We need to stop the billionaire elitist radicals who want to replace democracy with corporate feudalism and techno-elitist domination. If we don't, technological progress will become the private property of the 1% forever.
You think that sounds extreme? Well go read Come With Us If You Want to Live by Sam Frank in Harpers, if you can stomach it. As a technically literate person who believes in democracy, I have never read something as repulsive as the pontifications of the community of extreme techno-libertarians funded by uber-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel.
It is Charles Stross without the last shred of humanity
Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo.
- Charles Stross, Crib Sheet for Accelerando
That is the logical endpoint of the "government is inefficient" canard. The reason it is a canard is that government is designed to be fair, not efficient. Government is about "we're all in this together", not "I've got mine, Jack". Government is designed to preserve humankind, not to subsidize replacing it with a bunch of genetically-modified, electronically-enhanced cyborgs who calculate nothing but profit and loss.
Below the fold, we will try to find the fold between libertarians and corporatists.
Debunking the propaganda line
At some point, even casually libertarian rhetoric ceases to be about changing government by legitimate political means and comes to be about destroying government by de-funding and privatization, to be about drowning it in a bathtub, to being about letting it "wither away".
When Karl Marx said that the state would wither away, the majority response of democracies was outright war. In my mind, when libertarians say that government is a dead man walking, the response should be the same.
For example, here is a chunk of the solipsistic ramblings of one of our would-be techno overlords:
Politics as we know it will lose relevance. Large, gridlocked states will be disrupted like any monopoly. Customer-citizens, armed with information, will demand transparency, accountability, choice. They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up. There might be some civil wars, there might be many new nations, but the stabilizing force will be corporations, which will become even more like parts of a global government than they are today....Facebook will be the new home of the public sphere
-Eliezer Yudkowsky, quoted by Sam Frank
This is fantasy. Like Facebook never
"interferes in social relations" (forward reference to the Engels quote below)? Like Facebook doesn't cooperate with the CIA/NSA? Facebook as the public sphere? What public sphere
charges you a fee to participate? ROTFLMAO.
Run like a start-up? Start-ups attract more than their fair share of control freaks, egomaniacs, and con-artists. The attrition rate is high. Start ups are risky. A country should not be risky.
A question for libertarians. How is the Yudkowsky quote above any different than
The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.
-Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring
To me, the techno-libertarians sound as threatening to democracy as Marx and Engels. In their time, Marx and Engels were fringe crackpots. In our time, these T-Ls are fringe characters,
but they are being funded by billionaires. To me, a response is called for.
Now, historically there were socialists who were not Communists. But they were forced to constantly denounce Communism and make clear their loyalty to democracy. Today, there might be libertarians who are not corporatist elitists; but they have made no case for anything this side of corporate feudalism, and no one has been demanding that they do so.
I'm saying its time they must. It's time to draw a line between Libertarianism and Corporatism.
Libertarians should have to prove they are not merely corporatists
- which is pretty fucking hard when major corporatists are funding you. And, when said corporatists are up front about their dismissal of democracy.
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. Freedom might be possible, he imagined, in cyberspace, in outer space, or on high-seas homesteads, where individualists could escape the “terrible arc of the political.”...
Progress, Thiel thinks, is threatened mostly by the political power of what he calls the “unthinking demos.”
- Peter Thiel quoted by Sam Frank
I'd love to hear a "moderate" libertarian defend this treason, this ideological declaration of war from someone who fled the country rather than pay his taxes. Could someone please ask that entitled douchebag, Rand Paul, what his take is on the
tax-dodging, expatriate Peter Thiel?
Revealing the corporate agenda
I don't believe for one minute that these undersocialized adolescents are being funded for their great ideas. Who can take the next quote seriously?
Leverage Research has a master plan that, in the most recent public version, consists of nearly 300 steps. It begins from first principles and scales up from there: “Initiate a philosophical investigation of philosophical method”; “Discover a sufficiently good philosophical method”; have 2,000-plus “actively and stably benevolent people successfully seek enough power to be able to stably guide the world”; “People achieve their ultimate goals as far as possible without harming others”; “We have an optimal world”; “Done.”
- Sam Frank, Come with us if you want to live
This is the kind of stuff Neal Stephenson writes as satire. If you haven't read his
business plan, you should. It is hysterically funny.
However, I do believe it is in the self-interest of Peter Thiel to help these John Galt-wannabees succeed. I believe these highly-publicized Thiel-proteges are the cover story for the next big ripoff by the 1%. When the rest of society wakes up to how they have been robbed by click-through licenses, genome patents, and other IP mumbo-jumbo, they will have to fight their way through these established think tanks - the same way liberals had to fight their way through the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute in the 1980s. These poseurs are nothing more than useful idiots for a bunch of financial and societal gangsters the likes of which has never been seen before.
Over the last 30 years, aided by computer technology, the 1% have become a gang of looters, asset strippers, rentiers, loan sharks, and con-men. They do not add to the economy; they have been selling the US economy as scrap to China for twenty years. They steal from everyone, as is witnessed by the statistical fact that the growth of wealth of the 1% exceeds the growth of the economy. That is, they are taking the wealth from the bottom 99%, not creating new wealth.
This is not a surprise when you consider that the early growth of computers was fueled by Wall St. and the military/intelligence agencies.
For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics...
But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. ... (but) it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project.
-David Graeber Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
I think the next great ripoff will be ownership rights. You see it already. People are actually stupid enough to let Amazon
lease them books and Apple
lease them music, to give Facebook the rights to whatever they post. Trusting a company that makes your control over/access to things you have paid for dependent on their good will is like putting a lock on your house for which you do not have a key.
Uber is a great example of the techno crowd setting the pattern for internet apps as the new yellow dog contract. In fact, Uber is openly breaking the taxi laws of many cities, and stealing the money the medallion owners paid for the right to operate.
It takes an entreprenuer to start up (an Uber), but not to run it as a firm...After this initial project, what exactly are the capitalists at Uber contributing to the company? Almost all of the actual capital is owned by the workers, in the form of the cars that they pay for and maintain themselves...The capital owners maintain the phone app, but app technology isn't the major cost, and its getting cheaper and easier by the day.
If any set of companies deserves to have its rentiers euthanized, it's those of the "sharing economy", in which management relies heavily on the individual ownership of capital, providing only coordination and branding.
- Mike Conczal and Bryce Covert, Socialize Uber
But, in order to put this thievery over on the masses, they need the cover story of the conquering techo-entreprenuer, who "deserves" everything he has stolen. It is at this point that the whole
imitatio Marxi becomes exposed.
The concept of the "global democratic revolution" has its origins in the Trotskyist Fourth International's vision of permanent revolution. The economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism, promoted by neocons like Michael Novak, is simply Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history.
- Michael Lind, A Tragedy of Errors
This attitude of the heroic, not to say elite, techie shows up constantly in Sam Frank's interviews:
“Imagine there is a set of skills,” he said. “There is a myth that they are possessed by the whole population, and there is a cynical myth that they’re possessed by 10 percent of the population. They’ve actually been wiped out in all but about one person in three thousand.” It is important, Vassar said, that his people, “the fragments of the world,” lead the way during “the fairly predictable, fairly total cultural transition that will predictably take place between 2020 and 2035 or so.”
- Michael Vassar, quoted by Sam Frank
You got that? It is not even the 1%, it is only 0.03% who have any talent at all; and, of course, Mr. Vassar is a member of this elite. Only these self-annointed messiahs are capable of saving humanity. The arrogance is unbelievable; but it is rewarded handsomely by Mr. Thiel.
Recognizing the threat to mindfulness
While arrogance is not a great strategy for advancing corporatism, humble meditation is already being pressed into service.
He dropped out before high school and taught himself a mess of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. He began to “neurohack” himself, systematizing his introspection to evade his cognitive quirks. Yudkowsky believed he could hasten the singularity by twenty years, creating a superhuman intelligence and saving humankind in the process.
- Sam Frank describing Eliezer Yudkowsky
Yudkowsky is not the only neurohacker. The laughably naive dorks at the aforementioned Leverage Research are at it too.
...some Leverage staff members were conducting (a polyphasic-sleep experiment) on themselves. A schedule called the Everyman 3, which compresses sleep into three twenty-minute REM naps each day and three hours at night for slow-wave.
-Sam Frank
Sounds like a rightwing version of the
Human Potential Movement. Unfortunately, these vanguard neuro-
Stakhanovites are just following the corporatists lead:
The meditation rooms now commonplace in many corporate headquarters are like tiny bubbles in which small groups of high-powered employees experience a sense of work/life balance premised—wittingly or not—on the externalization of risk and suffering that is endemic to capital markets. From the perspective of socially engaged Buddhism, a key flaw in corporate mindfulness is its neglect of the relationship between personal and institutional suffering (or dukkha).
Meng’s version of mindfulness ignores institutional dukkha in favor of a myopic focus on personal stress reduction and interpersonal empathy. Indeed, elsewhere Meng has suggested that Google and other tech companies can streamline mindfulness practice by developing Fitbit-style apps that would allow users to calm their minds more quickly—a development that he says would not only be “good for your career” but would also make customers “happy to spend more money.”
This vision is consistent with Silicon Valley’s utopian view of ‘smart’ gadgets as ever-more-efficient catalysts for the achievement of human virtue.
-Kevin Healey, What is the sound of a thousand tech workers meditating?
I guarantee you that when someone calls out the solipsism of these people, they will use some flavor of corporate Buddhism-speak to counterattack.
How do you fight an avalanche of money?
Since the business accumen, not to say the sanity, of these geeks is suspect, one can only conclude the entire operation is a giant misdirection or cover story being paid for out of Peter Thiel's pocket change. I suspect this will turn out to be similar to the free daily newspaper that Sheldon Adelman pays for in Israel. It blindly supports Benjamin Netanyahu to the tune of $36 Million per year. But, in a clever dodge of the strict campaign finance laws of Israel, a free ideological broadsheet is not legally considered a campaign contribution.
Since the newspaper is privately owned, it need not make its balance sheet public. In a 2011 deposition in a suit against Adelson in Israeli court, a former business partner stated, "It is no secret that the free paper Israel Hayom loses $3 million a month, and cannot be profitable."
-Gershon Gorenberg, The Uniquely Awful Role of Sheldon Adelson in the Israeli Election
Just as with Adelson, it's no secret whom Thiel's stable of techno-elitists is there to cheer for:
Thiel and Vassar and Yudkowsky, for all their far-out rhetoric, take it on faith that corporate capitalism, unchecked just a little longer, will bring about this era of widespread abundance.
- Sam Frank
Corporate capitalism. Right, suckers. Trust the guys who have been robbing you and shredding your rights for thirty years just a little bit longer; and great things will happen. This cover story is utter crap. It is a warmed-over version of the hard-AI crowd of the 1980s. That time, the BS was funded by the DoD; this time it is funded by hedge fund billionaires. In both cases, the proponents got rich; and everyone else got nothing.
Thiel is funding a bunch of clueless headcases who feed each others delusions and neuroses. All this "singularity" hysteria is a bum's rush to get people to enslave themselves to sub-optimal (but, once accepted, un-escapable) modalities of computerized communication and intellectual property ownership.
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So, "moderate" libertarians, are you on-board with all of this? Democracy is crap? Only 0.03% of the population have any brains at all? All us peasants are the "unthinking demos"? Meditation is for making you more efficient and insensitive? Let me know, otherwise I am just going to start calling all libertarians useful idiots of the corporatist takeover.
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ADDENDUM - More on the hijacking of mindfulness
Slavoj Žižek has long argued that “Western Buddhism,” as he calls it, is an ideal palliative for the stresses of life under late capitalism — their “perfect ideological supplement.”
“It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game,” Žižek explains in a 2001 essay for Cabinet magazine, “while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.”
- Gentrifying the dharma: How the 1 percent is hijacking mindfulness.
Just like the gentrification of a neighborhood where new, wealthy people displace people who have lived there longer, the dharma is undergoing a process of gentrification in San Francisco today. Lost is the bigger picture of the teachings that asks us to consider our interdependence and to move beyond self-help and addressing only our own suffering. The dharma directs us to feel the suffering of others.
- Amanda Ream Why I disrupted the Wisdom 2.0 conference
Those of us who had by then been practicing Buddhist meditation for decades never dreamed it would become insanely popular—much less that it would be used to legitimize a culture that was becoming certifiably insane.
Mindfulness meditation is being used by the US military to make soldiers into more effective killing machines overseas—and to treat them for PTSD and suicidal impulses after they get back. Closer to home, companies like Google are using mindfulness to enable employees work harder for longer hours—sometimes for lower pay. Is your job stressful and unrewarding? Mindfulness could be the answer. Do you sometimes feel pangs of guilt about serving the 1% of the population that manipulates our elections, controls our money, and sends meditatively enhanced young soldiers off to fight meaningless wars? Mindfulness could be the answer as well.
- Clark Strand What was mindfulness