POG Politics Thread Version 3
Come on in! Since Dustin is taking his ball and going home, it's time to start a new politics thread.
Some explanatory power here
The Network State is a conspiracy by high ranking tech billionaires, most prominently Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan and Patri Friedman, to start their own sovereign nation-state. This is not an outlandish accusation, but rather, what they have said they are doing, what their actions confirm, and where their money is going. The Network State suggests that the ultimate goal of these venture capitalists is not to improve America, but to start their own nation-state, using a mix of expropriated land from the US (see the California Forever project in Solano County), and colonies in the global south, like Próspera. A distributed land mass, but one nation-state. article
in light of
Investor J.D. Vance has raised $93 million to start a venture capital firm, Narya Capital, based in his home state of Ohio, with fund backing from major names including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt and Scott Dorsey.
Axios, Jan 9, 2020
regarding the intentional chaos and disarray currently unfolding at the hands of the US executive.
But they do need to decide whether to completely break the USA to create space for its new competitor (I am reminded of the Judeo-Kabbalist theory of "Breaking the Vessels"), or to make use of ('refactoring') the existing infrastructure:
, New Yorker Feb 26 2025 :
When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests.
“Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”
Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James Pogue has explained, their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech companies.
Steve Bannon is the Lenin of MAGA.
That is a huge compliment btw.
Wearwolf, can you dumb that down for me? What are you saying?
I read "Bad billionaires plan new nation with help of Musk and Trump" To what end? Where? Why?
"A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states."
Lmk if that's not dumb enough [emoji56]
As far as ends, they are tech bros. Their utopia is technofascism.
Still doesn't make sense? However, it is a cool string of words!
It's like if 4chan was a country.
amp, is ww your gimmick account?
Wearwolf, can you dumb that down for me? What are you saying?
I read "Bad billionaires plan new nation with help of Musk and Trump" To what end? Where? Why?
What I'm reading (and inferring) is:
Certain billionaires, especially in the technology and supporting venture capital sectors, don't like being told to play nice with the rest of the economy. They think that everybody else is too stupid (giving up on libertarianism catching on) to see that their genius is the only thing standing between humankind and oblivion, so they're trying to create their own, new country, let's call it "Techland".
Geographically, Techland is not a contiguous (all parts connected by land) or even localized (a grouping of islands near one another) space. It is a "network" of otherwise isolated areas that they have purchased and privately developed.
The government of Techland will be much closer to the US under the Articles of Confederation, rather than under its current Federalized form. The networked territories of Techland will individually be very much like corporations, with shareholders, boards, c-suite douchebags, etc.
The statelets, provinces, or whatever they'll be called (think ancient Greek city-states, except they actually work together - somehow) will provide one another with mutual security using satellites, cyberwarfare, and unmanned armaments (drones in land, sea, and air), and their chief export will be IT services and medical research.
Techland will generally be an unregulated utopia, with the only common rule being that right of "exit" by a citizen of any member-state shall never be compromised. Child labor, human experimentation, robo-fetishism - these things will be left entirely up to the member-states to determine for themselves, and if somebody doesn't like it, they can just go somewhere else.
What I'm saying is :
Techland has no hope of happening while vibrant, viable (even if "for now"), established societies (like the USA, eg) offer people a comfortable (if suboptimal) alternative to rolling the dice in a startup nation. So to improve the relative prospect of Techland, they have to make USA etc much shittier.
I'm also saying that not all of the American Right is on board with this fantasy, and pressing upon this rift is currently the American left's best hope for a non-fascist future for the next 20+ years.
Just yesterday, Vance stood behind a podium to try to downplay and/or smooth this rift in the contemporary right.
The fact that he's doing this demonstrates that he feels it needs to be done, which in turn establishes that it exists.
fwiw, on an intellectual level, I think the concept of the Network State is really interesting. Political science has kind of stalled out since the EU failed to coalesce, and the notion of the EU continuing down its path of unification only in the face of increasing Russian encroachment is - again, on a purely intellectual level - banal.
The idea of a distributed, W3 (this time I do mean blockchain) state is paradigmatically new. I don't think it's sustainable, and I think it probably descends into either North Korea or colonial Jamestown, but it is still refreshing to have new meat to chew on.
The dude just never loses...
Elon would never do such a thing!!!!! lmfao
Ah ha! Have Musk download Trump's brain into an AI. Being a new entity bypasses the Constitutional restriction. Genius!
Democrats wonder why their approval rating is 27%... Listen to Chris Murphy on Jon Stewart. He makes Gavin Newsom sound like Shakespeare. Missions sets and Action sets? lololol
This boat is adrift!
