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Elon Musk calls for Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to be shut down
(finance.yahoo.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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To add onto this, though this is clearly just the early stages, I think what we're seeing with the consolidation of the Silicon Valley elites and Big Tech giants under the Trump faction is, in many ways, a coup by America's "New Money" Tech oligarchs against the traditional 20th century financial/industrial institutional elite that the MAGA Republicans had moved away from and therefore had visibly coalesced under the Democrats. I was listening to TrueAnon's take on the Republican "shift" of Big Tech and they highlighted the persecution complex that Silicon Valley had under Biden, where people like Zuckerberg were dragged into Congress and made to endure a televised grilling. This was something that would have never happened to the likes of Dimon, Soros or Buffett.
Given that explosive stock market capitalization had made these Tech oligarchs far wealthier than the "Old Money" ever had been, it must have been humiliating for narcissistic freaks like Zuckerberg who have megalomaniacal messiah complexes from usually being just in their Silicon Valley yes-men echochambers to experience being treated this way when they're also the new overwhelming power in America's elite. These deeply resentful individuals then saw in Trump's admin a way to finally have the Big Tech power base institutionally reconstituted at the top of the hierarchy, above the "Old Money."
Rather than LARPing as a character in some British drama about "New Money" losers spending the entire series trying to ingratiate their way into the "Old Money" elite nobility, they're deciding to simply flip the table and pull down the entire superstructure to rebuild from the rubble something that can acknowledge the powerbrokers. The destruction of all these old levers of American institutional power and the government careerists that have decades of networks with the "Old Money" elite (including in places like USAID, RFE and VOA - though it shows a bottom line of US imperial consensus still exists as RFA is untouched and unmentioned in all this) is to pauperize the latter's connections within the US state and to reset the playing field in a way favorable to the recognition of the overwhelming wealth of the new Big Tech oligarchy. The intent is to demonstrate an overwhelming show of force that demonstrates their political power through what Trump is able to do with their sponsorship, rendering it impossible for the Big Tech elites to be alienated and treated the way those like Zuckerberg were under Biden.
If this is the case, then we're looking at people who are actually bent on dominating the financial sector, which really behooves us to engage in analysis.
I, for one, don't believe there exists an abstraction higher than the financial industry. I don't think there's something above it that you can make it subservient to. I think that if they want to dominate the financial industry, it means replacing it. And through the lens of the technologist, replacing it means automating it. That means combining capitalist surveillance and computation to automate the deployment of capital, and that means fundamentally reorganizing society into a centrally planned one, albeit centrally planned using computers and AI for the maximization of financial ROI. I think this has been the trend for 25 years now, so I imagine there are very powerful people who believe this enough to try to make it happen.
That would take a good number of years to pull off, and the process would shed a LOT of bankers. It would create entirely new government departments. And it would likely bring about a lot of the things that QAnon people have been afraid of: more digital transactions and far less cash than today, national ID cards with transponders, open use of centralized national biometrics everywhere for everything - essentially the cyberpunk dystopia.
That direction is pretty frightening honestly.
There's definitely an internal contradiction within America's elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America's upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.
The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as "New Money." The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of "persecution" these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.
To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further "technologification" of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.
I think there's a very interesting contradiction here in that the technology oligarchs don't have money. They have securities. They sell some of those securities for money, they receive interest on those securities sometimes, but most of the time they borrow against those securities.
That means that the entire basis for their wealth is in the hands of the financial sector. And this presents a stacked problem for them. First, it means the financial sector has power over them by determining their stock price as well as setting the terms on liquidation and lending. But the second problem is that it's not cash, and therefore the tech oligarchs can't eliminate the financial sector entirely because it will tank or eliminate the value of their securities, which is where most of their wealth is. So they have likely been hard at work for a decade or more trying to figure out how to unseat the financial sector without destroying their own wealth.
Likely it will require use of the government to do it. The first signal they were doing that was 2008 when Facebook became an official channel for presidential campaigns. The fusing of the state and the technology companies accelerated after that. It's likely that this sort of thing was deemed orthogonal to the financial sector. Orthogonal but similar, in that the financial sector was thoroughly fused with the state, exemplified by the Dulles Brothers.
That fusion, though, likely created the path for technology to begin the process of subsuming finance without finance realizing it. And Trump, despite being aligned with finance, appears to be the vehicle for the catalytic changes to make this happen.
I'll go even further and say that Europe represents the financial sector's roots and the Trumpian stance of dominating Europe is a reification of the movement of technology dominating finance domestically.
Very interesting. This could be far more disruptive than I even imagined.
If this is the path we're on, the very obvious linchpin here will be mass produced autonomous weapons platforms or novel (likely energy) weapons (or both) that represent new lethal capabilities and capacities that will take decades for the working class to be able to organize against.