That’s a nice story. In reality the “open society” is open to takeover by international finance capital. It’s like running a server with “admin”:”password” SSH credentials — a security vulnerability that cedes control to outsiders. Imagine China and Iran allowing Larry Ellison to own their media, or allowing Larry Fink to control a big chunk of their markets, or allowing George Soros to manipulate their currency and operate NGOs within their borders. That would be plainly idiotic and suicidal.

“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!

There won’t be anti-trust as long as elections can be bought and there’s a revolving door between regulators and industry. We need a firewall to separate capital and state.

Yep. But everyone's realized this ship has sailed in the US right? Regulatory capture is complete.

Technology did change the world, and technocrats did shape it. This was part of what Burnham called the "managerial revolution". In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. It has never really changed ever since.

The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".

The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958:

"By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."

Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.

4) energy and materials scarcity and compounding ecological externalities

this of course affecting not only the Western regimes but technocratic rule everywhere

> In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. ... They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".

while "New Deal" have a lot of issues, note that 2 other approaches totally failed. At least for some time we considered them as failed ones. Unfortunately, a bit refreshed for some external appearance they start to be more and more popular again by populistically riding the issues of the "New Deal" approach while we all start to collectively forget why those 2 lost.

Seems to be working fine in China. Bad management happens, and does not refute the idea of management itself. Good management works.

For some time it worked in Germany and USSR too. Paradigm shifts are natural part of technology development. Somewhat similar to large companies, societies without individual freedom tend to have harder time making through such paradigm shifts, either failing completely or doing it slower and much more inefficiently, and as a result lose to the more efficient societies with individual freedom.

I think it's reductive to call China fascist or communist.

What is working in China? Because it certainly isn't communism if that's your point.

The USA didn't New Deal hard enough to keep up with the rest of the "Western" world's more humane form of capitalism, which you can see in how consistently the USA lags behind other countries in measures of actual human progress and comfort.

While most "Western" countries suffered through similar technocratic, neoliberal turns in the 80s, they were built on a stronger social democratic base than the USA.

And don't get fooled by "horseshoe theory" ignorance: Fascist states were/are authoritarian by definition. Communist states were/are authoritarian by culture.

The USA oligarchs were watching Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler and New Dealed just hard enough to blow some steam off and keep things mostly as they were.

If you believe Smedley Butler, at least some of those USA oligarchs were big Mussolini fans.

I found this comment very insightful - and it's interesting to see that it is downvoted even if there are zero replies trying to make some counter arguments..

Where is Germany going to get the fuel to power an ICE fleet? Where is Germany going to get the electricity to power an EV fleet?

Germany faces much bigger problems than the auto lobby.

Iran is the main source of resistance in the region. Libya, Iraq, and Syria have been pacified. Egypt has been bought off. All the groups still fighting Israel (Hezbollah, Houthis, probably Hamas) have received significant Iranian support.

I believe the calculation is this is Israel’s last best window of opportunity to leverage the declining American empire with a compromised asset in the White House. The time to strike is now, since in 10 years US military power and US political will in support of Israel will likely be diminished.

Chaos could be the point. That is the Libya model.

I am going to steal this code and run a different analysis. The author mentions that skeptics avoid grifters without punishing them. I am curious how things play out in the Seven Samurai model, where instead of marks you have peasants and instead of grifters you have bandits. What happens if you have samurai not skeptics? Who both take rice from the peasants and protect them from greater exploitation by bandits.

This would be a simple governance model, and you could predict something like “revolution” when the cost of samurai exceeds their benefit.

This was written by Harald Schäfer, the CTO of comma.ai. I'm not so sure if G. Hotz is still involved in comma.ai.

Ah I missed that.

Strictures which successfully regulated desire crystallized over the ages into particular forms of tradition and morality. Hence early conservatives like Carlyle and Chesterton were anti-capitalist: they saw the economics of desire as a corrosive force that would break down and nullify the experience of centuries as encoded in customs, tradition and other social bonds.

Successful protest movements are typically successful because they are organized and/or leveraged by a counter elite or foreign actor. One example is the CIA orchestrating protests to topple the PM of Iran in 1953.

Protest movements lacking elite or foreign state sponsorship (like the yellow vests in France, Occupy Wall St, or the Canada truckers) tend to wither away by attrition, get infiltrated and redirected, or else are dispersed by force.