Jean Tessier’s Reviews > Apocalypse Nerds: Comment les technofascistes ont pris le pouvoir > Status Update

The CCRU in Northern England promotes its own brand of techofascism. The leaders of tech want necropolitics: the power to decide who lives and who dies. The last pages try to be optimistic my pointing out some successful revolutions of the past, but there is no fleshed out way to resist against the deep pockets and intellectual ascendant of Thiel and Musk and their ilk.

The transhumanism of Ray Kurzweil draws heavily from science-fiction and is just the latest expression of (rich) people trying to break through the limitations of human existence. This latest instantiation specifically targets the elites, with eugenics undertones. Medtech advocates find lots of rich old people afraid of death and who are easy to part from their money.

"l'idéal politique cyberlibertarien est saturé d'angles morts, d'impensés et de raccourcis. Le rôle de la technologies est ainsi surinvesti. Véritable fétiche, celle-ci est dotée d'un pouvoir quasi-surnaturel, à l'image de la "main invisible du marché" chère aux néolibéraux." (p. 94)

Seasteading, Prospera in Honduras, experiments in Nigeria, California Forever. All projects so far cannot survive contact with local populations. Poor countries can take years to come around, but attempts in developed nations cannot get off the ground. Cybertechnologists want to recreate the partitioned landscape of the Middle Ages.

The Network State is a collection of people, connected by online media. They can pool their resources to buy enclaves in host countries. Citizenship is buying shares and managed by contact. Cyberlibertarians are the new neoliberals, with technology playing the role of market forces under Adam Smith. They want to exploit immigrants, but keep them away from citizenship.

Some of the software metaphors are stretched pretty thin. There is a chilling account of the soft coup, the show and methodic weakening of institutions so technofascists can take over society. They immediately neutralize anyone and anything that could get in their way. They aim to destroy the Cathedral, the institutions and stewards of modern, liberal society.

Trumpism is amorphous and that is its strength. Its adversaries cannot get a hold. It can play one part against another (e.g., Musk vs. Miller) without weakening itself. TESCREAL. It has multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideologies at its disposal that it can deploy piecemeal, when needed.

Peter Thiel has wanted to dismantle democracy since before he founded Paypal. Over the years, he has put in place the structures to achieve his goal. He wants a new world order ruled by an elite and where the masses are complacent. He continues Leland Stanford's vision of replacing slow, indecisive, and heavy democratic institutions grounded in the will of the people with more rational ones based in logic.