A Brief Primer on Technofascism
Introduction
It has become increasingly obvious that some of the most prominent and monied
people and projects in the tech industry intend to implement many of the same
features and pursue the same goals that are described in Umberto Eco’s
Ur-Fascism(4); that is, these people are fascists and their
projects enable fascist goals. However, it has become equally obvious that those
fascist goals are being pursued using a set of methods and pathways that are
unique to the tech industry, and which appear to be uniquely crafted to force
both Silicon Valley corporations and the venture capital sphere to embrace
fascist values. The name that fits this particular strain of fascism the best is
technofascism (with thanks to @future_synthetic), frequently shortened for
convenience to techfash.
Some prime examples of technofascist methods in action exist in cryptocurrency projects, generative AI, large language models, and a particular early example of technofascism named Urbit. There are many more examples of technofascist methods, but these were picked because they clearly demonstrate what outwardly separates technofascism from ordinary hype and marketing.
The Unique Mechanisms of Technofascism
Disassociation with technological progress or success
Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, and rarely involve any actual technological innovation. This is because the marketed goals of these projects are not their real, fascist aims.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are frequently presented as innovative, but all blockchain-based technologies are, in fact, inefficient distributed database based on Merkle trees, a very old technology which blockchains add little practical value to. In fact, blockchains are so impractical that they have provably failed to achieve any of the marketed goals undertaken by cryptocurrency corporations since the public release of Bitcoin(6).
Statement of world-changing goals, to be achieved without consent
Technofascist goals are never small-scale. Successful tech projects are usually narrowly focused in order to limit their scope(9), but technofascist projects invariably have global ambitions (with no real attempt to establish a roadmap of humbler goals), and equally invariably attempt to achieve those goals without the consent of anyone outside of the project, usually via coercion.
This type of coercion and consent violation is best demonstrated by example. In cryptocurrency, a line of thought that has been called the Bitcoin Citadel(8) has become common in several communities centered around Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Generally speaking, this is the idea that in a near-future post-collapse society, the early adopters of the cryptocurrency at hand will rule, while late and non-adopters will be enslaved. In keeping with technofascism’s disdain for the success of its marketed goals, this monstrous idea ignores the fact that cryptocurrencies would be useless in a post-collapse environment with a fractured or non-existent global computer network.
AI and TESCREAL groups demonstrate this same pattern by simultaneously positioning large language models as an existential threat on the verge of becoming a hostile godlike sentience, as well as the key to unlocking a brighter (see: more profitable) future for the faithful of the TESCREAL in-group. In this case, the consent violation is exacerbated by large language models and generative AI necessarily being trained on mass volumes of textual and artistic work taken without permission(1).
Urbit positions itself as the inevitable future of networked computing, but its admitted goal is to technologically implement a neofeudal structure where early adopters get significant control over the network and how it executes code(3, 12).
Creation and furtherance of a death cult
In the fascist ideology described by Eco, fascism is described as “a life lived for struggle” where everyone is indoctrinated to believe in a cult of heroism that is closely linked with a cult of death(4). This same indoctrination is common in what I will refer to as a death cult, where a technofascist project is simultaneously positioned as both a world-ending problem, and the solution to that same problem (which would not exist without the efforts of technofascists) for a select, enlightened few.
The death cult of technofascism is demonstrated with perfect clarity by the closely-related ideologies surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the bundle of ideas known as TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulartarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism)(5).
We can derive examples of this death cult from the examples given in the previous section. In the concept of the Bitcoin Citadel, cryptocurrencies are idealized as both the cause of the collapse and as the in-group’s source of power after that collapse(6). The TESCREAL belief that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will end the world unless it is “aligned with humanity” by members of the death cult, who handle the AGI with the proper religious fervor(11).
While Urbit does not technologically structure itself as a death cult, its community and network is structured to be a highly effective incubator for other death cults(2, 7, 10).
Severance of our relationship with truth and scientific research
Destruction and redefinition of historical records
This can be viewed as a furtherance of technofascism’s goal of destroying our ability to perceive the truth, but it must be called out that technofascist projects have a particular interest in distorting our remembrance of history; to make history effectively mutable in order to cover for technofascism’s failings.
Parasitization of existing terminology
As part of the process of generating false consensus and covering for the many failings of technofascist projects, existing terminology is often taken and repurposed to suit the goals of the fascists.
One obvious example is the popular term crypto, which until relatively recently referred to cryptography, an extremely important branch of mathematics. Cryptocurrency communities have now adopted the term, and have deliberately used the resulting confusion to falsely imply that cryptocurrencies, like cryptography, are an important tool in software architecture.
Weaponization of open source and the commons
One of the distinctive traits that separates ordinary capitalist exploitation from technofascism is the subversion and weaponization of the efforts of the open source community and the development commons.
One notable weapon used by many technofascist projects to achieve absolute control while maintaining the illusion that the work being undertaken is an open source community effort is what I will call forking hostility. This is a concerted effort to make forking the project infeasible, and it takes two forms.
Its technological form is accomplished via network effects; good examples are large cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which cannot practically be forked because any blockchain without majority consensus is highly vulnerable to attacks, and in any case is much less valuable than the larger chain. Urbit maintains technological forking hostility via its aforementioned implementation of neofeudal network resource allocation.
The second form of forking hostility is social; technofascist open source communities are notably for extremely aggressively telling dissenters to “just for it, it’s open source” while just as aggressively punishing anyone attempting a fork with threats, hacking attempts (such as the aforementioned blockchain attacks), ostracization, and other severe social repercussions. These responses are very distinctive in the uniformity of their response, which is rarely seen even among the most toxic of regular open source communities.
Implementation of racist, biased, and prejudiced systems
References
[1] Bender, Emily M. and Hanna, Alex, Ai Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype, Scientific American, 2023.
[2] Broderick, Ryan, Inside Remilia Corporation, the Anti-Woke Dao behind the Doomed Milady Maker Nft, Fast Company, 2022.
[3] Duesterberg, James, Among the Reality Entrepreneurs, The Point Magazine, 2022.
[4] Eco, Umberto, Ur-Fascism, The Anarchist Library, 1995.
[5] Gebru, Timnit and Torres, Emile, Satml 2023 - Timnit Gebru - Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Agi, 2023.
[6] Gerard, David, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Etherium and Smart Contracts, {David Gerard}, 2017.
[7] Gottsegen, Will, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Miladys but Were Afraid to Ask, 2022.
[8] Munster, Decrypt / Ben, The Bizarre Rise of the ’Bitcoin Citadel’, Decrypt, 2021.
[9] , Scope Creep, Wikipedia, 2023.
[10] , How to Start a Secret Society, 2022.
[11] Torres, Emile P., The Acronym behind Our Wildest Ai Dreams and Nightmares, Truthdig, 2023.
[12] Yarvin, Curtis, 3-Intro.Txt, GitHub, 2010.
Small suggestion - You define TESCREAL a couple paragraphs after using it for the first time, so you may want to include the definition or at least a footnote the first time you use it. If you want a non-youtube for footnote [5], there is this from the Washington Examiner - https://washingtonspectator.org/understanding-tescreal-silicon-valleys-rightward-turn/# .
I really like the parasitization of existing terminology, and am wanting more examples, but can’t think of any. NFT’s almost ruined PfP or Picture for Proof, but that’s not a great example.
great feedback! you can definitely see which section I wrote first, oops
you’ll definitely notice more instances of parasitization of terminology now that you know what to look for. it’s extremely common in AI projects — the term AI itself is vague enough that it can be applied to practically any technology that involves computation, and both historical (first AI boom) and modern grifters have exploited that vagueness for profit
not sure if it’s exactly the same type of thing, but the shift in meaning of the word ‘algorithm’ strikes me as kind of similar too
that seems like a good example too — an algorithm as I know it is essentially a stepwise mathematical function, but the term as it’s commonly used now (usually with regard to social media) has very little to do with that origin. social media’s relationship with technofascism runs deep, and it really deserves its own dedicated writeup
Techfash use of algorithm is absolutely as a condensation of the concept of an unknowable invisible hand that the thought police uses to determine what is fit for you to consume - i.e. they made it, then demonize it because rightwing content is deprioritized because nobody wants to hear that shit all the time. It is at once a method of controlling information, but also a convenient scapegoat for the right to blame their limited reach on and claim as a liberal censorship tool.
(the following words are a hard braindump after some long days, I may edit later)
(pre-edit 1: I agree with @future_synthetic about their post but think there’s an expanded area of use, as follows:)
it’s a bit “there’s two sides of a coin” (except it’s not actually the same coin and …) - from observation of various folks I get a very strong impression that “the algorithm” or “algorithmic” (and other uses) have vastly different ways in which it’s used in both framing and placement
for those with (some amount of?) (some kind of applicable?) domain knowledge[0], it allows them a handwavey “oh there’s a reason here and there’s some dials we can turn to tune it but that’s the limit of our control” escape
for those without domain knowledge[1], “the algorithm” is as good as the bogeyman. attempts at sensemaking[2] and regular 'ole patternmatching step in, to expectable outcomes
[0] - think spectrum of anywhere from “somewhat on the ball modern-tech marketing agency” through “dev actively working on building the surveillance engine refinements”
[1] - think J Random Internet User
[2] - in many places and times I keep thinking about this talk: https://archive.org/details/youtube-EOkD2KRQeDs - its subject matter is/was quite directed, but the overall things it observed about how people try to sensemake in sweeping hand motion all this shit… valuable, imo
(edit: goddamn you lemmy, give me newlines)
Yeah that is the further complication with “the algorithm”, it means different obfuscations in different contexts. Also further is that nearly every type of machine learning or automated process invariably references “the algorithm” or several such manufactured deities which we somehow cannot control or improve meaningfully once deployed.
deleted by creator
This is good but feels a bit like just a slice of a larger picture. I do appreciate that you’re trying to paint that larger picture though. Have you read Palo Alto? It’s sort of a wider perspective but it covers a lot of what you’re shooting for. But I don’t think it harps on Bostrom much and Bostrom is important; for coverage of him I’d check out The Eternal Return of Eugenics. But there’s more; check out Couterculture to Cyberculture too, especially for the weird ancap tendencies. What you begin to realize is that the techfash isn’t as distinct an element as you would expect; it’s a smooth curve across a wide range of people, all of whom have some tendencies towards what you might call tech fash but many of whom can credibly deny that they’re exactly fascist. There are the Yarvins and Thiels who are done with democracy, sure, but also Silicon Valley’s Safe Space who’s, ahem, probably partially fascist or at least very non-provably not-fascist. The overall effect is a giant international nazi bar. Your paper needs to be a lot longer is what I’m saying, and name a lot more names.
Superior by Angela Saini is the book on the return of race science too
I’ll add those sources to the research stack!
Your paper needs to be a lot longer is what I’m saying, and name a lot more names.
consider this a prelude to that paper; I’m intentionally not naming names in this one (other than project names in broad strokes), though names absolutely should and will be named in the full treatment this subject deserves
@self quite like what I’ve read so far, questions and thoughts follow
-
the layout of this seems like it’s meant to be a standalone article/post, rather than as a response of sorts (which is fine ofc). I could imagine something of the latter being useful, do you foresee this having a response sibling-post to go with it? or would that be a diy thing for others to write while referencing this?
-
along the topic of the weaponisation of open source, there’s something that’s been irking me for a while and that I’ve been short on spoons to write it (feel free to run with it if it’s any good): many, many, many of these projects feature the most absolutely ridiculous naïve-fragile designs, under the guise of “don’t worry, just ship it, you can just iterate”. there’s rarely any depth given to thinking about “but what about …” conditions, and always it’s shunted off into the “oh but if we’re actually having those problems, we’re already successful” kind of considerations/discussions. this last bit, of course, is bonkers because lots of The Bros want you to commit to their chosen thing ritenao, but seem to be incapable of even exploring that space at all (or, if/when they do, you get megawordvomit medium articles with simple industrial realisations in them)
-
[nit] the footnote ordering appears to be funky, I’m guessing that’s a braindump/writing-time ordering issues?
thank you! I really appreciate the feedback, and it’s making me want to start on the second draft of this much sooner than expected.
the layout of this seems like it’s meant to be a standalone article/post, rather than as a response of sorts (which is fine ofc). I could imagine something of the latter being useful, do you foresee this having a response sibling-post to go with it?
this is the first draft of a standalone post, but I also want it to be the prelude to an eventual series of posts on technofascism. a response post could absolutely be part of that series if there’s a desire for it.
along the topic of the weaponisation of open source, there’s something that’s been irking me for a while and that I’ve been short on spoons to write it (feel free to run with it if it’s any good): many, many, many of these projects feature the most absolutely ridiculous naïve-fragile designs, under the guise of “don’t worry, just ship it, you can just iterate”.
absolutely! this ties in with more than one techfash mechanism: alongside the weaponization of open source, this can also be seen as a reflection of the techfash disdain for good/successful engineering. in this case, it’s an amplification of a tendency that the technofascists took from venture capital and startup culture: the idea that shipping product and “changing the world” right now is more important than good engineering. I’d say the distinguishing line between the VC version of this tendency and its techfash form is that startups do at least attempt the cycle of iteration, while techfash projects only use it as a cover for their actual goals.
[nit] the footnote ordering appears to be funky, I’m guessing that’s a braindump/writing-time ordering issues?
this should hopefully get better, but it’s from a combination of two things: a complete lack of experience with Zotero (which I should have started using much sooner) and an obsession with Emacs, leading me to fight way too much with org-mode’s citation system. there’s very likely a better way to export citations (and I’ll likely change citation formats either way once this post reaches a more finalized state), but it’ll take a bit more experience on my end to figure out how to make it work
absolutely! this ties in with more than one techfash mechanism: alongside the weaponization of open source, this can also be seen as a reflection of the techfash disdain for good/successful engineering. in this case, it’s an amplification of a tendency that the technofascists took from venture capital and startup culture: the idea that shipping product and “changing the world” right now is more important than good engineering. I’d say the distinguishing line between the VC version of this tendency and its techfash form is that startups do at least attempt the cycle of iteration, while techfash projects only use it as a cover for their actual goals.
it also feels like the “builder” bullshit dovetails along the same angle - the VC lot have liked to pitch the false “there’s builders, and everyone else” dichotomy for a while, and then the coiner etc grifters took that and ran with it in a similar perversion as what you note here
another thought I had (which didn’t make it through the fog last night): another nasty dimension of the way they push shit is the misappropriation of “the community” - beyond the usual the bad-faith reasons along which they “build community” (which I believe others have written about before), there’s also an intentional expectation of offloading the “later” of the work on “the community”, and there’s been a fairly severe attempt at normalising this
this should hopefully get better, but it’s from a combination of two things: a complete lack of experience with Zotero (which I should have started using much sooner) and an obsession with Emacs, leading me to fight way too much with org-mode’s citation system. there’s very likely a better way to export citations (and I’ll likely change citation formats either way once this post reaches a more finalized state), but it’ll take a bit more experience on my end to figure out how to make it work
mood:
spoiler
another nasty dimension of the way they push shit is the misappropriation of “the community”
I will write more on this in the long-form reply to @fasterandworse@awful.systems’s feedback, but what’s interesting is misappropriation and weaponization of the commons is something fascism has been doing essentially from the start. this is why many fascists steal terminology from socialism, falsely claim to have socialist goals, and even occasionally outright call themselves socialists or communists if it’s useful to advance their real goals. point 13 of Ur-Fascism is relevant here (and even calls out Internet populism as a fascist tool, way back in 1995 [1]), but generally, this kind of subversion of the commons is a very old and extremely effective pathway for fascism.
[1] there are a lot of incredibly prescient authors who called out the mechanisms of technofascism under other names as early as the 90s, before the dot com bubble burst. @dgerard@awful.systems has been making some very good reading recommendations in that area, from authors whose work deserves much more attention now that the problems they pointed out are worse and everywhere.
mood:
hahaha, it’s like my programmer habits and my desire to write are constantly fighting each other
-
nit: typo- “just for it” should be “fork” i imagine in the section on forking. Feel free to delete this comment upon correction
Asking so as to not make an assumption: who is the intended audience? This is not intended as a reflective question (though I imagine any writer would have this in mind), more a question so I can better cater any feedback I might have. It’s hard for me to say anything because 1. I am already aligned with what you’re saying, and 2. I am two GnTs into the night.
essentially the target is folks like you and me — leftists (presumably) working in tech who don’t need convincing of any of this, but might not have the ideas in a structured form specific to what’s happening in tech. this one isn’t meant to be too convincing to anyone completely unaligned with the ideas I’m drawing on, which I figure is a job for another post or maybe even another writer
FWIW you nailed me on the tech. I am nominally leftist in the sense that I’m full communism all the way, without virtually any of the theoretical/academic knowledge to back it up. Whenever I read articles that quote Big Name from literature, I get a pang of guilt. So selfishly, I like it when there’s some expansion of terms. I think there’s a good amount of that in this draft- hence why I asked about target audiences, haha- I didn’t want to say “please explain more” if you were intending this for people much more well read than me.
In general I think the direction is good, I think you’re doing a good job of both expanding what technofascism is and making a case for your thesis, especially with relating back to definitions/properties of fascism. I don’t get the feeling that you’re doing anything wrong, so everything from here is just potentially useless ideation, so ignore it if you don’t want to add scope/lose focus.
I think it could be useful to draw parallels with historical implementations of fascism could give your article more narrative cohesion (not that you need more), but ultimately, matching with definitions is the stronger move. Specifically I’ve got in mind the Californian Ideology, and how the continuation of its evolution is the technofascism we have today, which is pretty much the same plot as a liberal/capitalist society fully blossoming into a fascist one.
Also, as a primer, prime me more daddy! Would love some further reading/context, though it’s totally fair not to have a list of reading in a first draft, aside from dat reference list.
I am nominally leftist in the sense that I’m full communism all the way, without virtually any of the theoretical/academic knowledge to back it up.
I don’t read much theory myself, and I think that might be due to my background. some of the folks who helped raise me were working-class communists, who taught me a lot of the basics of socialism without citing any theory at all (and I suspect the theory they did read had to be very concise and relevant; they didn’t have a ton of time to spare). that’s why I do my best to respect the reader’s time and summarize the research and theory that I studied for what I’m writing, because chances are that the reader is also too busy working to dig deep into theory. this also helps keep my writing relatively neutral to the reader’s background; I usually consider myself a fairly generic socialist, in that I can see value in a wide range of genuine (ie, not fash in disguise) pathways to durable (doesn’t fall apart under scrutiny and allow for a fascist takeover) socialism.
I think it could be useful to draw parallels with historical implementations of fascism could give your article more narrative cohesion (not that you need more), but ultimately, matching with definitions is the stronger move. Specifically I’ve got in mind the Californian Ideology, and how the continuation of its evolution is the technofascism we have today, which is pretty much the same plot as a liberal/capitalist society fully blossoming into a fascist one.
Also, as a primer, prime me more daddy! Would love some further reading/context, though it’s totally fair not to have a list of reading in a first draft, aside from dat reference list.
you’re not the only one making suggestions around these lines! David’s been recommending reading up on the Californian Ideology and on a few authors who isolated the distinguishing traits of technofascism way back in the 90s. catching up on that is what I’m focusing on right now, so hopefully my next draft should have some good pointers to other authors you can read up on.
Love to see it.
and I still need to buy some gin
I just finished reading it and enjoyed what you have so far. A lot of threads that I’m interested in but you have a different perspective that doesn’t get caught up in abstractions.
One piece of general feedback, knowing it’s a draft, is that the section titles may be unnecessary because your narrative flows well enough to follow in a linear thread.
Ok, digging in.
However, it has become equally obvious that those fascist goals are being pursued using a set of methods and pathways that are unique to the tech industry
This line leaves me wanting a little more info about why they are unique to the tech industry. Maybe because it’s close to home for me and my writing, but do you mean this because digital technology affords the methods and pathways in a way that the physical world doesn’t? Or is it related to the ideologies of the people behind them? I don’t think the intro is the place to explain it fully, it could be a whole article in itself, but maybe a few more words to tighten up that context would help.
There are many more examples of technofascist methods, but these were picked because they clearly demonstrate what outwardly separates technofascism from ordinary hype and marketing.
Sorry if nitpicky but “clearly demonstrate” hurts your intro a little bit because the article’s purpose seems to be to demonstrate why these thing are technofascist despite their hype and marketing.
Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, and rarely involve any actual technological innovation. This is because the marketed goals of these projects are not their real, fascist aims.
Nice summary of the key indicator. Because I get caught up in the details and haven’t thought about this stuff in terms of fascism much, I see this when they state a problem which you can’t argue with it as being a problem, but you can’t really argue with it not being a problem either. Usually because it’s a problem area rather than a tangible, pertinent, problem. Like “productivity”, for example. Then they present their solution which has the same characteristics. You can’t argue for or against it because it’s like using a marshmallow hammer to drive in a marshmallow nail. (Sorry to bring up my pet target example) Notion has all these wonderful things for organising stuff and collaborating because if you don’t talk about specific productivity problems and just talk about productivity in general then being “organised” sounds great!
Anyway, my reason for sharing this is that your article makes me think that technofascism can be found even in the most innocent-seeming projects because we’ve let the concept of solid product definition be iteratively replaced by these mushy masses of code.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are frequently presented as innovative, but all blockchain-based technologies are, in fact, inefficient distributed database based on Merkle trees, a very old technology which blockchains add little practical value to. In fact, blockchains are so impractical that they have provably failed to achieve any of the marketed goals undertaken by cryptocurrency corporations since the public release of Bitcoin(6).
I thought this paragraph could be improved as a follow up to the previous by talking about Bitcoin’s claimed purpose rather than the faults of the technology. You lead into it by talking about “Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals” but you don’t talk about Bitcoin’s stated goals, which are interesting in themselves. There is this strange juxtaposition between the libertarian love for bitcoin and decentralised independence yet the white paper makes it reasonably clear that bitcoin is pro-vendor and not necessarily designed for the purpose of the individual. It takes a pretty one-sided tone when read through that lens.
First sentence of the whitepaper:
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services.
moving on.
Successful tech projects are usually narrowly focused in order to limit their scope(9), but technofascist projects invariably have global ambitions (with no real attempt to establish a roadmap of humbler goals), and equally invariably attempt to achieve those goals without the consent of anyone outside of the project, usually via coercion.
This is a great line! Kind of like Bluesky making their own protocol instead of using webmention and activitypub.
In keeping with technofascism’s disdain for the success of its marketed goals, this monstrous idea ignores the fact that cryptocurrencies would be useless in a post-collapse environment with a fractured or non-existent global computer network.
This highlights that idea that if your goals solve conceptual problems with conceptual solutions the ability to see obvious problems like this are easy to dismiss as being conceptual criticism. When it can’t be used now to do something now then we have no criteria for success or failure. The grift is to keep edging the believers as long as possible by continuing to add new details that sweeten the pay off and push it further away at the same time.
Urbit positions itself as the inevitable future of networked computing, but its admitted goal is to technologically implement a neofeudal structure where early adopters get significant control over the network and how it executes code(3, 12).
I’m scared of the Urbit rabbit hole so I don’t give it too much time but this sounds exactly like the ENS project as well.
This can be viewed as a furtherance of technofascism’s goal of destroying our ability to perceive the truth, but it must be called out that technofascist projects have a particular interest in distorting our remembrance of history; to make history effectively mutable in order to cover for technofascism’s failings.
I like the way this contradicts the blockchain obsession with immutability and permanence of information. LLMs are perfect destroyers of truth and distorters of history - what exactly are the things we would want to calcify into blockchains with enough confidence that they exist unmodified forever?
One obvious example is the popular term crypto, which until relatively recently referred to cryptography, an extremely important branch of mathematics. Cryptocurrency communities have now adopted the term, and have deliberately used the resulting confusion to falsely imply that cryptocurrencies, like cryptography, are an important tool in software architecture.
They imply they are important by repurposing the word utility beyond any meaning. They’ve turned utility into a means and an end. They tell you something has utility in a way which 5 years ago would have sounded like an odd, unfinished, sentence. “This token is great because it has so much utility”
Its technological form is accomplished via network effects; good examples are large cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which cannot practically be forked because any blockchain without majority consensus is highly vulnerable to attacks, and in any case is much less valuable than the larger chain. Urbit maintains technological forking hostility via its aforementioned implementation of neofeudal network resource allocation.
The concept of weaponised open-source is fascinating and something I haven’t read about before. I really enjoyed this section and would definitely read a whole article exploring this further.
Thanks for sharing what you have so far! It was a nice read and it kept me hooked all the way. I hope this feedback is helpful. Looking forward to seeing your progress
there’s so much good feedback and so many great questions in this post! a longer form reply is in progress (you’ve prompted me to chase down new threads of inquiry) but until then, thank you for reading and for posting the kind of feedback that keeps me writing!
It was a really interesting read. Let me know if anything I wrote doesn’t make sense. I didn’t get a chance to proofread
this is just a first draft; you can probably tell which sections are complete by what got citations (and some of them didn’t get any text at all)
let me know if all of this makes sense and if I can either focus this more or expand it
Hey there, I enjoyed your text and would like to offer some feedback
The basic outline is
- Eco loosely defined fascism in his essay as X
- fascism by this definition prevalent among tech industry
- here are (difficult to prove/disprove) “unique” features supporting this claim
Tbh I don’t quite get why would you need to involve term “fascism” here if described claims are bad enough on its own. Instead, this text would be far easier to accept if reframed as criticism of TESCREAL – how it in addition with capitalism creates a destructive force that harms people.
Instead, current framing goes out of its way to claim singular ideological intentionality of vast networks of people. Why?
If you wanna say that CO2 causes global warming, there’s no need to say that all people driving diesel cars are accidental ecofascists. For all intents and purposes it’s enough to say that global warming y’know gonna kill millions of people 🤷
because TESCREAL is a nakedly fascist ideological bundle, and this is a draft of an antifascist article intended to demonstrate the unique pathways technofascism takes to arrive at fascist goals, written by someone who won’t ever be tone policed into not calling demonstrably fascist billionaires or their clingers-on fascists
thanks for reading
