UnderpantsWeevil

authoritarianism

More an invective than a material critique. You never seem to see a party or governor critique authoritarianism when they’re in power.

At best, you get a Reagan-esque figure mouthing Ayn Rand libertarianism while doing Christian Fascism via espionage and private back channels.

Image

It falls victim to the old SciFi trope “The only way to beat a Good Protagonist is with an Evil Protagonist”. And like all the Picard-Era movies, it has a habit of forgetting what made the television series gripping. Perhaps because it’s always afraid of doing something with a character that they can’t undo with a handwave by the time the credits roll.

Be Me

Log into Highly Competitive MOBA / Team Shooter Game

Rank: Mud

Get slotted into a team of 8-year-olds, Alzheimer’s patients, and people on disability after falling off a ladder at work.

Lose to a team of 9-year-olds, Parkinson’s patients, and people playing the game on a second screen during an office meeting

Oh gee, I wonder how it feels to be The Best Player In FlobsKnight: Cry of Obligation, kicking dirt on little old me!

Win against a team of 6-year-olds, people in a coma, and players with no arms learning to use the control with their toes

I am the greatest FlobsKnight player on earth!

Rank Up: Dry Grass

Quality of opponent improves slightly

Never win again

:-/

You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.

I would sooner download a tire fire.

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

Economic downturns tend to cause social unrest which legitimize expansion of the security state.

In this case, it appears that a fascist dictatorship is deliberately inducing the downtown to justify expansion of the DHS.

Naomi Klein laid out how this has happened in the past (particularly in the former Soviet states after the break up of the USSR) in her book Shock Doctrine. The pattern has also been laid out as a counter-insurgency strategy in Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method.

But the nut of it is that you tend to get both.

They want balkanization?

Yes. That’s a lot of what the “Freedom Cities” push is about. Create a network of autonomous enclaves where a single billionaire or board room effectively operates as a tyrant. Govern everything through permissions-based digital infrastructure (id badges to enter and leave any building or use any transit service, credit scores determined by years of service and employer approval rating, all property rented from the local oligarch, all residents are just at-will employees). It’s a pure technocratic Company Town model.

I want Balkanization because I think it would break the federal government’s kneecaps

Part of the insanity of it all is in how guys like Musk and Theil and Zuckerburg and Bezos don’t see any inherent value in a public federal system. They consider federalism an impediment to their vision of techno-feudalism and they see the money that the federal government uses to staff and support itself as resources wasted on a bureaucracy better managed by the private sector.

They are Anarcho-Capitalists in the most literal sense.

The Network State: How to Startup a Country

It’s so much more ambitious than that. They explicitly want Balkanization and formalized oligarchy along the Singapore/S. Korea/Hong Kong/Philippines model.