Skimming Karp’s screed it stuck me once again that our feral elite would kill us off without a thought as they transform the US government from being run by humans to being run by algorithmic computations. And they don’t seem to care that we know it. These AI systems are designed to maintain the status quo and power of the financial and tech elite by strengthening the control and surveillance capabilities of the state. It’s illustrative that they don’t want to drown that particular governmental function in a bathtub.

Of course, The Technological Republic, a ponderous manifesto, similar in a lot of ways to Atlas Shrugged, is set against a rapidly deteriorating planet, riven with wars, environmental disasters, political upheaval and monumental inequality, which raises the possibility that our elite are actively trying to cull the population. Watching Trump careen across the domestic and foreign affairs landscape with his massive indifference to collateral damage certainly lends credence to my conspiracy.

In The Peripheral, William Gibson described a fictional situation in the near future where all of the problems we confront now have produced a jackpot, killing off much of the world’s population leaving a kleptocratic elite ruling society.

Hmm, sounds vaguely familiar.

Techno-fascists like Karp, Bezos, Theil, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. are driving us headlong into our very own jackpot, while plotting to abscond to their fortified compounds in Hawaii and New Zealand and ride out the turmoil. But can they really trust their pilots and ex-Seals to protect them when the shit hits the fan? Then there’s the fact that the Hamptons are not a defensible position. And neither are Hawaii, New Zealand or Silicon Valley, for that matter.

Mark Blyth, a Scottish-American political scientist and a professor of international political economy at Brown University, says that “It seems that the folks with the pitchforks have figured out where the Hamptons are and it’s not a defensible position after all. In response, the folks in the Hamptons have done what threatened elites always do in such situations, they hire mercenaries, or as we call them today, more private security. The problem with such a move is that you can’t buy a private solution (build walls) for a public problem (rising anger). Finding Elysium or an island off Fiji run on Bitcoin, are not viable exits. Eventually, those on top need to recognize that their fates are not separable from those of their fellow citizens, and they are your fellow citizens, not a threat to be managed. Throughout history, most elites have failed to recognize this and things get worse before they get better. Let’s hope that the smart money in the Hamptons gets the memo this time around.”

Hate to be a Debbie-Downer but I’m pretty sure that our feral elite definitely did not get the memo. And, that, judging by their intellectual spewing, they plan to develop AI to indoctrinate, surveil, track and murder opponents instead of changing their sociopathic behavior. Historically this is the behavior of elites in the late stages of empire collapse, where they double down on the things that have worked in the past while increasing repression. It never works, but, for our feral elite, hope springs eternal, and they are banking on drones and robots to protect them from populist anger.

Update: Drones are a low-tech, asymmetrical force-multiplier, and I’m surprised that some aggrieved citizen has not flown a Shahed 136 into Jeff Bezos’s mega-yacht, or Musk’s cyber-truck, or Sam Altman’s Stargate.

Just wondering?