Elon Musk, and how Tecnirfasticismo has come to America

When a phalanx of the best executives of Silicon Valley—Mark ZuckerbergJeff Bezos, ELON ALMIZCLEand sundar pichai from Google—Aligned behind President Trump During the inauguration in January, many observers saw a loyalty based on corporate interests. The ultra-rich ceos were supporting a launder partner, perhaps waiting for an era of deregulation, tax exemptions and anti-“awakened” cultural changes. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more sinister: a new and proactive union of industry and government power, in which the State would promote aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In Trump’s second administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating in politics in a way that remembered one of the main topics of mimura study: elite bureaucrats who seized political power and took Japan to Japan World War II. “These are experts with a technological mentality and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in his book “Empire planning“(2011), labeled” techno-fascism “: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology” is considered the driving force “of this regime, said Mimura.” There is a kind of technicalization of all aspects of the government and society ” .

In the nineteen thirty, Japan colonized Manchuria, in the northeast of China, and the region became a test field for technofascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese Ministry of Ministry of Commerce, was appointed to direct the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936 and, with the collaboration of a new harvest of Japanese conglomerates known as ZaibatsuHe instituted a forced industrial development policy based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique from other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar industrialization strategies issued by the State, at the expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascist regime would not be structured in the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s, with the power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader, although Kishi had traveled to Germany in the nineteen twenty, as the Nazi movement expanded , and was inspired by German German industrialization for its Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said, Japan “slipped to fascism” when the bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scene, under the auspices of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, technical officials “acquire being able to create these supra ministerial bodies and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are inexplicable.” Today, Elon Musk’s DOGE It is Trump’s equivalent.

The American corporations of the twentieth century flirted with a fusion of state and industrial power. The businessman Henry Ford promoted an industrial organization system that became known as “Fordism”, whereby the State intervened in the economy to guarantee mass production and consumption. In the nineteenth year, IBM did business with the Nazi government through a German subsidiary, lending its technology to projects such as the 1933 census, which helped identify the Jews in the country. As recent feature in it Guardian By Becca Lewis, Silicon Valley has exhibited right -wing trends, hugging misogynist and hierarchical attitudes about achievement. Journalist Michael S. Malone was broadcasting WARNINGS On the emerging “technology” technology “in the late nineties, when he warned about” IQ Bistotry “in the technology industry and the disposition of people to boost the digital revolution while” throws the weak and wounded along the way. ” But our current moment marks a new conjunction of Internet entrepreneurs and daily government operations. American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for the Silicon Valley to play with, in the line of intermittent fasting or Ketamine therapeutic doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are currently being tested as DOGEWith personnel with Without experience Linked to Musk’s own companies, it is housed through the Federal Government.

Musk has reduced federal employee ranks, Close agencies whose authority challenges his and took advantage of artificial intelligence to decide where to cut, promising a government executed by Chatbots such as Grok, from Musk’s artificial intelligence company itself. DOGE He has obtained access to the private data of the Americans and has developed tools to send by email to the entire federal government at the same time, a digital megaphone that Musk recently used to demand that employees Send a list of your weekly achievements. As Mimura said, “you try to apply technical concepts and rationality to human beings and human society, and then you are getting into something almost totalitarian.” Techno-fascist opportunism goes beyond musk; One may feel other technological entrepreneurs and investors enslaving to exploit the alliance between Trumpism and Capitalism of Silicon Valley, building infrastructure nationwide. Sam AltmanThe CEO of OpadaiHe has organized his own agreements with the Trump government, including Stargate, a very exaggerated data center project worth five hundred billion dollars. Apple recently announced its own investment campaign of five hundred billion dollars in the United States over the next four years, including a plan to start building AI servers in Texas. However, nebulous, these extravagant plans indicate a spirit of collaboration. In Truth Social, Trump published with approval that Apple’s plans demonstrated “faith in what we are doing.”

Erin Mcelroy, a geographer of the University of Washington that studies Silicon Valley, has used the term “siliconization” to describe how places like San Francisco or Cluj-Napoc You, have been rebuilt in the image and ideology of the Silicon Valley. According to Mcelroy, the first signs of the current Siliconization of Washington date back to the administration of Barack Obama, which hugged social media platforms as Facebook as a governive communication vector. For a while, digital platforms seemed to support the democratic government as a kind of community megaphone; But now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the established government authority. “There is a state crisis,” said Mcelroy, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode the power of the State” to replace it faster.

Silicon Valley is based on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone: they can do better to disseminate information, design an office, develop satellites and advance space trips. For the same logic, they must be able to govern better than federal politicians and employees. The Vogueses concepts in Silicon Valley, such as Sheeseading and “Network States” have independent and autonomous societies that are executed in technological principles. The efforts to create such entities have failed or remained limited to the scope of brand construction, as in the startup PracticeA hypothetical plan for a new city driven by technology in the Mediterranean. However, under Trump’s new White House, the United States government is being offered as a guinea pig, Mcelroy said. “Now that we have Musk directing the state, I don’t know if they need their little bubbles on the high seas as much as they thought before.”

Such visions of a technologized society represent a rest of the populism of Make America Great Again that promoted the first Trump administration. Map reactionary as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptics of technological progress; As the journalist James Pogue has explainedIts objective is to claim an American culture “it was thought that it is lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “Technofaudalism” and declared war on musk. He sees it as antihumano, with American citizens turned into “digital servants” whose freedom is delimited by technological companies. In A January interview With Ross Douthat, from TimesBannon said: “They have to be detained. If we do not stop it, and we do not stop it now, it will destroy not only this country, it will destroy the world. “While the Map Right wants to restore things as they were (or how things imagine), technological law wants, in the writing of Mark Zuckerberg, break things. In it Times Interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the main accelerators”, which refers to another political ideology inflection by technology that treats chaos as an inevitability.

The acceleration has popularized in the last decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called nere-reactionary movement or dark lighting populated by figures such as Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for An American monarchy They have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0. The accelerating attitude is, like Andrea Molle, Professor of Political Science at Chapman who studies acceleration, he expressed it to me: “This collapse will sell anyway, if it shakes the curite.” The acceleration arose from the idea of ​​Karl Marx that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire the proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian’s “technocerationalism” as a different end: destroy the existing order to create a technological and hierarchical with engineers in the upper part. Musk “has to completely break any type of architecture of the preëxista government to impose yours,” said Molle. He added that a completely reviewed government by Musk could work a bit like the wireless system that operates teslas, which allows the company to theoretically update how its car works at any time: “An agency is allowed, but they still have control, and They can still intervene if the course does not go in the direction in which it is supposed to maximize efficiency. “