“Forgetting extermination is part of extermination”
― Jean Baudrillard, 1981, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 62
A month after the annual low in the global North’s bipolar oscillation of light, Blue Monday, the annual low in the bipolar oscillation of our collective affect, coincided by cruel fate with Trump’s Nerd Reich rally, so attaining a new level of P(doom).12 This also served to accentuate those other bipolarisations: of outlook and prospect.
The whitepilled,3 and all those on the guest lists in the glamourweave4 of the Trumpman Show —in the entitled embrace of fictitious capital in the capital of fiction, those hodling5 to capital’s ontological swindle, those punching down to gain favour6 with (the) capital’s Administration of Vibe and their diamond handed7 clique of cruel kids8— were all believing hard enough to party, dance, and parade through the night, venturing that (the) capital’s fairy glamour would hold to spare them the long walk of shame through the wreckage of empathy and reason.
“Everywhere, across the capital, people are comparing invitations and wondering, How did that person get into that party? and, as usually follows that question, Why wasn’t I invited? As one 28-year-old conservative influencer, Xaviaer DuRousseau, tells me, ‘It’s Republican Coachella, and Donald Trump is our Beyoncé.’ (He kept his weekend organised on a colour-coded spreadsheet in intervals of 30 minutes.)” — Brock Colyar, The Cruel Kids Table, 27th January, 2025 →
For the blackpilled,9 and all those of us not on the guest list, and not on the ‘allowed list’ —or, come on, let’s just call it what it is: the wealthy, Judeo-Christian, cis-het, privileged-white-male list, that operationally constitutes the life-opportunities, right-to-choose, bodily-autonomy and qualified-as-viable-life list— this was a spectacle so gloomy that it cast a shadow over a world already shrouded in darkness. For those outside the fortifications of capital —those not fortunate enough to have won the birth lottery, those excluded by increasingly machinic shibboleths, and those already deprived of rights or living in fear of them being taken— this was a traumatic ‘teaser trailer’ from which a yet more terrible prospect loomed: being subject to the intensified whims of the necropolitical chopping block, in this, the latest season of the ongoing saga, Capital’s Punishment. The plot of which follows the persistent delegitimisation and destruction of all life deemed sub-optimal, measured as inefficiencies, or in other words, the support of whose continued existence is deemed superfluous to capital’s interests.
This, the 47th American presidential inauguration, must be viewed less as a celebration of democracy than of the rise of something else. Not a new imperialism —at least, not of a single nation-state— but a new phase in the continued yet intensifying global reign of hyper-concentrated capital. As much as Trump’s actions and rhetoric might suggest otherwise, this is not America vs the world, or Donald Trump vs Europe, or a new cold war. Rather, it is hyper-concentrated capital, vs everything else. These are companies and individuals who recognise few borders and whom we now see emboldened, reaching out across the world to openly flex their political muscle, while simultaneously sequestering themselves into increasingly fortified enclaves to worship their growing fortunes. This is not some hidden conspiracy, but an open and accelerating transferal of wealth and power.
Welcome to the era of the ‘broligarchy that break things’10 —the high priests of capital’s holy orders of ‘optimisation’ and ‘efficiency’. Set upon dismantling our world by extinguishing our ‘astronomical waste’ in order to avoid theirs,11 they seek to make us pay for what they say we owe their future. Thrusting their rockets and their compute clusters towards the rapturous ejaculation of their progeny across their cosmic light-cone, they pledge to willingly sacrifice billions of ‘expendable’ human lives in our near term, in favour of the trillions of lives they predict in their longterm. Dissatisfied with the wealth they can possibly accumulate here, they now speculate in the off-world futures market, our lives as their stake.1213
Here, given command of a podium adorned with the seal of the president of the United States of America and in view of billions, was it really so surprising that the world’s greediest man —walking nexus of hyper-concentrated capital, arch bishop of the TESCREALites,1415 and newly appointed ‘Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War’1617— would perform to the crowd an entirely unambiguous Sieg Heil, which, after turning to the flag, he then repeated “for emphasis and clarity”?18 Or that he later denied its symbolism?
Under Musk and his billionaire class’s administration of vibes —their algorithms and their influencer proxies within Platform Capitalism1920— a growing number of people now acknowledge or respect the terrible hauntology of this forbidden sign far less than they believe in the promise of a return to the misty-eyed myth of a once-great America —Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, or England, take your pick of countries increasingly gripped by populism, the resurgence of right-wing nationalism, and an increasingly comfortable embrace with the necropolitics of profit over life.
There are also those who, on behalf of these fascism revivalists, now troll social media discussions pertaining to Musk’s performance of this gesture by posting photographic ‘evidence’ of countless famous others allegedly pictured striking a similarly straight armed pose —when we all understand perfectly well that the context of a podium, and the sharp and stiff manner in which that specific right arm extension is reached, alters its symbolism entirely.
Sometime, in the latter half of 1944, the Nazi occupation forces took my paternal grandfather from his home in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam to a labour camp in Germany. My father had been born just a year or so prior, on the 27th of March 1943 —coincidentally, the very night of the audacious bombing of Amsterdam’s Civil Registry Office by the Dutch resistance in their attempt to destroy the birth records required by the Nazis to trace Jewish bloodlines.21
Months passed without my grandfather’s return or news of his fate. Fearing for her life and that of her baby son, my grandmother fled the densely populated Amsterdam in the grip of the Hunger Winter famine,22 pushing my father in his pram to her sister’s home on the North coast, a journey of roughly 80km. She later managed to escape to the UK, likely making the crossing in a small boat.
Of course, signifiers float free from their historical anchors, and become fetishised precisely because they have lost their referents. With the diminishing presence of the last remaining survivors of one lot of Nazis, there is a growing threat that the Nazi symbolism of this gesture will be lost, along with first-hand recollection of that particular slide into fascism. However, regardless of the professed intentions of those performing this gesture, whether claiming trolling or irony, it matters not one bit. If you are stood in front of an audience promoting a political platform of fascistic right-wing policies, then performing this gesture unavoidably summons the histories of genocidal erasure.
You may call it a stiff-armed salute, a roman salute, a fascist salute, a Nazi salute, a Hitler salute, a Hitlergruß, a Sieg Heil, or even an ‘awkward gesture’ of ‘heartfelt gratitude’ (really?), take whatever position you wish on the semiopolitics of this sign. Attempt to dilute its power and its significance by re-contextualising it in any way you choose. Stick it in adverts for ‘real’ men’s products: muscle cars, internet service provided by a global network of satellites, a micro-blogging platform rebranded as a strip club for trolls, for brain-interface plugs, or hair (heir?) plugs; it makes no difference. It is a symbol of horror that summons past but indelible trauma; a signifier of the subjugation, oppression and persecution of the powerless, of the conscious and the careless extermination of those deemed somehow lesser, considered subhuman and expendable by the powerful, those who consider themselves to be superhuman, who deem themselves to be somehow more. For me, its symbolic horror will remain undiminished. Its performance on a stage such as this should set the air-raid sirens blaring, announcing the arrival of fascist rule.
Yet, again, we wait. We wait for them to ascend to the podium in knee-high boots and a toothbrush moustache, before we willingly recognise and actively resist the fascistic forces dominating our world.
The differing familial links between Musk and myself to opposing sides of the history of oppression2324 signified by this gesture, clearly evokes in us profoundly different psychological and emotional responses. However, I would contest that the hauntology of this sign and the historic referent it signifies for both of us is one and the same. He and I just feel very differently about that which it summons.
Since Musk’s repeated rendition of it, performance of this previously verboten gesture has rippled through those on the Right like a fashwave25 at a klan rally.26 Eager participants include UK far-right, face-in-the-hole clergyman Calvin Robinson —always piteously desperate for attention— and wandering-penal-colony Steven K. Bannon himself. The politics of those who have now since summoned the ghosts from centuries of genocide by raising a stiff arm and striking the pose of the fascist salute, could hardly have confirmed its symbolism more profoundly unless Hitler had risen from the grave to perform it himself.
Responding to historical comparisons in the wake of his performance, Musk later tweeted the following:
“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The 'everyone is Hitler' attack is sooo tired.”
In performing a Nazi salute while standing upon the presidential podium, a privilege for which he paid 270 Million USD, while perched atop the other platform for which he paid 9 Billion USD, while crowned by the eye-wateringly high maintenance27 despotic-halo of his 7,000 Starlink satellites in low-earth orbit,28 Musk was not signalling a slide into fascism and tech-oligarchy. Rather, this congregation of the greediest men in the world —of the centibillionaire club— around its most powerful throne, had been convened to belatedly celebrate their coronation.
“Neoliberal rationality redefines all social relations in terms of market transactions and competition. Politics becomes subordinated to the requirements of capital, leaving little room for alternative forms of collective life.” — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, 2015, p. 55
Evident in the grimace of furious conviction upon Musk’s face as he performed his Nazi salute, he is relishing this moment. Yet, what Musk the megalomaniac wants most is to upstage everyone; to make the inauguration about Elon. The kind of supremacy in which Elon believes above all others is Elon Supremacy.29 This was not a slip of the mask. This was a display of power.
Just as the aforementioned trolls had, Musk pointed to other political figures, like Macron, making similar gestures. Yet, unsurprisingly none of those slapped their chest and raised a stiff and extended right arm in quite this way. Moreover, not only does the conviction and sharp form of Musk’s particular execution of it align far more emphatically with its symbolic root, so too, it would seem, do Musk’s politics —and the parties he chooses to support in service of maximising his power.3031 The point here, however, is that with this performance Musk parades his impunity from the consequences of his actions and his immunity to critique.
Such impunity is, of course, by no means without precedent. When it comes to Western corporations and their CEOs supporting fascism and its operations, IBM’s supply and maintenance of the Hollerith machines critical to the Nazi’s collection and cataloging of Jewish population data across occupied Europe —throughout the entirety of WWII32— proved that such association, endorsement, or even enabling of atrocity has very little impact within capitalism on reputation or business success.
Not only has the machinic dissemination of information —through the Advertising Industrial Complex and Platform Capitalism’s manipulation of opinion, belief and desire— evolved radically since then, these changes, combined with vastly higher concentrations of capital, arguably afford new degrees of impunity. This unprecedented impunity is underscored by the continued supply of arms for Israel’s genocide in Gaza from Western nation states and arms manufacturers and other critical support from Western corporations, many of whom, along with many other Western corporations, continue to do business in and with Russia —prolonging Putin’s rule and funding his war machine as it continues to pummel Ukraine. Moreover, just as Trump’s impunity to serial felonies and Zuckerberg’s evasion of all responsibility for Facebook’s proven societal harms have unequivocally demonstrated, Musk and his (centi)billionaire class can do whatever the hell they wish,33 even when —especially when— at the very highest seats of power.
Comparisons between Musk and Goebbels34 may ring true. Yet, however much we might smirk at a projection of ‘Heil Tesla’35 on the exterior of one of his factories —and the suggestion that this is where he makes his ‘swasti-cars’— this will not redistribute the wealth of the world’s richest man. The ongoing precipitous fall in the Tesla stock price, and consequently in Musk’s personal net value, will undoubtedly hurt. His overinflated net worth is, after all, a critical aspect of his overinflated ego within the single-player-game quest he believes he is playing.
Choosing to boycott one particular billionaire’s products, even to deface them, will surely make us feel good.36 Yet, even if the Tesla stock price fell to zero, this is still not a redistribution of wealth, rather a devaluation of the assets Musk still owns. Protest and action against Musk and his brands are to be encouraged and admired. Yet we must not indulge in a bourgeoise conceit akin to believing that coordinating our wardrobes —to all wear pink jackets— to hear Trump’s address to a joint session of congress37 will turn the tide of inequity. To somehow force billionaires to stop eating up all of the assets and resources we will need to find ways of actually redistributing wealth more fairly.3839
Moreover, for critical comparisons to monstrous fascist acts and figures to pose any real reputational risk, we would need to live in societies not so completely inured40 to the routine delivery of systemic capitalistic, fascistic, patriarchal and colonial violence upon sections of the population today.41 In a world increasingly polarised by the tools and platforms owned by the very same concentrations of capital currently backing and enabling genocides and heinous oppression, reputational risk from such comparisons quickly falls away. It then approaches zero due to the increasingly powerful and effective mobilisation of right wing influence42 and their attenuations of the Tyranny of the Recommendation Algorithm —as its promotion of right wing views and censure and suppression of dissenting voices becomes ever more pervasive and unabashed.
“The old order has disappeared, and with it the traditional forms of political subjectivity. Capital now circulates through a network of institutions that are themselves subsumed into the logic of accumulation.” — Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 2000, p. 27
Anti-woke rhetoric claims that detaching our arguments from the present by historicising gestures like Musk’s salute leaves our arguments seeming, well, detached from the present. The counter argument being that it is critical we recall the chain of signification to the horrors of the past that is baked into the language of oppression and that we not cede an inch of the territory of inalienable rights to the attacks from the right. This is the culture war in which we are embroiled and unsurprisingly, it seems detachment from the past is precisely what Musk seeks. In a subsequent interview at an AfD rally in Germany, he declared:
“There is too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. Children shouldn’t be guilty for the sins of their parents.”43
It might have been possible to take this statement in good faith were Musk not so demonstrably keen on re-enacting the causes of “past guilt”. Were he not on a self-professed crusade to eradicate what he has termed “the woke mind-virus” and to do so by delegitimising and attempting to remove individual rights rather than bolstering them —as his gleeful cancellation of DEI policies throughout the federal government and censure of terms considered “too woke” illustrates, and as his estranged transgendered daughter, Vivian Wilson, would surely attest.
Exactly what era is it that the Right’s nostalgia yearns for a return to? The post-war era up until the early 1970s, the so-called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’, perhaps? After all, it is apparently the ‘invigorating’, radical shakeup inflicted upon society by WWII that Musk claims his destruction of the federal government is supposed to replicate. The economic boom in this period was dependent upon many factors, significant among them, the higher taxation of top earners. While the top marginal rate of tax was at points above 90% —double today’s rates— this is somewhat misleading, and further complicated by lower rates of tax on capital gains then than now. That said, wealthy individuals in the US and the UK certainly paid a greater portion of their income in taxes then than they do now —even when considering all forms of taxation. However, a fairer distribution of wealth will obviously require new taxes on standing concentrations of wealth, not merely higher taxation on the incomes flowing into them.
Crucially, as the economist Gary Stevenson explains so well,444546 the greater the inequity the more intensely the forces of capital accelerate towards ever higher levels of inequity. Explained in the simplest terms, within capitalism as it is currently configured, those holding extreme concentrations of capital will inevitably acquire an ever greater share of the available assets, raising the price of assets ever further beyond the reach of the average worker and leaving them paying ever higher rents on ever more assets to these same concentrations of capital. Clearly this is a self-compounding and extremely vicious cycle that accelerates towards exponentially rising inequity.47
“If you’re Rishi Sunak and your wealth is growing at 5% in an economy that’s only growing at 1%, where do you think that wealth is coming from? These guys are fucking eating you. They are eating you. They will own your houses. They will own your kids’ houses. That is what is going to happen. … The truth, is this gets worse; the economic situation gets worse, and worse, and worse, and worse. Because the inequality is getting worse. Most people believe, and because the media says, it’s a recession, and the recession is one year, two years. It’s not one year, two years, it’s permanent… it’s not even permanent, it’s worsening. If most people in this country understood that, they would not accept it.” — Gary Stevenson, 23rd February, 202548
Fully aware of this trajectory, our right to protest and our ability to resist have been almost entirely foreclosed. The growing influence from the hyper-concentrated (Network) state4950 of capital increasingly shapes our economies, our democracies, and our desires, opinions and beliefs. This makes the chances of a return to anything like the post-war boom or post-war wealth redistribution, ever more remote. Anyone paying the slightest attention to the actions taken so far by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) —a name that evokes images of trains full of ‘inefficiencies’ being transported to some awful fate— might quite reasonably conclude that it is a return to the WWII period itself that is the target destination here, this time by inflicting the ‘final solution’ through ‘total war’51 upon those scapegoated as inefficiencies to deflect attention from the billionaires.
For all their apparent yearning for an imagined lost glory, alt and far right movements do not wish for the restoration of a genuine past; rather, they revel in cynicism while simultaneously appropriating not merely the forbidden symbols and insignia of power but the long discredited attitudes and behaviours associated with them. In adopting these they assume a privileged and elevated status through a return to previously taboo oppressions and the persecution of others —in other words, the status of the bully and their gang of sycophants. The right’s repetition of these behaviours and attitudes further detaches them from their historical precedents, further dissolving their original meaning and draining them of critical energy.
It is precisely the dissolution of referential anchor points, this embrace with the annihilation of meaning, that empowers reactionary spectacle. In the detachment of signs from their meaning, entire histories of violence become aesthetic raw material to be marshalled in the creation of spectacle. Musk’s salute was not the first time, nor will it be the last time that the Right resurrects forbidden symbols, acts, behaviours, and attitudes, to then reclaim and repurpose them as ‘badges of honour’.52
It is no coincidence that, in their embrace of terms of condemnation —such as ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘classist’, ‘transphobic’, ‘homophobic’, or ‘fascist’, assigned to those engaging in oppressive and abhorrent behaviours and attitudes— the Right are mirroring the very détournement achieved by the minorities they target and seek again to oppress. Whereas marginalised communities have reclaimed discriminatory slurs once directed at them and inverted these as terms of empowerment to resist and overturn oppression, the Right now perversely mimics this act, reclaiming the labels assigned to them when guilty of oppressive acts or language, similarly endeavouring to invert their meaning as a way to reassert power and reclaim their habits of oppression —while feeling good about themselves.
Reporting for NY Magazine on the parties in the capital for Trump’s inauguration, in a piece titled, The Cruel Kids Table, Brock Colyar powerfully captures this ‘vibe shift’ among a ground-swell of hyper-online, newly emboldened young conservatives.
“Six months into Biden being president, I was like, I can’t fucking do this anymore,” says a 19-year-old New Yorker who once quite literally had blue hair and attends Marymount Manhattan, which he describes as “75 percent women and 23 percent trannies.” He had supported Biden, but “I hate watching the things I say. I took a much farther horseshoe around this time.” Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curl('') told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say “faggot” and “retarded.” — Brock Colyar, The Cruel Kids Table, 27th January, 2025 →
In this brilliant piece, Colyar accompanies the influencer, Arynne Wexler, as she mixes with those celebrating both Trump’s victory and their new found license to be mean and proud —a license they clearly believe his ascension and the lurch to the right that secured it has afforded them.
When I first reached out to Wexler, for example, asking to talk about her weekend plans for the inauguration, she wrote back, “Let’s do it. Full transparency, I think ‘pronouns’ are ‘retarded.’” She asked me to tell my readers that. “Tomorrow, we’re going to have images of them rounding up illegals and deporting them. That’s exciting,” she said another time, cackling.
Sure enough, the so-called “illegals” were, and continue to be, “rounded up”. On the 18th of February, 2025, the White House’s official X account tweeted a film showing people loaded onto this administration’s first deportation flight. The text in the tweet : “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊”, clearly urges their twitter followers to turn up the volume to ensure they derive the maximum ASMR53 thrill from the sound of the unfeasibly heavy chains with which —as is the main focus of the film— these first deportees were shackled at their ankles and wrists, prior to boarding the plane.54 A little over 2 weeks later, and the tweet had over 100 million views and nearly 100 thousand likes.
As we have seen, the Right afford themselves a growing license to indulge in both acts and language of oppression —ranging from casual racism to outright genocide and ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, these self professed “free speech fundamentalists” promise harsh prison sentences or deportation for those who dare to practice their right to free speech by protesting against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, also promising to defund any institution that abides such acts of dissent. It must also be noted that the US is by no means alone in the increasingly authoritarian suppression of the right to protest within Western democracies.
Regardless of Musk’s intentions, it is impossible for anyone, let alone the man hoarding more of the available wealth than any other —the alpha centibillionaire with his global network of courtiers— to perform such a gesture on such a stage without normalising the symbolism of its original form. In so doing, he provides a permission structure for those who prescribe to the set of beliefs invoked by it (then or now), a tacit endorsement, signalling that these beliefs may once again be paraded openly, without regard for the violence they inflict or for fear of reputational fallout.55 While the impunity Musk parades here is by no means evenly distributed amongst his followers, it nonetheless moves the Overton Window of socially acceptable behaviour and attitudes. After all, the reign of macro-fascism is brought into the world through the acceptance of countless prior micro-fascisms. These micro-fascisms are now machinically automated, operating on a global scale at a rate beyond human parsing.
“Those who have run out of holy spirit speak with mechanical tongues.” — Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity
This permission structure —for the dismissal of reality, and of history, the relentless attempt to detach symbols and signs from their chain of signification— is not limited to the ideological sleight-of-hand favoured by the political Right. It is also precisely the operative affect of the output of next-token prediction machines (LLMs and other ‘generative AI’). Consumption of the products of these machines deposits a residue of distrust, that lingers as an after-image of suspicion, similarly untethering all that is seen through it from that which it signifies.
In other words, these machines operate not only to render meaningless output, but their output also operates to render all other output meaningless. The total erosion of trust, the delegitimisation of any authoritative source of knowledge free from attenuations that align it with the interests of capital, is the state towards which the operations of these machines propel us. This is why their arrival coincides with escalating attacks on authoritative sources like Wikipedia —the last remaining sources that threaten their capital-based legitimacy, and against which their output may be easily discredited. It is this same erasure of trust that lies at the heart of the culture war and by extension of Musk’s DoGE operations, specifically in his scattershot accusations of illegitimacy and fraud.
This is the intended destination towards which Post Truth was always headed. Once one reaches absolute North, the direction North itself no longer exists —its opposite, South, lies in every direction. Similarly, once everything is utterly delegitimised, once everything is tainted with the after-image of suspicion, everything can be accused of being fraudulent, the truly illegitimate and the truly fraudulent no longer exist and their opposites, legitimacy and authenticity can be said to lie in every direction.56
The likes of Donald Trump, right-wing shock jocks and the right-wing press have long performed this same excretion of the residue of distrust that seeks to poison the info-sphere with a contagious after-image of suspicion. This is not something they hide, as was made abundantly clear in Bannon’s infamous call to “flood the zone with shit”. The fact is, many, if not the majority of Trump’s declarations, like the notion that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “eating the dogs”, or that COVID can be cured by injecting disinfectant, are operationally indistinguishable from the bullshit pouring from next-token prediction machines —advising users to eat a rock a day or to use glue to prevent cheese from sliding off their pizza.57 Indeed, these machines constitute the zone-filling machinic instrumentalisation of this delegitimising operation.
The departure here is one of scale, power and control over the tools of cultural production. No matter how many DoGE Youth Influencers they enlist, by far the most potentially far-reaching new weapon in the fascist’s arsenal, are these prediction machines —spewing their delegitimising excretions at unprecedented scale.58
What is more, the operations of the machines of predictive capitalism attempt to reduce all relations to machinic predictions, leaving the world trapped and entirely subsumed within the after-image of suspicion deposited by them. The legitimacy of everything within the digital realm is then flattened. The complexity and nuance of human expression, curation and connection, replaced by machinic prediction, algorithmically computed according to the necropolitics of profit over life.
Actual human creators of digital content are now faced with an impossible CAPTCHA: having to prove to their audience that neither they nor their content are AI generated.5960 At this point, outside of contextual cues of trust and authority, everything online can now be presumed equally legitimate and illegitimate because everything has been rendered illegitimate by this indelible after-image of suspicion. It is through this haze of illegitimacy that Musk can tell Joe Rogan’s audience that “social security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” —the full interview received 10 million views in its first 5 days, the brief clip of his false social security claim spread even more widely.6162
Soon after the interview aired, Musk’s DoGE began its dismantling of social security.6364 It should be noted that Musk has no problem whatsoever with actual Ponzi schemes, like Dogecoin, or the failed $Trump coin65 and any and all other crypto rackets. Of course, Trump then announces the founding of a ‘strategic crypto reserve’66 which will inevitably result in public money propping up these actual Ponzi schemes. The obvious difference being, however, that these actual Ponzi schemes will benefit a few already extremely wealthy people, rather than, you know, people who cannot afford healthcare, basic comforts, or this season’s fashionable luxury: fresh produce. It is all so *predictable*.
Early generative models mostly exposed the average blur of countless opinions within the distribution captured in their large-scale theft of data from the internet. Overturning every inconvenient truth, every ideologically contrary opinion, and every counterfactual entry held within such bottom-up, large-scale datasets through top-down, small-scale patches, corrections, and guardrails was always going to be a Sisyphean task.67 More recently, however, a ‘value-shift’ constituting a growing right-leaning bias is becoming noticeable.68 This is likely due to increasing use of synthetically generated data and the increasing test-time compute (reinforcement learning) applied on top of the pre-training compute. Simply put, new techniques in the development of these prediction machines, are facilitating the growing imposition of the ideology of their creators within their outputs.
Suffice it to say, it is not only in the language and attitudes of the DoGE Youth Influencers, as documented in Colyar’s NY Magazine piece, that the Right are operationalising and instrumentalising the normalisation and propagation of right-wing ideology. Musk’s integration of AI into federal government systems, including AI automation of the mass firing of federal workers, is likely the tip of an extremely troubling shitberg.69 However, in the realm of machinically automated discrimination, as Cory Doctorow explored in a recent post, there may be worse to come.70
“Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations – news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment – the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life.” — Guy Debord, 1967/94, Society of the Spectacle, p. 7
In Society of the Spectacle (1967) Guy Debord argued that modern life is dominated by images and representations that continuously circulate without anchoring to a stable account of the past or a coherent vision of the future. As a result, our experience of time is flattened into a continuous present, a state in which past and future dissolve into an endless now, thus erasing the critical power of historical reference.
Within this ‘continuous present’, political actions and cultural events are experienced as isolated, transient spectacles rather than as parts of a meaningful continuum. Debord suggests that this manipulation of temporality is central to the functioning of the spectacle, which ultimately serves to maintain the status quo.
Instead of serving as a dynamic source for resistance, within the Society of the Spectacle, history becomes a static archive —one that both sides of the political spectrum mine for legitimacy. The predictably polarised reaction to the spectacle of Musk’s salute is somewhat instructive. While the left seek to recall the chains of signification to past horrors, the right embrace the detachment of signs from their referents in service of a myth based politics.
The static archive of the ‘continuous present’ is symptomatic of a deeper transformation. As Debord outlines, the spectacle has not only flattened our temporal experience but subsumed all social relations, reducing them to mere functions of image and capital. In this instance, political engagement has been reduced to the circulation of signs of power over others —MAGA hats and Nazi Salutes— all forms of resistance are ultimately co-opted by a system devoted to the endless accumulation of capital.
Once a symbol with a near universally recognised referent of atrocity the Nazi salute now circulates as an autonomous spectacle. As Baudrillard warned, the dissolution of the sign’s referent collapses meaning into the self-referential churn of simulacra, where representation no longer mediates reality but replaces it. Yet, what emerges from the current phase of capital moves beyond the collapse of meaning into simulation. It is now further (re)processed, re-digested and reconstituted into something yet more abstract: the latest phase of fictitious capital formed from the machinic blur of recommendation, of next-human-target, next-content and next-token prediction.
The result is not just a world of free-floating signs, but of infinitely recombinable, computationally flattened relations. The output of predictive capital inserts a new layer of alienation that detaches everything from everything else, forming an ever-deepening separation of irreconcilable isolation: a fractal shibboleth.71 The machinic logic of prediction does not merely accelerate the circulation of signs but strips their capacity for meaning beyond value, reducing all relations to the same operational logic of machinic selection and permutation.
This is a deepening of capital’s ontological swindle: a self-replicating process that, in its pursuit of self-maximisation, recursively reorders the world into an ever-expanding lattice of detached, differential tokens. Predictive capitalism operates through a logic of schizo-psychopathy —constantly fragmenting and recombining reality into statistical predictions. History and reality are not merely obscured in its operation but restructured as interchangeable, statistical outputs —no longer contested, only predicted in the form of tokens that valorise capital (that ‘make line go up’). As Debord might have put it, prediction is both the result and the project of the present mode of production.
So, no, Musk’s salute was not the sign of a potential slide into fascism and oligarchy; it was not an omen of things to come. It was a deafening siren announcing our current predicament. The Sieg Heil always was a Nazi victory salute and this was a victory parade.72
Yet, again, we wait. We wait for them to ascend to the podium in knee-high boots and a toothbrush moustache, before we willingly recognise and actively resist the fascistic forces dominating our world.
HODL is a cryptocurrency slang term that refers to holding a crypto coin or token for the long term. It comes from a typo in a 2013 thread titled “I AM HODLING” posted on BitcoinTalk, a cryptocurrency forum. https://www.britannica.com/money/HODL-cryptocurrency
(finance slang) The resolve or stubbornness of an investor to hold on to a financial asset despite its volatility https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diamond_hands
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responding to the ADL on twitter https://x.com/AOC/status/1881493371900113227
Though the efforts of the group of homosexual and Jewish resistance fighters was only partially successful, the destruction of 15% of the total documents held is thought to have saved many lives by preventing the Nazis from identifying Jewish bloodlines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office_bombing
Fashwave is a sub-genre and the electronic music genre, vapourwave and is complete with its own micro-sub-genre Trumpwave. https://gnet-research.org/2023/06/28/understanding-fashwave-the-alt-rights-ever-evolving-media-strategy/
Starlink’s 7,000 satellites already in orbit and plans to expand that number to 34,000, the company currently has zero competitors, with even the Chinese government scrambling to have just 600 of a planned 14,000 satellites of their own in orbit by the end of 2025. https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2024/08/china-starlink-qianfan-satellite-internet-launch-priority?lang=en
https://x.com/J_JHelin/status/1883230154828444144
https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1897116285210910807
Even outlawing billionaires entirely. Surely 100 million USD is more than enough? As for a personal wealth approaching 500 billion, the notion that would ever not damage society when the median global net worth is just 84 thousand USD with the median in the poorest countries being as low as 200 USD, is both insane and repugnant.
https://x.com/VersoBooks/status/1882969111673847810
According to research conducted by LSE, Austerity measures in the UK between 2010 and 2019, “resulted in about 190,000 excess deaths, or a 3% increase in mortality rates, including many ‘deaths of despair’.” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities/2024/06/19/the-cost-of-austerity-how-spending-cuts-led-to-190000-excess-deaths/
https://x.com/RealJakeBroe/status/1884124070817718729
Why Inequality is Ignored by Economists — Gary Stevenson
Inequality is Driving Everything — Gary Stevenson
How the Rich Get Richer — Gary Stevenson
Stevenson and others, like Grace Blakeley, argue that not only do we need to reform tax on income but to introduce a tax on extreme concentrations of wealth.
How Bad Will it Get? — Gary Stevenson
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1891922058415603980
https://x.com/RightWingWatch/status/1884682862282027026
This topsy-turvy logic that nothing can be legitimate unless everything is illegitimate, almost seems a twisted riposte to and inversion of: “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free.” — Fannie Lou Hamer, July 10, 1971 https://academic.oup.com/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/29348/chapter-abstract/244099842?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1895655463255248904
$Trump coin lost Tump’s supporters 12 billion USD https://www.uniladtech.com/news/tech-news/donald-trump-supporters-lose-12-billion-after-meme-coin-collapse-393345-20250228
https://x.com/_alice_evans/status/1884222217623597240
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881547272556777647