How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, And Andreessen—Four Billionaire TechnoOligarchs—Are Creating An Alternate, Autocratic Reality
Taplin, teacher, author ("Fast and Breaking Things") and film producer (Mean Streets, The Last Waltz), is director emeritus of USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab. His work includes touring for Bob Dylan and his band, vice president of media mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch, professor at the University of Southern California, and co-founder of the leading video-on-demand company Entertainer.
Four very powerful billionaires , Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen are creating a world where "nothing is real and everything is a show". If we want to think about extreme income inequality, post-truth reality, and how we got to the Second American Civil War, we need look no further than these four "big bags" of historians' explanations. Timothy Snyder , "Paying for the Blind Spotlight."
I call them technocrats in reference to the influence of the technocratic movement founded by Joshua Haldeman, Elon Musk's grandfather, in the 1930s. Technocrats create an interconnected bureaucracy in Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of other companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information. It affects how billions of people live, work and love; Chaos will spread across the internet, public unrest and stock races will break out. These four men have long been hailed as heroes in tech, but in reality they are part of a larger undemocratic and authoritarian shift in the tech world to maintain the status quo and maintain their market leadership or near monopoly and billions of dollars worth of money. . Ownership is wealth, essentially protected by taxes. (The competition is for goalies, Thiel once said.)
In fact, it is American oligarchs who control internet access to billions of Facebook, Twitter, Thread, Instagram and WhatsApp users, including 80% of the American population. They are more interested in replacing our current reality and imperfect economic system from the outside with something more opaque, centralized and unaccountable, and if that happens, they will control it. .
And I use the word techno-determinism because we were satisfied with the way the technocrats were running our country and we thought they would give us a bright future. But the future they sell us - crypto assets, human-computer integration through artificial intelligence, the possibility of us spending our lives in space or on Mars - is bogus. Once again, in Snyder's words, Donald Trump has shown that he "doesn't lie so much as deny the truth and invite people to an alternative reality." This kind of deception works here too. The alternate reality these people focus on is the realm of techno-determinism, where eventually all real work will be done by artificial intelligence and vast numbers of people will become useless to society.
The technocrats have made no secret of their plans to feed the government and finance some of their nefarious schemes. Their plans for the future involve nothing more than confronting the nihilism of the looming dystopia. The four projects they are implementing to realize their vision will require tens of trillions of dollars of (mostly public) investment capital over the next two decades. First draft supported by Andres And He, Thiel and Zuckerberg are members of the Web3 network, a virtual world (metaverse) accessible through a virtual reality (VR) hood that, for all its obvious promising benefits, is capable of turning the free web into an online amusement park. Each door requires a coded code to open. The second project is to support cryptocurrency. As noted by Adam Fisher , a high-profile Israeli venture capitalist, "Cryptocurrencies are not an investment concept tied to liberal political ideology, but rather a rebellion against liberal political ideology that implements human greed through blockchain technology." The third project involves supporting Elon Musk's $10 trillion dream of a pipeline to send humans to Mars.
But of all the technocratic myths, none comes more from the heart of Peter Thiel than the idea of transhumanism. To understand Big Tech's biggest lie, one must dive deep into social movements focused on finding "human-enhancing technologies" that will one day enable humans to live to be 160 or older. Needless to say, access to life-extending systems that have yet to be invented would be incredibly expensive, so according to this plan, the only chance of survival into the second century would be for millionaires.
