The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 2

A lock-step cabal of Technocrats is prosecuting a coup d’état against America and, indeed, the world. Trump is being promoted as the Monarch of the Dark Enlightenment’s Gov-Corp Technate, where the state will be owned by the oligarchy. These Technocrats now have political power, technological power, and inconceivable wealth at their disposal. Americans don’t see that language of freedom and liberty has been redefined as Orwellian double-think. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
In Part 1 of this series, we explored the political philosophies that have long been adopted and promoted by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and considered the implications, given both men’s obvious influence on the Trump administration. Musk is a high-profile advocate of Technocracy, and Peter Thiel is an accelerationist neoreactionary who favours, in particular, the Dark Enlightenment. Before you read this article (Part 2), I urge you to familiarise yourself with the explanations of Technocracy and the NRx (the neoreactionary movement) provided in Part 1. Otherwise, many of the references here will lack context.
As we noted in Part 1, Thiel and Musk are part of the oligarchic class by virtue of being invited to join a network led by other oligarchs whose stratospheric wealth far surpasses that of the names published on the “richest people in the world” lists. Welcomed into their exclusive club, Thiel and Musk are made men. In Part 2, we will explore how the political philosophies and the associated economic theories of Thiel and Musk are shaping public policy. Keep in mind that these two men are far from alone in attempting to create an American gov-corp Technate.
Libertarian Technocrats?
Although they borrow some libertarian ideas, there is nothing truly “libertarian” about either technocrats or accelerationist neoreactionaries. Their convoluted theories, once applied, could not be more authoritarian, more anti-liberty. Just as it is an oxymoron to describe Musk as a “libertarian technocrat,” so is it absurd to think of Peter Thiel as an “anarcho-capitalist.” Yet propagandists persist in encouraging us to see them in these terms. Witness a 2014 article in The Atlantic titled “The Libertarian Capitalist’s Case for State Power and Making No Money.”
It is possible that people like Thiel and Musk self-identify as libertarians because they think “liberty” means freedom granted by — and to — the oligarchy.
In Part 1, we referenced the Venetian Republic. The Doge of Venice was the ruler of the banking, finance, and commercial empire of the Venetian Republic. That is to say, the Doge was given the liberty to rule by the oligarchs of the day. We might wonder if the naming of the Department of Government Efficiency (the DOGE) that Musk leads deliberately references the Venetian magistrate. Some say it does, while others suggest another possibility.
Created as a joke in 2013 by cryptographers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, the Dogecoin, a memecoin, has seen its price and market cap soar and fluctuate wildly thanks in no small measure to Elon Musk’s comments about it. Much of Musk’s talk about Dogecoin has been deliberately provocative. For example, in 2019 he declared himself the “former CEO of Dogecoin,” though that was never the case. His social media posts alone have provoked major changes in the price of Dogecoin. Musk has also aggressively hiked its value by, for instance, hinting it might become the basis of the proposed “X pay” payment system on his newly acquired ‘X’ platform — formerly Twitter.
Musk encouraged bullish investment in Dogecoin. Of course, just because someone encourages you to do something that doesn’t negate your personal responsibility to conduct due diligence. When some investors lost their shirts, as Dogecoin prices tumbled, they tried to sue Musk in 2022 with a potential $258 billion class action lawsuit. The case was dismissed last year. The judge ruled that Musk’s comments were just “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified.” Though it is worth noting the offhand comments of one man took the Dogecoin from a literal joke — a crypto parody — to achieving a market capitalisation of $14.5 billion in 2021.
If there is an in-joke to the naming of the DOGE, nominally led by Elon Musk, some argue it is Musk’s fondness for the Dogecoin that is reflected in the D.O.G.E acronym. Yet, the symbolism of “the Doge ”— one who is granted the liberty to rule by oligarchs — is perhaps more conspicuous. Just as with the term “Accelerator” — meaning high-impact investment to accelerate the growth of a startup — an obvious underpinning ideology is implied, even if rarely discussed.
In the introduction to his 2012 treatise, “The Dark Enlightenment,” political philosopher Nick Land highlighted the importance of an article written three years earlier by oligarch Thiel.
Land wrote:
One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In a related article Thiel penned, titled “The Education of a Libertarian,” he was describing himself, and yet the personal philosophy he outlined in it was pure accelerationist neoreactionism.
Thiel opined that “the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed,” given that the government’s response to every crisis was “more government.” He also claimed that the post-WWI deflationary depression in Western nations was the last “sharp but short” shock to have allowed the alleged advantages of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” to flourish. After that depression, he said, so-called “democratic” politics had stifled the opportunities to capitalise on crises. As a result, Thiel said he no longer believed “that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world.”
Asserting, in so many words, that democracies were useless, Thiel announced he had found a new life goal:
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.” The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.
For Thiel, the “unthinking demos” is us: the holders of the “neo-puritan faith” in progressive “social democracy” — the acolytes of the Cathedral (and the people whom Nick Land considers “inarticulate proles”). In Thiel’s view, we must embrace our “technoplastic” future, become intelligible, move beyond politics, and liberate capitalist innovation by swearing fealty to the gov-corp model.
To this end, Thiel identified three “technological frontiers” upon which he could construct his darkly enlightened aristocracy.
Read More: The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 2
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