The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.พ. 2024
- In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic, names and explains the political ideology of the unelected leaders of Silicon Valley. They are “leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement” she calls: techno-authoritarianism.
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Marc Andreessen is describing a form of political/economic social organization called anarcho-capitalism. That’s basically capitalism without a state.
More specifically, it is a global economic system of unregulated markets, governed primarily by contracts between private parties and enforced via a legal system that permits parties to seek monetary damages for harms incurred due to the actions of other parties.
No regulatory state, no surveillance state, no nation states, no police, no armies, no wars. No drug laws, no drug wars, no morality laws, no wars on crime, no prison-industrial complex, no prison for non-violent crimes, and no prison for violent crimes, either. Private security services protect clients from violent crime and the criminal element. Private schools replace the failed state education complex. No taxes. No redistribution state. No nanny state. Total freedom, total personal, existential responsibility. You’re on your own.
This is the world that Elon Musk and thousands more just like him seek. They just don’t think it’s a good idea to expose their ideas to the test of public examination. It’s useless to try to explain to the masses why this is the best and only future for humanity, so the less said, the better. Let each successive incidence of creative destruction reveal itself to the average person after the fact. Let the tech oligarchy worry about the small stuff. They like it.
Techno-authoritarianism is the product of an uneasy alliance between the social libertarian vision of tech’s early pioneers, like Steve Jobs, with the monopolistic business strategies pioneered by venture capitalists in the software market. This generation of entrepreneurs sought to create products that would democratize and liberate human knowledge, creativity, and economic potential; their VC funders argued, in Congress, before regulators, and in the courts, that natural monopolies would deliver the best blend of innovation and value to buyers of computer hardware and software.
Marc Andreessen and his generation of tech entrepreneurs and funders took these strategies into the consumer Internet and social media sectors, where they proved powerful enough to topple, not just other tech companies, but the incumbents and market leaders in a broad range of non-tech consumer categories. And while promoting the same vision of consumer freedom and economic power, they produced products consciously designed to gain increasing control over consumers’ time and spending habits.
The result today is a grotesque caricature of the promise that technology innovation, unfettered by the regulatory state, would unleash a new golden age of human creativity, wealth creation, and personal freedom. Instead, we’ve each been handed a nominally free digital playground, all for the price of our economic potential, our social stability, our political freedom, our privacy, and our happiness.
Meanwhile, the fortune and fate of every society is relentlessly coming under the control of a smaller and smaller number of tech oligarchs, who argue among themselves, but out of earshot from us, over the kind of world they mean to impose on us, and under what terms. The situation sheds a new light on corporate slogans like “Don’t be evil” or “Move fast and break things.” Indeed. In the techno-authoritarian view of the world, these are all the laws a society needs; and the results we’ve gotten thus far are all the results we have a right to expect.
I've worked in that world for 20 years and the Venn diagram of tech bros and libertarians is nearly a solid circle. Very self focused. Personal wealth.
What does the intersection of incels to tech bros and libertarians look like?
@@americatruecrime full circle
Interesting, because that's certainly not who they donate campaign money to.
The techno-optimist worldview is predicated entirely on survivorship bias - focusing only on those who survived/benefited and ignoring those who died/suffered along the way.
It's like saying: "It's perfectly safe to sail into massive storm because [those people] prayed to God in unison and they made it back from a storm safely. So if we just pray together as well, we'll have nothing to worry about."
...
What about all the other ships at sea whose crew prayed and still didn't survive the storm?
As another example: People who deny the threat which social media poses to democracy often say: "the printing press disrupted things and everything still turned out fine," conveniently ignoring the European Wars of Religion which the printing press sparked, resulting in millions of deaths.
How many women and girls will become victims of deepfake porn, have their lives destroyed and commit suicide before the harms of AI are taken seriously?
Techno-optimism begets techno-authoritarianism begets techno-feudalism.
Faravakous has already wrote a book about this called "techno feudalism "
God bless you guys xo
Write the peoples' response. The Pessimists Manifesto.
That’s an interesting way of spelling ‘capitalism’
I have a hard time, trusting people who want to turn a quick buck
The authoritarianship under a dictator is much different than authoritarionism in a democratic society where your ruled by faceless men, technocracy.
Examples? Hear an awful lot scary words but never anything meaningful. I get it - you don't like Elon Musk anymore (or free expression by those who question your reporting).