Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/02/tech-bro-fascism-looks-like-a-lot-like-old-fashioned-fascism.html
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Some people don’t see the message even if they are being beaten around the head with it.
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As of this week Balaji and his fellow tech bros just bribed their way onto the ballot in their ongoing fight to create a legal pathway for building the “utopian” society they’ve been planning in California.
We need to fight these fascist motherfuckers tooth and nail.
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The things I have heard said casually and without a moment’s hesitation since the tech boom era in this rapid growth city…
people sent all these very smart boys to the very best schools to learn all the very best things and they came back ready to pay us all back for their suffering I guess?
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A lot of these guys read Snowcrash and thought it sounded like a pretty rad world to live in.
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Gonna have to disagree with ya there…
Just being there should serve as a red flag…
And not everyone was taken in by the California ideology…
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Lemme guess, Rage Against the Machine is also somehow his favorite band…
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The nod.
Not “you nod”
Not “you acknowledge each other”
Not, “hey, you know, I’m trying to come up with a better system of government, so I’m not going to worry about party members great each other just yet.”
What is it with fascists and their weird fixation on symbols?
(yes yes, creating an in-group. I know. But this sounds like something that the other 7th-graders would find boring and tedious.)
Also, with so many colors to choose from, he really decided to go with “the future is gray!”
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So… none of us nasty liberals. He wants conservatives, but not too conservative. Cultists, but his cultists, not the other guy’s.
Since I live in France now, I can probably find a guillotine somewhere if you’d like to borrow it. “Tech bro fascist” is just another term for oligarch. They all suck and deserve the worst society can give them.
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I’m not a liberal, but I suspect he wants to keep me out of his utopia even more. Anarcho-communism is the polar opposite of what he wants.
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As I mentioned on another thread, blues vs. grays is not new to American history, and you have to be pretty awful to think the grays were good guys.
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Mike Judge really didn’t have to go very far to parody the characters in Silicon Valley.
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I guess they’re fortunate that there’s no Sylvester McMonkey McBean who could sell everyone else… gray shirts. Ironclad plan, pal.
Also; I’m shocked that living in California hasn’t taught him a lesson about shirt-color-based violence.
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Even when the price of Bitcoin does go up, it’s not exactly demonstrating its usefulness as a stable currency that can facilitate routine financial transactions, which was supposedly the whole point of digital currency. I just wish that it would go all the way to zero already.
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We look to people with the mindsets of boring tedious 7th graders with lots of room to mature as symbols of leadership and successful adulthood when they can get their hands on enough money. We made one president.
You know… I guess it’s easier to hold unwarranted power when you can do it through symbolic quasi-religious tokens.
I hate it. I just actually dislike this aspect of humanity and the kind of miserable bullshit it foists upon others in the pursuit of vanity.
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The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.”
The Nazi had Hugo Boss design their uniforms. This idiot apparently expects his followers to destroy democracy dressed up in their favorite vendorwear.
Marx was right when he said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
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Nah, it’s still the Old Gray.
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“Balaji, and your ilk, would you kindly fuck off?” 
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If they like bitcoin that much, why wouldn’t they just move to Cryptoland?
Oh, they need to steal from other people because building something themselves didn’t work out? Huh. Huh. Funny it should turn out that way.
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Yes, it’s ridiculous fascism. This part is especially important:
Those who try to downplay Balaji’s importance in Silicon Valley often portray him as a “clown.” But “President” Donald Trump taught us that clowns can be dangerous, especially those with proximity to influence and power. In the nearly 11 years since his secession speech at Y Combinator, Balaji’s politics have become even more stridently authoritarian and extremist, yet he remains a celebrated figure in key circles.
He has the ear of wealthy arseholes like Mark Andreesen, Garry Tan, and no doubt Thiel and Musk (who probably loves the echoes of his racist, anti-Semitic grandpa’s Technocracy movement). He also gets a lot of play in the techbro media sphere. This translates into real influence in the Bay Area.
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