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| Someone needs to slap the smug off their faces |
From time to time I find myself entertaining a semi-regular sanity check: Is it just me or is the world rapidly going into the toilet? I don't think it's me but if you take a look at Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros with the stupid smug smirks on their ugly pusses, does it look like they have any inkling how fucked up everything is? My working assumption has been that their stolen wealth provides a nice cushion and buffer from the misery that their thievery has wrought on the planet and most of its inhabitants. But I never ruled out that having gotten more than enough of theirs, their sociopathology and bad character has blinded them (willfully) to the harm that they do.
The distinct picture I get from 2 recent books on the topic, Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End Times Fascism (and the Fight for Living World), is that my assessment may be too kind. The Epstein Class as Klein and Taylor call the tech oligarchs and their courtesans are actively engaging in behavior that they are fully aware is dooming the planet. Emblematic of their pathology is their cramming of AI, the last gasp of an otherwise flatlined Tech sector down the throats of the rest of us. AI -- the elusive sci-fi technology that could only be approximated through the resource-consuming Big Compute of Large Language Models-- may well be a bubble, but in the meantime, the edge lords of Silicon Valley have captured former skeptic Donald Trump whose administration is greenlighting a race to the bottom of the rare earth, fresh water and petroleum barrels, environment be damned, in the construction and operation of data centers across the planet. Their obscene accumulation of wealth aside, the bald pursuit of riches is itself an inadequate explanation for their behavior. As both books demonstrate, the class has built around itself a cathedral of rationalizations for the imperiling of the planet and all of its inhabitants who are not members of their rarefied cohort.
While Duran's book focuses on the tech oligarchs and features venture capitalist Peter Thiel and those who drift in his orbit (programmer turned edge-lord philosopher Curtis Yarvin, fellow Tech Bros Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan and most prominently and breathlessly, Thiel "mini-me" J.D. Vance among them), Klein and Taylor’s account includes also those (like Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and megachurch pastor John Hagee) intent on hurrying along the apocalyptic teleologies of their Iron Age religions and the ethnonationalists (particularly the Christian variety, such as Christ Church pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow Idaho) motivated by a desire to preserve a supremacy of their own identity that was fabricated by delusions bred of sociopathology to begin with. In all cases in contrast to fascisms of the past, the end times fascists have no program for the masses whose support they require in order to sustain their grip on the planet whether through voting in numbers large enough for plausible deniability of fraud or suppression of the opposition, or through mere mute acquiescence if not thrall to their superiority and centrality to what is left of the future of humanity.
Empathy in this world view (if it could be felt by any of the cohort) is a weakness. While the Epstein class thrives without a natural capacity for it, their method for building electoral support for their ultimately trans-governmental project in spite of the harm it does for most people promotes antipathy. As Klein and Taylor describe the rise of it:
The story they told was a simple one: The struggle you are having paying the bills and finding a decent job? It’s not the fault of the bankers and speculators who crashed the economy, or the politicians who passed the bill on to you. It’s all those migrants, driving down wages and draining public services. This was the true great replacement—the substitution of migrants for bankers—and it worked, achieving the old trick of channeling rage down instead of up once again, by convincing people they needed to “take back control” (as the Brexit slogan went) not from oligarchs but from immigrants.
The good news for the rest of us, per Klein and Taylor, is that the very flaws of personality and character that obsess the end times fascists with the accumulation of power, wealth and rationalizations for their antisocial proclivities do not lend themselves to excellence at the building of the coalitions that may be required for the sustaining of their dominance:
As the Italian scholar of fascism Alberto Toscano writes, “The pathological personalization of power is at the core of the far Right’s rise.” In practice, this means that end times fascism, unlike its predecessors, is not led by disciplined and buttoned-up generals but rather by vain and messy influencers, a category that now includes egomaniacal and attention-obsessed politicians and CEOs.
Elon Musk-- let loose by Trump to have his way with the Federal government through the auspices of the edgily named DOGE-- is the paragon of the class. His goal of continuing the cream of humanity's story on Mars depends on terraforming a dead, poisoned and poisonous planet, to give the inheritors a landing place after spending earth. What makes the asshole think he can terraform Mars when we don't have a clue how to terraform Earth, a much saner and more immediately beneficial project?
As Duran reminds us, in spite of their high regard for their own genius and fundamentalist belief in their transcendant mission for themselves in whatever form they take, they are still humans, still subject to the laws and strictures of earthly human society. In spite of their criminal ambitions, Trump designs of de-regulation aside, there are existing ways we have at our disposal to put on the brakes. Although it is inconceivable that if we are successful in putting a stop to their momentum there will not be persistent revivals of their goals. As Duran writes:
To prevent this, we need investigations, hearings, prosecutions, and likely some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. We need a full postmortem of our brush with national death, as well as prison sentences and severe financial penalties for those who participated in, or profited from, the defiling of our government.
Is it possible that the vast bulk of humanity will prevail? Klein and Taylor remind us that the Trump administration's seemingly unstoppable "mandate" for de-immigration rapidly lost support as soon as the face of it became apparent-- ICE goons in masks battering down doors to remove parents from their sobbing children and Americans being shot in the face and back by faceless invaders sent by their government. Across the country, the neighbors of ICE's victims, far from applauding the fascist mission of their government naturally banded together in defense of ICE's targets. Furthermore, movements sprang up spontaneously in opposition whenever data centers mysteriously proliferated across the country with little public discussion. Americans by and large understand that the massive consumption of resources and attendant outpouring of toxic externalities are being forced upon us in spite of their intention to make us obsolete, and they are not taking it lying down. The cry is spreading across the globe, evidenced by Italians successful banding together to force Jeff Bezos to move his invasive wedding celebration elsewhere
The point ... is to show that the Hobbesian cliché that we will inevitably turn on one another in emergencies is just one of the many stories that people have made up. And as we’ve seen again and again, from the neighbors lending a hand in storm-ravaged North Carolina to the legions of volunteers cleaning Valencia’s streets after the floods, there are plenty of people whose actions expose that story as a cynical lie.
