Our Coming Cyberpunk Dictatorship (Snow Crash)

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There’s a worst case scenario looming here, right?

On January 20th, Trump asked the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to submit a joint report, within 90 days, recommending whether or not to invoke the Insurrection Act over the non-existent “invasion” on our Southern Border. This would allow Trump to declare Martial Law with far-reaching consequences. We’ve already seen his administration’s willingness to simply violate the law by allowing a billionaire Nazi to completely gut whole departments, threaten the judges who try to stop him, and has begun simply ignoring their rulings, much as his hero Andrew Jackson did when committing genocide against Native Americans during the Trail of Tears in violation of numerous treaties. They’ve also already been abducting and detaining people without due process or even accusation of a crime and sending them to slave camps in El Salvador. And it’s only been three months.

Much discussion around Trump’s inability to become a dictator has revolved around the fact that the constitution mandates term limits and the Republicans don’t have the votes to amend the Constitution, but this implies that Trump doesn’t simply declare martial law and suspend elections, constitutionality be damned. He could even declare the Democratic Party an enemy of the state and forcibly disband them (he already routinely describes them as the “radical Marxist” “enemy within” and has suggested he’ll use the military against them), leaving Republicans with sole control and the ability to remake the Constitution however they want. Laws are just words on paper unless someone is willing and able to enforce them.

This all would have sounded hysterical not so long ago in a way it simply doesn’t anymore, at least not to me. There’s a reason that a book about the US descending into Fascism was called It Can’t Happen Here, because that’s what everyone says until it does. And meanwhile the Democrats who spent the election declaring Trump a danger to democracy have shown themselves capable of little more than simply puttering around complaining about not having the votes and maintaining “norms” and making sad faces while they affirm his appointments and vote for his budget.

Of course, even if “Democracy” is preserved, it’s worth considering how much of it is even left at this point. Because, let’s be clear, Elon Musk bought this presidency for the bargain price of $250M, along with the contributions of other billionaires and their various media empires, as well as the tech billionaires who lined up to kiss the ring during the inauguration that Musk anointed with his Seig Heil. This on top of reports of voting irregularities during the election, particularly in Pennsylvania, something I might not give too much credence to if Trump himself hadn’t thanked Muskfor “knowing those vote-counting computers” so that he “won Pennsylvania by a landslide”. And there’s that weird interview with Musk and his son by noted fascist Tucker Carlson where Tucker asked what the son thought of the election and the son cackled like a movie villain and said, “they’ll never know!” Which… I mean, obviously that wouldn’t hold up in court, but that’s weird, right? (Hat tip to Some More News for digging up that one.) Meanwhile, Musk threatens to fund primary challenges to any Republican who defies Trump, in a brazen demonstration of money controling the supposedly democratic processes while the right-wing media churns up the kind of people who bombard wavering Republicans with death threats.

But of course, all of this is the result of decades of work by the rich to undermine elections and move the needle Right through a program of gerrymandering, voter suppression, a collection of media machines that bombards the media landscape with their point-of-view from Fox and News Corp to Sinclair to networks of podcasters and YouTubers funded by both our own oligarchs and foreign ones, to initiatives as varied as think tanks and promotion of “school choice” and Home Schooling as ways of explicitly spreading Christian Nationalism and right wing beliefs. Musk himself spent $44 billion to transform Twitter almost overnight into a Nazi propaganda machine under the auspices of “free speech”—but then Fascists have always loved using the rhetoric of “free speech” to keep their ideas in the public sphere right up until they gain power and squash everyone else’s ideas, something illustrated by Musk turning around and promoting the jailing of journalists, or Trump saying he wants to prosecute news organizations that say things about him he doesn’t like, the arrest and threatened deportation of protestors without accusing them of any actual crime, or revoking hundreds of student visas for taking part in peaceful protests. But look up Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance if you want to understand why the greatest danger to free speech is actually the speech of those who want to destroy it.

It’s not an accident that Trump filled his cabinet with billionaires. This has been called oligarchy, but it’s equally a plutocracy, rule by the rich.

And that being the case it’s worth asking exactly what kind of world the rich seem to be envisioning, what future exactly are they trying to bring about.

Cyberpunk as a distinct genre essentially begins with the publication of Neuromancer by William Gibson in 1984. It remains the only book to sweep the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards, coined the now ubiquitous word “Cyberspace”, and despite not (yet) managing to cross the line into a film adaptation (though it’s prequel, “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), got an adaptation in 1995 and the first sentences of its opening crawl seem prescient for some reason), it’s fingerprints are all over popular culture and in particular The Matrix film series which lifted parts of it wholesale (including the term “Matrix” for a virtual reality world, though Gibson himself may have been inspired by Doctor Who there). Very annoyingly for me, a TV adaptation finally seems to be materializing on Apple TV, just too late for me to be able to use clips of it in this video. It’s like they’re not thinking of me at all.

And yet, despite how influential Neuromancer has been, it may turn out that a different seminal Cyberpunk novel that’s floated around Hollywood development Hell for decades has eclipsed it. While Neuromancer depicted a world where major multinational corporations had achieved the power and influence of states, Snow Crash (1992) took this to its anarcho-capitalist conclusion, where nation states as we know them have dissolved to be replaced with patchworks of microstates and citystates (with a few large conglomerates) entirely controlled by corporations. Snow Crash is clearly intended as a work of satire; because corporations have control of laws, slavery has been reintroduced, racially segregated apartheid conclaves are common, the police have credit card readers in the back of their cars to facilitate bribes, the Mafia and Colombian narco-traffickers are just two more states fighting over turf, and a punk on a motorcycle has a personal nuclear weapon.

The satire, however, seems to have been lost on many of the tech industry leaders inspired by the book. This is, after all, the book where Mark Zuckerberg got the word “Metaverse” to describe the virtual reality environment he wants to create. But the Metaverse of Snow Crash, much like the OASIS in Ready Player One (2011) (a book that borrows concepts wholesale from Snow Crash but has none of its insight), has the power and mystique it does because it’s an escape from the real world dystopic hellscape created by corporate domination. There’s a reason the hero of Snow Crash lives in an old storage unit and the hero of Ready Player One lives in stacks of rusting trailer homes.

The book (and Neal Stephenson’s work in general) is very popular among the Silicon Valley set, as shown most obviously by Mark Zuckerberg’s company rebrand, but also by things like one of the buildings at the Seattle Amazon campus being named after a character in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995), which also takes place in an anarcho-capitalist dystopia, the Metaverse being name-checked by the creators of Second Life, and Stephenson himself being hired as the Chief Futurist for the Augmented Reality company Magic Leap. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Carmack, and Peter Thiel are all cited as fans of the work, and Snow Crash was required reading for the X-Box development team.

And yet despite this, folks like Peter Thiel are chasing exactly the kind of despotic endpoint that the book elaborately lampoons. And this is never more clear then when looking at the work of Thiel’s pet philosopher (to use the term very loosely) and someone name-checked by Vice President JD Vance and influential on the administration and those behind it.

In an essay from 2008 called “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century”, computer programmer Curtis Yarvin (writing under the psuedonym Mencius Moldbug) in his blog Unqualified Reservations, laid out a vision. He says early in the essay, that he’s “read about six zillion science-fiction books in which this is the general state of the future”, and as one reads it becomes clear exactly the sort of science fiction he’s talking about, as if any of these books portray this future as a good thing. Instead of democracy, Yarvin proposes, there should be many small states each run by a single corporation with a CEO who functions as dictator or monarch. Citizens would have freedom of movement between these small states, and thus each corporation could compete for citizens thereby creating a laboratory of innovation, much as corporations in market capitalism compete for customers.

On it’s face, if you’re the type of person who thinks capitalism is the best and most natural system for governing an economy, this all makes a certain amount of sense. Rather than the messy and imperfect business of democracy, allow corporations to hash things out in a marketplace of citizenry. Yes, most corporations are run like dictatorships, or at best oligarchies, but so what? As Yarvin has said, “Almost everything in your world that works was made by a monarchy. … Your computers were made by a corporation that is run by a CEO who basically has absolute but accountable control over operations of that country. Steve Jobs in a way is similar to Napoleon.”

Of course, this isn’t really true. As per the book The Entrepreneurial State (2013) by Mariana Mazzucato, historically the (ostensibly democratic) government has been behind most of the major technological innovations of the United States rather than the risk-averse private sector, from the moon landing to the internet to GPS, research that the US then allows the private sector to capitalize on. In fact, we’re now in the process of discovering just how much fundamental scientific research is actually funded by the government as Musk’s pimple-faced goon squad heedlessly slashes it all. But let’s put that aside for a moment.

The problems with this premise become apparent as soon as Yarvin lays out his vision for a San Francisco corporate city state. “Friscorp,” he writes, “may also import menial laborers, as Dubai does today, but they are not to be confused with the actual residents.”

If you know anything about Dubai’s labor situation, you know that what Yarvin is calling “imported menial laborers” are better know as “slaves”. Much attention has been paid to the second part of this essay where he deals with the question of what to do with the indigent, non-productive poor and first (joking, or so it seems) suggests grinding them up for biodeise a la Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, and then instead suggests they could all be seated in a room hooked up to virtual reality to keep them busy for their lives. But I think the absurdity of both these suggestions illustrates how he simply doesn’t care about these people. Those who can become slaves will be, those who won’t, well, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

But, surely, you may ask, Yarvin can’t actually believe in slavery? But in an essay called “Why Carlyle Matters”, Yarvin identifies himself as a modern “Carlylist”, a disciple of 19th century racist monarchist Thomas Carlyle, and like Carlyle describes slavery as simply a natural human relationship. And like Carlyle, he’s indicated that he thinks Africans are perhaps biologically suited to slavery.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Yarvin’s also described himself as like Hitler but smarter.

The phrase the “Dark Enlightenment” was coined by reactionary philosopher Nick Land to describe Yarvin and other ideologues who sought to roll back the Enlightenment and return to basically feudal relations. And this is openly what Yarvin is about, writing that “the most interesting, detailed and elegant European forms are found in the period we call feudal, and thus it is only natural that a reactionary design for future government will have a somewhat feudal feel”. Thus we can think of this episode as something of a stand-alone sequel to the one about Technofeudalism. That was about how feudalism plays out in the economic and technological sphere, this episode is about how it plays out in the political one.

But it’s natural that conservatives would want to ultimately spin backwards towards Feudalism. As I talked about in “How Conservatives Become Fascists” and further in “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine” and its excerpt “The Conservatives Who Love Israel And Hate Jews”, Conservatism is an ideology based around the idea that there are natural hierarchies in which it’s right and proper for some people to stand above others whether socially, economically, or politically. Indeed, there’s research to show that conservatives are people who believe that hierarchy is inherent to reality. Carlyle is the traditional version of this, an old school monarchist who opposed democracy in principle because some were obviously fit to be kings and others to be subjects or slaves.

Indeed, capitalism itself, despite its origins in the overturning of the feudal order by the ascendant of the merchant class, has a natural tendency to spin back into an authoritian model as the merchant capitalist victors dubbed themselves the new monarchs and pulled up the ladder behind them (much as Yarvin now sees himself as part of a new aristocracy while being the descendent of impoverished Eastern European Jewish communists). This is because, just as Yarvin points out, capitalist corporations are not democracies, they’re monarchies or oligarchies of major shareholders.

Every so often disciples of Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard pop up in my comments proclaiming in no uncertain terms that what we have today isn’t capitalism at all, its corporatism, because the corporations have coopted the state through regulatory capture—which is to say the rich use their power to control the mechanisms meant to regulate them. And that this is also somehow both socialism and fascism, government do stuff bad. And the thing is, they’re not wrong about the poisonous relationship between corporations and the state. It’s just that their solution is to destroy the state and let corporations run rampant in some naive notion that competition will somehow always undermine monopolies in contravention of all history and common sense. Any child playing the game Monopoly learns how unregulated capitalism inevitably produces monopolies. But if you look at a system that allows individuals to amass more wealth than some nations and use that wealth to co-opt ostensibly democratic governments and you say the problem there is the democratic government, well, it sounds to me like you’ve been fed a boatload of propaganda by a bunch of capitalist ideologues who actually want the government out of their hair.

There’s perhaps no better example than Yarvin himself for the way in which this “libertarian” ideology that’s supposedly about freedom actually produces fascism. I’ve described this before as being because the “libertarian” values property rights over human rights—a mindset that says taking money away from rich people to feed starving people is wrong because your taking away someone’s property. But capitalists know that the propertyless rabble being able to vote in free and fair elections runs the risk of them voting for people who will rob them of their wealth. This is why the patron of Yarvin, Vance, Zuckerberg, and Trump—Peter Thiel—said “I no longer believe that democracy is compatible with freedom.” The rich understand that the government is the only organization with the power to strip them of their wealth and power, which is why they’ve spent so much time and effort to wrest control of it.

In “How Will Capitalism End?”, I talked about how in the 20th century there rose a distinct layer of society, called the Professional-Managerial Class by authors John and Barbara Ehrenreichs in 1977, which essentially managed the means of production on behalf of the business owners—in other words, the white collar workers and skilled professionals who filled office towers and specialists offices. While technically proletarian because they made their primary living from wages paid to them by business owners, they still commanded higher salaries than most other workers, and most importantly to our discussion here, tended to have higher educations.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, socialism and communism were very much ideologies of the poor and working class, as one would expect of political systems that sought to redistribute power and wealth to them. However, in his book Capital and Ideology (2019), the sequel to his seminal Capital in the 21st Century (2013), economist Thomas Piketty discusses how over the course of the late 20th century, and particularly since the dawn of the Neoliberal Era around 1980, the poor and uneducated tended to abandon leftism and left-leaning parties became dominated by what he terms the “Brahmin Left” but is essentially the Professional Managerial Class. This “Brahmin Left”, in turn, being made up of the well off and educated, were vulnerable to the logic of Neoliberalism and its economic models that overturned the Keynesian order that had created the prosperity of the previous thirty years and instead reduced everything to markets and incentives. Thus America got Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and so on, while Britain got figures like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Keir Starmer, politicians who couldn’t imagine more than a token resistance to entrenched wealth and power. And as Piketty points out, this trend wasn’t limited to one country but happened throughout the West, both in places with serious internal ethnic conflicts and ones without, though those with internal ethnic conflicts had them inevitably used by the right to shore up their power, as the right always does.

And so in the electoral sphere, the battle between the workers and the owners envisioned by Marx was essentially replaced by a battle between two sets of elites: educated technocrats on one side and rich business and land owners on the other. Piketty even compares this situation to pre-modern, feudal societies where a powersharing relationship formed between a clerical, intellectual elite and the noble, warrior, land-owning classes. It’s little wonder that the masses have felt abandoned and betrayed as costs have skyrocketed faster than wages and whole towns have been hollowed out by a globalization promoted by both sides of the political sphere. It’s no wonder that they’ve turned to populism and conspiracy theories that explain exactly how a shadowy elite has been keeping them down.

One interesting thing about the battle of the elites is that it’s mirrored in the corporate world as well. In “How Will Capitalism End?” I talked about how the PMC are currently themselves being either impoverished or replaced by technology at one end or sucked up into the ownership class by stock options on the other. And yet there’s still a fight going on constantly between the shareholders who own businesses and the executives and upper management who run them.

I once read a book by a former mutual fund manager who hilariously compared Hedge Fund managers to Marxists because they worked to line their own pockets at the expense of investors. It’s old news that the bourgeois are in class conflict with the ordinary proletariat, fighting to push down wages and up working hours, but this shows vividly how they’re also in class conflict with their own upper management, the 1% fighting against the 10%.

I mention all this to explain why the villains Curtis Yarvin claims to be fighting are what he calls “the Cathedral”, which is to say journalists, government employees, and everyone involved with universities, people he describes as “elites” who “control the media” (and, like Piketty, compares to feudal clerical intellectuals). This is a bit counterintuitive, of course. I mean, it’s hard to imagine universities having more control over the media than the literal billionaires who own most of it, and we’ve recently had a number of vivid examples of how they’re more than happy to reign in their properties to toe right-wing lines. Likewise the fantasy of a “deep state” that somehow has more power than the literal president, Congress, and so on is absurd on its face, and like much of right wing rhetoric today rests not on hard reality but floats on an ocean of conspiracy theory and innuendo.

But, as mentioned, it’s not that the accusation of white collar workers and university professors being on the left side of the spectrum comes out of nowhere. They do very much make up the core of the technocratic PMC that form the Democratic Party leadership today, for example. And this is not just because people who actually learn things about the world come to understand that far right policies are bad, actually, though that’s true too. It’s also an example of class incentives. While the highly educated who come from or become among the wealthiest people still tend to be politically right, and while university roles are still made up predominantly of those from more privileged backgrounds (particularly in the United States where higher education is ruinously expensive and threatens lifelong debts that can’t even be discharged by bankruptcy), for most higher ed is still seen as a mechanism of advancement for wage laborers—get a degree and you can have better jobs with better wages. Universities, in other words, produce the PMC who understand that they’re in a fundamental conflict with a property-owning class that have every incentive to reduce their wages and force them to work more and longer hours. (That a liberal arts education was never really supposed to be a kind of trade school and was instead supposed to produce well-rounded and informed citizens ready to be a knowledgable electorate is beside the point now, as humanities courses intended to help people learn how to think about the world are the first up to the austerity chopping block, but I digress.)

However, the PMC’s own bubble of personal success blinds them to the struggles of those beneath them and allowed them to sign onto policies of free trade, globalism, and austerity that destroyed the livelihoods of the majority of workers.

Which then is what made less educated wage laborers vulnerable to right wing populist appeals to grievance and xenophobia and the line that it’s actually this Brahmin Left and the government that’s responsible for all their suffering, as well as employing appeals to tradition and traditional values, even if that means they vote for candidates whose policies of even more tax cuts for the rich (who already pay lower taxes than high-earning wage workers) and more deregulation and taking apart institutions designed to protect them like the Consumer Protection Bureau and insane ideas like broad tariffs will actually make their lot dramatically worse.

The exception to this trend, as Piketty points out, is persecuted minorities. African Americans and Muslims in countries like Britain and France often have socially conservative world views that one might think would make them more sympathetic to conservative parties. However, these minorities correctly understand that right-wing parties are openly hostile to them, and therefore consistently vote for left-wing ones. There’s a line of reasoning that ordinary people who vote for right-wing candidates are “voting against their own interests” and there’s truth to this, the result of oceans of propaganda forced down their throats, but there’s also a way this misses how these people understand that the private and public institutions all around them are so often working against them. Barack Obama had a moment in 2008 when he came in on a mandate to repair the economy and could have cracked down on the banks and financial institutions that had caused the crash, arresting the perpetrators or even nationalizing their companies to prevent them from doing so much damage again, like they did in Iceland. Instead, he just bailed them out. In the face of that and a thousand examples like it it’s hard to believe that the left-of-center establishment really has our back at all. In the face of rising inflation, the Federal Reserve’s strategy was to raise interest rates in hopes of reigning in not prices but wages. Meanwhile economists and the Biden administration touted how great the economy was rebounding under him while simultaneously nearly one-in-four Americans was functionally unemployed.

It’s no wonder people voted for a candidate who promised to tear the whole thing down.

But one thing to remember is that most voters didn’t vote for Trump, not even in 2024. Approximately 245 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2024. 77 million voted for Trump, 75 million voted for Harris, and 89 million didn’t vote at all. And while there’s a variety of reasons we can talk about for this, like how inconvenient voting is in the US compared to other countries, active voter suppression efforts, the lack of competitive races in many districts due to gerrymandering, and the electoral college making presidential voting feel pointless in non-swing states. But in particular Piketty points out that voter turnout in the United States among people without an advanced degree, independent wealth, or a high income collapsed after 1980. In other words, people who feel unrepresented by either of the elite groups that dominate the two party system have grown so cynical of politics they see no point in voting at all.

I understand why this moment can blackpill you. Every day there’s another thing in the news that makes things look more dire. This episode was already out-of-date when I finished writing it, so forgive me if I don’t catalog every outrage. And it’s true that immeasurable damage has already been wrecked, lives have already been lost, and the Orange Monster is just getting started.

We who oppose him and his movement have one major advantage, however: our enemies are by-and-large incompetent buffoons.

One thing about Curtis Yarvin is that anyone who knows anything about history knows that Yarvin doesn’t know anything about history. For example, he says things like that absolute monarchies are preferable to democracies not because the king deserves to rule but because “it is to the benefit of all that this arbitrary rule exists, because obedience to the rightful king is a Schelling point of nonviolent agreement.” Fancy terms like “Schelling point” (a solution in Game Theory that people tend to choose by default) give him the imprimatur of someone smart who knows what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t at all. The era of absolute monarchies was riven by horrifically violent and unending wars of succession, which is why the American media likes to wax so poetic about our (usually) peaceful transfers of power. He’ll say things like “Nothing like Stalinism, for example, is recorded in the history of the European aristocratic era. Why? Because Stalin had to murder to stay in power.” Which makes me question whether he’s read a history book in his damn life. (Stalin actually suppressed Eisenstein’s second classic film about Ivan the Terrible and forbid the planned third installment because he felt that there were too many unflattering parallels between himself and the mad Tsar. Ivan’s reign was characterized by the mass murder of nobles who challenged his power (and tried to assassinate him), the murder of his own son, the torture and massacre of the people of the city of Novgorod (who, in paranoia, he suspected of conspiring against him), and near-constant warfare in order to expand his territory and power. And this is just one of interminable examples of how the time of monarchies was drenched in blood.)

And Yarvin’s “Patchwork” essay is full of obviously stupid ideas. For example, he solves the conundrum of freedom vs. security by saying there is no conundrum, security always wins. “The absence of crime and disorder is the test of public safety, and in anything like the modern state the risk of private infringement on private liberties far exceeds the risk of public infringement. No cop ever stole my bicycle.”

Now, this is a baffling statement to anyone even casually familiar with the history of police brutality. I’m old enough to remember when in 1997 the New York police sodomized a man with a broomstick. But it’s telling that Yarvin doesn’t say “no cop ever assaulted me”, he says “no cop ever stole my bicycle”. Because, as has been noted before, conservatives believe that the point of the law is that there are some people it protects but does not bind, and others whom it binds but doesn’t protect. To someone like Yarvin, the point of the police is to protect him and his private property from the kind of people the police sodomize with broomsticks. But as anyone who knows anything about authoritarian states will tell you, you’re only free from violence until you’re not. The history of such states, from ancient monarchies to modern dictatorships, is full of the formerly well-to-do who fell afoul of the regime in one way or another and wound up fed to the dogs.

And Yarvin’s plan for American is for us to “get rid of our dictator-phobia”, ignore the “irrelevant” constitution, and “Retire All Government Employees” or “RAGE”, a policy proposal that now finds itself being enacted in the form of DOGE.

Indeed, the influence of Yarvin and “Patchwork” on the billionaire elite has been huge, and they’ve backed numerous efforts to bring his sort of corporate mini-states into existence. Most of these attempts have ended in disaster, like the cruise ship Satoshi envisioned as a floating crypto-kingdom but whose owners couldn’t insure or run it, or the floating home off Thailand that didn’t bother securing permission from the Thai government and whose owners had to go into hiding from authorities. The most successful effort has been Próspera in Honduras, which made a deal with the authoritarian government designed so that it would be difficult to undo even once that government was overthrown, and is now the subject of ongoing protests because no one in Honduras actually wants these rich assholes there. And all of these efforts were in part funded by Peter Thiel and others like him who also back the Trump regime, leading Trump to dutifully promise to build so-called “Freedom Cities” which are just more Network State/Patchwork-style bullshit.

In other words, these are people who are so stupid they think Curtis Yarvin is smart.

The mystique around Musk being some kind of genius has now been revealed for the spin it always was, as I discussed in ”Elon Musk, Wokeness, and the Myth of Meritocracy”, and I think even the proverbial “low information voter” now understands that he’s a Nazi once he threw Seig Heils at Trump’s inauguration. We watch Musk do things like tweet that the “Director of Climate Diversification” at the International Development Finance Corp has a fake job, we watch the administration ban words resulting in things like removing a line in a tax manual on “the inclusion of a taxpayer identification number” because it contains the word “inclusion” or the removal of a picture of the “Enola Gay” aircraft, we watch Trump appoint a TV host as Secretary of Defense (all while railing against DEI for promoting unqualified people) and have him include an editor at the Atlantic on a chat with secretive war plans, we watch them calculate tariffs against trade deficits with demands that countries lower their unfair deficits as if a country selling more stuff to us than we buy from them is some kind of problem or market manipulation and doing it so obliviously that they levied tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica, we see all this and think they can’t possibly be this stupid. But they are. We’re taught to believe that these mega-CEOs and billionaires achieved their success through the merit of their personal genius, and often that seems to be what they themselves think. But we can see it was really through confluences of luck, privilege, and rapacious and unscrupulous greed.

Part of the problem with Snow Crash (and many Cyberpunk dystopias like it) is that it becomes easy to ignore the satire and fundamental horror of the setting because everything seems so cool. Stephenson’s protagonist hero, hilariously named Hiro Protagonist, may live in a storage unit but he’s also the self-proclaimed world’s greatest sword-fighter, a street-smart hacker with a katana who delivers pizza for the mob in a high-tech race car. All the things that make his world terrifyingly dangerous—the wild factionalization of the law and legalization of corruption amid sovereign city states—also makes it exciting to read about. The “punk” part of CyberPunk was about how people lived on the margins and the “street” finding its own uses for things, but living on the margins in real life isn’t generally fun.

This is a general problem with satire, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his critique of The Colbert Report, a show that sought to lampoon right wingers but became beloved by them. The villain of Snow Crash, the billionaire L. Bob Rife, who basically owns the internet, demands the right to spy on his workers wherever they are (and occasionally punish them for their sexual proclivities) because the work-related knowledge in their heads is his property, and he seeks to develop technology to essentially indoctrinate and control the minds human race. Though it was published before their rise, it’s obvious that Rife is a megalomaniacal tech mogul along the lines of Musk, Bezos, or Zuckerberg. But it’s easy to imagine that when Zuckerberg renamed his company after the novel, he still envisioned himself as the cool hacker-builder-samurai guy, much as Musk still portrays himself as battling an “establishment” despite the fact that he’s now one of the most powerful people in the world. (Yarvin though, I suspect, might simply see Rife as not the villain at all but the hero.)

But then guys like Zuckerberg or Musk or Thiel, guys who like technology and read books like Snow Crash but are privileged and unscrupulous enough to con their way to the top of the capitalism heap and surround themselves by sycophantic yes-men get used to a state of affairs where their every desire can become a reality and everyone around them tells them what a genius they are for making it so. Of course they read a book like Snow Crash and think this is the world they want to create, guys like them are basically gods there.

Cyberpunk as a genre is basically inseparable virtual reality, which forms a neat duality of the grim and grimy real world and the fantastic and wondrous digital one.

However, both Zuckerberg’s Meta and the Metaverse-inspired Second Life, along with the long list of failed headset and headset companies that sought to change the world with virtual or augmented reality (which includes not only major company projects like Google Glass and Apple Vision Pro but unicorn start-ups like Magic Leap (with Stephenson on staff) which drummed up literal billions of VC cash promising to replace cell phones before its first product foundered and crashed sending it through successive rounds of layoffs and pivot strategies. While VR has had some success in the gaming space, ambitions to move people into “virtual worlds” for anything else has been promised for decades and thus far consistently crashed and burned.

The thing is, virtual reality is a wonderful convention in a work of fiction. It essentially allows you to have a portal fantasy—which is to say, a story where a character steps from one world into another—in a work of science fiction, and one in which the world stepped into is crafted by humans to be essentially however they want it to be. There’s a lot of fun stories to be had in a set-up like that.

But in reality, of course, when you put on a VR headset you’re not stepping into another world. You’re still sitting in your chair or whatever in your home. You just have two little televisions strapped to your eyes, summoning eyestrainand motion sickness. Going to a “virtual bar” to hang out with friends sounds great in theory, but besides the fact that you have to bring your own beverage, so to speak, you’re not actually touching your friends, you’re not seeing their faces react naturally to your face, the entire virtual bar environment just seems like an unnecessary and complicated imposition. VR for gaming makes a certain amount of sense, but for meetings and socializing it’s just a worse version of video chat.

But the reasons that virtual reality as a concept has consistently failed have been detailed before. The interesting thing is that despite those failures, tech CEOs and VCs keep coming back to the well to try and bring this to reality, with Zuckerberg’s Meta pivot only being the largest and most obvious disaster. The fact that nobody wants virtual reality, that Zuck’s version of a meeting in the Metaverse looks dramatically less useful than just using Zoom, doesn’t matter—they want virtual reality and they’re brilliant geniuses who are leading the world forward, aren’t they? Well, aren’t they?

Which is to say that virtual reality, much like libertarian corporate states, is something that sounds cool but that doesn’t really work and that nobody actually wants. It’s just another thing that they can desperately try to convince us is the Next Big Thing for them to squeeze profits out of. And its more evidence of how divorced the myopic and childish billionaire elite are from reality.

My Technofeudalism piece ended on a down-note so I want to bring a ray of hope to the darkness here and explain why while in the short term we’re still quite fucked in the long term there may be some reason for hope.

If Trump and the Republicans do actually dissolve democracy in the US, we’ll have a long, hard, and bloody road ahead of us, but contrary to popular belief fascists aren’t actually very good at running countries or maintaining power. Consider how fascists fell and were replaced not only when violently overthrown as in Germany or Italy, but simply once the Great Leader died like in Spain after Franco or Portugal after Salazar. Plenty of other authoritarian regimes were established only to fall and be replaced by liberal democracies after a handful of decades, as in Taiwan, Chile, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Argentina, and more. A Trump dictatorship would not have to be the end of the story especially in a country with as entrenched a tradition of democratic republicanism as this one.

But let’s assume that in the short term democracy (or at least the rickety impersonation of it we have now) doesn’t end or isn’t more and more obviously rigged and that it’s possible for the Democrats to win again. Let’s even assume that the remarkably opaque democratic party machinery might allow a left wing populist to get the presidential nomination and have leadership positions in the Senate and House, something that’s actually seeming more likely than ever now with Schumer painted as a collaborationist and AOC more and more emerging as a leading figure in the party imagination.

And what is it this breed of Democrats would inherit? A lot of government bureaucracy that will be newly appointed by Trump and fundamentally opposed to them, but also a precedent and leeway for letting those employees go and replacing them. (And we’re assuming this new leadership isn’t so stupid that they don’t want to replace these people because they’re desperate to cling to “norms” that will only ever be weilded against them when the other party feels free to ignore them.) Further they’ll have a huge number of departments and areas they’ll have to simply rebuild from scratch. It will take a huge amount of time and effort to even come close to unfucking the fuckery this regime has already wrought but it also gives whoever’s doing it an unprecedented opportunity to remake governmental systems from scratch.

On top of this there’s weird things like Trump’s executive order to start a sovereign wealth fund to nationalize Tiktok. Now, that fund might never materialize, but we actually have the president of the United States talking about nationalizing private enterprises, something that would’ve been anathema to the party of Reagan. Far from being some right-wing fever dream, such sovereign wealth funds are a fundamental part of more socialized democracies like Norway, where the government owns the oil industry among other ventures. A president and a government with a mind to could nationalize a whole lot of other businesses that are right now being run for private profit at the expense of the American people, not the least of which are the tech platforms even now forming the basis of the new technofeudal system I described in “How Capitalism Becomes Feudalism”.

I know it’s still hard to imagine at this moment a world where the government, say, nationalizes Amazon.com and then makes it an a marketplace that helps and encourages the vendors who sell on it and operates for the public benefit with democratic oversight rather than one that seeks to constantly undermine vendors and game their own customers. But it was hard to imagine a fascist White House until distressingly recently, and a hundred years ago it was hard to imagine things we take for granted now like eight hour work days, social security, or integration.

Even without huge measures like nationalizing Amazon, we could break up Amazon the way we did to Ma Bell. And dozens of other policies are on the table, including things like the Post Office or the Federal Reserve offering public bank accounts instead of only offering bank accounts for banks, or greater Federal Funding and encouragement of cooperative ownership that would move away from ownership of capital by small numbers of rich shareholders, the 10% who now own 93% of the stock market. And most of all, as Piketty recommends and as has been promoted by figures like Warren and Sanders, we could introduce wealth taxes and bring back truly progressive income taxes so that the richest Americans don’t pay less in tax then their secretaries. It’s hard to believe now that the United States once had some of the highest taxes on the richest people in the 1950s and 60s, uncoincidentally a time of economic prosperity for the middle class. We did it before, there’s no reason we can’t do it again. And this only scratches the surface of the kind of policies we could enact on the back of American outrage over the oligarchal menace on our republic.

Further, Trump clearly doesn’t understand all the ways in which his “America first” policies actually doom the project of American global dominance. Defunding and crippling USAid, an agency that provides things like food and medicine to the poor (and also helped bring down Apartheid in South Africa, which might help explain Musk’s vendetta against it) is horrific and has already killed at least an estimated 15,000 people, but USAid was also a mechanism for the US to project “soft power”, providing services and money to countries in exchange for concessions from their governments. Likewise, Trump’s promotion of cryptocurrency undermines the global dominance of the US dollar (as do the increased use of sanctions over the past decades which push countries off the dollar). This isn’t to say crypto is good—it’s a scam down to its bones—but that it’s very inability to act as a viable currency or do any of the things its backers promise is the key to its destructiveness to American monetary hegemony. And the administration is gutting the CIA and NSA (no tears shed from me) and backing down from its commitments of global defense, and while this leaves countries like Ukraine hung out to dry, it also undermines the US’s ability to enact the kind of undemocratic and authoritarian regime change on governments it doesn’t like (as it has done to uncountable countries) or swing its weight around to promote its corporate overlords buying up and draining dry the resources of developing nations. Meanwhile the tariffs that will bring back punishing levels of inflation also undermine the free trade agreements the US uses to enforce its IP and investor-state dispute settlements that cripple the economies of developing nations.

On top of this, tariff-driven inflation, mass government layoffs, freezing grants, and so on are driving us off an economic cliff. Of course, this doesn’t worry the billionaire elites because, as The Shock Doctrine (2007) by Naomi Klein explains, economic downturns actually benefit the rich who can swoop in and buy up resources at bargain prices while also (as per The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (2022) by Clara E. Mattei) increases unemployment which drives down wages and weakens worker bargaining positions and union power in order to maximize profits for shareholders. They love it when we’re all in the shit.

So let’s be clear: this is all going to suck. It’s going to suck for the world economy, it’s going to suck for everyone who depends on US aid, it’s going to suck for Americans.

But at the same time a recession and ongoing worldsuck is bad for the electoral chances of the governing administration and with the Republicans in control of the White House and Congress all blame can be laid at their feet. Which gives the Democrats an opportunity to transform back into a party that represents the majority of Americans. But this kind of political change can’t happen without mass movement and organization on the ground demanding that change. The Democrats can only be transformed into the kind of party that represents the majority of Americans by people using their voices and their votes to drumming out the conservatives, opportunists, and bastions of the neoliberal order like Nancy Pelosi who uses her position to make insider stock trades or Mayor Pete who during the Pandemic felt it was important that even making COVID tests had to be done for profit.

And without a radical course correction, both in the Democratic Party specifically and in the United States and world more generally, the mass hoarding of wealth by the few will continue to get worse.

Even before the annihilation of the world wars, however, the mass inequality of the Gilded Age to which Trump so dearly wants us to return lead precisely to the mass action and agitation that resulted in things like progressive income tax, antitrust laws, the legalization of unions, and so on. It’s possible to move the needle and force our elected officials to make substantive changes without first facing apocalyptic destruction. The question is whether we’ll be able to do it.

We don’t have the power to change corporations. But we can change the government. And that’s really why the right hates the government, why they keep beating the drum that the government is the problem and not the massive corporations that are actually wrecking everything.

The Democratic Party today only has two messages: “vote” and “give us money”. And while voting is the bare minimum of what we can do, the Democrats are also getting scared by the fascists and running Right, in other words running towards them rather than away from them. They treat their own left-wing base as votes they can take for granted and therefore not pay attention to. And the only way to stop that is to organize.

Forming and supporting mutual aid networks and getting to know your neighbors will help us all survive what comes next. And it will also help us build or join groups that can take political actions, from protests, participate in letter writing and call-in campaigns or knocking on doors for candidates or even run for office yourselves. In Technofuedalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis says that the very tools they’ve created to oppress us are the very ones that make it easier for us to communicate and organize with each other. We can use their machines against them.

I tell people to join the DSA because they’ve been extremely effective at actually running candidates and getting them elected as well as stumping for specific issues and getting laws passed. If you don’t like the DSA, fine, but join or form some organization that’s actually doing something.

And then we need to protest and primary these Democrats until we’ve made them understand or drummed them out. The time of centrist appeasement is done. The good news is that we’re already doing this to Chuck Schumer for his collaboration.

We need to be clear about what we want, which is not just massive new wealth taxes (though those to) and policies that benefit everyone like universal healthcare and universal public income, but actual worker control of the means of production, whether through local or national democratic government or through worker cooperatives operating under market socialism. As I’ve said before, neither of these are utopian pipe dreams—the government already runs plenty of services and tens of thousands of worker and consumer cooperatives exist already in this country alone. Socialism is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Three people may have as much wealth as the next 50% of the planet, but that wealth literally doesn’t exist without us and our labor. It’s time to take it back.

Well, it’s been a while. To be honest, it was hard for me to work on this because the barrage of stupid and horrible news made me want to do anything else to take my mind off of it. I’m sure some of you can empathize. But time to stop that and get down to business.

I also got a bad cold recently and that delayed things too.

You can support this project at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield and for as little as $1 an episode get exclusive author’s notes and other bonus content. I wrote a detailed history of liberalism for this episode because I wanted to talk about how Yarvin’s neofeudalism was explicitly a reaction to it but in the end it seemed like too much of a digression, but I’m going to put it up on Patreon.

I want to thank my Patrons, Miriam Byroade, Martin Nordlund, Aj, Heather B, Karlee Esmailli, Peter Bostrom, Catherine Kauffman, Paul OConnor, Graeme Dunn, Alexander Burgan, Craig Kingham, alex, StevM, Erstwhile Gamer, StarWanderingFool, K Jones, Eric Tien, Olivia Anne Gennaro, Craig DeHaan, Curtis Shea, Marina, Emre Bagdatoglu, Christopher Paul Bettridge, sven terje bang, Tyler Smith, Milo, Michael Kelly, Daniel Warren, Adam Roesner, Christopher keidong, Cerulean, Robin Podolsky, dko, Macy Morrow, Matthew Morgan, Max Lawson, B R, Austin Armstrong, Mariano Muñoz, Christian Frost, Mike Gillis, Diana Sofronieva, Kathryn Carruthers, Gabi Ghita, Hristo Kolev, Kevin Cafferty, Ulysse Pence, Wilma Ezekowitz, Nancy S Rosen, IndustrialRobot, Adam Hill, Arthur Rosenfield, and Jason Quackenbush

Thanks!

Bibliography

Books:

  • Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson, 1992
  • Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984
  • Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty, 2020
  • Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty, 2013
  • Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis, 2024
  • The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato, 2013
  • A Capitalist’s Lament: How Wall Street Is Fleecing You and Ruining America, Leland Faust, 2016
  • The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein, 2007
  • The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, Clara E. Mattei, 2022
  • Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, Richard Seymour, 2024
  • Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right, Elizabeth Sandifer, 2017

Articles and Misc:

On Trump and Musk:

On the Political Situation:

On Snow Crash, Cyberpunk, and Technology:

On Neoreaction:

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