“Socially liberal billionaires have been with us a long time…But the libertarian pose of some Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations, is a bit of a sham” – Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of Shadow Government, 2016.
“Fascism and communism are not two opposites but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory based on the collectivist principle that man is a right-less slave of the state – Ayn Rand
Cognitive Dissonance: A permanent state of nervousness that one may be right in one social context but wrong in another larger social or moral context and thus seek social support for the wrongness to assuage and absolve the tension and by doubling down on their belief in their rightness by embracing an ideology opposite to the reality at hand that serves as a cover to their economic interests (sociologist Peter L. Berger paraphrased).
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Silicon Valley has always been known to be engaged with tracking every person who uses an electronic communication device and selling that personal data for commercial purposes. But the covert corporate sale of personal data to intelligence agencies is problematic because the American method of conducting warfare, intelligence, anti-terrorism, law enforcement, germ warfare, psychological operations (Psy-Ops), and even domestic pandemic policy, is predicated on it. This is what former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle about in 2013. There no longer was any right to privacy in the USA. What Snowden revealed was that government intelligence agencies were using data supplied by private contractors to violate basic civil rights to privacy.
This is even more crucial to large private high-tech corporations today who see an opportunity to reap even larger windfalls for their monopoly enterprises by being able to sell their data to Artificial Intelligence users including government. That is what is puffing the stock market. However, the potential for intrusiveness is limitless. So, there already has been a figurative “marriage” of what is called the ‘surveillance state’ and corporate high-tech monopolies, damn the anti-monopoly laws. This is also why citizens were no longer guaranteed free speech on communication platforms because the platform is owned and operated by a private corporation not a government entity. This is the perfect foil or excuse by government that they are not the ones prying into your life.
When the government becomes an appendage of corporations it is often called fascism. But some corporate CEOs claim they are “libertarians”, putting themselves in a double bind while trying to otherwise convince the Capitalistic minded American public of their virtuousness.
During his first term as president, Donald Trump signed a bill repealing broadband privacy law. Once in office, Joe Biden issued an executive order preventing internet censorship by private corporations, but this did not have the status of law. Back in 1997, the US Supreme Court issued a decision that the Communications Decency Act limiting online speech was unconstitutional. By 2013, David Moon released his book How Geeks, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet.
This has led to several attempts to pass federal legislation that would stop, limit or condition the sharing of data between government and corporations such as Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the corporate-backed counter bill the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN).
Recent Supreme Court decisions have reaffirmed that government cannot control social media by blocking, removing or demonetizing content based on a person’s views. But what about selling their views, preferences and even personal medical data back to government intelligence agencies or to other commercial enterprises especially for Artificial Intelligence (AI) purpose
The view of the public has been to hardly give a thought about privacy because of their naive faith in Capitalism and sense that corporations should have no fewer rights than individuals to reap a monopoly economic windfall. But individuals aren’t natural monopolies, a notion that the public has all but forgotten since railroads were regulated in the early 1900’s. This may be why Silicon Valley CEOs are embracing their version of libertarianism that making money is an entitlement of the private sector and that government and big business are separated like religion and the state. But the religion of business and the state are inseparable in a disguised Monopoly Capitalist-Oligopolist state where everyone is presumed to be entitled by the god of mammon to reap a profit even if it means snooping into other’s private bedrooms or medical records, abortions, STD’s, etc.
Government and private communications corporations have already established a cozy relationship. Private corporations are also now developing AI technology that they want to guarantee can be protected by tacit monopolization. They can’t sell AI technology if every individual customer has a right of privacy contract guaranteeing free speech. That is why you are constantly receiving updated internet privacy policies in your email.
Into this new private-public surveillance state a cabal of Silicon Valley corporations is backing a vice-presidential candidate drawn from their corporate ranks hoping they can get legislation favorable to surveillance corporations through Congress under a new administration. All it will take are political connections and a presidential candidate who owes his corporate donors for financing his election. It will help getting elected if that corporate donor articulates libertarianism along with vice-presidential candidate who can also claim to be a man of the people; a southerner, an Oakie, or a Johny reb and not someone whose favorite movie was “Pirates of Silicon Valley” or the 1960 novel and movie “Cash McCall” by Cameron Hawley.
It’s not like the Democrats aren’t in bed with corporations either. In 2020, 25 Silicon Valley Corporations gave $90 million to BLM, along with $35 million to Antifa from billionaire George Soros, to fund fake anti-race riots to bring about the destruction of small, mainly ethnic business districts in Big Blue cities. And corporations eventually promised at least $50 billion to activist organizations ostensibly to explicitly eliminate the mainly white working class and replace them using Critical Race Theory under the rubric of anti-racism. The disguised purpose was to wipe out small independent business districts so that large global corporations could capture their customers with online restaurants and grocery stores and food deliveries, etc. But neither the Biden administration, nor Hillary Clinton, nor Bernie Sanders called for prosecution of these berserk scofflaw corporations under anti-racketeering laws. President Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, to assure civil rights but not the Democrat Party in 2020.
Much, of the recent past political tumult, even the recent assassination attempt, reflects an internal war between competing corporate cabals in Silicon Valley. It’s more like a mafia family turf fight between the Trafficante and Gambino families; or the ancient Roman Claudians versus the Flavians with the libertarian Cato on the sidelines, than it is a civil war, race war, Marxist class war, or principally a War between political parties. But the media won’t report that and the academicians and think tanks are either paid off or stuck in their own ideologies.
The opinion polling of the electorate is on the media’s tv screens, but a plausible rig is still in for the election. The gullible public do not realize elections have been replaced by a battle between corporate cabals as to which candidate they can place into the presidency under a junta by buying the election. Nonetheless, Col. Douglas MacGregor and his Our-Country-Our-Choice movement still gullibly believe in democratic elections. Has no one told them we are living under Oligarchic Capitalism, and they need to re-strategize accordingly? (see Vilfredo Pareto, The Transformation of Democracy: Vilfredo Pareto, 1984). Or do legacy Americans still only believe what is reported on TV and mass media and the prevailing narrative?
American elections have devolved into what sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called “the circulation of the elites”. So-called elections are juntas and are not when rulers are overthrown from below and there is a peaceful transition, but when one set of elites’ overthrows another. To Pareto, “history is the cemetery of aristocracies”. Think ancient Rome where vying rulers each had their own armies that would battle it out, and if their military general became too popular, he might overthrow his patron and claim the throne himself (see A.H. Allcroft, Rome Under the Oligarchs, 1896).
Pareto described how regime change was cyclical and typically pitted “rule by foxes” characterized by patronage, co-optation and control of very large complex political machines against “rule by lions” characterized by use of force, centralized control, and clear lines of hierarchical control. But in America today, the foxes have captured and caged the lions by controlling the military.
Rome was a Timocracy ruled by the landowners just as the U.S. is ruled by those with monopoly capital (a Corporatocracy). The Social Order is subordinate to the Capital Order in a Capitalist Oligarchy (see Clara Mattei, The Capital Order, 2022). To analyze or forecast elections is way too rational. Brainwashed Capitalist rationalized minds can’t see society is a fabric of fantasy and folly more than from ideological design or a functioning system. Moreover, humans are foolish enough to believe their own irrationalities are rational (see Vilfredo Pareto and Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 1512).
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Government’s role in this political tumult has been “let you and him fight” and explains why recent elections have been rigged to install weak presidents who will cow tow to these warring corporate cabals. Oligarchs are running the country without much check or balance. And even when the courts issue a decision, the damage has been already done and it is non-compensable because it falls under the category of a legal regulatory taking necessitated by a fake emergency. This conflict reflects Fascism where warring corporate cabals rule the government (it is not solely infiltrators into the federal government who have dual citizenship in another country who are solely controlling the government!). Into this internecine warfare, both sides are accusing the other of being “communists” and “Marxists” because the public mind associates those terms with the evil and wickedness (see Unhuman Communist Revolution or Corporate Fascist Guerrilla Warfare?)
The current pseudo-libertarian CEO’s do not believe they are committing any crime because in America making money is the ultimate religion and occupational ideologies insulate them from thinking otherwise. A theodicy is a religious explanation or justification for evil or for success. The tacit American Theodicy is the secular anointing of those who are rich regardless that they were selected and financed by other elites (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs morphed into technocratic sainthood). But where does the right to make monopoly profits end and the people’s right to privacy begin? And what about the well-known negative unintended consequences of mass surveillance technologies? Is it a coincidence that the social security database, presumably including Medicare records, has been recently reported as hacked? As Mike Lofgren states: “One of the ironies of the digital age is that even as American citizens have become worthless, and less to businesses as paid employees, their (economic) value as living repositories of commercial data (and obscene profits) is becoming greater by the day” to monopoly capitalists (The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, 2016).
Which brings us back to the expected payoff the winning Silicon Valley cabal will expect from a new president whose election they financed and who owes them in return. But what about the civil liberties of the American people to a right to privacy? The pseudo libertarian oligarchs are inured to the consequences of their actions and can live with their almost sociopathic cognitive dissonance, but will the public tolerate unaccountability once they know they’ve been sold out by their saviors? Or will they be set up once again for unarmed demonstration, criminalization and incarceration?
