I wasn’t planning to follow up my last blog post about tech for a while but I’ve been quite struck by its reaction.
Mostly, it’s been ignored. When I made a concerted effort to resume blogging last year, one of the first things I did was remove all of the web tracking and “optimisation” plugins from my installation of WordPress because what killed my love of writing a decade or so again was how I felt I’d got sucked into attempting to gamify the attention economy. So I don’t have any data on how well my blog posts do these days. But I can guess how well they do second hand, by the reaction I get via social media and what comments I get on the blog itself.
In this case, the answer to that has been very little. I’m not really surprised. It’s over long, attempts to cover too much ground and is stuffed full of my idiosyncrasies. I didn’t expect many people to read it; I perhaps didn’t expect quite so few people to read it at all.
What little feedback I’ve had from friends and family is that it’s too simplistic to say tech billionaires are all fascists, and that obsessing about them is a waste of my time.
On the former, I thought I was fairly careful to not call them fascist; I agree that it’s become a lazy smear of late, and simply isn’t useful. I certainly mentioned Marc Andreessen’s admiration for Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, but that’s simply a fact. I now realise that I did rather stupidly use the subheading “Technofascism and the end times” for the last section; that was me rushing to finish the article and get it out without thinking (I’ve now corrected this), but the text itself doesn’t refer to either Thiel or Ellison as fascists.
In fact, I think it’s quite interesting to examine how they aren’t fascist. Both men are certainly comfortable associating with people whose politics can, at best, be described as fascist-adjacent, but neither man seems particularly interested in leading or even being part of the sort of nostalgic, hyper-masculinist, quasi-military mass movement promising a return to greatness that we associate with fascism.
Rather, their interest seems to be more in mass surveillance and establishing a world carved up into competing blocs run by oligarchies (I am of course by no means the first to recognise the parallels between this and George Orwell’s dire predictions after the Second World War). I don’t get the impression they are particularly interested in who gets to run these oligarchies or how, as long as they retain a controlling interest in the Western bloc.
On the topic of wasting my time by thinking about this stuff; by contrast I wish more people were paying attention not just to what they are doing (there has been a gratifying increase in public interest in Palantir’s growing interest recently), but their reasoning behind it. In retrospect, we all should have been paying more attention to what was happening in the late 2000s which lead to the rise of the far right by the mid-2010s. Donald Trump and Nigel Farage espound overly simplistic, ludicrous ideas as well. Their stories, I suspect, are nearly over now. But I suspect that many of the ideas I’ve talked about in this essay series so far are going to continue to influence politics for years to come. Our lack of a strategic response to them is capitulation.
I do worry that this sounds conspiratorial; that I’m alleging some kind of Elder Protocols of TESCREAL. The TESCREAL bundle is an important frame to look at the group of largely aligned philosophies which appear to be dominating thought at the top of the US tech industry, but it is by no means a hegemony. Peter Thiel has called Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky “Antichrists”, for goodness sake.
Many of these people are bitter rivals in charge of competing companies. I certainly think that many of these tech billionaires are actively pursuing agendas. But what’s interesting is that all this is happening pretty openly and it is the culmination of decades of public discourse.
I hate to keep ragging on Nick Clegg (this is a lie; I love ragging on Nick Clegg — and he continues to give me such cause to do so), but I really can’t get past his notion that I began the first part of my essay discussing: his idea that Silicon Valley engineers merely view the world in terms of processes and facts, and have no sense interest in telling stories about how society should be run.
It’s politicians that’s stopped telling stories about the future, largely due to rise of people like Clegg and Tony Blair; men who flatter themselves as enlightened technocrats yet behave like consiglieri to their billionaire godfathers. It is they who live in “a world of facts and process,” which is why authoritarians and simple populists have been playing politics on easy mode for the past 18 years. We shouldn’t be emulating them.
Since I returned to writing last year, I’ve got a lot out of it, but I’ve found it a challenge to do so while holding down a day job which is pretty detached from politics and keeps me on my toes for much of each day. As such, my research process is pretty heterodox; mainly I just hoover up articles and books that I hear about on a pretty ad hoc basis, and try to find connections between them.
I miss a lot. I’m kicking myself, for example, for not discovering this article about Peter Thiel’s personal philosophy until two days after publishing. Indeed, I’d like to explore in greater detail how different Thiel and Ellison are to the other business leaders I referenced, while still mingling in the same circles and having a lot of very similar ideas. How do Thiel’s obsessions with antichrists, katechons and preventing the world from uniting behind a single leader square with the transhumanist dream of humanity colonising the stars, for instance? Does eternal conflict serve the purpose for them what infinite growth serves for people like Andreessen? Currently I don’t have a clear understanding of that.
I’m very conscious that I’m only really scratching the surface of all this stuff. For example, Thiel isn’t the only one who has been influenced by theology. Nikolai Fedorov, the 19th century founder of Russian cosmism, was a massive influence on transhumanism. I simply lack the time to dig deeper at a faster pace than I have been.
But then, that’s the purpose and value of blogging. All of the stuff I write here is tentative. Maybe I’ll decide all this transhumanism stuff is great and not concerning at all in six months (I doubt it); it’s certainly giving me plenty to ponder. As someone who flatters myself that I oppose the possible futures of infinite growth, eternal conflict and utopia, I’ve realised I don’t really have a better alternative — and that’s a problem. I don’t think it’s enough to simply dismiss this as all bad stuff by being boosted by silly people.
I’m going to keep plugging away, and I suggest that whoever is reading this stuff (both of you) does the same.
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