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.
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
Interesting connection. Are the tenets "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and "Responding to change over following a plan" aligned with fascism?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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"?
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?
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] threadSo if people are still not convinced it might be a good time to reconsider, maybe read a history book or two.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Orwell warned about this sort of thing already: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
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.
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."
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.