Miguel Afonso Caetano<p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BigTech</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Billionares" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Billionares</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SiliconValley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SiliconValley</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Technocrats" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Technocrats</span></a>: "I call them the Technocrats, in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks. These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (“Competition is for suckers,” Thiel once posited.)</p><p>Indeed, they are American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 percent of the US population. Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality—and our economic system, imperfect as it is—with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control."</p><p><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/musk-thiel-zuckerberg-andreessen-alternate-autocratic-reality" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/mu</span><span class="invisible">sk-thiel-zuckerberg-andreessen-alternate-autocratic-reality</span></a></p>