Techno‑feudal elite are attempting to build a twenty‑first‑century fascist state

[etherus]

The question is: will and or when will the response to this violence exceed levels which can be controlled by the same mechanisms? I believe there is a window here, where in most countries experiencing this shift, there are still many individuals who have the power to effect change if they accept the risk. This won't be the case forever - at some point it will be few, not many. Community is important; look after it.

[avtar]

Unfortunately communities tend to be endangered species these days. Perhaps this issue and other seismic societal shifts will change that.

[designerarvid]

What countries apart from the US are experiencing this shift?

[d_silin]

The article is unpleasantly accurate.

[RGamma]

> a transnational “authoritarian international” in which oligarchs, political operatives, royal families, security chiefs, and organized criminals cooperate to monetize state power while protecting one another from scrutiny.

At least the crackpots now get to see what a real deep state (concentrated power behind public facade) looks like.

[tastyface]

Flagged in 3... 2...

Alas, the prototypical tech "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" has become the "temporarily embarrassed lord."

[EMIRELADERO]

While the article points out many worrying trends which are true, I would caution against making far-reaching predictions, especially if they involve drastic, rapid change.

Orwell warned about this sort of thing already: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

[paperwallet]

This was a good read. The author makes a valid point that there is no distinction to be made between Communism and Fascism as they both represent Authoritarianism.

[tempodox]

That fascist state is already here, with Sam Altman helping them with domestic surveillance and autonomous killer robots. How long until they get deployed to U.S. streets?

[mark_l_watson]

>> Drawing on the work of Robert Reich, William I. Robinson, Yanis Varoufakis, and others, alongside historian Heather Cox Richardson

Good references to use!

I used to enjoy the All In Podcast a lot, but since two of the 'besties' joined Team Trump, it has become clear to me just how self serving they are.

[poszlem]

The Anthropic situation with the Department of Defense is the clearest example of the application of 'Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state', a doctrine that is explicitly fascist.

So if people are still not convinced it might be a good time to reconsider, maybe read a history book or two.

[alwa]

I’m glad, then, that Anthropic seem to have chosen the path outside the state.

Though who knows what, if any, resemblance the theatrics bear to either the meat of the dispute or its eventual substantive outcome…

I’m kind of surprised TFA made it through without a nod to Karp’s book [0]. The guy’s not shy about how hard he wants to make the power.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760945/the-technolo...

[kelseyfrog]

To add some context that I learned recently, the fascist project was specifically anti-liberal in the sense that it rejected the conception of universal natural inalienable rights as its ideology base.

Rights, when universal and natural are inalienable, while rights when derived from the state are alienable. The ability of a state to make anyone a non-person is, and should continue to be, a horrific thought to entertain.

[imiric]

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

[EA-3167]

It seems to be a much better example of cronyism being used to oust a competitor to OpenAI at the direct incitement of Altman. I have no doubt that the Trump admin and people like Miller, Hegseth et al dream of ruling with an iron fist... they're just too incompetent to pull it off.

They couldn't even pull it off when they had a mandate and some people with actual talent in the first admin.

[cc-d]

Yep. Sounds like us.

It's better than previous "fascist" states in some ways, worse in others. Please remember everybody, many past "authoritarian" states have been character assassinated relentelessly, and the world you inhabit may not be nearly as free as the illusion our very based media boys have presented to you.

The very terminology provided to you to describe these power structures is a form of warfare in and of themselves.

[artemonster]

In the past times where Czar elite could be executed like cattle and when French kings knew their heads could fly off guillotines, the elites were *behaving*. There was an unspoked social contract that you do shit for us, and we let you do be yourselves, whatever you do. Nowadays, we have wonderful law and nobody is responsible for anything, nobody is prosecuted, just fucking nothing. Time for pitchforks?

[thrance]

Don't make the mistake of idealizing the past. It took a decade of terrible winters and famine for the head of a single French king to be parted from his body. And it took one century more for a lasting Republic to be born.

[_DeadFred_]

We made the Norman nobles CEOs and gave them protection/removed responsibility from all of their actions. But let them continue to see themselves as purely 'value extractors' extracting from workers/markets/economies and doing nothing else.

At least Norman lords had to nominally provide housing on their holdings and had to have some kind of care that their serfs survived. CEOs don't even do that (they literally build models on lowest wage zero hour jobs that their labor can't actually live on or move labor from one desperate overseas country to the next).

[deadbabe]

Modern social media has only been around for maybe 10-15 years. The honeymoon phase of the 2000s and early 2010s was probably the peak of value for the individual user, but I would say in the mid 2010s the value began to tilt and now the corps extract far more value than what they deliver to individual user’s lives.

Social media today has little value beyond an engine to deliver dopamine hits, increasingly more of this content is just AI slop. I don’t think this will ever be palatable for most users.

I think 10 years from now, it is plausible that major social media platforms will have been completely abandoned by “real” users, in favor of private decentralized chat groups and small anti-viral platforms, where most members have only 1 or 2 degrees of separation to each other, and where the content posted is of interest, but not addicting, and not infinitely scrollable.

This would do a lot of damage to the techno-fascist state, as it takes away one of the pillars upon which their control stands.

[tempodox]

In 10 years we won’t have the devices nor the software to run such a network. We will have state-approved devices running state-approved software. There will be no escape from brainwashing and total surveillance. The time to stop this is now.

[ares623]

Look, if a techno-fascist state is what's needed for me to continue not having to write any code anymore, then I will gladly accept it. Techno-fascism is preferable to the horrors of Agile. /s

[tempodox]

Right, you’ll be out of work and without income, but free of Agile.

[fulafel]

Interesting connection. Are the tenets "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and "Responding to change over following a plan" aligned with fascism?

[AreShoesFeet000]

In my personal experience, an ironic statement that hits too close to home will - regardless of the irony - get downvoted. Partly because irony serves to be lost and it is lost too much. Partly because it still uncovers something uncomfortable. A lot of people really do want fascism. So you loose on both sides. Brutal.

[atmosx]

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. - D.A.

[d_silin]

Centrist positions are inherently unstable (think top of the hill) because they require active efforts to maintain the balance between factions prone to polarizations (left->far-left, right->far-right). It requires consistently good statesmanship or strong external challenge for opposing factions to act in united manner.

[ffsm8]

Funny things about that though, if you're centrist today, you'd be considered far left in the 2000s

[fwip]

Historically, people like that become known as collaborators.

[lioeters]

Being a centrist is a cowardly position, inevitably on the wrong side of history, serving the ruling class while backstabbing your fellow workers and citizens. You'd rather pretend to be asleep and let it all happen to us than open your eyes and fight with humanity.

[jacquesm]

The bystander effect in a nutshell. You too are eventually accountable and culpable and when the wheels of fascism turn far enough you'll find yourself as part of an outgroup.

[ares623]

Work for it.

[tootie]

Woke only exists in the mind of the far right.

[russdill]

"I don't like the Jews and hate the Nazis."

[krapp]

You can't have centrist fascism. To have any kind of fascism, you would first need to commit to a specific ideological position.

[beej71]

You left Trump off the list, though. Deliberate?

[tootie]

Jenny Cohn on bluesky posts a ton of stuff on technofeudalist: https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social

A favorite target is Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale who was recently discussing regime change in Iran with Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah.

[spopejoy]

How convenient that your analysis elides debt servicing from war and increased discretionary military spending. Debt rose the most under Reagan and Bush and now Trump with the same call for cutting taxes while bloating military spending. And let's not forget the TARP and other bailouts in 2008. But by all means, talk about "corrective market forces that curb waste" -- tell me, when has any government in history been run by "market forces"?

[musicsnob]

That the highest earners pay the most taxes in nominal terms should not be a surprise, it's just basic math. 10% of $1B is still more than 20% of $1M. These self-annointed elites are still hoarding an incredible amount of wealth, with average tax rates that are often more lower than lower income brackets. Yet, they consume more services than lower income people.

Social Security is more than 90% funded by payroll taxes collected exclusively for that purpose. Combining that budget item with HHS and other departments funded by more general income taxes is quite misleading. Defense is the largest single expenditure in the US budget -- even more so when factoring in the VA.

Finally, more dollars can always be printed because the US dollar holds the highly privileged position of being the "world's currency", and exploiting the benefits from that, such as printing a near-endless supply of USD without causing a gallon of milk to cost $1500 (yet).

Numbers aside, you seem to suggest that The Free Market could correct our path to fascism, and that pesky human services and wanton over-regulation are what are really preventing us from reaching our final enlightened form... We are all much closer to being destitute than we are to being next in line for billionaire-dom. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."

[busterarm]

In those other socialist-leaning nations the spending is there just hidden in the form of jobs. A much higher percentage of labor is governmental -- usually around 25% more.

The US can get away with what it's doing because we just have that much more productive economic activity going on here.

[_DeadFred_]

Reminder that the Republican policy for the last 40 years includes things like starve the beast in order to build up/support inefficient government spending so that they can make exactly this argument.

When one party is ACTIVELY sabotaging the Federal government in order to achieve political goals they can't get at the ballot box, and in order to set the grounds to make exactly the argument you are, we have to wonder, what exactly is the solution? Is it to do the thing we were manipulated to be forced to do, or to throw out the party that cared more about their goals than our country, are willing to destroy our government's ability to govern, and are willing to spend 40 years being manipulative to achieve it? I say throw out the part that intentionally spent 40 years destabilizing our government and TRYING to deliver worse outcomes.

[watwut]

Are you claiming elite is NOT doing that? Because project 2025 is kind of about that and billionaires in fasct do support fascist policies.

[breakyerself]

Any honest reading of the history and the scholarship around the development of fascism and its characteristics would absolutely lead any honest person to the conclusion that there is a fascistic political movement happening in the United States and elsewhere.

When fascism loses its meaning it's when reactionaries describe leftist opposition to fascism as fascism. When they call antifa fascist for opposing fascism violently. That's when the meaning gets muddled.

[113]

> sloppy thinking and sloppy arguments

If you think this is the result it's probably just because you're not used to discussing political theory. Within academic spaces these discussions are very well developed and nuanced. HN people like yourself aren't very used to being left behind but there are experts that understand what you don't.

[manuelabeledo]

We need a synonym for “fascist” because some people agree that what they do and how they do it is bad, but they are incapable of looking past the word.

[dwb]

Can you give some examples of uses of "fascism" where it is merely referring to "bad people that I don't like", and not one of the many instances of fascism in the world today? If you're unfamiliar with the detailed thinking about the subject, I recommend this list:

https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html

[MagicMoonlight]

The mistake of the perpetually online is thinking that what you wanted ever mattered.

Peasants would lose half their crops to taxes, in a world where there was not a single state provided service. There wasn’t even a state really.

There has never been a world where the average person doesn’t get shafted.