American billionaire Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has called for the US-funded radio stations Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to be shut down. Source: Musk on X (Twitter) Yes, shut them down.
If this is the case, then we’re looking at people who are actually bent on dominating the financial sector, which really behooves us to engage in analysis.
I, for one, don’t believe there exists an abstraction higher than the financial industry. I don’t think there’s something above it that you can make it subservient to. I think that if they want to dominate the financial industry, it means replacing it. And through the lens of the technologist, replacing it means automating it. That means combining capitalist surveillance and computation to automate the deployment of capital, and that means fundamentally reorganizing society into a centrally planned one, albeit centrally planned using computers and AI for the maximization of financial ROI. I think this has been the trend for 25 years now, so I imagine there are very powerful people who believe this enough to try to make it happen.
That would take a good number of years to pull off, and the process would shed a LOT of bankers. It would create entirely new government departments. And it would likely bring about a lot of the things that QAnon people have been afraid of: more digital transactions and far less cash than today, national ID cards with transponders, open use of centralized national biometrics everywhere for everything - essentially the cyberpunk dystopia.
There’s definitely an internal contradiction within America’s elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America’s upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.
The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as “New Money.” The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of “persecution” these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.
To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further “technologification” of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.
If this is the case, then we’re looking at people who are actually bent on dominating the financial sector, which really behooves us to engage in analysis.
I, for one, don’t believe there exists an abstraction higher than the financial industry. I don’t think there’s something above it that you can make it subservient to. I think that if they want to dominate the financial industry, it means replacing it. And through the lens of the technologist, replacing it means automating it. That means combining capitalist surveillance and computation to automate the deployment of capital, and that means fundamentally reorganizing society into a centrally planned one, albeit centrally planned using computers and AI for the maximization of financial ROI. I think this has been the trend for 25 years now, so I imagine there are very powerful people who believe this enough to try to make it happen.
That would take a good number of years to pull off, and the process would shed a LOT of bankers. It would create entirely new government departments. And it would likely bring about a lot of the things that QAnon people have been afraid of: more digital transactions and far less cash than today, national ID cards with transponders, open use of centralized national biometrics everywhere for everything - essentially the cyberpunk dystopia.
That direction is pretty frightening honestly.
There’s definitely an internal contradiction within America’s elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America’s upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.
The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as “New Money.” The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of “persecution” these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.
To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further “technologification” of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.