"Tech-Fash"

Get with the program!

Right now, my thinking keeps circling around certain poles, certain ideas, in an unresolved tension I can only try, imperfectly, to express

In waves, I feel a terrible sense of defeat. I keep revisiting my past, wishing I had taken different paths, here and there. But I suppose that is just my ego, holding on to the idea that some other outcome was possible: Is there anything I, personally, could have done that would have actually led to a different result from the civilizational crisis, with the scarce resources available to me? If I am honest, definitely not. I did, at least, try.

We find ourselves, to put it mildly, behind the eight ball; Blundering into despotism (I resist the gnarlier word, “Fascism”), rejecting the social progress hard-won over the last sixty years.

“The people” have, apparently, spoken. What “the people,” apparently, want is narcissist sociopathic billionaires devoid of empathy to charge America forward into the abyss. They are enthusiastically inspired to destroy their children’s future through suicidal social and ecological policies. In return they get the ghoulish, fleeting, pleasure of “owning the libs,” mass deportations of unprotected poor people, free speech for the super-wealthy, and control over women’s bodies. They get prayer in school, and a “new piety” based on a fantastical distortion of Christ’s original teachings.

But of course, this is not “the people” speaking. This is the triumph of the best mind-control, the best PsyOps, money can buy. A protracted war of eradication, directed against the inner domains of consciousness, conscience, subjectivity.

Somehow, all of this is embedded in the greater “laws” that govern cycles: Historical and natural cycles. Cycles of evolutionary growth and decay. Synchronicities and harmonics. Death and rebirth. Kali. Shiva.

Are we on the verge of discovering the grim answer to Fermi’s paradox?

I foresaw — remembered — all of this, as pattern, inevitable unfolding, from my earliest childhood until now. Past and future like fractal swirls. Thin layers of onion skin peel away to reveal translucent core. Don’t you remember all of this, too?

Do you remember, also, where it goes from here?

The branching paths leading from this moment outward, onward.

Will it be a million Luigi Mangione’s rising up? A mass noncompliant civil disobedience movement saying “fuck you” to the authoritarian mind-fuckers, with our bare, broken bodies? Prisons filling up. Concentration camps. Work makes free. The non-compliant forced to get neuralink implants to keep them permanently in line. Injected nanoparticles. Models and bottles. The Revelation, Rapture, postponed. Internal enemies identified.

How is it that we find ourselves living through this degraded plot — this Grade B dystopian film spectacle — yet again? Don’t we ever learn anything?

There are many ways to look at our current situation. We can see it as what Antonio Gramsci called a “crisis of hegemony,” where “the old is dead but the new cannot be born.” Journalist and author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracies, and How America Cracked Up (2024) John Ganz writes in his newsletter, Unpopular Front:

I think we are in a crisis of hegemony moment: neoliberalism is dying, but its replacement is yet to be born. And, as in pre and post-hegemonic times, the field of politics is fragmented and incoherent, there’s no hegemonic class or portion of a class that’s able to lead, so everything reverts to “the economic-corporate phase,” when different social interests seek their own short-term benefits rather than coalescing behind a vision of social development. The capitalist class as a whole is having trouble advancing or even understanding its interests: it seems hopelessly fractured.

In“Talking with Max Read about Our Tech-Fash Overlords,” Ganz and Max Read, a former editor at New York Magazine and culture critic, explore how Silicon Valley, in alliance with the Far Right, is rapidly reshaping politics, culture, and the economy. They focus on the influence of tech billionaires and their ability to undermine traditional institutions. Obviously, Elon Musk is a central figure in all of this: His suddenly central, Rasputin-ous role in shaping government decisions underpins the seismic shift from liberal democracy toward a more ersatz system bypassing traditional checks and balances.

Below, I provide an in-depth synopsis of this episode with some of my own notes. I found it to be helpful for my own, ongoing sense-making: Understanding what is happening, and why, seems a prerequisite for effective action or intervention, if such is even possible.

Ganz and Read compare Musk to Ross Perot, a diminutive tech billionaire who ran for President in 1992 and 1996. Perot advocated for direct democracy through electronic town halls to bypass Congressional authority. Perot also wanted to remove Congress's ability to raise taxes, along with other ideas that undermined constitutional principles. They seemed absurd back then, but they foreshadowed the current situation.

Musk, through Twitter, is effectively implementing a postmodern version of Perot’s vision. He uses his 200 million person reach on social media as a weapon to manipulate public sentiment (among other possible tools such as deep fakes) and exert political influence, foregoing traditional channels. This shift to plebiscite-style governance controlled by platform owners takes us away from (admittedly imperfect) representative democracy, toward manipulation by power-mad individuals for personal gain.

Mediating institutions, such as Congress and the legacy media, get weaker as platforms like Twitter become tools for gauging and manipulating public sentiment in real time via a kind of nonstop “applause-o-meter.” This dynamic erodes traditional governance and allows for financial and political gain through emotion-driven click-bait strategies. The hosts link the rise of speculative markets (cryptocurrencies) and technologies like AI to this manipulation, where mood swings and volatility drive financial decisions and political discourse.

Ganz and Read look at the tech billionaire’s assault on traditional politics and media as part of a broader class war they are waging against the professional managerial class.