Broligarchy Watch

Cross-posted from "What 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 Knew About Tech-Bro Paternalism" by @paywall@rss.ponder.cat in !theatlantic@rss.ponder.cat

Last fall, the consumer-electronics company LG announced new branding for the artificial intelligence powering many of its home appliances. Out: the “smart home.” In: “Affectionate Intelligence.” This “empathetic and caring” AI, as LG describes it, is here to serve. It might switch off your appliances and dim your lights at bedtime. It might, like its sisters Alexa and Siri, select a soundtrack to soothe you to sleep. The technology awaits your summons and then, unquestioningly, answers. It will make subservience environmental. It will surround you with care—and ask for nothing in return.

Affectionate AI, trading the paternalism of typical techspeak for a softer—or, to put it bluntly, more feminine—framing, is pretty transparent as a branding play: It is an act of anxiety management. It aims to assure the consumer that “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” as a recent report from Elon University called it, will be one not of threat but of promise. Yes, AI overall has the potential to become, as Elon Musk said in 2023, the “most disruptive force in history.” It could be, as he put it in 2014, “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” It is a force like “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape,” he suggested in 2018. And yet, AI is coming. It is inevitable. We have, as consumers with human-level intelligence, very little choice in the matter. The people building the future are not asking for our permission; they are expecting our gratitude.

It takes a very specific strain of paternalism to believe that you can create something that both eclipses humanity and serves it at the same time. The belief is ripe for satire. That might be why I’ve lately been thinking back to a comment posted last year to a Subreddit about HBO’s satire Silicon Valley: “It’s a shame this show didn’t last into the AI craze phase.” It really is! Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, a year before Musk, Sam Altman, and a group of fellow engineers founded OpenAI to ensure that, as their mission statement put it, “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The show ended its run in 2019, before AI’s wide adoption. It would have had a field day with some of the events that have transpired since, among them Musk’s rebrand as a T-shirt-clad oligarch and Altman’s bot-based mimicry of the 2013 movie Her.

Silicon Valley reads, at times, more as parody than as satire: Sharp as it is in its specific observations about tech culture, the show sometimes seems like a series of jokes in search of a punch line. It shines, though, when it casts its gaze on the gendered dynamics of tech—when it considers the consequential absurdities of tech’s arrogance.

The show doesn’t spend much time directly tackling artificial intelligence as a moral problem—not until its final few episodes. But it still offers a shrewd parody of AI, as a consumer technology and as a future being foisted on us. That is because Silicon Valley is highly attuned to the way power is exchanged and distributed in the industry, and to tech bros’ hubristic inclination to cast the public in a stereotypically feminine role.

Corporations act; the rest of humanity reacts. They decide; we comply. They are the creators, driven by competition, conquest, and a conviction that the future is theirs to shape. We are the ones who will live with their decisions. Silicon Valley does not explicitly predict a world of AI made “affectionate.” In a certain way, though, it does. It studies the men who make AI. It parodies their paternalism. The feminist philosopher Kate Manne argues that masculinity, at its extreme, is a self-ratifying form of entitlement. Silicon Valley knows that there’s no greater claim to entitlement than an attempt to build the future.

[Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

The series focuses on the evolving fortunes of the fictional start-up Pied Piper, a company with an aggressively boring product—a data-compression algorithm—and an aggressively ambitious mission. The algorithm could lead, eventually, to the realization of a long-standing dream: a decentralized internet, its data stored not on corporately owned servers but on the individual devices of the network. Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper’s founder and the primary author of that algorithm, is a coder by profession but an idealist by nature. Over the seasons, he battles with billionaires who are driven by ego, pettiness, and greed. But he is not Manichean; he does not hew to Manne’s sense of masculine entitlement. He merely wants to build his tech.

He is surrounded, however, by characters who do fit Manne’s definition, to different degrees. There’s Erlich Bachman, the funder who sold an app he built for a modest profit and who regularly confuses luck with merit; Bertram Gilfoyle, the coder who has turned irony poisoning into a personality; Dinesh Chugtai, the coder who craves women’s company as much as he fears it; Jared Dunn, the business manager whose competence is belied by his meekness. Even as the show pokes fun at the guys’ personal failings, it elevates their efforts. Silicon Valley, throughout, is a David and Goliath story. Pied Piper is a tiny company trying to hold its own against the Googles of the world.

The show, co-created by Mike Judge, can be giddily adolescent about its own bro-ness (many of its jokes refer to penises). But it is also, often, insightful about the absurdities that can arise when men are treated like gods. The show mocks the tech executive who brandishes his Buddhist prayer beads and engages in animal cruelty. It skewers Valley denizens’ conspicuous consumption. (Several B plots revolve around the introduction of the early Tesla roadsters.) Most of all, the show pokes fun at the myopia displayed by men who are, in the Valley and beyond, revered as “visionaries.” All they can see and care about are their own interests. In that sense, the titans of tech are unabashedly masculine. They are callous. They are impetuous. They are reckless.

[Read: Elon Musk can’t stop talking about penises]

Their failings cause chaos, and Silicon Valley spends its seasons writing whiplash into its story line. The show swings, with melodramatic ease, between success and failure. Richard and his growing team—fellow engineers, investors, business managers—seem to move forward, getting a big new round of funding or good publicity. Then, as if on cue, they are brought low again: Defeats are snatched from the jaws of victory. The whiplash can make the show hard to watch. You get invested in the fate of this scrappy start-up. You hope. You feel a bit of preemptive catharsis until the next disappointment comes.

That, in itself, is resonant. AI can hurtle its users along similar swings. It is a product to be marketed and a future to be accepted. It is something to be controlled (OpenAI’s Altman appeared before Congress in 2023 asking for government regulation) and something that must not be contained (OpenAI this year, along with other tech giants, asked the federal government to prevent state-level regulation). Altman’s public comments paint a picture of AI that evokes both Skynet (“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” he said at the 2023 congressional hearing) and—as he said in a 2023 interview—a “magic intelligence in the sky.”

[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]

The dissonance is part of the broader experience of tech—a field that, for the consumer, can feel less affectionate than addling. People adapted to Twitter, coming to rely on it for news and conversation; then Musk bought it, turned it into X, tweaked the algorithms, and, in the process, ruined the platform. People who have made investments in TikTok operate under the assumption that, as has happened before, it could go dark with the push of a button. To depend on technology, to trust it at all, in many instances means to be betrayed by it. And AI makes that vulnerability ever more consequential. Humans are at risk, always, of the machines’ swaggering entitlements. Siri and Alexa and their fellow feminized bots are flourishes of marketing. They perform meekness and cheer—and they are roughly as capable of becoming an “immortal dictator” as their male-coded counterparts.

By the end of Silicon Valley’s run, Pied Piper seems poised for an epic victory. The company has a deal with AT&T to run its algorithm over the larger company’s massive network. It is about to launch on millions of people’s phones. It is about to become a household name. And then: the twist. Pied Piper’s algorithm uses AI to maximize its own efficiency; through a fluke, Richard realizes that the algorithm works too well. It will keep maximizing. It will make its own definitions of efficiency. Pied Piper has created a decentralized network in the name of “freedom”; it has created a machine, you might say, meant to benefit all of humanity. Now that network might mean humanity’s destruction. It could come for the power grid. It could come for the apps installed in self-driving cars. It could come for bank accounts and refrigerators and satellites. It could come for the nuclear codes.

Suddenly, we’re watching not just comedy but also an action-adventure drama. The guys will have to make hard choices on behalf of everyone else. This is an accidental kind of paternalism, a power they neither asked for nor, really, deserve. And the show asks whether they will be wise enough to abandon their ambitions—to sacrifice the trappings of tech-bro success—in favor of more stereotypically feminine goals: protection, self-sacrifice, compassion, care.

I won’t spoil things by saying how the show answers the question. I’ll simply say that, if you haven’t seen the finale, in which all of this plays out, it’s worth watching. Silicon Valley presents a version of the conundrum that real-world coders are navigating as they build machines that have the potential to double as monsters. The stakes are melodramatic. That is the point. Concerns about humanity—even the word humanity—have become so common in discussions of AI that they risk becoming clichés. But humanity is at stake, the show suggests, when human intelligence becomes an option rather than a given. At some point, the twists will have to end. In “the coming Humanity-Plus-AI future,” we will have to find new ways of considering what it means to be human—and what we want to preserve and defend. Coders will have to come to grips with what they’ve created. Is AI a tool or a weapon? Is it a choice, or is it inevitable? Do we want our machines to be affectionate? Or can we settle for ones that leave the work of trying to be good humans to the humans?

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Cross-posted from "This is what resistance to the digital coup looks like" by @cm0002@lemmy.world in !fediverse@lemmy.world

Sunday morning I came across a blog post by Jared White bestowing praise on journalist Carole Cadwalladr’s TED Talk: “This is what a digital coup looks like.”

Cadwalladr’s presentation was phenomenal, filled with brilliant, incendiary quotes against the Broligarchy (in her words: tech bros + oligarchy = broligarchy). I would recommend everybody watch it.

It's filled with memorable, superb quotes about the broligarchy. A must see, to be shared widely. But then I looked up Cadwalladr's online activity. She uses Bluesky for social and Substack for publishing. This is impossibly incongruous after her incendiary TED talk. Honestly, it made me sad. One place is owned by crypto bros, the other is funded by A16Z {Andreessen Horowitz}...

Elon Musk has joined forced with Republican power broker Peter Thiel on a bid to help build Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defence shield.

Mr Musk’s SpaceX is partnering with Mr Thiel’s Silicon Valley data company Palantir Technologies and US drone builder Anduril Industries on a joint proposal for the project.

It would involve SpaceX supplying up to 1,000 orbiters that would provide an early warning of a missile or nuclear launch against the US.

A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers, probably from another manufacturer, would then shoot down the enemy warheads.

While Golden Dome has attracted interest from more than 180 companies, the three companies have already pitched the plan to top officials from the White House and the Pentagon, according to Reuters, which reported the story citing unnamed sources.

The situation is likely to fuel criticism that Mr Musk is profiting from his political role in the White House. He holds the title of “special government employee” at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), the agency Mr Trump created to reduce wasteful federal spending.

US defence officials are said to be conscious of the relationship between Mr Trump and Mr Musk, who donated almost $300m (£227m) to his election campaign.

...

Mr Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder, is also a prominent supporter of Mr Trump and played an influential role in the rise of JD Vance, now vice president. Anduril Industries was set up by Palmer Luckey, another Trump supporter.

Archive

May be a little elementary for people in this community, b ut I hope it's helpful to someone out there!

The growing debate over the future of intellectual property law in the age of AI took a wild turn in the past few days when Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Block, and initially a leading figure at Bluesky, declared he would like to see all IP law eliminated.

“Delete all IP law,” Dorsey wrote on X on Friday (April 11).

Elon Musk, owner of X and head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chimed in by saying “I agree.”

...

Ed Newton-Rex, a former VP of Audio at Stability AI and now a leading campaigner for the protection of intellectual property, described Dorsey and Musk’s assertion as “tech execs declaring all-out war on creators who don’t want their life’s work pillaged for profit.”

Pushback also came from Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, patent specialist and lawyer who served as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in the 2024 election.

“Actual IP professional here – NO,” she wrote in response to Dorsey’s tweet. “IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations. If you want to reform it, let’s talk!”

To which Dorsey responded: “Creativity is what currently separates us, and the current system is limiting that, and putting the payments disbursement into the hands of gatekeepers who aren’t paying out fairly.”

Notably, Dorsey is Chairman of Block, Inc., the company formerly known as Square, which owns music streaming service TIDAL.

Dorsey’s tweet likely doesn’t reflect official TIDAL policy on the issue of IP. The company’s CEO, Jesse Dorogusker, told MBW a few years ago that he views music as being “undervalued and underpriced.”

One can only imagine what the value of music would look like if copyright protections were to disappear altogether. It would not be a stretch to imagine that its value would fall close to zero, along with the value of other commercialized cultural products, and the value of labor carried out by artists and other creators.

Responding to Dorsey, some on social media pointed out that Dorsey’s own businesses have benefited from IP protections.

“Very easy to say after you’ve made billions off your IP,” one commenter wrote.

The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.

Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.

Yet they paid an average 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the US, according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF), which said the Silicon Six had “hardwired” tax avoidance into their business models.

Analysis by the not-for-profit organisation found that if one-off repatriation tax payments in the US connected to historical tax avoidance were excluded, the average corporate income tax contribution of the six firms fell to 16.1% over the past decade.

The companies had also inflated their stated tax payments by $82bn over the same period by including contingencies for tax they did not expect to pay, the report claimed.

Paul Monaghan, the chief executive of the FTF, said: “Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hardwired into corporate structures. The Silicon Six’s corporate income tax contributions are, in percentage terms, way below what sectors such as banking and energy are paying in many parts of the world.”

Monaghan pointed to “aggressive tax practices” such as the contingency tax positions, while the companies also exerted “enormous political influence as well as economic power”, spending millions of dollars on lobbying governments.

The report comes as the US tech companies’ influence has been highlighted by the presence of their bosses including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg at Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

A significant tax cut for such companies has reportedly been at the heart of discussions with the UK in its attempts to secure lower tariffs on its products exported to the US.

Analysis: As a new book shows, growth and success has turned optimistic tech startups into corporate cesspits of greed, manipulation and contempt

In the early days of Google, the phrase 'don't be evil' was both its motto and part of its Code of Corporate Conduct. By 2018, that phrase was history and so was the sentiment that that inspired it in many peoples' eyes.

For many tech giants, growth and success has seemed to morph what were once benevolent and optimistic startups into cesspits of greed, manipulation and contempt. Descriptions of the inner workings of companies like Google, Facebook (now Meta), and Twitter (now X) portray dystopian hellscapes in which employees are treated like disposable cogs in an ever-grinding machine and competitors are squeezed out of the market by means fair and foul. It is a world where corporate leaders tell us that the biggest failing of civilization is that we have empathy for one another.

In Careless People, a new exposé of corporate life at Facebook/Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams describes her seven years in the executive suite of that company. As a former diplomat from New Zealand, she joined Facebook believing that the internet could make the world a better place by fostering connections between people and communities.

But the corporate world she describes is one in which the internet was consciously used to spread hate, fear and division. It's a book where the behaviour of top executives involving ongoing patterns of sexual harassment, exploitation and fawning worship of power-mad leaders reads like something from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

...

While I agree with many of the points Carolan raises, I believe her analysis misses a major factor in the development of toxic cultures in so many tech giants, namely the lionisation of CEOs and top executives. Leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have accumulated immense wealth and power, and they are sometimes treated like demi-gods in the business press.

“Our economy should be judged on how well it cares for working people, rather than the number of billionaires it produces daily,” stated the leader of an economic justice organization.

Amid warnings from economists that President Donald Trump’s trade war could increase living costs for millions of American families and potentially trigger a recession, the economic justice group Patriotic Millionaires introduced a “bold, surprisingly straightforward economic strategy” on Monday. This plan aims to curb the growing power of the oligarchy and “permanently stabilize the economic lives of working people.”

The strategy, named America 250: The Money Agenda, was presented during an “expert town hall” event called “How to Beat the Broligarchs” and comprises four critical pieces of legislation:

• The Cost of Living Tax Cut Act, which exempts federal taxes up to the median living cost for a single adult without children—$41,600 annually—shifting the tax burden from the working class to the millionaire class through a surtax;
• The Cost of Living Wage Act, which increases the minimum wage to $21 per hour, aligning it with the living costs for a single adult without children;
• The Equal Tax Act, which synchronizes the tax rates for capital gains and incomes over $1 million and seals the “stepped-up basis loophole” that reduces the tax responsibilities of the ultra-wealthy; and
• The Anti-Oligarch Act, which imposes substantial taxes on the transfer of wealth across generations, on large trust-held fortunes, and on the real economic income of the ultra-rich to prevent further wealth accumulation at the top, including through a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

According to Patriotic Millionaires, the last proposal is a “long overdue response to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ century-old warning: ‘We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.'”

Cross-posted from "Elon Musk’s xAI allegedly uses 'illegal' generators to power Colossus supercomputer facility" by @cm0002@lemmy.world in !technology@lemmy.world

Cross-posted from "A Strange Stain in the Sky: How Silicon Valley Is Preparing A Coup Against Democracy" by @crossdl@leminal.space in !technology@lemmy.world

The first, and also the most futuristic techno-utopian one, is the colonisation of Mars. Elon Musk founded Space X in 2002 (Peter Thiel was the first outside investor) with the idea of re-founding humanity. It’s all there: the call to save humanity by turning it into a multi-planetary species, the desire to start from scratch without the legal constraints of Earth, and the will to break with the established order. As you can read, half-hidden, on the terms and conditions page of the Starlink service owned by Space X:

The parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.

Elon Musk’s X stands to benefit financially if the government pulls an £800m tax on US tech firms as part of an economic deal with Donald Trump, as a prominent tax campaigner indicated the social media platform qualifies for the levy.

Dan Neidle, the head of the non-profit organisation Tax Policy Associates, said the social media platform was eligible for the digital services tax, which is on the block in negotiations between the US and the UK.

“Technically it’s fairly clear X should pay the DST,” he said.

Ministers have been discussing dropping the DST as part of negotiations with the US in exchange for the Trump administration granting the UK a carve-out from tariffs which would otherwise be levied on 2 April.

The technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said on Monday that “nothing was off the table” when it comes to the tax, which was first imposed by the Conservatives in 2020 to stop international technology companies avoiding tax by hiding their profits offshore.

...

Labour MPs have voiced their concern about the prospect of the government dropping the DST under pressure from the Trump administration. Rachael Maskell said this weekend: “I would be concerned if relief was granted in what would be seen as a dash to let the US tech companies off the hook, while at the same time as making disabled people pay for the revenue loss, with their lifelines being cut.”

Another Labour MP said: “This would be the very worst optics: dropping a tax on big tech companies in the same week we announce more departmental spending cuts and give the details about our welfare cuts.”

...

According to the National Audit Office, 90% of DST revenues in its first year of operation in 2020-21 came from five businesses. Amazon, Google, eBay and Apple have publicly acknowledged paying the tax, and Facebook’s parent, Meta, is widely presumed to have done so.

The tax is expected to raise £800m this year, rising to £1.1bn by the turn of the decade, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Yet implementation of the Online Safety Act is now in question because Donald Trump’s government has identified it as a symptom of wider European infringement of free expression. As the Guardian revealed this week, US state department officials expressed their concern in a meeting with Ofcom, the regulator responsible for enforcing new digital regulations.

That intervention should be seen in the context of an aggressive trade policy that cannot tolerate any foreign restriction on the extension of American economic interests overseas. That explicitly includes regulation that “incentivises US companies to develop or use products and technology in ways that undermine free speech or foster censorship”.

...

Mr Trump’s power is bolstered by alliance with tech industry oligarchs. The unwritten deal is that the president’s cause is boosted on social media and the platforms’ commercial interests are driven by the president. That is why US trade policy is being deployed against European regulators that have tried to make the internet – or the part of it over which they have legal jurisdiction – less lawless.

Yielding to that pressure would cede control of the digital information space to people who actively subvert it for the cause of American ultranationalism. It would mean accepting that a vital part of the digital infrastructure for a free society operates according to rules set by companies that are poisoning the wells of public discourse.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20304106

Local organizers say they have less of a chance at making climate reforms in the majority Black city than Musk does at imposing environmental harms

“There should be no way a $5 billion project can move forward without a single community [meeting],” Pearson said, noting that the decision reinforced the community’s feelings of being ignored and disenfranchised, and confirmed suspicions that official discussions were taking place behind closed doors. “This is literally what corporate colonialism looks like.”

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/1997571

TL;DR: Self-Driving Teslas Rear-End Motorcyclists, Killing at Least 5

Brevity is the spirit of wit, and I am just not that witty. This is a long article, here is the gist of it:

• The NHTSA’s self-driving crash data reveals that Tesla’s self-driving technology is, by far, the most dangerous for motorcyclists, with five fatal crashes that we know of.
• This issue is unique to Tesla. Other self-driving manufacturers have logged zero motorcycle fatalities with the NHTSA in the same time frame.
• The crashes are overwhelmingly Teslas rear-ending motorcyclists.

Read our full analysis as we go case-by-case and connect the heavily redacted government data to news reports and police documents.

Oh, and read our thoughts about what this means for the robotaxi launch that is slated for Austin in less than 60 days.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27463109

Nearly two months ago, Elon Musk went on a public crusade against Reddit.

On X, he said it was “insane” that subreddits were blocking links to the platform in protest of him ~~appearing to give a Nazi salute~~ giving repeated Nazi salutes. A few days later, he posted that Reddit users advocating for violence against Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees had “broken the law.”

As it turns out, Musk wasn’t only using his X platform to call out content on Reddit. He was also privately messaging Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, according to people familiar with the matter.

Shortly after the two CEOs exchanged text messages, Reddit enacted a 72-hour ban on the “WhitePeopleTwitter” subreddit that hosted the thread about DOGE employees, citing the “prevalence of violent content.” The specific thread Musk shared on X was also deleted, including hundreds of comments that didn’t call for violence or doxxing. (So far, Reddit doesn’t appear to have intervened in any moderator decisions to ban X links from the subreddits they oversee.)

When asked about Musk and Huffman’s correspondence, Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini sent the following statement: “We take any report of Reddit policy violations seriously, whether on Reddit directly or through other public or private means. We will evaluate content reported to us and take action if violating.” Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The news of Musk’s outreach to Huffman quickly made its way to some of Reddit’s moderators, who discussed it together on Discord. After one wrote, “Musk is coming for /r/Comics,” which was one of the subreddits that was banning links to X, another responded by calling him a “giant baby,” according to screenshots of the conversation that were shared with me.

EDIT: minor correction up top after y'all gave the text a SolidShake

A billionaire tech entrepreneur who used his wealth and influence in Silicon Valley to help Donald Trump win the presidency has deep connections to the new administration’s efforts to remake the government.

His name? Peter Thiel.

While Elon Musk and a crew of longtime employees and young acolytes have been fanning out across Washington under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, more than a dozen people with ties to Thiel — including current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefitted from his investments and charitable giving — have been folded into the Trump administration.

Some Thiel allies have held high-ranking government posts before, while others are heading to Washington for the first time. Thiel himself has no formal role in the Trump administration.

Musk and Thiel have been intertwined since the early days of PayPal, which Thiel helped found and where Musk briefly served as CEO. Since then, Musk, who leads Tesla Inc., SpaceX and other companies, has become the world’s richest person, while Thiel has built a multifaceted empire ranging from software firm Palantir Technologies Inc. to investment offices with stakes in top Silicon Valley startups.

...

While links between industry and government have always existed, the current state of play is “unprecedented in the modern era,” said Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University.

“The ambition seems to be more than just working at an arm’s length and profiting from state contracts,” Slobodian said. “There is an ambition for a bottom-up renovation of how the government operates.”

Archive

It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017.

...

If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there. While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)

Still, in the context of what we know about Meta already, nothing Wynn-Williams says about the company’s actions and inactions is shockingly new. Careless People is not an investigative work, but a memoir, with the narrative thread being the observed callousness of the company’s leaders.

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

This week represents a hinge of history. Everything has changed. America and Russia are now allies. Ukraine has been thrown to the dogs. Europe’s security hangs in the balance. On the one hand, there’s nothing any of us can do. On the other, we have to do something. So, here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting a conversation. I’ve recorded the first one - a scrappy pilot - a podcast I’ve called How to Survive the Broligarchy and I’ve re-named the newsletter too. This first conversation (details below) is about how we need a new media built from the ground up to deal with the dangerous new world we’re in. That can only happen, in partnership with you, the reader. The days of top-down command and control are over. Please let’s try and do this together.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/23256007

When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.

But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.

In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa.

He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.

Some draw a straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump’s side today.

The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.

Others are sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.

But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.

The story of Elon Musk, the way it's usually told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero - or supervillain. He's the world's richest man, and now an adviser to the US President. He uses X - his social media platform - to berate politicians he doesn't agree with around the world.

He plans to put chips in people's brains, and to save the world by colonising Mars. Musk's visions of the future seem to stem from the science fiction that has fired his imagination since he was a boy. But what's the real story, the true history, behind the comic book? Back in 2021 Harvard History Professor and New Yorker Writer Jill Lepore became fascinated by this question.

So she made a Radio 4 podcast which tried to explain Musk through the science fiction he grew up with - tales of superheroes with origin stories that seemed to influence how he understands his own life. So much has happened since then that we decided to update that series - and add three new episodes, too. Because Musk keeps changing, and so does what Lepore calls 'Muskism' - his brand of extreme capitalism and techno-futurism. And strangely, his origin story keeps changing, too.

How can understanding these fantasy stories - some of them a century old - help us understand the future Musk wants to take us to?

Well worth a listen, especially episode 2:

Musk is reinventing himself as a kingmaker for the United States and the world. He wants to shape the future. But in this episode, Lepore goes back to his past - to his childhood and family history. As a boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, Musk developed a fascination with science fiction - especially Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of Musk’s grandfathers was the leader of a strange sci-fi inspired movement known as Technocracy. Technocrats found democracy in adequate to modernity, and wanted engineers and scientists to run governments. Lepore argues Technocracy bears an uncanny resemblance to some things going on today in Silicon Valley and Washington today: from de-regulation of the economy to the rise of crypto-currency.

Observing the emergent broligarchy’s elaborate conspiracy to extract as much wealth and power as they can from Donald Trump’s second coming, it is justifiable to feel sick in the stomach. Men of tremendous wealth, with a history of treating the mothers of their children sadistically, of endorsing books justifying torture and the elimination of human rights, of making zillions from government and military procurement while tirelessly working toward disbanding government programs that offer a sliver of protection to the poor, have decamped at Mar-a-Lago kissing Trump’s ring and preparing for direct government power.

From their perspective, the deal they cut with Trump is an incredible bargain with a rate of return that no conventional business can hope to emulate. For a few hundred million dollars that they invested in Trump’s re-election, within minutes of his victory they amassed extra wealth to the tune of hundreds of billions. To be precise, the value of Peter Thiel’s Palantir shot up by 23 percent while Musk’s Tesla saw its stock rise by 40 percent to a capitalisation level higher than most of the rest of the global car industry combined.

For a few crumbs off their table, that they ploughed into the Trump campaign, the Big Tech brotherhood are in the process of receiving three amazing gifts: Gargantuan government contracts. A tremendous goldrush following the elimination of regulations that will allow them a gloves-off onslaught against the public’s concerns over their ways and wares (e.g., autonomous vehicles, rogue AI bots and drones, massive increases in electricity consumption). And, lastly, immense state-sanctioned bargaining power in their dealings with workers, suppliers, competitors and the rest of us.

And then there are, of course, the non-trivial concerns about their broader ambitions. Thiel’s favourite book is, reportedly, The Sovereign Individual. Its authors, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, literally and without the slightest hint of irony liken the broligarchs to the Olympian gods before going on to argue that it is only right and proper that they dominate the world. “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies,” they proclaim. As for Thiel himself, his explanation of why he likes this shoddy book so much is that it offers an “accurate” prediction of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today.” What Thiel neglected to say, of course, is that his dream is not one in which exorbitant power has withered but, rather, that it is a dream in which men like him monopolise it. At least he is honest enough to acknowledge that his version of freedom is incompatible with democracy.

But is any of this truly novel? However reprehensible the broligarchs’ practices and convictions might be, is it not possible that we are surrendering to a recollection of the past that is so recklessly optimistic that, by contrast, the present looks like a deterioration, when it is nothing but a recapitulation of our past?

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That’s all true. However, there is a superpower, a hyper-weapon, that the broligarchy possess today that their Big Business and Wall Street predecessors did not. It is a form of capital that never existed until recently: cloud capital which, of course, does not live up in the clouds but down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest.

Unlike traditional capital, from steam-engines to modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce commodities. Instead, it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. These produced means of behavioural modification train us to train them to determine what we want. And, once we want it, the same machines sell it to us, directly, bypassing markets. In this light, cloud capital performs five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, what it made us want. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us to sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour: As we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants and photos, we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs while, in the factories and the warehouses, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us are deployed – usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists – to make them work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time.

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.

That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.

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The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors.

Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton.

Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said.

And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.

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If you don’t like limits and rules, it stands to reason that you’re not going to like democracy. As Thiel wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the broligarchs are trying to undermine the rule of democratic nation-states.

To escape the control of democratic governments, they are seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, a la Musk and Bezos. But it can also come in the form of “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — independent mini-nations, carved out of the surrounding territory, where tech billionaires and their acolytes would live according to their own rules rather than the government’s. This is currently Thiel and Andreessen’s favored approach.

With the help of their investments, a startup city called Prospera is already being built off the coast of Honduras (much to the displeasure of Honduras). There are others in the offing, from Praxis (which will supposedly build “the next America” somewhere in the Mediterranean), to California Forever in, you guessed it, California.

The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25502522

A look into how the tech leaders may be using the new administration to achieve their own agenda. Looking specifically at Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andressen, Ben Horotwitz, Brian Armstrong, and David Sacks as well as their relationship with figures like JD Vance, Balaji Srinivasan, and Curtis Yarvin. There is a focused discussion on how a shaping of the government might take place based on convergences between the ideas of Yarvin, who influences the tech libertarian right, and Project 2025, who have authored a playbook exclusively for President Trump to help with his transition to power.