Not all fellow travelers are allies. And no kings means no to data center power plant schemes, AI slop, and crypto corruption.
While I think it’s great that people are actually making a fuss about the horrendous and very real horrible that Donald Trump has been connected to, I’m also cautious because palace intrigue is still in the realm of monarchy, isn’t it.
I’ve suspected that the installation of JD Vance to the VP position was always meant to lead to Donald Trump not even finishing out his term in office, and the tech tycoons using JD Vance as a faux ex-hillbilly puppet who will try to take over as a maga figure, but just like Donald Trump, as a tool of the corporate tycoons. JD Vance reportedly met with Rupert Murdoch recently in Montana. (Because of course Rupert Murdoch bought a huge estate off the Koch family, of course that’s a thing.) The problem is that JD Vance may actually be worse in some ways. He’s a follower of Curtis Yarvin and even Steve Bannon has problems with that lot, apparently some of that stuff is a bridge too far even for Steve Bannon. Perhaps JD Vance’s lack of popularity is a weakness. It’s something that immediately came up when he was chosen as a running mate, and something I’ve heard repeated by friends, family, and acquaintances, especially people in or from Appalachia. Lots of people just don’t like that snooty patooty flip-flopping tycoon funded politician.
Nevertheless and regardless of whatever, JD Vance he would be handed power and I suspect some Trump haters, like Never Trumpers and various so-called centrist liberals defending Democrats right now, may flip to Republicans once that happens, and they will join with the monarchist tech tycoons either wittingly or in some cases of course, unwittingly. It seems to me like the Abundance Agenda PR being pushed so hard has been in place to grease those wheels. That whole Abundance thing is funded and emanating from the Kochtopus after all.
Obviously truly pro-democracy people would never side with the tech monarchists of course, right? If they are cognizant at least they can’t have it both ways without bad faith. People involved with The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025 is an anti-democracy strategy), white nationalists, racist Christian nationalists, the fossil fuel industry, religious and financial cults, and various business owners and corporate industry executives who (perhaps mistakenly) think they will do very well under authoritarianism. None of these people want democracy, or want to seriously curtail it beyond recognition. But the fact that some people are actual monarchists, despite many of them saying it outright, is not something even clearly understood by the most senior Democratic party politicians at the highest levels of the party, like Nancy Pelosi and Josh Shapiro. If it were the case there’s no way the governor of Pennsylvania would be going to Trump events and relishing and welcoming these tech tycoon machinations in Pennsylvania. So I would not expect many others to realize, or perhaps care, about the issue of democracy. It’s not so much that people start out bad or are bad people, but that sometimes just anyone who gets into power has their brains changed and priorities are shifted. Activists can’t put politicians on pedestals, though some politicians are worse than others.
And it has to be stated clearly that tech tycoons pushing this data center power plant stuff are monarchists who want tech feudalism and “network states” (aka “freedom cities”: freedom in the sense of aristocratic liberty); and these network states would be basically company towns (or the coal patch villages like my grandma grew up living in) without democracy where workers are subjects and rich people are lords, like a corporate workplace 24/7. Think of it as vindictive profiteering HOAs that leverage the legal system to do debtors prison, but with much more powerful psychopaths who take over your neighborhood who are actually doing unregulated nuclear plants and stuff like that. There are tycoons who’ve laid out pretty clearly what they’re planning, and what they want to push through.
In some cases of course it’s just ignorance that will lead people to go along with a lot of this stuff. We live in media silos and info cocoons.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)
It’s rather like how people think data centers just means a quiet building with nice clean computers running inside, when what it really means is an unmitigated or even unauthorized power plant emitting air pollution, maybe even burning tires, and with noise so bad it drives people mad and vibrates houses over a mile away. There are many such examples of people signing onto things they don’t understand because they don’t really think things through or look too closely. It’s actually typical for people to not engage critical thinking and it’s a mistake to assume anyone will be informed, or even behave rationally if they are.
The bottom line is that AI boosters, and especially anyone pro-crypto is not a friend to democracy, ordinary people, or actual scientific advancement (Karen Hao and Gil Duran explain that seeming contradiction about tech tycoons). And of course, it is necessarily very difficult to form coalitions or find common ground with people who don’t care about the environment or human rights.
It’s absolutely imperative to recognize that no kings means resisting tech tycoon data center power plants, AI boosters, and corrupt cryptocurrency. These issues are inextricably linked.