To frame your argument in a way someone like me can understand, the 2 factions have a common goal, to tear down the current state. The conflict becomes an issue as that goal approaches because the religious faction wants to build a theocratic state with them in control, and the tech faction wants as little state as possible leaving them in (supposed) control of their feifdoms.
And control is the subject Vance studiously avoids with his technology tapdance and focus on how the current system has failed "the workers" as his explanation for no conflict, no conflict, you're the conflict. Doubtless the pitch is the tech faction elite will be part of the exempt ruling class in Giliad while their workers go to madatory morality classes. Good luck with that guys. I know who I'm putting my money on.
Outstanding piece, and I have been waiting for someone to take this contradiction on so ably for a while. Many specific examples come to mind from manufacturing, too. The Big 3 are saying that it forced to reshore production that is low on the value chain they’ll automate it as much as possible. How can the circle be squared here between the populists and techno-optimists? Is Trump going to try to ban AI and automation in factories? If so, it really puts the lie to his admin’s overtures to the innovators. If not, the populists aren’t going to get any jobs.
The baseline claim that a closed economy will be good for innovation is deeply bizarre.
Super important and valuable distinction: the deep conflicts between globalist technocrats and anti-globalist Christian nationalists in Trump 2.0. And absolutely agree Vance's gloss that Big Tech is committed to the dignity of labor isn't credible and, in fact, cringe-worthy to anybody who has worked or lived around these corporations. But maybe you are over looking, or downplaying, the unifying force behind their combination: authoritarian, even totalitarian, order. They both, technocrats and religious traditionalists, want to fix, make inviolate, their own authority, and pacify or subdue everyone else, labor, liberal critics, non-whites, and non-Christians.
I laughed out loud at Vance's suggestion that design and manufacturing can't be segregated. Isn't that exactly the model upon which Apple became the world's wealthiest corporation, designing innovative products in California and manufacturing them cheaply in Asia?
He does have a bit of a point. It was the separation of manufacturing from company management that led to Boeing's downfall. You can't take manufacturing for granted. Airplanes are not just giant cell phones. Good designers have to work with the people who design the tools and who use the tools, otherwise they could design something that is impractical to make. You can't design anything without knowing how to make it, including at the chip level. What you can make limits what you can design! Designers are not specialists in everything, so they must collaborate with the people who take part in it, including the workers on the line.
The other half of his legitimate point is that when you consider the college-educated designers valuable, but the workers on the line, who have to turn the designs into reality, expendable, you are making both a practical and moral error. Remember the old, "good," Southwest Airlines, where Herb Kelleher said his first job was to please the workers, who would then do a great job pleasing the customers, who would then spend money, pleasing the shareholders. Now, only the shareholders and the tech lords count. A big reason for our present social upheaval.
Read up on W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker for more. And visit your local Tech high school, where the less privileged kids go. They need jobs, and know it. And unlike politics, you can't BS your way through fixing a car.
JD was brought up in horrible circumstances, but he doesn't seem to understand the realities a lot of people face now. He will never go hungry again.
DEI? Gimme a break.
The replacement theory in actual use is to replace us all with technology owned by the new overlords, who we all saw at the coronation ceremonies recently. They even got a group shot.
The TradCath as you label them has a loud, possibly dominant, faction of wanting a theocracy? But whose? Christians in the US, unlike elsewhere in Europe, has many flavors with competing views of what "G*d's Word" is and how to interpret it. As with the religious wars in the Old World - Catholicism vs Islam, Catholicism vs Protestantism (and flavors of that) - the same will happen in the US. Isn't that why the Constitution was written to separate Church and State? The religionists appear to be winning at the SCOTUS.
Silicon Valley is hardly very innovative these days. The VCs see a fad, pour money into it, and then try to cash out. Whether the technology is actually useful or becomes a problem due to enshittification is not their concern. Software may be "eating the world", but it also shits, fouling the world it eats.
I think the SV "techno accelerationists" are closest to Mussolini's Fascism. The TradCath are just throwbacks to white supremacists, and arguably closer to Hitler's Nazis in wanting racial purity. This goes back to the 19th century at least in the US, an idea Hitler latched onto when scapegoating the Jews and Slavs and the Final Solution".
Good point. Either way, they are going to control how you live. Both reactionaries and tech lords are by nature authoritarian. Both have a lust for power, but won't admit it.
We tried a theocracy here, but got over it. Let's get over that again, plus the technocracy.
The people advocating for both positions are advocating for their own self interests. They are the new elites, muscling out the old ones.
They want to create their own DEI, and are better power players than the people who created the old DEI.
Neither group wants anything to do with the populist revolt against health care, for instance. But there are more health care users than health care owners, so this could be a big wedge to stick into that crack.
Neither the technologists nor the theocrats have any solutions for health care. Neither want to talk about economic populism in a real way, like giving us have any rights at work, or as consumers in the monopolized marketplace. Only the little people pay taxes, or follow the law.
Both groups will throw the little people under the bus. They will escape responsibility as we just saw in Signalgate. Actual people think that was BS, because they know what would have happened to them if they had done what those big shots did. Do I see another wedge?
Sometimes, people fall in love, then they gradually realize their lover is unfaithful to them.
Sometimes, they actually catch their "lover" in bed with another....
"...enshittification...Software may be "eating the world", but it also shits, fouling the world it eats." 😂😂😂
I think you're right about the "TradCath". That's why we call them "Chistofascists". They're not really any more "Christian" than Hitler was - and he made that same claim.
As long as they're playing the "Trad Christian card," how about they follow the Trad Commandments? Or at least, say 6 or 7 out of ten of them, for a start?
Or that "serving one master" idea?
Or that idea about how hard it is for a rich man to get to heaven?
If they could just do that "Do onto others" one, all the rest would fall into place. That would strengthen the moral muscle.
But JD is against empathy, so I guess not. He only likes "Do unto others as long as they are MAGA people." He is actually a tribalist more than a Christian.
Or maybe they are making a joke, like they know about the corruption and abuse (wink, wink) but are cool with it?
It would be fun to imagine them all sitting in a pew in Enfield, Connecticut, listening to Jonathan Edwards preach "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." That would be some All-American old-timey religion!
(BTW I live in Connecticut and have been to that spot. The church is gone, but there is a plaque.)
People mystify me sometimes. They think they will get away with stuff. So they do it.
And Vance is mostly Catholic because the lord to whom he owes his fealty, Peter Thiel, follows Rene Girard. Who is no friend of the working classes at all. (and TradCath would have to distance itself from Thiel's gay lifestyle and accelerationists' transhumanism - if it is to remain TradCath at all.)
But I can think of a factor you left out. In the traditional right wing alliance between "populists" and moneyed interests, the populists themselves have two strands: racists, and socialists. Within the populists, the racists and socialists can compromise on a herrenvolk system. The moneyed interests then split this by buying off the racists with racism and squeezing out the socialists.
But in today's right, the moneyed interests also have two strands: there are the bug-eyed Silicon Valley accelerationists, and then there are the old economy plutocrats whose fortunes are based on finance, energy, manufacturing etc. These groups are harder to reconcile, particularly since the accelerationists insist on destroying the old before they have actually produced the new. Up to now, the old money has been pretty delusional about this - the recently professed shock on discovering that Trump is actually pretty bad for the economy was grimly amusing. But, you know, if something can't continue, then it will stop.
This sounds a lot like the Gilded Age conflict between "Old Money" and "New Money", except that now the "New Money" has become the "Old Money", and the "New Money" is replaced with the "New New Money".
Actually, that idea is as old as capitalism itself. The original factories were not called "Satanic mills" for nothing.
If you ever worked in a factory you know you are a slave to the machine, not the other way around. Charlie Chaplin conveyed that very well a century ago.
My family once owned a textile factory, and I can tell you it is very very bad for the hearing also. "Cheap labor" is also nothing new, and almost put us out of business. First the factories competing with us moved to the American south chasing it, then China. Glad we never were a supplier to Walmart, who was Amazon before there was an Amazon.
If you ever belonged to a trade union, they were out to get rid of you. And they will fight dirty to do it. Guess how I know this?
The big fish tries to eat the little fish. Fishes act like that.
The previous Musk, Werner von Braun, also lusted to go to Mars. He had slave labor in the factories making his V2 rockets, which were pointed at London. When von Braun came here to America, he tried to minimize how much he knew about that stuff. He was useful to have around, so we kept him around. These tech guys are not as original as they think. They are just the current version.
And nobody walks out of a shift at a sweatshop feeling ennobled, know that for sure.
Absolute banger of an article. This is a tension that cannot be papered over.
As a Canadian, I have lots of reasons to hope that the Trump administration implodes quickly. There are lots of ways that this might happen. This is clearly one of the top ones.
Excellent piece. Yes the right more resembles People's Judean Front and pals rather than a monolith. As I see more possible areas for conflict than with fusionism (and more outsize egos vying to be the great man) it will be interesting to see how long the coalition holds.
This was excellent. You could also point to historical examples, such as Nazi Germany, which claimed to be populist, was led by a cruel man filled with resentment, and was reactionary, anti-religion, and very high tech.
And then we have the "Network State" movement, a reworking of essentially the "technofeudalism" vision, where traditional government is replaced by "Big Brother and the Holding Company", to steal a rock band's name from the Sixties, a leadership of techbros creating a society promising "unrestricted freedoms something something", with some nominal citizen voice, but in practice a competitive authoritarian state.
A roundup and references to the New Order is here:
It seems as if DOGE is really the test case here. If the government can survive long enough to come out on the other side reasonably well intact (not a given, by any stretch of the imagination), the massive failure of DOGE's relentless and ruthless attacks against the state will resolve the argument between these two camps (and contrary to the VP's assertion, you can't have your DOGE and eat it too).
Ok. With that out of the way, this apparent tension reflects the same tension with Nixon's "Southern Strategy". Appealing to both "Lost Cause" types and religious fanatics - especially evangelicals, while still catering to the Big Capital class. Of course, this expanded to the nth degree under St. Reagan.
Reagan famously - or, in my view, infamously - talked about how fat tax cuts for fat cats would create a "trickle down" effect. He also talked about banning abortion and "allowing children to pray in school", a euphemism for >forcing< children to pray in school.
No actual tension existed here because the fat cats didn't concern themselves with either the racist dog whistles nor state sanctioned religion, while the "Confederates" didn't concern themselves with economic matters.
Now we have a new breed of Robber Barron, with the only difference being the "sector" they're in - Big Tech instead of Big Oil. We also have a new breed of reichwing blue collar types. Some of them are still in the "Klan/Confederate" mold, some exist in the religiosity mold. The big difference is now they've seen their factories uprooted and shipped overseas where slavery (or near slavery) is legal.
VP Hillbilly is trying to reconcile the ultra rich with the ultra poor. Sooner or later, something's got to give, and it looks like it's happening. With Speaker Jackass Johnson telling his caucus to avoid town halls, where they're likely to be (rightfully) excoriated - and maybe pelted with rotting produce (also rightfully) - and GOP town halls now featuring effigies of their GOP reps - or better still, Dems taking advantage of the vacuum, the cracks in the GOP armor are quite visible.
There needs to be a concerted effort on the part of public intellectuals to inform the masses about how federal funding actually works. Too many are parroting Musk's ignorance(malevolence) with regards to federal spending being akin to a households or corporation. The public has been brainwashed to think the federal gov is funded by tax dollars. It is not. For a proper understanding of how Monetary Sovereignty works one can read the work of Rodger Malcom Mitchell on Wordpress.
I feel like the tech accelerationists need to wreck society so they can then swoop in and save us from it with a beautiful new world inspired by the novel “Snow Crash.” Because the point of the book that none of them missed is “sovereign enclaves are great.”
To frame your argument in a way someone like me can understand, the 2 factions have a common goal, to tear down the current state. The conflict becomes an issue as that goal approaches because the religious faction wants to build a theocratic state with them in control, and the tech faction wants as little state as possible leaving them in (supposed) control of their feifdoms.
And control is the subject Vance studiously avoids with his technology tapdance and focus on how the current system has failed "the workers" as his explanation for no conflict, no conflict, you're the conflict. Doubtless the pitch is the tech faction elite will be part of the exempt ruling class in Giliad while their workers go to madatory morality classes. Good luck with that guys. I know who I'm putting my money on.
Outstanding piece, and I have been waiting for someone to take this contradiction on so ably for a while. Many specific examples come to mind from manufacturing, too. The Big 3 are saying that it forced to reshore production that is low on the value chain they’ll automate it as much as possible. How can the circle be squared here between the populists and techno-optimists? Is Trump going to try to ban AI and automation in factories? If so, it really puts the lie to his admin’s overtures to the innovators. If not, the populists aren’t going to get any jobs.
The baseline claim that a closed economy will be good for innovation is deeply bizarre.
Super important and valuable distinction: the deep conflicts between globalist technocrats and anti-globalist Christian nationalists in Trump 2.0. And absolutely agree Vance's gloss that Big Tech is committed to the dignity of labor isn't credible and, in fact, cringe-worthy to anybody who has worked or lived around these corporations. But maybe you are over looking, or downplaying, the unifying force behind their combination: authoritarian, even totalitarian, order. They both, technocrats and religious traditionalists, want to fix, make inviolate, their own authority, and pacify or subdue everyone else, labor, liberal critics, non-whites, and non-Christians.
I laughed out loud at Vance's suggestion that design and manufacturing can't be segregated. Isn't that exactly the model upon which Apple became the world's wealthiest corporation, designing innovative products in California and manufacturing them cheaply in Asia?
He does have a bit of a point. It was the separation of manufacturing from company management that led to Boeing's downfall. You can't take manufacturing for granted. Airplanes are not just giant cell phones. Good designers have to work with the people who design the tools and who use the tools, otherwise they could design something that is impractical to make. You can't design anything without knowing how to make it, including at the chip level. What you can make limits what you can design! Designers are not specialists in everything, so they must collaborate with the people who take part in it, including the workers on the line.
The other half of his legitimate point is that when you consider the college-educated designers valuable, but the workers on the line, who have to turn the designs into reality, expendable, you are making both a practical and moral error. Remember the old, "good," Southwest Airlines, where Herb Kelleher said his first job was to please the workers, who would then do a great job pleasing the customers, who would then spend money, pleasing the shareholders. Now, only the shareholders and the tech lords count. A big reason for our present social upheaval.
Read up on W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker for more. And visit your local Tech high school, where the less privileged kids go. They need jobs, and know it. And unlike politics, you can't BS your way through fixing a car.
JD was brought up in horrible circumstances, but he doesn't seem to understand the realities a lot of people face now. He will never go hungry again.
DEI? Gimme a break.
The replacement theory in actual use is to replace us all with technology owned by the new overlords, who we all saw at the coronation ceremonies recently. They even got a group shot.
They don't need a union, they own the company!
VP Hillbilly is part of junta that revolves around lying as a central tenet. Like his King, everything he says is a lie.
I guess they'll just have to go to war with each other after they've successfully subjugated the rest of us - if they succeed at that.
This is a terrific piece Henry…Thank you. I am both enlightened and cheered by it.
The TradCath as you label them has a loud, possibly dominant, faction of wanting a theocracy? But whose? Christians in the US, unlike elsewhere in Europe, has many flavors with competing views of what "G*d's Word" is and how to interpret it. As with the religious wars in the Old World - Catholicism vs Islam, Catholicism vs Protestantism (and flavors of that) - the same will happen in the US. Isn't that why the Constitution was written to separate Church and State? The religionists appear to be winning at the SCOTUS.
Silicon Valley is hardly very innovative these days. The VCs see a fad, pour money into it, and then try to cash out. Whether the technology is actually useful or becomes a problem due to enshittification is not their concern. Software may be "eating the world", but it also shits, fouling the world it eats.
I think the SV "techno accelerationists" are closest to Mussolini's Fascism. The TradCath are just throwbacks to white supremacists, and arguably closer to Hitler's Nazis in wanting racial purity. This goes back to the 19th century at least in the US, an idea Hitler latched onto when scapegoating the Jews and Slavs and the Final Solution".
Good point. Either way, they are going to control how you live. Both reactionaries and tech lords are by nature authoritarian. Both have a lust for power, but won't admit it.
We tried a theocracy here, but got over it. Let's get over that again, plus the technocracy.
The people advocating for both positions are advocating for their own self interests. They are the new elites, muscling out the old ones.
They want to create their own DEI, and are better power players than the people who created the old DEI.
Neither group wants anything to do with the populist revolt against health care, for instance. But there are more health care users than health care owners, so this could be a big wedge to stick into that crack.
Neither the technologists nor the theocrats have any solutions for health care. Neither want to talk about economic populism in a real way, like giving us have any rights at work, or as consumers in the monopolized marketplace. Only the little people pay taxes, or follow the law.
Both groups will throw the little people under the bus. They will escape responsibility as we just saw in Signalgate. Actual people think that was BS, because they know what would have happened to them if they had done what those big shots did. Do I see another wedge?
Sometimes, people fall in love, then they gradually realize their lover is unfaithful to them.
Sometimes, they actually catch their "lover" in bed with another....
"...enshittification...Software may be "eating the world", but it also shits, fouling the world it eats." 😂😂😂
I think you're right about the "TradCath". That's why we call them "Chistofascists". They're not really any more "Christian" than Hitler was - and he made that same claim.
As long as they're playing the "Trad Christian card," how about they follow the Trad Commandments? Or at least, say 6 or 7 out of ten of them, for a start?
Or that "serving one master" idea?
Or that idea about how hard it is for a rich man to get to heaven?
If they could just do that "Do onto others" one, all the rest would fall into place. That would strengthen the moral muscle.
But JD is against empathy, so I guess not. He only likes "Do unto others as long as they are MAGA people." He is actually a tribalist more than a Christian.
Or maybe they are making a joke, like they know about the corruption and abuse (wink, wink) but are cool with it?
It would be fun to imagine them all sitting in a pew in Enfield, Connecticut, listening to Jonathan Edwards preach "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." That would be some All-American old-timey religion!
(BTW I live in Connecticut and have been to that spot. The church is gone, but there is a plaque.)
People mystify me sometimes. They think they will get away with stuff. So they do it.
And Vance is mostly Catholic because the lord to whom he owes his fealty, Peter Thiel, follows Rene Girard. Who is no friend of the working classes at all. (and TradCath would have to distance itself from Thiel's gay lifestyle and accelerationists' transhumanism - if it is to remain TradCath at all.)
They can quote chapter and verse - but they pick and choose the ones they like, and then misinterpret whatever way suits them.
Ah the absurdity of it all.
Do you know these people?
Hah!
This was a good piece.
But I can think of a factor you left out. In the traditional right wing alliance between "populists" and moneyed interests, the populists themselves have two strands: racists, and socialists. Within the populists, the racists and socialists can compromise on a herrenvolk system. The moneyed interests then split this by buying off the racists with racism and squeezing out the socialists.
But in today's right, the moneyed interests also have two strands: there are the bug-eyed Silicon Valley accelerationists, and then there are the old economy plutocrats whose fortunes are based on finance, energy, manufacturing etc. These groups are harder to reconcile, particularly since the accelerationists insist on destroying the old before they have actually produced the new. Up to now, the old money has been pretty delusional about this - the recently professed shock on discovering that Trump is actually pretty bad for the economy was grimly amusing. But, you know, if something can't continue, then it will stop.
This sounds a lot like the Gilded Age conflict between "Old Money" and "New Money", except that now the "New Money" has become the "Old Money", and the "New Money" is replaced with the "New New Money".
The Capitalist Wet-dream Never Dies:
"the chief impetus of the Silicon Valley model over the last couple of decades, has not been to elevate workers but to replace them."
Actually, that idea is as old as capitalism itself. The original factories were not called "Satanic mills" for nothing.
If you ever worked in a factory you know you are a slave to the machine, not the other way around. Charlie Chaplin conveyed that very well a century ago.
My family once owned a textile factory, and I can tell you it is very very bad for the hearing also. "Cheap labor" is also nothing new, and almost put us out of business. First the factories competing with us moved to the American south chasing it, then China. Glad we never were a supplier to Walmart, who was Amazon before there was an Amazon.
If you ever belonged to a trade union, they were out to get rid of you. And they will fight dirty to do it. Guess how I know this?
The big fish tries to eat the little fish. Fishes act like that.
The previous Musk, Werner von Braun, also lusted to go to Mars. He had slave labor in the factories making his V2 rockets, which were pointed at London. When von Braun came here to America, he tried to minimize how much he knew about that stuff. He was useful to have around, so we kept him around. These tech guys are not as original as they think. They are just the current version.
And nobody walks out of a shift at a sweatshop feeling ennobled, know that for sure.
Absolute banger of an article. This is a tension that cannot be papered over.
As a Canadian, I have lots of reasons to hope that the Trump administration implodes quickly. There are lots of ways that this might happen. This is clearly one of the top ones.
And we, your neighbors "downstairs" are doing everything we can to accelerate that implosion.
Excellent piece. Yes the right more resembles People's Judean Front and pals rather than a monolith. As I see more possible areas for conflict than with fusionism (and more outsize egos vying to be the great man) it will be interesting to see how long the coalition holds.
John Cleese is my all time favorite straight man. Nobody can deadpan like he can. I also like his notes on substack.
This was excellent. You could also point to historical examples, such as Nazi Germany, which claimed to be populist, was led by a cruel man filled with resentment, and was reactionary, anti-religion, and very high tech.
And destroyed itself.
Well I hope we don't follow that example. Nazi Germany destroyed itself, but took a big chunk of the rest of the world along with it.
Yup
And then we have the "Network State" movement, a reworking of essentially the "technofeudalism" vision, where traditional government is replaced by "Big Brother and the Holding Company", to steal a rock band's name from the Sixties, a leadership of techbros creating a society promising "unrestricted freedoms something something", with some nominal citizen voice, but in practice a competitive authoritarian state.
A roundup and references to the New Order is here:
https://www.thenerdreich.com/trumps-weird-freedom-cities-and-the-network-state-cult/
Superb explication.
It seems as if DOGE is really the test case here. If the government can survive long enough to come out on the other side reasonably well intact (not a given, by any stretch of the imagination), the massive failure of DOGE's relentless and ruthless attacks against the state will resolve the argument between these two camps (and contrary to the VP's assertion, you can't have your DOGE and eat it too).
Curb your DOGE!
"After the usual opening inanities..." 😂😂😂
Ok. With that out of the way, this apparent tension reflects the same tension with Nixon's "Southern Strategy". Appealing to both "Lost Cause" types and religious fanatics - especially evangelicals, while still catering to the Big Capital class. Of course, this expanded to the nth degree under St. Reagan.
Reagan famously - or, in my view, infamously - talked about how fat tax cuts for fat cats would create a "trickle down" effect. He also talked about banning abortion and "allowing children to pray in school", a euphemism for >forcing< children to pray in school.
No actual tension existed here because the fat cats didn't concern themselves with either the racist dog whistles nor state sanctioned religion, while the "Confederates" didn't concern themselves with economic matters.
Now we have a new breed of Robber Barron, with the only difference being the "sector" they're in - Big Tech instead of Big Oil. We also have a new breed of reichwing blue collar types. Some of them are still in the "Klan/Confederate" mold, some exist in the religiosity mold. The big difference is now they've seen their factories uprooted and shipped overseas where slavery (or near slavery) is legal.
VP Hillbilly is trying to reconcile the ultra rich with the ultra poor. Sooner or later, something's got to give, and it looks like it's happening. With Speaker Jackass Johnson telling his caucus to avoid town halls, where they're likely to be (rightfully) excoriated - and maybe pelted with rotting produce (also rightfully) - and GOP town halls now featuring effigies of their GOP reps - or better still, Dems taking advantage of the vacuum, the cracks in the GOP armor are quite visible.
There needs to be a concerted effort on the part of public intellectuals to inform the masses about how federal funding actually works. Too many are parroting Musk's ignorance(malevolence) with regards to federal spending being akin to a households or corporation. The public has been brainwashed to think the federal gov is funded by tax dollars. It is not. For a proper understanding of how Monetary Sovereignty works one can read the work of Rodger Malcom Mitchell on Wordpress.
I found this helpful and used it in an attempt to combine ideological analysis with structural ideas like authoritarianism and patrimonialism to build up a rounded picture of Trump 2 - https://williamcullernebown.substack.com/p/trump-2-what-is-it-really
I feel like the tech accelerationists need to wreck society so they can then swoop in and save us from it with a beautiful new world inspired by the novel “Snow Crash.” Because the point of the book that none of them missed is “sovereign enclaves are great.”