Silicon Valley’s Class War and the New Defense-Industrial Complex, w/ Max Read
For months, I’ve been a bit tortured over the storm clouds I see forming and have tried to give coherence to it in an essay I’ve been working on. The non-dramatic version is that I see a wicked convergence of Silicon Valley billionaires and the defense industry that is going to rain death upon the world and soak the American public for all it’s worth in the process (a little dramatic, I guess).
To explore this space further and preview my dystopian thesis with someone who gets both tech and politics, I invited Max Read on to my most recent livestream to discuss.
We talk about Zuckerberg’s reactionary turn. How DOGE is a fairly boring tool of class war—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to cut back on the technocratic class that keeps monopoly capital in check with regulations. The grift of crypto and why the “strategic crypto reserve” is basically just a way to give Elon/Andreeson types an exit while the American people hold the bag. And I float my argument that the Palantir-Anduril-SpaceX-OpenAI cartel makes both a more expansive national security state and World War III more likely, maybe inevitable.
This was a really fun convo with a really smart guy (and a great newsletter writer).
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