And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.
Danes are the sons and daughters of the greatest monster slayer to ever have maybe actually been real, Beowulf. Perhaps they shall come to slay our “Grendel”, as their forefather did for King Hrothgar, so long ago.
And, really, it’s just Ayn Randian Objectivism, mixed with Christian Dominionism, mixed with neofuedalism, dreamed up by a dude who spent years after the Dotcom Bubble popped, doing nothing but staying in his apartment after accepting a buyout of several hundred dollars reading the works of long dead white people.
This. Every trick Orbán used is straight from Putin. After he fully seized power in Russia, authoritarians the world over flocked to Moscow to learn directly from the master. Then they went home and got to work. The Danube Institute, the Hungarian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, hosted a large neoreactionary conference where they laid out the case that democracy doesn’t work. That democracy is a well-meaning but fundamentally flawed system of government. The reason they think it’s flawed? Because it requires giving all people equality under the law. Women equal to men, gay equal to straight, non-Christian equal to Christian, Non-white equal to White, and this is really the only one that matters, poor equal to wealthy. The obscenely wealthy cannot comprehend a world in which the voice of those with less wealth is equal to their voice. By virtue of their enormous fortunes, taken through exploitation and inherited from their ancestors, they feel that they and they alone should have the right to govern. That they are inherently superior because they were fortunate enough to be born into lives of wealth, connection, and privilege.
He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.
Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)
See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire’s weather/disaster alert service.
This is true, the US is awful big. There’s work arounds, though. Balloons aren’t hard to build and launch, but the fact that they would be sending and receiving data packets directly inside US airspace would make them ridiculously easy to track and take down.
Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.
True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.
I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.