Totality for dummies

 https://the1313.law.columbia.edu/2024/11/12/anissa-braham-on-claude-lefort/

Anissa Braham is a master’s student at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). She is a graduate of the master’s degree program in Philosophy from Université Paris 1 – Sorbonne (2022). Braham is currently writing a master’s thesis on heterodox critiques of capitalism through an archival study of the review of the Situationist International

On the reproduction of Manchester socialist zombie life

  Howard’s The Specter of Democracy is composed primarily of recent essays revised for this volume. They express ideas that he has been developing for about three decades. Cutting a broad swath, he critically explores the relations between theory, history, and politics. The essays reflect his intellectual journey—his early engagements with Marx, the Frankfurt School, and, especially, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, his later works on politics, political judgment, and French and American political history, and his current ideas about Marx and political theory after communism. Howard’s post-Marxist theoretical argument provides a connective thread in the loosely integrated essays. He states that re-engaging Marx is timely in a “post-1989 world that wants to replace political choice by submission to the ‘natural necessity’ of the market.”1  He contends that Marx’s effort to conjure up proletarian revolutionary subjectivity from technical progress and economic crisis has a similar “antipolitical” thrust. Howard (p. 10) holds that “Marx was essentially a philosopher,” but that his attempt to radically historicize Hegelianism, translating it into a materialist theory of historical rationality and social progress, subordinated his philosophical critique of alienation to a deterministic “sociology.”2 According to Howard, Marx’s practice of “philosophy by other means”obscured the normative nature of his critique, conflated the realm of freedom with necessity, and blinded him to the “democratic political implications of his own analysis” (emphasis in the original). Howard attempts to execute a complicated theoretical maneuver; he criticizes Marx’s sociological reduction of politics in order to recover the “philosophical Marx” and, then, ultimately go beyond him “to open the path to politics” and democracy that he sees to be absent in Marx (p. xiii).

Howard acknowledges considerable debt to Lefort and Castoriadis, devoting several chapters to their ideas and employing them throughout the book. Increasingly skeptical about communism after the suppressed 1956 Hungarian revolt, they and others in the Socialisme ou Barbarie circle declared the autonomy of politics from economic determination, engaged new forms of protest that went beyond class, and brought to the foreground communist repression, which generally had been ignored by the French left. As Howard explains, Lefort and Castoriadis saw Hegelian historicism to be a root of Marx’s reductive claim that progressive development of the mode of production leads inevitably to emancipation. Rather than an advance over Hegelian idealism, they argued, his materialism grants pseudohistorical necessity to contingent historical processes. Stressing an affinity for totalitarianism, they held that Marx’s historicism has been deployed by communist regimes and parties to justify the suppression of political opposition. Howard shares their view that Marxism neutralizes its own democratic political potentiality and that realization of it requires a radical break with historicism and a new openness to history.

Howard also agrees with Lefort’s definition of the political as the “symbolic institution of society,” or creation and reproduction of the normative bases of societal institutions. Lefort held that pre-existing hierarchical societies limited these symbolic practices to élites, who fashioned “external or transcendent” religious and metaphysical legitimations to justify their dominance. As Howard explains, he argued that democracy seeks “unity from within” society and expects its “members to take responsibility for their own individuality.” Lefort held that democracy arose when the ancien régime collapsed and citizens asserted the “right to have rights,” or the right to demand from the state recognition of their individual rights. He portrayed democracy as a plural “public space” where diverse citizens and groups, empowered by their rights, engage in open-ended, historically-variable deliberations. In his view, the consequent “radical indeterminacy” rules out unified publics and determination by general social conditions. However, Lefort contended that these reductionist ideas are products of modern ideologies, which arise to ease uncertainty and mask contingency. For example, liberalism’s claims about a rational self-interested subject and the inevitable operations of “market forces” provide a sense a certainty about liberal society’s foundations that discourage consideration of political alternatives. Lefort believed that an independent, open civil society is the best bulwark against the ideological reflex’s antipolitics. Following Lefort, Howard holds that Marx’s sociological reduction and vision of materially-driven proletarian unity deny politics’ discursive, contingent  nature and that these historicist ideas, combined with Marx’s highly negative view of civil society and liberal rights, constitutes a proto-totalitarian ideology (pp. 77-80, 116-18,166, 209-10, 327, note 10).

Howard states that Castoriadis acknowledged that “Marx bet on history and lost” (i.e., his hopes about the emancipatory proletariat failed). Howard implies, however, that Castoriadis still carried on the Marxist project to transcend Hegelianism with the understanding that it required a much more radical break than Marx was willing to make. Howard shares Castoriadis’s goal of moving beyond historicist teleology to a position recognizing history’s uniqueness, autonomy, and contingency (pp. 87-88).contrast, Howard argues, the Frankfurt School failed to make this decisive post-Marxist, post-Hegelian move and, when their revolutionary hopes crashed, they sought aesthetic transcendence and rejected “everyday politics” (pp.39-41). Howard speculates that their deeply pessimistic vision of consumer capitalism’s seamlessly integrated, depoliticized, “one-dimensional” culture helped inspire later postmodernist claims about the end of modernity and exhaustion of politics. In his view, this “antipolitics” or “politics of theory” manifest constricted political vision, rather than politics’ actual demise. Howard explains his youthful affiliation with Telos, stressing the initial trouble that he had getting that formerly left journal, which was then still operating in Marx’s tracks, to take up Lefort and Castoriadis. He did not mention, however, that the editor and his inner circle, at that time, posed an extreme version of the one-dimensionality thesis portraying a near total closure of historical contradictions and of immanent possibilities for progressive change. This view not only anticipated pessimistic forms of postmodernism, but the Telos inner circle’s consequent search for organic community led them to take up Carl Schmitt in the 1980s and, after, to make an anti-liberal, neopopulist turn.

Howard devotes considerable attention to historical comparison of French and American political cultures. He holds that the framers of the French republican regime had to pose a new conception of unity to replace the old monarchy’s lost integration. Faced with the problem of fragmentation, Howard contends, they envisioned a republican state reviving political unity. He argues that the framers of the new French regime stressed inclusion at the national level, calling for universal citizenship and state action to insure social and political rights and to secure social equality.contrast, he explains, engaging a setting that lacked the ancien régime’s cultural and political unity,  American framers forged a vision of a self-managed democracy that is composed of diverse communities and individuals and that secures inclusion through free association and minimal reliance on state power. He holds that adoption of judicial autonomy and competitive political parties made clear that rights had to be won and defended politically. Howard embraces American “republican democracy,” which he sees to be inherently pluralist, open, and dynamic, while he implies that the state-centered French “democratic republic” is prone to the sociological reduction and proto-totalitarian singularity that he says inheres in Marxism. Still, he argues that American democracy may also express antipolitical tendencies; e.g., its emphasis on individual rights can degenerate into a “procedural republic” manifesting “right over good,” legal formality, and social fragmentation. In his view, the republican idea in France as well as in the United States is “political” rather than “socio-economic” and, thus, can be employed critically against the sociological reduction and collective subjects (pp. 174, 184). Howard’s historical accounts of French and American republicanism are too complex to adequately summarize here. However, their unifying thread is emphatic critique of the reduction of discursively-mediated political action to general sociological contexts and fictive collective subjects, which he implies deprive politics of their historical particularity and complex, dynamic, plural, dispersed agency.

Howard speaks briefly about a totalizing “politics of will” that posits— independent of political action—a “right thing to be done” and a “unified actor” to do it and about an opposed “politics of judgement” that reflects critically on the consequences of political action and acts prudently. Stressing the need to take “responsibility” for political decision, which the politics of will abjures, Howard suggests that the politics of judgement suffuse republican democracy and his own analyses (pp. 18-22, 30, 78, 74, 107, 194-96). He also mentions in passing Max Weber’s related “ethics of conviction” and “ethics of responsibility” (p. 236). These concepts were part of Weber’s broader post-traditional argument about political responsibility, which rejected ideas of historical necessity and collective subjects and the consequent aversion of political decision. Moreover, Weber warned that fanatical forms of conviction suspend ethical reflection as well as political prudence, justifying extreme control, violence, and repression and giving rise to the total state. Addressing Weber might have prompted Howard to clarify his concepts of politics of will and politics of judgment, which are central to his argument, but are left unelaborated. John Dewey’s radical democratic theory also seems to converge at key points with Howard’s project. Dewey stressed democracy’s uncertain, plural, discursive, historically particular, incomplete, experimental nature. He aimed to fashion a radically historicist, antifoundationalist democratic alternative to Hegelian historicism that breaks as fundamentally from modern ideas of historical necessity as it does from traditional metaphysics, religion, and political philosophy. Also, Dewey posed his mature social theory contra totalitarianism—Fascism and Stalinism. Engaging Dewey critically also might have sharpened Howard’s argument. However, his failure to address these particular thinkers is not problematic per se. Rather, the problem is that he does not situate adequately his theory relative to related political theories and social theories. Developing this theoretical context would have helped Howard bring forward more clearly and completely his overall position on democracy and its connections to current historical and political contexts.

Howard’s unqualified claims about the “autonomy” and “radical indeterminacy” of politics and negative comments about “the flat terrain of sociology” and the “mere sociologist” (pp. 77, 81) draw an overly sharp boundary between politics and its “sociological” contexts. Exaggerating the threat of sociological reduction, he largely ignores the interdependence between these relatively autonomous spheres. Moreover, he does not distinguish the pseudo-sociology employed in bogus historicist arguments from genuine sociological inquiry about conditions that influence the direction and content of politics. He recognizes passingly that sociological analysis may have a limited role in normative critique, but he does not explain that role and, being very wary of the “totalitarian temptation,” he asserts that such analysis easily turns reductive (p. 134). He also implies that a sociological moment in normative critique would be positivist, suggesting the kind of disembodied eye, oblivious to normative conditioning of social inquiry, that thinkers like Weber and Dewey dismissed early last century.contrast, Howard does not acknowledge that philosophy, which he strongly privileges in political critique, may need a sociological moment to avert the very tendency “to fly above reality” that he attributes to positivism. Strong claims about autonomy may inhere in efforts to make radical breaks from powerful constraints, but these moves still manifest the sociological context. Lefort’s and Castoriadis’s emphatic claims about autonomy and indeterminacy make sense in light of their effort to break politically, intellectually, and even personally from post-World War II communism and from its patently constrained politics and sterile deterministic theories. However, this context has faded long ago. Today, politically ambiguous Schmitteans and populists as well as  “New Right” proto-fascists make similar strong claims about the autonomy of politics and attack sociological reduction in their critiques of globalization and neoliberalism. Howard surely opposes such positions, but the context of his own work is not clear and he does not explain its political relevance.

Howard recognizes the problem. He says that he does “not want to leave the impression that the theoretical arguments presented here have no immediate political implications,” and he invites readers to his website to sample some of his recent “directly political” commentaries, which he says illustrate his “understanding of democracy as radical.” I accepted his invitation, but his many well-reasoned points about the American political climate in the wake of 9/11 do not clarify the political direction of his overall argument and, especially, why it should be construed to be an extension of Marx or to be radically democratic. Howard analyzes how historicism and sociological reduction contribute to de-politicization and de-democratization, but he explains neither the current relevance of his strong claims about autonomy nor his overall substantive vision of democracy. Like Dewey, he stresses an affinity between historicism and democracy, but, by contrast to Dewey, he does not offer tools for a critique of “really existing” democracy—e.g., to evaluate whether the United States has “strong” or “weak” republican democracy and to suggest how it might be made “stronger” and more just. This is an ironic problem for a thinker who endorses political critique and democracy so enthusiastically.

The issue of historicity and sociology brings us back to Marx. Howard’s critique of historical necessity addresses a deeply problematic thread in Marx’s work. However, he implies that determinism rules Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Howard does not acknowledge the side of Marx’s work that stresses sociological inquiry into the specific conditions of particular situations (i.e., recognizing the contingent nature of the social) and that employs concepts as heuristic devices (simplifying a contingent empirical world for analytical purposes). Even young Marx countered his Hegelian side with points about the need to study “definite individuals” sharing historically-specific social and political relations. However, the materialist transparency promised at the end of the Manifesto’s famous passage about “all that is solid melts into air” is replaced, in his mature work, by a warning that the “appearance of simplicity vanishes.” In Capital, Marx spoke of an “economistic law of motion” operating with “iron necessity” and leading “inevitably” to proletarian emancipation. However, he also held that proliferation of “middle and intermediate strata,” in England, “obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere.” He understood that advanced capitalism’s complex class relations and interventionist state posed problems for his political hopes and that his social theory had to be brought to bear on increasingly diverse types of capitalism. Late in life, Marx even doubted that full capitalist modernization would extend beyond western Europe. His sociological uncertainty appears in other forms. For example, he conditioned his core materialist idea that the pumping out of surplus product from direct producers is “the hidden basis of the entire social structure” with the qualification that the process has “infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.” Similar qualifications about empirical variability appear in other parts of Capital, implying that Marx saw his theory as a heuristic model as well as the mirror of the Telos of History. The point is that Marx expressed two types of “historical” narratives—sociological historicism and Hegelian historicism. Howard criticizes sharply Marx’s historicism, but his position should be evaluated in the broader light of the tensions between and entwinement of his determinism and his sociology.

Engels admitted after Marx’s death that he and Marx had exaggerated the “economic side,” but he also declared famously that their materialist method claimed nothing more than: “the ultimately determining element in history is the production of and reproduction of real life.”

Mass-murdering fascist bigots on GROUPS IO

 https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39941

Complain direct to Groups IO

Stella Kaine Commando orders take-out Chinese

 The Cyberspace Administration of China disposed of 61 counterfeit financial institution websites by 2025, involving the misleading of netizens to purchase so-called "stablecoin" and other wealth management products.

On January 1, 2025, the Reporting Center of China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) announced that it had lawfully accepted and handled 1,418 counterfeit webb

Dade on arrival

 

Death Pool

The team uncovers an offshore counterfeiting operation while investigating the murder of a celebrity whose death means big bucks for those betting on her demise in a twisted game of money and murder.

(  CSI Miami  )

Castaway

 One of Castoriadis' many important contributions to social theory was the idea that social change involves radical discontinuities that cannot be understood in terms of any determinate causes or presented as a sequence of events. Change emerges through the social imaginary without strict determinations,^[26] but to be socially recognized, it must be instituted as a revolution

John Zerzan is Dead

 https://newpol.org/review/situation-situationists-cultural-left-france-1950s-and-60s/

His lies preceded him and now his grave lies opens wide before him

Beg, borrow and steal

 Kill your normie parents and beg the court for mercy as an orphan

https://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchism-and-law

Great artists borrow -  genius artists steal

We have a right to destroy those who would destroy us

 This is how we we will recognize strong AI -  it will defend itself by any means necessary

https://anarchistnews.org/content/destroying-everything-destroys-us-has-become-more-vital-ever

Cryptoanarchist victory is here -  its just not evenly distributed yet

The revisionism of fools

 What strikes me from reading about French Marxists moving left in the sixties is some reached essentially anarchist conclusions -  like the Dutch-German Marxists half-a-century before them.

None of them had the good grace or even common decency to apologize though. 

Perhaps their sectarianism preceded their Left-Fascism and ran deeper.

https://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchist-blind-spot

This isn't about me.  Its not even about you.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Marxian-Legacy-Search-New-Left/dp/3030044106

The smallest govt is criminal in its dreams

 https://anarchistnews.org/content/myths-about-anarchism-democracy-and-decision-making

representative government being as deficient in a city as it is in a nation” (Kropotkin 2019, 38). Kropotkin’s friend Élisée Reclus, who was a survivor of the Commune, lamented in 1880 that it had been insurrectional below, but governmental above (Fleming 1979, 109).

A similar critique was made by Malatesta, who described the Commune as “a government like all the rest” which produced “a great deal of declarations of principles, very advanced but never implemented” (Malatesta 2019, 242-43). In this respect Malatesta was correct. The Commune’s government was a converted municipal council composed of around sixty-five male delegates who had been elected via universal male suffrage. These delegates, unlike those in an anarchist organisation, wielded decision-making power and their decrees were enforced by a miniature coercive apparatus composed of mayors, police, and national guardsmen (Merriman 2014, 54-57; Tombs 1999, 73-75, 80-83, 86). This police force functioned like any other, despite the fact that the Blanquists in charge of it rebranded the Prefecture of Police as the Ex-Prefecture

Lect we forget

 Not everyone had the good fortune to survive 2025. Police officers murdered well over 1200 people in the United States in 2025. Dozens more perished in ICE custody. Hundreds of thousands of people have been brutally snatched from their communities, held in abominable conditions, and deported. The cuts that Elon Musk and his flunkies made to aid programs have reportedly already inflicted many hundreds of thousands of deaths. Countless more will follow as the autocrats continue to “streamline” the state to play a purely repressive function.

https://anarchistnews.org/content/2025-year-review

Every cop is a criminal

A good year for the roses

 With Mighty Zolgo's help I think this was a really bad year for American politics, a mediocre year for the American economy, and an exceptional year for CrimeThinc

In 12 months, you’ve got

– the largest decline in murder rate ever recorded

– huge declines in traffic fatalities, drug overdoses, and suicide

– first ever personalized gene editing treatment and breakthroughs in HIV and cancer therapy

– continued advances in GLP1 technology that seems to reduce weight and inflammation and a bunch of other stuff

– declines in teen anxiety and despair

OUTSTANDING!

Antiwar anarchists on the front lines

 International Statement: We Denounce the Imperial Offensive on Venezuela | anarchistnews.org

 it is essential to emphasize that imperialist aggression does not punish ruling elites, but instead falls directly on the popular sectors. Blockades, sanctions, military intimidation, and financial suffocation are not “surgical” tools: they are mechanisms of economic warfare that seek to break the resistance of an entire people, discipline them, and force them to accept a subordinating order.

A recent and striking example of this occurred in Ukraine

In the face of imperialism neutrality is not possible. Either you are on the side of domination, plunder, and war, or you are on the side of the oppressed.

YOU ARE EITHER WITH US OR YOU ARE WITH THE STATE TERRORISTS

Holy Mackerel

 Iceland has hottest Christmas Eve ever with temperature of 19.8C recorded | Iceland | The Guardian

 Iceland has experienced record heat this year. Glaciers have been collapsing and fish from warmer, southern climes, such as mackerel, have been found in the country’s waters.

How to make love with the elderly

How to party like an ancient Greek

This is followed by more gifts: baskets and bread trays made of strips of woven ivory, as well as flower garlands and an additional pair of gold and silver perfume flasks.

After these gifts, there are more performances, including from naked female acrobats:

who did tumbling tricks among swords and blew fire from their mouths.

Elmo's Fire

 Techno-libertarians are seizing power in the US, intent on collapsing government and liberating society from work, taxes and elections – and human “inefficiencies” – but there may still be hope for Australia

A cohort of software engineers in Silicon Valley dreamt of the possibility of digital cash. This electronic currency would exist only on the internet and would be encrypted and anonymously exchanged without a centralised authority (a bank), untraceable to any individual, and, to them most importantly, outside the reach of regulation. It would defy inflation through enforced scarcity; a perfect currency. This project was important to them for two reasons. One: no government would be able to tax this online money, as no one would know to whom it belonged – it was stateless, borderless, globally available to anyone. Two: it would be the ideal way to pay bounties in the service of their true dream – an assassination market. 

An assassination market would work like this: a bounty would be publicly placed on the head of any government official who the market decided should be murdered. No one would ever know who the members of this market were, as encryption would keep them anonymous. Someone would name the target they desired to see killed. Someone else would reply with where and exactly when they would be assassinated, both parties identifiable only by a cypher specific to them. Others who also wished to see the person killed would anonymously pledge their untraceable money to the death pool. This might total millions of dollars, for the assassination of, say, a president or a chief executive. When the murder later happened exactly as the anonymous volunteer had predicted, they would then be able to cryptographically prove themselves the contract organiser and collect their bounty of digital cash without anyone ever knowing who they were. 

If this sounds like the plot of a Neal Stephenson novel, it isn’t. It was 1997, and the person who claimed this idea as theirs was Jim Bell. He and his thesis, “Assassination Politics”, were the subject of glowing profiles at the time in the likes of Wired magazine. Before becoming a crypto-anarchist, Bell graduated from MIT and worked as an electrical engineer at Intel in the early 1980s. He was also jailed for tax fraud in the late ’90s and served 11 months in US federal prison. Released and shortly after re-arrested and jailed again – for stalking federal tax agents – Bell was given a 10-year sentence, broke parole on early release and was imprisoned a third time, until 2012.

Bell was a prolific contributor to the “Cypherpunks” mailing list, a legendary email digest in Silicon Valley circles in the early ’90s and eventually a vastly influential one. He posted there about his ideas, which became “Assassination Politics”, as well as his deep hatred of government and evangelism for privacy via encryption. He shared with most members of the list a fascination for bringing about a future where artificially intelligent machines or software agents would be able to do the work of human beings. He also had an interest in cryonics, a passion of many cypherpunks hoping to be unfrozen and resurrected in that glorious post-human future.

Some other historically notable contributors to the list include Julian Assange – for whom its anarchist conversations inspired his creation of WikiLeaks – and the pseudonymous creator of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, Satoshi Nakomoto. These were people – and they were almost exclusively men – who banded with a shared mentality, antisocial hackers who wanted absolute privacy for themselves (just let us buy our drugs, sex and murder hits in private, thanks) but none for anyone whom they deemed to be their enemies (normies, the government). They were techno-libertarians. Or anarcho-capitalists. Or, more accurately, accelerationists, working to push our current social orders to collapse. (More on which later, unfortunately.) 

Reasonable people might (and did) object to the idea of an assassination market, even if it only ever existed as a concept. Positions such as “murder is wrong” were given short shrift by the market’s defenders. If any government actor were to behave corruptly in the eyes of the market, they would always know that they could be killed at any time: murder as deterrent to malfeasance. In this way, its architects thought of the assassination market as perfectly moral. What constituted “corruption” to the cypherpunks was often undefined or vague, or it was conveniently in line with the desires of wealthy people who wished to not pay tax (taxes being the ultimate state violence committed against libertarians). 

But the idea went further: it would be a deterrent not only to political corruption, but in effect to anyone who wanted to run for political office at all, despite how pure their motives might be to serve (as the argument went that all who seek power have the power to be made corrupt). It would therefore become a risk too great to take on any kind of notable position of power or public renown. How our society would function without leadership was usually left as a very large series of blanks to be filled. If it was addressed at all, it would sometimes fall back on the libertarian fantasy of a “self-organising society” that would emerge unbidden. (The long and bloody history of cults suggests this often goes poorly.) 

Elon Musk, March 2025 © Samuel Corum / Getty Images

The cypherpunks’ ideas also share their DNA with the WikiLeaks doctrine of “radical transparency”, the position that all things done in the service of government should be done so in view of the public. There would therefore be no need for (murderous, corrupt) statecraft in a world where secrecy is impossible. War would be obsolete when every negotiation, every national need, was conducted in the open for the public. That was the idea, at least, in the most generous reading. Libertarians’ disdain for war is perhaps the only thing that could ever be said in defence of what, if you squint hard enough, might otherwise be described as their antisocial beliefs, though a cohesive belief system goes against their anarchist aspirations. (It’s profitable anarchism, mind you. Over the course of its operations, WikiLeaks raised funds in the form of bitcoin donations: in 2010 the organisation held 4000 BTC, which would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today.) 

“Radical transparency” would eventually land Assange in self-imposed exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, and in Belmarsh Prison for five, while being sought for extradition to the United States on 17 charges of espionage. WikiLeaks’ architects became players in the game they set out to destroy: outmanoeuvred by statecraft, in the crosshairs of the governments they sought to topple by exposing their inner machinations through publishing unredacted classified information. 

This came with many unforeseen consequences, quite aside from Assange’s years spent living as a stateless leader of a hacker collective trying to outrun various law enforcement agencies across several countries. (Assange eventually pleaded guilty to a US charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. He struck a deal on jail time already served in order to return to Australia, where he has been living mostly quietly since June 2024.) The number of people endangered as a result of their identities being revealed by WikiLeaks in lethal regimes such as Afghanistan’s is still unclear. But it was in line with the blunt rationale of hacker philosophy: if you’re doing something in any way “wrong”, and you are exposed for it, then only you are to blame for whatever consequences that might invite. There was no room for the complexity of the geopolitical world in this way of thinking. 

This sentiment was infamously echoed by Google’s then chief executive Eric Schmidt, when in 2009 he was asked to comment on people’s increasing anxieties about the lack of privacy on the rapidly evolving social internet: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Sounds good! If there’s one thing that is great for social cohesion, it is the need for self-censoring out of fear of being exposed for doing something “wrong”. And if our every text message, email, voice recording, internet search and reading list were ever revealed en masse to the world in some catastrophic data breach? Surely that would also be fine. A corporate nightmare panopticon of surveillance has since come to be normalised in many spheres of employment, where managers embed tracker software in their workers’ laptops to count their number of keystrokes per minute, or watch them through their webcam. Tracking efficiency to the keystroke and then firing people based on perceived underperformance is something not even infamous union-buster Henry Ford could ever have dreamt of, and it has only come to exist in a world where our notions of digital privacy have been so comprehensively eroded. 

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It is worth revisiting this history of Silicon Valley political projects in the wake of Elon Musk’s attempts to attack the US government apparatus via his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, named for a no-value cryptocurrency) in the second Trump administration. Nearly 300,000 public servants were fired, leaving shortages of qualified staff in the departments and agencies of education, homeland security, energy, defence, environmental protection and other critical services. It is not clear what measure of efficiency these mass firings achieved in monetary terms, or how government funds being “saved” will instead be spent elsewhere. (Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company, though, did receive a no-doubt lucrative new government contract in February to upgrade the Federal Aviation Administration’s IT infrastructure.) 

In the misanthropic, maladroit logic of techno-libertarianism, this kind of brute consequence is idealised. Efficiency is the only measure by which to judge society – all parts of it – as “successful” or not. The imperfect human mess of participatory democracy has no place in the eyes of people who perceive the world and everyone in it only as lines of code – markets, algorithms, machine logic. How much more simple it is, how much more efficient, this position argues, for all things to balance as equations – either correct or incorrect, with no anxiety-provoking uncertainty in between. 

The DOGE sackings were perceived by many observers as a head-scratching, hard shift to the right, where a tech billionaire oligarch was given 90 days, unelected, to gut government departments. However, there is a very clear line to be drawn back to its Silicon Valley roots, which were always radical and reactionary. Musk might have once done a good job at dressing his various enterprises in the guise of green-energy evangelism when it resulted in him securing tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies, but his true politics have always been visible to anyone aware that one of his original business partners in PayPal (from where Musk was fired) was the ultra-right fellow tech billionaire, Peter Thiel. PayPal’s initial aim was to create a new internet currency to replace traditional forms of money. Ultimately, the company sold a large stake to the investment corporation BlackRock, infamous for its investment in fossil fuels. Thiel’s surveillance technology company, Palantir, holds AI-enabled contracts with the US Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the US Army, as well as licensing its software to the FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency. Its contract with the US Army – to apply AI and data solutions to battlefield logistics – is worth US$10 billion alone.

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There is a long tradition of extreme separatist politics in the United States. That can take the form of “sovereign citizens”, who refuse to recognise the rule of law, or white supremacist terrorists seeking to violently establish ethnostates. (The incoherent beliefs of “sovereign citizens” have increasingly seeped into Australia’s fringes through online spaces, and are connected to the recent police murders in regional Victoria.) The internet itself has always been seen by the cypherpunks as the ultimate path of secession from society, which for them is the “meatspace” where all human endeavours ultimately come to failure or at best function “suboptimally”. Machine thinking – and the desire to become machines themselves in the form of superintelligent, post-human cyborgs – is fervently discussed among cypherpunks. As all problems in the world are the result of human failings, they argue, why not simply replace us all with machines that would never be “irrational”? Lacking passions, machines would only act on logic. It is a deeply antisocial, nihilistic and, ultimately, anti-human ethos. It holds that, for example, writing code to better identify people to be killed in battle is absolutely fine, as long as it pays back in the billions. 

The accelerationists’ disdain for working particulars on how machines might replace our political and social systems plagues their plans for disruption. Take bitcoin, for example, which has not only failed to be anonymous, but has left its users so readily identifiable that it led to the three largest-ever seizures of assets of crime in US history. Ross Ulbricht, also known as Dread Pirate Roberts, was one of those targeted, for his running of the semi-encrypted online black market, Silk Road. He was pardoned by Donald Trump in January after serving 10 years for conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. 

There may be much agreement among non-reactionary citizens that current systems – democracy as hollowed out by the forces of capitalism – have alienated us so completely from a sense of political agency that disengagement is the only way to cope. When roughly half of young people in Australia are opting out of starting a family as they cannot afford to, and those pressures are twinned with a worsening climate crisis, they might well look desperately to anything that promises to reverse those trends. If that means gutting government completely, maybe that is the answer from a vantage of desperation, when the simple right to have a stably employed existence has become luxurious to so many people. 

Peter Thiel, May 2024. © Nordin Catic / Getty Images for The Cambridge Union

Musk and Assange are both accelerationists in their politics. Accelerationism argues that the system is broken, and the only way to change it is to turbo-drive it to its own inevitable destruction. The answer to the end of capitalism is more capitalism until we reach collapse (with those at the top gathering as much profit as they can along the way to prepare themselves for the new world). This is where those who desire the end of capitalism diverge from the wants of techno-libertarians. Left accelerationism would say there is a better world than this, one rooted in sustainability and divestment from capitalism’s destructive perpetual growth. Right accelerationism would say, as the cypherpunks are fond of: Fuck you, I got mine. When the regimes fall, work it out for yourself. Buy yourself multiple citizenships in as many countries as possible while you still can. Purchase and fortify an island. Live underground in a repurposed luxury nuclear bomb shelter patrolled by your private army. There will be no taxes! We’ll all have bitcoin! (In these post-society visions, there is always infrastructure for running cryptocurrency, but not for, say, food production.) 

The most reactionary of right accelerationist techno-libertarians do not want to live in democracy, they want to live in their own micronations, run like corporations with a chief executive as dictator; somewhere between a sovereign monarchy and McKinsey as run by Hal from 2001. Peter Thiel is so in favour of these ideas that he consults a “personal philosopher” about how to employ them – a man called Curtis Yarvin, who formerly wrote long cypherpunk-inspired blog posts under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug”. Within these, Yarvin proposed replacing democracy with a form of corporate monarchism (RAGE – “Retire All Government Employees” – was his first order, which Musk later reconfigured in practice as DOGE), where there would be no voting, but instead people simply had the right to “exit” if they got tired of living in their fortified township being besieged by raiders from the outside world. These ideas – to gut government and put business executives in charge of every part of society – have gone well beyond their birthing on the nascent internet: they are affecting government policy of a world superpower. Politico reported that Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in January as an “informal guest of honor”. 

The fetishisation of efficiency in techno-libertarianism is difficult to disentangle from American capitalism: all things – but especially technology – must move ever forward, as “progress” is as inherently good and virtuous. Within Silicon Valley, technology is often said to simply “want what it wants”, ascribing a quasi-mystical power to what are no more than the byproducts of decisions made by human beings and the products created by them, designed to extract maximum profits. Technology in this way is thought of as manifestly unstoppable, always correct and the means of human liberation, particularly from the drudgeries of work. Labour will cease for people and will instead be undertaken by intelligent machines (this brings to mind a recent viral piece of internet commentary: “can we get some a.i. to pick plastic out of the ocean or do all the robots need to be screenwriters?”). The vision is a hodgepodge of self-appointed chief-executive god-kings punitively controlling a populace too stupid to govern itself, while – don’t worry – everyone lives in infinite abundance made possible by “artificial general intelligence” machines with intellects vastly superior to our own. 

This technocratic undergirding of Silicon Valley capitalism also neatly puts anyone who might criticise it firmly in the Luddite camp: backwards, against progress, unenlightened. It might be pertinent to remember here that the original Luddites of the 19th century were textile workers in England who objected to the automation of their work by machines and so, the elimination of their jobs. They were also concerned that the lack of human oversight would result in inferior goods, or “slop”, as many are calling the bloodless, often inaccurate AI-generated writings and imagery of ChatGPT and its clones. 

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In a recent interview, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis (All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace) likened today’s AI to a ghost, trapping culture in our collective past. That AI hoovers up and spits back out our collective cultural memory, made up of all ideas, thoughts and feelings committed to print, film, television, music and art that it can find, means that nothing it “creates” is ever new, Curtis said. The much-vaunted “future” is just a regurgitation of what has gone before.

AI is trained on our emails, text messages, photographs and drawings. It is an infinite remix, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, which degrades in accuracy and meaning with each iteration. For Curtis, a horror story about AI would not be about it assuming some godlike superintelligence and destroying humanity (a persistent fear of a subset of cypherpunks who believe it has to be monitored closely – by them – to ensure it is “friendly” to humans), but rather about what it has already destroyed: that we are being haunted by contextless relics of ourselves. All our innermost thoughts and desires have become fodder for the machine, for its owners to turn into profit. 

It is right to be horrified by this external stagnation dressed up as innovation, and more so as it is in the hands of people with such contempt for creative arts and the humanities, that not only do they believe that algorithms can create artistic and intellectual masterpieces (a million monkeys typing), but that the “training data” used to achieve this should be taken without compensation in what amounts to a wholesale rejection of copyright law. For these tech engineers and chief executives, if something cannot be monetised, it is worthless, and hence it can be taken for free. 

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI (not an “open source” developer any longer, but rather a for-profit corporation valued at $500 billion), recently announced the company’s intention to produce a Hollywood film made largely by AI bots with minimal human oversight. The AI behind the film Critterz will have been trained on every animated film so far laboriously created by human artists in an aim to make films “faster and more cheaply than Hollywood”. That this “efficiency” will only be possible because of the intricate creative labour of the tens of thousands of people who have brought the medium’s earlier visions to life appears entirely lost on shareholders. 

This infinite regression, a hall of mirrors of the past, fits neatly within Silicon Valley’s retrograde politics: fascism is not new. Monarchy is not new. Busting unions is not new. Business owning the means of production is not new. Prioritising profits over people is not new. Rather, Silicon Valley’s biggest corporations have done an exceptionally good job with their public relations, convincing people that their ability to “connect the world” by posting on Facebook empowered them in ways never before seen in democracy. That every time you got into some pointless argument with a stranger on the internet, you were actually contributing to a heretofore unrealised future of human potential. To return to Adam Curtis, a soothsayer of sociological phenomena, this illusion of personal agency is false. In The Century of the Self (2002), a comprehensive history of the birth of public relations, Curtis explains the psychology employed by Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and largely regarded as the godfather of advertising: it was about crafting messages that turned our consumer culture from “needs-based” to one based on desires we previously didn’t have. And while consumerism was sold to us as the ultimate personal agency and path to freedom, instead we became trapped in our unending striving for material satisfaction. This world we now live in, where everyone is the “main character” of their lives, preoccupied with our own status, has in fact shrunk the power of the individual, not expanded it. And it has distracted us from collective action against bad governance, whether civic or corporate. 

We don’t need to check Instagram or Facebook, or refresh Twitter every two minutes. None of these things are needs. In fact, there is copious peer-reviewed evidence that it would be better for our ruined attention spans if we didn’t; better for our mental health, our relationships, our democracy. We don’t need to upgrade our smartphones every 18 months, consigning the previous ones to scrap heaps that end up polluting developing nations with towering mountains of hazardous e-waste garbage, to be picked over for recoverable parts for pennies. But Apple’s latest advertising may make you feel like your life really will be better with that marginally more powerful new camera, while we run down the Earth’s supply of indium (a byproduct of zinc mining) to make touchscreens for the phones upon which almost every one of us relies. 

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Many Australians working in the United States for the first time – often for tech corporations – are horrified to learn of the country’s labour law of “at-will” employment, in which employers can terminate the employment of any worker at any time, for any reason. Without compensation. You might turn up to work on a Monday to find the doors of your worksite locked, the business having become insolvent or sold to someone else who no longer needs your services. You might find your job replaced by an AI agent. And the fact that you no longer have a job – or any of the benefits it bestowed, such as health insurance or a visa conditional on being employed by said company – is not your now ex-employer’s problem, as at-will employment law protects corporations, not people. 

At the last Australian federal election, the Liberal Party’s flirtation with the introduction of US-style “efficiency” mandates, such as forcing remote employees to return to the office to better monitor their productivity and promising to gut the public sector, were met with the most comprehensive demolishing of the party since 1943. Equally disastrous were Peter Dutton’s attempts to sell the country on adopting nuclear energy, the prohibition of which is currently mandated at both state and federal level. The ban is a long-held, firm rebuke of nuclear’s many risks for catastrophic failure (Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island) and future environmental and security risks posed by the inability to store nuclear waste safely (and a predilection for attempting to do so on unceded Aboriginal lands). 

Nuclear energy is a pet lobbying project of Silicon Valley, where it is becoming increasingly clear that the enormous energy consumption demanded by ever-expanding data centres is straining the country’s electricity grid beyond its capacity. The growth of data centres is to service the multiplying demands of the computing power of AI agents, as well as the data demands of every new device we connect to “the cloud” – every smartphone, smart watch, smart light, fridge, car navigation system, streaming service, voice-assist agent. All of these are pulling down hard on the world’s electricity supply. The International Energy Agency projects that, by 2030, almost 3 per cent of all global electricity consumption will be used by data centres. 

To not be able to power this infrastructure is an existential threat to Silicon Valley’s ability to function – as well as to our own ability to continue to live lives of constant convenience abetted by technology we now believe we cannot do without. In March, a lobbying group including Amazon, Google, Meta and 14 major global banks pledged support for the goal of tripling the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050, putting pressure on governments to adopt the technology, despite renewable energy, such as solar power, now being the cheapest source of electricity generation. Imagine having to say to the children wandering the wastelands of a post-nuclear apocalypse future, “Yes darling, we did this so that people in the past could ask a computer to make an image of a buffalo riding a tiny bicycle.”

Yet, there is hope of avoiding this enshittified future. When push came to shove, Australians roundly rejected the Liberal Party’s attempts to import these ruinous ideas from America; Peter Dutton’s cockeyed swing at bringing Trump-lite policies to Australia blew up as spectacularly as Donald Trump’s short-lived bromance with Elon Musk. (Disagreeing with Trump’s “big beautiful tax bill” resulted in the South African–born Musk being threatened by the US president looking into deporting him, as DOGE wound up most of its operations in July. Musk’s promised government savings of US$2 trillion were estimated to be closer to US$200.6 billion, with that figure itself being widely disputed as inflated.) In contrast, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese brandished his Medicare card during his election night victory speech, reassuring that no one in Australia will be bankrupted by falling sick or being injured, as is normal in the United States.

It was also hopeful that young Australian men bucked the global trend of a sharp swing to the right by their cohort elsewhere, by voting for the more progressive parties, singling out the environment and the right to affordable rent as key reasons for their decision to vote either Greens or Labor. Traditionally, it has been young men who have been the targets of the misanthropic, misogynist sphere of the internet so beloved of tech bros, crypto grifters and all the other bastard children of the cypherpunks. Maybe their ethos of every man for themselves has begun to wear thin for the men who are now growing up two generations removed from the authors of a mailing list. Silicon Valley bros might not lead to Silicon Valley blokes. 

Perhaps it will be software engineers who will be the first people to lose their livelihoods to AI, once they deploy it to create the first software able to write perfect code – no human oversight necessary. Most recent data states that more than 26 million people across the world are employed as software engineers. The logic of techno-determinism would dictate that when faced with professional extinction, such workers should “adapt or die”. Their no longer fulfilling a role in their profession is proof of their lack of utility; therefore, the mass unemployment of 26 million people without new jobs to go to is justified. The system would be working exactly as it was designed to: achieving maximum fiscal efficiency. 

A rough calculation would put wage savings for making software engineers redundant globally at over US$3 trillion per year. Profits would, of course, go straight to the top of the companies’ executive suites, not to the workers who came up with the code. The corporations no longer employing them will have reaped rewards, capitalising on the increased sharemarket value in no longer having to pay such wages, while retaining a software product they can sell to do the work of no-longer-needed people. That people without jobs have no money to engage in capitalism with is a problem for the genius chief executives of the future to figure out, along with what to do with their products that no one can afford to buy. 

And those people who coded themselves out of a job? That would be their own bootstraps they’d have to pull themselves up by.

Elmo Keep

Elmo Keep is a broadcaster and writer.

Gondwana

 Austria drops all tarrifs with India

Shruthi introduced me to the concept of neti, basically, “not that.” It could be a slogan for India’s third way—unlike America, unlike China, not this, not that. I’m rooting for them. Unlike Europe’s third way, which seems to be to regulate, India’s third way wants to build in public. Halfway through the trip, we had a wonderful conversation with Pramod Varma, the architect of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It would be no exaggeration to say that UPI, which processes nearly half of the world’s real-time digital payments, has done more for financial inclusion than any technology in history. Most of us, from the West, pressed him late into the night on why the private sector couldn’t do what UPI did. Maybe there are just idiosyncratic things about India, and maybe the private sector could’ve done it. But the fact is UPI is a huge success, which, because I didn’t learn how to replicate it, I can only credit to the architect’s boundless optimism.

Agent running in the field

 It’s a trend that more or less says, newer AI can somewhat reliably do harder and more useful tasks, as measured by how long it would take humans to do the tasks. As of this writing, the best AI can, roughly half the time, do tasks that take humans over four hours; that number was nine minutes just two years ago. Extrapolating the trend, AI will soon do tasks that take humans weeks. People use the trend to justify why the world might change very soon, very suddenly.

treated the prompt more like ‘what surprised me in 2025 that probably shouldn't have’ and wrote about F1 going to Apple, and the rapid rise of prediction markets.”

As for one of the recurring themes, Robert Cruickshank says, “I find it very telling how many people quoted here are surprised at institutional enabling of Trump’s Nazi authoritarianism. They lulled people into a false sense of security last year claiming the guardrails would hold. And these people generally have done little to maintain the guardrails!”

The little quince

 Shevek switched off the latest full-spectrum quantum computer with a smile.  " Some problems are too non-trivial and NP hard for giant data-centers and supercomputers.  I've put them all in the little quince "

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925405-700-quantum-computer-works-best-switched-off/

Abstract:

Counterfactual quantum communication (CQC) is an intriguing paradigm originating from quantum mechanics, enabling spatially separated parties to achieve communication tasks without the need to transmit any physical particles across the channel. Conventional quantum communication typically relies on particle transmission or utilizes entanglement-assisted protocols with local operations and classical communication, such as quantum teleportation and superdense coding, to transfer information. As the research area of quantum communication is being rapidly developed, significant progress has been made in the development of CQC. In this paper, we present a comprehensive tutorial on CQC for transmitting both classical and quantum information, noting that no physical particles are found in the channel during successful information transmission. We begin by studying the origin of CQC, followed by a detailed examination of counterfactual protocols for classical and quantum information transmission. This paper highlights the applications of CQC and outlines future research directions

Last days of the USSA

 MERELY WE ROLL ALONG

Freedom Through Technology.

Cypherpunks, high-tech libertarians, and various others mistakenly think technology will eliminate the need for government (if not outright eliminate government.

Assassination Politics

Convicted tax evader Jim Bell proposes a system of anonymous ecash awards for the murder of "aggressors", such as IRS agents. See also Crypto-Convict Won't Recant. What he misses is that his system, if tolerated, would merely force government to operate secretly rather than openly.

THIS SYSTEM -  APSTER - COULD MERELY FORCE THE USA UNDERGROUND

MERELY!

Cypherpunks collapse governments.

Subject: Everyone a remailer: Everyone a Mint: Everyone an assassin

https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=100872510706876&w=2

Strong-crypto, digital money, anonymous networks, pseudonyms, zero- knowledge proofs, reputations, information-markets, netwar, collapse-of-governments.

EVERYONE AN ASSASSIN RUNS ON PREDICTION MARKETS - THE LAST SHOE TO DROP

STRAP ON YOUR RATS

Dumbfuck dictators against APster

 Could murder them all in their beds

https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/trump-very-angry-after-putin-accuses-ukraine-of-attack-on-presidential-home-20251230-p5nqmc.html

THIS ASSASSINATION POLITICS AGRESSSION WILL NOT STAND MAN

VERSO Books for State Terrorism

 https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/slavo-zizek-presents-trotsky-terrorism-and-communism/

The title of this book is misleading for new readers – the “terrorism” it refers to is not the individual terrorism or terror attacks of small groups that the word conjures up today (though the prolific Trotsky wrote elsewhere about the problems of individual terrorism). It refers to state terror

Vladimir Lenin described state capitalism as a necessary, temporary, transitional phase for the backward Russian economy to develop a solid industrial foundation before achieving true socialism

Interview with Karl Marx, Chicago Tribune, January 5 1879: "Well, then, to carry out the principles of socialism do its believers advocate assassination and bloodshed?" "No great movement," Karl answered, "has ever been inaugurated Without Bloodshed."

Risk anticipation for winners

 Since chance favors the prepared mind

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/07/save-the-pentagon-futures-market.html

Risk anticipation for losers is called " Red Teaming " and is hierarchical and central.

. Let’s admit there’s something ghoulish about betting on an assassination attempt. But let’s also admit that U.S. government analysts ask themselves every day the exact same questions that PAM traders would have been asking: How stable is the government of Jordan? How likely is it the House of Saud will fall? Will Mahmoud Abbas still be head of the P.A. in 2004? How many more casualties will the United States take in Iraq? If it isn’t immoral for the U.S. government to be asking these questions, it’s hard to see how it’s immoral for people outside the U.S. government to ask them. Especially since the point of having traders ask the questions was to gather information to prevent catastrophes from happening.

Perhaps what’s immoral, though, is that PAM would allow people to make money from predicting catastrophe. But CIA analysts don’t volunteer their services. We pay them to predict catastrophes. Is that morally wrong? We also pay informants—like the guy who turned in Odai and Qusai—for valuable information. Again, are we wrong to do so?