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The Emerging Tech-Lash - by John Ganz - Unpopular Front:

Something like a class-consciousness of the most reactionary section of the tech bourgeoisie now appears to be crystallizing and, with it, a concomitant set of political practices and ideologies. (Musk and Thiel formed PayPal together.) The ideology, stripped of all its mystifying decoration, is actually pretty simple and crude: it says “bosses on top.” This is the unifying thread that runs through Yarvin’s tedious peregrinations from radical libertarianism to monarchism: the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good. It is, to borrow a term from the history of apartheid, baaskapp—boss-ism. “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel once wrote, calling for a kind of “technocratic rejection of politics as such,” to quote the sociologist Dylan Riley. But this vision of “freedom” is not only shared by the bosses and their paid ideologues—there is a “mass” component of the politics as well: this ideal of freedom is shared by a mob that worships the power of the oligarchs and wants its own freedom to consist in the total license to behave online without encountering moral sanction from the pestering wokes or to have personal consequences of any kind. Through the adoption of crackpot racial or IQ notions they can flatter themselves that they are part of the elect, minor shareholders in the oligarch’s basskapp.

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