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DESCRIPTION:Altman Stop Using AI To Steal: Speak Out  At Sam Altman’s $45 Million SF 
 Mansion\nStop TechnoFascism,  Slave Labor & Theft Of Our Thoughts & 
 Labor\nBillions For Heathcare, Education & Housing Not The Billionaire 
 Bloodsuckers\n\nAltman’s $45 Million Dollar Mansion\n950 Lombard St, San 
 Francisco\n\nMonday June 15th, 2024  12:00 Noon\n\n\nThe capitalist mania 
 over the development of artifical intellegence and robotics is a threat to 
 the future of all working people and the world.Altman has personally stolen 
 the voices of actors like Scarlett 
 Johansson.\nhttps://thehill.com/video/scarlett-johansson-accuses-openais-sam-altman-of-stealing-her-voice/9714588/\nAI 
 is being developed by the massive theft of all data, pictures, voices and 
 videos on the internet. This wild wild west theft of voices from artists 
 like Scarlett Johansson by Sam Altman and his company Chat GPT is being 
 driven for profiteering. \nThey are also using this for genocide against 
 the Palestinians and  the war machine which receives trillions of dollars 
 from both the Democrats and Republicans.\nSam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter 
 Theil, Larry Ellison and other tech billionaires and capitalist speculators 
 have total control of the development of this technology regardless of the 
 cost to working people and the public. This is a deadly threat to our 
 future.\nAI whistleblowers from Chat GP have also been retaliated against 
 for speaking out about the dangers of this unbridled development and there 
 must be an international movement to control this development so it does 
 not threaten the future of the world.\nAI and algorythims are now used to 
 discriminate against women, blacks and brown people and the control of tech 
 and media threaten by these techno fascists are driving toward a fascist 
 dictatorship to benefit them and their ideological and political agenda 
 with complete deregulation and no accountability.\nThe introduction of 
 autonomous vehicles has threatend milliions of workers and Goldman Sachs 
 has said 350 million workers around the world will have their jobs 
 eliminated with the introduction of this Tech. It is being developed to 
 eliminate labor and replace workers with AI robots. This is an existential 
 issue for nurses, teachers, transportation workers, logistics workers, 
 journalists, actors, writers and public workers. \nAltman and his cronies 
 have no plan for the future of the hundreds of millions of workers who will 
 be displaced because they are driven by profiting from the use of AI and 
 Robotics.\nTheir dystopian view of their world is one of unlimited wealth 
 and control for themselves and slave labor for the mass of workers and 
 people and they need fascism to accomplish this agenda.\nWe demand that 
 this technology benefit working people and the public and it will not take 
 place under these billionaire oligarchs and crooks\nSpeakers will address 
 this issue and how working people can confront this new challenge to our 
 future.\n\nSponsored by\nUnited Front Committee For A Labor 
 Party\nwww.ufclp.org\nAlliance For Independent Workers, Founder, 
 AiW\nLaborNet\nLabortech.net\n\nTechno Crypto Fascists Unite\n\n‘It’s 
 Not 2016 Anymore’: Trump Finds Friends in Silicon 
 Valley\n\nhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/us/politics/trump-sacks-silicon-valley-donors.html\n\n\nDonald 
 Trump is heading to San Francisco for a fund-raiser, and his host, the tech 
 entrepreneur David Sacks, hopes to portray Silicon Valley as a more 
 MAGA-welcoming place.\nDavid Sacks, an entrepreneur and investor, will host 
 a fund-raiser at his home in San Francisco for former President Donald J. 
 Trump on Thursday.Credit...Peter DaSilva for The New York Times\nTheodore 
 Schleifer.png\nBy Theodore Schleifer\nJune 6, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET\n\nOne 
 March night in the nation’s capital, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of 
 Ohio, left a conservative gala to join a group having dinner with Donald 
 Trump Jr.\nAs the meal wrapped, Mr. Vance decided, on a whim, to invite a 
 friend, whom he had just introduced at the gala dinner, to meet the former 
 president’s son. Soon, the three Republicans — Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump Jr. 
 and Mr. Vance’s friend, David Sacks, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur — 
 were getting to know one another for a half-hour or so in a private dining 
 room of the Conrad Hotel.\nIt was there, at that impromptu post-dinner hang 
 hours after Mr. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, that Mr. 
 Sacks signaled that he was all-in for Trump 2024.\nOn Thursday evening, 
 this time on his own California turf, it will be Mr. Sacks’s turn to host 
 Team Trump. The former president himself is flying to San Francisco to 
 attend a fund-raiser at Mr. Sacks’s $20 million home on the toniest 
 street in the city’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood. The private 
 event, the first campaign fund-raiser since Mr. Trump’s criminal 
 conviction last week, is expected to raise north of $12 million, according 
 to people involved in the gathering.\nBeyond the money, the fund-raiser in 
 the beating heart of the liberal tech industry is also shaping up to be a 
 landmark event, at least symbolically.\nFour years ago, and certainly eight 
 years ago, the Bay Area remained a haven for liberalism and offered little 
 support for Mr. Trump. But that Obama-era bonhomie between Silicon Valley 
 and the Democratic Party has come close to disintegrating. These days, 
 entrepreneurs complain as much about President Biden as they do about Lina 
 Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who has ascended to Darth 
 Vader-like status in some corners of the technology industry.\nTo be sure, 
 most of the tech industry’s elite maintain their liberal leanings on 
 everything from immigration to climate change. Mr. Biden made his own trip 
 to Silicon Valley last month, where he raised millions of dollars and was 
 feted by internet icons, including Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist, 
 and Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo chief executive. But times have 
 changed, and Republicans on a national level see an opportunity to make 
 incursions with wealthy entrepreneurs who have drifted rightward following 
 the Covid pandemic and the resistance to the social-justice movements of 
 2020.\n“It’s safe to say that there’s a wellspring of support in 
 Silicon Valley,” Mr. Sacks wrote in a text to The New York Times, 
 “especially given the backlash to the political prosecution of 
 Trump.”\nMr. Sacks has expressed a desire to friends to make the San 
 Francisco event something of a statement. He hopes to portray Silicon 
 Valley as a changed place — and San Francisco as no longer the liberal 
 mecca of the Grateful Dead and Allen Ginsberg.\n\n\n\nOver the last few 
 years, Mr. Sacks, a longtime associate of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, has 
 transformed from a prominent Silicon Valley executive into an unlikely 
 media celebrity for would-be entrepreneurs, especially those leaning right, 
 who listen to his popular “All-In” podcast. He has also substantially 
 increased his political involvement, hiring aides to steer his giving, 
 setting up his own super PACs and, as of late, building relationships at 
 Mr. Trump’s Florida home base, Mar-a-Lago, links to which he lacked just 
 a few months ago.\n“There’s a ton more latitude that people feel like 
 they have now,” said Saurabh Sharma, the head of a conservative advocacy 
 group called American Moment, which hosted the gala featuring Mr. Sacks and 
 Mr. Vance. “It’s not 2016 anymore.”\n\nTHE TRIP TO SAN FRANCISCO IS 
 MR. TRUMP’S FIRST VISIT TO THE FAMOUSLY LEFT-WING CITY IN AT LEAST A 
 DECADE. THE FORMER PRESIDENT HAS CALLED SAN FRANCISCO “HORRIBLE,” 
 “FILTHY” AND “DRUG-INFESTED,” AND HE HAS OFTEN INVOKED ITS 
 HOMEGROWN POLITICAL FIGURES, SUCH AS GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM AND FORMER HOUSE 
 SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI, AS EXEMPLARS OF WHAT HE SEES AS LIBERAL 
 EXCESSES.\n\nSome attendees of Mr. Sacks’s event are flying in from out 
 of town. As of Tuesday, the event at his home — nicknamed the Broadcliff 
 by him and his wife, Jacqueline — had sold out of its two ticket levels, 
 $50,000 per person and $300,000 per person. Several people who belatedly 
 expressed interest in going learned they would be unable to do so. Later, 
 over the weekend, Trump will be hosted in Orange County in Southern 
 California by another tech entrepreneur, Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook 
 executive who went on to co-found the virtual reality company Oculus and 
 the defense tech company Anduril.\nPeople involved in the San Francisco 
 fund-raiser said that the roughly $12 million they expect to raise will 
 beat their initial goal of about $5 million. About 25 people are expected 
 to attend the dinner, and about another 50 or so are slated to attend a 
 bigger reception.\nA few of the more famous Silicon Valley Republicans are 
 skipping the event. Mr. Thiel, who has been in Europe this week for the 
 annual meeting of the Bilderberg Group, is not expected to attend, 
 according to two people familiar with his plans. Neither is the venture 
 capitalist Marc Andreessen, a person familiar with his plans said. Keith 
 Rabois, a prominent G.O.P. donor and an early PayPal executive alongside 
 Mr. Sacks and Mr. Thiel, won’t be there — but his husband, Jacob 
 Helberg, will be, along with his guest, Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of 
 Tennessee.\nThe fund-raiser is expected to draw heavily from leaders in the 
 crypto industry. Ryan Selkis, a politically active crypto entrepreneur, has 
 told people he plans to attend. The industry has taken a recent beating 
 from Mr. Biden, whose veto last week of a crypto-friendly bill drove a few 
 attendees to the Trump gathering, according to a person involved in the 
 event.\n“As opposed to an event in Palm Beach, where it’s more likely a 
 bunch of wealthy people who want to go to France or England, this event is 
 a little bit more about the business community saying, ‘Enough,’” 
 said Trevor Traina, a former ambassador to Austria under Mr. Trump. A 
 friend of Mr. Sacks, Mr. Traina plans to attend the event.\nSenator J.D. 
 Vance, Republican of Ohio, who worked as a venture capitalist at one of 
 Peter Thiel’s firms, introduced Mr. Sacks to Donald Trump Jr., and will 
 be in attendance at the fund-raiser himself.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for 
 The New York TimesImageSenator J.D. Vance stands and applauds at an outdoor 
 rally, as a crowd behind him sits and claps.\nMr. Sacks has had two primary 
 sources of help. The first has been Chamath Palihapitiya, an early 
 executive at AOL and Facebook, who is now one of Mr. Sacks’s so-called 
 “besties” on their joint podcast and a former large donor to Democrats. 
 The other is Mr. Vance, the Ohio senator who lived briefly in San Francisco 
 and worked as a venture capitalist at one of Mr. Thiel’s firms. Mr. 
 Vance, who will be in town for the event, co-founded a donor network 
 popular with some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, called the Rockbridge 
 Network, and he has been deeply involved in urging his friends in the 
 industry to turn out for the gathering.\nAmong those friends was Mr. Sacks 
 himself, whom Mr. Vance has called “one of his closest confidants” in 
 politics. Mr. Sacks helped launch Gov. Ron DeSantis’s failed presidential 
 bid alongside Mr. Musk on X in early 2023 and was slow to embrace Mr. 
 Trump. Mr. Sacks said in the aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, that the riot at 
 the Capitol had disqualified Mr. Trump from serving in elected office, but 
 Mr. Vance then spent upward of a year trying to change Mr. Sacks’s 
 mind.\nMr. Sacks has expressed to friends that he no longer thinks that 
 being a Trump supporter in Silicon Valley is so provocative.\nDuring Mr. 
 Trump’s last trip to Silicon Valley for fund-raising in the fall of 2019, 
 organizers worked hard to disguise the host of the event, out of fear of a 
 backlash, not informing guests of the precise location until very close to 
 the day of the fund-raiser. Nowadays, Trump supporters in tech take pride 
 — a sign in itself. Ron Conway, a leader of liberal tech executives for 
 decades, has grown alarmed by the trend and encouraged a few friends to 
 skip the event, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Other 
 Democratic veterans in tech have even questioned the hosts privately and 
 effectively asked them if they had lost their minds.\nShawn Steel, a 
 Republican National Committeeman from California who has worked in politics 
 for decades, called the pro-Trump cohort of Republican givers “true, new 
 gladiators.”\n“I gave up on Silicon Valley years ago,” Mr. Steel 
 said. “There’s been a transformation — real money is coming.”\nMr. 
 Sacks had expressed an interest in turning the event into a 
 content-creation opportunity, perhaps by pulling out microphones for a live 
 taping of Mr. Sacks’s and Mr. Palihapitiya’s podcast. That plan has 
 since been scuttled. Still, the paper invitation to donors was sure to 
 attach a rather specific honorific atop the names of these two professional 
 venture capitalists: “All-In Co-Hosts.”\n\n\nA Devil’s Bargain With 
 OpenAI\n\nPublishers including The Atlantic are signing deals with the AI 
 giant. Where does this 
 lead?\nhttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/a-devils-bargain-with-openai/678537/\n\n\nBy 
 Damon Beres\nIllustration by The AtlanticA blend of The Atlantic's and 
 OpenAI's logos\nMAY 29, 2024\n\nA blend of The Atlantic's and OpenAI's 
 logosListen to this article\n\nProduced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio 
 (NOA) using AI narration.\nThis article was featured in the One Story to 
 Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.\nEarlier today, The 
 Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, announced in an internal email that 
 the company has entered into a business partnership with OpenAI, the 
 creator of ChatGPT. (The news was made public via a press release shortly 
 thereafter.) Editorial content from this publication will soon be directly 
 referenced in response to queries in OpenAI products. In practice, this 
 means that users of ChatGPT, say, might type in a question and receive an 
 answer that briefly quotes an Atlantic story; according to Anna Bross, The 
 Atlantic’s senior vice president of communications, it will be 
 accompanied by a citation and a link to the original source. Other 
 companies, such as Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and 
 Politico, have made similar arrangements.\nIt does all feel a bit like 
 publishers are making a deal with—well, can I say it? The red guy with a 
 pointy tail and two horns? Generative AI has not exactly felt like a friend 
 to the news industry, given that it is trained on loads of material without 
 permission from those who made it in the first place. It also enables the 
 distribution of convincing fake media, not to mention AI-generated 
 child-sexual-abuse material. The rapacious growth of the technology has 
 also dovetailed with a profoundly bleak time for journalism, as several 
 thousand people have lost their jobs in this industry over just the past 
 year and a half. Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has behaved in an erratic, 
 ethically questionable manner, seemingly casting caution aside in search of 
 scale. To put it charitably, it’s an unlikely hero swooping in with bags 
 of money. (Others see it as an outright villain: A number of newspapers, 
 including The New York Times, have sued the company over alleged copyright 
 infringement. Or, as Jessica Lessin, the CEO of The Information, put it in 
 a recent essay for this magazine, publishers “should protect the value of 
 their work, and their archives. They should have the integrity to say 
 no.”)\nRead: ChatGPT is turning the internet into plumbing\nThis has an 
 inescapable sense of déjà vu. For media companies, the defining question 
 of the digital era has simply been How do we reach people? There is much 
 more competition than ever before—anyone with an internet connection can 
 self-publish and distribute writing, photography, and videos, drastically 
 reducing the power of gatekeepers. Publishers need to fight for their 
 audiences tooth and nail. The clearest path forward has tended to be 
 aggressively pursuing strategies based on the scope and power of tech 
 platforms that have actively decided not to bother with the messy and 
 expensive work of determining whether something is true before enabling its 
 publication on a global scale. This dynamic has changed the nature of 
 media—and in many cases degraded it. Certain types of headlines turned 
 out to be more provocative to audiences on social media, thus 
 “clickbait.” Google has filtered material according to many different 
 factors over the years, resulting in spammy “search-engine optimized” 
 content that strives to climb to the top of the results page.\nAt times, 
 tech companies have put their thumb directly on the scale. You might 
 remember when, in 2016, BuzzFeed used Facebook’s livestreaming platform 
 to show staffers wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon until it 
 exploded; BuzzFeed, like other publishers, was being paid by the 
 social-media company to use this new video service. That same year, 
 BuzzFeed was valuedat $1.7 billion. Facebook eventually tired of these news 
 partnerships and ended them. Today, BuzzFeed trades publicly and is worth 
 about 6 percent of that 2016 valuation. Facebook, now Meta, has a market 
 cap of about $1.2 trillion.\n“The problem with Facebook Live is 
 publishers that became wholly dependent on it and bet their businesses on 
 it,” Thompson told me when I reached out to ask about this. “What are 
 we going to do editorially that is different because we have a partnership 
 with OpenAI? Nothing. We are going to publish the same stories, do the same 
 things—we will just ideally, I hope, have more people read them.” (The 
 Atlantic’s editorial team does not report to Thompson, and corporate 
 partnerships have no influence on stories, including this one.) OpenAI did 
 not respond to questions about the partnership.\nRead: It’s the end of 
 the web as we know it\nThe promise of working alongside AI companies is 
 easy to grasp. Publishers will get some money—Thompson would not disclose 
 the financial elements of the partnership—and perhaps even contribute to 
 AI models that are higher-quality or more accurate. Moreover, The 
 Atlantic’s Product team will develop its own AI tools using OpenAI’s 
 technology through a new experimental website called Atlantic Labs. 
 Visitors will have to opt in to using any applications developed there. 
 (Vox is doing something similar through a separate partnership with the 
 company.)\nBut it’s just as easy to see the potential problems. So far, 
 generative AI has not resulted in a healthier internet. Arguably quite the 
 opposite. Consider that in recent days, Google has aggressively pushed an 
 “AI Overview” tool in its Search product, presenting answers written by 
 generative AI atop the usual list of links. The bot has suggested that 
 users eat rocks or put glue in their pizza sauce when prompted in certain 
 ways. ChatGPT and other OpenAI products may perform better than Google’s, 
 but relying on them is still a gamble. Generative-AI programs are known to 
 “hallucinate.” They operate according to directions in black-box 
 algorithms. And they work by making inferences based on huge data sets 
 containing a mix of high-quality material and utter junk. Imagine a 
 situation in which a chatbot falsely attributes made-up ideas to 
 journalists. Will readers make the effort to check? Who could be harmed? 
 For that matter, as generative AI advances, it may destroy the internet as 
 we know it; there are already signs that this is happening. What does it 
 mean for a journalism company to be complicit in that act?\nRead: OpenAI 
 just gave away the entire game\nGiven these problems, several publishers 
 are making the bet that the best path forward is to forge a relationship 
 with OpenAI and ostensibly work toward being part of a solution. “The 
 partnership gives us a direct line and escalation process to OpenAI to 
 communicate and address issues around hallucinations or inaccuracies,” 
 Bross told me. “Additionally, having the link from ChatGPT (or similar 
 products) to our site would let a reader navigate to source material to 
 read the full article.” Asked about whether this arrangement might 
 interfere with the magazine’s subscription model—by giving ChatGPT 
 users access to information in articles that are otherwise paywalled, for 
 example—Bross said, “This is not a syndication license. OpenAI does not 
 have permission to reproduce The Atlantic’s articles or create 
 substantially similar reproductions of whole articles or lengthy excerpts 
 in ChatGPT (or similar products). Put differently, OpenAI’s display of 
 our content cannot exceed their fair-use rights.”\nI am no soothsayer. It 
 is easy to pontificate and catastrophize. Generative AI could turn out to 
 be fine—even helpful or interesting—in the long run. Advances such as 
 retrieval-augmented generation—a technique that allows AI to adjust its 
 responses based on specific outside sources—might relieve some of the 
 most immediate concerns about accuracy. (You would be forgiven for not 
 recently using Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, which runs on OpenAI technology, 
 but it’s become pretty good at summarizing and citing its sources.) 
 Still, the large language models powering these products are, as the 
 Financial Times wrote, “not search engines looking up facts; they are 
 pattern-spotting engines that guess the next best option in a sequence.” 
 Clear reasons exist not to trust their outputs. For this reason alone, the 
 apparent path forward offered by this technology may well be a dead 
 end.\nDamon Beres is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the 
 Technology section.\n\nSam Altman, Techo Fascism & The Fascist 
 Movement\n\nThe Despots of Silicon 
 Valley\n\nhttps://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/despots-silicon-valley/677386/\n\n\nThe 
 intellectual origins of the movement that self-described 
 “techno-optimists” are advancing is dark—and deeply familiar.\nBy 
 Hanna Rosin\nIllustration by Ben Kothe. Source: Gerard Julien / AFP / 
 Getty.Next to the Radio Atlantic logo, Mark Zuckerberg wearing a crown of 
 mouse pointers\nOn the day that Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, 
 he tweeted, “the bird is freed,” a very short phrase, even by the 
 standards of Twitter (now X). And yet it contains so many innuendos and 
 unanswered questions. Was the bird shackled before? Is the man who freed it 
 … a liberator? Freed to do what exactly?\nMusk has always talked a big 
 game on free speech and even described himself as a “free speech 
 absolutist.” But his ownership and management of X has revealed the deep 
 inconsistencies between his professed values and his actions. And it 
 isn’t just Musk. Throughout the world of tech, evidence of illiberalism 
 is on the rise.\nIn this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, Adrienne 
 LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic, names and explains the 
 political ideology of the unelected leaders of Silicon Valley. They are 
 leading a movement she calls “techno-authoritarianism.”\nListen to the 
 conversation here:\nSubscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | 
 Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts\nThe following is a transcript of the 
 episode:\n[Music]\nNews Archival: This is the big surprise in Silicon 
 Valley today. Sam Altman, the face of the generative-AI boom and CEO of 
 OpenAI, he’s out of the company.\nAdrienne LaFrance: You probably 
 remember seeing headlines right before Thanksgiving about a bunch of drama 
 at OpenAI.\nNews Archival: That roller-coaster ride at OpenAI is over. At 
 least we think it’s over. Ousted CEO Sam Altman has been rehired, and the 
 board that pushed him out is gone.\nLaFrance: I mean, it was probably the 
 most dramatic story in tech, possibly of this century. I mean, really 
 dramatic.\n[Music]\nHanna Rosin: That’s Adrienne LaFrance, the executive 
 editor of The Atlantic, and she’s been following tech for decades. So you 
 would expect that she would find this Silicon Valley office gossip 
 dramatic.\nBut the surprising thing is, a lot of people did—which is 
 probably because underneath that “will they or won’t they rehire Sam 
 Altman?” question, there was a more fundamental debate going 
 on.\n\nRECOMMENDED READING\n\nA photo-illustration of Mark Zuckerberg in 
 profile wearing a crown of cursor arrowsADRIENNE LAFRANCEThe Rise of 
 Techno-authoritarianism\n\nillustration with an 1820 painting of outdoor 
 feast with people in historical dress fleeing a giant flaming Facebook logo 
 in a colonnaded courtyardJONATHAN HAIDTWhy the Past 10 Years of American 
 Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid\n\nA mother sleeps in a bed next to her 
 baby.EMILY OSTERWhen Parents Try to Do It All, They Do It 
 Poorly\n\n[Music]\nLaFrance: On one side, you have people arguing for a 
 more cautious approach to development of artificial intelligence. And on 
 the other, you have an argument or a sort of worldview that says, This 
 technology is here. It’s happening. It’s changing the world already. 
 Not only should we not slow down, but it would be irresponsible to slow 
 down.\nSo it’s this just dramatically different worldview of, you know, 
 almost polar opposites—of if you slow down, you’re hurting humanity, 
 versus if you don’t slow down, you’re hurting humanity.\nRosin: So the 
 most oversimplification is like scale and profit versus caution.\nLaFrance: 
 Exactly. But the people who are on the scale-and-profit side would like you 
 to believe that they are also operating in humanity’s best 
 interest.\n[Music]\nRosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. The 
 drama at OpenAI was a rare moment where an ideological divide in Silicon 
 Valley was so central, and explicit.\nWe’re not going to talk about the 
 Sam Altman saga today. But we are going to talk about these underlying 
 beliefs, because in an industry defined by inventions, and IPOs, and tech 
 bro jokes, it’s easy to miss what a fundamental driver ideology can 
 be.\nIn a recent story for The Atlantic, Adrienne argued that we should 
 examine these views more carefully and take them much more seriously than 
 we do. And she put a name to the ideology: 
 techno-authoritarianism.\n[Music]\nRosin: So, we are used to thinking of 
 some tech titans as villains, but you’re kind of defining them as 
 villains with political significance. What do you mean when you call them 
 the despots of Silicon Valley?\nLaFrance: So I’ve been thinking about 
 this for years, honestly, and something that had been frustrating me is I 
 feel that we, as a society, haven’t properly placed Silicon Valley where 
 it needs to be, in terms of its actual importance and influence.\nSo we all 
 know it influences our lives. And, you know, I would love to talk about 
 screens and social media and all the rest, but Silicon Valley has also had 
 this profound influence politically and culturally that is much bigger than 
 just the devices we’re holding in our pockets.\nRosin: Mm-hmm.\nLaFrance: 
 It has bothered me because I feel like we haven’t properly called that 
 what it is, which is an actual ideology that comes out of Silicon Valley 
 that is political in nature, even if it’s not a political party.\nIt’s 
 this worldview that is illiberal. It goes against democratic values, 
 meaning not the Democratic Party but values that promote democracy and the 
 health of democracy. And it presupposes that the technocratic elite knows 
 best and not the people.\nRosin: I mean, authoritarian is a very strong 
 word. We’re used to using “authoritarian” in a different context, 
 which is our political context.\nLaFrance: Definitely. I mean, I guess the 
 nuance I would want to add is that this is not political in the traditional 
 sense. It’s not as though you have authoritarian technocrats trying to 
 come to power in Silicon Valley by way of elections or coups, even. 
 They’re not even bothering with our systems of government, because they 
 already have positioned themselves as more important and influential, 
 culturally. And so it’s almost like they don’t need to bother with 
 government for their power.\nRosin: I see. So it’s a form of power we 
 don’t even recognize, because we don’t exactly have structures to put 
 it in or understand it.\nLaFrance: Well, we may not recognize it as readily 
 because of that, but I think if you look not even that closely, it’s 
 pretty plain to see.\nIf you just pay attention to how people talk about 
 what they think matters, who they think should make decisions, who they 
 characterize as their enemies—institutions, experts, journalists, for 
 example. You know, if it looks like an authoritarian and quacks like an 
 authoritarian, then, you know: ta-da.\nRosin: Right. Right.\nLaFrance: The 
 reason I wanted to try to define what this ideology is, is I do feel as 
 though over the past five to 10 years, something has shifted, gradually at 
 first and then more quickly. The sort of subversion of Enlightenment-era 
 language and values to justify an authoritarian technocratic worldview was 
 alarming to me. And so, for example, you’ll see a lot of people in this 
 category describing themselves as free-speech absolutists—I think a 
 really easy example of this would be Elon Musk—and saying all the things 
 that someone who believes in liberal democracy might agree with on its 
 face, but then acting another way.\nSo, to say you’re a free-speech 
 absolutist but then tailor your privately run social platform to serve your 
 own needs and beliefs and pick on your perceived enemies—I mean, that’s 
 not free-speech absolutism at all.\nAnd so this sense of aggrievement has 
 accelerated and become, you know, more vitriolic and more ostentatious. It 
 just seems like it’s getting more pronounced.\nRosin: When did you start 
 paying attention to tech titans? When did you start following the 
 industry?\nLaFrance: I first started really writing about tech for The 
 Atlantic in 2013.\nRosin: Mm-hmm. What was the promise of tech back then? 
 How were tech titans framing their own work or behaving differently than 
 now?\nLaFrance: Right. I mean, so 10 to 15 years ago, we were talking about 
 the dawn of the social mobile age. So smartphones are still sort of new. 
 (Social media is not totally new. You know, Facebook started in 2004. You 
 could go back to, like, Friendster or Myspace before that.) Uber was new. 
 It was very much an era of people still being wowed.\nAnd frankly, I’m 
 still wowed by this. Like, you pick up this smartphone—this new, shiny, 
 beautiful device—and you press a button on the phone, and something can 
 happen in the real world: You summon a taxi or, you know, food delivery. 
 All of this stuff seems totally normal to us now, but it was this 
 miraculous time where people were creating a way of interacting with the 
 world that was totally new.\nAnd so there was still, I think, certainly 
 healthy skepticism, but you had a lot of the bright-eyed optimism that I 
 think started, certainly, in the ’90s that still carried over.\nRosin: 
 And was there a worldview attached to that awe? Like, I remember the 
 phrase, “Don’t be evil,” but I can’t place it in time. Like, was 
 there some idea of—\nLaFrance: I can’t remember when Google retired 
 that, but there certainly came a point where it became ridiculous to wear 
 that optimism on your sleeve. There was this time where Silicon Valley was 
 a place for underdogs, for people with big dreams and the ability to code, 
 and they’d come and do amazing things.\nI think we also have to 
 remember—I don’t want to be too starry-eyed about it—even then, this 
 was an era where you had, like, the bro-ish culture, and women working in a 
 lot of these companies at the time report just terrible experiences.\nAnd 
 so there are flaws from the start, as with any industry or any culture. But 
 I think 10 or 15 years ago is around the time things started to curdle a 
 little bit.\nI believe it was 2012 when Facebook eventually bought 
 Instagram, with its $1 billion valuation, and it was this moment where 
 people were like, No. Come on. Like, That’s an insane amount of money. Is 
 it really worth that?\nAnd you had a string of these sort of obscene 
 amounts of money. And what you were witnessing—and I think people started 
 to realize this then, too—was like the monopolization and these giants 
 gobbling up their competitors. The forces set in motion that led us to the 
 environment that we’re in today.\nAnd we didn’t know it until a couple 
 of years later, but 2012 was also the year that Facebook was doing its 
 now-infamous mood-manipulation experiments, when it was showing users 
 different things to see if they could try to make people happy or sad or 
 angry, without their consent.\nAnd by then, I think, the general public was 
 starting to realize, you know, there may be some downsides to all these 
 shiny things.\nRosin: Yeah. And then came 2016, when it felt like 
 Facebook’s role in the election was something everybody 
 noticed.\nLaFrance: Right, and all kinds of questions about targeted ads 
 for certain populations and election interference, foreign or otherwise. 
 So, definitely, there was another wave of intense criticism for Facebook 
 then. You know, serious questions about these companies wreaking havoc have 
 been around for years.\nRosin: It’s been eight or 10 years. So, like, 
 what feels different now?\nLaFrance: The reason I wrote this now is we are, 
 in America, certainly, and elsewhere in the world, facing a real fight for 
 the future of democracy. And the stakes are high. And it seemed important 
 to me, you know, at a time when everyone’s going to be focused on the 
 2024 presidential election, as they should be, and on the stakes there, 
 there are other forces for illiberalism and autocracy that are permeating 
 our society, and we should reckon with those too.\n[Music]\nRosin: After 
 the break, we talk about a voice that seems to capture 
 techno-authoritarianism perfectly. And of course, we 
 reckon.\n[Music]\nLaFrance: So if you look at the social conditions that 
 help provoke political violence or stoke people’s appetite for a strong 
 man in charge—or pick your destabilizing social, political, cultural 
 force—a lot of those things go together and overlap.\nAnd I think a lot 
 of those same conditions are exacerbated by our relationship, individual 
 and societal, with technology and then further exacerbated by the tech 
 titans who want to defend against any criticism of the current 
 environment.\nRosin: I see. So the tolerance for political autocracy and 
 our tolerance for technological autocracy, they kind of meld together and 
 produce the same results.\nLaFrance: I think so. I mean, just think about, 
 like, Orwell or Ray Bradbury. We know that—I mean, those were futuristic 
 books in their times, thinking of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451—\nRosin: 
 Politics and technology, the interaction between—that is the engine of 
 sci-fi.\nLaFrance: Yeah, or just look at how Hitler used the radio. Like, 
 technology is not inherently evil. I love technology. I desperately love 
 the internet. Like, I actually do.\nBut I think when you have 
 extraordinarily powerful people putting their worldview in terms of, 
 Progress is inevitable, and, Anyone who doesn’t want to just move forward 
 for the sake of moving forward is on the side of evil, just the starkness 
 of how they frame this is so uncomplicated.\nThere’s no nuance, and 
 it’s in really authoritarian terms. Just, it should scare people.\nRosin: 
 Okay. I think I want to get to the specifics of what this ideology actually 
 is.\nLaFrance: Okay. So a useful example is Marc Andreessen, the venture 
 capitalist. You know, Andreessen Horowitz is his firm. He’s a very 
 well-known, influential, but pugnacious guy.\nAnd he has written what he 
 calls “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” and it’s a very long blog 
 post, but I think a revealing one and worth reading in the sense that it 
 lays out some of what I’m describing here.\nHe lists, sort of, what a 
 techno-optimist would believe, and I’m paraphrasing here, but: progress 
 for progress’s sake, always moving forward, rejecting tradition, 
 rejecting history, rejecting expertise, rejecting institutions. He has a 
 list of enemies.\nYou look at the well that people are drawing from, and it 
 gives you a sense of the sort of the intellectual rigidity, I would say, of 
 just: What we’re doing is good because it’s what we’re doing, and 
 we’re going to do it because we’re doing it.\nThere’s sort of this, 
 like, circular logic to it. So anyway, that’s one example, “The 
 Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”\nRosin: Let’s read some of the lines, just 
 to typify his style of writing and thinking. I mean, the one that I always 
 think about, is the one about the lightning.\nLaFrance: It’s really 
 dramatic. [Laughs.]\nRosin: I remember thinking, when I read that line, 
 I’ve never possibly read anything as arrogant as this.\nLaFrance: I know, 
 well, but we shouldn’t laugh at it, because he’s serious. Do you know 
 what I mean?\nRosin: Well, let’s get to that, but just so people 
 understand the style—\nLaFrance: Okay. [Demonstratively clears throat.] 
 I’m really not going to laugh. Okay. He says, “We believe in nature, 
 but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering 
 in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning 
 works for us.”\nRosin: “The lightning works for us.” Wow. That’s 
 something.\nLaFrance: Look, I get, like, there’s a version of this that, 
 harnessed properly, could inspire people to do spectacular things.\nAnd, 
 like, there’s something beautiful about great imagination in tech. 
 That’s great. But yeah, saying, “The lightning works for us,” is a 
 bit much.\nRosin: I actually have trouble understanding optimist versus 
 pessimist.\nLaFrance: Right. He’s so mad for an optimist.\nRosin: Yes. 
 It’s a combination of, sort of, Ayn Rand speak and a kind of angry 
 Twitter manifesto.\nBut it is dark and apocalyptic, and I did wonder about 
 that. Like, why is it called “The Techno-Optimist” and yet it feels 
 extremely reactionary? Like, it echoes a kind of reactionary language that 
 you hear in some corners of the Republican Party and Trumpism. It’s a 
 little bit like “Make America great again.” The way people talked about 
 that is the most pessimistic political slogan that anyone’s ever won 
 with.\nLaFrance: Totally. I mean, I think you’re hitting the exact point, 
 which is they take—I’ll speak just for Andreessen here. He is 
 describing himself and this manifesto as optimistic, but in the same way 
 that some technocrats take Enlightenment values and claim to support them 
 while saying the exact opposite of what those values actually mean. And so 
 I think it’s a subversion of meaning. It’s: We’re optimists. We’re 
 the good guys.\nAnd then you read it and you’re like, This is 
 horrifying.\nBut this isn’t some Reddit forum in the corner that only six 
 guys are reading and agreeing with each other. These are the most powerful 
 people on the planet, and they’re hugely influential and people buy into 
 it.\nRosin: Could you help me understand, what’s the ultimate goal of a 
 techno-optimist? Is it social change? Is it an attitude shift? Is it 
 money?\nIt’s very hard to understand. Is it just scaling a company? Or is 
 it cultural, societal change? Like, what do you think they’re 
 after?\nLaFrance: Well, I wouldn’t call it a techno-optimist. I 
 wouldn’t use that term.\npromo image.pngBut the worldview that’s being 
 expressed here, I think the goal, certainly, is to retain power and to 
 maximize profit. And one of the stated goals from the manifesto is quote, 
 “to ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.” So 
 that’s clearly talking about continued enrichment for these powerful 
 people, who are already very wealthy. But you know, they want to build new 
 things and make a ton of money.\nRosin: Mm-hmm. That’s the weird thing. 
 Like, it doesn’t sound like a business strategy.\nLaFrance: 
 [Laughs.]\nRosin: It sounds like a manifesto for social overhaul. And so 
 it’s hard to understand what it is.\nLaFrance: I will say, to be fair, I 
 think this encapsulates also the people who are creating world-changing 
 tech for good, which is happening.\nI mean, if you look at even the realm 
 of AI, we hope—we haven’t seen it yet, but I fully expect we will see 
 AI that helps cure diseases. That’s remarkable. We should all wish for 
 that outcome. And I hope that the people working on this are singularly 
 focused on that kind of work.\nAnd so I think if you were to ask someone 
 like Marc Andreessen or Elon Musk or pick your favorite technocrat, they 
 would say, We’re changing the world to make it better for humanity. 
 We’re going to go to Mars. We’re going to cure disease.\npromo 
 image.png\nA\nAnd people who have this worldview may, in fact, help do 
 that, which is fantastic. But in order to get to Mars, what’s the 
 trade-off if you’re talking about this worldview?\nRosin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 
 Among the leaders of major tech companies, how prevalent do you think this 
 attitude is?\nLaFrance: It’s a really good question. Honestly, there are 
 so many tech companies, I don’t feel comfortable saying that it’s 
 widespread across every one. Like, there’s so many tech companies, 
 right?\nRosin: Mm-hmm.\nLaFrance: But it is highly visible and vocal among 
 many very influential leaders in tech. So if you were to look at every 
 single tech company, it may not even be a majority. But among the most 
 powerful people, it’s highly visible and prevalent.\nRosin: And how would 
 you compare it with the attitudes of, say, the robber barons of earlier 
 eras?\nLaFrance: There is actually a great book called Railroaded by the 
 Stanford historian Richard White that is mostly about robber barons, but 
 the entire time I was reading it, I was thinking about Silicon Valley, 
 because it’s a very natural comparison.\nYou have this sort of, you know, 
 world-changing technology that is rapidly enriching this handful of 
 powerful men—mostly men—and this question of, you know, Did railroads 
 change America for good? Certainly. Of course, they did. But, there are 
 questions of monopoly and how much power any one person should hold and all 
 the questions that come up with Silicon Valley, 
 too.\n\n\nTECHNO-FASCISM’S LEVEL OF EFFICIENCY AND TOTALITARIAN POTENTIAL 
 CAN EASILY LEAD TO REPRESSIVE SYSTEMS THAT WILL NOT TOLERATE 
 DISSENT.\n\nhttps://abolishtime.medium.com/the-roots-of-techno-fascism-49e6dd79b03b\n\nUnlike 
 the racist mythologies of German fascism, the mythic dimensions of 
 techno-fascism are rooted in ancient religious narratives about humans 
 naming and taking control of the environment, and in the abstract thinking 
 of philosophers who laid the conceptual and moral foundations for the 
 modern myth of progress, including the idea that human life is mechanistic 
 in nature and is driven by nature’s law governing natural selection. 
 While the moral foundations of techno-fascism align with the values of 
 market capitalism and the progress-oriented ideology of science that easily 
 slips into scientism, its level of efficiency and totalitarian potential 
 can easily lead to repressive systems that will not tolerate dissent, 
 especially on the part of those challenging how the colonizing nature of 
 techno-fascism promotes consumerism that is destroying the environment and 
 alternative cultural lifestyles such as the cultural commons. \n\nThe 
 primary characteristic of all fascist modernizing movements is conformity 
 of thinking and behavior, which is directed and controlled by total 
 surveillance systems that track people’s thoughts, behaviors and 
 relationships. The latest in the emerging techno-fascist arsenal of 
 surveillance technologies is the new facial recognition system now being 
 adopted by local police, which will shortly become part of the FBI’s $1 
 billion Next Generation Identification program. Photos of people not 
 suspected of criminal activities, as well as those who are, will be 
 instantly available to 18,000 local, state, federal and international law 
 enforcement agencies. The facial recognition technology can identify 16,000 
 distinct features of a person’s face, and compare them at a rate of more 
 than 1 million faces per second, with other photos held by police 
 agencies.\n\n\nThree of the most important threats to what remains of our 
 civil liberties include how social unrest resulting from extreme 
 environmental changes can easily lead to redefining what constitutes 
 criminal behavior. A second major problem is that the facial recognition 
 software has a 20 percent failure rate. And the third threat is the one now 
 plaguing local police across the United States: namely, how their biases 
 and misinterpretations lead to police actions that result in the death of 
 innocent people.\n\nThe increased reliance upon computer-mediated learning 
 at all levels of education contributes to the conformity of thinking needed 
 in the techno-fascist state. Lost are the ethnically diverse, 
 intergenerational narratives passed forward through face-to-face and 
 mentoring relationships, which leave students exposed to the myths that 
 serve the interests of the controlling elites of scientists, computer 
 scientists and engineers, corporate heads and the military establishment. 
 The guiding ideology and moral codes first articulated in the early 18th 
 century by Johannes Kepler’s suggestion that life processes should be 
 understood as machine-like continue to be reinforced both by the computer 
 scientists who have announced the beginning of the post-biological world, 
 and their followers who rely upon the values of efficiency, accountability, 
 profits, data and purposive rationality to engineer machines that replicate 
 human behaviors and thought processes.Comparing Historical Fascism and 
 Techno-FascismThe questions that need to be asked about the parallels 
 between the European varieties of fascism and American right-wing groups 
 include the following: Is there a parallel between how the German National 
 Socialists in the 1930s manipulated the democratic process to gain support 
 of their totalitarian agenda and how the National Rifle Association (NRA), 
 for example, uses the protection of the US Constitution and its ability to 
 keep Congress supporting its agenda of arming right-wing, hyper-patriotic 
 Americans? What about the parallels between the male-dominated fascist 
 movements in Europe and the male-dominated fields of computer science, 
 engineering, national security agencies, the military establishment and 
 corporations whose future is tied to the digital revolution? Does the 
 concern with data, efficiency and a vision of progress that is easily 
 interpreted in the language of social Darwinism reflect the West’s deep 
 assumptions that this is not only a human-centered universe but also one 
 that should be guided by the scientific and culturally uninformed 
 rationalism of men? \n\nFascism also relies upon the combination of 
 conformity in thought and values, the loss of historical memory and a 
 perceived crisis or endpoint that requires the collective energy and 
 loyalty of the young and old. In addition, there needs to be a significant 
 percentage of the population that is hyper-patriotic, thinks in clichés 
 and is willing to support the use of imprisonment and torture of those who 
 challenge the rise of techno-fascism, especially those labeled as 
 environmentalists who will be viewed, as like the Jews in Nazi Germany, as 
 weakening the power of the state and impeding progress.\n\nDIGITAL 
 TECHNOLOGIES HAVE INTRODUCED IRREVERSIBLE CULTURAL CHANGES, SUCH AS 
 UNDERMINING LOCAL DEMOCRACY.\n\nDigitally mediated learning, which is 
 heavily dependent upon print- and data-based accounts that encode the 
 taken-for-granted cultural assumption (and ideology) of the people who 
 write the programs, reinforces a mindset that responds to short 
 explanations that do not lead to the experience of boredom associated with 
 long-term memory, narratives and written accounts. The ways in which the 
 social media reinforce the importance of the shifting sense of immediacy 
 and instant responses to the anonymous Others ensure that the emergence of 
 a fascist state will go unrecognized. The systems of local control 
 involving a variety of democratic practices and traditions of ecological 
 wisdom must first be lost to memory. Where in the digitally mediated 
 curriculum will students learn about these traditions, when the ideology 
 underlying the digital revolution represents traditions, including local 
 decision-making, as sources of backwardness and as impediments to students 
 creating their own ideas from the wealth of context free data available on 
 the internet?It must be recognized that digital technologies have 
 indispensable uses that vary across a wide range of cultural activities, 
 from medicine, scientific research, monitoring and maintaining the 
 society’s technological and economic infrastructure, education and nearly 
 every facet of the industrial and consumer-dependent culture. But the 
 digital technologies have also introduced irreversible cultural changes, 
 such as undermining local democracy (did we vote for any of these 
 technologies?), creating a new generation that is unaware of the political 
 dangers and threats to personal security that accompany the loss of 
 privacy, undermining the face-to-face intergenerational narratives 
 essential to maintaining ethnic identities and the traditions of the 
 cultural commons that strengthen patterns of mutual solidarity while 
 reducing dependency upon consumerism, and further strengthening the 
 longstanding traditions in the West of elevating abstract knowledge over 
 ecologically informed ways of thinking.Today, the internet is shortening 
 people’s attention spans to the point where little more than slogans and 
 sound bites now serve as the basis of political decision-making. Masking 
 disinformation as models of factual accuracy and objective reporting, Fox 
 News has conditioned millions of Americans to accept ideologically driven 
 propaganda, which further reduces the likelihood of mass resistance to the 
 techno-fascist agenda.Will We Resist?The most critical question is whether 
 there will be resistance to how everyday lives are being increasingly 
 monitored, motivated to pursue the increasingly narrow economic agenda of 
 the emerging techno-fascist culture and stripped of historical values and 
 identity. Will enough of the public recognize the dangers that lie ahead 
 and will they be able to articulate the importance of what is being lost, 
 including how what is being lost undermines the diversity of cultural 
 commons experiences that are more ecologically sustainable? It is important 
 to note that the computer scientists who play a central role in 
 articulating the ideology that underlies the emerging techno-fascist 
 culture totally ignore the cultural and linguistic roots of the deepening 
 ecological crisis. The title of the book written by Peter Diamandis and 
 Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2012), could 
 serve as the anthem as we march into the future envisioned by the 
 techno-fascists. The scientific justification for replacing humans and 
 their diverse cultures with the culture created by super-intelligent 
 computers, according to a number of computer scientists following the lead 
 of Ray Kurzweil, is being controlled by nature’s process of natural 
 selection.In order to understand the traditional defenses against 
 totalitarian regimes now being lost, we need to focus more specifically 
 upon the cultural transformations that occur as students spend more of 
 their day in classrooms where computer-mediated learning increasingly 
 displaces face-to-face interaction with teachers and professors who might 
 spark their curiosity to explore beyond the orthodoxies of the day. The 
 many hours of the day texting friends, playing video games and exploring 
 the seemingly endless boundaries of cyberspace also shorten attention spans 
 in ways that undermine long-term memory. Speed and context-free slogans 
 have now replaced depth of understanding and critical judgment.As 
 surveillance systems are increasingly being used to anticipate acts of 
 terrorism, where crime will occur next in communities, perhaps it is time 
 to stop referring to surveillance and to call it what it is: a policing 
 system. The next step will be to monitor potential sources of dissent – a 
 problem that scientists are now working on as they study the connections 
 between people’s vocabularies and their patterns of thinking. Other 
 scientists are making progress along the same pathway pioneered by Nazi 
 scientists by developing facial recognition technologies that will be 
 globally connected. Scientists are also working to discover the chemical 
 changes needed to eliminate bad memories (as well as good memories such as 
 privacy and a life free of commercialism). The next step is to adapt the 
 genetic technologies (CRISPR) that now exist for engineering conceptually 
 and morally compliant babies needed in the techno-fascist state. \n\nThe 
 expansion of surveillance of people’s lives adds another layer to the 
 fascist political agenda of the American right-wing groups that mirror key 
 characteristics of the fascism in European countries. Their social agenda 
 includes placing barriers in people’s ability to vote; the use of the 
 prison system to control a large segment of the poor and non-white 
 population; the intertwining of fundamentalist religions and segments of 
 the government focused on national security, and using the military to 
 globalize the American way; suppressing basic human rights, especially for 
 women; undermining the rights of workers to organize for the purpose of 
 opposing being exploited; and allowing fraudulent elections in which the 
 super-wealthy are able to control the outcome of state and federal 
 elections.The expansion of technological and corporate power involves 
 greater reliance upon the use of context free metaphors such as “national 
 security” and “terrorist” to justify using the power of the police 
 against individuals and social groups engaged in demonstrations and acts of 
 resistance against the environmentally destructive corporations. As the 
 sources of protein become even more limited due to the warming and 
 acidification of the oceans, and as many other scenarios play out as 
 ecological systems collapse, greater social unrest will occur in response 
 to a variety of issues that the money-controlled state and federal 
 governments have not addressed. In short, a deepening ecological crisis and 
 the increasing displacement of humans by machines will result, and 
 techno-fascism will become the new normal. And just as the European 
 varieties of fascism led to more violence in the world, techno-fascism is 
 heading down the same lawless pathway with hackers and global cyberattacks 
 becoming the new normal against which we have no protection.\n\n\n\n\nThe 
 Roots Of 
 Techno-Fascism\n\nhttps://truthout.org/articles/is-the-digital-revolution-sowing-the-seeds-of-a-techno-fascist-future/\n\n\nEstelle 
 Ellison\n\n·May 26, 2023\n\nThe technological apparatus of the 
 surveillance state is dizzying in scope and ability. It all offers 
 today’s reactionaries an unparalleled level of adaptability and deceit 
 that compliments their arsenal of violence that has accumulated oppressive 
 techniques over many centuries. While many liberal opportunists hope to 
 work within an industry whose fascist qualities are already extremely 
 explicit, the state becomes more emboldened in its attempts to make 
 abolition impossible.\nThis is not an analysis of technological means nor 
 is it a call to action for people to try to wrest tools out of the hands of 
 techno-fascism. This is, instead, a critical inspection of the reactionary 
 social dynamics that are aided by techno-fascism. During this cultural war, 
 oppression manifests alongside new vectors of power that are a direct 
 product of this relationship between social technologies and their 
 disparate users. Here, we are focusing on why these technologies are being 
 utilized this way rather than how these technologies operate.\nThe national 
 political stage decries echo chambers and advocates for a free-marketplace 
 of ideas where the merits of genocide must be entertained before deciding 
 whether to condemn it. In this capitalist social forum, the presumption of 
 good intentions and the ignorance of harmful impact both absolve people of 
 responsibility for any and all resulting consequences of interfacing with 
 techno-fascism. As marginalized people are being eradicated, the 
 responsibility for this violence is obscured behind cryptic webs of 
 plausible deniability and disguised eugenicist logic.\nAmong strong 
 disincentives to acknowledge world-threatening material consequences for 
 everything that makes capitalist normalcy possible, we are faced with an 
 unserious liberalism that mistakes the inclusion of and concessions to 
 fascist ideology for progressive saviorism. This social phenomenon is 
 juxtaposed with reactionaries and opportunists who wish to be seen as 
 logical and relatable. Between them is an implication that the left and 
 right stewards of capitalism are better than outright nazis who make no 
 attempt to obfuscate their intentions. In this way, americans elevate the 
 importance of feeling better than open fascists far above the need for the 
 competent collective ability to disempower fascists. Indeed, the latter is 
 depicted as something proven obsolete by the former.\nEmphasis on this 
 feeling rather than actual material consequences in people’s everyday 
 lives imbues all who fall prey to this colonial trap with an inclination to 
 excuse fascist violence. The confidence that comes exclusively from feeling 
 progressive instead of from effectively dismantling oppressive systems is 
 itself very compatible with techno-fascism. Those who distance themselves 
 from the reactionary attitudes and behaviors shown to them by an attention 
 economy simply congratulate themselves for knowing better, while others who 
 see something to gain from eugenics and genocide are ever more neatly 
 folded into fascist ideologies.\nAgain, the all-important feeling of 
 progressivism makes way for an apathetic distance from matters of 
 oppression, preventing even the option of material opposition to fascism 
 from occurring to most americans. It is in this same twisted logic that 
 merely tolerating people of marginalized identities is seen as sufficient 
 for delivering a self-important progressive “feeling.” However 
 difficult it may be for liberals to see, understand and respect queer and 
 trans personhood, choosing not to openly call for their removal from public 
 life is seen as a job well done. This could not be a better foundation for 
 above-ground fascist attacks on queer and trans life. In this way, 
 techno-fascist mobilizations are relatively frictionless with assured 
 possession of agreeable platforms that allow for widespread coordinated 
 efforts to foment white supremacist violence from the state and its most 
 reactionary citizens.\nThe displacement of queer and trans personhood 
 predates today’s techno-fascist apparatus, as does the battle against 
 bodily autonomy. But those who would gain from defeating everyone whose 
 very existence is a perceived threat against patriarchal power see 
 unhindered opportunity in the tools and riches offered by techno-fascism. 
 For every person who quietly wishes they did not have to see human 
 reminders of wealth disparity in the US, there is another person who feels 
 emboldened to advocate for the extermination of homeless people.\nIn this 
 cultural war, fascists correctly believe that they will find like-minded 
 people who are willing to act on their beliefs. In the face of both 
 democrats and liberal opportunists who advocate for the incarceration of 
 those who engage in community self-defense against fascist violence, why 
 wouldn’t reactionaries all strike while the iron is hot\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2024/07/08/18867865.php
SUMMARY:Stop Using AI To Steal: At Sam Altman’s $45 Million SF Mansion Stop Technofascism
LOCATION:Billionaire Sam Altman's $45 Million Pacific Heights Mansion\n950 Lombard 
 St, San Francisco
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2024/07/08/18867865.php
DTSTART:20240715T190000Z
DTEND:20240715T200000Z
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