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Push Button Putsch - Series Introduction: The “Brain Trusters”

Dec. 25, 2024
By:
Jeremy Flores
Amber Durrell

Push Button Putsch Series

Introduction: The “Brain Trusters” 01. Models of Change 02. The Treaty of Game Theory 03. The Lights of Perverted Science Bibliography “What a hideously immoral phenomenon, you tell me. Wait a little. For here is an admirable case of time’s revenge: the egoism of command leads to its own destruction.” —Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power

In a time where far-right right political movements gain ground internationally and, as Bernie Sanders writes, “more Americans are giving up on government and democracy,” the second Trump presidency marks the final phase in a decades-long project to break up the United States and dismantle the institutions by which we safeguard human rights. Without a significant corrective factor, the void left when public governance is eliminated will “open markets” (read: open power vacuums) for incompetent oligarchs who could not compete in a properly-regulated free market to intermediate in private life via subpar “services” in the style our broken healthcare system. The functions and power of public institutions will be lost or transferred to for-profit enterprises.1 Further dereliction or abdication by political elites will smooth the path to establish this new aristocracy of the firm.2

Neoliberalism—a supposed safeguard of democracy—was insufficient to prevent or address this threat because neoliberalism preferences the market over the state to a degree that eventually destroys both. When Biden declared neoliberalism over and himself “the most progressive president since FDR,” he nevertheless prioritized subsidies for industry, indicating that the core precepts of neoliberalism remained paramount in his administration. The current “vote blue no matter who” version of the Democratic Party depended on a careful balance of similar unforced errors, deferred promises, and right-wing bogeymen to maintain relevancy.3 Now that overtly-oligarchic technologists and their toadies4 have amassed enough wealth to regulate themselves, openly claim equal footing with elected officials5, and ultimately buy the presidency while openly and brazenly threatening a civil war with “100% probability,”6 citizens must come to terms with the fact that “politics you don’t have to think about” is a myth. The following essays will offer frameworks to understand the current state of affairs.

American democracy has been hobbled by unbridled greed justified and facilitated by just such ungrounded, self-serving thought experiments.

Hannah Arendt wrote a description of a new intellectual class of pundits and technologists that rose to prominence in the wake of the Second World War. These individuals were instrumental in shaping subsequent Western thought including, among other things, the tenets of neoliberalism, the overemphasis on science entepreneurship, and the promotion of aristocratic ideals.

Arendt writes:

[T]here are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable,” but that they do not think. Instead of indulging in such an old-fashioned, uncomputerizable activity, they reckon with consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences. The logical flaw in these hypothetical constructions of future events is always the same: what first appears as a hypothesis—with or without its implied alternatives, according to the level of sophistication—turns immediately, usually after a few paragraphs, into a “fact,” which then gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculative character of the whole enterprise is forgotten. Needless to say, this is not science but pseudo-science.7

American democracy has been hobbled by unbridled greed justified and facilitated by just such ungrounded, self-serving thought experiments. Even up to the present day, similar “brain trusters” lay the intellectual groundwork and strategy to gradually dismantle democracy by bastardizing concepts from STEM, philosophy, and economics.

The basis of civilization and the foundations of social interaction across the world—the “fundamental ascendancy of power over violence”—risk being upended by these modern-day “brain trusters.”

This series, Push Button Putsch, takes its name from a related observation by Arendt: the fact that limitations in weapons technology previously served as an under-characterized “check” on would-be coupists. This check could be worked around with the use of autonomous systems, allowing an elite private faction of power to seize outsize control over civilization, pushing the world backwards into an aristocratic model of governance.

She writes:

No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers. Only the development of robot soldiers, which [] would eliminate the human factor completely and, conceivably, permit one man with a push button to destroy whomever he pleased, could change this fundamental ascendancy of power over violence.8

The basis of civilization and the foundations of social interaction across the world—the “fundamental ascendancy of power over violence”9—risk being upended by these modern-day “brain trusters”; for by what other means may the state—humanity’s greatest instrument of power—be replaced?

Compare Arendt’s observation to the rhetoric of Palmer Luckey, cofounder of defense startup Anduril. He recently stated:

Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. I think that it’s reasonable for the philosophers to degrade those people and whine about how they’re sick in the head, but society needs them .... Even if I’m sick in the head, we need people who are willing to fight for our country—and I’m not doing that directly, my life’s not on the line. You need people like me, who are sick in that way, who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence.

An ordinary citizen “enthused and excited about enacting violence on others” would have trouble showing the collectedness necessary to buy a single gun, much less be put in charge of a military project; perhaps that is why he made sure to clarify that “I’m not doing that directly.” Luckey is an expert not in the actualities of war or combat, but in taking ungrounded thought experiments to their extremes. Those who are “sick in the head” may be useful for committing genocide or other barbarisms but should not be handed the keys to national defense. Though he and other technologists insist they are simply “cold-blooded enough to think the unthinkable,” the truth of the matter is “that they do not think.”

What may very well be a forced delegitimization of the US federal government via Trump’s absurd policies and cabinet appointments is more accurately seen as the endgame of a multi-decade strategy to dismantle democracy in favor of oligarchy and aristocracy.

Luckey, who has helped “bridge[] the gap between Silicon Valley and the DoD,” and whose firm in the past few days has joined a federal bidding consortium alongside Palantir, SpaceX, and OpenAI, also recently stated that “[m]ilitary aircraft must be autonomous by default. I don’t quite fall into the ‘ban development of new manned systems’ camp, but America must take advantage of our technological strengths. Assume every new-start is robotic unless and until the requirements force otherwise.” Trae Stephens—cofounder of Anduril, its executive chairman, and partner at Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund—is now being considered for the Deputy Secretary of Defense role; Kathleen Hicks, the person currently filling that position, recently launched the Replicator Initiative under the Biden administration, an AI-focused military strategy where autonomous systems, like those Anduril specializes in, are to take a primary role in our general defense strategy.10

These concerns become all the more pertinent given recent remarks by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who just days ago stated that “[w]e are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years” and that we must “shift to a wartime mindset”: “If we don’t spend more together now [on defense] to prevent war, we will pay a much, much, much higher price later to fight it.” If, indeed, NATO allies must make due preparation,11 then we must be exceedingly careful in the selected strategies12, from the technologies chosen to those who are entrusted to make them to those who are entrusted to control them13; otherwise, in defending against threats foreign, we risk succumbing to threats domestic. How fitting it would be if the “retvrn” to Greco-Roman “ideals” were occasioned by a Trojan horse.

The following pieces will examine how a minority power faction with an aristocratic aim could work toward the successful takeover or dissolution of the democratic state; its motivations and techniques via the philosophical and technical assumptions of neoliberalism; and its relations to modern technology projects such as AI and their implications. What may very well be a forced delegitimization of the US federal government via Trump’s absurd policies and cabinet appointments is more accurately seen as the endgame of a multi-decade strategy to dismantle democracy in favor of oligarchy and aristocracy. The end product of the “brain trusters” is Trump, and so their work must be re-examined from first principles.

  1. As Sam Altman recently stated: “the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration.” This itself is simply a recapitulation of longstanding agendas in Silicon Valley; for example, in 2017, Michael Moritz “mused” in a letter to potential Sequoia LPs about “the potential to experiment with new kinds of governance.”↩
  2. As one article recently put it: “The future belongs to American companies, not necessarily to Americans. The AI revolution is lifting the market value of US businesses, but history tells us it may not do the same for workers.”

    This may explain the unyielding gerontocracy which has seized control of United States politics. The Democrats, for example, just days ago elected a seventy-four year old recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer to be the top party member in the House Oversight Committee.↩
  3. Worse still, the Biden administration has gone out of their way to support the technocracy at the expense of the public. Sam Altman, for example, has been raising hundreds of billions of dollars from foreign investors for a secret project dubbed “InfraCo” and has a “personal backchannel[]” with US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

    Further, as a scathing analysis found, “what National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan calls ‘a strong, resilient, and leading-edge techno-industrial base’ capable of ‘usher[ing] in a new age of the digital revolution’” ultimately “eclipsed the incipient Build Back Better project of constructing an electoral coalition of low-wage service-sector workers, public-sector unions, and immigrants.” In the end, “Bidenomics became[] the embrace of national-security justifications for public expenditure; the celebration of technology and its attribution to entrepreneurs; the quieting of campaigns to build political power capable of raising the rate and shaping the distribution of taxes; the return of austerity to city budgets; and the pursuit of border security.”↩
  4. In the 2024 election, Andreessen Horowitz was connected to both major candidates. Ben Horowitz recently stated that Harris “has been a great friend” to he and his wife for over ten years, and further that “[s]he’s also been a friend to the firm in our early days, helping with several events at my house.”

    Like other figures in Silicon Valley, Andreessen also has an interest in Julius Evola, “a leading theorist of esoteric racism” in the lead-up to the war; his work was read by Mussolini “with enthusiasm” who “provisionally adopted it as the semi-official line of the regime.” (Cf. Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism, p. 291.) Countless Americans lost their lives defeating those powers and those bankrupt ideas; nevertheless, it seems that the American public no longer has any choice but to select from among the “friend[s]” of their ideological descendants: individuals who cite figures like Evola and Filippo Marinetti and are directly connected with their contemporaries such as the neoreactionaries Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin.↩
  5. There are countless examples of various technocratic leaders directly and via their firms making comments and taking actions to this effect; to choose just one, the disgraced founder of StabilityAI recently stated: “All governments will be run by AI in a few decades anyway.”↩
  6. Perhaps as a preview of the counterforce the public may expect to find among our leadership, Supreme Court Justice Jackson just days ago made her Broadway debut; Justice Sotomayor, meanwhile, earlier this year stated: “There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried .... There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”↩
  7. Arendt, On Violence, p. 6-7. Emphasis in original.↩
  8. Arendt, On Violence, p. 50.↩
  9. In Arendt’s constructions, she contrasts violence with power, the latter being a revocable lease of authority: “When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’ we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name.” (Cf. Arendt, On Violence, p. 44.) That is, military automation provides a viable path for elites to materially eliminate the idea—the promise for some, the threat for others—of consent of the governed altogether.↩
  10. To put this into the most-concrete terms possible, Trump is now threatening to invade Mexico, annex Canada, take over Greenland, and reappropriate the Panama Canal. As others theorize about the current period generally: “Getting people used to mass death is a prelude for getting them to accept mass murder [] anywhere in the world, including the United States.” Nevertheless, “The Pentagon is moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously decide to kill humans” as of last year; more recently, Joe Lonsdale and Palmer Luckey have made statements that some have taken as a “willingness to explore the concept of fully autonomous weapons.” In any case, “[a]ctivists and human rights organizations have long attempted to establish international bans on autonomous lethal weapons, but the U.S. has consistently resisted these efforts.”

    “The Solution,” a satirical poem about the Sovietization of East Germany by Bertolt Brecht, all too seriously suggests where this could all be going: “...The people / Had forfeited the confidence of the government / And could win it back only / By redoubled efforts. // Would it not be easier / In that case for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”↩
  11. Their edge, of course, may be stymied by the AI “brain trusters” themselves in ways reminiscent of, though conducting themselves slightly more foolishly when compared to the actors involved in, the nuclear tensions that began the Cold War: “One start-up founder [] said that Silicon Valley has accepted that most advanced AI tech will eventually get into the hands of foreign militaries. This is coupled with the belief that the US defense sector commits its own human rights abuses and that the AI war is too important to be lost.”

    As a VC observed: “Nobody cares where their money is from as long as they can find money .... It’s like see no evil, hear no evil.”↩
  12. E.g. AI may be used for nuclear command and control.↩
  13. Palantir cofounders Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale have each respectively compared themselves to Batman, a mentally-disturbed vigilante who uses his vast wealth and elite social status not only to conceal his illegal activities but to also recruit/adopt vulnerable young men into his enterprise. As Lonsdale writes: “As SF morphed into Gotham and the hideout atop the SoMa clock tower was for sale, I briefly considered a Batman role.”

    Worse still, Joe Lonsdale also rebuffed recent national security concerns about his business dealings, expressing a selectiveness in following rules usually found among above-the-law aristocrats and oligarchs rather than figures in defense: “I’ll follow the law and the advice of US intelligence and defense leaders we respect, but beyond that I will continue to use my judgement.”↩