Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Trump Tech Culturefit

Marketing hype ("innovation"), parochially profitable fraud ("meritocracy"), deregulatory privatization and looting ("disruption"), digi-utopianism ("financialization"), majority precarization ("acceleration"), singularity (New Economy, Long Boom, End of History, Make America Great Again, We're Gonna Win So Much You'll Get Tired of Winning)...

Tho' Silicon Valley has a notional affiliation with the Democratic left (based mostly, I daresay, in an utterly unreliable, sentimental, subcultural attachment arising out of proximity to the vestigially-liberal Bay Area, and in a rejection of Republican anti-science and Christianist evangelism that benefits Democrats who declare themselves "fact-based" in response, but who too often take that to endorse reductionist, quantificationist, eugenic, unaccountably technocratic, bourgeois-consumerist, corporate-militarist, and techno-triumphalist "Thought Leadership" qua "fact"), the truth is that Trump & "Tech" are a match made in Hell.

I expect full co-operation in no time at all -- Peter Thiel is not a counter-example but a reductio ad absurdum. Futurology has always been a genre of marketing deception and hyperbole amplified into techno-transcendental religiosity, what better ideological framework to rationalize Trump's otherwise unmoored authoritarian greedhead aggrieved-aggressive masculine impulses?

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