Yup. If you've listened to the silicon valley elite ramble on without a script or investors to impress, they think feudalism is the second best thing to the discovery of fire.
I guess their hyperfixation prevents them from seeing why it doesn't work or prevents them from appreciating the many occasions of serfs and lower nobility overthrowing their lords, dragging them + their families out into the open, and then setting upon them in such fashion where being beaten to the death by the mobs would've been the more humane outcomes.
Or the number of times during the industrial revolution and the Gilded Age where overworked, exploited laborers finally said, "Fuck this", kicked in the doors of their foremen, and left them as barely recognizable, bloody masses of broken bones and torn meat after settling their "labor dispute".
While this I don't condone or advocate violence, it would appear that the only way these Nerd Reich chodes are capable of learning is by doing or experiencing.
I remember reading the 4-Hour Work Week a while back and thinking: Nobody is going to read this and recognize how completely amoral this mindset is (and yeah, Tim Ferris can go fuck himself; come at me): Gaming the system as a core philosophy is such a tantalizing idea—and, frankly, a pretty effective shortcut to wealth—that our society just straight-up wasn't prepared for what would happen when an entire generation pursued it uncritically.
We are simply consuming...everything. The life-sustaining biosphere that we cannot exist apart from that evolved over billions of years, and the economy built over centuries of labor (and admittedly a fuckton of injustice too, but nonetheless along a general trend towards a more egalitarian state). The consumption is fully codified into an ethos, and it's pretty much just conservatism.
Yeah it shows how clueless these people are. Feudalism was a complex system that involved basically every facet of society at the time like religious beliefs and agricultural technology. It ended with the rise of the middle class, professional armies, and a lot of other things.
We aren't going back to feudalism, societal conditions are too different. These dumbshits imagine themselves as potential feudal lords, but the only thing they are leading us towards is a complete collapse and angry people bashing down the doors of their bunkers.
And I've known enough rich people to know thats not what they want. They want to fly around on their jets, grow their bank accounts and pay less taxes lol. So they think if they can be lords of their own private cities they'll have the ultimate freedom.
I want to believe you, but I still think it's optimistic to think the technocrats don't have a lot more power to subjugate the people than at any other time in history. Will the people really rise up when the elites control the stream of information, the military, AND the algorithm?
People are mollified by their toys. The right-wing media empire can stream a string of lies directly into their limbic systems, and so as long as they have the occasional burger and new iPhone, the people are literally anesthetized to the injustices happening directly to them.
I do not want to be defeatist, but I'm concerned by the attitude that some kind of revolution by the working classes is inevitable. I think it's likely the only way we defeat this age of technofascism, but I think it's far from a given and we can't just take for granted that it's going to happen.
want to believe you, but I still think it's optimistic to think the technocrats don't have a lot more power to subjugate the people than at any other time in history
If that were the case, more than a few wouldn't have asked the people designing their doomsday shelters to dumbfounded and mouth agape stares what mechanical methods could be employed to keep their own security detail compliant or from turning on them.
There's also the fact many a dictator in modernity found themselves at the business end of a noose or a rifle despite having a much tighter grip on every facet of society than what these pasty skinned, skinny fat dweebs do.
They currently have leverage because the masses still have something to lose. That leverage evaporates into nothing when the masses lose everything, the promises of paper or digital money no longer have meaning, and the threats of physical violence are no longer a deterrent because they aren't inherently different than those issued or realized any other day of the week.
There's a reason some of the older, saner oligarchs have openly warned the Nerd Reich to reign in their sociopathic tendencies and to quit trying to collapse society as we know it to live out juvenile fantasies because they only half paid attention in literally any history course: the same ones know all of them are not and will never be safe if the masses are pushed beyond their breaking point.
I truly hope you are right and I'm wrong. I just feel like we've never seen tools of mass control like these in the history of our species. Sort of like societal nukes: No one should have the power to control what goes in front of everyone's eyeballs with a few lines of code, but here we are. No tiny group of people should own this much of the world's media, but here we are. And no one should ever be able to surveil and collect data on every single human, but here we are.
Tbh I dont know. I just dont think things will go on like they are now for much longer. And will people just put up with an economic collapse or will something change? I feel like movements like occupy wall st or BLM show the energy is there. Tho it may just be maga nuts shooting at everyone else.
I think the entertainment thing is true but even that only goes so far if people cant pay their rent or afford groceries. Look at something like the arab spring. As much as I think social media has wrecked political discourse, without it I dont know the arab spring would have happened. So I dont know which side is stronger. Bad actors have bots everywhere and turds like Elon Musk can just buy up platforms. But you cant control everything. Modern internet infrastructure doesnt allow it in the way newspapers and TV did.
I have some hope that things will change. But then again we elected trump twice and people think Musk is a super genius, so maybe we're just screwed.
With RFK Jr. and his cabal of deluded grifting snake oil salesmen at the helm, otherwise preventable epidemics that can kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people can now run roughshod!
You might not die from plague but you could very well die from H5N1!
Definitely. The forces were already there but the plague was a huge accelerant. The decline would have been much slower without it. You have to wonder what future historians will say our big ones are. climate change? a debt-ridden global finance system? An increasingly impoverished middle class? All of the above probably.
Exactly. Democracy represents a sort of compromise to prevent the situation where people resolve wealth and power inequality with violence. They're really stretching the system to its breaking point at the moment, though.
They seem to think between a combination of AI mass surveillance and AI weapons to protect them, once they take control the masses will not be able to do anything to stop them. Thus why Elon stole all the US government data on people and Palantir has been given an expanded and illegal level of access to databases.
I don't condone violence. I will say that one of the reasons that traditional feudalism never really took off in the eastern Roman empire was because, at any point, it was entirely possible for the mob to break into the palace and tear the divinely appointed emperor limb from fucking limb, and watch the next guy promise to not do whatever the hell the last idiot did.
A lot of tax policies in eastern Rome were reversed when the mob got ahold of the tax policy guy.
Tech might actually be the "solution" to this. If you have complete control over every aspect of people's lives, and every piece of tech that they interact with, you can prevent them from ever organizing. It's far easier to intimidate or eliminate 1% of your population before they ever grow to a large enough number to be a threat.
Cameras in the home. Cameras at work. All under the SafeCam™️ brand. Make it about child safety, people eat that shit up. Third places designed specifically to be easily surveiled (sp?). They don't even have to be mostly cameras, audio would work fine. And those microphones would be built into the microwave. The oven. The SmartToilet™️. The smoke detectors. And lest we forget, putting surveillance in a smartphone is already a solved issue. LLM's are advancing, I'm sure within 10 years the capability to monitor a few hundred thousand people will be doable, with nothing but a pile of graphics cards and some fuzzy logic. A few mistakes aren't a big deal, either. Examples must be made, and innocence proves nothing.
Control the media as well. Paint ElonTown as a bastion of resistance to corporate evil. Convince your slaves workers that they are already the underdog, fighting for their freedom every day by going to work and hitting their quotas.
It's absolutely fucking terrifying, but I can see the roadmap. And if I can imagine it, someone smarter than me can paint it.
It's the same mindset of every criminal throughout the centuries: "it won't happen to me" mixed with good old "this time it's different" and a pinch of "I'm smarter than the last tzar".
The thing is back then people weren’t as easily satiated as they are now. Unless the phones are somehow taken away, scrolling has such a negative effect on society overall.
I guess their hyperfixation prevents them from seeing why it doesn't work or prevents them from appreciating the many occasions of serfs and lower nobility overthrowing their lords, dragging them + their families out into the open, and then setting upon them in such fashion where being beaten to the death by the mobs would've been the more humane outcomes.
I started meeting these people about fifteen years ago, people working in tech and getting CS degrees talking about how monarchies and landed gentry made perfect sense.
Yep, Tushar Atre was his name. Though it has to be said that in addition to abusing his employees for amusement and ego, he also stole their wages and gloated to them about doing so.
Are the people living in those towns going to be slaves? A core part of feudalism was serfdom, that people were owned along with the land they lived on and the lords of that land were free to do what they willed with their possessions and they couldn't leave.
This is real slavery, not some wage-slave analogy.
I wrote an essay in my AP-History class calling our current system/libertarianism “economic feudalism” in 2001. Then I went to college , grad school, and became a working ecologist.
This whole quarter century I’ve felt like Cassandra of Troy.
Only if they offer cheaper rent, lower crime, and better infrastructure than democratically ran US cities.....which is actually really easy to do.
If you don't allow residents a say then you can maximize land utility and build vertically, you build vertically and suddenly things like a subway system is self sustaining.
I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
So what if it is feudalism? Psst, I have some something to tell you: your local university is organized exactly like a feudal state. Bet you don't have any objections to that do you? 😂
Besides, I would rather live a clean, safe, efficient company town than a dirty, dangerous, crime ridden failed city run by incompetent politicians. 😉
"Sure, but if Pullman / Ford / Hitler had done X with their company town / reich, it would have worked"
Coupled with:
"This is going to herald a golden age because socialism is for children and fools"
Ending with:
"Wow, that was a rough 40 years filled with disease and bloodshed . . . lesson learned! Everyone, say it with me , 'never again!' . . . Anyway if you need me, I'll be on the other side of that leaf I turned over, responsibly investing my nepotic golden hoard and placing my name on libraries and schools that I selectively donate heavily, benefitting those populations that I approve of because of how I've always been a pillar of altruism, as you might recall. Have a merry Meta everyone, and a happy Goog year!"
Wow! What an AMAZINGLY ORIGINAL idea. Crazy that no one has thought of this before. It's a shame, because we could probably have learned something from that experience.
They have been. Honduras is working to get rid of the one in their territory and attempts at seasteading have been shut down hard. There isn't much else to push back on currently, most of this is just libertarian tech bros circlejerking in an occasional conference.
It's not that bad. Just devoid of any soul.
Conservatives might actually love it - no homelessness, no drugs, no gays, no freedom of speech, clean cities, lots of brown people doing the shit jobs for cheap.
Exactly this. Dystopian stories are dystopian to the average prol. To those in power... It's their utopia. They love the idea of being the select few living in decadence, and trampling everyone else for it... To make their wealth and power all the more so.
I know you mean cyberpunk as a genre in general, but it is frankly WILD how close Mike Pondsmith was to predicting the fall of the US with his Cyberpunk lore, or at least he drew some strikingly accurate parallels.
Europe and US relations sour as NATO is dissolved.
Deep State federal agencies conspiring against long time allies in favor of market manipulation.
US reputation is tarnished around the world, the US government sees secessionist movements in the Mid-West and West coast.
US and corporate interests instigate a conflict in Central America to grab control over trade infrastructure and natural resources.
How long until some terrorist group fighting corporate colonialism decides to destroy the internet leading to highly regulated local subnets managed by governments and/or corporations?
It's different because anyone who cannot pay the $1,500 is completely excluded from the city. The point is to exclude the poor and homeless. Since there are no poor people, there is no need to tax residents to pay for services that help the poor.
In normal cities, people who can't pay rent are still allowed to enter the city and use city services.
It's not a popular idea but it meets a real need in my opinion. In the US, most people live in suburbs and a big reason for that is that suburbs are built to exclude the poor. This is just bringing the same concept to cities, so you can walk around downtown and only see other professionals, just like you were walking around in an upper middle class gated community.
This may be how people think now… but a proper “future city” based on the idea of corpo towns (not that the town is owned by a company), as in a city that is a LLC based DAO, where every citizen gets a single share (voting), and every citizens inputs / outputs are controlled by the DAO/cityAI will eventually happen.
Take Googles employee footprint.
Now take the vale of 50% of their GROSS expenses for employees…
That number, will be bigger than the yearly budget of roughly 40-45 states in the US.
AND google has significantly less “citizens” than any of those states even close to their #
You are really naive, for real. The point is not to exclude the poor, the point is to make everyone inside the city poor and dependent on the corporation. How do we know it? Because it has f*cking happened everywhere at some point. You want to leave your job? Sorry, you can't because your corporation also owns the apartment you live in and the store where you buy everything. Oh, and you are not paid in money, only in virtual currency that is allowed inside the corporation facilities, so no option to go outside with the "money" you earned.
This is the future Thiel, Elon, etc want. Curtis Yarvin has been spouting this nonsense for years and getting tech CEOs to buy into it. Even JD Vance is a proponent of this model, he’s one of Thiel’s puppets.
They want a tech-run feudalism where the leaders don’t represent and are not beholden to citizens, the citizens are granted housing and blessed with jobs so they live their lives in service to the company. Literal feudalism / slavery where a certain class does not have inherent rights.
The Solano County project is dead. The investors behind it were exposed because the Department of War was concerned that entities were buying up land around Travis Air Force base and they demanded to know who they were and why were they doing it. It was a concern that Chinese agents were setting up listening posts because Travis hosts sensitive communications. Who they heck wants to live next to an air force base? The planes are quite noisy.
After the exposure, they came forward and announced plans for a new modern city on that land. But the city needed approvals for converting land reserved as farmland and the only way to do that would be a ballot initiative, which failed spectacularly because nobody was in favor of a city for billionaires and Solano County residents paying for the infrastructure. Now the plan is to do something with nearby Fairfield, CA.
Burning Man may be many things and attracts rich people, but is not some festival dedicated to tech people. Although there is a push to create a permanent year-round Burning Man (think theme park) on Fly Ranch, a property owned by Burning Man. The event was hosted there in 2007. Very rich people bought up land nearby, but the plan to develop this project is on hold from lack of funding.
If they want a company town, Empire, NV is near Gerlach, Fly Ranch, and is a company-owned town complete with rail spur, dirt airport, industrial area, and plenty of power which was owned by US Gypsum and now owned by Empire Mining Company.
I'm often let down by commenters in this sub defending some pretty indefensible things for the sake of technological progress. I'm really glad to see an overwhelming rejection of this idea here
Hey didn’t we have company towns and cities back in WV and other Appalachia areas? Coal camps where you buy from a company store with company issued money?
Look up the Battle of Blair Mountain. Sadly a lot of WV has drank the MAGA kool-aid because the Democrats thought it was too hard to campaign in the mountains and commit to protecting and expanding good union jobs.
Edit: You basically win WV if you are pro-gun, pro-union, and pro-leave-me-the-fuck-alone.
Not that they should be able to do it but I hope they get the chance to show the world how horrible they're going to be. Within a few months someone will die becuase of mismanagement and it will lead directly back to those at the top. That's if the city even gets going because even rich people want to live somewhere where people are and things actually work.
My guess is for the first decade or so, a city like this will seem cool. But then as the city owners want to see higher profits, they will raise what they charge higher and higher while cutting services.
So we have this tech idea to divide the US into districts. With each district focusing on production for very specific things. And then we can have games, you know, with participants from every district. Or something something.
This is out of the Project 2025 hand book isn’t it? It’s where the billionaires create gated cities for multimillionaires to keep them feeling better to support the illusion that they are above those lowest on the economic hierarchy despite their dependency/interactions with common service sector employees. It’s the natural evolution of The American Dream.
Whenever I hear someone complaining about the 'tech elites', I wonder to myself, 'Are these the same people using facebook every day even though they claim they hate it? Are these the people using instagram and snapchat to connect with others? Are they the ones who use ChatGPT to answer their every question?'
If the answer is yes, then I can only sigh. Why do you think the vampire gives you these services for free? Since the vampire is not interested in your money, but in YOU! You invite the vampire into your houses, into your cellphones then wonder why the vampire thinks they own you?
If everyone stopped using free services over night, the vampiric reign of the tech bros would be ended in a fortnight.
Cities with very big walls to let the poor starve out of them, I guess. We already saw that in countless sci fi novels/movies, and it usually doesn't end well for everyone involved.
Buy some land somewhere outside the USA and go at it. Don’t let the door hit your asses on the way out. If they feel a dictator led state is the way to go hey good luck with that. Its worked out so well for the dictators of the 20th century. Build a libertarian homeland and see how that works out for you. I just suggest you pick a place without bears.
I cant even begin to fathom what this world will be like in 100 years. If fucks like them can get their way and they most likely will to some extent with all the wealth they hoard.
So what, back to feudalism?
Yup. If you've listened to the silicon valley elite ramble on without a script or investors to impress, they think feudalism is the second best thing to the discovery of fire.
I guess their hyperfixation prevents them from seeing why it doesn't work or prevents them from appreciating the many occasions of serfs and lower nobility overthrowing their lords, dragging them + their families out into the open, and then setting upon them in such fashion where being beaten to the death by the mobs would've been the more humane outcomes.
Or the number of times during the industrial revolution and the Gilded Age where overworked, exploited laborers finally said, "Fuck this", kicked in the doors of their foremen, and left them as barely recognizable, bloody masses of broken bones and torn meat after settling their "labor dispute".
While this I don't condone or advocate violence, it would appear that the only way these Nerd Reich chodes are capable of learning is by doing or experiencing.
What these idiots don’t seem to grasp is that the current system in the USA has allowed this historically large concentration of wealth.
Perfect opportunity for them to pull up the ladder behind them. They want to "win", not for others to join their competition
I remember reading the 4-Hour Work Week a while back and thinking: Nobody is going to read this and recognize how completely amoral this mindset is (and yeah, Tim Ferris can go fuck himself; come at me): Gaming the system as a core philosophy is such a tantalizing idea—and, frankly, a pretty effective shortcut to wealth—that our society just straight-up wasn't prepared for what would happen when an entire generation pursued it uncritically.
We are simply consuming...everything. The life-sustaining biosphere that we cannot exist apart from that evolved over billions of years, and the economy built over centuries of labor (and admittedly a fuckton of injustice too, but nonetheless along a general trend towards a more egalitarian state). The consumption is fully codified into an ethos, and it's pretty much just conservatism.
I agree! I got the audio book and after a chapter or two was completely disgusted by the whole pyramid scheme aspect.
But they are idiots.
Their entire wealth is based around the valuation of 1s and 0s.
Yeah it shows how clueless these people are. Feudalism was a complex system that involved basically every facet of society at the time like religious beliefs and agricultural technology. It ended with the rise of the middle class, professional armies, and a lot of other things.
We aren't going back to feudalism, societal conditions are too different. These dumbshits imagine themselves as potential feudal lords, but the only thing they are leading us towards is a complete collapse and angry people bashing down the doors of their bunkers.
And I've known enough rich people to know thats not what they want. They want to fly around on their jets, grow their bank accounts and pay less taxes lol. So they think if they can be lords of their own private cities they'll have the ultimate freedom.
I want to believe you, but I still think it's optimistic to think the technocrats don't have a lot more power to subjugate the people than at any other time in history. Will the people really rise up when the elites control the stream of information, the military, AND the algorithm?
People are mollified by their toys. The right-wing media empire can stream a string of lies directly into their limbic systems, and so as long as they have the occasional burger and new iPhone, the people are literally anesthetized to the injustices happening directly to them.
I do not want to be defeatist, but I'm concerned by the attitude that some kind of revolution by the working classes is inevitable. I think it's likely the only way we defeat this age of technofascism, but I think it's far from a given and we can't just take for granted that it's going to happen.
If that were the case, more than a few wouldn't have asked the people designing their doomsday shelters to dumbfounded and mouth agape stares what mechanical methods could be employed to keep their own security detail compliant or from turning on them.
There's also the fact many a dictator in modernity found themselves at the business end of a noose or a rifle despite having a much tighter grip on every facet of society than what these pasty skinned, skinny fat dweebs do.
They currently have leverage because the masses still have something to lose. That leverage evaporates into nothing when the masses lose everything, the promises of paper or digital money no longer have meaning, and the threats of physical violence are no longer a deterrent because they aren't inherently different than those issued or realized any other day of the week.
There's a reason some of the older, saner oligarchs have openly warned the Nerd Reich to reign in their sociopathic tendencies and to quit trying to collapse society as we know it to live out juvenile fantasies because they only half paid attention in literally any history course: the same ones know all of them are not and will never be safe if the masses are pushed beyond their breaking point.
A good example is Ghadaffi, who found his business end at the business end of a rifle (well, bayonet specifically)
Putin is apparently very afraid of that exact ending, and I want to see if someone can fit the entire length of a Mosin Nagant up there.
They will one day and it’s going to be fucking fantastic
Long rifle or carbine version?
I don't get the bunker craze. Mate, if you need a bunker, your money is worthless and your guards will kill you and take your stuff.
They'll make bomb collars (and then get an IRL "hug of death")!
I truly hope you are right and I'm wrong. I just feel like we've never seen tools of mass control like these in the history of our species. Sort of like societal nukes: No one should have the power to control what goes in front of everyone's eyeballs with a few lines of code, but here we are. No tiny group of people should own this much of the world's media, but here we are. And no one should ever be able to surveil and collect data on every single human, but here we are.
Please be right.
Tbh I dont know. I just dont think things will go on like they are now for much longer. And will people just put up with an economic collapse or will something change? I feel like movements like occupy wall st or BLM show the energy is there. Tho it may just be maga nuts shooting at everyone else.
I think the entertainment thing is true but even that only goes so far if people cant pay their rent or afford groceries. Look at something like the arab spring. As much as I think social media has wrecked political discourse, without it I dont know the arab spring would have happened. So I dont know which side is stronger. Bad actors have bots everywhere and turds like Elon Musk can just buy up platforms. But you cant control everything. Modern internet infrastructure doesnt allow it in the way newspapers and TV did.
I have some hope that things will change. But then again we elected trump twice and people think Musk is a super genius, so maybe we're just screwed.
A big reason Feudalism also ended was because of the Black Death
Good/bad news:
With RFK Jr. and his cabal of deluded grifting snake oil salesmen at the helm, otherwise preventable epidemics that can kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people can now run roughshod!
You might not die from plague but you could very well die from H5N1!
Ain't it great!
Definitely. The forces were already there but the plague was a huge accelerant. The decline would have been much slower without it. You have to wonder what future historians will say our big ones are. climate change? a debt-ridden global finance system? An increasingly impoverished middle class? All of the above probably.
You’re totally right, they want all the power and none of the responsibility. If I’m not mistaken that was a big reason lots of Kings were “deposed”.
Exactly. Democracy represents a sort of compromise to prevent the situation where people resolve wealth and power inequality with violence. They're really stretching the system to its breaking point at the moment, though.
They seem to think between a combination of AI mass surveillance and AI weapons to protect them, once they take control the masses will not be able to do anything to stop them. Thus why Elon stole all the US government data on people and Palantir has been given an expanded and illegal level of access to databases.
Nerd Reich is a great term
I don't condone violence. I will say that one of the reasons that traditional feudalism never really took off in the eastern Roman empire was because, at any point, it was entirely possible for the mob to break into the palace and tear the divinely appointed emperor limb from fucking limb, and watch the next guy promise to not do whatever the hell the last idiot did.
A lot of tax policies in eastern Rome were reversed when the mob got ahold of the tax policy guy.
Tech might actually be the "solution" to this. If you have complete control over every aspect of people's lives, and every piece of tech that they interact with, you can prevent them from ever organizing. It's far easier to intimidate or eliminate 1% of your population before they ever grow to a large enough number to be a threat.
Cameras in the home. Cameras at work. All under the SafeCam™️ brand. Make it about child safety, people eat that shit up. Third places designed specifically to be easily surveiled (sp?). They don't even have to be mostly cameras, audio would work fine. And those microphones would be built into the microwave. The oven. The SmartToilet™️. The smoke detectors. And lest we forget, putting surveillance in a smartphone is already a solved issue. LLM's are advancing, I'm sure within 10 years the capability to monitor a few hundred thousand people will be doable, with nothing but a pile of graphics cards and some fuzzy logic. A few mistakes aren't a big deal, either. Examples must be made, and innocence proves nothing.
Control the media as well. Paint ElonTown as a bastion of resistance to corporate evil. Convince your
slavesworkers that they are already the underdog, fighting for their freedom every day by going to work and hitting their quotas.It's absolutely fucking terrifying, but I can see the roadmap. And if I can imagine it, someone smarter than me can paint it.
These fuckwads think a bit of entertainment will be enough to stop this from happening again, how did they get this far being so stupid?
It's the same mindset of every criminal throughout the centuries: "it won't happen to me" mixed with good old "this time it's different" and a pinch of "I'm smarter than the last tzar".
The thing is back then people weren’t as easily satiated as they are now. Unless the phones are somehow taken away, scrolling has such a negative effect on society overall.
Sounds like "it works" to me
Yeah, sure, but now they have robots.
Key issue is now people are placated with essential tech
I started meeting these people about fifteen years ago, people working in tech and getting CS degrees talking about how monarchies and landed gentry made perfect sense.
It’s scary that Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil.”
this is part of the reason we must tax the Rich very aggressively if ypu don't they start acting like they own the place.
Wasn't there a tech millionaire who tortured his employees, and was kidnapped and murdered by them back in 2019?
Yep, Tushar Atre was his name. Though it has to be said that in addition to abusing his employees for amusement and ego, he also stole their wages and gloated to them about doing so.
I think a company town is a more apt comparison. South Park even had an episode about it during the pandemic.
Back to the company towns. The company owns everything. You work for wages and spend those wages on things the company sells you.
That's the neat part, we never left!
It's been labeled "technofeudalism", and honestly, we can do so much better than that with advanced technology.
Humanity is being steered in a direction that isn't meant to serve us, but to employ us for anyone who wants to exploit the world's resources.
It's what the elites want.
I wonder if they know how feudalism ended...
Let them find out
Back to the times of company towns and scrip.
Are the people living in those towns going to be slaves? A core part of feudalism was serfdom, that people were owned along with the land they lived on and the lords of that land were free to do what they willed with their possessions and they couldn't leave.
This is real slavery, not some wage-slave analogy.
I wrote an essay in my AP-History class calling our current system/libertarianism “economic feudalism” in 2001. Then I went to college , grad school, and became a working ecologist.
This whole quarter century I’ve felt like Cassandra of Troy.
No-no-no! Absolutely not, now it's techno-feudaliam or cyber-feudalism if you wish
Here’s a YouTube video covering all of this.
It’s from before Trump won the 2024 election. They’ve been planning and talking about this for years now
https://youtube.com/shorts/Jvpuueyr4y4?si=zK0s1IZPPKDf_lb3
Dark Enlightenment
God I just want Americans to reel the tech industry in. Big tech does not have care about our economic interests.
Anyone dumb enough to think that a billionaire won't lose interest in their toy city project and forget to feed their pets deserves what they get...
They’re calling it “network states” lol but yes
“It’s not the best choice, it’s Auntie’s Choice.”
In Alien: Earth, America (world?) is divided into city-states run by tech trillionaires, so, not that far off?
Ehm, Techno-fuedalism*
Only if they offer cheaper rent, lower crime, and better infrastructure than democratically ran US cities.....which is actually really easy to do.
If you don't allow residents a say then you can maximize land utility and build vertically, you build vertically and suddenly things like a subway system is self sustaining.
Yes. Peter Thiel has written numerous essays espousing the virtues of tech-feudalism with no voting for the plebs.
Been saying it for years
I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
No, see it’s just “libertarianism”.
So what if it is feudalism? Psst, I have some something to tell you: your local university is organized exactly like a feudal state. Bet you don't have any objections to that do you? 😂
Besides, I would rather live a clean, safe, efficient company town than a dirty, dangerous, crime ridden failed city run by incompetent politicians. 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Not a new concept, just economic slavery
at least some of the music was catchy:
https://youtu.be/B9j91-18Kb4
Wild that we sang that around campfires in Boy Scouts.
Techno feudalism baby… city states defined by the respective mega corporation, ruled by the respective technofascist
It just the same 'ol cycle.
"Sure, but if Pullman / Ford / Hitler had done X with their company town / reich, it would have worked"
Coupled with:
"This is going to herald a golden age because socialism is for children and fools"
Ending with:
"Wow, that was a rough 40 years filled with disease and bloodshed . . . lesson learned! Everyone, say it with me , 'never again!' . . . Anyway if you need me, I'll be on the other side of that leaf I turned over, responsibly investing my nepotic golden hoard and placing my name on libraries and schools that I selectively donate heavily, benefitting those populations that I approve of because of how I've always been a pillar of altruism, as you might recall. Have a merry Meta everyone, and a happy Goog year!"
So musk took literally your sentence about “ if Hitler had done X with their company town” lmao
Alien Earth touched on this in a really captivating way
I’ll check it out!
Is this not also the premise of Outer Worlds? Except with 5000% more camp?
"Wake up Samurai. We have a city to burn."
Oh, wrong subreddit.
I just hope people can still be rallied to fight for their rights in the future!
Wake UP samurai!
Wow! What an AMAZINGLY ORIGINAL idea. Crazy that no one has thought of this before. It's a shame, because we could probably have learned something from that experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
Insane fascist businessmen never really change, do they?
Most on this list are still active: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust
States need to start pushing back HARD against this. The enshitification timeline needs to be nipped before it is too late.
They have been. Honduras is working to get rid of the one in their territory and attempts at seasteading have been shut down hard. There isn't much else to push back on currently, most of this is just libertarian tech bros circlejerking in an occasional conference.
Yeah the last thing we need is to have to bail out 120+ failed technostates 20 years from now.
Too late, the buds are blooming.
If history has taught us one thing, it is that it is never too late to teach the elites a lesson.
In a capitalist world? Seriously, how?
Seriously, crack a history book.
This has low key been covered many times by journalists reporting on the connection between Peter Thiel and the financing of JD Vance.
This is also what happens when societies allow private interests and companies to grow to the size of countries economically.
It's called the UAE. Get to packing, elites.
It's not that bad. Just devoid of any soul. Conservatives might actually love it - no homelessness, no drugs, no gays, no freedom of speech, clean cities, lots of brown people doing the shit jobs for cheap.
Your better start believing in cyberpunk dystopia. You're in one.
Wake the fuck up Samurai, we have a city to burn
Deny it all you want, but a Cyberpunk future is inevitable
Techno elites read books like Snow Crash and thought, "that would be the greatest world to live in..."
My exact thought; burbclaves here we come.
Exactly this. Dystopian stories are dystopian to the average prol. To those in power... It's their utopia. They love the idea of being the select few living in decadence, and trampling everyone else for it... To make their wealth and power all the more so.
And Palantir is angling to become the CIC
All the corporate dystopia with none of the cool cyberware...
What do you mean, we have Meta glasses?/s
Your phone??
Look, I'm not saying I would get a lot of us out of a pair of Mantis Blades in my arms, but they would get shown off quite frequently.
If you can get them, then you'd end up using them.
Fights would be a thing.
Let's be honest with ourselves: interchangeable plug and play bottom bits, sold in vending machines.
I know you mean cyberpunk as a genre in general, but it is frankly WILD how close Mike Pondsmith was to predicting the fall of the US with his Cyberpunk lore, or at least he drew some strikingly accurate parallels.
How long until some terrorist group fighting corporate colonialism decides to destroy the internet leading to highly regulated local subnets managed by governments and/or corporations?
You could just not give people ideas, you know.
Shadowrun was before cyberpunk
cyberpunk is a genre
But it's unlikely a dragon wakes up and half the population turns into magical beings... Right??
We could all use a Dunkelzahn right now.
Shadowrun was published in 1989, Cybeprunk in 1988.
Watch for a juicer uprising, then.
There's a dude here asking for donations to the church of Splynncryth. Legit, you think?
Aw, cute.
Cyberpunk as a concept has existed since the 80's
OK, well if the $1500 is analogous to paying rent what comes with that?
How is this supposed to be any different than living in an extended stay hotel?
It's different because anyone who cannot pay the $1,500 is completely excluded from the city. The point is to exclude the poor and homeless. Since there are no poor people, there is no need to tax residents to pay for services that help the poor.
In normal cities, people who can't pay rent are still allowed to enter the city and use city services.
It's not a popular idea but it meets a real need in my opinion. In the US, most people live in suburbs and a big reason for that is that suburbs are built to exclude the poor. This is just bringing the same concept to cities, so you can walk around downtown and only see other professionals, just like you were walking around in an upper middle class gated community.
This may be how people think now… but a proper “future city” based on the idea of corpo towns (not that the town is owned by a company), as in a city that is a LLC based DAO, where every citizen gets a single share (voting), and every citizens inputs / outputs are controlled by the DAO/cityAI will eventually happen.
Take Googles employee footprint.
Now take the vale of 50% of their GROSS expenses for employees…
That number, will be bigger than the yearly budget of roughly 40-45 states in the US.
AND google has significantly less “citizens” than any of those states even close to their #
You are really naive, for real. The point is not to exclude the poor, the point is to make everyone inside the city poor and dependent on the corporation. How do we know it? Because it has f*cking happened everywhere at some point. You want to leave your job? Sorry, you can't because your corporation also owns the apartment you live in and the store where you buy everything. Oh, and you are not paid in money, only in virtual currency that is allowed inside the corporation facilities, so no option to go outside with the "money" you earned.
This is the future Thiel, Elon, etc want. Curtis Yarvin has been spouting this nonsense for years and getting tech CEOs to buy into it. Even JD Vance is a proponent of this model, he’s one of Thiel’s puppets.
They want a tech-run feudalism where the leaders don’t represent and are not beholden to citizens, the citizens are granted housing and blessed with jobs so they live their lives in service to the company. Literal feudalism / slavery where a certain class does not have inherent rights.
The Solano County project is dead. The investors behind it were exposed because the Department of War was concerned that entities were buying up land around Travis Air Force base and they demanded to know who they were and why were they doing it. It was a concern that Chinese agents were setting up listening posts because Travis hosts sensitive communications. Who they heck wants to live next to an air force base? The planes are quite noisy.
After the exposure, they came forward and announced plans for a new modern city on that land. But the city needed approvals for converting land reserved as farmland and the only way to do that would be a ballot initiative, which failed spectacularly because nobody was in favor of a city for billionaires and Solano County residents paying for the infrastructure. Now the plan is to do something with nearby Fairfield, CA.
Burning Man may be many things and attracts rich people, but is not some festival dedicated to tech people. Although there is a push to create a permanent year-round Burning Man (think theme park) on Fly Ranch, a property owned by Burning Man. The event was hosted there in 2007. Very rich people bought up land nearby, but the plan to develop this project is on hold from lack of funding.
If they want a company town, Empire, NV is near Gerlach, Fly Ranch, and is a company-owned town complete with rail spur, dirt airport, industrial area, and plenty of power which was owned by US Gypsum and now owned by Empire Mining Company.
I'm often let down by commenters in this sub defending some pretty indefensible things for the sake of technological progress. I'm really glad to see an overwhelming rejection of this idea here
Oh great, do you also get paid in company scrip? You can use it to buy a shanty, 10 minutes of internet and MABYE some food?
YAY!
/s obviously
Not script, company sponsored cryptocurrency.
Better tell St. Peter that I can't make it, since the company store owns my soul now
Hey didn’t we have company towns and cities back in WV and other Appalachia areas? Coal camps where you buy from a company store with company issued money?
Look up the Battle of Blair Mountain. Sadly a lot of WV has drank the MAGA kool-aid because the Democrats thought it was too hard to campaign in the mountains and commit to protecting and expanding good union jobs.
Edit: You basically win WV if you are pro-gun, pro-union, and pro-leave-me-the-fuck-alone.
My great grandfather on my dads side was ones of the mines that fought in the battle of Blair Mt. my family’s from Logan county
Damn. Respect.
Thanks. That generation was made of something different
Not that they should be able to do it but I hope they get the chance to show the world how horrible they're going to be. Within a few months someone will die becuase of mismanagement and it will lead directly back to those at the top. That's if the city even gets going because even rich people want to live somewhere where people are and things actually work.
We tried this. They were called pullman camps.
No one liked it.
This is the end game, Corporation Cities that have no allegiance to any country.
What about no? Maybe just maybe number go up is not the best metric corporations.
My guess is for the first decade or so, a city like this will seem cool. But then as the city owners want to see higher profits, they will raise what they charge higher and higher while cutting services.
People will wonder up trapped there.
So we are just speed running Cyberpunk 2077? Who TF was walking around Night City and thought "This would slap in real life".
Peter Thiel between one of his rants about the anti-Christ.
Atlas Cringed
Government controls capitalism, or capitalism controls government.
We somehow found ourselves with the latter. Don't know if we'll ever have a chance to get the former.
Didn't the Bioshock games already show us where this story ends?
Don’t expect these dipshits to understand media literacy.
I for one welcome our new Weyland-Yutani overlords…
So we have this tech idea to divide the US into districts. With each district focusing on production for very specific things. And then we can have games, you know, with participants from every district. Or something something.
Who would want to live there?
Basically the rich don't like poor so they make there own city of rich people
I'm so glad Toronto shut this down when Google applied to do something like this in 2017.
The current cities arent for profit enough
This is out of the Project 2025 hand book isn’t it? It’s where the billionaires create gated cities for multimillionaires to keep them feeling better to support the illusion that they are above those lowest on the economic hierarchy despite their dependency/interactions with common service sector employees. It’s the natural evolution of The American Dream.
Lmao, look to the middle east for how this will actually turn out in 20 years lol. I hear The Line is going great in Saudi Arabia.
Whenever I hear someone complaining about the 'tech elites', I wonder to myself, 'Are these the same people using facebook every day even though they claim they hate it? Are these the people using instagram and snapchat to connect with others? Are they the ones who use ChatGPT to answer their every question?'
If the answer is yes, then I can only sigh. Why do you think the vampire gives you these services for free? Since the vampire is not interested in your money, but in YOU! You invite the vampire into your houses, into your cellphones then wonder why the vampire thinks they own you?
If everyone stopped using free services over night, the vampiric reign of the tech bros would be ended in a fortnight.
But man is too narrowminded to ever do that.
I hate this country so much right now. I’ll never forgive MAGAts for putting us all in this position.
So, Sovereign Citizens but with wealth? God can antibiotic resistance speed up a bit
Welcome to Night City!!!
[ Removed by Reddit ]
I'm not touching that even if my life depended on it. From miles away you can see the trap.
We really need to stop this before we really do become a cyber punk like society
Oh so when does real life alien earth start?
Who would ever move to one of these places?
Will there be a subscription package?
Night City was supposed to be fiction …
just another day of backbreaking labor in the Bitcoin mines
Who cares. There will never be enough to quench their unquenchable thirst.
Some people say a man is made out of mud.
Winner is the one that builds the biggest eye of Sauron.
We dodged a huge bullet here in Toronto by not backing down on Sidewalk Labs' (Google) demands.
It's not clear from the article, but how are they actually going to provide public services like fire control or policing?
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
the return of company towns
“Welcome to Elysium! Not you though, you are gross and poor.”
These limp dicked dimwits love imagining themselves geniuses for wanting to play cult leader of corpo town instead of just enjoying their money.
Even non profit charities have their issues with not appropriately spending money, let alone for profit
Cities with very big walls to let the poor starve out of them, I guess. We already saw that in countless sci fi novels/movies, and it usually doesn't end well for everyone involved.
Sci-fi movies are becoming real life
Anyone else feel a violent uprising?
Are there sufficient billionaires to go around?
wow they will be ousted by their own ai lmao
Sounds like Oryx and Crake.
Night City here we come!
They've been talking about this for awhile but it has never worked out and never will
Ahh curtis yarvins ideas at work
I look forward to our future soylent green meals
Buy some land somewhere outside the USA and go at it. Don’t let the door hit your asses on the way out. If they feel a dictator led state is the way to go hey good luck with that. Its worked out so well for the dictators of the 20th century. Build a libertarian homeland and see how that works out for you. I just suggest you pick a place without bears.
IRL Mulligan's Valley.
I cant even begin to fathom what this world will be like in 100 years. If fucks like them can get their way and they most likely will to some extent with all the wealth they hoard.
Who is John Gault?