by P Henry
This week the BBC screened Panorama – Trump and the Tech Titans – BBC iPlayer . Considering how the BBC is sliding to the right, this programme is worthwhile seeing as it outlines how Tec Billionaires help Trump build his road to oligarchy. It’s about how power and control is more important than social justice. It’s about how IT controls more than the programs on your computer.
With extensive clips of Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sax and others of the 13 billionaires supporting Trump, it showed the development of their power. It showed how Thiel’s company Palantir Technology uses its government funded counter-terrorism tools against the American and other free world populations. There were a few minutes of sensible overviews from Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich and Michael Wolff highlighting the dangers of history’s most “powerful ever group” taking total control over social systems. They control not only political and economic power but “how we speak to each other”.
The socio- economic dangers of this powerful faction was better covered by Technofeudalism (2024) by Yanis Varoufakis, reviewed online (23) Technofeudalism – the video – YouTube. He describes how this form of capitalism not only decides what we desire but undermines the existing systems by having “a hitherto undreamt power to extract surplus value …. free labour…. Vastly more powerful than Henry Ford or Rupert Murdoch could ever be.”
Paulina Borsook’s (an early silicon valley worker) much earlier book Cyberselfish (2000) and reviewed online (23) The Woman Who Predicted Tech Fascism — Paulina Borsook Was Right – YouTube, shows how the culture of cybertechnology billionaires is selfish, absorbed in gaining power exclusive of others’ rights, at the cost of all other people.
It would seem we have much to be concerned about being controlled by this new technology and its owners.
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