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.
Becoming more politically active has been a massive source of community for me. And if community is already endangered (which isn't something I disagree with, by the way - so many people are inadequately supported), that's all the more reason we should find and build it.
half of Europe is on the verge of shifting to parties with nostalgia for 20th century fascism and the Trump admin declared it a foreign policy goal to help bring them to power.
Not to get into politics too much, but surely that is a bit different. EU right wing populism and conservative raise had been slowly happening for some 15-20 years. US for 14 months.
The AfD in Germany scheduled their party conference in Weimar, Thuringia to take place exactly 100 years to the day after a famous Nazi rally in... Weimar, Thuringia...
uh...fox news started from NIXON, so too were the far right judges. this republican farce hit a tipping point, it didnt just suddenly be fascist. its like bitcoin and they suddenly saw they had 51%. whether its true is debateable but this isnt just a few months.
"NIXON" (also known plainly as Nixon) was "far right?"
You must be joking.
By any measure, and in every poly sci department, Nixon is viewed as moderate or even slightly left wing.
He created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, created OHSA, signed NEPA, monkeyed with wage and price controls, signed a breath-taking number of anti-discrimination and affirmative-action orders, pushed school desegregation in the South...Nixon would be called a "progressive" today.
I know. Your baby boomer grandparents thought anyone who wasn't McGovern must be Hitler, but...Nixon was pretty liberal. Regan ran against him in the 1968 primaries just for this reason.
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.
> a transnational “authoritarian international” in which oligarchs, political operatives, royal families, security chiefs, and organized criminals cooperate to monetize state power while protecting one another from scrutiny.
At least the crackpots now get to see what a real deep state (concentrated power behind public facade) looks like.
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.
The problem with these kinds of articles is that their arguments completely break down when looking at the facts.
The top 5% already pay 40% of all taxes in the US. For the the top 1% that number is still 25%. [1]
At the same time over 50% (!) of the budget goes towards social security, medicare and other health services [2]. That's a much higher percentage vs. socialist-leaning nations such as Sweden [3].
Despite its reputation of being an individualist, capitalist nation, for all intents and purposes, the US has already implemented socialism.
The problem, as is typical with countries where public sector spending is a large %age of the economy, is that such spending is not subject to healthy corrective market forces that would curb waste. More dollars can always be printed and taxed, so high-level corruption, bureaucracy and an ever-growing thicket of regulation is the consequence.
The author calls out the corruption and nepotism, and rightfully so. However what he fails to understand is that it is born in an ever-growing government "economy", not curbed by it.
Time to retire the use of the word Fascism. It's lost all meaning at this point. It's become a shortcut for "bad people that I'd don't like".
The result is sloppy thinking and sloppy arguments.
The people that you need to convince will see the word "Fascist" and tune it out as more left wing noise.
The threats are real, however this framing is doing more harm than good.
We need a synonym for “fascist” because some people agree that what they do and how they do it is bad, but they are incapable of looking past the word.
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.
To add some context that I learned recently, the fascist project was specifically anti-liberal in the sense that it rejected the conception of universal natural inalienable rights as its ideology base.
Rights, when universal and natural are inalienable, while rights when derived from the state are alienable. The ability of a state to make anyone a non-person is, and should continue to be, a horrific thought to entertain.
That is precisely the key and you can already see many examples of this in the last 12 months. One group after another is stripped of their rights and mistreated and yet nobody actually does anything other than some protests. I wonder how this sort of thing would go down in France or Germany, for Germany of course the track record is sub-optimal but I would hope that they had at least learned their lessons well enough to avoid a repetition of the blackest chapters in our history.
What puzzles me is how for many years it was predicted that this was going to happen and that in spite of the warnings it still did. I just don't get it.
>What puzzles me is how for many years it was predicted that this was going to happen and that in spite of the warnings it still did. I just don't get it.
Let's say that there are twelve doughnuts in the box. You see someone eat one, and there are 11, 10, 9... and when there are six, you make a prediction: we're going to run out of doughnuts.
A few minutes later, after a late burst of doughnut-grabbing (putting the exhaustion of the box ahead of schedule), it happens. What's the best way to understand this experience?
A) People were removing doughnuts from the box without knowing what would happen. You were the only one who understood how to count in reverse (a skill not ordinarily taught in public schools), and revealed a truth they might not have even understood - until it occurred before their eyes.
B) You revealed a consistent desire to eat doughnuts and a social norm that permitted it, which held true minute after minute, both before and after you published. That's excellent science. They knew they were eating doughnuts, and they wanted them. Their knowledge of the running-out effect, possibly discovered earlier in internal studies, drove them to accelerate the process at the end, rushing to grab the last one before the competition did.
This is why the UK stripping Shamima Begum - a British citizen by birth - of her citizenship always concerned me. Effectively leaving her stateless. She was an easy target for this. Perhaps it feels like some form of justice or punishment. So people just nod along.
But what precedent does that set? A very dangerous one imo
It seems to be a much better example of cronyism being used to oust a competitor to OpenAI at the direct incitement of Altman. I have no doubt that the Trump admin and people like Miller, Hegseth et al dream of ruling with an iron fist... they're just too incompetent to pull it off.
They couldn't even pull it off when they had a mandate and some people with actual talent in the first admin.
It's fascism. A shakedown to place private corporate power under state control. Consider that the people dreaming of ruling with an iron fist are currently in charge, shooting citizens in the street, and shaking down billion dollar companies aren't so incompetent that we need not worry.
What do you mean, "they couldn't pull it off?" They have already accomplished half of what they set out to do [1], a quarter of the way through Trump's term.
As incompetent and stupid as they are, the dunking just never seems to stop. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares, and nobody who cares has any power.
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?
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.
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
In my personal experience, an ironic statement that hits too close to home will - regardless of the irony - get downvoted. Partly because irony serves to be lost and it is lost too much. Partly because it still uncovers something uncomfortable. A lot of people really do want fascism. So you loose on both sides. Brutal.
I guess if you get downvote for saying something ironical, then that's the loss of audience, not you.
One can argue that a thoughtful irony which gets downvoted might be more interesting than thoughtful irony which gets upvoted because of the points you mention.
Irony shouldn't be in a bubble of all upvotes. Funnily enough I had searched up some irony quote websites a few days back and going back on them was fun to find a relevant quote:
Irony is just the honesty with the volume cracked up
Damn that’s good quote. And I would even go as far as saying that the apparent cynicism of the “honesty with the volume cracked up” is just a mirroring of the inversion that symbols suffer while transiting Culture.
In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey.
This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
Centrist positions are inherently unstable (think top of the hill) because they require active efforts to maintain the balance between factions prone to polarizations (left->far-left, right->far-right). It requires consistently good statesmanship or strong external challenge for opposing factions to act in united manner.
While setting proactive centrist initiatives might be hard, centrist sentiment with passive inaction is very very easy. All you need to do is tut-tut occasional "excesses."
In other words, the centrism of taking risks is very different from the centrism of avoiding them.
It depends on how the populace feels. It could also technically be a valley with the extremes on either side. Honestly though I think the centrists can never find positions people can get rabid about because by definition it calls for moderation.
Being a centrist is a cowardly position, inevitably on the wrong side of history, serving the ruling class while backstabbing your fellow workers and citizens. You'd rather pretend to be asleep and let it all happen to us than open your eyes and fight with humanity.
That analogy does not make sense. You are assuming political spectrum is a left to right gradient which you just move along, when in reality it is a constantly shifting multi dimensional spectrum that shifts on different issues. However if we apply today’s centerist to the end of the 1990’s they would be more a Bush conservative.
The bystander effect in a nutshell. You too are eventually accountable and culpable and when the wheels of fascism turn far enough you'll find yourself as part of an outgroup.
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.
Unfortunately communities tend to be endangered species these days. Perhaps this issue and other seismic societal shifts will change that.
Becoming more politically active has been a massive source of community for me. And if community is already endangered (which isn't something I disagree with, by the way - so many people are inadequately supported), that's all the more reason we should find and build it.
What countries apart from the US are experiencing this shift?
half of Europe is on the verge of shifting to parties with nostalgia for 20th century fascism and the Trump admin declared it a foreign policy goal to help bring them to power.
it's red alert time.
Not to get into politics too much, but surely that is a bit different. EU right wing populism and conservative raise had been slowly happening for some 15-20 years. US for 14 months.
Trump was elected in 2016, the Snowden leaks are from 2013. These processes have been going on for a while, and those aren't the earliest indicators.
The US has weakened structurally a lot over the past decades. Democracy ends slowly then suddenly I guess.
The AfD in Germany scheduled their party conference in Weimar, Thuringia to take place exactly 100 years to the day after a famous Nazi rally in... Weimar, Thuringia...
and they say it's a coincidence.
uh...fox news started from NIXON, so too were the far right judges. this republican farce hit a tipping point, it didnt just suddenly be fascist. its like bitcoin and they suddenly saw they had 51%. whether its true is debateable but this isnt just a few months.
"NIXON" (also known plainly as Nixon) was "far right?"
You must be joking.
By any measure, and in every poly sci department, Nixon is viewed as moderate or even slightly left wing.
He created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, created OHSA, signed NEPA, monkeyed with wage and price controls, signed a breath-taking number of anti-discrimination and affirmative-action orders, pushed school desegregation in the South...Nixon would be called a "progressive" today.
I know. Your baby boomer grandparents thought anyone who wasn't McGovern must be Hitler, but...Nixon was pretty liberal. Regan ran against him in the 1968 primaries just for this reason.
I think you need to look into the history of Roger Ailes, this is 50 years in the making. Maybe a 100 if you want to include the John Birch society.
Putin is behind all this shi(f)t.
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.
Orwell warned about this sort of thing already: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
The article is unpleasantly accurate.
> a transnational “authoritarian international” in which oligarchs, political operatives, royal families, security chiefs, and organized criminals cooperate to monetize state power while protecting one another from scrutiny.
At least the crackpots now get to see what a real deep state (concentrated power behind public facade) looks like.
Flagged in 3... 2...
Alas, the prototypical tech "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" has become the "temporarily embarrassed lord."
Yep. Sounds like us.
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.
>> Drawing on the work of Robert Reich, William I. Robinson, Yanis Varoufakis, and others, alongside historian Heather Cox Richardson
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.
The mistake of the perpetually online is thinking that what you wanted ever mattered.
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.
The problem with these kinds of articles is that their arguments completely break down when looking at the facts.
The top 5% already pay 40% of all taxes in the US. For the the top 1% that number is still 25%. [1]
At the same time over 50% (!) of the budget goes towards social security, medicare and other health services [2]. That's a much higher percentage vs. socialist-leaning nations such as Sweden [3].
Despite its reputation of being an individualist, capitalist nation, for all intents and purposes, the US has already implemented socialism.
The problem, as is typical with countries where public sector spending is a large %age of the economy, is that such spending is not subject to healthy corrective market forces that would curb waste. More dollars can always be printed and taxed, so high-level corruption, bureaucracy and an ever-growing thicket of regulation is the consequence.
The author calls out the corruption and nepotism, and rightfully so. However what he fails to understand is that it is born in an ever-growing government "economy", not curbed by it.
[1] https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
[3] https://www.government.se/government-of-sweden/ministry-of-f...
Time to retire the use of the word Fascism. It's lost all meaning at this point. It's become a shortcut for "bad people that I'd don't like".
The result is sloppy thinking and sloppy arguments. The people that you need to convince will see the word "Fascist" and tune it out as more left wing noise.
The threats are real, however this framing is doing more harm than good.
We need a synonym for “fascist” because some people agree that what they do and how they do it is bad, but they are incapable of looking past the word.
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.
I’m glad, then, that Anthropic seem to have chosen the path outside the state.
Though who knows what, if any, resemblance the theatrics bear to either the meat of the dispute or its eventual substantive outcome…
I’m kind of surprised TFA made it through without a nod to Karp’s book [0]. The guy’s not shy about how hard he wants to make the power.
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760945/the-technolo...
To add some context that I learned recently, the fascist project was specifically anti-liberal in the sense that it rejected the conception of universal natural inalienable rights as its ideology base.
Rights, when universal and natural are inalienable, while rights when derived from the state are alienable. The ability of a state to make anyone a non-person is, and should continue to be, a horrific thought to entertain.
That is precisely the key and you can already see many examples of this in the last 12 months. One group after another is stripped of their rights and mistreated and yet nobody actually does anything other than some protests. I wonder how this sort of thing would go down in France or Germany, for Germany of course the track record is sub-optimal but I would hope that they had at least learned their lessons well enough to avoid a repetition of the blackest chapters in our history.
What puzzles me is how for many years it was predicted that this was going to happen and that in spite of the warnings it still did. I just don't get it.
>What puzzles me is how for many years it was predicted that this was going to happen and that in spite of the warnings it still did. I just don't get it.
Let's say that there are twelve doughnuts in the box. You see someone eat one, and there are 11, 10, 9... and when there are six, you make a prediction: we're going to run out of doughnuts.
A few minutes later, after a late burst of doughnut-grabbing (putting the exhaustion of the box ahead of schedule), it happens. What's the best way to understand this experience?
A) People were removing doughnuts from the box without knowing what would happen. You were the only one who understood how to count in reverse (a skill not ordinarily taught in public schools), and revealed a truth they might not have even understood - until it occurred before their eyes.
B) You revealed a consistent desire to eat doughnuts and a social norm that permitted it, which held true minute after minute, both before and after you published. That's excellent science. They knew they were eating doughnuts, and they wanted them. Their knowledge of the running-out effect, possibly discovered earlier in internal studies, drove them to accelerate the process at the end, rushing to grab the last one before the competition did.
I would suggest, (B).
This is why the UK stripping Shamima Begum - a British citizen by birth - of her citizenship always concerned me. Effectively leaving her stateless. She was an easy target for this. Perhaps it feels like some form of justice or punishment. So people just nod along.
But what precedent does that set? A very dangerous one imo
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
It seems to be a much better example of cronyism being used to oust a competitor to OpenAI at the direct incitement of Altman. I have no doubt that the Trump admin and people like Miller, Hegseth et al dream of ruling with an iron fist... they're just too incompetent to pull it off.
They couldn't even pull it off when they had a mandate and some people with actual talent in the first admin.
It's fascism. A shakedown to place private corporate power under state control. Consider that the people dreaming of ruling with an iron fist are currently in charge, shooting citizens in the street, and shaking down billion dollar companies aren't so incompetent that we need not worry.
Act accordingly.
What do you mean, "they couldn't pull it off?" They have already accomplished half of what they set out to do [1], a quarter of the way through Trump's term.
As incompetent and stupid as they are, the dunking just never seems to stop. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares, and nobody who cares has any power.
1: https://www.project2025.observer/en
This site reads like the greenie version of the Drudge Report.
Yikes.
Jenny Cohn on bluesky posts a ton of stuff on technofeudalist: https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social
A favorite target is Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale who was recently discussing regime change in Iran with Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah.
I'm good, thanks.
Why are you here?
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?
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.
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
In my personal experience, an ironic statement that hits too close to home will - regardless of the irony - get downvoted. Partly because irony serves to be lost and it is lost too much. Partly because it still uncovers something uncomfortable. A lot of people really do want fascism. So you loose on both sides. Brutal.
I guess if you get downvote for saying something ironical, then that's the loss of audience, not you.
One can argue that a thoughtful irony which gets downvoted might be more interesting than thoughtful irony which gets upvoted because of the points you mention.
Irony shouldn't be in a bubble of all upvotes. Funnily enough I had searched up some irony quote websites a few days back and going back on them was fun to find a relevant quote:
Irony is just the honesty with the volume cracked up
- George Saunders.
Damn that’s good quote. And I would even go as far as saying that the apparent cynicism of the “honesty with the volume cracked up” is just a mirroring of the inversion that symbols suffer while transiting Culture.
In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey.
This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
I don’t like woke and hate the far right. When do I get my centrist fascist state.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. - D.A.
Centrist positions are inherently unstable (think top of the hill) because they require active efforts to maintain the balance between factions prone to polarizations (left->far-left, right->far-right). It requires consistently good statesmanship or strong external challenge for opposing factions to act in united manner.
While setting proactive centrist initiatives might be hard, centrist sentiment with passive inaction is very very easy. All you need to do is tut-tut occasional "excesses."
In other words, the centrism of taking risks is very different from the centrism of avoiding them.
It depends on how the populace feels. It could also technically be a valley with the extremes on either side. Honestly though I think the centrists can never find positions people can get rabid about because by definition it calls for moderation.
Being a centrist is a cowardly position, inevitably on the wrong side of history, serving the ruling class while backstabbing your fellow workers and citizens. You'd rather pretend to be asleep and let it all happen to us than open your eyes and fight with humanity.
Funny things about that though, if you're centrist today, you'd be considered far left in the 2000s
That analogy does not make sense. You are assuming political spectrum is a left to right gradient which you just move along, when in reality it is a constantly shifting multi dimensional spectrum that shifts on different issues. However if we apply today’s centerist to the end of the 1990’s they would be more a Bush conservative.
Historically, people like that become known as collaborators.
The bystander effect in a nutshell. You too are eventually accountable and culpable and when the wheels of fascism turn far enough you'll find yourself as part of an outgroup.
Work for it.
You can't have centrist fascism. To have any kind of fascism, you would first need to commit to a specific ideological position.
Woke only exists in the mind of the far right.
I don’t know, I’m grouping runaway feminism and high LGBT visibility and celebration as woke.
"I don't like the Jews and hate the Nazis."
Peace in our time.
>weaponize disinformation, and provide the surveillance backbone of an emerging global police state.
Blessed description of all leftist goverments (especially Biden's, goverment of UK, France, etc).
You left Trump off the list, though. Deliberate?
You left leftist off the list, though. Deliberate?
I left them off because you already said them and it would be redundant. But now we know your answer to my question is "yes".
We all get to choose whether or not we put party before country. Some people choose poorly.