One of the three pillars of modern 21st century fascism is masculinism. (The other are white supremacy and theocracy/thearchy). Masculinism is a capsule encompassing misogyny (the hatred of women as women), MRA, redpilling, incel ideology, pick-up artist and seduction communities, the aesthetics of Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate, the thinking of Jordan Peterson, etc. The throughline of these subcultures is that ... masculinism is essentially frame-flipped feminism.
Masculinist narratives assert that there is a battle of the sexes, and feminism was a tool used by women to subvert and overturn the "naturalized" masculine world order with females ending up as the dominant sex and males ending up tragic heroes degraded to victims in the modern order. Masculinists see feminists as the final boss, and regard LGBTQ rights movements as a plot by women to further emasculate men by creating more complex sexual divisions than lock-and-key male-female procreative intercourse. So LGBTQ hate is the stage boss that must be defeated to prepare to battle the final boss of feminism.
relatedly, undergirding the reactionary deluge of anti trans hate is the belief that youth are not autonomous agents but, like women: 1. paragons of innocence under constant threat from [insert diabolicized minority here]; 2. vessels for intergenerational transfer of conservativism and social reproduction of white patriarchy
When you talked about the right-wing view of industrial capital versus financial capital, I thought of something I read a while ago about the conservative love of family-owned big business versus the publically-owned corporate big business.
Though not the same thing, I think it flows in the same vein. Business that are family-owned tend to foster generational wealth and its "good blood", they are indifferent to political correctness and modern concepts of egalitarianism, their relationships with employees and the public are more personal in nature, and profit tends to be even more consolidated at the top.
In the conservative mind, this is how businesses & entire industries ought to be run. Much like everything else they believe in, right-wing folks look to the past for inspiration about the future. Back in the middle ages, in pre-egalitarian times, none of the liberal-progressive ideas they hated even existed. Everyone accepted their place in the pyramid.
And the antisemitism goes well with this. Who in the middle ages was a very convenient enemy that was used to distract the population from failures in leadership by the ruling families? Jews of course.
So I suppose I'm drawing a line from tech entrepenuers morphing from "bossists" to reactionaries that want to return humanity to an earlier form of neo-feudalist government, to these same reactionaries peddling knee-jerk antisemitic conspiracy theories to distract the preferably uneducated masses from their own failures when convenient.
The danger, though, and it's an affliction for pro wrestlers too, is that committing to kayfabe can lead to "living the gimmick."
See Ric Flair for instance. The real Ric Flair was very much the flamboyant libertine he portrayed in wrestling. We now know why his career lasted so long. He had as many marriages as world title reigns and he spent recklessly to maintain his lifestyle. Wrestling promoters would pay him big bucks to appear, and he does love the spotlight enough to not care that he's too old and broken down to "go Broadway" (a slang term for 60-minute time limit draw matches) and his ringwork is limited to chops, low blows and his figure-four leg lock.
He's also not aged well since he lived long enough to be part of #MeToo. His most infamous incident was a 2002 plane ride full of WWE wrestlers; Flair himself was accused of being drunk and strutting around in his robe, exposing himself to a flight attendant. Plus his long association with rightwing politics will only alienate him further from wrestling fans, who believe it or not are largely working-class Democrats.
Modern-day GOP politicians also no longer detach themselves from their kayfabe personas. On the left, AOC can. She has her AOC kayfabe persona, but ultimately she is what we understand to be a congresswoman in the responsibilities of the job. She handles constituent services, does legislative research, attends votes, caucuses with allies, etc. On the right, MTG cannot. She's everything her public persona is and so much less. Her commitment to the bit has transformed into a sincere worldview.
I think calling every context switching politician kayfabe makes the analogy less useful (or worse, lends itself to "all politicians are equally bad" discourse), and I would definitely not use it on AOC.
I think both you and I know what kayfabe is and how it works. You probably were or are a pro wrestling fan -- that's why you'd probably understand the underlying idea of it.
(To any non-wrestling fans reading this: Kayfabe is originally carnival slang for "fake," but pro wrestling inhabits a strange space where neither "real" nor "fake" describes the spectacle before you. A working indie pro wrestler, when he gets The Question, gave the best answer: "Pro wrestling is predetermined. It is not fake." Pro wrestling cannot be considered a sport because the participants are working toward a known outcome. Yet to get to the outcome, wrestlers must take the same training and preparation as professional athletes, and it is an intensely physically challenging spectacle. And yes, wrestlers are frequently injured. The word "kayfabe" is an apt description of pro wrestling, a melding and confusion of what it means to be real and fake, knowing it is simulated but speaking of it as if it were real competition.)
I'll defend my description of AOC. She's young and she is incredibly context-savvy. She's self-aware of her fame, she reads her social media, she reads the press and she reads the room. More importantly, AOC knows who her haters are -- and AOC is a master at playing the heel to them.
However, she's aware that there's a mundane, tedious aspect of House politics that she must also fulfill. So she knows when and how to set aside the public context and does the duties of her office just the same as someone without her savvy or charisma does it. This is a great, admirable quality to have.
The agon of capital cohorts (finance vs. industrial) should not be viewed through the frame of left vs. right or progress vs. reaction -- existential battles that speciate politics into incompatible and irreconcilable factions -- but rather sectarian strife.
Finance vs. industrial capital is more like a religious schism or gangs feuding over turf, in other words narcissisms of small differences or Girardian terror, high-stakes battles over petty rewards.
Agonism is the idea that conflict (agon) is an inevitable consequence of the human condition, and things like politics are created to channel the agon (or the idea at the center of the conflict) into a positive force. Agonism can be history shaping, like the existential conflicts of left vs. right or progress vs. reaction, but in the absence of existential conflicts and stable power relations, you have lesser conflicts like industrial vs. financial capital that are fissiparous. I picked up that word on another Substack and finally got to use it. :)
“When one examines the specific characteristics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism—abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility—it is striking that they are all characteristics of the value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx.”
It is also striking that they are all characteristics attributed to, and extolled of, the software industry, AKA Silicon Valley's main beat.
Just another thing that members of every group do but only some groups get blamed for.
"Marx's notion of commodity fetishism divided the world into use value and exchange value."
???
By 'commodity fetishism,' Marx refers to attributing independent agency to the economic relations created by society, i.e., "I lost my job because of the economy." His use of the terms, 'Use' value versus 'Exchange' value refers to the different values of commodities. For a Marxist, the amount of socially necessary labor required for their production is the only objective criterion for the value of a commodity. The exchange value, by contrast, is what a commodity is worth on the market.
Marx's analysis did divide the function of commodities but not 'the world' and his notion of the fetishism of commodities as a false consciousness is not his analysis of commodity values.
Very interesting and perceptive. As it happens, I am about 95% of the way through Gitta Sereny's masterwork Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. Speer was universally viewed as a marvel of industrial organization -- on his own he may have extended the war by a year or two (though if he had convinced Goering and the Gauleiters to allow German women to be mobilized it would really have been a different story). Many of these tech types are clear racists or anti-Semites, but many more are morally empty like Speer. They will swallow anything in pursuit of their idea of progress.
I can take a stab at "Why now?" for our darling Tech-Overlords.
1. They're a dying breed in a maturing market. Each new novelty is exposed as merely that, or just straight up fraud, which leads to...
2. They bet against the world's institutions and lost, or at the very least, discovered there were limits to their reach. With crypto, with Trump, with the Metaverse. They wanted to make everyone in the world dependent on them, but they couldn't resist the appeal of sharing ideas with other terminally online kooks and bigots. As well as making "new friends" in all sorts of high places all around the world. And this has led to...
3. Big Tech sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Playing coy fraud and spy games with the world's governments and criminal cartels is so fun and exciting! Until it's not. And right now they're literally toying with Big Data-ing themselves out of existence with new AI technology, and they hypocritically cry out for the world's governments to regulate their "Wild West" they were so very proud of. Henry Ford didn't spend his declining years wrestling with car safety issues, he retreated to a childhood kookland, a time when cars didn't exist. Musk and Thiel and the rest will do the same.
Of course, this also feeds into their ego, like Eco's ur-fascist model where the cult of death and the cult of the hero are interchangable. The goal of the fascist to seize his private existential angst and channel it into something Wagnerian, an epic saga that gives their increasingly irrelevant time on this planet meaning. Musk will keep impregnating women, devaluing his family life into something resembling the eternal quest of a 13 year old satyr, while Thiel will lean so much into vampire mythos that he'll go through with his $250,000 a month cryogenic coffin, even though he knows it's futile, because fuck you and the universe too, that's why. Epic win!
And then there's 4, because fascism is an easy way to evade and absolve one self's of responsibility for anything, ie blame it on the jews, the women, the transgendered. It wasn't Big Tech algorithms that turned your parents into unapproachable, toxic kooks or arrested your children into a permanent state of adolescence. Nope, it was nefarious, nebulous forces and bad actors who did that!
Modern fascism's Big Tech interpretation will be, "Together, we are unaccountable."
Dec 20, 2023·edited Dec 21, 2023Liked by John Ganz
(Late to this; apologies.)
I would also not skimp on crediting what I'll call 'rich ressentiment' in the form of men (almost always, still) who feel like they ought to be in full control of the world but are not—not even in a moral sense of 'ought', though that usually follows, but rather that they can not understand why they can not get absolutely everything they want, given that they can get 99% of it. Mr Trump, I'd say, understands this, living simultaneously as one born with a literal 1940s million dollars but completely under his father's thumb.
This is old-hat except that I differ with many (including myself, months back) about that 'ought': generally people assume that our backers of fascism believe that they have a _moral_ right to run everything and that they'd do a better job at it than existing institutions, where I think it likely that many of them don't care about those, they belueve that they could seize all the power they don't have and they very much _want_ to do so.
Tech-Overlords hold themselves as the "other side of the argument" in a Hegelian abstract-negative-concrete (commonly misattributed as Hegel saying thesis-antithesis-synthesis) dialectic against "the woke" and "wokeness."
Wokeness is deliberately abstract, and now exclusively used by privileged castes/classes as an epithet, but there is a concrete "horror" embedded within it. The people, let's call them Underservants, working in tech fields do not share the politics or worldview of the Overlords. Most tech jobs are in very left-leaning Democratic metropolitan areas, and the Underservants reflect the vox populi in the communities in which they live. Tech jobs are not especially demographically diverse, but there is enough demographic diversity among women, immigrant professionals, and Americans of color that the workfloor resembles the modern Democratic voter coalition.
The Underservants are also in this time and place, a bourgeoisie advancing a socially progressive political agenda, much in the way academics, artists and intellectuals have in earlier periods of history.
This social consciousness will lead to the Underservants turning inward to their organizations and holding their Overlords as the cause of all social ills.
The Overlords know this, and the erstwhile-libertarian ideology that marked the "Silicon Valley ethos" begat a generation that wants to atone for the sins of their forebears. The Overlords see the Underservants' claims as zero-sum, or negative-equity. For every rights claim, every increment of progress must come at the expense of the status quo. In other words, when a woman earns a right, an incel is created. Every LGBTQ advance must come at the degredation of masculinity. Each step of progress is only possible by making the present Overlords less powerful and weaker than the Overlords before them.
There is no such thing as a master without slaves. A laird without peasants. A husband without a wife. The identity of one, and all of the consequent material and psychological wealth, power and status, is inextricably linked to possession of the other. The other yearns for extrication. These two opposing forces meet in a Hegelian gladiatorial arena of inevitability in a fight to the finish.
One of the innumerable but lesser acknowledged benefits of learning things from Ganz’s newsletter is that one feels no guilt whatever about detesting Silicon Valley billionaires and their ideological lickspittles.
Your point at the closing that "while classical fascism and antisemitism might not be the ultimate form these tech politics take, it will spit out something like fascism and antisemitism" is especially relevant in light of all the recent 'are they fascists or not' debate. It's been frustrating to read people who are all "it can't be fascism because it doesn't meet these" very specific to the 1920s and 1930s criteria, which of course renders the concept useless in a contemporary context. As Eco pointed out, “the fascist game can be played in many ways, [but] the name of the game doesn’t change.”
On a related note, Corey Robin once referenced an essay by Jodi Dean on techno feudalism in the LA Review, that's been picked up by a few other people, like Yanis Varoufakis. That also seems to have some relevance here, given the backward looking/forward looking nature of reactionary modernism.
I'd say the rich reactionaries flirting (or twerking up against)anti-Market views, beside being an attempt to ride a Populism Tiger, has the character of men (it does seem to be all men) who've done very well who have reason to dislike a system which at least claims to be able to topple them, as badly (by design) as it does that these days. I think they may simply want to pull the ladder up after them, and can want that because they don't understand that they're sitting on its top, not floating in mid-air.
Corey Robin is my go-to, having given probably the best contemporary explanation of reactionaries: “For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”
In plainer English: "Defend your status and the Hierarchy that feeds you."
That 'the felt experience of having power' is very good, and well-appropriated from 'felt experience'‘s more frequent use in analyses of the lives of the oppressed. I would amend it only by saying that it's not just having power, but also of feeling that one _should_ have power, one _would_ if the Universe were running as it's supposed to do. Also, I would lump 'status' in with power, as I think you do, as (for one thing) many people don't experience power directly, but rather in the forms of what they can do or what not can be done to them because of their status. (I'll guess the term-of-art would be 'mystified power'.)
For most of us, status is a better ~guarantor of your future food (and grooming, mating, care in illness,safety from pain, impunity in inflicting pain, general happiness) than your own abilities, so in many moods how can I blame the rich, the very bigoted, the sexist (though that's more of a stretch, since that's my most likely failing) for wanting to feel secure?
I'm not a Marxist, but I was struck by a Marxist's claim that a good Marxist should not hate the rich: such both ignores economic determinism (which bug in Marxism I can live without) and clouds the judgement (which seems just right)—and the point of analysis is understanding and the chance to do something about it, not yet another way of feeling oneself better than some other people (which is tempting because status is the best &c.).
Not exactly the people at the top, it's the people right in the middle, small business tyrants, teetering on the edge of returning to proletarian status, who believed the promise of Middleness e.g. "I, the large capitalist, will lord over you, but don't worry: You get to lord over black people/your wife/the impoverished! Better to be in the middle instead of at the bottom, right?" and blame some malign influence (usually Jews) for allowing the people at "the bottom" to skip right over them and get to "the top" before them. They don't want to pull up the ladder, because they thought that there wasn't supposed to be a ladder under them in the first place.
…and such are much more prone to status-anxiety than either the poor, who generally know they're screwed because they suffer from their status, not anxiety over, or the rich (who rarely become poor or middle-class these days).(Joe Bob Briggs, the Sage of Grapevine, Texas, opined once that the problem wasn't an absence of the Ladder of Success but rather the removal of the Greasy Slide of Failure…I don't agree completely, but have been struck by how many reversals of fortune among the wealthy there used to be, maybe their former, extreme, formality had to do both with aping the old nobility and with status-armouring).
Good bourgeoisie have long noted the use-value/ exchange-value split and identified with the former (e.g. Romney's "makers and takers"); the reactionary departure is in racializing the contradiction and turning it into an anti-Semitic trope.
It's kind of hilarious however that both the vanguard of reaction and its shock troops (car dealers, small businessmen, petit bourg of every kind) at most manage the labor of others and never make anything of use value. This valorization of "utility" must be radically distorted to serve it's ideological purpose !
Hanania is so strange. I feel sort of bad for reading his (free) posts, but it's fascinating to see someone who concedes all of the left's points about the pathological tendencies of the right: anti-empiricism, anti-rationality, gullibility, rampant grifting; and who is also contemptuous of almost every conservative writer, but supports them all because he basically wants the US to turn into Nazi Germany.
On TESCREAL: the point of that acronym/idea is to use the people you're describing (Musk, Sacks, Thiel) to criticize both mainstream liberals who think AI is important and/or dangerous (like Sam Altman) or people who take utilitarian/"effective altruism" approaches generally to other things (who are often left-liberal) by saying that they're all the same.
Do you mean that you sympathize with some of the terms in the acronym but don't like being lumped in with Musk (and the "Rationalists", "longtermists" etc.)? That's how I feel, it's unfortunate that certain kinds of futurist ideas have become so strongly associated with that sort of libertarian thought (and sometimes fascism of the 'reactionary modernist' variety, as with Thiel) in recent years.
Right, I have basically utilitarian moral views, and give lots of money to eg GiveWell. I think this does not put me in a category meaningfully like Elon, who's not, shall we say, focused on the welfare of the world's poorest.
But more to the point, the people like Gebru who coined the term TESCREAL are particularly focused on AI, and they are making the case that certain positions on AI (mostly that we should worry a lot that it will kill us all) are associated with people that their audience (which includes AI researchers and academics) doesn't like. I think this is a bad way to go about an analysis of the situation, although I sympathize since these worries are basically made up and thus difficult to more sensibly refute.
How is Altman - an admitted doomsday prepper whose side project is scanning the eyeballs of Africans to use them as part of a crypto scheme - a 'mainstream liberal'?
https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Sam+Altman&cycle=&state=CA shows donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars to boring D political organizations and candidates over a period of many years with none to republicans. He's also obviously a weird guy in the way that it seems most people with too much money end up as, but his politics seem pretty legible.
That goes well beyond 'weird', and I don't think 'donates a tiny percentage of fortune to mainline Dems' indicates anything other than savvy for a California-based tech CEO, but if it makes you feel better, then sure.
I think that the boring political contest over the direction of the country is way more significant than investments in colonial cryptocurrency schemes and being a doomsday prepper and AI nut.
And FWIW, I believe that Musk believed himself when he claimed to be a moderate way back when. That's the point - one can hold bland explicit political beliefs without noticing that your horrible implicit politics directly contradict that, at least until they finally take over
A New York Times newsletter article wrote about irony poisoning. It's describing the tendency of online communities like 4Chan to have an anything-goes community where transgressiveness, edginess, absurdity and irony are celebrated. A subculture is born.
Once upon a time, racism, Nazism, etc. could hide behind a veil of detachment through irony and humor. Then, sincere Nazis began to show up and mingle.
You know contact theory, that being around a member of an outgroup will eventually lead to empathy, sympathy and tolerance and wear away at prejudices? Well, contact theory works the other way.
Extremely online edgelords will relate to Nazis, recognizing they are normal people with everyday problems and are deserving of empathy, sympathy and tolerance. When they can interact with a flesh-and-blood Nazi, they slowly come around to their viewpoint and start to adopt the far-right worldview as well.
They will then come to turn against the "normie" consensus that kept much of the Western world together, that Nazis are bad, and the education about the horrors of what was witnessed during and after World War II is all just emotional manipulation.
So these transgressive spaces come to be defined by their far-right personalities. The humor does serve a purpose: it's a feint, a codpiece, a red herring to give their sincerity plausible deniability.
I missed out on your session with Interintellect as I suddenly got ill with Covid. Wish I could have been present. Here's what I'd like to ask you: what do you think has largely caused the rise of reactionary modernism and rationalism? Do you think reactionary tech modernism and the rationalist community are analogous to Romanticism? If so, what makes them analogous, and would be analogous to the Enlightenment?
Nazism surely drew a great deal of influence from social Darwinism, cast as unimpeachably rational science. That seems relevant here. Ditto the interest in classical civilizations and mores, with a special hard-on for the Spartans. Big data & accompanying algorithms/AI aren't a revolution on the order of Darwinism IMO, but certainly extremely disruptive and new. When you have that kind of dramatic shift, many smart people will decide that society's morals aren't keeping up with our new knowledge. Charles Murray is obviously a reactionary, but his performance is self-consciously obsessed with rationality and scientism: the latest numbers, he argues, reveal the truth--our morality and policy choices should follow. AI and gene editing make for a particularly creepy Übermensch fetish to come. One peculiar feature of "reactionary modernism" is that the idealized past is really pre-Christian--the Fascists loved the Pagan strongmen, an interest shared by the new Tech Right, it seems. In this sense, reactionary modernism--in both its reaction and its modernism--argues for a fundamental break with Christian moral thinking (meant in the broadest sense) along with its rejection of other staples of the West (democracy, liberalism, egalitarianism as a political ideal, the golden-rule ethos, etc.). Reactionary modernism lands instead on the strong dominating the weak as a scientific (amoral) natural truth--aided by technological advancements to make the strong ever stronger still, the uberubermensch.
It's not surprising that the Thiel / Yarvin types fantasize about running the U.S. (or disparate off-shore nation-states) like a Silicon Valley tech company. What's strange are their fantasies about how Silicon Valley companies operate today. How can they be so deluded about their own lived reality?
I've worked in tech for almost 25 years, mostly in the S.F. Bay Area. In that time, I've worked for big tech, small startups, and companies in-between. I've encountered a few autocratic CEOs in startup circles, and one thing they had in common is an inability to retain employees.
As for big tech, I'm plenty familiar with the inner workings of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, and they are as messy and bureaucratic as you would imagine any giant company to be. In this environment, I suppose it's possible for a CEO to behave like an autocrat, but a business is not a military outfit. Bosses don't issue commands. Workers don't wait around for orders. People operate with quite a bit of autonomy. And they can also simply quit.
I suppose what I've left out, now that I think about it, is that these guys explicitly talk about their own rank and file employees in the same way they talk about the general public — that is, as an obstacle or inconvenience.
These guys also tend to see women not as autonomous agents, but as a resource that's improperly allocated under democratic and egalitarian systems.
yeah absolutely. i want to deal with the misogynistic part of it more
Please do, John.
One of the three pillars of modern 21st century fascism is masculinism. (The other are white supremacy and theocracy/thearchy). Masculinism is a capsule encompassing misogyny (the hatred of women as women), MRA, redpilling, incel ideology, pick-up artist and seduction communities, the aesthetics of Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate, the thinking of Jordan Peterson, etc. The throughline of these subcultures is that ... masculinism is essentially frame-flipped feminism.
Masculinist narratives assert that there is a battle of the sexes, and feminism was a tool used by women to subvert and overturn the "naturalized" masculine world order with females ending up as the dominant sex and males ending up tragic heroes degraded to victims in the modern order. Masculinists see feminists as the final boss, and regard LGBTQ rights movements as a plot by women to further emasculate men by creating more complex sexual divisions than lock-and-key male-female procreative intercourse. So LGBTQ hate is the stage boss that must be defeated to prepare to battle the final boss of feminism.
relatedly, undergirding the reactionary deluge of anti trans hate is the belief that youth are not autonomous agents but, like women: 1. paragons of innocence under constant threat from [insert diabolicized minority here]; 2. vessels for intergenerational transfer of conservativism and social reproduction of white patriarchy
When you talked about the right-wing view of industrial capital versus financial capital, I thought of something I read a while ago about the conservative love of family-owned big business versus the publically-owned corporate big business.
Though not the same thing, I think it flows in the same vein. Business that are family-owned tend to foster generational wealth and its "good blood", they are indifferent to political correctness and modern concepts of egalitarianism, their relationships with employees and the public are more personal in nature, and profit tends to be even more consolidated at the top.
In the conservative mind, this is how businesses & entire industries ought to be run. Much like everything else they believe in, right-wing folks look to the past for inspiration about the future. Back in the middle ages, in pre-egalitarian times, none of the liberal-progressive ideas they hated even existed. Everyone accepted their place in the pyramid.
And the antisemitism goes well with this. Who in the middle ages was a very convenient enemy that was used to distract the population from failures in leadership by the ruling families? Jews of course.
So I suppose I'm drawing a line from tech entrepenuers morphing from "bossists" to reactionaries that want to return humanity to an earlier form of neo-feudalist government, to these same reactionaries peddling knee-jerk antisemitic conspiracy theories to distract the preferably uneducated masses from their own failures when convenient.
My God, we are living in some dark days.
But it is not real. The right wing loves (and depends on) financial capital. It's just kayfabe for their base.
The danger, though, and it's an affliction for pro wrestlers too, is that committing to kayfabe can lead to "living the gimmick."
See Ric Flair for instance. The real Ric Flair was very much the flamboyant libertine he portrayed in wrestling. We now know why his career lasted so long. He had as many marriages as world title reigns and he spent recklessly to maintain his lifestyle. Wrestling promoters would pay him big bucks to appear, and he does love the spotlight enough to not care that he's too old and broken down to "go Broadway" (a slang term for 60-minute time limit draw matches) and his ringwork is limited to chops, low blows and his figure-four leg lock.
He's also not aged well since he lived long enough to be part of #MeToo. His most infamous incident was a 2002 plane ride full of WWE wrestlers; Flair himself was accused of being drunk and strutting around in his robe, exposing himself to a flight attendant. Plus his long association with rightwing politics will only alienate him further from wrestling fans, who believe it or not are largely working-class Democrats.
Modern-day GOP politicians also no longer detach themselves from their kayfabe personas. On the left, AOC can. She has her AOC kayfabe persona, but ultimately she is what we understand to be a congresswoman in the responsibilities of the job. She handles constituent services, does legislative research, attends votes, caucuses with allies, etc. On the right, MTG cannot. She's everything her public persona is and so much less. Her commitment to the bit has transformed into a sincere worldview.
I think calling every context switching politician kayfabe makes the analogy less useful (or worse, lends itself to "all politicians are equally bad" discourse), and I would definitely not use it on AOC.
I think both you and I know what kayfabe is and how it works. You probably were or are a pro wrestling fan -- that's why you'd probably understand the underlying idea of it.
(To any non-wrestling fans reading this: Kayfabe is originally carnival slang for "fake," but pro wrestling inhabits a strange space where neither "real" nor "fake" describes the spectacle before you. A working indie pro wrestler, when he gets The Question, gave the best answer: "Pro wrestling is predetermined. It is not fake." Pro wrestling cannot be considered a sport because the participants are working toward a known outcome. Yet to get to the outcome, wrestlers must take the same training and preparation as professional athletes, and it is an intensely physically challenging spectacle. And yes, wrestlers are frequently injured. The word "kayfabe" is an apt description of pro wrestling, a melding and confusion of what it means to be real and fake, knowing it is simulated but speaking of it as if it were real competition.)
I'll defend my description of AOC. She's young and she is incredibly context-savvy. She's self-aware of her fame, she reads her social media, she reads the press and she reads the room. More importantly, AOC knows who her haters are -- and AOC is a master at playing the heel to them.
However, she's aware that there's a mundane, tedious aspect of House politics that she must also fulfill. So she knows when and how to set aside the public context and does the duties of her office just the same as someone without her savvy or charisma does it. This is a great, admirable quality to have.
The agon of capital cohorts (finance vs. industrial) should not be viewed through the frame of left vs. right or progress vs. reaction -- existential battles that speciate politics into incompatible and irreconcilable factions -- but rather sectarian strife.
Finance vs. industrial capital is more like a religious schism or gangs feuding over turf, in other words narcissisms of small differences or Girardian terror, high-stakes battles over petty rewards.
Agonism is the idea that conflict (agon) is an inevitable consequence of the human condition, and things like politics are created to channel the agon (or the idea at the center of the conflict) into a positive force. Agonism can be history shaping, like the existential conflicts of left vs. right or progress vs. reaction, but in the absence of existential conflicts and stable power relations, you have lesser conflicts like industrial vs. financial capital that are fissiparous. I picked up that word on another Substack and finally got to use it. :)
“When one examines the specific characteristics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism—abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility—it is striking that they are all characteristics of the value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx.”
It is also striking that they are all characteristics attributed to, and extolled of, the software industry, AKA Silicon Valley's main beat.
Just another thing that members of every group do but only some groups get blamed for.
Similar things are often said about the LGBTQ community. No surprise that they're another favored target of the far right...
It's posts like this that I find so valuable in your work.
"Marx's notion of commodity fetishism divided the world into use value and exchange value."
???
By 'commodity fetishism,' Marx refers to attributing independent agency to the economic relations created by society, i.e., "I lost my job because of the economy." His use of the terms, 'Use' value versus 'Exchange' value refers to the different values of commodities. For a Marxist, the amount of socially necessary labor required for their production is the only objective criterion for the value of a commodity. The exchange value, by contrast, is what a commodity is worth on the market.
Marx's analysis did divide the function of commodities but not 'the world' and his notion of the fetishism of commodities as a false consciousness is not his analysis of commodity values.
Very interesting and perceptive. As it happens, I am about 95% of the way through Gitta Sereny's masterwork Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. Speer was universally viewed as a marvel of industrial organization -- on his own he may have extended the war by a year or two (though if he had convinced Goering and the Gauleiters to allow German women to be mobilized it would really have been a different story). Many of these tech types are clear racists or anti-Semites, but many more are morally empty like Speer. They will swallow anything in pursuit of their idea of progress.
I can take a stab at "Why now?" for our darling Tech-Overlords.
1. They're a dying breed in a maturing market. Each new novelty is exposed as merely that, or just straight up fraud, which leads to...
2. They bet against the world's institutions and lost, or at the very least, discovered there were limits to their reach. With crypto, with Trump, with the Metaverse. They wanted to make everyone in the world dependent on them, but they couldn't resist the appeal of sharing ideas with other terminally online kooks and bigots. As well as making "new friends" in all sorts of high places all around the world. And this has led to...
3. Big Tech sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Playing coy fraud and spy games with the world's governments and criminal cartels is so fun and exciting! Until it's not. And right now they're literally toying with Big Data-ing themselves out of existence with new AI technology, and they hypocritically cry out for the world's governments to regulate their "Wild West" they were so very proud of. Henry Ford didn't spend his declining years wrestling with car safety issues, he retreated to a childhood kookland, a time when cars didn't exist. Musk and Thiel and the rest will do the same.
Of course, this also feeds into their ego, like Eco's ur-fascist model where the cult of death and the cult of the hero are interchangable. The goal of the fascist to seize his private existential angst and channel it into something Wagnerian, an epic saga that gives their increasingly irrelevant time on this planet meaning. Musk will keep impregnating women, devaluing his family life into something resembling the eternal quest of a 13 year old satyr, while Thiel will lean so much into vampire mythos that he'll go through with his $250,000 a month cryogenic coffin, even though he knows it's futile, because fuck you and the universe too, that's why. Epic win!
And then there's 4, because fascism is an easy way to evade and absolve one self's of responsibility for anything, ie blame it on the jews, the women, the transgendered. It wasn't Big Tech algorithms that turned your parents into unapproachable, toxic kooks or arrested your children into a permanent state of adolescence. Nope, it was nefarious, nebulous forces and bad actors who did that!
Modern fascism's Big Tech interpretation will be, "Together, we are unaccountable."
(Late to this; apologies.)
I would also not skimp on crediting what I'll call 'rich ressentiment' in the form of men (almost always, still) who feel like they ought to be in full control of the world but are not—not even in a moral sense of 'ought', though that usually follows, but rather that they can not understand why they can not get absolutely everything they want, given that they can get 99% of it. Mr Trump, I'd say, understands this, living simultaneously as one born with a literal 1940s million dollars but completely under his father's thumb.
This is old-hat except that I differ with many (including myself, months back) about that 'ought': generally people assume that our backers of fascism believe that they have a _moral_ right to run everything and that they'd do a better job at it than existing institutions, where I think it likely that many of them don't care about those, they belueve that they could seize all the power they don't have and they very much _want_ to do so.
I'll add a No. 5.
Tech-Overlords hold themselves as the "other side of the argument" in a Hegelian abstract-negative-concrete (commonly misattributed as Hegel saying thesis-antithesis-synthesis) dialectic against "the woke" and "wokeness."
Wokeness is deliberately abstract, and now exclusively used by privileged castes/classes as an epithet, but there is a concrete "horror" embedded within it. The people, let's call them Underservants, working in tech fields do not share the politics or worldview of the Overlords. Most tech jobs are in very left-leaning Democratic metropolitan areas, and the Underservants reflect the vox populi in the communities in which they live. Tech jobs are not especially demographically diverse, but there is enough demographic diversity among women, immigrant professionals, and Americans of color that the workfloor resembles the modern Democratic voter coalition.
The Underservants are also in this time and place, a bourgeoisie advancing a socially progressive political agenda, much in the way academics, artists and intellectuals have in earlier periods of history.
This social consciousness will lead to the Underservants turning inward to their organizations and holding their Overlords as the cause of all social ills.
The Overlords know this, and the erstwhile-libertarian ideology that marked the "Silicon Valley ethos" begat a generation that wants to atone for the sins of their forebears. The Overlords see the Underservants' claims as zero-sum, or negative-equity. For every rights claim, every increment of progress must come at the expense of the status quo. In other words, when a woman earns a right, an incel is created. Every LGBTQ advance must come at the degredation of masculinity. Each step of progress is only possible by making the present Overlords less powerful and weaker than the Overlords before them.
There is no such thing as a master without slaves. A laird without peasants. A husband without a wife. The identity of one, and all of the consequent material and psychological wealth, power and status, is inextricably linked to possession of the other. The other yearns for extrication. These two opposing forces meet in a Hegelian gladiatorial arena of inevitability in a fight to the finish.
One of the innumerable but lesser acknowledged benefits of learning things from Ganz’s newsletter is that one feels no guilt whatever about detesting Silicon Valley billionaires and their ideological lickspittles.
Your point at the closing that "while classical fascism and antisemitism might not be the ultimate form these tech politics take, it will spit out something like fascism and antisemitism" is especially relevant in light of all the recent 'are they fascists or not' debate. It's been frustrating to read people who are all "it can't be fascism because it doesn't meet these" very specific to the 1920s and 1930s criteria, which of course renders the concept useless in a contemporary context. As Eco pointed out, “the fascist game can be played in many ways, [but] the name of the game doesn’t change.”
On a related note, Corey Robin once referenced an essay by Jodi Dean on techno feudalism in the LA Review, that's been picked up by a few other people, like Yanis Varoufakis. That also seems to have some relevance here, given the backward looking/forward looking nature of reactionary modernism.
I'd say the rich reactionaries flirting (or twerking up against)anti-Market views, beside being an attempt to ride a Populism Tiger, has the character of men (it does seem to be all men) who've done very well who have reason to dislike a system which at least claims to be able to topple them, as badly (by design) as it does that these days. I think they may simply want to pull the ladder up after them, and can want that because they don't understand that they're sitting on its top, not floating in mid-air.
Corey Robin is my go-to, having given probably the best contemporary explanation of reactionaries: “For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”
In plainer English: "Defend your status and the Hierarchy that feeds you."
That 'the felt experience of having power' is very good, and well-appropriated from 'felt experience'‘s more frequent use in analyses of the lives of the oppressed. I would amend it only by saying that it's not just having power, but also of feeling that one _should_ have power, one _would_ if the Universe were running as it's supposed to do. Also, I would lump 'status' in with power, as I think you do, as (for one thing) many people don't experience power directly, but rather in the forms of what they can do or what not can be done to them because of their status. (I'll guess the term-of-art would be 'mystified power'.)
For most of us, status is a better ~guarantor of your future food (and grooming, mating, care in illness,safety from pain, impunity in inflicting pain, general happiness) than your own abilities, so in many moods how can I blame the rich, the very bigoted, the sexist (though that's more of a stretch, since that's my most likely failing) for wanting to feel secure?
I'm not a Marxist, but I was struck by a Marxist's claim that a good Marxist should not hate the rich: such both ignores economic determinism (which bug in Marxism I can live without) and clouds the judgement (which seems just right)—and the point of analysis is understanding and the chance to do something about it, not yet another way of feeling oneself better than some other people (which is tempting because status is the best &c.).
Not exactly the people at the top, it's the people right in the middle, small business tyrants, teetering on the edge of returning to proletarian status, who believed the promise of Middleness e.g. "I, the large capitalist, will lord over you, but don't worry: You get to lord over black people/your wife/the impoverished! Better to be in the middle instead of at the bottom, right?" and blame some malign influence (usually Jews) for allowing the people at "the bottom" to skip right over them and get to "the top" before them. They don't want to pull up the ladder, because they thought that there wasn't supposed to be a ladder under them in the first place.
…and such are much more prone to status-anxiety than either the poor, who generally know they're screwed because they suffer from their status, not anxiety over, or the rich (who rarely become poor or middle-class these days).(Joe Bob Briggs, the Sage of Grapevine, Texas, opined once that the problem wasn't an absence of the Ladder of Success but rather the removal of the Greasy Slide of Failure…I don't agree completely, but have been struck by how many reversals of fortune among the wealthy there used to be, maybe their former, extreme, formality had to do both with aping the old nobility and with status-armouring).
Good bourgeoisie have long noted the use-value/ exchange-value split and identified with the former (e.g. Romney's "makers and takers"); the reactionary departure is in racializing the contradiction and turning it into an anti-Semitic trope.
It's kind of hilarious however that both the vanguard of reaction and its shock troops (car dealers, small businessmen, petit bourg of every kind) at most manage the labor of others and never make anything of use value. This valorization of "utility" must be radically distorted to serve it's ideological purpose !
*its (autocorrect blah)
Hanania is so strange. I feel sort of bad for reading his (free) posts, but it's fascinating to see someone who concedes all of the left's points about the pathological tendencies of the right: anti-empiricism, anti-rationality, gullibility, rampant grifting; and who is also contemptuous of almost every conservative writer, but supports them all because he basically wants the US to turn into Nazi Germany.
On TESCREAL: the point of that acronym/idea is to use the people you're describing (Musk, Sacks, Thiel) to criticize both mainstream liberals who think AI is important and/or dangerous (like Sam Altman) or people who take utilitarian/"effective altruism" approaches generally to other things (who are often left-liberal) by saying that they're all the same.
I think that's an interesting point, but I hate the acronym
I hate the acronym too, and not just because it's trying to claim that I'm just like Elon Musk.
Do you mean that you sympathize with some of the terms in the acronym but don't like being lumped in with Musk (and the "Rationalists", "longtermists" etc.)? That's how I feel, it's unfortunate that certain kinds of futurist ideas have become so strongly associated with that sort of libertarian thought (and sometimes fascism of the 'reactionary modernist' variety, as with Thiel) in recent years.
Right, I have basically utilitarian moral views, and give lots of money to eg GiveWell. I think this does not put me in a category meaningfully like Elon, who's not, shall we say, focused on the welfare of the world's poorest.
But more to the point, the people like Gebru who coined the term TESCREAL are particularly focused on AI, and they are making the case that certain positions on AI (mostly that we should worry a lot that it will kill us all) are associated with people that their audience (which includes AI researchers and academics) doesn't like. I think this is a bad way to go about an analysis of the situation, although I sympathize since these worries are basically made up and thus difficult to more sensibly refute.
How is Altman - an admitted doomsday prepper whose side project is scanning the eyeballs of Africans to use them as part of a crypto scheme - a 'mainstream liberal'?
https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Sam+Altman&cycle=&state=CA shows donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars to boring D political organizations and candidates over a period of many years with none to republicans. He's also obviously a weird guy in the way that it seems most people with too much money end up as, but his politics seem pretty legible.
That goes well beyond 'weird', and I don't think 'donates a tiny percentage of fortune to mainline Dems' indicates anything other than savvy for a California-based tech CEO, but if it makes you feel better, then sure.
I think that the boring political contest over the direction of the country is way more significant than investments in colonial cryptocurrency schemes and being a doomsday prepper and AI nut.
And FWIW, I believe that Musk believed himself when he claimed to be a moderate way back when. That's the point - one can hold bland explicit political beliefs without noticing that your horrible implicit politics directly contradict that, at least until they finally take over
A New York Times newsletter article wrote about irony poisoning. It's describing the tendency of online communities like 4Chan to have an anything-goes community where transgressiveness, edginess, absurdity and irony are celebrated. A subculture is born.
Once upon a time, racism, Nazism, etc. could hide behind a veil of detachment through irony and humor. Then, sincere Nazis began to show up and mingle.
You know contact theory, that being around a member of an outgroup will eventually lead to empathy, sympathy and tolerance and wear away at prejudices? Well, contact theory works the other way.
Extremely online edgelords will relate to Nazis, recognizing they are normal people with everyday problems and are deserving of empathy, sympathy and tolerance. When they can interact with a flesh-and-blood Nazi, they slowly come around to their viewpoint and start to adopt the far-right worldview as well.
They will then come to turn against the "normie" consensus that kept much of the Western world together, that Nazis are bad, and the education about the horrors of what was witnessed during and after World War II is all just emotional manipulation.
So these transgressive spaces come to be defined by their far-right personalities. The humor does serve a purpose: it's a feint, a codpiece, a red herring to give their sincerity plausible deniability.
I found the NYT irony poisoning article: https://static.nytimes.com/email-content/INT_4981.html
I missed out on your session with Interintellect as I suddenly got ill with Covid. Wish I could have been present. Here's what I'd like to ask you: what do you think has largely caused the rise of reactionary modernism and rationalism? Do you think reactionary tech modernism and the rationalist community are analogous to Romanticism? If so, what makes them analogous, and would be analogous to the Enlightenment?
Nazism surely drew a great deal of influence from social Darwinism, cast as unimpeachably rational science. That seems relevant here. Ditto the interest in classical civilizations and mores, with a special hard-on for the Spartans. Big data & accompanying algorithms/AI aren't a revolution on the order of Darwinism IMO, but certainly extremely disruptive and new. When you have that kind of dramatic shift, many smart people will decide that society's morals aren't keeping up with our new knowledge. Charles Murray is obviously a reactionary, but his performance is self-consciously obsessed with rationality and scientism: the latest numbers, he argues, reveal the truth--our morality and policy choices should follow. AI and gene editing make for a particularly creepy Übermensch fetish to come. One peculiar feature of "reactionary modernism" is that the idealized past is really pre-Christian--the Fascists loved the Pagan strongmen, an interest shared by the new Tech Right, it seems. In this sense, reactionary modernism--in both its reaction and its modernism--argues for a fundamental break with Christian moral thinking (meant in the broadest sense) along with its rejection of other staples of the West (democracy, liberalism, egalitarianism as a political ideal, the golden-rule ethos, etc.). Reactionary modernism lands instead on the strong dominating the weak as a scientific (amoral) natural truth--aided by technological advancements to make the strong ever stronger still, the uberubermensch.
It's not surprising that the Thiel / Yarvin types fantasize about running the U.S. (or disparate off-shore nation-states) like a Silicon Valley tech company. What's strange are their fantasies about how Silicon Valley companies operate today. How can they be so deluded about their own lived reality?
I've worked in tech for almost 25 years, mostly in the S.F. Bay Area. In that time, I've worked for big tech, small startups, and companies in-between. I've encountered a few autocratic CEOs in startup circles, and one thing they had in common is an inability to retain employees.
As for big tech, I'm plenty familiar with the inner workings of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, and they are as messy and bureaucratic as you would imagine any giant company to be. In this environment, I suppose it's possible for a CEO to behave like an autocrat, but a business is not a military outfit. Bosses don't issue commands. Workers don't wait around for orders. People operate with quite a bit of autonomy. And they can also simply quit.
I suppose what I've left out, now that I think about it, is that these guys explicitly talk about their own rank and file employees in the same way they talk about the general public — that is, as an obstacle or inconvenience.