire oligarchy in which the once sovereign people will be as cattle to the slaughter of their hopes, dreams and, perhaps, lives.
Yippee, it's Dystopia!
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For a time, from early 2020, it seemed that the democratic systems of the West had simply been arrested in their paths, and waylaid by a fake pandemic with instantly decipherable ulterior motives. There was, from the beginning, this mystery concerning why it was that almost the entirety of systems and establishments and citizens — though long steeped in talk of democracy and freedom — seemed not to see what was happening as problematic. The surface rhetoric was that this was not a temporary situation, but the beginning of a new dispensation, a ‘Great Reset’, in due course giving way to a 'New Normal’. Whole systems of government and ideology seemed to cave in before this assault, as though subject to some unseen element of force or other persuasion. The resistance, pretty much everywhere, came from outside the systems, from the margins of society, the mavericks and naysayers and eccentrics (‘outside the centre’) — some populists but by no means all — who insisted that these weeks, then months, then years, were an aberration that must be brought to a halt and then reversed. It was obvious; otherwise two millennia of political progress would have been all for nothing.
Although the demeanours of governments and the rhetoric of supranational bodies like the WEF, the WHO and the UN suggested that what had been announced as a crisis was being appropriated as an opportunity to alter the nature of political and social reality, the necessity for this did not seem to be supported by any substantial facts. Yet, the controllers continued to insist: they must be allowed to save our lives. Even among the parliamentary oppositions of multiple countries, there was this tone of equivocation: the constant prating about the ‘virus’ and the ‘pandemic’, as though these phenomena had been somehow significant for themselves rather than on account of their — again, self-evident — corrupt management to inflict enormous damage on society and humanity. Looking back, it becomes clearer: the Right was almost as equivocal as the Left was enthusiastic; ‘conservatives’ masked up and adopted serious faces, even as the liberals began to froth through their face masks. Only the cranks and soreheads seemed to see that something strange was happening that might be even more ominous than even the worst of the scare porn propaganda suggested.
In the United States, the underfoot conditions took even longer than elsewhere to clarify themselves. In the final year of his first presidential term, Donald Trump seemed to initially resist the idea of a deadly virus, then seemed to bridle at the idea of lockdown, but then seemed to shift his ground, turn a 180 and become an arch proponent of the Covid ‘vaccines’, making a virtue of their being rush-released under the heading ‘Operation Warp Speed’. Was he having a laugh? Some of his supporters winked broadly at the perplexed Deplorable onlookers and explained that he was speaking in code. We would see. Then, it became clearer, or seemed to: it was all about the election. On the night of the count, Trump appeared to be winning, only for the numbers to flip as the witching hour forced a pause, and we awoke only hours later to find that Joe Biden had been raised from his underground bunker, casting MAGA into the wilderness for at least another four years.
It was expected that, in opposition, Trump would reveal his cunning plan — how he had pushed the ‘vaccines’ only so as to prevent an extended lockdown, which would have killed many millions of people. Instead, he doubled down on valorisation of his ‘beautiful vaccines’ and otherwise said very little on the subject. Still, MAGA being pretty much the only show in town, was not going to go gently into the dark night of Democratic insanity. After a few months of flailing about in various courtrooms, Donald Trump and his supporters, at home and abroad, seemed to abandon their pitch for electoral justice and dug in for the long haul.
Time would tell. His people trusted his motives and strategy, even if they lacked the remotest understanding of either. Among the Deplorables, Trump held what he had, incrementally supplementing his support as a consequence of the disastrous Biden presidency. In the end, on November 6th 2024, after 1,461 days and 1,461 nights in the wilderness, Donald Trump delivered a decisive defeat to Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, reclaiming the presidency for another four years, and this time, though subtly changed in appearance and confidence, strode out into the world again as President of the United States of America, as though the date was still January 2021 and nothing at all had gone wrong.
It is difficult to sketch a map of events leading to this situation, but it seemed that the very re-election of Donald Trump triggered the beginnings of a dramatic reaction against him — not, perhaps, among his most devout and enthusiastic supporters, but further afield, among those who, from a distance, had placed their most fervent trust in him for a turnaround in the affairs of the world — ‘political affairs’ being almost the least of these. No sooner was his victory secure than people seemed to decide that it was too late, too little and too good to be true. Even up to the (for an hour or so) déjà vu-invoking witching hour of November 6th 2024, there seemed to be a consensus among those who had spent four years under assault from Woke, BLM, Antifa, the Deep State, and the crazed mass migration policies that were destroying multiple Western countries, that Donald Trump represented the best — nay, the sole — hope of turning things around. But, in retrospect, it feels as though there was, maybe even from dawn on November 6th, an ebbing of enthusiasm and hope. Something didn’t feel right — some sense of anti-climax, perhaps, or some darker foreboding. Even his victory speech seemed half-hearted and lacking in something that no-one was able to name — a deficit of jubilation, perhaps, or a strange sense of same-old-same-old — but which many of those who had counted the days to this moment could feel in their bones as a sudden chill or in their guts as a dull ache of sorrow.
For the past — say, for round figures — 70 days, there has been a hubbub of disquiet underlying what has seemed, at the surface level, a rather spectacular opening to the second Trump presidency. Day after day, he announced things that, back in 2020 or 2021, no one would have dared to dream of: the vindication of the right of women to their own unmolested sports; the instantaneous shredding of 70 ‘genders’, the calling to order of Zelensky, the stuffing of the WHO and the slighting of the WEF. He announced ceasefires and peace talks in conflicts where before there had only been bellicosity and slaughter. Yet, the sense of disappointment seemed only to grow.
There was an absence of specifics as to what precisely was felt to be amiss, mostly a general air of disgruntlement and suspicion. Trump is not what he seems, it was said, as though he had only just then declared his intention to run for president, and very little elaboration was offered. It was as if we were supposed to have known this all along. ‘Don’t believe in saviours!’ struck up the disconsolate chorus, as though, at its moment of culmination, the once hopeful had woken up from the dream.
Much of the focus of the negativity seemed to be on Elon Musk rather than specifically President Trump, but that did nothing to get Trump off the hook. There were mumblings about Musk being ‘the real President’, and still more about J.D. Vance being in the pocket of Silicon Valley and his ‘pimp’, Peter Thiel. Even Steve Bannon, the spiritual leader of MAGA, seemed disconsolate, suddenly erupting in fury like a jealous sibling contemplating a new baby in the family crib. Elon Musk, he said, was a ‘parasitic illegal immigrant’ and a ‘technofeudalist’ who didn’t believe in America, was ‘not with us when it comes to the little guy’, and wanted ‘to impose his freak experiences and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.’
The overall effect was as though of a wedding which had gone straight to the reception even though the groom had left the bride standing on the steps of the altar. It has been all for nothing seemed to be the growing consensus beyond Trump’s home-base, something expressed as a tone or a trope rather than a matter of fact or evidence. Don’t you get it yet? they would ask, as though they had assumed your scepticism from the beginning and were now disappointed to note your ebullience. Still trusting in your saviour, eh? Those who pleaded, ‘Wait and see!’ met with scorn and disbelief, just as ‘Time will tell’ provoked looks of derision and impatience. To suggest that President Trump be allowed his hundred-day honeymoon was to invite a withering smile. When pressed, they issued seminars about Warp Speed, or some other tale from the days of old, which they knew, or ought to have known, we’d been relentlessly parsing for several years.
Now, just past the two-thirds juncture in the first one hundred days of President Trump’s second term of office, there is the beginning of clarity, an outpouring of not so much facts as background and insights into what it might be that underlies the strange sense of unease that has accompanied the opening months of this second Trump presidency. It is not, in itself, being as yet unproven, something utterly damning or bang-to-rights. But it serves as something like grounds for an understanding of several minor causes for disquiet about the take-off of the second Trump administration, not least the sudden outbreak of peace, love and understanding between tech moguls like the appalling Bezos and the unspeakable Zuckerberg.
For me it began with a post titled 'Algocracy' on The Corbett Report,‘ late last week, which draws a rough sketch of a rather ominous scenario:
Can you imagine if there was someone — say, some technocratic billionaire oligarch who happens to be the co-President of the United States right now — who had the means, motive, and opportunity to create some sort of Everything app, a WeChat for America and the rest of the world, which will combine all aspects of your digital identity and persona, exactly as Klaus Schwab was saying is going to happen in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. All of your data: your digital ID, your finance data, your social media history, who you talk to, where you go — all of that together in one convenient little app.
That’s a somewhat dated hypothesis, though one still awaiting rebuttal, but James also introduced a new element by linking to a very impressive and detailed two-part article by Iain Davis on the site Unlimited Hangout, which goes into the undertows of what is said to be going on in the second Trump administration, which adds to the above a new element of sinister possibility.
This article comes (to date) in two parts:
The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 1
The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 2
Davis’s broad case amounts, at this stage, more to a hypothesis than a proven argument, though that is not in any regard to diminish it. Sometimes the most momentous stories begin like this.
The title of the article, ‘The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate’ conveys only a flavour of its content, or at least, since I was unfamiliar with the word ‘Technate’, and the term Gov-Corp, so it did with me. A ‘Technate’ is the name given to a region over which a technocracy operates, ‘technocracy’ denoting rule by experts. ‘Gov-Corp’ suggests a joint exercise in governance involving politics and corporations, i.e. a synonym for ‘fascism’ in its original and most coherent meaning.
The title therefore conveys an approximate sense of the Trump movement having entered some kind of Faustian pact to return to government as something other than a democratic enterprise, which, as the argument unfolds, conveys a general sense of President Trump as the quasi-autocratic head of a technocratic oligarchy dominated by corporate power. The article does not amount to a definitive exposure of such a conspiracy, but provides a stunning amount of circumstantial detail which goes a long way to establishing a prima facie case. The thesis, I would say, remains somewhat tentative, but nevertheless compelling.
The articles are detailed and dense with information, facts, names, analysis and links to other material. If I say I do not find it entirely convincing, it has nothing to do with any deficiency in the reportage, but with the immensity of the implications if even half of what Davis is intimating turns out to be well-founded. In that case, the implications would include the possibility that Donald Trump has been seduced or bought off by extremely dark forces, or perhaps even that he had been a fraud all along, and that, either way, he has betrayed, or is shortly to betray, those millions of people, in America and elsewhere, who have placed their trust in him.
I have said repeatedly in the face of earlier intimations to somewhat similar effect that I do not believe this is possible, that Trump would, in any circumstances, sell out or abandon the Deplorables. I cannot say that I have entirely abandoned that hope, but I am certainly in a different frame of mind after reading Iain Davis’s article. There is much in the article that might be called circumstantially indicative, and much also that is ambiguous. But there are also things that resonate with, or seem to explain, certain mysteries about Donald Trump that have lain on the evidential table for months or years. An example is his persistent assertion or insinuation that the ‘pandemic’ was a real thing, when the dogs in the pound know it was an infernal hoax. Why would he do that, and continue to do it, now that he no longer has a need to? After all, he has appointed to the position of health tzar in his administration a man whose record suggests a belief not radically distant from the most implacable sceptic. He has restored and compensated members of the US military who were cancelled as a result of refusing the poison injections. Are these exercises in misdirection? If not, why continue to equivocate? Why not come clean with his people and the world? Why not admit any faults or unwitting misdeeds on his own part and begin a thorough examination of the entire episode, with a view to establishing a process whereby the wrongdoers might be identified and brought to justice?
There is now a case to answer. The work of Iain Davis, linked above, suggests a possible reason: that Donald Trump, in office for the second time, is there to adopt and continue a programme of societal and existential transformation that was begun by sinister others five years ago, at the start of the last year of his first presidency, a time when he may have been innocent of anything nefarious or perfidious. Now, if Davis’s hypothesis proves correct, Trump’s innocence, if any, has evaporated.
The article is littered with unfamiliar, ambiguous but highly resonant terms and nomenclature, some of which can as yet be only approximately understood. Aside from ‘Technate’ there is ‘techno-optimism’, ‘Dark Enlightenment’, ‘technopopulism’, ‘neoreactionaries’, accelerationism and ’Dark MAGA’ . . . There are also the names of multiple actors and influencers, of varying degrees of familiarity: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, Larry Ellison, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, Nick Land, Joseph Schumpeter . . . What the article describes in the final analysis is a kind of diffused movement that has been incubating for many years, with the aim of replacing democracy with a form of corporate monarchy or — the word is not shied away from — dictatorship, by way of countering the allegedly sclerosing or corrupting limitations of democratic systems in practice. It is further asserted that these savants, influencers and ‘neoreactionaries’, working through Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, now have their claws into the second Trump administration.
Davis dives in:
[T]he proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise. Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose ‘representative democracy’ and characterise it as both a ‘democracy’ (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.
What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.
The nomenclature is dizzying and detail-heavy, and is adequately explained in Davis’s text and connecting links. What it amounts to is a new (or very old) version of the radical transformation we intuited to be on the table since the spring of 2020, then proffered by different sets of dark actors, such as the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation, and creeps like George Soros and Bill Gates. Then, in the earliest days of the ‘pandemic’, the impetus for hyper-radical change in the working and thinking of the world seeming to be coming from left-field; here it would, perhaps more concretely and definitively, be emanating from the populist right, from just about the most successful such movement the world has ever manifested. But, if Davis is right, this is no democratic-minded initiative seeking to raise a debate about the weaknesses and limitations of democracy — with, say, a view to correcting and refining the recent drifting; this is, on the contrary, a fully-formed organism and strategy, having its roots in a long-standing murky underground, now finding favour with some of the richest and most powerful entities on the planet as it finally emerges into the ambiguous light of real political power.
Even in its sometime overreach or implausibility, Davis’s account/narrative resonates with the moment of continuity we have been experiencing since the Ides of March, 2020, and in ways that we could never have imagined down all the days of our lives until political and social reality were altered out of all recognition by the spurious insinuation of a global health crisis, now all of five years ago.
The feeling that has accompanied this has been as time winding counterclockwise, as progress (no scare quotes!) taking us backwards in everything except wealth- and power-seeking, and facing an entirely new horizon, whereon everything seemed utterly different, though for no particular good reason. Problems we had never really taken as more than irksome were now proffered as intractable and even terminal, requiring to be addressed in ways that suggested pulling the rug from under everything we had been told, and come to take for granted, all our livelong lives. Democracy was outmoded, had run its course. Freedom was a far right obsession. The notion that all men were created equal was just a piece of feelgood-directed rhetoric that now needed revisiting. The kind of capitalism we had arrived to (going forward!) required something more wieldy and functional — like totalitarianism, for instance, as Mr Larry Fink, CEO of the world’s largest crime syndicate, BlackRock, and the self-coronated Emperor of All the World and Its Kingdoms, told us with a straight face. This notion of totalitarianism as the bride of the new kind of capitalism, sounded fiendishly similar to ‘The Winner Takes All And the Devil Takes the Hindmost’.
These are things we received or sensed from the beginning of the pseudopandemic, but have only gotten around to arranging in some kind of order in the last year or so. For a time, it seemed the crisis might repair itself, and we might in time go back to something like the old ways, the old systems. This was always an illusion, but one permitted to ensconce itself in our thinking so we would chill out and get used to some of the new ways of doing things.
We had sensed for some time that something big was in train, and had an approximate sense of what it might be. It had something to do with what seems like a terminal crisis of capitalism — the debt burden, the scarcity of true collateral, the flimsiness of the Ponzi scheme on which the world was built, which in essence amounts to borrowing from our great-great grandchildren — and at the same time with a sense of jadedness with the practical inadequacies of the second best political system in the world ever, still awaiting the arrival of its final and ‘perfecting’ replacement. ‘Democracy’, even as its name escalated in holiness, had seemed in its practice to become more and more threadbare and disrespected, continuing really only as a shadow of its ideal, so that, finally, proposals for its final abolition could more readily be presented as a minor curve in the road to Utopia.
Now, the talk in certain quarters, and with incremental volume, is as though the New Normal was always going to be a matter of time alone. What began as an utterly unpalatable notion was left lying there, under our noses, for sixty months, without anyone pushing it overly hard or obsessively. Just give it some thought, seemed to be the intimation. Let’s talk about it another time! This, of course, came after a period of sustained gaslighting, in the course of which we were called upon to deal with the possibility that we might all be going mad, since we alone — each one of us separately and solo — seemed to think that what we perceived to be on the table was not merely insane but outrightly unthinkable. This couldn’t be happening, or at least not as a serious proposition, because, if it were, it would be the most momentous thing that anyone had mooted in a long period of centuries, and therefore would have been the subject of intense debate as to its fundamentals and ramifications. Instead, there was silence, aside from an occasional murmur of talk seeming to suggest that the proposal to abolish democracy and human freedom was the most natural thing in the world, the inevitable evolutionary course arising from decades of talk about the limits of freedom, the complexities of human sovereignty, the illusory nature of egalitarianism and the outright inefficiency of democracy. What else could come next but a return to oligarchy and neo-feudalism? It stood to reason, did it not?
Has it taken even one of the past 1,800 (-very odd) days to bring us, weary and resigned to an acceptance of the ‘inevitable’, albeit this time curated from ‘our own side’? Was this the plan always, from the beginning, or is this development, if Iain Davis’s prognostications are entirely apropos, purely an opportunistic convergence of forces perceiving a moment of maximum advantage? Have the forces which Davis has fingered and placed under the microscope, and which lay unsuspected under their stones for decades, simply seized the moment and, heaving the weight of derision and indifference that interred them, wriggled themselves loose and, casting the weight of failure and indecision off their backs, followed the MAGA star to Washington to be born?
Davis describes ‘a diverse group of iconoclast scholars working out of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) of Warwick University in the UK’, which seems to be the thinking head of what we will cautiously call ‘the movement’. This caucus, led by ‘philosophers and cultural theorists’ Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, had majored in the work of an obscure Austrian Marxian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who developed the theory of ‘creative destruction’ which held that capitalist economies constantly evolve due to the cyclical disruption caused by innovations that destroy old markets and create new ones. This undoubtedly charming and fascinating bunch combined their thoughts about Schumpeter’s 'creative destruction’ with their exploration of ‘deterritorialisation’, a brainchild of our old friends in the Frankfurt School, which proposed that any sociopolitical ‘territory’ would ultimately be altered, mutated or destroyed. In this schema, democracy is just one technical system among multiple others, and the point of social organisation is not the preferment of human needs, endeavours, hopes and aspirations, but efficiency and profit and, above all, the power to ensure efficiency and profit for those who are already rich and powerful enough to demand and claim them.
And then there is Curtis Yarvin, a strange and — were the situation not so dire — fascinating specimen of a dilettante thinker who is living proof of the axiom coined by the scientist, Neils Bohr, to the effect that if an idea does not appear bizarre, there is no hope for it.
Yarvin is a ‘punk philosopher’, maybe also an ‘anarcho-capitalist’ (why not?), certainly a ‘neoreactionary’, who was once at the outer fringes of ‘right-wing thought’, and has now stumbled into Bethlehem to be interviewed recently and at great length by both Tucker Carlson and the New York Times.
Yarvin offers some very ‘interesting’ arguments. If none of this were to go beyond the confines of a university debating society, it would at least be highly entertaining, some of it intriguing, much of it mad, but all of it excellent mental crunching for the idle ‘intellectual'. The trouble is that, right now, we are living through a time of such radical possibility and change, as well as a level of public corruption — of the media in particular — which has not been experienced for perhaps centuries, so that interesting and entertaining ideas might very easily spill over into tyrannical realities. The outcome of the discussion we are now having, or not having, could in a very short time result in the most unimaginable levels of despotism, intolerance, surveillance, control and cruelty, in which many of Yarvin’s ideas could fit as snugly as bugs in a rancid rug. Some things he says — like abolishing academia and the media — bring me to my feet, but only because that would be the equivalent of the criminalisation of Woke: a good freaking start. Others not so much.
Like his idea that running a country is the same as running a corporation. Imagine, he jousts, if your MacBook had been made by the Californian Department of Computing, or if California was governed by Apple. Which would we prefer? Hobson’s choice, I respond: the real question is: Who thinks governing in the name of a sovereign, free people is the same as producing calculators and telephones?
Yarvin says that we need a government that actually works, and we don’t have one, which is true of just about everyone everywhere. But perhaps this is better than a government that works in much the manner of a board of omnipotent screws, which is what he seems to be proposing.
I watched the interview with Yarvin by a New York Times journalist determined to ask him all the wrong questions (‘Would you be wacist at all, Curtis?) while nonetheless treating him with a degree of seriousness and respect that would certainly not have been available had he been a populist politician saying the same things. Sure, Yarvin’s views are amusing and provocative, but delivering entertainment and amusement have not, of late, been among the criteria applied by media deciding whom to give column inches or airtime to. It has also been observed that Yarvin’s views are simply a sexier version of the motherWEFfers’ agenda, as expressed in the written works of Klaus Schwab: a global technocracy, managed via AI, and ruled by hereditary corporate monarchs.
Yarvin couches these ideas in plausible-sounding but actually profoundly regressive ideas. Being a ‘reactionary’ is not necessarily bad in itself; but it can be if the reaction is against fundamentals of human dignity and freedom.
‘There is no difference between a CEO and a dictator,’ Yarvin says. ‘If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia’.
Like other ‘neoreactionaries’ he has a profound contempt for what he calls ‘wards’ (the onetime sovereign people), whom he regards as irrelevant to the future of politics, which must aspire to much higher objectives than serving the public if it is to continue to be ‘relevant’.
In 2008 under his pen name, Mencius Moldburg, Yarvin wrote of his proposal to ‘virtualize’ humanity:
Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma. The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards [people] — either metaphorically or literally — but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.
Today, now he finds himself unexpectedly in the mainstream, Yarvin tends to describe this kind of commentary as ‘trolling’, a rather too neat concept for disposing of past excesses.
As Iain Davis puts it:
The Dark Enlightenment is not racist. It is anti-human race. Its advocates do not care what colour gov-corp’s customers are. They seek, rather, to transform all of humanity, to bring an end to what it is to be a sovereign human being.
Yes. He is also correct in observing that the ‘neoreactionaries‘, in dissing democracy, never pause to parse that concept and consider that it may have multiple incarnations, iterations or potential states, some of which have never properly been tried, and which are certainly not what we are experiencing at the moment.
Few of those who talk down democracy seem to be prepared to look at the details of its flaws, or the reasons why it has gone off the rails. If they wished to open this box, there is more than enough in these and related questions to improve things by about 1,000 per cent if we went about it with a genuine motive to achieve a better world. These include: the problems with the party system, which has revealed itself as inimical to the very impulses of the democratic ideal; the partly consequent failure to preserve the essentials of free public conversation, a sine qua non of both democracy and freedom; the nefarious effects of fake money on the workings of government, which by definition severs politics from accountability to its demos.
Iain David stresses a related point, though I am not sure I agree entirely with his focus or definitions in this context:
The NRx [‘neoreactionary’] uses the word ‘democracy’ when referring to 'representative democracy.’ Yet ‘democracy’ and ‘representative democracy’ are two separate, distinct, and almost diametrically opposed political systems. Representative democracy is based on every sovereign individual devolving all of their decision-making ‘authority' to a select few elected politicians, whereas 'democracy’ sees every sovereign human being retaining and exercising their own sovereign authority through the rule of law.
Of course, the ‘rule of law’ is, on the basis of recent experience, just as decidedly an unreliable guarantor of democratic values as the democratic systems themselves. Democracy is more than this: it is the placing of the will of the people at the centre of all questions arising in the public sphere, and the maintenance of a careful watch to ensure that the will of the people is respected and implemented at all times. Central to this is the concept of a public conversation — perhaps the core issue requiring to be repaired before any more radical surgery can be attempted. Without a free and open conversation, no system of government will function as it needs to.
But I agree fully with Davis here:
Disillusionment with representative democracy is no reason to hand over totalitarian sociopolitical control systems to oligarchs. Accelerating towards hegemony is not a solution. Unless you are an oligarch, it is a stupid and suicidal proposition.
And here:
To be frank, it makes little difference what we hoi polloi believe. The oligarchs who are conversant with these political philosophies are evidently trying to bring them to fruition in our lifetime. We ignore the consequent cultural revolutions and social engineering projects at our peril. Make no mistake: They are already underway.
And, the more I read of and thought about his article, here too:
The shared view of technocrats and neoreactionaries that society would be better if it were ruled by the likes of Musk and Thiel is an absurd and dangerous folly. We shouldn’t labour under any illusions that they’re ‘nice’.
What most certainly may be said is that there appears to exist, in the group immediately around Donald Trump, a tendency towards dilettantism concerning politics and political systems which is, at best, worryingly frivolous and casual concerning what not long ago was considered the sacred nature of democracy. If we are charitable enough to filter out the manifest lusting after power that probably lurks downstage of visible events, and loosely accept the argument that democracy has ceased to be effective or efficient, we must surely double back to re-emphasise that efficiency was never among the primary objectives of democracy, unless what is meant is effective and efficient implementation of the people’s desires.
In some ways, the tendency of tech moguls to bleat about their ‘disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics’ is reminiscent of the attitude of a (mostly) different generation of tech moguls and savants, who, a generation ago, parcelled up the then emerging tech possibilities and questions and carried them off to their lairs in Silicon Valley, wherein they were discussed and debated in every conceivable light aside from the light of public attention and involvement. Only in the past decade has the brood of those moguls and savants re-emerged — to tell the world what its plans are for everyone. Now, those sons and daughters of the modern tech pioneers propose the abolition of democracy because it doesn’t work, but appear to have no intention of asking the people who will be affected and who might have some things to say to this question if politely asked for an opinion. In other words, democracy is to be abolished without this question being put to the people.
And here, precisely, is the crux: The most striking aspect of discussions and explorations of the role of technology in human society is that they have long since ceased to have any democratic impulse or flavour.
Now, if Davis is correct, the schemers and plotters have hit paydirt, having landed and tamed their perfect instrument, the Big Kahuna, the champion of the onetime lost and forgotten working people of America, now a risen tribe, itself marching on Washington for the second time, this time with clarity and focussed intent, and the scent of victory in its nostrils, only to have its man abducted on the steps of the White House and waylaid into a parlour of splendour and opulence, containing a large boardroom table, at the top of which sits a man with familiar visage, the emperor of All the World and Everything In It, Every Blade of Grass and Every Grain of Sand — our old friend, the Wrong Honourable Laurence D. Fink.
The President, barely inaugurated (sans Bible), sits down and is lost.
Or is he?
They have done this, if they have, via a series of connections, improbable save for the presence of one factor: money, lots of it, unlimited amounts of it, in particular the $280-odd million Elon Musk donated to Donald Trump’s second election campaign, which more or less guaranteed his victory. But these connections lead back, via Musk and Peter Thiel (once business partners in founding PayPal), to the dark underbelly of the Dark Enlightenment and the ‘neoreactionary’ ‘thinkers’ who have come to put flesh on a simple idea: that democracy is history and that the future is technocratic, which is a polite word for ‘totalitarian’, exactly as Emperor Fink expressed his wishes and requirements.
The necessity here is for a figurehead, to put a gracing aspect on what is planned as a trillionaire oligarchy, in which the once sovereign people will be as cattle to the slaughter of their hopes, dreams and, when the moment becomes opportune, conceivably their lives.
Technocracy rejects the notion that ‘all men are created equal.’ Seriously: if Davis is correct, this rejection is shortly to become a cornerstone of MAGA thinking, ‘going forward’. One of the most shocking aspects of what Davis describes is what he depicts of the visceral contempt evinced by these people towards those who, even to this moment, have been encouraged to consider themselves the ‘sovereign people’, which is to say those who imagine themselves to share in the democratic franchise.
Exhibit B: one Nick Land: ‘Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to entirely exclude them from this calculation, although their portion of sovereignty will be estimated with appropriate derision.’
In the future, as the ‘neoreactionaries’ see it, business and wealth-creation will have melded seamlessly into politics, and taken root there in a monogamous marriage, as though they’d been natural bedfellows from the beginning. Business will no longer need to buy politicians; it will employ them as its front-of-house managers. This used to be called fascism, but that word is already taken, being applied to anyone who would point to these developments and changes and describe them for what they are.
Iain Davis places Elon Musk at the centre of what is happening, suggesting, as do others, that he is not what he seems. This mirrors an undercurrent that has persisted in the ‘freedom movement’ — worldwide, as far as I can tell — since the night of Trump’s election, at first without any real evidence being proffered, seeming to amount to no more than a feeling of ‘It’s too good to be true’, but then emerging as a more coherent disenchantment. Finally, in Davis’s work, I would say, it is now acquiring some flesh.
Three years ago, I profiled Musk for the American magazine, First Things, largely favourably but also depicting him as an ambiguous figure on an ambiguous steed, i.e. a zebra.
This is probably the most germane section;
[H]is charger is not white, nor even a horse, but something like a zebra, either black with hopeful white stripes or white with worrying black ones. He has many critics who look with suspicion at his 2,000+ Starlink satellites and mutter how conveniently they appear to fit with the new age of surveillance and social credit systems. Then there is his Neuralink venture, for developing implantable brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), which essentially enable the brain to connect remotely with robotic and smart devices. It is, in short, another way of creating a mob-compliant mind, and human trials are scheduled to begin this year [2022].
The circumstantial evidence, then, points to Musk as a tech poacher turned gamekeeper. He claims that for years he tried to persuade the world to slow down AI, but eventually admitted defeat and decided ‘if you can’t beat them, join them.’ He is conscious of the potential for dystopian outcomes arising from the supplanting of human relationships with robotic ones, but ominously adds: ‘It’ll be whatever people want, really.’
‘I am really quite close to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me,’ he has said. ‘It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is exponential.’
His thinking becomes worrisome when he hints that implanted neural circuitry is just the next step from smartphones: 'We all of us already are cyborgs. You have a machine extension of yourself in the form of our phone and your computer, and all your applications. You are already superhuman.’
Sure, Musk defuses much of the concern when he talks about democratizing AI technology to render it safer, but what is ominous right now is that, thanks to the Covid Project, the democratic processes are more weak and tender than they have been in perhaps 75 years. A key contributor to social media lawlessness has been the wholesale failure of democratic representatives to confront the high-handed and quasi-criminal practices promoted and justified by self-serving tech moguls rabbiting on about free speech.
I still feel mostly like that. From his demeanour, appearance, stuttering articulacy and general aura of hipsterism, it does not seem like Elon Musk could ever be a plausible Bad Guy. It is hard to imagine him in jackboots. Yet, can we be sure?
If he is a fraud who has inveigled his way into the Trump administration and the MAGA movement, he has a pretty shrewd way of covering his tracks. I seem to recall (I can’t immediately find the reference) that Iain Davis mentions the ‘StarGate' episode that occurred on the very first day of Trump’s second term. This was when the new president announced his first major initiative, an AI project called ‘Project StarGate’, which promised $500 billion investment in American AI infrastructure, including data centres and energy generation facilities, with the likelihood of some 100,000 jobs ’almost immediately’.
The project involves a partnership of three companies, Oracle, SoftBank Group and OpenAI, which will ‘closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system’.
At the launch, which was held in the presence of President Trump, Oracle Chief Technology Officer, Larry Ellison, said the project will result in ‘vaccines that prevent cancers’ and ‘personalised medicine where we never again run into a problem like Covid-19.’
I wrote of it in my diary that week:
Hmmm. A trifle ominous, to be sure, not least in the context that the discussion about the safety or otherwise of mRNA therapies remains . . . to be conducted. Since the issue of the damage caused by the Covid mRNA injections has not even begun to be investigated, it seems premature — to say the least of it — to be launching new varieties of what may prove to be the same lethal concoctions.
Oracle, I am informed, was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. Its first major client was the CIA, and its very name was inspired by a CIA project with Oracle as its code-name. Larry Ellison worked on this project while employed at Ampex, a technology firm with government contracts, which was involved in developing an advanced database system. As of 2020, Oracle had contracts with all five branches of the United States military, as well as several prevailing or pending contracts with the CIA, and also business relationships with local law enforcement across the United States. It is worrying indeed that, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the CIA might once again have ties to a company that will be able to genetically modify mRNA vaccines tailored to an individual. Trump’s recent silence on the Warp Speed fiasco becomes a significantly more acute matter.
I also remarked upon something that Iain Davis doesn’t mention: that no sooner had news of the launch of StarGate hit the wires , it was attacked by . . . Elon Musk, who has had previous business relationships with some of the project’s principals. Now, he emerged to tweet that its backers 'don't actually have the money’.
The following day, he followed up with a series of X reposts drawing links between one of the StarGate partners, Sam Altman, and a certain Reid Hoffman, a businessman who has been linked to some of the series of lawfare assaults on Donald Trump in recent years, in particular the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, in which endeavour, as Musk reminded us, he was cheered on by the same Sam Altman, who in December 2021 tweeted:
Very few people realize just how much @reidhoffman did and spent to stop Trump from getting re-elected—it seems reasonably likely to me that Trump would still be in office without his efforts. Thank you, Reid!
Although repeatedly noting his ambiguous countenance and problematic activities, I have never succumbed to the Musk Derangement Syndrome that currently infects the ‘freedom movement’. I don’t believe he is power-crazed in the way that many of our tribe seem to do.
I have never met Elon Musk, but I like him in as far as this is possible to say.. I think he’s a little crazy but not in malign ways. I think he’s smart, though not in an egghead way. I find him charismatic and funny and in a sense, loveable (‘loveable’ has a subtly different meaning to ‘lovable’ — look it up!)
In a paragraph that ended up on the editor’s floor, I once wrote of him:
Elon Musk has charisma under four headings: personal charm; a rare quality of magnetism associated with leaders who arouse fervent popular devotion and enthusiasm; an aura of being gifted with quasi-magical powers relating to his skills and personality, which may include the ability to perform miracles (advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic, he says); and, most important, the capacity to be utterly himself, comfortable in his own weird uniqueness.
But I have retained my wariness about him, although those who repeatedly accuse me of ‘not getting it’ (without saying what ‘it’ is) tend to gloss over the things I have actually written on the subject.
In an essay from this time last year, ‘Beware the Ides of March, Part II’, which survives as a chapter in my forthcoming book, The Abolition of Reality, I wrote:
A dark thought occurs to me, as it has occurred to others, and will not go away: What if Musk is one of the Combine’s [Evil Ones’] creatures, but carefully choreographed to appear to be something like a ‘white hat’, who has come to rescue us from the villainous Schwab and his scheming, evil-laughing minions? What if this is the true Plot? I have wondered many times about their pushing of Schwab, the dead spit of a pantomime villain, to the forefront of their Great Reset, and asked myself: What if they are making a movie, in which wicked old Klaus is being set up (probably knowingly, since he plays it with such gusto!) as the fall guy, — i.e. the story of a plot to take over the world that is destined to fail because the ‘cavalry’ arrives just in the nick of time?
And then what? After the celebrations, we all sit around (‘democratically,’ as in the olden days) and discuss what to do. Nice Mr Musk has an idea: Why don’t we introduce a social credit system using his satellite surveillance network, get our brains chipped and each receive a free driverless car? Whoopee!, Elon — yes, let’s!
If the plan is for Trump to be the new American Caesar, then Elon Musk, for sure, is and has already been, the kingmaker-in-chief.
And yet, on the other side of the line, Musk truly has been one of the most articulate voices against the rise of AI, his own recent entry into that market notwithstanding.
‘I am really quite close to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me,’ he said a few years ago. ‘It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is exponential.’
This appears to remain his position — more or less:
In an interview with Joe Rogan in March 2025, Musk was still speaking about the dangers and ambiguities of AI, though perhaps with a certain detectable shift or softening of tone from the warnings he was giving a few years back:
Here, the focus of the conversation was on the contamination of AI by ideological or other biases, a problem that seems to have no solution but wiping the slate and starting over.
One of the many paradoxes emerging from the crucible of artificial intelligence (AI) is that its dangers can emanate from opposing corners. On the one hand, it has been observed, one of the great unknowns of AI is that it has a logic all of its own, that it is removed from the zone of human emotion, incapable of empathy or other softening anthropomorphic urges, thereby placing humanity at potential risk as more and more functions come to be transferred from the old, human-centred systems, to the new digital ones. On the other hand, there is a grave danger from the installation in AI devices of certain human-system logics or ideological reflexes which, being present in the data whereby AIs get to be ‘trained’, are capable of skewing the processes of AI decision-making, and are almost impossible to root out. Data comes not from some sterile factory of wisdom and knowledge, but from the real world, already contaminated by prejudice, ideology and dogma, so that what emerges at the end of the AI’s learning process is not guaranteed to be sufficiently free of such biases as to avoid posing immense dangers to humanity or to be capable of recognising these as problematic before it gets too late.
Here, with Rogan, Musk is in whimsical mood, taking something close to a benign, even facetious view of the risks.
‘I always thought AI was going to be way smarter than humans, and an existential risk, and that’s turning out to be true.
‘It’s not necessarily bad,’ he went on to elaborate concerning the potential of AI. ‘It’s just it’s definitely going to be outside of human control. The danger is going to be more humans using it against each other.’
And again with that frivolous tone:
‘To some degree, I think, reality is an irony maximiser. The most ironic outcome is the most likely — like, the most ironic, entertaining outcome is the most likely.’
Nevertheless, he told Rogan, he had founded his own AI company, OpenAI{with which he has since severed all connection}, because he believed that existing operatives, like Google, were not prioritising AI safety sufficiently to protect the public.
‘I wanted to start something that was the opposite of Google, because I was concerned . . . Google wasn’t paying enough attention to AI safety, in my opinion. So, I was, like: what’s the opposite of Google? Would it be a non-profit open-source AI? And now open-source AI has turned into a closed-source, for-maximum-profit AI.’
He explained thusly his withdrawal from OpenAI:
‘It’s like, let’s say you donated some money to preserve some portion of the Amazon rainforest, and instead of doing that they chopped down the trees and sold them for lumber. And you were like, “That’s actually the direct opposite of what I donated my money for!” It doesn’t make sense. So, I’m not happy about that.’
The discussion then moved to the reasons he had started up his own free AI-assistant platform, Grok, ‘designed by xAI to maximise truth and objectivity’.
He said:
‘Like, Grok is at least a maximally truth-seeking AI — even if that truth is, like, politically incorrect. Like we have seen some of the crazy stuff from OpenAI and from Google Gemini. Like where it says, ‘Generate image of the Founding Fathers’, and it generates an image of diverse women! The problem is, if you programme an AI and, say, like, the only acceptable outcome is a diverse outcome, and that’s, like, a mandate from the AI, then you could get into a situation where it says, “Well, there’s too many white guys in power, let’s just execute them!”’
He then move to the issue of AI contamination by ideology:
‘It was also, like, if you asked AI which is worse: global thermonuclear war or misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, and it would say “misgendering Caitlyn Jenner is worse than global thermonuclear war”. I’m like, “Okay, we’ve got a problem, here, guys!” And even Caitlyn Jenner said, “No, definitely, misgendering me — that’s way better than everyone dying!” But if you programme an AI to think that misgendering someone is the worst thing that could possibly occur, well it could do something totally crazy in order to ensure that there’s no misgendering that could ever happen: “We’ll just annihilate all humans!” That ensure the probability of misgendering is zero, because there’s zero humans.’
This is an old argument, but still vital in its relevance.
Joe Rogan: ‘The big fear is that these things are gonna become sentient, make better versions of themselves, and we’re gonna be lost. We’ve lost control over the world. It’s now . . there’s a higher life form that lives amongst us, that we’ve created. How far away are we from that?’
Elon Musk: ’Well, it has a silicon consciousness, I think we’re training towards having something that’s smarter than any human, smarter than the smartest man, by maybe next year or so. I mean, a couple of years.
‘There’s a level beyond that, which is, like, smarter than all humans combined, which frankly is around 2029 or 2030, probably. Right on time!’
‘Time for what’ he doesn’t say, and nor does Rogan ask him. Musk continues:
‘I think the probability of a good outcome is, like 80 per cent likely. That’s my rough estimate. So, in a way, the cup is 80 per cent full.
Rogan: ‘That makes me feel a lot better. I like 80. 80 sounds good! I was thinking maybe 60/40 the other way!’
Musk: ‘I think the most likely outcome is awesome. But it’s a very high . . . you know, you could go either . . . I think it’ going to be either super-awesome or super-bad. I think it’s probably not going to be something in the middle.’
This seems like a resiling from his previous pre emphatic position that AI needed to be paused and subjected to a full and open public discussion, which is to say a democratic process.
I should add, for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t have an agenda here except trying to figure out what the truth is, if such is even possible. I am not a Musk partisan, or indeed a Trump partisan. I have believed that their (re)entry into the government of the United States offered positive possibilities for the entire Western world, perhaps even presenting a chance of pulling it back from the brink of the abyss.
If Musk is a Bad Guy, we need to know it, but we have a similar interest in the possibility that he may not be. There’s no virtue in simply being pessimists, to say nothing of paranoid, but nor should we adopt a Pollyanna demeanour in the face of volatile and explosive possibilities.Neither should we jump to conclusions on the basis of circumstantial evidence, vague feelings, ambiguous clues, and misreadings of what, in any event, is the tightrope nature of the job Elon Musk is there to do, in the Trump administration or in his own businesses. Being a ‘tech mogul’ is not in itself evidence of criminal intent.
It is to easy to simply decide that every actor is malign of intention and behind a mask of democratic pretence (if he is!) seeking power and control over humanity. In some instances this is undoubtedly the case, and we should at all times be alert for the signs. But there may be other motivations which seduce or conscript people into the pursuit of knowledge of technology, and these may or may not have negative implications for humanity. My fear in recent weeks is that we are sifting and deciding such questions on the basis of prejudice rather than sense or reason, that ticking even one of a handful of boxes (wealth, tech connections, et cetera) renders someone already fatally suspect. Declaring ‘a curse on all their houses’ rules out any possibility of acquiring allies for human-centred thinking within the glass halls of the tech sector. Conversely, we need to steady ourselves (i.e. I need to steady myself) by considering the possibility that we suffer from an excess of wishful thinking concerning the MAGA ‘common sense’ revolution. Yes, it’s pretty much the only show in town, and also a show worth watching, if only sometimes for the entertainment value. But we should not allow our entrancement with this second chance to blind us to possible dark sides.
Even after reading Iain Davis’s article, I’m still not prepared to write off Elon Musk, and this means that, informing ourselves with the material set out by Iain David, we need to place matters under a more vigilant watching brief. The evidence — against Musk in particular — is not conclusive enough to condemn him — not yet. Yes, I still insist on using my inbuilt antennae and humanity divining apparatuses — intuition, instinct, experience of human character based on a lifetime of encounters — to establish to my own satisfaction and on a constant rolling basis, whether someone is friend or foe. To do otherwise is to abandon all faith in or hope for the future, which leaves us precisely nowhere.
But I worry more these days that Musk has become somewhat evasive on some of the questions about which he once seemed far more emphatic and immovable. These include the necessity to train technology within the crucible of democracy and to ensure that its creative and productive energies are directed, first and foremost, at serving human beings. I don’t hear him saying these things so loudly anymore, and this may well be because he feels there is nobody listening. But that, in my view, is not an argument for remaining silent; it is an argument for shouting more loudly from the rooftops. Hw is still young, and his lungs are still strong.
There is also another factor which we might consider in his favour.. Musk’s primary obsession in this area is space exploration. I don’t share this obsession with him, and know almost nothing about it, even whether it’s a real thing, or just another piece of fakery orchestrated to beguile and mislead the public. But presuming that it is a real and genuine thing, I see no particular harm in it. The idea of colonising Mars doesn’t turn me on, but I know it turns Elon on, and I don’t see, in the entire panoply of issues arising worryingly in this area, how or why this, of itself, presents a major significant moral or human dilemma.
There is one caveat to be added here: that some of the aspirational aspects of the space exploration issue are the same as some of those that would lead also down a road to transhumanism and other less harmless areas.
There is a physical problem, from a human perspective, with spaceflight: we are not biologically adapted to this pursuit. Human beings cease to be able to breathe naturally once they move outside the earth’s atmosphere, and moreover are adversely affected by solar radiation once clear of Earth’s magnetic sphere. These factors radically curtail our capacity for space exploration.
There is a contingent ‘solution’ to this that does not involve modifications to the human structure: the artificial creation of conditions in space which are more congenial to human needs: ‘mini-environments’ which allow humans to breathe and be protected from harmful radiation, i.e. oxygen tanks, spacesuits, et cetera. These techniques, however, are flimsy, fragile, precarious and, above all, short-term. They are a long way from delivering space to human colonisation. When we humans embark on space travel, we do so as though sea trout undertaking a hike across the Sahara with bottles of Evian on their backs. Humans can perhaps ‘explore’ space, but only tentatively and at considerable risk.
Musk’s central objective, it seems to me, is to overcome these limitations, itself an honourable and worthy endeavour. The problem is that the implications of the methods he now proposes just happen to coincide with the objectives of those who pursue the transhumanist/posthumanist project(s), a matter presenting a rather more murky prospect with regard to human aspirations more generally. It is conceivably possible to 'adapt’ humans to space travel — by dint of devices which would alter the human structure to enable the human body to function outside the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic sphere. The ‘solution’ is turning human beings into what we know of as ‘cyborgs’ — man as cybernetic organism — which also happens to be the ‘solution’ of the transhumanist movement to other alleged categories of limitation holding back the human in different ways.
This is where the danger enters in — not so much in the ambition as in the inevitability of the implications. It is one thing for a single human being to volunteer for physical adaptation in order to facilitate ease of movement in outer space, and quite another to present the same technologies to the human race in general on a take-it-or-leave-it basis as a condition for their continued participation in society. In the broader context, solving the same fundamental dilemma as the space travel limitation involves rendering the human form to all manner of technologies, including robotics, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. The problem being addressed is nominally the same one — the limitations of human biology and structure — but the implications go much further than merely achieving ease of movement and diminished risk on a weekend away on Mars. They amount, potentially, to the total enslavement of the human being.
Transhumanism, rather ‘amusingly’, is sometimes referred to as a ‘freedom movement’ — the liberating of humanity from the ‘prison’ of given structure — but the paradox is that it is likely to lead out of one ‘cell’ — the natural biological one — into another: the technological prison which would steal existing human autonomy and maroon humanity in a new kind of serfdom. The problem here is that the tech boffins do not recognise this as a problem: for them it is, at worst, a worthwhile adventure and, more ominously, an opportunity to open up unlimited vistas for the human race. What they mostly seem to mean by this, however, is ‘unlimited vistas’ to be pursued by themselves, and at the same time the acquisition of unlimited control over ‘the wards’, i.e. with the control panel being permanently in the manicured hands of a tiny minority of (sort of) human beings. This, precisely, is the danger of ‘algocracy’ — ‘rule by algorithm’: a programme for the future enslavement of humanity by a tiny elite of its number.
Iain Davis’s article merits repeated readings to absorb all its potential implications. There are many disturbing warnings to take on board — not necessarily always proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but certainly reaching dry ground on the balance of probabilities. Much of what he says might be thought dizzying in its improbability, and yet it becomes solidified in Davis’s description and, moreover, we have surely learned in the recent years not to dismiss almost anything as ‘improbable’. We catch, as though on the wind, incongruous phrases like ‘pecking rights’ mined from the deepest vein of ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’, but now posited as the driving mechanisms of a new political dispensation seeking to replace democracy with something that we are urged to confidently name as ‘dictatorship’, and, thus re-equipped, enter a New World, in the guise of a ‘revolution of common sense’, which looks exactly like the world we have spent the past five years (and more) fighting to avoid.
‘Technopopulism’, obviously, might be the bespoke word of choice for a MAGA version of the motherWEFfers’s wet dream, designed as an acceptable synonym for ‘Technocracy’, ‘Technate’ and even ‘totalitarianism’, which is to say a synonym for the law of the jungle, although more apposite metaphors might be those of farming, the electric fence, and the butchering trade.
In this new dispensation, sovereignty would become private property, and belong to those with the means to buy it, bottle it, dole out its benefits and enforce its powers. Sovereignty would then become a resource, a product, an ideological instrument, rather than some principle or guarantee of the centrality of the human race qua human race to the proprietorship of the world and reality.
Perhaps ‘citizen’ was never a good word; but now acquires a nostalgic resonance, being threatened with replacement by ’customer’, a polite euphemism for ‘subject’ or worse. Not everybody, of course, uses these words — at least not yet — but they are implicit in the changed language of power and the demeanours of those who get to use it.
What has disappeared, first and foremost, is not merely freedom, democracy or sovereignty, but politics, although its ghost remains behind to ensure that the trick will not be rumbled until it is too late. The halls of power have become corporatised, and the men in suits who inhabit them have changed from being men of dogged principles and beliefs into men who can tell you the price of everything and yet be convincing as to the relativity of all values.
The critical contributing factor to our delivery to this moment, as we now see clearly, was the total corruption of the Fourth Estate, something that had never seemed even remotely possible until the start of the present decade. Yes we knew that, corporately, media organisations might have in the past been prone to bribery and bias and partisanship and vested interests (theirs and otherwise), but the public sense of security that pertained in those times, and — seeming indestructible — appeared entirely justified on the basis not of the corporate ownership of media but its journalistic software. Journalism was a profession, with principles and codes of conduct and checks and balances on such as ideology and religiosity, and a long record of defending these against the attempted incursions of management, advertisers and proprietors. But when the most fundamental civic values of our societies died overnight, it was neither televised nor reported, and therefore went unnoticed by just about everybody. And noticing that nobody noticed, the surviving spokespeople for the dead principles and codes of conduct, looking up from counting their rolls of fake money and hearing nothing that disturbed them, realised that they did not need to explain or justify; all they had to do was fall silent. If there was nobody to say anything, then nobody could be certain that anything had happened at all.
Meanwhile, the language we use to half-describe what has been happening is the old one: left right, left right . . . preserved long past its use-by in order to soak up the energy of those who might decode things before the transformation can be completed and the deal sealed and the ladder kicked away. .
Iain Davis writes, with calm precision:
Neither Technocracy, accelerationism nor the Dark Enlightenment exist within our familiar political paradigms. They are so far outside the Overton window that we can’t even discuss them without either being embroiled in pointless and redundant debates about whether they are communist or fascist or being subjected to eye-rolling scorn.
The Great Reset is not, as we may have imagined, merely a new economic contract. It is a new social contract and a new politics and a new system of governance. It is all-new, and was baked into the Covid cake from the start. Is it possible that, after five years of looking leftwards and being wearied by the attrition of uncertainty and vacillation, we look rightwards now and find that cake in the shop window of the most powerful nation on Earth, its red icing rapidly hardening on top, and the inscription: ‘Yippee, it’s Dystopia!’
Postscript: As I prepared to post this article, someone sent me a link to a newspaper article bearing the headline, 'Trump says he’s considering ways to serve a third term as president'. See for yourself.
Perhaps?: QED?
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