This is an unusual and possibly the most important election in United States history.
The election is over in a few days and I just discovered this extremely important information. I knew that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were promoting Trump & Vance but I didn’t know why. This post is about that why.
We stand on a line to continue this experiment of democratic government or cross and descend into techno-religious stone age government.
EXCERPT BELOW FROM:
TNR The New Republic
Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator’s benefactor. But they’re both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society.
July 22, 2024
"In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”
Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”
He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”
Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas…
“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia…
Vance is a Thiel creation. And like his billionaire benefactor—who once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”—Vance embraces a radical ideology hell-bent on destroying government as we know it. And they got these ideas, at least in part, from Yarvin.
Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote in Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.
Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both…
He predicted Trump would run again and win, then offered some advice: “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” He added that Trump should defy any court orders that tried to halt this partisan purge of the civil service.
Yarvin calls this plan RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. It’s captured perfectly in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, which calls for firing an estimated 500,000 federal employees and dismantling entire agencies. If Trump wins, Vance may well be in charge of executing the plan.
Vance did not get this extremist ideology from his Appalachian upbringing or—needless to say—Yale Law. It was incubated in America’s tech capital, San Francisco, where he forged crucial ties with Thiel, Yarvin, and David Sacks, the longtime Thiel associate and pro-Putin crusader who recently hosted a Trump fundraiser at his mansion in Pacific Heights. And if Vance ends up in the White House, it will be with $45 million in monthly campaign contributions from Musk, who already made a $44 billion in-kind contribution by gutting San Francisco-based Twitter and transforming it into a right-wing misinformation weapon."
MORE AT:
TNR The New Republic
Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator’s benefactor. But they’re both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society.
July 22, 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment
You can add your voice to this blog by posting a comment.