Comment by tavavex
7 hours ago
Why not? They hold all the cards and have aligned one of the most powerful governments in the world with them, while wielding enough money to make almost any nation, let alone individual, more inclined toward doing what they need. They will only become more powerful.
Because they'll turn on each other.
In an authoritarian regime, it's all competition, no co-operation. Whoever the big dog is gets to say what happens, right up until a bunch of the little dogs drag him down and then fight each other to replace him. If he's lucky and skillful he'll have worked this out and kept the little dogs at each other's throats so they don't gang up on him.
The whole operation of government becomes about "who's the boss?" and the boss gets to run the government to favour himself and his cronies, acquiring more power and wealth.
Any pause to consider the ordinary folks caught up in this is a weakness, that will be taken advantage of by the other wannabe bosses.
It's not a utopia for any of them because of the constant paranoia and fighting. Try to rest on your laurels and enjoy the spoils of what you got for a second, and boom; you get thrown out of a window.
Nah, billionaires understand class solidarity (not intentionally, but coercively, because they have to to get where they are). They'll carve out fiefdoms where they don't step on each other but step on all us (for a tech example, see ISPs)
On the way up, yes. But once they're there, no. As soon as the only way of getting more power is to take over someone else's fiefdom, all that class solidarity disappears.
See the recent purges of the military leadership in China. Or Putin's cronies continually accidentally falling out of windows. It's not safe near the top.
Authoritarian regimes don’t run on facts. They run on the primacy of Authority. Cameras record factual information. Facts are inconvenient for Authority. You know, 1984 Department of Truth style.
Yeah but the camera was broken that day the policeman beat you. On protest day? It's magically up and running.
It’s not a coincidence that the CIA just took down the World Fact Book.
When you control the cameras you can memory hole any inconvenient truths.
They will have the AI just make a video of you doing whatever they feel like accusing you of and publish that from a .gov website.
well if you never read about how any of those work you might think that.
In reality they are very much interested in facts, because they give them info who to oppress harder
This is really a failure to understand how oppressive regimes work.
The goal is not to accurately target people, the whole point is you don't care. The exercise of power is the point.
It doesn't matter who's door you kicked in: you were right to do it no matter what, and they were guilty no matter what.
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I don't think fascists are that smart, they will go after those that get in the way and those who they perceive as weak. They are bullies who are cowards and all that.
When people feel they have nothing left to lose they will happily drag everyone else, especially those of means, down into the mud with them, even if it costs them their own life because they already think it is worthless.
Yes, that if, the most powerful government stays intact. But as it turns out, tech CEOs want to dissolve the nation state and its government to implement their vision of a utopia. The same nation state, the same government that protect their interests and assets, and make lawfare possible in the first place.
I know about these plans, but even if they end up happening to their fullest extent, I don't see why people are so unanimously predicting that they'll definitely fumble the bag. By the time this can happen, they will almost certainly have the most advanced weaponry available and enormous groups of people working on defending them. Again, they can buy anything. In their dream world, power descends directly from them, making their governments obsolete. The direct power of the governments isn't just erased, it'll transition into their hands.
Tech CEOs are not statesmen, even if they consider themselves smart enough to govern. Nor are they warriors, and historically speaking, feudal lords were trained from early childhood in both the art of war and the art of governing. What I mean by that is that these people have no experience of governing, nor do they have any experience of violence and the horrors of war, i.e. they do not have the competence for being feudal lords, and network states or libertarian communes are essentially feudal-like arrangements. What will they do, if they are confronted with large nation-states such as China or Russia? What will they do when other small states don't respect the libertarian non-aggression principle? Will the Andreessens, Thiel and Zuckerbergs of this world be respected by the military, or will they shit their pants when confronted with a military coup, or worse, the enemy's military?
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Because
"When the last tree has fallen
and the rivers are poisoned
you cannot eat money, on no."
-- Aurora, The Seed
> Why not? They hold all the cards...
Cards that only work because of the current system that they are hacking away at. Revolutions tend to eat their young, wannabe American oligarchs should check on how things turned out for the majority of post-soviet Russian oligarchs.
Nikolai Yezhov held all the cards under Stalin, right up until he got purged by Beria. Then Beria held all the cards until he was ousted and shot in turn. In a dog-eat-dog world, the top dog is the biggest target.
The imperial boomerang will ensure they self-destruct.
Yeah but sometimes that takes a few centuries.
Cards can always be taken with violence. Chaos is progression to a state of all versus all, where the most important thing is having the biggest wrench: https://xkcd.com/538/.
And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench. Before you consider the sheer difficulty of making mass violence happen (especially in a world where tech can be used to regulate a sufficient portion of people's worldviews as required), at some point they'll probably just have the upper hand militarily. As military tech gets better, wealth will be able to shift directly into physical power, amplifying their abilities against a comparatively powerless populace.
Difficulty: the "populace" is everywhere.
If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.
If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.
And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.
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> And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench
Tech CEOs can easily outlive their usefulness once the machinery is built, and can easily find themselves labeled "terrorists" if they try to fight back with whatever feeble power they have.
Political factions, purges and patronage is what comes next, amd despite their inflated egos, they won't be the patrons.
Money and power don’t usually make you smarter, in fact they usually make you dumber. You can have every anti social belief and the intentions of the antichrist, but if you’re smart and run your system well everyone will still benefit.
Yes the rich have "all the cards" but the thing about societal reorganization is things get completely flip-flopped and the fact society recognizes you as owning a mansion and a screw factory today doesn't mean that they won't recognize Castro's lieutenant as controlling it tomorrow.
Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
[0] https://cdn8.openculture.com/2017/08/20195126/800px-Soviet_c...
[1] https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/41868a585464d87b...
..That said, what you're saying could be true. I think the truth is that we don't know, and I'm pretty sure we would've felt the same way about the people in the above pictures.
Why not? We have examples from history to look at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.