The tech “libertarian” right turn

I understand the confusion of people surprised to see many tech “libertarians” have been making a turn toward far right authoritarianism. A few things to help make sense of this:

---

Understand the split between anarchists and libertarians in the United States.

Anarchists’ opposition to power & authority includes an opposition to the power of wealth.

The libertarian tradition embraces private property emphatically — it regards anything less than total control of one’s property as a violation morally equivalent to violent bodily assault. “I created that wealth with my time and effort, so taking any portion of it treats me as a slave.” Though libertarians regard private property as logically prior to the state, they have shown again and again that they are eager to support exercise of power by authoritarian states to enforce it.

---

Many American “libertarians” are fascists & white nationalists engaged in misdirection. For example, I have an old post cataloguing how Ron Paul was never really a libertarian, but loved misleading people into thinking he was.

---

Sincere bonehead contrarian libertarians have a tendency to make the switch.

Partly it is just going from one contrarian form of zealotry to another. Partly it is an easy drift from “I am awesome, and I would prosper were I not handicapped by the state” to “my people are awesome, and we would dominate were we not handicapped by liberalism”.

---

Neoreactionaries — a distinctly nerdy strain of far right ideology — have a fantasy of authoritarian minarchy. They argue that the state per se is not the problem; they fault the liberal state as “too big”. If the government is unencumbered by due process and regulatory responsibility, they believe, its ruthlessness allows it to be “small” so that in practice citizens are more “free”.

They misread Singapore as embodying their dream. “You might get the death penalty for spitting on the sidewalk, but if you steer clear of obvious mistakes and political dissent, the government stays out of your way. There is so little regulation of economic freedom!”

---

Libertarianism has a crisp simplicity and superficial elegance which appeals to the Engineer Mindset common in the culture of the “tech” industry. But libertarianism is not the only facile “rational” simplification of a complex domain which plays to that frame of mind.

It also produces notorious crackpottery like 9/11 Truthers: “jet fuel cannot melt steel beams, QED!” Fashy “logic” is full of exactly that sort of move:

• pseudoscientific racism and sexism
• Clash Of Civilizations claims about the superiority of Rational Western Culture
• the Fremen Mirage

---

Silicon Valley culture understands itself as standing at the top of a competitive meritocracy with authoritarian & fashy implications:

• we defeated supposed experts in their domains because we are smarter and better — competition is the truth of the world which reveals inborn excellence
• it is good when this concentrates resources in our hands, because it empowers our efforts which make the world work better — they must rule, it is destructive when others try to “steal” their deserved wealth and power
• our corporate organizations are Super Effective, unlike the clumsy state — democracy is stupid & inefficient, unlike heirarchical exercise of authority

(It is necessary here to caveat that the common claim “Fascism = Corporatism” is a misleading canard.)

---

Animating much of this we can see the libertarian misunderstanding that “authoritarian” means a “big” state. But authoritarianism is better understood as “power unchecked by limiting institutions”, the thing these guys want for themselves, because they are so much smarter than everyone else that they will use that power well.

My trouble with Trek

Numbskull conservatives grumbling about Star Trek “going woke” can go to hell; anyone paying attention knows they don’t understand Trek.

I have the opposite problem.

The mission

A proper Trek story is a parable in which liberal-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin values prevail. (More on how that works in an earlier post.) In The Original Series, this expressed the hopes of Cold War America, countering dread that technology — in particular, nuclear weapons — would doom us all.

For a while I thought that both Discovery & Strange New Worlds Understood The Assignment:

• The pilot episode of SNW ending with Captain Pike talking down a society about to destroy itself with cold war brinksmanship could not be a more direct revival of the spirit of TOS
• The pilot episode of Discovery gave Captain Georgiou my favorite line of Trek dialogue ever: “Starfleet does not fire first”
• In Disco S3E02 “Far From Home” Tilly won over a room full of hard-bitten, hostile people from a brutal society just by relentlessly acting in good faith
• In SNW the Enterprise crew respected Hemmer’s resolute pacifism
• Disco characters called the Mirror Universe Terrans “fascists”, describing their seeming strength as “painted rust”

I could go on.

But.

The problem

It seems unmistakable that the people currently making Trek sincerly think their stories deliver the song of the liberal ethos. But more often they fumble the ball so badly that they say the opposite.

I understand why people took SNW S02E02 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” as first-rank Trek reflecting the values I am talking about … but I could not get past the Federation having regulations requiring apartheid planets.

I was thrilled when S3 of Discovery ended with the Federation refusing to compromise its values in the face of profound temptation, demaning that Osyraa must face trial if the Emerald Chain were to join the Federation. But then I was mortified that the story turned toward Captain Burnham resolving the conflict by running and punching.

SNW gave us big-hearted Dr. M’Benga as the moral center of the Enterprise crew … then revealed that he too is really good at punching … and might be a war criminal.

The TOS episode S1E11 “Arena” which introduced the Gorn was a perfect exemplar of a proper Trek story: under the pulpy action and monster costumes, we got Kirk resolving the conflict through understanding. So when SNW revisted the Gorn and portrayed them as — in the showrunner’s own words — “not every other iteration of representation of the human other in alien skin, they’re evil”, it altered not just the worldbuilding canon but reversed what a Trek story is.

And worst of all, the worldbuilding of the far future 32^nd Century revealed in Discovery is a worse betrayal than any one botched story could deliver.

Yes, the Federation retained its liberal values for centuries, despite further technological change, but the Burn curtailing space travel shattered the Federation’s strength. Progress did not progress. Humanity did not mature further. Liberal values did not prevail on the merits; the Federation’s ethos only worked under historically-contingent material conditions.

So of course Discovery ended with the Federation refusing the Progenitors’ technology, fearing that they lack the wisdom to use it without it becoming destructive.

The people making Trek cannot find it in them to portray liberalism working, even as a fantasy.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Sean Kelly on Twitter describes how the Trek parody show dodged these mistakes and made a more Trekkian statement than actual Trek has done lately:

Interestingly, the Season 3 finale of The Orville took direct aim at the idea that Star Trek’s utopian future is only possible because of the replicator, and the typically-conservative Trek fans who make the argument.

A woman from an underdeveloped planet keeps begging for replicator technology on the grounds that it would bring her planet into the same socialist utopia that the crew of the Orville enjoys, and the first officer says “You’ve basically got that backwards.” She explains that it was their socialist utopia that brought about the cooperation necessary to invent the replicator, and that had it been invented during Earth’s 20^th or 21^st centuries it wouldn’t have worked, because the rich and powerful would have hoarded the technology.

As @BoomerNiner often says, we have enough resources on the planet right now, without a replicator, to give everybody food and housing — if we wanted to. The invention of a replicator wouldn’t change that.

Zefram Cochrane, famously, tried to invent the warp drive with a profit motive — he thought he was going to get rich off the technology, and it was only the realization that we weren’t alone in the galaxy (and perhaps a few lectures from people from the future) that changed him.

But mankind wasn’t ready for all the various technologies that sprang from this revolution, which is why the Vulcans tried to keep a close eye on humanity’s entrance into the galaxy. A few years after First Contact, Earth’s government launched a probe, called “Friendship-1” that tried to give other planets the means to contact Earth.

Instead, the people the probe found reverse-engineered the antimatter technology and accidentally destroyed their planet.

The same thing happened in The Orville — early explorers, acting like missionaries, tried to bring their advanced technology to other worlds in the hope of helping people — but the technology just created conflict and ruined entire planets.

People don’t suddenly become moved to share because of abundance — Elon Musk had 44 billion dollars and he didn’t decide to share it with the world, he decided to buy Twitter with it. He has always, and will continue to, hoard his wealth for himself no matter how much he has. If Tesla invented a replicator they wouldn’t give that away to everyone for free. They’d patent it, and sell it to world governments with DRM software they could deactivate remotely if those governments didn’t pay a subscription fee.

If governments had replicators, they wouldn’t suddenly start handing out free, delicious, nutritious food to everyone — “that will collapse the economy,” they’d say. “Free food for the needy would be unfair to people who’ve been paying money for food all this time.” “How will people be motivated to work,” the Republicans would say, “if they don’t have the threat of starvation hanging over them? If everyone has enough food, how will we motivate people to join the Army?”

Even though the replicator was producing molecularly-identical food to the real thing, conservatives would insist it wasn’t “real” enough for them. “Real” beef, they’d say, demands the slaughter of an animal. Replicated beef is basically vegan. The beef industry would quickly draw battle lines with their donation money, congressmen from places like Texas would move to outlaw replicated meat from being served on the grounds that it hurts entire industries. Conspiracy theorists would insist that replicated beef is full of additives the government is trying to sneak into them to feminize men and make you sick, even though real beef is full of antibiotics and hormones. Campaign ads would show Republicans personally slaughtering cattle and gutting deer to show their commitment to only eating meat that was really alive. We’re already seeing this type of thing when, like, Cracker Barrel tries to introduce plant-based sausage that’s entirely optional to order. People freak out that you might take their meat away.

In short, inventing a replicator wouldn’t save us — right now, it’d ruin us even faster, as the amount of bounty the wealth plays keep-away with would just grow even larger and more ludicrous.

Capitalism would never allow a replicator to exist to its true potential, too many people would go broke. Replicators didn’t create the Star Trek future, the Star Trek future comes first, then replicators.

A way out

I am not the first to notice how the Federation resemble us culturally more than they should, given the radically different world of teleportation and space travel and aliens and replicators and so forth which they inhabit. Indeed, they are obsessively backward-looking — Shakespeare and baseball and Dixon Hill and so forth.

Consider also:

• They vigorously oppose gene modification, and recent shows have underlined the point
• They recoil at AI personhood, despite the ability to produce it surfacing again and again, including in recent stories

These people are kicking and scratching to avoid the transhuman change implied by their technologies.

In-universe, we can see why they make this turn. The outcomes of embracing transhuman-like change they run into during their explorations are either baffling Pure Energy Beings or nightmarish dystopias.

What if they encounter something different?

I feel certain that someone in the current Trek writers room knows their Iain M. Banks. We just got two stories about the Federation botching their encounters with Excessions! So let’s bring in another thing about the Federation:

• The Prime Directive forbids them intervening in lower-tech societies, even where they could easily correct political and material horrors

We know where Iain M. Banks’ high-tech hippie anarchist Culture stand on this stuff. When they encounter the Federation, they are gonna be pissed.

A bunch of Starfleet officers will turn coat. Do you doubt that Christopher Pike would warp back to Omelas and set things right?

Trans women in prison

Returning to an old theme, I was recently asked about whether it was “appropriate” to place a trans woman convicted of multiple rapes in a women’s prison. Even if I assume that the specifics of the instance which inspired the question were rightly reported, which is not a safe assumption given the absurd lies common among opponents of trans liberation, I have to say —

It is more appropriate for that individual to be placed in a women’s prison than it is for ...

• ... thousands of men to serve as guards in women’s prisons.
• ... prison guards of any gender to be so weakly accountable that inmates are vulnerable to rape by guards.
• ... inmates in prisons to be so poorly secured that they notoriously vulnerable to violence from other inmates including but not limited to rape.
• ... prison rape to be a routine subject of “jokes” in our society.
• ... the overwhelming majority of cis women in prison now to be placed in a women's prison, given the cruelty and counterproductiveness of even the best prison as a remedy for the things we use them for now.
• ... Ted F*@%ing Cruz to pretend he is motivated by concern for the safety of women in prison rather than motivated by pandering to transphobia for political advantage.

I hope that clarifies my position.

The Fremen Mirage

One sees this bullshit around a lot:

Historian Bret Deveraux calls shenanigans briefly in Foreign Policy and at length on his blog.

I’m choosing the Fremen — and really the Dune series more generally – to stand in for a particular set of oft-repeated historical ideas and assumptions. It is not one idea, so much as a package set of ideas — often expressed so vaguely as to be beyond historical interrogation. So let’s begin by outlining it: what do I mean by the Fremen Mirage? I think the core tenants run thusly:

• First: That people from less settled or ‘civilized’ societies — what we would have once called ‘barbarians,’ but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune — are made inherently ‘tougher’ (or more morally ‘pure’ — we’ll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.
• Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.
• Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.
• Fourth: That the consequence of the previous three things is that history supposedly could be understood as an inevitable cycle, where peoples in harder, poorer places conquer their richer neighbors, become rich and ‘decadent’ themselves, lose their fighting capacity and are conquered in their turn. Or, as the common meme puts it:

Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And weak men create hard times.

(The quote is originally from G. Michael Hopf, a novelist and, perhaps conspicuously, not a historian; one also wonders what the women are doing during all of this, but I have to admit, were I they, I would be glad to be left out too).

[⋯]

This complex of ideas is what I phrase as the Fremen Mirage, and as you might imagine from that word ‘mirage,’ there are real, gaping problems in this vision of history. I’ve picked the Fremen to stand in for this idea in part because — being a fictional people — they are unconstrained by the real world messiness of actual societies. Instead, Frank Herbert quite clearly intends the Fremen to be a sort of purified form of this trope, the hardest people from the hardest conditions; they’re even presented as being more extreme than another example of this same trope, the imperial Sardaukar, who also indulge in the same ‘hard men from a hard place’ idea. Moreover, Herbert plays out this cyclical vision of history in the books, with the going-soft (slowly) Sardaukar being no match for the hard-ways Fremen and the latter – despite a near total lack of modern military or industrial infrastructure and what should be a crippling manpower disadvantage — spreading out and defeating all of the ‘civilized’ armies they encounter (with attendant worries that they will will become ‘soft’ and thus weak, should their planet, Arrakis, be made more habitable).

Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people — say the Greeks — may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon). But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized). Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents.

The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)

[⋯]

... the idea at the core of the Fremen Mirage is that the Fremen are militarily stronger in a general sense. If I may lean on a sports analogy, we would not call a team ‘better’ if they lost 98 games but happened to win the last 2. The question is both the ratio of victories to defeats, and the impact of those results. And that’s why the march of the state and of farming is so instructive: we can see the same process repeat itself, in a wide variety of areas, over very long periods of time, with what must have been many hundreds if not thousands of small wars. And it is quite clear from that evidence, that at the dawn of civilization, it was the least Fremen societies who tended to win the most.

Bow to no one

I know that civilians complain that Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings spends half an hour delivering a succession of several endings, but I am a nerd and they are wrong and I was sure glad to have the time to regain my composure before the lights came up when I first saw The Return of the King.

(Also I hope that the people who complain about the care The Lord Of The Rings takes in closing off several characters’ story arcs at the end have learned their lesson from several recent examples of epics which were lazier on this score. But I digress.)

Because I am that kind of nerd, I have watched the writers’ & director commentary on the Extended Dance Remix home video release, and when the “you bow to no one” moment comes, Jackson says that it is probably his favorite thing in the entire film series.

Jackson does not say why, but I think I know, because it is mine too; it makes me misty every time I watch it.

Jackson committed hard to the original book’s feudal worldview. We get Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor talking about their “quality”, ferggawdsake.

And then for a single blessed minute of screen time, Jackson says hell no. Your kingly bloodline did not do this, Aragorn II Elessar Telcontar. The restoration of the line of Isuldur is not the story here. Ordinary people standing up during extraordinary circumstances saved the world.

Damm right the hobbits do not bow.

Democracy.

I quite like this video-essay on the moment ...

… but I have to caveat that it references the Fremen Mirage, a far-right aphorism which is utter BS:

Hard times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Good times create weak men
Weak men create hard times.