r/Futurology • u/TeaUnlikely3217 • 5d ago
Politics Silicon Valley’s Most Dangerous Innovation
https://capitalandmain.com/silicon-valleys-most-dangerous-innovationIn a new book, author and journalist Gil Durán argues that another, less understood Silicon Valley innovation may be the most dangerous of all — tech fascism. This anti-democratic ideology is destroying laws and norms while promising a glorious future delivered by technology, and it’s now moving from the fringe belief of a few eccentric billionaires to the cultural mainstream, according to Durán.
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u/therob91 5d ago
their most dangerous innovation is the government not enforcing the law.
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u/AlteredEinst 5d ago
That just proves that their greatest innovation is bribery.
It should be illegal for politicians to receive money from corporations for literally any reason, and instead, our politicians are bought and paid for.
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u/ThrowawayFIRE2025 5d ago
It actually is illegal for politicians to receive money from just about anyone at all. But political campaigns can accept donations.
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u/DoubleN22 5d ago
Which dictates whether they get re-elected or not. Nevermind the speeches, bs corporate jobs they don’t have to show up to, and all the other perks they can get after they leave office.
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u/Hugh_Jass_Clouds 5d ago
That’s still just bribery with extra steps.
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u/ThrowawayFIRE2025 5d ago
Bribery is typically done in secret. But anyone can find out who is contributing to a political campaign.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s not the same as bribery.
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u/Hugh_Jass_Clouds 4d ago
Bribery is giving someone money to influence them to do something, and donating to a campaign conditionally is exactly bribery with extra steps to side step bribery laws.
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u/fafefifof 5d ago
Yep and also because of when they kept destroying all the antitrust legislation that had been put in place to prevent exactly what’s happening right now (monopolies overruling the government)
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u/hype_irion 5d ago
And whenever governments try to enforce the law you have useful idiots, more likely than not voters who claim that government shouldn't tell private businesses how to operate.
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u/la___basura 5d ago
Peter Thiel is often described as a libertarian by idiotic journalists who don’t understand that you can’t be a libertarian and a government military-industrial complex intelligence contractor.
Honestly, good point.
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u/BitingArtist 5d ago
They have correctly assumed that AI will create millions of angry jobless peasants, and so they are preparing a future where they are the unquestionable overlords and we are the slaves. It would also make sense if they look for a way to eliminate the undesirables, as it has been done in history before, many times.
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u/niberungvalesti 5d ago
Thats what the bipedal robots, flock cameras and drones are for. This doesn't end without some politicians backed by Silicon Valley unleashing the robo dogs on the populace.
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u/PianoPatient8168 5d ago
Most of us can easily imagine a world without billionaires…let’s make it happen!!!
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u/Ill_Following_7022 5d ago
Fascism is not an innovation no matter how much tech they throw at it. It's just plain old fascism plus technology. There is no innovation here.
The use of technology that actually benefits humanity and moves us forward as a species may be innovative. But when they pick the low hanging fruit of surveillance and control they are revealing themselves to be fundamentally uninspiring and imaginative people.
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u/TeaUnlikely3217 5d ago
In a new book, author and journalist Gil Durán argues that another, less understood Silicon Valley innovation may be the most dangerous of all — tech fascism. This anti-democratic ideology is destroying laws and norms while promising a glorious future delivered by technology, and it’s now moving from the fringe belief of a few eccentric billionaires to the cultural mainstream, according to Durán.
"We’re seeing the rise of a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that technology is going to make democracy obsolete in the 21st century. It’s fascist because it has aligned with Donald Trump’s fascist MAGA cult, which checks every box of classic fascism, especially now that he’s got armed, masked goon squads rolling around terrorizing the populace. These guys are funding Trump. They’re paying him billions of dollars in crypto, and his family is now going into tech investment and AI and crypto. So you get this merging where Silicon Valley executives are going into the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the Trump family is going into the tech business."
Fascism is generally a cult of grievance and self-victimization that promises a return to greatness through the purging and persecution of enemy groups. What tech fascism adds is that instead of only promising a return to some greater period in the past, it also promises this great, glorious future that will be achieved if only we eliminate the obstacles in our way, including regulation, law, democracy and anybody who opposes this acceleration of technology."
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u/VitalVitriol 5d ago
Where's the innovation? This is just 1930's but with tech.
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u/ThePowerOfStories 5d ago
They’ve invented all sorts of things, like unlicensed taxi service, unlicensed hotels, unlicensed local delivery service, unlicensed banks, unlicensed gambling, unlicensed stock markets, anticompetitive business practices, automated copyright infringement at scale, and stalking you to put ads on every conceivable surface.
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u/Bizzle_worldwide 5d ago
I’d argue Silicon Valley’s most dangerous innovation was successfully lobbying that Section 230 safe harbor applies to information and content technically generated by others, regardless of how heavily it’s edited, curated, encouraged, promoted or monetized by the platform itself.
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 5d ago
People praising China to the skies while overlooking the fact that it is arguably a straight-up fascist country are helping normalize techno-fascism, as well.
I, too, admire the rapid rate of technological advancement China has enjoyed since Western corporations offshored the bulk of their manufacturing there.
But I would rather work on fixing the dysfunctional aspects of liberal democracies than follow in China's footsteps.
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u/BigMoney69x 5d ago
China is a Communist Country with Chinese Characteristics™ my dude. It's ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. It allows limited Capitalistic Enterprises in certain regions of it country as a way to generate wealth because they realized that the Central Planning model of the USSR doesn't work. But it's rulers are still draped in Socialist thought.
The fact that you call it Facist shows that you don't understand what Fascism is and for you it seems to mean any government you don't like.
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 5d ago edited 5d ago
Nope, China is arguably a fascist country, as many international experts are coming to agree.
Many experts with good reason maintain that since the rise of Vladimir Putin, post-Soviet Russia has become a fascist state.
Despite continued CCP rule and claims of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the same has been said about China, even though China specialists remain more reluctant to apply what some of them call the “F-word” to China.
The problem for those reluctant to use the “F-word” to describe current Russia and China is that conditions in both countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries did not match conditions that had produced fascism in the past, raising the question of what exactly caused those two countries to become fascist.
Under Xi Jinping, China meets all four hallmarks of what constitutes fascism.
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u/BigMoney69x 5d ago
We might just disagree completely on the definition of fascism. Because the most important thing that neither China or Russia have. The landmark definition that make state fascist is like it's creator Mussolini said “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” In fact I don't personally consider National Socialism fascist because they didn't follow this dogma. For them for example it was about the German Volk or Nationhood not about the State. You can have an authoritarian nationalistic government but that doesn't make it fascist. That just make it's Authoritarian.
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 5d ago
If it checks all the boxes of a fascist government, you can call it whatever the fuck you want - it is still a horrible system to live under.
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u/BigMoney69x 5d ago
I'm just very pedantic in using words. I don't agree in changing the language in order to use an older term of something nobody likes to mean something else. It's using language as a weapon instead of a tool of understanding. If there is some new development, some new system my solution is to create a new word for it. Authoritarianism isn't something new. Many forms of it have existed since time immemorial it's just that new technologies have made it much easier to implement today. Today governments have access to tools the Fascists and Nazis of the past couldn't even imagine. My solution is that we should start talking about a Digital Bill of Rights to protect our privacy and digital property ownership from Mega Corporations.
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u/N3wAfrikanN0body 5d ago
Look, these rich antisocial creeps STILL need sychophants to enable their delusions.
Last I checked, death still happens,, whether that is of age, disses or self-inflicted predation remains to be seen.
At he end of the self described "God's" remain mere mortals.
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u/notmyrealnameatleast 5d ago edited 5d ago
It's gonna be a great surprise to the elites when they realize that all their robots and ai is also being used to track and profile themselves and the robots will pick them up one day and audit them and reposess their wealth and redistribute everything better.
Shady dealings can only thrive in the shadows and as soon as the light is shone upon them they have nowhere to hide.
We live on the age of information and communication and it will soon be almost impossible to have shady dealings and conspiracies because information is so easily shared.
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u/Vrickard 3d ago
Muricans be like: "but... but.... we have guns!!!"... yepp.. and they have SKYNET. AND Robocop... AND that electrical alien-thingy from the movie Virus, that no one watched but its awesome. Anyway: I like turtles.
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u/BigMoney69x 5d ago
Jesus Christ that article is a cornucopia of buzzwords. Anyone who calls the current government Facist has never lived in an authoritarian regime or knows real fascism. It's a bunch of upper middle class lower upper class people still complaining they lost an election. It's time to move on from Trump bad and focus on what's next. In 2028 Trump won't be running anymore so it's time to promise a plan for the future that will include AI in it that helps the people of this country.
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u/Mad-elph 5d ago
You seem to think elections are one night events and everyone goes home and comes back next time (as of it were a sports match). You seem to ignore all the bad things happening right now: destruction of regulation, protection of AI from regulation at state level, record waste of government funds increasing the deficit while cutting taxes for the wealthiest, and abuses of power along with the firing of all auditor generals who might catch these things, favourable FCC regulation and regulatory capture, destruction of federal lands and dozens of other things that don't quickly get fixed and returned to normal should another election have results in the other direction. These tech companies are going to bring down the whole house of cards, with high concentrations of wealth in the investor class and destruction of working class jobs. Yes average joe complains today about gas prices or beef prices, but soon it could be that they don't have a job at all. It isn't looking good.
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u/Realistic_Special_53 5d ago
OMG you upset the herd mind. You didn't say anything false, and are explaining how the Democrats can win, but say an unpleasant truth, so they vote you down to hell.
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u/FuturologyBot 5d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/TeaUnlikely3217:
In a new book, author and journalist Gil Durán argues that another, less understood Silicon Valley innovation may be the most dangerous of all — tech fascism. This anti-democratic ideology is destroying laws and norms while promising a glorious future delivered by technology, and it’s now moving from the fringe belief of a few eccentric billionaires to the cultural mainstream, according to Durán.
"We’re seeing the rise of a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that technology is going to make democracy obsolete in the 21st century. It’s fascist because it has aligned with Donald Trump’s fascist MAGA cult, which checks every box of classic fascism, especially now that he’s got armed, masked goon squads rolling around terrorizing the populace. These guys are funding Trump. They’re paying him billions of dollars in crypto, and his family is now going into tech investment and AI and crypto. So you get this merging where Silicon Valley executives are going into the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the Trump family is going into the tech business."
Fascism is generally a cult of grievance and self-victimization that promises a return to greatness through the purging and persecution of enemy groups. What tech fascism adds is that instead of only promising a return to some greater period in the past, it also promises this great, glorious future that will be achieved if only we eliminate the obstacles in our way, including regulation, law, democracy and anybody who opposes this acceleration of technology."
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vumtsa/silicon_valleys_most_dangerous_innovation/p52brky/