Back in 2018, I explained the rise of Big Tech as a result of
a) low-interest rate environment of the global economy
b) SoftBank's ability to borrow cheaply despite deep losses
The recent wave of massive AI investments proves it's still true! A thread 🧵theguardian.com/commentisfree/… Check this Bloomberg piece on how the $500 billion AI project - Stargate - would be financed. It shows that
a) SoftBank, its main backer, is about to report a $ 1 *billion* quarterly loss
b) It borrows in Japan - hence its low-interest rate debt payments finance.yahoo.com/news/softbank-…

In 2014, I wrote an essay on the rise of "algorithmic regulation" / "lean start-up" imaginary in government circles. Silicon Valley's recipe for government efficiency, I argued, would - at best - yield the "Singaporization" of liberal democracy. 🧵 below theguardian.com/technology/201… Re-reading that essay in 2025, I can't shake off the suspicion that there would be no DOGE without Obama - and there would be no Elon Musk without Cass Sunstein and Tim O'Reilly. These were the Mensheviks to DOGE's Bolsheviks.

The attack on foreign aid/USAID reveals the naive idealism - i.e. non-materialism - of Trump's eco-nationalist wing. They hate aid's supposed progressivism - but not its role in containing China, channeling $ to US corps abroad, or cultivating pro-US sentiment globally. 🧵 That aid has been key to US economic and political hegemony since the 1940s - and that, without it, America would be in an even weaker position vis a vis China - doesn't matter. And it can't matter, not when the enemy is so generic (e.g. "Wall Street" or "techno-feudalists")

The Silicon Valley bits of Bannon's interview are quite revealing about one thing. All the recent talk about “technofeudalism” and antitrust - and their fusion by Bannon - has come to obfuscate the dynamics (as well as history) of America’s global techno-power. A thread. 🧵 First, why date America's efforts to use the tech industry to strengthen its global hegemony to *2008*? This has been going on since the mid-1970s! That's how Europe & Japan were eventually defanged while the Global South (e.g. Group of 77) weren't allowed to regulate US tech.

Will either "surveillance capitalism" or "techno-feudalism" framework survive the rise of generative AI? I very much doubt it: both seem less relevant/accurate today than they did a few years ago. A thread on what we've learned about their deficiencies. As for surveillance capitalism, it's obvious that advertising is mostly peripheral to the whole AI enterprise. So is manipulating users into "extracting" their personal data, creating behavioral future markets, stealing their "right to the future," etc. It all feels dated now.

While generative AI presents the best possible case against tying an important innovation to capitalist dynamics, Silicon Valley's cultural hegemony will make us to draw the exact opposite conclusion, i.e. that generative AI shows that capitalism & tech progress are inseparable🧵 First, what's so rational about pursuing such a massive R&D endeavor via market competition? Why have several companies spend billions - not to mention their energy bills - on building identical capabilities? Imagine multiple Manhattan Projects or Apollo Programs: it's a waste.

Going through many historical materials from late 60s/early 70s to research A SENSE OF REBELLION, I've realized that today's Silicon Valley (SV) is no longer the guardian of the counterculture's legacy but, rather, one of its main enemies. Some reflections below.🧵 Hippies wanted a communal, decommodified world, where property rights were loose or abolished. "Open land" was one of the rallying cries of people at the communes. Silicon Valley, in contrast, is dreaming of fully privatized, techno-feudal cities - private property on steroids.

Today’s thread is on the strangest figure of 1960s tech counterculture. A friend of McLuhan, Bateson & Glenn Gould. Someone who went from being a CIA-adjacent psychiatrist to a hippie guru to a manual worker in an iron foundry to a Maoist instructor of Chinese engineers.





Meet Warren Brodey (b. 1924), the star of A SENSE OF REBELLION. Someone with huge but unknown impact on digital culture (MIT's Negroponte lists him as one of his most important early mentors). Someone who, in his hippie phase, would climb trees - pantless (see end of this clip!)

Think that Project Cybersyn was about "planning" but with telexes and computers, i.e. just another chapter in the Socialist Calculation Debate? Think again. I definitely changed my interpretation of it while working on The Santiago Boys... A thread
🧵⬇️ Traditional Soviet-style planning tries to fit complex and unwieldy reality into one's model of it. Sure, one might occasionally revise and expand the model - two cheers for Big Data & AI! - but one is just as likely to try to bend the reality.

The trailer of The Santiago Boys now with subtitles in Portuguese! In honor of that, here is a thread on Cybersyn's Brazilian connection ... Yes, it existed! And what a connection it was!🧵 The Cybersyn team was mostly Chilean (plus a Bolivian, a Brit, and a German). But in early 1973, a brave Brazilian engineering joined the team: Carlos Eduardo de Senna Figueiredo. (photo: Carlos today)

Based on research for The Santiago Boys, here is a thread on the most evil tech company that ever existed: ITT. It mingled in politics everywhere it went. Its rise was abetted by the Pentagon, the CIA, and Wall Street. And it became a target of violent terrorist attacks. 1. Unlike other tech giants, it was born on the periphery of the US empire in the 1910s: in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Its founders were born in St. Thomas the Virgin Islands, just a short trip away from Little Saint James island later owned by Jeffrey Epstein (marked on the pic)

Glad to see my NYT essay triggering the neoliberal contingent. Evidence of wrong claims so far: zero. 1/4 Even on libraries, what a cheap shot! Compare the results of decades of defunding & privatizing public libraries in the US (where one company, Library Systems & Services, runs the country's THIRD largest library system) with Europe's pro-library & pro-public policy... 2/4

I'll have more to say about the links between neoliberalism and solutionism in the forthcoming book. For now, let me share a few quick observations (some fo them resurface in my latest NYT piece on neoliberalism and A.G.I.-ism): 1/6 a) At first, it might seem that the long-running neoliberal efforts to privatize sectors such as education, transportation, and healthcare have no match in the digital economy. Here, the private sector has run the show almost from day one, with little left to privatize. 2/6

Since my New Left Review critique of "techno-feudalism" is paywalled, here's a quick thread summarizing the key arguments of this very long 38-page essay 1/9 I argue that the debate over neo-/ techno-"feudalism" is an oddity for the left. It only appears reasonable because of the unresolved tensions over (economic) exploitation vs. (extra-economic) appropriation in Marxist theory. Those tensions surfaced in the Brenner Debate. 2/9

You know what was fully decentralized, with workers owning the means of subsistence and everyone's place in the political and economic order completely overdetermined by their social standing? Feudalism. Look it up. 1/5 Web3 utopia of "decentralization = emancipation" rests on a flawed assumption about power. MANY sources of decentralized privately-owned infrastructural power ***are not necessarily more emancipatory*** than ONE source of privately-owned centralized power. 2/5

Thread on Web3.
In 1991 Albert O. Hirschman published a great book, The Rhetoric of Reaction, which outlined three common critical narratives in response to social change & social transformation. With Hirschman, we can identify three types of critiques of crypto/Web3... 1/6 1. Perversity: The solution will make the problem worse (e.g. financialization)
2. Futility: The solution won't work (e.g. DAOs won't replace firms)
3. Jeopardy: The solution will undo some other accomplishment (e.g. designed/tokenized incentives will undermine solidarity) 2/6

Today, I got an interesting first-hand experience with how the crypto land/cabal deal with its critics. 1/5 On Jan 10, I got a DM from Danny O'Brien, whom I've never met but interacted with online. Danny, having spent many years at EFF, now works for @FilFoundation - a Web3/crypto project. Danny asked to clarify some things we were debating on Twitter; I sent him a long message. 2/5

I'm no publicity genius but it's obvious that, in announcing it ahead of time, people pushing Web3 have screwed it up already. 1/4 Big Tech of the older generation didn't bet anything on the "Web 2.0" label. They did their thing without any big ideological framework; saying "tech is good" was enough. "Web 2.0" was something that O'Reilly stuck on them, to sell conferences and books. 2/4

Another thread on Web3 and its lack of imagination. So: I do pride myself on being one of the first to publicly and loudly insist on the centrality of data to the Web 2.0 model of accumulation (e.g. see the Al Jazeera documentary we've done in 2015) aljazeera.com/program/rebel-… 1/13 The goal of that early critique was to show that Web 2.0 firms shouldn't usurp our institutional imagination: another, more progressive political & infrastructural arrangements around data were possible. Public policy to realize them was missing - something we had to change! 2/13

Two things on the "public goods" discourse of Web 3. First, if we accept that "public goods" can be provided by private actors, then Web 2.0 is/was all about public goods (search, email, soc networking are free, whatever data they suck in). 1/2 Second, the ease with which Web3 crowd accepts that "public goods" are to be privately funded is surely the consequence of them growing up in "there is no alternative"/"capitalist realist" age; they can't really conceive of non-market/non-private models of service provision. 2/2