Decided to put here Quinn Slobodian’s forthcoming book where he tries to trace the madness that is now in the driver’s seat while the current coup in the US, smashing institutions and taking over the Federal government. Here is a preview and review of it by economist and inequality specialist Branko Milanovic on his substack. An excerpt:
“One has to admire Quinn Slobodan: in order to write his most recent book “Hayek’s bastards: The neoliberal roots of the populist right” (the title is modeled after “Voltaire’s bastards” by John Ralston Saul), he had to enter the world of madmen who produced movies, fictionalized novels, investment newsletters, and comic books detailing the forthcoming economic apocalypse (several apocalypses every year for half a century), invraisemblable conspiracies and own racial superiority. All of that was happening because the piles of money were paid by various tycoons to maintain in a comfortable lifestyle and publishing activity Mont Pelerin Society fellows, so that they could continue meeting each other and exchanging the predictions of doom and gloom in the luxury hotels of the Riviera, Alpine resorts and even on the Galapagos islands.“
You can check the recent QS article in the New Statesmen: Elon Musk’s hostile takeover: Inside the mind of the billionaire at the heart of American power (I am afraid it is a must nowadays). If you wonder what the hell is going in the US and if we are both assisting to a coup while dancing and doing our morning routines.
A podcast with John Ganz of Unpopular Front and Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History at Boston University and author of the forthcoming Hayek’s Bastard’s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Among the topics discussed: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, cryptocurrency, Las Vegas, and NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang’s leather jacket.
Listen to the podcast HERE.
Here is John Ganz Unpopular Front newsletter
Here is a review I wrote about J. Ganz’s excellent book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, which recently got nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award.
Listening to this lively cross-talk between savvy historians, I must say that I’m somehow getting the feeling that even they are at a loss with what is going on and who can blame them. This is how quickly things are unwinding all over the place -(here is a good breakdown of the ideological make-up of Romania’s candidate in a similar vein) with the growing feeling there’s a Muskian IPad baby coup underway. Really liked how Grimes was brought into the mix making her the principal purveyor of coolness or general must-watch stuff into Musk’s life. Apparently, she introduced Musk to Adam Curtis’s documentaries on a private flight (of which apparently he got bored quickly). Interesting (and confirmed by many others these days) is the way industrial policy – or attempts at it (see the Foxconn fiasco) or bringing back the industries and forgotten Golden Age hard SF trope (“flying cars” and such) home or pushing a new network superstate (Thiel + Balaji), the main nationalist drive of Trump’s campaigns is completely contradicted by his alliance to the techbroligarchy and crypto scammers. The return of the materiality of the cloud is welcome though, but also feels half-hearted. The fact that “the cloud” and cloud computing are not something in the sky, but involve actual productive forces and manufacturing, that cloud computing needs huge amounts of energy and are major drivers of climate emergency (the footprint of cloud computing is now larger than aviation) keeps getting more obvious by the day. What is worrying and what has been going on for a while is that Musk, Bezos, and other billionaires pretending to save a “worldless” humanity (in Michel Nieva’s accurate phrasing) have been using these capitalist hard SF tropes constantly for years.
The novelty of US technofascism (in comparison with German or Italian versions) seems to be its speculative finance Anarchapulco vector . The simple fact that they do not promise full employment and ethno-economics but also crypto should give us pause. My only caveat is what I consider a bit risky – so say that China is not innovating, that everything is a knock-off (thus echoing a lot of techbro diatribes – especially Palantir CEO Alex Karp saying that China does not have a tech scene) except top-notch EVs. Here we should think more about what Cory Doctorow called memefacturing (the rapid transformation of memetic objects into mass-produced commodities), the process of shanzai-ification (on which I wrote before on SFitze), and small incremental (like my Miyoo mini example) improvements and big push for new telecom standardization. But otherwise I agree that what’s going on sounds like a bad idiotic knockoff of what the current anti woke coalition understands China is doing. All their measure are a deformed version of Hong Kong (exported oriented economy plus Macau (casino economy) or rather “Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore and Meyer Lansky’s Las Vegas” (in Slobodian’s pun). Evgeny Morozov also wrote 10 years ago about the wannabe Singaporization of the US economy (or what they understand of it).
TimeSpace Warps 