Ep. 09 The Network State (1)

But it's bringing us to a sort of the post-COVID tech bro skepticism about the way the world is addressed to a very similar audience with similar aims in the sense of let's talk about the way that we need to transform the world to solve all the problems that are there.

Yeah.

One thing that I thought was super interesting, and maybe the only reason to listen to this podcast about it, is that in going through it, I discovered something which had not been as clear to me before and does not come through in Yarvin simply because of when it was written, which is it provides insights, let's say, into why it is that all these tech bros, the tech class, whatever you want to call them, have in the last decade or so turned so decisively away from their sort of original soft left mentality counterculture approach and made the shift into a kind of Trump or Trump adjacent type of right wing right wing thinking.

Yeah, I mean, you can kind of see that shift in between this text and the Yarvin text, although, you know, you would never call Yarvin a left winger, but you would definitely call him at the time a sort of committed libertarian who's drifting very fast into ethno nationalism as the natural conclusion of his libertarian ideas.

That happens with tech in general.

Before the dot-com bubble, before tech became an industry, it was obviously coming out of people who were privileged enough to be going to places like Stanford and interfacing with this machinery, with this technology.

Of course, it's a privileged class, but it's largely young people coming out of the summer of love.

Right.

So they're bringing in if they're political at all, it's usually like soft progressivism, but it's usually like sort of countercultural, you know, don't touch my drugs, man, style libertarianism.

And then obviously what we have today with the likes of Elon Musk, Andar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg,

Ellison.

Yeah, is full descent into fascism.

And it really raises the question of how do you get from point A to point B without seeing any contradiction happening in the middle of the road? And I think that the network state kind of explains a little bit from a cynical reading how the tech right, as people are calling it, started to...

Form

to become that way.

Yeah, I think it articulates a way of seeing the world, which explains a little bit why it is that these people ended up feeling aggrieved to the point where they started to reach for these more extreme forms of political expression and also then sort of privileged themselves as the new thought leaders themselves.

To remake a society that would be better for themselves and by extension for everybody else.

Or

even how the extreme forms of political ideas that they had from the very beginning, like communalism, for example, get morphed when they come into the contact with technical infrastructures and the massive amount of money that it takes to make those technical infrastructures relevant in the 21st century.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's something I want to explore today.

How is it that people worth hundreds and hundreds of millions all the way up to now a trillion dollars at the same time subscribe so enthusiastically to what is essentially a politics of grievance and have done so increasingly during the period that's more or less 2016 to today when their wealth has increased stratospherically? I mean, that's a hard thing, I think, for normal people, for the average person to get their head around.

Why is it that somebody who's doing very, very well into the existing system somehow is convinced that the existing system is completely broken and needs to be changed and so on? And I think that this book, I mean, it doesn't try, it doesn't explain that directly, but in the blueprint that it offers, it provides insights as to how, to the way that that sort of that mindset emerges.