The Shape of Technofeudalism
Hiding behind the doors in the parlors of the powerful.
Let’s start with several touchpoints.
The court of Louis XIV at Versailles
The film Dangerous Liaisons
Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 4
The following lyrics from Stone Temple Pilots
Lady picture show, she hides behind the bedroom door
Lady picture show, she hides behind the bedroom wall
She hides because she don't know nothin', don’t know nothin' anymore
She keeps a funny face, it's locked and bagged, it's just outside the door.The following lyrics from Nirvana
He's the one
Who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
Knows not what it means.
I’m listening to my playlist Grunge Corral, my favorite songs of that genre that I didn’t really discover until MTV’s Real World first season with Puck and Interstate Love Song was the theme of the show.. and I dug that and got into Vaseline and that was the beginning. Those last two songs came on when I was thinking about what to think about Elon Musk being worth half a trillion.
The bottom line I came up with is this..forgive me for writing the first way it comes out of my typing fingers:
Modernity has very few defenders, and everything about modern democracy can be subverted by the will of kings. The kings of today hardly exist; they are on the margins of American consciousness but they loom in the shadows waiting for the right moment. The only Americans capable of keeping America together are the generals in the Marine Corps and those who run the logistics behind their provisioning.
So I’m thinking Alex Karp, Peter Theil, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and a handful of others. You tell me who runs the tightest ships in the American military industrial complex and those are the ones who will work hardest to defend the Constitution all the way down to the last drop of blood and shell casing. Everybody else lines up like a scene out of Life is Beautiful.
Who’s Your Leviathan
I’m thinking about the wealthiest person I ever sat down and ate with, who had been until recently somebody on the non-working side of an oil fortune. And I’m secretly wondering how long I might remain on his guest list, if he keeps such a thing. This is my hedge against the things I worry about most, and that is the people who want to light fires in the streets of America and burn baby burn.
You see, so many are hiding behind the doors in the parlors of the powerful. I wish it weren’t that way, then again, look what happened to Polonius. We Peasants kind of know it, but we don’t really. Those who know don’t say. Those who say don’t know. Epstein. Why on earth would any of us care? Because we hope it means our Congress Critters can impeach. But we kinda know that Congress is hamstrung, and so won’t really do anything but obfuscate, classify, delay and diffuse responsibility. We can count on that kind of panto and drama. What we cannot count on is something like a Free Corporation run by a king. You know, like the ones I’m talking about.
Everybody knows that AT&T gets paid just to keep you up to your ears in TikTok. What else do they care? Everybody knows the Green economy is what made Tesla. But we can talk about Elon Musk because we identify him via Tesla. But we don’t know Elon’s attorney, or his private pilot. They’re hiding behind the door in the parlors of the powerful.
The powerful companies with their powerful technologies will sell their products and services to the powers that carry the national interest, or do a convincing job of such. Wall Street knows how that money flows. I’m just following the footsteps of Berkshire Hathaway.
I cannot count on the Republican Party to be what it’s supposed to be. I cannot count on the Democrat Party to be what it’s supposed to be. They are too easily hijacked and to lame to put the peasants first. Worse still, a plurality of American peasants just want some kind of permanent woke ethnic and religious franchise that has nothing to do with the principles of the Constitution.
They want representation without taxation. Rights without responsibility. Sponsorship without patriotism.
Patriotism’s Due
Somebody named John Schaar wrote the following. It’s not a soundbite.
“To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts; one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods, memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.”
“But such primary experiences are nearly inaccessible to us. We are not taught to define our lives by our debts and legacies, but by our rights and opportunities. Robert Frost’s stark line, “This land was ours, before we were the land’s.” condenses the whole story of American patriotism. We do not and cannot love the land the way the Greek and Navaho loved theirs. The graves of some of our ancestors are here, to be sure, but most of us would be hard pressed to find them: name and locate the graves of your great-grandparents.
But if instinctive patriotism and the patriotism of the city cannot be ours, what can be? Is there a type of patriotism peculiarly American: if so, is it anything more than patriotism’s violent relative nationalism?Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.”
We Americans are lacking in that sense of obligation. Why? Because we are following the social clues of Lady Picture Show. We don’t even know her name. We like the pretty songs and we like to sing along, but we know not what it means. This babble springs from the burbling brooks of the symbolic capitalists, with their tautologies of influence.
I’m rich and famous because millions of people know me.
Millions of people know me because I’m rich and famous.
They’re the first line flunkies of the powerful. So what is socially valuable is always in play. We peasants cannot count on our sense of decency to work for the millionaires and billionaires who have IDGAF tattooed on their spines. We have to plot a way to fake it like those who make it up. This is the shape of our feudalism. It’s techno because not only the airwaves, but the regulation of the airwaves is beyond or ability to influence. The interwebs haven’t shut us up yet, but.. here’s a scary thought.
How Many Googles?
The people who built Google could build another one, or two or three. They’re planning to under the guise of the necessity of training space for AI. Think of a data center as a standing army. How many Oliver Norths could you sneak in under the radar?
The last time I was in Utah just 2 years ago, my cab driver told me she hadn’t heard anything about the giant data center the federal government was building there. I wonder if there is only this one. I can’t imagine it hasn’t been updated or doubled, but nobody wants to snitch on their sponsors.
Patriotism & The Destruction of America
I’m going to come back to questions of patriotism all this year in preparation for having a substantial amount of background material for the Semiquincentennial this July. Right now I think it has a whole lot to do with the land and with the infrastructure and with family on the physical side, and with rights and responsibilties on the intellectual side. In the meantime, take a moment and sing God Bless America in your head.
Let me leave you with this thought to be developed. It takes millions of people a couple of decades to make a dent in what America is. Technofeudalism has that capability. If that becomes the Leviathan force over the nihilism of today’s court of public opinion, then it will dent the nation further. On the other hand, Western Civilization and the Open Society does not depend solely on the fate of American patriotism.