This is good but feels a bit like just a slice of a larger picture. I do appreciate that you’re trying to paint that larger picture though. Have you read Palo Alto? It’s sort of a wider perspective but it covers a lot of what you’re shooting for. But I don’t think it harps on Bostrom much and Bostrom is important; for coverage of him I’d check out The Eternal Return of Eugenics. But there’s more; check out Couterculture to Cyberculture too, especially for the weird ancap tendencies. What you begin to realize is that the techfash isn’t as distinct an element as you would expect; it’s a smooth curve across a wide range of people, all of whom have some tendencies towards what you might call tech fash but many of whom can credibly deny that they’re exactly fascist. There are the Yarvins and Thiels who are done with democracy, sure, but also Silicon Valley’s Safe Space who’s, ahem, probably partially fascist or at least very non-provably not-fascist. The overall effect is a giant international nazi bar. Your paper needs to be a lot longer is what I’m saying, and name a lot more names.

@self quite like what I’ve read so far, questions and thoughts follow

1. the layout of this seems like it’s meant to be a standalone article/post, rather than as a response of sorts (which is fine ofc). I could imagine something of the latter being useful, do you foresee this having a response sibling-post to go with it? or would that be a diy thing for others to write while referencing this?

2. along the topic of the weaponisation of open source, there’s something that’s been irking me for a while and that I’ve been short on spoons to write it (feel free to run with it if it’s any good): many, many, many of these projects feature the most absolutely ridiculous naïve-fragile designs, under the guise of “don’t worry, just ship it, you can just iterate”. there’s rarely any depth given to thinking about “but what about …” conditions, and always it’s shunted off into the “oh but if we’re actually having those problems, we’re already successful” kind of considerations/discussions. this last bit, of course, is bonkers because lots of The Bros want you to commit to their chosen thing ritenao, but seem to be incapable of even exploring that space at all (or, if/when they do, you get megawordvomit medium articles with simple industrial realisations in them)

3. [nit] the footnote ordering appears to be funky, I’m guessing that’s a braindump/writing-time ordering issues?

nit: typo- “just for it” should be “fork” i imagine in the section on forking. Feel free to delete this comment upon correction

Asking so as to not make an assumption: who is the intended audience? This is not intended as a reflective question (though I imagine any writer would have this in mind), more a question so I can better cater any feedback I might have. It’s hard for me to say anything because 1. I am already aligned with what you’re saying, and 2. I am two GnTs into the night.

Small suggestion - You define TESCREAL a couple paragraphs after using it for the first time, so you may want to include the definition or at least a footnote the first time you use it. If you want a non-youtube for footnote [5], there is this from the Washington Examiner - https://washingtonspectator.org/understanding-tescreal-silicon-valleys-rightward-turn/# .

I really like the parasitization of existing terminology, and am wanting more examples, but can’t think of any. NFT’s almost ruined PfP or Picture for Proof, but that’s not a great example.

I just finished reading it and enjoyed what you have so far. A lot of threads that I’m interested in but you have a different perspective that doesn’t get caught up in abstractions.

One piece of general feedback, knowing it’s a draft, is that the section titles may be unnecessary because your narrative flows well enough to follow in a linear thread.

Ok, digging in.

However, it has become equally obvious that those fascist goals are being pursued using a set of methods and pathways that are unique to the tech industry

This line leaves me wanting a little more info about why they are unique to the tech industry. Maybe because it’s close to home for me and my writing, but do you mean this because digital technology affords the methods and pathways in a way that the physical world doesn’t? Or is it related to the ideologies of the people behind them? I don’t think the intro is the place to explain it fully, it could be a whole article in itself, but maybe a few more words to tighten up that context would help.

There are many more examples of technofascist methods, but these were picked because they clearly demonstrate what outwardly separates technofascism from ordinary hype and marketing.

Sorry if nitpicky but “clearly demonstrate” hurts your intro a little bit because the article’s purpose seems to be to demonstrate why these thing are technofascist despite their hype and marketing.

Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, and rarely involve any actual technological innovation. This is because the marketed goals of these projects are not their real, fascist aims.

Nice summary of the key indicator. Because I get caught up in the details and haven’t thought about this stuff in terms of fascism much, I see this when they state a problem which you can’t argue with it as being a problem, but you can’t really argue with it not being a problem either. Usually because it’s a problem area rather than a tangible, pertinent, problem. Like “productivity”, for example. Then they present their solution which has the same characteristics. You can’t argue for or against it because it’s like using a marshmallow hammer to drive in a marshmallow nail. (Sorry to bring up my pet target example) Notion has all these wonderful things for organising stuff and collaborating because if you don’t talk about specific productivity problems and just talk about productivity in general then being “organised” sounds great!

Anyway, my reason for sharing this is that your article makes me think that technofascism can be found even in the most innocent-seeming projects because we’ve let the concept of solid product definition be iteratively replaced by these mushy masses of code.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are frequently presented as innovative, but all blockchain-based technologies are, in fact, inefficient distributed database based on Merkle trees, a very old technology which blockchains add little practical value to. In fact, blockchains are so impractical that they have provably failed to achieve any of the marketed goals undertaken by cryptocurrency corporations since the public release of Bitcoin(6).

I thought this paragraph could be improved as a follow up to the previous by talking about Bitcoin’s claimed purpose rather than the faults of the technology. You lead into it by talking about “Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals” but you don’t talk about Bitcoin’s stated goals, which are interesting in themselves. There is this strange juxtaposition between the libertarian love for bitcoin and decentralised independence yet the white paper makes it reasonably clear that bitcoin is pro-vendor and not necessarily designed for the purpose of the individual. It takes a pretty one-sided tone when read through that lens.

First sentence of the whitepaper:

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services.

moving on.

Successful tech projects are usually narrowly focused in order to limit their scope(9), but technofascist projects invariably have global ambitions (with no real attempt to establish a roadmap of humbler goals), and equally invariably attempt to achieve those goals without the consent of anyone outside of the project, usually via coercion.

This is a great line! Kind of like Bluesky making their own protocol instead of using webmention and activitypub.

In keeping with technofascism’s disdain for the success of its marketed goals, this monstrous idea ignores the fact that cryptocurrencies would be useless in a post-collapse environment with a fractured or non-existent global computer network.

This highlights that idea that if your goals solve conceptual problems with conceptual solutions the ability to see obvious problems like this are easy to dismiss as being conceptual criticism. When it can’t be used now to do something now then we have no criteria for success or failure. The grift is to keep edging the believers as long as possible by continuing to add new details that sweeten the pay off and push it further away at the same time.

Urbit positions itself as the inevitable future of networked computing, but its admitted goal is to technologically implement a neofeudal structure where early adopters get significant control over the network and how it executes code(3, 12).

I’m scared of the Urbit rabbit hole so I don’t give it too much time but this sounds exactly like the ENS project as well.

This can be viewed as a furtherance of technofascism’s goal of destroying our ability to perceive the truth, but it must be called out that technofascist projects have a particular interest in distorting our remembrance of history; to make history effectively mutable in order to cover for technofascism’s failings.

I like the way this contradicts the blockchain obsession with immutability and permanence of information. LLMs are perfect destroyers of truth and distorters of history - what exactly are the things we would want to calcify into blockchains with enough confidence that they exist unmodified forever?

One obvious example is the popular term crypto, which until relatively recently referred to cryptography, an extremely important branch of mathematics. Cryptocurrency communities have now adopted the term, and have deliberately used the resulting confusion to falsely imply that cryptocurrencies, like cryptography, are an important tool in software architecture.

They imply they are important by repurposing the word utility beyond any meaning. They’ve turned utility into a means and an end. They tell you something has utility in a way which 5 years ago would have sounded like an odd, unfinished, sentence. “This token is great because it has so much utility”

Its technological form is accomplished via network effects; good examples are large cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which cannot practically be forked because any blockchain without majority consensus is highly vulnerable to attacks, and in any case is much less valuable than the larger chain. Urbit maintains technological forking hostility via its aforementioned implementation of neofeudal network resource allocation.

The concept of weaponised open-source is fascinating and something I haven’t read about before. I really enjoyed this section and would definitely read a whole article exploring this further.

Thanks for sharing what you have so far! It was a nice read and it kept me hooked all the way. I hope this feedback is helpful. Looking forward to seeing your progress

this is just a first draft; you can probably tell which sections are complete by what got citations (and some of them didn’t get any text at all)

let me know if all of this makes sense and if I can either focus this more or expand it

Hey there, I enjoyed your text and would like to offer some feedback

The basic outline is

• Eco loosely defined fascism in his essay as X
• fascism by this definition prevalent among tech industry
• here are (difficult to prove/disprove) “unique” features supporting this claim

Tbh I don’t quite get why would you need to involve term “fascism” here if described claims are bad enough on its own. Instead, this text would be far easier to accept if reframed as criticism of TESCREAL – how it in addition with capitalism creates a destructive force that harms people.

Instead, current framing goes out of its way to claim singular ideological intentionality of vast networks of people. Why?

If you wanna say that CO2 causes global warming, there’s no need to say that all people driving diesel cars are accidental ecofascists. For all intents and purposes it’s enough to say that global warming y’know gonna kill millions of people 🤷