The Silicon Valley Insurrection: Take Back the Internet
To save ourselves from fascism we need to wrest back control of our digital lives
First of all, some news: This column and newsletter are now also being mirrored on Ghost, a rival service to Substack.
Many Substack users will remember Ghost as one of the major alternatives that several big-name writers such as Ed Zitron and Platformer moved to earlier in the year out of protest and frustration at Substack refusing to remove or limit or really in any way moderate white supremacist and Nazi content.
I believe in freedom of speech and I also abhor those creatures and I’m not the kind of person who thinks their right to have and to express monstrous and incorrect opinions means that we all have to join hands and sing kumbafuckingya with them and listen to their stupid shit, so I support those writers and readers who abandoned the platform. Lately the American election has brought out a resurgence in toxicity that is making it difficult for people to support my work.
I am not making any plans at this point to leave Substack. Nothing is changing for anybody, all subscribers, free and paid, will continue to receive this newsletter as normal.
However, current or future paid subscribers: If you prefer that none of your money goes to Substack, then you can subscribe to the Ghost version of the same content. If you are fine with keeping your subscription exactly the way it is, I’m fine with that also. I just want to give my supporters more control over where their money goes.
The Ghost site is here:
https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/
I do not believe this violates any terms or conditions as I do not believe either site has any kind of exclusivity clause over what I decide to publish of my own writing. There are, however, rules against me offering content on this platform in exchange for payment made outside of it. Therefore, subscribing to the Ghost newsletter will not get you a comp subscription to the Substack version, nor, unfortunately, can I offer any perks here such as a comp subscription to The Poolish. I have slightly reduced the price over there to compensate.
The Ghost newsletter, at this stage, is for paying subscribers only, just to keep things uncomplicated. It will be the same content, the only difference being, maybe, I’ll change the wording of stuff over there when I’m talking about Substack.
You might ask, why Ghost? And why am I running this on two platforms instead of just switching over? Why do this so messily? I have answers to all of that, and I will get to them later in this essay.
I’m going to start with some dark shit, friends, just to get it out of the way right off the bat, but I’m going to work up to some optimism today. If you’ll bear with me, I hope that the optimism will outweigh the rest.
I wrote this piece unsure of what the temperature of the room was going to be when most people read it. Paying subscribers saw this four days before the thing happened and the polls were still saying the result would be a coin flip.
The polls were garbage.
Now you may need to consider the very real possibility that you’re not going to be getting a proper election in 2028. They’re not going to want to go through the stress and expense of this again. Maybe in 2032 or 2036 they’ll get sick of governing because the sport has gone out of it and they might loosen their grip a little.
I have my doubts about their loyalty to the game this time around, though, because this is a different kind of American Republicanism than we’ve seen before. They have the rallies and the rhetoric and the aesthetic but they’re a product of a new generation. Donald Trump is already a decrepit fossil of German authoritarianism whose final task is to pass the torch.
The first Trump presidency of 2016 was shepherded in by the Old Fascism of Steve Bannon but that was nearly a decade ago. The culture has already changed. Bannon, I think, doesn’t even realise that he’s extinct.
This will be remembered as the Silicon Valley Insurrection.
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Elon Musk has made a deal with Donald Trump to rig certain aspects of the media ecosystem in Trump’s favour in exchange for a role in government, overseeing departments that regulate his own companies. We now know that Jeff Bezos also made a deal, the details to which we aren’t yet privy. For those of you who may have fallen for the Mark Zuckerberg good billionaire/bad billionaire image rehabilitation scam of the past few years, make no mistake: Zuck is also complicit.
All three men control immense swaths of the tech economy and want more.
The incoming Vice President, JD Vance, is a protégé of tech co-founder and former business partner of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, an open opponent of democracy, both of them inspired by software developer and hack political philosopher Curtis Yarvin, an explicit opponent of democracy. They are supported in their Trump campaign funding by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; David Sacks, another Musk business partner; Vivek Ramaswamy, biotech startup and faux presidential candidate. These men are all venture capitalists, a class of ultra-elites whose day-job is pumping their obnoxious wealth into schemes to undercut and ultimately destroy established industries.
These are men who see themselves as the rightful owners of the world. Trump has promised many of them high-level unelected positions in his government. Managerial positions, running the country for him while he goes about the aspects of the presidential business that he enjoys—sitting on the throne, being on TV, hosting rallies for himself, and playing golf.
These men are very happy to accept the job. They’ve been trying for years to crack the code, to convert the de facto power of capital into the real political power of lawmaking. Mostly that has involved disingenuously attaching themselves to whichever political movements they think might get them close to a president. Musk, of course, famously sold himself as an environmentalist during the Obama era. Marc Andreessen was a Hillary Clinton supporter who cited his pro-immigration beliefs.
Neither displayed anything but disdain for Donald Trump. They were bleeding heart Silicon Valley liberals right up until it looked like the MAGA movement had momentum, at which point they switched on a dime into a slithering coven of snide, sneering race scientists, whispering fourteen words into the ears of jackbooted Christian Nationalists in the halls of congress.
Trump himself only cares about two things—being mean and being famous—so he’s the first candidate to consider unreservedly handing them what they want. Trump knows now that the internet was a huge factor in his 2016 win. It was a game changer, the first presidential race of the Extremely Online era. He needs the internet. They own the internet.
And they are very, very open to deals.
I honestly think Trump is too dumb and too blind to realise that they intend to usurp him. Or maybe he doesn’t care, maybe they’ll let him rule for as long as he’s able and then let him pass the torch in a relatively organic way.
In any case, Trump is not the pinnacle of American fascism. He is its opening act. He is the first American president to have no experience or knowledge of politics and to come instead entirely from the business world. He is obviously not the first capitalist president but he is the first time Capitalism has been president. Even so, he is old capitalism, from the time of stock tickers and company towns. He is Old Money.
He is a transitional figure. New money is coming. Venture capital. The Silicon Valley oligarchs. They don’t care for old guard conservatism or Christian nationalism and absolutely not democracy. Their goals are starkly at odds with egalitarian humanism. They will bulldoze humanity to get what they want.
I’m not just speculating. Elon Musk has openly admitted that the plan, once he is in power, is to collapse the economy and strip the regulatory state to its bare bones. The scheme is right in line with the so-called “Effective Accelerationism” movement that most of the men I’ve mentioned follow at least to some degree, and which dictates that capitalism and technology must accelerate unrestricted by any human or cultural concerns.
According to software engineer Guillaume Verdon, chief developer of effective accelerationism, “We’re trying to solve culture through engineering.” That means treating human beings as elements of a complex system and trying to bring that system under the engineers’ control. In line with Elon Musk’s project to convert social media into a large scale propaganda engine, an online re-education camp, the project is to engineer people ideologically.
The problem isn’t that they don’t think of us as people. The problem is that they don’t think of themselves as people. They are nothing so mediocre and insipid. We have spent so much energy trying to defeat fascism in our political institutions that we neglected to prevent it taking over the internet.
We didn’t see this happening because we were so focused on our government institutions that we didn’t see it taking root online. We still don’t see “the internet” as part of the “real world” even though we spend an increasing amount of time using it. But when the Trump movement and its New Right and all that started emerging in 2015 it had already seized power online and we didn’t even know it.
I’m not talking about forum Nazis. I’m talking about the consolidation and centralisation of communities and services. I’m talking about Zuck and the architects of Web 2.0. I’m talking about Jeff Bezos’ Amazon using every underhanded strategy in capitalism’s toolkit to undercut and steamroll every competitor in online commerce. I’m talking about the google monopoly. The tech oligarchs have been swallowing the internet since the time of GeoCities.
The walled gardens of social media, each owned by central authorities who are increasingly the same authority—the acolytes of Thiel, Bezos, and Musk—are the swamps we all live in now online. They always announce themselves as “free speech” in order to justify the ugly views, and then use algorithms to force-feed those views to you.
This is the substructure of the human engineering project. This is how they will undercut public faith and trust in education and institutions and replace it with their education and institutions.
We’re all inside the mouse trap as it’s being built.
Now I promised you some optimism, so here it is: The next few months at the very least are going to be ugly, but we have a strategy. We take back the fucking internet.
One of the reasons I’m expanding my voice beyond the Substack platform—not leaving it, but diversifying—is to avoid being beholden to any one platform. Climbing the walls of the gardens is just the beginning. I have no brand loyalty to any of these vampires and putting my work on Substack doesn’t preclude me from making it available elsewhere any more than posting on Twitter precludes someone from posting on Instagram.
The reason for Ghost in particular has nothing to do with spooky season, but that’s a happy coincidence. It’s because Ghost are dabbling in a grander computer engineering project that I think is going to save social media and liberate us from the tech oligarchs that are trying to poison us against our own species. It’s called federation.
This is already old news to any of you who are particularly tech-minded and I admit it’s taken me this long to actually begin to understand what it is. It first made waves back in 2022 when Musk bought Twitter in the first place and people started looking for alternatives, many flocking to the superficially Twitter-like platform Mastodon.
At the time, though, one recurring complaint was that Mastodon was too complicated to use. I was one of the whingers. Its complication came from its federated structure, which is something that none of the other big social networks had.
Twitter, for example, kind of has the feel of everybody being together in the same chat room or forum. You can’t see everyone at the same time but your experience is fed to you through either the followers you choose or that the algorithm chooses. In a standard platform like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, there are groups of mods and admins the same as on a forum who are able to enforce its rules, and those rules are set by the owner of the platform, who is almost always some shithead techbro billionaire who wants to harvest your data, milk you for commercial gain, and then churn your corpse into SpaceX rocket fuel.
The difference with federation is that nobody owns Mastodon. As entrenched as I am in a capitalistic context it took me a long time to figure out what that means or how it’s possible for a website not to have an owner—like, someone is running it, and paying for it, right?—until I got my head around the fact that it’s the same as nobody owns email, or HTTP, or for that matter, telephony. It is a technology. A user account on a federated platform is more like an email address than an account with a social media platform.
Take Bluesky, another Twitter-esque platform that is moving toward federation. It’s not there yet and it uses a different technology than Mastodon, but the two can be bridged together. Even though these sites look like what we’ve come to expect from social media “feeds,” visually Twitter-like, Mastodon and Bluesky are more like Gmail and ProtonMail. Different interfaces, but if you both have an account with either one, you can communicate.
I’ve been reading a lot of tech journalist and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick over on TechDirt, who has been getting me excited about this kind of thing and who does a great job of chiselling through the tech illiterate stony plate housing my liberal arts brain. I strongly recommend you read some of his work on the subject if you’re curious.
I’ve come to firmly believe that this, or something very like this, is our exit strategy from Silicon Valley fascism and prison-breaking the internet. We can take control.
As writers and content creators and artists and journalists, this is how we reclaim our voices. Our ability to connect our art and our work and our voices to other human beings has been stolen from us and fed into algorithms to be redistributed according to profit margin and the preferred narratives of the platform owners who laughably claim for themselves the job of engineers of humanity.
Diversifying and moving away from a single platform, and working towards a decentralized future, frees me from the borders that we’ve for some reason built around entire areas of the internet. Whether warranted or not, I’ve found myself feeling pressure not to criticize other writers on Substack, even though dissecting internet personalities is kinda part of my thing now, there’s always this ominous fear of a crackdown from above if I attack one of Substack’s royalty. No more! No more will I exercise restraint with Hanania, Taibbi, or Mercola. Shit, maybe I’ll come for Yglesias if he ticks me off.
I am excited for the day that writers don’t have to beg or pay gatekeeper platforms like Facebook for the privilege of making connections to other human beings, to be permitted or denied according to how much it serves the platform or The Plan. When you can just follow my work the same as you can follow my tweets—in the same feed, even.
They want to take our voices from us, we’ll take their voices from them. Let Elon Musk tweet away to his heart’s content down here with the rest of us, if he so chooses, but no more loudly, or he can rot alone in the swamp he bought along with the pitiful amphibians who salivate at his heels.
I’m going where the humans are. This all doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us.
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