Part 3: On Power
Part 3: On Power
Or, What Would Ned Ludd Do during a Big, Dumb Gold Rush?
Soon, very soon (less than three weeks!!, the radio keeps saying), a portion of voting Americans will put a new (or returning) individual into a position of extreme power. As an anarchist and a chronically fatigued person, I would love to skip over this cycle entirely. Nothing irritates my values, my psyche, and my ability to have casual conversations with acquaintances more than a presidential election year.
One option is obviously, glaringly better than the other. And she can still only really be described as Far Less Bad, wholly representative of a bad, violent system.
But this series isn’t about electoral politics—it’s about AI (mostly), and the way that its acolytes, pushers, opportunists, and profiteers constitute a distinct (yet familiar) socio-political movement and cultural dynamic that will surely impact life on earth to a lasting degree.
In the last installment, I looked at “Value,” particularly market value, as it relates to AI. In our world, the market is a force of great and terrible power. Today, I want to expand that conversation into other realms of power, most broadly labeled “political.” We’ll have new players in traditional lobbying, the bleak political program of the worst tech fascists, and (in good news), labor power flexed by some new Luddites.
Silicon Valley As Lobbying Juggernaut:
As this long piece in the New Yorker explores in detail, the tech sector has begun making its influence manifest in political, as well as economic, terms. “Pro-crypto donors are responsible for almost half of all corporate donations to pacs in the 2024 election cycle, and the tech industry has become one of the largest corporate donors in the nation.”
And while the article focuses primarily on crypto, sharing stories of the industry’s ability to shift politicians of all stripes (not just those as capricious as Trump, who pivoted from calling crypto “a scam,” to remembering he loves a scam—releasing an NFT of his own in a time of financial need, to boasting that he will fire every anti-crypto regulator on “day one”), this influence obviously applies equally to AI firms who share similar motivations: avoid regulation, sell untested technology to the public as an acceptable good or a controllable evil, reap unrestricted profits.
We need only examine the well-worn facts of the impact of money in politics to imagine the future wrought by a politically activated tech sector. Think of the impact of CUFI and AIPAC on the restrictive way elected officials must engage with questions of U.S. support for Israel, even during well-documented, live-streamed genocidal campaigns flown in the face of international law and public moral outrage. Think about the way the fossil fuel lobby was able to create, perpetuate and elevate the entire field of climate change denial and the disastrous impact that’s had on our ability to galvanize a reasonable response to that crisis. What could go wrong when the tech elite pour their unmatched resources into achieving their desired ends?
Tech Fascism in Shades of Gray:
So, I should start by saying that I read Ayn Rand in high school. This, it must be said, is the only appropriate developmental stage at which to read her books, during a moment in which you, too, are a lone and unrecognized genius, toiling under the restrictions of a society that just doesn’t understand how unique and great you really are. So, yeah, I read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, even We The Living! Yikes, but I’m glad to have engaged with one of the great intellectual luminaries of the American right. Perhaps it was the beginning of a life too much spent on opposition research.
If you missed these important lessons (maybe not everyone’s dad is a libertarian?), here are the basics from Atlas Shrugged you need to understand for what’s next.
A railroad tycoon (a lady railroad tycoon, who, you should know, is also super hot) fights against the tyranny of government regulation alongside her (also-hot) Argentine mining heir ex-boyfriend (who is at risk of losing his fortune to the nationalization of his ore), an also-also-hot steel magnate who invented new metal (not to be confused with nu-metal), and an oil man named Ellis Wyatt (all the names in this book telegraph how you’re supposed to feel about the hot industrialists and the flabby, pale bureaucrats, BTW). But wait—everyone useful to the protagonist seems to be disappearing just as she needs them for her railroad projects! No one wants to work anymore!
It turns out, a SUPER hot and VERY genius engineer named John Galt is behind it all, enticing every moral and genetically blessed industrialist to go on strike and come to his weird little canyon compound! That will show the moochers, looters, takers, and whiners! Our railroad gal gets to the commune and ditches the hot steel magnate for Galt. (It’s ok with the steel guy, he is probably super into eugenics and thinks the two will make a more ideal future race.) Everyone is there! The last rationalist philosophy professor who had to work as a cook because the university hated rationality! A Power & Light CEO! A coal baron! A billionaire banker! Two auto industry titans! An under-appreciated composer, I guess, why not! A brain surgeon! A beautiful actress who left decadent Hollywood to secretly marry a pirate, who (for reasons I can’t remember) is also a huge part of the story! And finally, a Judge who is seen at the end of the novel re-writing the Constitution! Cool!
Everyone who is bad at or hates business literally dies in a convenient train accident. Also, John Galt gives a three hour speech on the radio and it is like 150 pages of the book that’s just Ayn Rand explaining why, Objectivist-ly, her notion of self-interest should be the guiding principle of all life on earth! Fuck bitches, get money!
Ok, wow, I didn’t think I was going to write all that about Atlas Shrugged, but that Wikipedia entry really unlocked my memory. Phew.
I hadn’t thought about Ayn Rand in a while until I came upon stories about Balaji Srinivasan and his vision for the “Gray tribe” in San Francisco and for the emergence of “network states” more generally. If you haven’t heard of Srinivasan (most often referred to by his first name, Balaji), congratulations, you’ve managed to avoid the more crypto-centric corners of the internet and the sub-genre of “Two Dudes Talking” podcasts. For excellent overviews of Balaji and his ilk that are better researched and sourced than I have time for in this series, head over to The Nerd Reich.
In short, Balaji’s Grays are tech loyalists, from founder on down to fanboy, those who can put the cold steel of rationality front and center and hitch themselves to the vague future promise of the tech industry as a whole. Grays exist in opposition to Blues (Democrats and their generally liberal cultural milieu) and, most often, as a vaguely allied but more forward-looking counterpoint to Reds (conservative, old-school Republicans).
To paraphrase Balaji’s own words in a long-ass video podcast that was mercifully chapter-labeled by Youtube, “…Reds look to God, Blues look to the State, Grays look to the Network…Reds are the past, Blues are the present—the Post-War Order looking to hold on despite the evidence all around that it’s falling apart—and Grays are the future.”
And the thing is, I can sort of see the appeal of this pitch. The two-party ruling-class consensus of American Empire is a failed system. A huge portion of regular working people are not represented in the present-day status quo, a huge number of us were famously not enfranchised in the murky “better times” of the MAGA-verse, and it seems like we should, given advancements in science and technology, be able to build a better world than this.
However. As I hope I’ve made abundantly clear in this series, these Gray, strange people are also not the visionaries of a livable, humane future.
People who live in San Francisco, or perhaps certain sections of Seattle, Austin, Boston and other techie hubs, may recognize the Gray vision for state creation through privatization as already nascent. Balaji uses existing infrastructure like corporate keycards and biometrics to help acolytes imagine a more Gray future. Now, access to certain areas (mostly office buildings) is controlled and the Gray elect are able to escape the Blue-created nightmare of “hobos” and other undesirables “littering” the streets. So what if that could be a whole city? If enough Grays could take over existing political structures and private ownership of adjacent city property, those Gray-friendly hubs could be physically networked and essentially closed to non-Grays. Through the creation of parallel institutions (and, of course, the courtship and outright bribing of the police force), the need for the Blue world could be eliminated.
To be clear, this Gray vision is not particularly original. It’s a) how cults frequently operate, eliminating the need for interaction with the portions of society out of alignment with the belief system and power structure of the group. I live near a community going through this exact dynamic with an extremist church. Through real estate, parallel institutions, and the electoral power of a raw, obedient future majority, they are, in some ways, on their way to their publicly promised “takeover”.
However, it’s also b) kind of…not entirely different from some of the ways I think society might better operate. As an anarchist, I believe that regular people can build the skill and social cohesion necessary to live autonomously within functional, collective structures. That we don’t need the threat of state-sanctioned violence nor the perverse, life-and-death stakes of capitalism to live well and care for one another. In this context, parallel institutions rock! In terms of efficacy, anarchistic mutual aid often kicks the shit out of both “Blue” bureaucratically-mediated assistance programs and “Red” in-group charity, filtered through the lens of morality. See recent examples in Hurricane Helene or projects like Crips for eSims for Gaza.
But, of course, the unpredictable beauty of decentralized autonomous organizing is quite the opposite of what the openly fascistic tech-right desire. Their implicit—and sometimes explicit—ideal is deeply authoritarian, a society ruled by the perfect order of an infallibly rational god-king. Whether authority is derived from AGI itself or more individualized cult-societies built around charismatic boy-genius Founders, it’s a dark vision of a world rife with abuse of power. What could go wrong if we put the kind of mature, rational people who would buy and ruin an entire social network just so people would stop bullying them for their shit takes, apartheid emerald mine inheritance, and generally off-putting demeanor? No matter who envisions themselves on top, this is an ideology with plenty of room for eugenicists, misogynists, and boosters of ethnic cleansing.
One nascent “network state” that’s garnered media coverage lately is (woeful shoutout to my defunct, decade-old, radio show of the same name) Praxis, founded by schlubby sweats-wearing millenial Dryden Brown. In his own words (in this recent BBC article), he describes this movement as “the pursuit of the frontier.” This language is one of many ways today’s tech power elite (and aspiring figures like Brown) brand this moment (as I have, here) as a sort of grand, exploratory, nation-building colonial project. Comparisons to the Founding Fathers flourish and many of the fascistic ideas bubbling to the highest reaches of techie discourse come straight from “Dark Enlightenment” figures like Curtis Yarvin. I don’t think they’re wrong to compare their unregulated moment in the sun to other pivotal moments in Western history, particularly the frontier era of Westward Expansion. It’s a moment filled with just as much dehumanization, snake oil, and get-rich-quick talk.
And maybe you’re thinking that we’ve deviated far, far from the AI boom that this series is supposed to be about, and that these are just a few of Silicon Valley’s oddest creatures, outliers. But undeniably, the entire sector has lurched far to the right, alongside (and out ahead of) our national politics as a whole. Elon Musk is a prominent example alive in the public imagination. Peter Thiel has been a right-leaning libertarian since his own teenage Ayn Rand reading days, but many of the rest of the tech elite have generally been perceived (culturally) as “Blues,” even if their actions were somewhat “disruptive” to the status quo. The impacts of social media, of algorithmic bias, of early applications of generative AI have hardly been “woke” and while the right may whine all day about censorship (casting aside the fact that the First Amendment—kind of outdated anyway, no?—does not apply to private companies which is the whole appeal of this network state thing in the first place, yeah?), the vast majority of negative impacts from these technologies fall disproportionately upon exactly the groups you’d imagine they would under a racialized and patriarchal late capitalism.
One milestone in the rightward thrusting of the tech sector took place last month, when Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts appeared as a special guest at the September “Reboot 2024: The New Reality” conference, which the Heritage Foundation also co-sponsored. Soleil Ho pointed out the general lack of enthusiasm among the audience at the pro-natalism panel immediately following Robert’s first appearance in their telling of the bizarre fusion that was this conference:
“Much ink has been spilled lately over the conservatism of Silicon Valley tech billionaires like Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who each have contributed significant symbolic and monetary resources to political causes. Musk and Thiel are somewhat outliers in their emphasis on “anti-woke” culture war issues like diversity, equity and inclusion, and trans rights. But it’s clear from the sold-out, Heritage Foundation-sponsored conference that the utilitarians in tech and conservatives see real potential in this alliance…If that means selling out women and girls along the way? I’m sure more AI is worth it, right?”
Who does take care of Elon Musk’s twelve children day to day? Soon, I’m sure, it will be a state-of-the-art, ugly-ass AI nanny of some kind, and until then, women and underpaid care workers will surely, happily, fill the gap. And if we don’t like it, we can look forward to pledging our fealty to the best tech corporation for our individual needs. Love it or leave it. I’m sure these Gray guys have super genius ideas for schools, hospitals, food, and you know…society.
Finally, Some Luddites (sort of):
I wanted to be able to close on a more hopeful note regarding power, as in, the power of regular people to express any level of agency in our lives. There isn’t a huge amount of news on that front, but I do really trust people to problem solve and support one another in moments of crisis and upheaval (see: well, look around). I came upon a couple of interesting posts about the recent longshoreman’s strike, which had automation at the heart of its demands.
The first was an econ-heavy analysis of the strike, its goals, and what it means for other workers and the economy at large. The standout paragraph reads:
“Open AI just raised the largest venture capital round ever because Sam Altman is a master fundraiser. People are very excited about what AI can offer but there is no sense of democracy in the implementation. They just do things, which is how it always is. They move fast and break things, and the things they break can be people’s lives. And that’s just the American way and it’s brought a lot of efficiency to society but it’s probably time for some plan to take care of workers.”
I don’t love the passive framing of “some plan to take care of workers,” because, in the ideal scenario, the workers are themselves creating the plan to care for one another, but I do appreciate the analysis of power. “They [those with enough VC or other money to implement big, society-rocking changes via markets] just do things…” And what the previous section of this piece shows, I hope, is that there is an entire politics and values system built upon the idea that the most important thing is the powerful individual’s unrestricted ability to “just do things.” The massive danger comes when people with this ruthless belief system also monopolize control over (allegedly) the most powerful technology to ever exist.
So how do we resist? For me, trying in small ways to keep up on what is even happening, rather than allowing tech to remain shrouded in its own notions of majesty and mystery, helps. I hope that this series can be a way into that for you, if you’re interested. Maybe it’s getting involved in the open-source movements working to maximize direct access to these technologies (though that itself can be a slippery topic, which will be explored minimally in this series’ final installment). Maybe it’s unplugging and trying to start a farm commune, honestly. And maybe, like the longshoremen, it’s finding a foothold in your daily life from which to stand and fight against an anti-democratic rollout of powerful and unproven tech.
I haven’t yet read Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine, but I have been enjoying their Substack of the same name. (Of particular interest to readers of this post, this piece about Elon’s particular role as a tech authoritarian, released after I was almost done with this essay and therefore not otherwise referenced.) From another post, Merchant’s summary of the political project of the (tragically misunderstood) Luddites:
“By resisting those bosses who used machinery as engines of exploitation, the Luddites helped foment class consciousness, strengthened the bonds that would yield a wide-ranging reform movement, and challenged the idea that, in an industrial society, one party should be able to use machinery to accumulate profits at the expense of another, or of the common good.”
Sound familiar? In the case of the tech industrialists, the profits have been accumulated at the expense of many others—the captive prison laborers who train facial and image recognition systems, the users whose personal data has been scraped to create dangerously biased recommendation engines, the workers handling hazardous materials and working in unsafe conditions, often invisibly, to bring our shiny implements into being, and on—and at the expense of the common good. All in the name of a progress and efficiency that rings hollow to many of us around the world. (See Part 1: On Function for more on that).
Now, AI powered automation is accelerating, which is primarily a problem of power. It isn’t so much that all of this technology is inherently bad or dangerous. It’s that it is further empowering an already extremely powerful class of people. The machinery is (and will, if unchecked, continue to) accumulating profits as an agent of the already powerful at the expense of all of the rest of us. While AI will be sold to the smart phone users of the world as a nifty way to remove blemishes or consult the all-knowing oracle, it will, without major checks on power, actually serve as a tool to further entrench the existing structures which enrich a tiny few on the backs of the rest of us, human and non-human alike.
There are ways to strike back against entrenched power, but they require a level of organization and long-term vision somewhat incompatible with our instant gratification culture—one that considers posting on social media a significant political act.
Merchant writes, “Today, just as 200 years ago, bosses—whether a shipping magnate or a CEO of an AI company—won’t hand over the gains from a new technology to their workers willingly. It’s why the longshoremen, as well as other unions, like SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, decided that automation was an existential threat to their jobs—and to fight back by rejecting the notion that bosses should hold the power to decide to use technology to replace their work. Outside the pundit class, these proved to be effective and popular positions, and each group won their fight, at least in the short term.”
We must remember the lessons of power exercised during previous industrial epochs, whether by the Luddites who used direct action or by the thinkers who insisted that workers could determine our own futures. We are still many and they are still few. Another world is possible, one which is not a Gray tech dystopia run by the most repellent men around. Next installment, the final part of this series, will focus on this topic: On Dreams.
Until then,
TRW