Broligarchy Watch

Lots of fascinating reads.

The richest men in the country are in the final stages of a 40-year plan to kill America and crown themselves kings. It’s not a conspiracy anymore: they’re bragging about it. And they’re convinced they’ve got you too distracted to care.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/22266116

Part 1 - https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2025/05/26/Internet-Sucks-Cory-Doctorow/

“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992

He DOGEd Twitter's employees in France, and it turns out... not so legal.

Reporting Highlights

The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside "sniper" had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.

The firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter came after Perlmutter and her office earlier this week issued part three of a lengthy report about artificial intelligence and expressed some concerns and questions about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/19886316

Comments

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/02/elon-musk-spacex-texas-starship-00317693

Marc Andreessen is predicting that at least one job is safe from the rise of AI: his own.

And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful “Armageddon Lobby.” It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a “secular” vision of humanity’s grand future — though it shares many similarities with traditional religion, including a belief in “God” and the promise of immortality through cryonics. The renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this vision “The Mindset,”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21217025

More on the Xai crimes in Memphis:

New data reveals the hidden network of African workers powering AI, as they push for transparency from the global companies that employ them indirectly.

Cross-posted from "Seth Rogen’s Trump Jokes Are Edited Out of Awards Broadcast | Mr. Rogen said President Trump had “single-handedly destroyed all of American science.”" by @silence7@slrpnk.net in !nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz

Cross-posted from "What 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 Knew About Tech-Bro Paternalism" by @paywall@rss.ponder.cat in !theatlantic@rss.ponder.cat

Cross-posted from "This is what resistance to the digital coup looks like" by @cm0002@lemmy.world in !fediverse@lemmy.world

Elon Musk has joined forced with Republican power broker Peter Thiel on a bid to help build Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defence shield.

The growing debate over the future of intellectual property law in the age of AI took a wild turn in the past few days when Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Block, and initially a leading figure at Bluesky, declared he would like to see all IP law eliminated.

The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.

Analysis: As a new book shows, growth and success has turned optimistic tech startups into corporate cesspits of greed, manipulation and contempt

“Our economy should be judged on how well it cares for working people, rather than the number of billionaires it produces daily,” stated the leader of an economic justice organization.

Cross-posted from "A Strange Stain in the Sky: How Silicon Valley Is Preparing A Coup Against Democracy" by @crossdl@leminal.space in !technology@lemmy.world

Cross-posted from "Elon Musk’s xAI allegedly uses 'illegal' generators to power Colossus supercomputer facility" by @cm0002@lemmy.world in !technology@lemmy.world

Elon Musk’s X stands to benefit financially if the government pulls an £800m tax on US tech firms as part of an economic deal with Donald Trump, as a prominent tax campaigner indicated the social media platform qualifies for the levy.

Yet implementation of the Online Safety Act is now in question because Donald Trump’s government has identified it as a symptom of wider European infringement of free expression. As the Guardian revealed this week, US state department officials expressed their concern in a meeting with Ofcom, the regulator responsible for enforcing new digital regulations.

Local organizers say they have less of a chance at making climate reforms in the majority Black city than Musk does at imposing environmental harms

TL;DR: Self-Driving Teslas Rear-End Motorcyclists, Killing at Least 5

Nearly two months ago, Elon Musk went on a public crusade against Reddit.

A billionaire tech entrepreneur who used his wealth and influence in Silicon Valley to help Donald Trump win the presidency has deep connections to the new administration’s efforts to remake the government.

It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017.

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.

The story of Elon Musk, the way it's usually told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero - or supervillain. He's the world's richest man, and now an adviser to the US President. He uses X - his social media platform - to berate politicians he doesn't agree with around the world.

Observing the emergent broligarchy’s elaborate conspiracy to extract as much wealth and power as they can from Donald Trump’s second coming, it is justifiable to feel sick in the stomach. Men of tremendous wealth, with a history of treating the mothers of their children sadistically, of endorsing books justifying torture and the elimination of human rights, of making zillions from government and military procurement while tirelessly working toward disbanding government programs that offer a sliver of protection to the poor, have decamped at Mar-a-Lago kissing Trump’s ring and preparing for direct government power.

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.

A document authored by an anonymous group of whistleblowers accuses Elon Musk of attempting to spearhead a private hostile takeover of the US Government on behalf of an extremist anti-democracy philosophy known as the ‘neo-reactionary’ movement, by effectively hijacking the Republican Party.

No, the emails aren’t from a Nigerian prince, but whoever is writing them seems to use the same style, cajoling and repetition. The sad thing is, these aren’t from some poor guy in an internet cafe circa the 2000s, no–these emails have been pummeling the inboxes of federal workers from their own government. These workers have had their email inboxes flooded with bizarre imperatives to basically go away. They’ve been insulted in the emails, being encouraged to leave and find “higher productivity” jobs in the private sector. They’ve had carrots dangled in front of them, saying they can take a second job or go on awesome vacations. They’ve been demoralized, and most are likely very confused, of course, by design. What we have here is the Grover Norquist quote coming to life, the: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it in the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” For those too young to have heard this, the quote is from one of the OG architects of this current bile-filled situation. It’s always been their fervent desire to implement this bathtub murder–they’ve been patient and have all the plans in place. Now they are in the stage where they’ve drawn up the water, telling you they have some nice lavender bath bombs and beckon you through the steam.

Meet Curtis Yarvin: whose seemingly crazed ideas have found fertile ground among technocrats and oligarchs who have never quite shaken entitled Ayn Rand’s “greed is good” sensibility.

An influential Silicon Valley publication runs a cover story lamenting the “pussification” of tech. A major tech CEO lambasts a Black civil rights leader’s calls for diversifying the tech workforce. Technologists rage against the “PC police”.

While the corrupting influence of big money over our government is not new, the specifics of this danger are different today than perhaps at any other time in our nation’s history. Tech billionaires, who already had enormous power, helped underwrite a winning presidential campaign in ways that would have been illegal just a few elections ago. And there are now fewer restraints than ever before on their ability, or the president they helped elect, to break through the checks and balances of our political system. This system, President Joseph Biden recently warned, can best be described as an “oligarchy.” Or, as others have dubbed, a “broligarchy.”

This isn’t mine, but it seems relevant for this community.