Pozostając w temacie dystopijnych wizji przyszłości przedstawiam kolejny ciekawy artykuł.

‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros

Billionaires, or their equivalents, have been around a long time, but there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.

Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon, underground lair in New Zealand, or virtual reality server in the cloud. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension.

Na wstępie mamy opisane jak bogaci ludzie w ostatnich latach zaczęli mieć coraz większe ambicje co do kierowania i budowania naszej cywilizacji.

What evidence we do see of their operations in the real world mostly take the form of externalised harm. Digital businesses depend on mineral slavery in Africa, dump toxic waste in China, facilitate the undermining of democracy across the globe and spread destabilising disinformation for profit – all from the sociopathic remove afforded by remote administration.

Tutaj jest opisane, że współcześni szefowie technologicznych korporacji nie mają problemu ze współpracą z totalitarnymi reżimami i dewastowaniem naszego środowiska.

Zuckerberg had to go all the way back to Augustus Caesar for a role model, and his admiration for the emperor borders on obsession. He models his haircut on Augustus; his wife joked that three people went on their honeymoon to Rome: Mark, Augustus and herself; he named his second daughter August; and he used to end Facebook meetings by proclaiming “Domination!”

 It’s that sort of top down thinking that led Zuckerberg to not only establish an independent oversight board at Facebook, dubbed the “Supreme Court”, but to suggest that it would one day expand its scope to include companies across the industry.

Ponownie artykuł wskazuje, że Zuckerberg wzoruje się na pierwszym cesarzu rzymskim nie tylko w wyglądzie ale i zachowaniu.

At least Zuckerberg’s anti-democratic measures are expressed as the decrees of a benevolent dictator. Musk exercises no such restraint. In response to the accusation that the US government organised a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in order for Tesla to secure lithium there, Musk tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

Artykuł sugeruje, że Zuckerberg stara się aspirować do roli życzliwego dyktatora gdy Elon Musk jest jeszcze gorzy.

This is unprecedentedly broad, or what could be called “horizontal” power. It is success across such a wide spectrum that has given today’s tech billionaires false confidence in the extent of their own expertise. Gates, who regularly dispensed advice on vaccines and public health in television interviews, eventually issued a report in which he graded each country’s pandemic response as if he were a school teacher who knew better than every nation’s department of health (no one got an A).

Wspomniane są też działania Gatesa w kontekście szczepionek gdzie stawiał się jako objawiony autorytet w tej sprawie nawet jeśli nie miał w tym żadnych kompetencji.

Thiel directly quotes Nietzsche to argue for the supremacy of the individual: “madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule”. In Thiel’s words: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” This distorted image of the übermensch as a godlike creator, pushing confidently towards his clear vision of how things should be, persists as an essential component of The Mindset. You don’t get hockey stick stock charts without such totalised, dominion thinking.

Ogólnie krytykowany jest wizerunek nowych technologicznych półbogów na jakich obecnie się kreuje nowe pokolenie biznesmenów, które prowadzi do tego, że ówcześni miliarderzy coraz bardziej postrzegają sie jako lepszych od zwykłych ludzi, a przez to uprawnionych do kierowania losem maluczkich.

This is not capitalism, as Yanis Varoufakis explains in his new book Technofeudalism. Capitalists sought to extract value from workers by disconnecting them from the value they created, but they still made stuff. Feudalists seek an entirely passive income by “going meta” on business itself. They are rent-seekers, whose aim is to own the very platform on which other people do the work.

To z kolei prowadzi do rozwoju nowego feudalizmu gigantów technologicznych. Tak o to wygląda późni kapitalizm.

#antykapitalizm #revoltagainstmodernworld #polityka