The Long, Cold Totalitarian Winter Is Coming
We are on the cusp of a long night, a winter of totalitarianism in which the American dream, class mobility, and self-government get crushed to pieces like a piece of ice thrown onto concrete.
Yes, this is a very alarmist headline. For you Game of Thrones fans out there, you probably caught on to the “winter is coming” reference and the image of the Night King and his creepy, sinister, White Walker minions. But if you aren’t familiar with the series, here’s a brief overview – without any spoilers (until the very, very end of this article).
Throughout the book and HBO series, there is a bigger picture story unfolding behind all the backstabbing, politicking, nudity, and sex: the return of the ancient White Walkers, supernatural ice creatures who can raise the dead, turn them into frosty-eyed zombies, and control them at their will. While all of the living, breathing humans – the lords, kings, knights, advisors, maesters, craftsmen, peasants, etc. – do very human things, i.e., bicker among themselves and fight for land, power, and gold, the White Walkers quietly assemble the biggest army in the history of the world, and descend on the Wall, the only defense between the wild north and civilization to the south. The White Walkers are evil, and have no other intention but to destroy humanity and usher in the “Long Night,” a winter so dark and cold that all human life gets snuffed out for good.
I’m sure there is more lore behind the White Walkers, courtesy of author George R.R. Martin, but I am not that much of a nerd so as to seek it out. I will leave it at that, and if I am missing something important (and you are a big Game of Thrones aficionado), let me know.
I reference the White Walkers and the Night King because they kind of remind me of the AI tech bros, and how these Silicon Valley elites and their army of lobbyists are accumulating so much power behind the scenes, while the rest of us quibble and snipe at each other over issues that are important but perhaps not as urgent or existential.
Again, not to spoil anything at this point, but in Game of Thrones, the only way the humans have any chance of defeating the White Walkers is by recognizing the threat for what it is, and then putting aside differences to fight together and defeat the icy barbarians at the gate.
We are staring down a similar emergency. The tech bros are more powerful than ever, more powerful than any Robber Baron of the Gilded Age. Our wall – our constitutional form of government – is crumbling. And all the tech bros, like White Walkers, are deadset on changing our society, how we live, and how we work. We are on the cusp of a long night, a winter of totalitarianism in which the American dream, class mobility, and self-government get crushed to pieces like a piece of ice thrown onto concrete.
What The Tech Overlords Really Want
I’m going to stop calling them tech bros because “tech bros” is too glib. They are not laid-back bros who want AI to eliminate the 40-hour workweek and give Americans more free time to spend with family and friends; they are tech overlords chasing profits even at the expense of our humanity and civilization, and they want to nerf what democratic power we still have left (if any), and make us work more for less. They want a technofeudalist world, where they call the policy shots in Washington, D.C., while the rest of us peasants twiddle our thumbs over keyboards, iPhones, porn sites, and gambling apps. They have already infiltrated the Trump White House and are pushing for a colossal AI buildout — a project on par with the New Deal and post-Civil War Reconstruction — without an iota of input from Congress or the public, at breakneck speed. (The Trojan Horse That Snuck Through MAGA’s Gates)
Why? The U.S. constitutional system of government and its financial system is broken – most of us can agree – and maybe it’s beyond repair. The tech overlords understand that it is broken (or breaking, at least) and believe that the only way it can be fixed is by accelerating its destruction, a philosophy known as “accelerationism,” and building a new form of government on the other side. In February, Quinn Slobodian, a professor of international history at Boston University, described what system of government our tech overlords, including their philosopher king, Curtis Yarvin, want in the future:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet. Yarvin expressed the essence of the worldview recently when he enthused over Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and rebuild it as a US-backed colony securitized as an asset and sold to investors—as he called it, “the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”
You might think this sounds crazy, dystopian, or utopian, depending on how you feel about the tech overlords. For some, privatized corporate states sound like a great idea – in theory, of course; in practice, not so much. And you might think this is a fringe ideology. But from my own observations, there are more people than you think who subscribe to this worldview, particularly among young right-wingers who went down the proverbial rabbit hole during COVID-19 and the Biden years. Many of them, including Silicon Valley billionaires, believe they are dissidents, though the fact that they now control the executive branch eludes them.
In April, Semafor reported on the tech overlord group chats that began in the COVID era and the peak of racial BLM hysteria in 2020. The chats captured this ideology while exposing how the tech overlords feel shackled by the current system and woefully underappreciated for their talents and contributions to society. As Semafor noted, “The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new [Silicon Valley] conservative consensus.” Conservative is not quite the word for it, however. The group chat participants were more reportedly concerned with raw political power, and, frighteningly, some have ties to the Trump White House. Sriram Krishnan, one of the organizers, currently serves in the White House as a senior AI advisor. Although he was not among the chat participants, David Sacks, Silicon Valley’s mouthpiece par excellence, is one of the most powerful men operating in the White House today. He has the president’s ear, and the president is acting on his behalf.
At all costs, the tech overlords want power. The power to shape politics and society as they see best, circumvent Congress, dodge existing laws and regulations, and subvert the will of the American people. Ninety-nine percent of taxpayers could say, “We don’t want to subsidize your AI buildout. We actually don’t want any of this.” The 1%, the tech overlords and their lap dogs, would reply, “Sorry, losers.”