How is it possible that the rich were able to convince the mediocre to usage their political freedom to keep the rich in power? erstwhile British leftist politician Aneurin Bevan asked this fascinating question in 1952, he captured the top paradox of liberal democracy. Now in the era of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and their brothers from large Tech, you can see that Bevan's paradox survived the trial of time and was preposterously oppressive.
Witnessing a Born broligarchy With her fancy plan to compression as much wealth and power out of Donald Trump's second coming, it's hard not to feel the force in her stomach. Unimaginable wealthy men known to have They treated their children sadisticallythat they recommended Books justifying torture and the abolition of human rights that they have earned space property on government and military contracts, tirelessly striving to delete government programs providing though protecting the poor, they all went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's ringing and prepare for taking over direct power In his government.
From their perspective, they made an incredibly lucrative marketplace with Trump, in which the rate of return is incomparable with the profits that can be generated in any conventional business. They invested respective 100 million dollars in the re-election of Trump, after which they gained another 100 billions in the minutes after his win. More specifically, the value of Peter Thiel's Palantir company fired by 23 percent, and Tesla Muska recorded a 40% increase in share value, reaching a capitalisation level exceeding Total value the global automotive industry.
For the fines they threw Trump into the campaign, the large Tech fraternity has just cut off 3 fabulous coupons: gargantuan government contracts, abolition of regulation (and the extraordinary gold fever it caused, since the fresh oligarchs will no longer gotta respond to any public concerns about autonomous cars of uncontrollable AI bots and drones or a gigantic increase in energy demand), and finally, with the state's blessing, they have just gained tremendous bargaining power in talks with workers, suppliers, competitors and the remainder of us, the small ones.
Not to mention not so trivial fears of their far broader ambitions. I hear Thiel's favourite book is The Sovereign Individual. Authors James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg virtually and without a note of irony compare the broligarchs to the gods of Olympus and claim that they have the full right, or even the work of dominance over the world. As the authors say: "A sovereign individual, with much more resources and beyond the scope of many forms of coercion, will give fresh form to governments and will reconfigure economies."
Thiel himself asked why this tacky book so appealed to him, states that in it he finds a “precise” forecast of “a future in which there are no state powers now ruling us.” However, Thiel forgets here, of course, that he does not dream of this powerful power being annihilated, but of being monopolized by people like him. At least he's honest adequate to admit that specified a version of freedom contradicts democracy.
But are we truly dealing with something completely new? The actions and beliefs of the broligarchs are, of course, reprehensible, but are we by any chance subject to unreflexively optimistic memories of the past, which makes the present seem to us the way to destruction, and at the same time is simply a recapitulation of our past?
When George W. Bush broke the provisions of the Geneva Convention and even the American Constitution, legalizing the endless torture in Guantanamo Bay, my American friends lamented America's lost innocence. I didn't agree with them. due to the fact that didn't America lose her innocence in the civilian War? In the Spanish-American War? In times of Prohibition? Hiroshima? The murders of 2 Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? In the Oklahoma bombings? You would think that specified carefree innocence could surely be easy recovered! Isn't that what we're doing again, looking in amazement at how a pack of oligarchs goes through the same revolving door separating large business from the government?
In many ways, it is nothing new. John D. Rockefeller, 1 of the first American sharks in the industry, founded a dynasty on which the full work of Musk looks like amateurism: Rockefeller's boy was a media mogul, grandson became vice president. Thomas Edison ordered the public execution of an elephant by electrocution, supplied by George Westinghouse, to have the government look favorably at his own DC system. Henry Ford took over 1 of the newspapers to coerce mayors and city councils to remove from streetcars so that these would give way to cars and Ford buses.
In those days, the large business did not have the power the net gives, but he knew another ways of shaping the political, philosophical and cultural environment in which we live. Have we forgotten how the oligarchs, specified as the Koch brothers, have financed for decades Atlas Network and Association Mont Pèlerin, to make marginal neoliberalism a universal creed in which the cruel war of the rich against the majority hides under the appearances of promoting “freedom”? Or did we forget how Goldman Sachs bank dropped off his own president at Bill Clinton's administration to be the secretary of the treasure to make this abolished all regulations To prevent an absolute Wall Street self-restraint?
It's all true. However, there is simply a peculiar power that the broligarchs present have, and which was beyond the scope of their predecessors from Wall Street and the large business. This is simply a form of capital that only late appeared: Cloud capital, which evidently does not float somewhere in the sky, but is here on Earth, and includes network-bound machines, server farms, cell towers, software and algorithms created by AI, or rests on the ocean floor, in endless kilometers of fibre optics.
Unlike conventional capital, from steam engines to modern industrial robots that make up the means of production produced, Cloud capital does not produce goods. Includes machines made to modify human behavior.
Sheep behaviour-modification measures created They teach us how to teach them to influence what we want. And erstwhile we want it, the same machines will sale it to us directly, bypassing any markets. In this light, the capital in the cloud plays 5 roles that erstwhile went beyond the possible of capital: it attracts our attention, creates our desires, sells us straight and outside conventional markets what it taught us to want, Controls the work of the proletariat, and in the end it squeezes out of us immense resources of free work, sustaining a giant network of behavioral modification machines, which is an element, which work we do free of charge and voluntarily.
Posts published by us with reviews, product ratings, uploaded videos, aggressive comments and photos aid to play capital in the cloud, and for our work we do not get a broken penny. In fact, it has turned us into peasants of the digital world, whereas in factories and warehouses the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sale us products are utilized to force workers to work faster and more efficient and keep track of them, usually with devices placed on the human\m wrist.
Little wonder, then, that the owners of this capital in the cloud have in their hands an unimaginable power, allowing them to get an unprecedented amount of free labour from virtually all ununderstanded amount for the usage of the cloud carried by capitalist vassals and, of course, the excess value produced by the proletariat. And now that they were able to buy a seat at Trump's presidential table, the broligarchs gained power for which men like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and even inactive active Rupert Murdoch would be cut.
Turning to Bevan's superb question, present it is easier to see how rich people convince the mediocre to quit their own freedom and service the rulers: capital in the cloud, unlike any another form of capital or state power to date, can automatically and straight form our behavior. Any hope and belief in individual acts, and even democracy itself, can only reconstruct us a revolution.
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The text was published in French in the Le Monde paper of January 3, 2025. From English she translated Dorota Blabolil-Obrębska.
