Balaji Srinivasan #elitist #wingnut

Balaji Srinivasan #elitist #wingnut newrepublic.com

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco[…]you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan[…]
“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen[…]in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country[…]
In 2013, a New York Times story[…]described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent”[…]
Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference[…]In a podcast interview one month before[…], Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith[…], Theodor Herzl[…], and Lee Kuan Yew[…]Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts[…]
Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city[…]The Grays would make an alliance with the police[…]
Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords[…]Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city together[…]
Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone[…]except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”)

“Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs. Crips[…]
“Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first)

10 comments

Sounds like the "Technocracy" movement from the '30s mixed with Byzantine chariot-racing factions.

Blaming all of society's ills on the Blues, and then stating that in order to save civilization, the Blues have to be exterminated. Why does that sound so fucking familiar?

I’ve read a bit more into this, and it’s not a new idea. It’s called technofeudalism. This is a version which involves company towns and cults based on corporate culture, which isn’t new either. If there’s anything new, it’s that the “company towns” are actually more like city neighborhoods (I don’t know if this is actual new, just that I haven’t heard of it) and that he seems to think that one can take over a chunk of a city by driving out or converting everyone by using a weird imitation of fascim. There are a bunch of issues and fundamental flaws with the concept.

First is the assumption that countries will just let rich people carve out their fiefdoms and operate largely autonomously, or even secede outright. Maybe if they’re rich enough and the country is poor enough, but poor countries aren’t going to be favorable locations for this.

Second is the assumption that people and businesses will just sit there while some techbro tries to carve out his kingdom, and not attempt to class-action sue him into oblivion once they can connect him to the violence and slow-roll takeover by his cultists. I mean, powerful churches have occasionally taken over small towns in a similar fashion before, over the objections of the other citizens, but this is something a bit different and as far as I know, untried in the real world.

Third is that there probably aren’t enough potential cultists in any one particular region to fully run a fiefdom, so you’re probably going to need some equivalent of peonage or slavery. Most people and democratic governments are going to take a rather dim view of forcing unwilling people into that, though many would tolerate trickery so long as there was at least a theoretical ability to leave (a “you should have known” sort of disdainfulness or schadenfreude).

Fourth is that the above is kind of how it works anyway in some of the larger companies; the people who invest heavily in corporate culture for personal status, wealth, and/or security spend a lot of time on that rather than working, and do less work than the lower-paid un-invested grunts (and tend to accumulate less skill and institutional knowledge as well). But the grunts can usually quit, if they’re treated badly enough, and can be downsized, neither of which a fiefdom can afford over the long run. This seems to be operating under the unspoken assumption that either everyone is a cultist who devotes themselves to it 24/7 (unlikely) or that the peons are satisfied enough that they won’t want to rebel or leave.

Fifth is why people supposedly won’t want to rebel or leave: because rich techbros know better for everyone than “government” does, and are not in fact infected with a severe case of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to subjects outside their area of expertise. Hahaha no.

Sixth is that this shares a lot of the same sort of thinking which has resulted in attempts to create a real-world equivalent of Galt’s Gulch, none of which were successful because the creators were either scammers or people who have zero grasp of logistics, and only a vague idea how to run civilization, because Dunning Kruger again.

This kind of essentialism, and considering metals usually associated with the color grey…

Silver Legion Mk. II?

Yeah this sounds like a idea that’s doomed to failure in the short term let alone the long term.

Does OP know fascism is a losing ideology?

Silicon Valley is cancer.

@Conscience #196317

Even better: Has he noticed that Futurismo is no longer A Thing?

@Bastethotep #196319

Soooo, where should we set up Germanium Valley or Carbon Valley? I’m not sure which direction we want.