Tech-Lords, Demagogues, & Davos
Up on the sun
where it never rains or snows
There's an ocean
where the wind it never blows
Interesting times when the elites of a society recognize their rule is under threat. Almost always, it's perceived as newly hatched, a recent event, or as a single individual holding an ax above their outstretched necks. Lost are the decades ignored, dismissed, and tut-tutted. The changing social, political, economic, and most especially technological environments they created, leading to this particular historical moment.
The FT has a piece worth reading excellently demonstrating this mindset, How tech lords and populists changed the rules of power. It’s not a bad article, though it's a news piece. Well enough describing the present situation, but unhelpful to in any way understand the longer and deeper causes on how we got here.
First, a look at what’s good,
“The new technological elites, the Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs and Sam Altmans of this world, have nothing in common with the technocrats of Davos. Their philosophy of life is not based on the competent management of the existing order but, on the contrary, on an irrepressible desire to throw everything up in the air. Order, prudence and respect for the rules are anathema to those who have made a name for themselves by moving fast and breaking things, in accordance with Facebook’s famous first motto.”
In the words of Standartenführer Hans Landa, “That’s a bingo.” Giuliano da Empoli, the author, writes, we are in “a battle between power elites for control of the future.” As newsy analysis, it’s better than most. Da Empoli writes,
“By their very nature and background, the tech overlords are more akin to nationalist-populist leaders — the Trumps, Mileis, Bolsonaros and leaders of the European far-right movements — than to the moderate political classes that have governed western democracies for decades.”
He continues,
“Of course, Trump and other populist leaders seem to have emerged from the past, rather than from the future. These figures are impossible to understand if we rely on the political science of recent decades, whereas we need only open a Latin classic, Tacitus or Suetonius — or even one of the satires, Juvenal or Petronius — to find figures very similar to those who dominate today’s political scene.”
Here he gets a gold star for bringing up Rome, must be the Italian, but not in a helpful way. To say these character archetypes are new to the present, outside Trump everyone in the article mentioned emerged into public recognition in the last two decades, ignores the whole of history between Rome and now. This lot has always been with us, the question is keeping them out of or checking their power. Unfortunately, over the last century, the unfettered worship of inane celebrity and destructive wealth has grown appreciably in America as earlier republican values and processes deteriorated, which gets to the reporter’s common misuse of Roman history as analogy.
The "Latin classics" he mentions were all written at least a century after the fall of Rome’s republic. They are writings about the debauched characters of the first century and half of imperial Rome, make no mistake, virulently debauched they all were. Such an analogy would imply the American republic is already gone, though that is not what da Empoli implies. It exemplifies the piece’s real lack of historical perspective, the newsy problem.
The author looks at the present political crisis as a fight between our new Tech-Lords and half-allied neo-demagogues against an establishment politics he defines as “a political class of technocrats — or aspiring technocrats — from the right and left, moderate, reasonable, more or less indistinguishable from each other, who governed their countries on the basis of liberal democratic principles, in accordance with market rules, sometimes tempered by social considerations. A place where politics was reduced to a competition between PowerPoint slides, and the most transgressive thing you could do was wear a black turtleneck instead of a light blue shirt at cocktail hour.”
And there’s the rub, why this piece is a lot less useful than the author, FT, and probably most readers think. It’s a spot-on description of what American politics has become in the last four decades. A politically castrated class of eunuchs uncritical celebration of wealth and tech, facilitating the large scale dismantling of old industrial economies without the slightest concern for those left behind or resulting massive concentrations of wealth, all oblivious to the resentment and desperation created.
In newsy analysis regarding humanity’s latest technology revolution, he writes,
“For their part, moderate politicians failed to understand that, far from being simply a business project, the advent of digital technology was laying the foundations for a veritable political revolution and, ultimately, regime change.”
“The easy-going nerds who promised us a future of universal brotherhood in the late 1990s have thus been able to transform themselves into frightening molochs, engaged in a ruthless war for planetary and intergalactic supremacy, with no rules or responsibilities to counterbalance their immoderate power.”
It’s not just politicians who failed to understand technology’s fundamentally subversive nature, everyone has. Our wealth and power rapacious molochs really don't understand it either. If you could be somewhere “intergalactic,” it would all be truly funny, but alas.
By starting with the 1990s, the article is unhelpfully constrained by a decades’ perspective, creating a serious inability to confront the challenges we face. For example, there is no understanding how two centuries of industrialism and almost a century of broadcast media completely destroyed the established agrarian republics’ institutions and political processes. Both these technological revolutions created “the political class of technocrats” da Empoli laments is now being destroyed. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say, it certainly wasn’t democracy. Contemporary technologies’ role reshaping human society is nothing new, technologies have done so since our Homo ancestors first harnessed fire and chipped stones to create a cutting edge.
Most distasteful, he uses populists, a recently derogatory term adopted by the Davos lot as a label for the petty-neo-tyrants they’ve done most to create. The author probably hasn’t a clue the original Populists were one of the great democratic movements of American history. America’s yeoman farmers struggled mightily to hold onto their democratic enfranchisement against the consolidating power of new technologies, especially the railroads and telegraph, wielded by the new industrial corporations and East Coast money changers – the late 19th century Davos. However, it is a history known by Allen Greenspan, who in the last year of his Fed Chairmanship resurrected the long buried populist label, warning of the reaction brewing to his years of ultra-plutocratic monetary policy.
Finally, and sadly for an Italian, da Empoli dishonors Machiavelli, a republican, who would have found today’s Tech-Lords, demagogic politicians, and Davos cabal all equally distasteful. After all, five centuries ago, Niccolo perfectly described our present moment and much of the reform opportunity already missed in his Discourses on Livy. He actually understood the lessons of Rome writing,
“The wish to reform little by little requires a prudent person to come forward who sees this problem from some distance and in its initial stages. It is very likely that an individual of this type may never emerge in a city, and even if one were to emerge, he might not be able to persuade others of what he himself has come to understand, because people used to living in one way do not wish to change, and all the more so when they do not see the evil for themselves but must have it demonstrated to them through abstract arguments.”
Abstract arguments no longer necessary, all but the purposely blind can see. If our Tech-Lords succeed, disregarding the rising afflictions caused by the various and numerous buffoons of social media and our reality-TV politics, it will not simply be the lawyers and technocrats swept away, but what's left of our two and half century old experiment with modern republicanism.
