Posts Tagged ‘slavery’
“A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.”*…
The “nation state” as we know it grew from the Treaty of Westphalia (which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648) and the “Westphalian system” of states that it spawned. While scholars debate the emergence of the modern nation-state, most see it as a 19th-century European phenomenon facilitated by developments such as state-mandated education, mass literacy, and mass media.
From the beginning, some scholars (and speculative authors), pondered what might come after the nation-state. Some foresaw a global government; some, an evolution into communal anarchy or zero world government, in which nation states no longer exist. In the 1990’s, Samuel P. Huntington suggested the devolution of the world into clashing civilizations.
In the event, how are nation-states doing?
As we skate up toward the (date on which we choose to celebrate the) 250th “birthday” of the U.S., we might feel that the “idea,” that sense of love and fellowship in the U.S., is under strain. And as we look around the world, we see those “national virtues” fraying in country after country.
So it’s auspicious that Will Davies and Andrew Barry have collected several colleagues views on the state of The State…
Events in the 2020s have raised the question and problem of ‘the state’ anew, in ways that few could have predicted, even if there was a clear sense that neoliberalism was already faltering or dying over the previous decade. A new era of mercantilism, protectionism and economic nationalism apparently dawned, as successive US administrations increasingly sought to weaponize trade policy to resist rising Chinese power in the global economy. The Biden administration’s rhetoric, which elevated national security concerns alongside economic growth, questioned the allocative efficiency of international markets and pressured European powers to similarly foreground geopolitical considerations in their economic policies (Sullivan, 2023). The Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, both passed by the US Congress in 2022, demonstrated a more concerted effort by the Federal government to direct private and public sector investment towards strategic national security goals. The second Trump administration’s determination to press ahead with tariffs on dozens of US trading partners, despite causing financial instability and harm to US corporations and consumers, has further signalled a new era of state economic interventions and geopolitical tactics.
Significantly, one thing that distinguishes the present conjuncture from the immediate post-2008 world is that prominent liberal elites in ‘the West’ are now notably reflexive and at pains to declare a new policy paradigm (e.g. Foroohar, 2022). For example, following large investments by the Hewlett Foundation in 2018 and 2020, a research agenda developed in pursuit of ‘post-neoliberalism’, which has seen high profile attempts to draw a line under a ‘free market’ economic model. Indeed, some argue that there is a need to celebrate the state as a source of economic dynamism, security and technological strategy (Mazzucato, 2013, 2021). Ideas of ‘modern supply side’ economics, ‘new productivism’ and ‘abundance’ have also emerged in the United States to provide strategic direction for a more active and interventionist state (Klein & Thompson, 2025; Rodrik, 2022; Yellen, 2022). In a striking public manifestation of this movement, Britain’s then shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, outlined a vision of what she termed ‘securonomics’ that wedded goals of prosperity with those of national security (Reeves, 2023).
The new fusion of geopolitical strategy and economic policymaking in the United States and Europe, evident in renewed enthusiasm for industrial policy, ‘onshoring’ and ‘friend-shoring’ of supply chains, was catalyzed in part by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is also associated with the continuing long wave of competitive innovation in digital technologies, including AI, the rise of China as an alternative economic model, and the contested political response to climate change. In these circumstances, juridical problems of borders and sovereignty have become entangled with material problems of energy, natural resources and ‘critical minerals’, leading to heightened geopolitical interest in areas of the globe (such as the Arctic, the DRC, Ukraine, Venezuela) that are now thought to be of particular geological and strategic importance in an era of ‘transition’ (Barry & Gambino, 2024). Disruption to supply chains and energy security, following the crises of 2020–2022, led to worldwide inflation, driven by supply-side factors that policymakers were ill-equipped to respond to, and for which most incumbent political parties were punished in the 60 national elections of 2024 (Weber et al., 2024). Attention turned toward the capacity of states to govern in areas of national strategic importance, where infrastructure, technoscientific innovation, energy security and critical resources are needed to sustain competitiveness and boost productivity.
The international order appears to be in a state of flux, to a greater extent than at any point since 1989, and arguably earlier. The global economy is fragmenting along with the ideology of a ‘rules-based international order’ (Amoore, 2023). The decentring of ‘the West’ in the global economy and the over-arching challenges of technological change and climate breakdown are profoundly altering what is expected of ostensibly autonomous states vis-a-vis competitors. Assumptions about neoliberal or ‘advanced liberal’ rule which achieved hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s, no longer seem adequate in a geopolitical, ecological and technological context in which the state is being asked to do far more, by capital, by publics and by emerging technologically mediated epistemological arrangements that offer novel ways of perceiving, characterizing, classifying and knowing the increasingly uncertain world.
Arguably, the question and problem of the state have been posed most forcefully by illiberal, authoritarian nationalist regimes, driven by the rising popularity of many radical and far right political parties. ‘Populist’ parties of the Right have been in the ascendence in many democracies around the world since the global financial crisis (Hopkin & Blyth, 2019; Revelli, 2019). Given electoral successes in India, Brazil, Hungary, Italy and the United States, populist leaders and parties are no longer simply critics of the status quo. They have pushed forward policies for targeting their ideological and ‘cultural’ opponents, whether these are to be found in universities, the ‘old’ print and broadcast media, independent civil service and so on. In these states in particular, ethno-nationalist, patriarchal and ‘anti-woke’ agendas have been threaded through public policies in areas of education, culture, welfare and border control, with fiscal policy also being remade to serve radical Right agendas.
Here and elsewhere, rising authoritarianism and nationalism appear able to co-exist with a new strain of anarcho-capitalist libertarianism that further challenges liberal assumptions about jurisprudence and bureaucracy, as arbiters of public goods (cf. Hall, 2017). ‘Neo-reactionary’ and anti-democratic ideologies, which first achieved hegemony in relatively niche online communities, now threaten to disrupt the basic capacities of the modern bureaucratic liberal state, casting doubt on the value and durability of democracy and the rule of law (Slobodian, 2024; Smith & Burrows, 2021). As illustrated by the example of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the second Trump administration, the collapse of trust in government, politicians and the mainstream media in many democracies potentially offers greater freedom and political power to private wealth and rentiers, as a substitute for public institutions.
The above are somewhat disparate examples, drawn from the midst of a fast-moving situation of apparent state transformation for which we do not yet have an adequate theoretical framework or name. They may not all belong to the same tendency and may contradict each other in various ways. Despite the temptation, we should avoid the urge to bring them under a single conceptual umbrella, at least for the time being. Rather than offer a sweeping diagnosis of this conjuncture, then, in this collaborative essay, five members of the Editorial Board of Economy and Society each reflect on their own theoretical and conceptual equipment, its genealogy, possibilities and limitations for interrogating the present state of the state, especially in what we might call the ‘actually existing neoliberal states’ of the Global North.
In the 1980s and 1990s, this journal helped to forge a heterodox perspective on power in modern societies, urging scholars to look beyond the state to understand the power and politics of liberalism, to those non-state centres of calculation, knowledge, control and standardisation, which (after Foucault) were collectively understood as core to government (Burchell, 1993; Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose,1993; Walters, 1995). In an era when orthodoxy held that ‘neoliberalism’ was leading to a contraction of ‘the state’ and the expansion of ‘the market’, this journal exuded scepticism towards these categories and assumptions, in favour of empirical attention to the heterogeneity, historicity and contingency of shifting technologies of power. Deconstruction of familiar sociological and political categories allowed the play of power and politics in (neo)liberal societies to be seen afresh, without the conceptual edifice of ‘the state’ getting in the way.
We suggest that now is a useful moment in which to think again, to bring ‘the state’ back into view and examine the tools that are available to make sense of the present. The problems of the 2020s are different from those of the 1980s and 1990s, or indeed the 1930s or 1900s, and so should our problematizations be too. In this essay, we do not seek to name or singularly theorize the present crisis or conjuncture of the state, but rather to address it from different perspectives, both reflecting on and updating the journal’s longstanding preoccupations with the power and politics of knowledge and economy in liberal states.
The five contributions that follow do not offer a unified response to the question of the state of the state today. William Davies begins by situating analysis in debates over ‘neoliberalism’ that have, in many respects, dominated the social sciences in recent decades. Davies excavates a host of rich insights from a diverse range of perspectives, highlighting how the challenge of theorizing state transformation is closely bound up with wider reaching power relations of shifting ideas, policy paradigms and ideologies, alongside cultural and material transformations. In this reflection on post-2008 theoretical and empirical literatures, Davies invites us to think beyond historical precedents and models of ‘crisis’, and to recognize the heterogeneity of the present, the intermingling of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘post-neoliberal’ tendencies, which have contributed to the renewal of the problem of the state.
Samantha Ashenden’s contribution stresses the centrality of the idea of crisis to the current conjuncture. On the one hand, one might say that the state is ‘in crisis’ – a legitimation crisis to use Jürgen Habermas’s term. On the other hand, the state has come to act in the context of what proponents of state action themselves conceive as a series of crises. This has given a renewed justification for state action, or interstate action, whether to address financial, environmental and security crises or, as Ashenden argues, crises of fertility and population. What does the burgeoning of crisis talk tell us about the state today?
If the question of fertility – and population and demography – has long been a preoccupation and justification for the state, so is the milieu, the natural and unnatural environment. Andrew Barry’s contribution directs us to the way in which the chemical composition of the world has provided both the object and means for state action. The state has long been engaged in both managing and sustaining a ‘chemical regime of living’. Barry’s intervention points to the conjunction of state efforts to control access to mineral resources in the name of security (so-called ‘critical minerals’) with growing concern with what some have called the ‘chemical crisis’ of pollution and public health.
Ilias Alami’s contribution proposes an explicitly Marxist account of the present-day state. His contention is that state transformations are the manifestation of the political mediation of ‘determinate mutations in planetary capital accumulation’. He outlines a range of critical mutations, including the concentration of industrial production in East Asia, the displacement of labour by machines and consequent underemployment and industrial overcapacity, environmental degradation, and the geopolitical competition for resources. These are the conditions for growing economic interventionism by the state, and tighter relations between state and capital which are taking increasingly anti-democratic forms.
Finally, in her contribution, Linsey McGoey does not deny the significance of rising state intervention today. Yet, McGoey questions accounts of its history and its novelty. In doing so, she draws inspiration from Giovanni Arrighi (2009) who argued that the idea that the nineteenth century was an era of free trade is part of the mythology of the twentieth century, and from Friedrich List who highlighted the ‘inconvenient facts’ not acknowledged by Adam Smith. McGoey directs us to consider the history and politics of substantial efforts to deny the close relation between the state and the ‘free market’ which has been present all along…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The State of the State.”
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As we contemplate countries, we might recall that today is Juneteenth.
Though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863), word was slow to spread. Indeed, in Texas (which had been largely on the sidelines of hostilities in the Civil War, had continued its own state constitution-sanctioned practice of slavery, and so had become a refuge for slavers from more besieged Southern states) it took years… and federal enforcement.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, who’d arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 federal troops to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, read “General Order No. 3” from a local balcony:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Former slaves in Galveston celebrated in the streets; Juneteenth observances began across Texas the following year, and are now recognized as state holidays by 41 states– and as of 2021, as a federal holiday.
“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”*…
… which might be the same thing?
As more and more folks are fearing obsolescence (if not, indeed, subjugation) by emerging technology, Matthew Wills reminds us that this fear– especially as embodied in androids– has a long (and dark) history here in the U.S…
Our word “robot” comes from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. In it, historian of robots Dustin A. Abnet explains, Čapek repurposed the Czech word for “drudgery” or “servitude” to refer to the artificial workers produced by the play’s Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots) company. [See also here.] Created from synthetic organic material, and thus more android than mechanical, these worker-roboti ultimately overthrow their human masters.
The play was a sensation in Europe, and then a year later, in America, though something was lost in translation. Čapek used robots to criticize soulless Fordism—the “standardization and regimentation” of American capitalism—and hence the US’s political and cultural power in Europe and around the world. (Other Europeans would conceive of the robot in the same way, notably director Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou in the 1927 German film Metropolis.)
But a funny thing happened to these robotic symbols of American capitalism by the mid-twentieth century. They were Americanized by American capitalism. Americans, as Abnet notes, “turned a figure that initially rebelled against the dehumanizing effects of Fordism into a tamed electro-mechanical slave holding aloft a global empire of consumerism.”
Nowhere was this more literal than in the Westinghouse Electric Company’s “simple remotely controlled mechanical men and women” used to advertise the company’s products from 1927 to 1940. “Technology did not have to run amok, Westinghouse’s robots suggested; it could instead become a tamed slave that empowered each individual consumer to become his or her own master.” In the American context, where the language of master and slave was rooted in racism, Westinghouse “connected robots to romanticized white myths about slavery.”
“Americans had always racialized robot-like creations,” continues Abnet, citing the first American automaton (a caricature of a Native American) and the “grotesque minstrel-like caricatures of Black and Asian bodies” that made up automatons in the late nineteenth century.
Westinghouse’s creations, named Herbert Televox, Karina Van Televox, Telelux, Rastus, Willie Vocalite, and Elektro, were promoted as docile domestic workers. Abnet quotes the New York Times’ science and technology editor extolling the benefits of the first of these “mechanical slaves” in 1927: “it obeys without the usual human arguing, impudence or procrastination.”
Rastus, Westinghouse’s Great Depression-era robot, was the most overtly racialized of these corporate robot slaves. Rastus was modeled on a minstrel show character: “black rubber ‘skin,’ overalls, a white shirt, and a pail hat.” In addition, “the robot had a ‘rich, baritone voice’ that would have been read as unmistakably black.” While “all of Westinghouse’s other robots told jokes…Rastus and its blackness were themselves the joke.”
In 1930, Westinghouse’s President explicitly expressed the prevailing white romanticism of slavery. In the company’s Electric Journal, he argued that without the exploitation of the “muscles of others,” there could be “no art, literature, science, leisure, or comfort for anyone.” Rastus’s “tamed black body,” stresses Abnet, “underscored the larger rhetoric of slavery that shaped the fantasy the company offered white consumers.”
“Ultimately, Westinghouse’s robots were not just about more efficiently accomplishing work or ensuring greater leisure time; they were a symbol that deployed racialized slavery in ways that could reassure white Americans of their own freedom, their own mastery over both technology and the bodies of others.”
Čapek’s robots had successfully rebelled, killing all but one human. In America, that couldn’t happen, at least according to the corporations selling the robot idea. But fear of a robot rebellion, like the fear of slave rebellion before the Civil War, remained. Abnet notes that the “most common robot story in American science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s told a story of white men, using their cunning, strength, and willpower to restore their authority over the robots who should be their slaves.” Movies, especially science fiction serials, often told the same story.
A century after R.U.R. and forty years after The Terminator, the uneasiness engendered by robots (and their droid, cyborg, replicant, and AI cousins) persists, reflecting longstanding concerns about labor, autonomy, and power…
Early automatons in the US evolved from symbols of revolt into racialized figures tied to labor and the legacy of slavery: “How America Racialized the Robot,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
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As we move on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Aretha Franklin’s up-tempo cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” enter the Billboard Hot 100. It rose steadily over the next several weeks, hitting #1 in June, where it stayed for two weeks and won Franklin two Grammy Awards at the 1968 ceremony, including the first of eight consecutive Grammys for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. An R&B classic, it has also become a protest anthem, thanks to its connections to both the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s.
“Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection”*…
Every week, Sam Circle reads the New Yorker— closely– and publishes a wonderful review of the contents of each issue in two parts: the primary editorial and the poetry and cartoons. In their most recent missive, the “Random Pick” (an article from the archive) was “This Year’s Model” by Michael Kelly. (June 17, 1996)…
Who’d have guessed that the most blistering take I’ve read on the Democrats’ current travails would be something a centrist wrote in the ‘90s? I have a general sense of Clinton’s deal, but given that I was four when he left office (I know, I know) the details aren’t visceral for me, and it’s hard to know how literally to take leftists when they call him a social conservative. But [while] I wouldn’t exactly call [Kelly] trustworthy in general (here’s Tom Scocca with a blistering and definitive posthumous takedown), I at least grant the trust of contemporaneousness when he says Clinton is, “on social issues,” running “to the left of Pat Buchanan but to the right of, say, George Bush”. It’s sick that Kelly’s issue with Clinton claiming he’s going to gut welfare and put far more cops on the streets is that he maybe can’t be trusted to actually do so; it doesn’t matter, though, because Kelly’s analysis is still sharp, and in many ways Clinton can be seen as a predecessor of Trump: “You vote for Clinton, and who knows what you’ll get? Maybe he’ll turn again – back your way.” There are no principles, there are only deals; it’s a politics of nihilism loosely cloaked in a politics of populism. And centrists still push this “we’re just following the polls” message. This is an uneasy glimpse of the past, clarified by the horrors of the present…
The legacy of the “centrist urge” and faux populism in the 90s…
See also: Rebecca Solnit’s “Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo” (source of the image above)
* “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” – Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail“
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As we take stock, we might recall that it was on this date in 1862 that Congress passed the the Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves, effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”*…
Brian Klaas on the state of the American Dream…
Intergenerational poverty—in which those who are born poor stay poor throughout their lives—is an obvious blight on society. Its persistence also flies in the face of many meritocratic myths about poverty being purely a reflection of limited talents and poor choices rather than structural and social factors.
But how persistent is intergenerational poverty? And which countries are best—and worst—at tackling it?
Recently published research in Nature set out to answer that exact question, with a comparison between the United States, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Denmark. This design allowed the researchers to examine differential rates of intergenerational poverty among five rich democracies that are ostensibly peer nations.
The findings are brutal reading for the United States. As the researchers explain:
We found that the United States has a much stronger intergenerational poverty than the four other high-income countries examined. Spending all of one’s childhood in poverty in the United States is associated with a 42 percentage point increase in the mean poverty rate during early adulthood. This is more than four times stronger than in Denmark and more than twice as strong as in Australia or the United Kingdom.
Crucially, though, through a series of clever research methods, they were able to identify the key drivers of the variation between these countries. And, as they point out, the biggest factor that makes the United States an outlier is tied to government policy around taxes and the social safety net. Using sophisticated modelling, they were able to demonstrate that “if the United States were to adopt the tax and transfer insurance effects of its peer countries, its intergenerational poverty persistence could decrease by more than one-third.”
This is the kind of social research that deserves more attention; it’s solid evidence that the persistence of intergenerational poverty is, to a large extent, a policy choice. That’s depressing, of course, but it’s also a call to action: these are the stakes of politics.
The governance choices we make have enormous impacts on the life chances of millions of people, and it’s why the pushback against bad policy is essential—and why depressed complacency about the currently dystopian state of the world, while understandable, is self-defeating and counterproductive.
There are solutions—and the ripple effects of our actions taken now can get us closer to implementing them, even (or especially) when it seems most hopeless…
Bracing– but painfully timely– reading: “The American Outlier of Intergenerational Poverty,” from @brianklaas.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
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As we take the necessary steps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1775 that Thomas Paine published African Slavery in America – the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.
The full text is here.
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines who you will be when you can’t help it”*…
Indeed. And not just what one reads, but how one reads it. The estimable Henry Farrell reviews the “tech canon” that seems to underlie so much of what Silicon Valley and the tech world at large is advocating. That canon’s celebration of great men and the acomplishments of small teams helps explain everything from Mark Andreessen’s accelerationist manifesto through the machinations of DOGE to Jeff Bezos’ resteering of The Washington Post…
… Tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating the merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule.
This fervor has yielded a recognizable “Silicon Valley canon.” And as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of reengineering the government, it’s worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads — as well as the ones they don’t. Viewed through the canon, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image.
Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the “vague tech canon” might be. He’d been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine Sun asked why James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a “Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture.” The promptled Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of 43 sources, which he stressed were not those he thought “one ought to read” but those that “roughly cover[ed] the major ideas that are influential here.”
In a later response, Greer argued that the canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, DC as an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers, who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley canon provided guideposts for how to change the world.
Said canon is not directly political. It includes websites, like LessWrong, the home of the rationalist movement, and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, for members of the “grey tribe” who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. [Paul] Graham’s many essays are included, as are science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup.
But such advice can have a political edge. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, co-authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Thiel’s early ambitions (along with other members of the so-called PayPal mafia) to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar.
Then there are the Carlylian histories of “great men” (most of the subjects and authors were male) who sought to change the world. Older biographies described men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society.
Such stories, in Greer’s description, provided Silicon Valley’s leaders and aspiring leaders with “models of honor,” and examples of “the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done.” The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself, and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk — whose biography was on the list — were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America’s role in the world.
Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn’t simply reinforce Silicon Valley’s own mythologized self-image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry, set on remaking the world for the better, to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn’t everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose-engineered efficient systems?…
[Farrel discusses James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual and the enhusiastic reactions of SV avatars Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin…]
… We don’t know which parts of the canon Musk has read, or which ones influenced the young techies he’s hired into DOGE. But it’s not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change.
Musk, a heroic entrepreneur, will surely make history as his tiny team of engineers cuts the government Leviathan down to size. One DOGE recruiter framed the challenge as “a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.” When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper and more effective. That, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves.
From another perspective, hubris is about to get clobbered by nemesis. Jasmine Sun’s question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach. But Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency that they themselves embody…
… Seeing Like a State, properly understood, is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers writ large. From Scott’s broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the “hidden layers” of artificial neurons that allow it to work. DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek…
… Some of this revised canon might draw on Patrick Collison’s own bookshelves, which contain a far wider range of ideas than the canon itself. Collison’s reading interests tend toward classical liberalism, but writers who rub shoulders on his shelves, like Karl Popper and Elinor Ostrom, could be brought into debate with less well-known liberals like Ernest Gellner and contemporary left-liberals like Danielle Allen. All of these thinkers are deeply concerned with building and maintaining a genuinely plural society in which groups can get along despite their differences…
We are what we read: “Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions” (gift article) from @himself.bsky.social in @bloomberglp.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full…
… as is Farrell’s addendum (in his wonderful newsletter): “Silicon Valley’s thing about Great Men“– “There is an alternative.”
And listen to Farrell discuss these issues (with Max Read and John Ganz) in the podcast episode “The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics“
And for a reminder that this phenomenon has long, deep roots, see “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries,” from TechCrunch in 2013.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we anguish over antecedents, we might recall that it was on this date in 1854 that the Republican Party was “organized” (In Ripon, Wisconsin). It held its first public meeting on March 20th and its first convention on July 6 of that same year.
The party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to slavery and future admission as slave states, and was largely animated by anti-slavery advocates (including some ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soilers).
The Kansas–Nebraska Act was authored by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and passed in 1854… the same Stephen Douglas that debated Abraham Lincoln in the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Douglas was re-elected by the Illinois General Assembly, 54–46. (Until 1913, when the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution— which provides that senators shall be elected by the people of their states– was ratified, senators were elected by their respective state legislatures.) But the publicity made Lincoln a national figure and laid the groundwork for his 1860 presidential campaign.
How times change…
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