welcome to the austerity doom loop
ok let's talk about the shiba inu in the room
i. intro
From the West Coast to the not-quite-East-Coast marched a small army of the most annoying people on the planet, from the Bay Area to the D.C. marshes, from the far Western reaches of the continental United States to the center from which the American expansion still echoes, the grifters have come now, finally, for the core of the American rot; I never thought the American blockchain enthusiasts would ever trudge into any sort of mud and dirty up their heavy tees but here we are, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised—Zuckerberg and Bezos have been hitting the gym for years now and likely don’t skip leg day. And remember, Walt Disney of all people trudged into Orlando to build his island of absurd delusion there (Disneyland defenders begone!), and wouldn’t it make sense for our generation’s fascist pop culture businessman “dream creator” to make his own? It’s a sad reveal, though, that Musk’s Disneyland would turn out to be Washington D.C. itself.
After twenty years of half-baked attempts at meeting the future where it’s at, the surveillance capitalists have taken steps to manufacture their own: a hegemonic project of lazy siphoning and non-competitive control of the market from top down, a handful of men controlling millions→billions of mechanical wood ticks collecting in our hair both domestically and in the United States’s client states.
The “Disruption” Game, The Tech Grind, The Startup Mindset, The 48 Laws of Power, A 14-Step Path to Venture Capital Success, How to Win Friends and Influence People having merged with The Art of the Deal through the lens of Google Campus Culture taken to its natural end: The Google bus is coming now to remake the American Fed, the world’s most powerful economic force, to be used as a blunt force weapon to bonk the rest of the world over their heads with—and “bonk” is unfortunately the word their supporters under the age of forty would use—to force them to take our software, our products, and our technology instead of China’s. Or, in the case of Europe and Canada, hit them with an elaborate tariff game into offshoring their domestic industries over to us so we can resell their own products to them for an surcharge (more on that later).
Elon Musk purchasing and lording over Twitter was nothing in hindsight but a premonition of America’s future domestic and foreign trade policies. The jury’s still out on whether it will also seep into the Pentagon, but I would be surprised, as of today, if the takeover is not an all-encompassing one.
Beyond just administrations and whichever party is in power, another way to look at American political power is through eras of Governmental Emotional Infrastructure: i.e., Reagan’s administration set the temperature for the 80s and the 90s and the Obama administration set the temperature for the late 2000s and the 2010s. Trump’s second administration, now with substantially more legitimacy in the eyes of the media and Washington political channels, is setting the temperature for the next two decades—but perhaps more as it seems his team is hellbent on overturning the constitution itself. But he’s not acting alone. The American tech landscape has been moving in this direction for a while ever since the surveillance economy began to bloom in the 2010s.
I genuinely believe that Silicon Valley has been in a state of panic over AI for a couple years now, and not because of its “dangers,” but because they can’t seem to achieve the mass adoption they would like to claim (and sometimes actually are claiming); even with the fearmongering promotion cycle—”AI is going to destabilize the world! BRRR,” they say as they shake their jowls like Nixon—the American public just simply hasn’t broadly adopted AI tools yet.
So far mostly been just a partial adoption by (mostly male) optimization nerds and middle managers who are afraid of seed oils, likely hold takes on reserve about Gamergate, and shitpost with a manic, whining why don’t you like me? energy. And the rest seem to be single men in India. That’s to say, AI tools have so far fallen into the providence of losers1, and so the project for The Valley, who have desperately needed something brand new and “innovative” to keep the money faucet on, has been to force AI on the American People through Google Search, GrokAI, the Snapchat AI chatbot, etc. etc. But these efforts have been met with a lot of annoyance from the general public and baffling screenshots going viral in which AI might recommend putting glue in marinara sauce.
But now the Valley has a man in power with Musk’s placement in the White House,—he has a cot there; the richest man on the planet lives inside a federal building right now—a maybe-actually-is-a-fascist white South African immigrant on a vast cocktail of amphetamines and other psychoactive drugs who has been newly deputized as the United States’ Prime Minister in everything but name. It should be fair to say that this new arrangement of executive power in the States is moving closer to the UK’s system with two heads of government: here’s a king on his golden throne, the head of state, and here’s the prime minister, the head of government.
The entire country and its federal structures, the pillars keeping the US in the general shape it’s had since FDR’s austerity programs of the 1930s, are now fully theirs to “disrupt” and they certainly don’t mind transforming the federal government into a tech startup if it’s in the image of an AI generated cartoon a 2013 meme. The “tech startup” is the only mold our oil barons of today see as completely viable. Cut costs as completely as possible; the fed better become profitable, otherwise it might get outcompeted and “bought” by China—this is their greatest fear of all. I have to imagine China’s DeepSeek AI scared the shit out of them. The contract between the American People and the Tech Oligarchs—we give them unfathomable wealth and they, in return, give us an international edge on consumer technology for the next hundred years—is increasingly becoming a clear contradiction in the face of international tech production, and rather than allow that contradiction to fester into political action against American tech, the broligarchs are more than willing to wrest the country forever into their pocket instead of face consequences. American tech is lazy. Let’s not forget this. Since the 2010s, startups are founded not to innovate but to innovate just enough to be bought out by Google, Meta, or Microsoft. Their goal is to be noncompetative.
The Baby-Boomers-in-trucks-wearing-sunglasses profile pictures that represented Trumpism the first time around—the so-called MAGA base—has shrunk to the wayside (after a good chunk of them presumably died of the coronavirus); it been replaced almost entirely by a new strain of “American conservative guy” who is an early adopter of AI products, who spend his days chatting about a smattering of cryptocurrencies with unctuous names on Reddit and Discord, who participated in The RobinHood Gamestop moment in 2021, who felt excited about the NFT boom, and who made a couple hundred dollars riding the Tesla stock up and down based off of following Musk’s manic shitposting.
Silicon Valley is fine with their political base’s obnoxious and blithe self-humiliations and has actively aligned themselves with this (rather embarrasing) political faction, seeing them wisely as a mass political extension of their own B.F. Skinner political tint—if Zuckerberg’s Rogan interview is anything to go off of, this right wing group their main alignment right now—but not because of any merit to the cryptofascists; rather it’s because these types of guys are dumb enough to make Silicon Valley’s products into their whole personalities.
As Matthew Broderick phrases it, “The entire country will be running on Silicon Valley’s delusion machine. And whatever the future of computing is that was supposed to arrive, never will.” This project has the veneer of being about futurist aspirations, i.e. building a better tomorrow in which the United States is competitive with China’s quick ascendency in technology and software, but in reality this project, as it’s being run now through the executive branch, is more about consolidating power into one single American Hobbesian Leviathan, the creation of a one-party state in the United States, not necessarily Republican or Democrat (though the Republicans were the ones dumb enough to let the idea in), but rather a party purely held by the Executive Branch with X as its extension and main feedback mechanism—it seems, too, that Meta is also beginning to become another extension and feedback mechanism as Zuckerberg’s cold shark eyes certainly sense blood in the water. It’s a demolition derby. Anything not nailed to the ground is getting pushed into a shitty AI system that can be steered by a central authority. Techno-feudalism? Maybe. Let’s see if it sticks.
There will be elections still, of course, and there will be opposition, but looking at the sheer manic energy of the DOGE wrecking ball, I can’t imagine the elections will be very competitive2 in four years’ time. It’s not only Trump; he too smells the blood in the water and is using the broligarchs as contractors to tear down the government and then rebuild it from the ground up to attempt to curb the rot at the heart of the American empire. American imperialism 2.0 here we go.
If anyone wanted to understand what Trump meant by draining the swamp, now it should be clear.The small bit of hope we might take from this comes from Trump’s history of not paying his contractors. There’s a power struggle between Trump and Silicon Valley coming, I would imagine—there seem to be too many contradictions in the Republican party at the moment for true, lasting unity— and once the bill comes due for the demolition costs and the construction comes to an end, there’s a good chance Trump will kick them to the curb. But such is not a reliable hope as Trump himself is getting older and he seems intent on handing off his consolidated power to a successor who is quite a bit more online and active in online conversations about “rational eugenics.” But in short: the whole American system since the 1940s, the way of life that Americans are acquainted with, is coming to an end. We’re in the austerity doom loop now. Everyone for themselves. Later-Stage capitalism (lol).
The first hundred days of the new trump admin (trump II) is a plan that’s been on the sidelines of the country’s political-economic sphere since the 2010s and it’s taking full advantage of its actionable moment. This shouldn’t be a cause for panic but awareness. I don’t mean to write something quite so dire here—I’ve been trying to steer myself away from the depressing content here but I have a bit of a platform, also so I just want to communicate that you should be keeping your head up with this stuff—maybe even store away some canned food in case things get really bad (more on that later).
ii. on writing about american politics rn
Ok so I was very back and forth on whether I would write about American politics at all this year. Trump’s something of a political basilisk, a singular figure who avoids critique or commentary because anything (or so it seems to me) that anyone writes or says about him is quickly taken up into the ironic/outrage dialectics surrounding his ascendency, making commentary more-or-less mute and impossible to land.
But Trump’s second admin has been something that kind of needs to be looked at (at least a little bit), so I’m breaking my promise to myself not to write about American politics this year and to shine my shitty flashlight into this dark mess that’s come upon us—and besides, with this being a rather anti-Silicon Valley blog (freaks!), Musk’s involvement with it all gives me another reason to write all this, so… why not?
So let’s talk about DOGE.
iii. on DOGE
Important to keep in mind: the DOGE project, beyond Elon’s absolute abhorrent sense of humor and 🤣 spamming, is an active attempt at purging dissent throughout the federal government and, by extension, the domestic and international spheres of American influence. The keyword here is active. Because, well, it is active even if otherwise hollow.
The “department” is not about efficiency but rather about consolidating power for the executive branch while grifting off billions to Elon’s own businesses. Trump is Trump and he’s writing checks from the executive branch that are more than double the funds the executive branch actually has to give. Ramaswamy dropped out of DOGE because he worried about its legality as the department’s purpose became more and more drastic and whether it would be political suicide for his career.
The veneer of the DOGE program is to streamline federal spending, an idea that makes complete sense coming from everything we know about Musk and the rationalists and all the cryptofascist goons on X. Its legality comes from its placement in the already existing United States Digital Service (USDS) which was created under Obama’s executive branch to give consultation to the broader federal government on its IT systems.
The DOGE team is reportedly planning on replacing government workers with xAI in an attempt to streamline federal contracts and grants, abolish the department of education and labor, and god knows what else. They’re pulling out Jenga blocks as fast as their ketamine addled hands can—rumor even has it that OpenAI is in talks with the white house about using their AI systems for nuclear weapon security systems. All of this would be shocking if it didn’t also inspire an exhausted eye roll. It’s the dialectic that Trump and Elon work best in: the sad gray area between dramatic rug pulls and an exhausted ironic detachment.
But it’s the way DOGE has of “streamlining” these programs that should capture our interest. The committees going department by department and grilling federal employees on their “productivity” are made up of mostly 23 year old recent MBA graduates whose questions tend to gravitate towards, “how proficient are you with AI tools?” And if the answer is not very, then the bureaucrats are almost certainly losing their job within a couple weeks at the hands of some of the most annoying graduates of any university system ever.
To be clear, the federal government does have some erroneous spending but it’s likely that these make up less than 1% of its budget. And certainly much of government aid is cover for more nefarious actions domestically and abroad, but if we fire the person who’s been in charge of verifying and ensuring national insulin distribution for the past forty years, making sure that it’s not watered down and, well, that it actually is insulin, and replace the person in that role with a 26 year old marc andreessen fanatic with significant venture capital ties, things will get quite a bit worse for everyone. To make matters worse, multiply that by thousands of replacements affecting every small thing that needs even a modicum of regulation on a national level. It’s going to create a cascade of decay nationwide, affecting schools, universities, hospitals, airports, social security, insurance, etc. etc.
But even beyond the wheels coming off, there’s a political angle that we need to come to terms with—this mandate of techno-efficiency in federal departments is a purge of political dissidents.
The awareness and knowledge of how to use AI tools is in itself a political stance, so asking and firing federal employees based on a definition “efficiency” that demands understanding of AI tools is really not so different from asking and firing a federal employee based on whether they believe in the Trump/Musk program.
The goal is the movement of everything to underneath the prevue of the executive branch and a unified Federal AI system. All that’s been holding them back from achieving their goal is a federal court system that might give up sooner or later, not to mention there’s precedent for the Executive branch ignoring the courts by suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus.
Think about this for a moment: if their plan is fully successful,—and we really have no way of knowing yet whether it will be successful or not—they will have achieved of a complete overthrow of the structure of government in favor of a centralized AI system. Think of the way that UnitedHealth’s AI system aggressively denied coverage with a remarkably high error rate which even the company’s own insiders knew well about, and apply that to all federal spending, research grants, public school funding, food stamps, the list goes on.
It’s a coup through “software updates.” Let that sink in for a second. This is not a theoretical news event on the horizon that may or may not happen. This is not the bumbling shenanigans of Trump I. This is directed political action being undertaken at a manic Zyn’d up pace. This is going to cause unimaginable pain for the American people and the people of America’s trade partners. Over forty thousand federal employees have so far taken the buyout Musk’s offered them from their positions. That’s just the start. These people are working in the EPA, in the Department of Education, in the National Archive, these are the people keeping American secondary education in place—none of these things will ever work the same again, and this is just the start.
And all of this stems from the fact that the Valley couldn’t stomach a single whiff of regulations from Lina Khan—the best thing that Biden did in his administration (imo) was put her in charge of the FTC. This whole overthrow of the American federal government could be seen as an exaggerated knee jerk reaction to the threat of slight regulation against Silicon Valley’s owners who see themselves no longer as curating the needs of the present but needing to actively remake the future in their image to keep themselves afloat against a perception of the American public turning on them.
It turns out that the all-too-online data-obsessed libertarians who would write out out hundreds of boring pages about futuristic free-market feudalism on geocities blogs in a manic fervor during the late 2000s and early 2010s can actually stand up from their gaming chairs. And who would have guessed? Unfortunately for us, though, a majority of Washington’s politicians seem to be chronically wheelchair bound.
iv. on musk
Elon’s special in no way except that he believes fully in his futurist bullshit he’s on (a ketamine daydream). He believes in it enough to confidence-man himself into unfathomable wealth. He’s a cunning idiot, a useful idiot for himself. But it seems as if he learned quite a bit over the years about how to stir up vague noise to suit his own priorities. His pumping of his own stocks and cryptocurrency holdings through Twitter postings that were half jokes (so the SEC can’t get his ass) and half vague calls to action (“Dogecoin is the people’s crypto. No need to be a gigachad to own”) have led to an acute skill in toeing the line between misinformation, outright lying about why certain federal cuts are required, and sprinkling in just enough half-truth that his reply guys start frothing at the mouth. He silences opposition among US politicians by threatening them with online hellfire the blueprint of which was Gamergate.
I don’t have much else to say about Musk except I hope he kills himself sooner rather than later.
v. on “radicalism”
I genuinely believe that People really do want change and feel, for the most part, betrayed by the false promises of Obama’s 2008 campaign. Any radical leftist change to the establishment gets labeled radicalism—think of Bernie saying “this is not radical, this is not radical,” over and over again (but it is! and radical political reshuffling could be a good thing if done with empathy!)—resulting in the complete passivity of American leftists because class consciousness in the United States is a middle-class hobby, and being labeled radical is too real for most american leftists, so they become content to do nothing. “Just you watch how this turns out,” American leftists say. “You’ll think back to the time you scoffed at me for softly bludgeoning you with random quotes from Adorno and Lacan and regret ridiculing me because of how bad things will get for us all.” There’s no action! Only a passive resentment and humiliation that makes American leftists into handwringing—but it’s at the same time difficult to imagine how American leftists could be actually allowed to seize power as the Democrat party, the so-called “party of the left,” is mortally terrified of actual materialist leftist policies—i.e. tax the hell out of the rich and make essential industries Publicly owned—and refuse to allow anyone into the rank and file of the party unless they’re slightly right of center (which, I should remind, Kamala Harris absolutely was). Anyone further left of right of center is thus labelled a radical leftist—but conservative radicalism gets labelled as deeply American, patriotic even. Not to mention the republican voter base is for a large part isolated bumpkins holding onto whatever values they think they hold and more than willing to lose themselves in an illusion of a violent Antifa left-wing hoping to feed babies to Hillary Clinton.
It is easy for the American mainstream to refer to socialism as radical because American socialists don’t do ever do anything, when’s the last time they’ve taken real political action since the Black Panthers?; it was easy for the press to call Trump radical in his first term because he was seen widely as an ineffectual shitposter; but when power is actually held, the accusations of radical quickly evaporate. The term “radical” is reserved only for the ineffectual. Everything lines up behind power.
Accusations of radicalism from the centrist “resistance libs” aimed at Trump bounce off—these are people who think that calling Musk “elmo” is a radical political action—and my hunch is that, going forward, all types of reporting on many people are being deported and how many American prisoners are being sent to El Salvador’s prisons (which is a proposed plan by Marco Rubio btw, to send American citizens to be imprisoned in a foreign country) will become gradually less and less, reporters and whistleblowers will become quieter as they increasingly fear retribution from Trump’s Executive Branch, which has the potential to be a new solitary political party in itself, without the label, if gone unchecked. America genuinely risks becoming a single party state in these next four years if it isn’t already.
But don’t fall into the trap of defending the neoliberal establishment. It is something and of course something is better than the cruel structure of national nothingness we’re going to get if DOGE achieves its mission, but don’t think for one second that the American federal institutions are innocent in all of this. They’ve been on the corporatist wave for quite a long time and have been rotting gradually from the inside since the Reagan era of deregulation and funding cuts.
vi. on Trump
He was voted in because the American people do desperately want a radical in office, even if they wouldn’t ever admit to wanting a radical, and they want a radical because a radical is the only type of person who can make any sort of change in the power structure of the country from a rotting neoliberalism to something else.
And Trump is a transformative figure. There’s no denying it. He’s the dark libido of the political 1930s having been resurrected by the dark electricity of 4chan memes that he doesn’t understand and likely is incapable of understanding, like a Frankenstein’s monster he stands too stiff and tall in the political landscape for comfort. His eeriness comes to us out of place like seeing someone in a liminal hallway where we expected to see no one.
Trump is acting like FDR but in creating a reverse New Deal.
And let us not forget that Trump’s demolishment and rebuilding of the federal government from scratch is widely applauded by the middle managers and the executives of this country who have long feared government encroachment on their profit centers. It turns out the self-perceived humiliation of “wokeness” and a nebulous specter of DEI were too much for them to stomach. “We were the bullied ones in school!” they cry out. “We read Lord of the Rings in high school! We played Dungeons and Dragons! We were the oppressed ones!” Being called problematic, racists, and occupiers was too tough on them, it seems. I wonder if they themselves realize how humiliated they felt.
vii. on the democrats
China is the hill they’re willing to die on. The old-guard Democrats and Republicans are willing to seppuku for a last-ditch effort to outmatch China; the institutions that kept us somewhat safe from the financial predators of this country, in the merest semblance of a social-security network, are being stripped for parts because maybe, just maybe, handing everything over to tech-accelerationism will help us defeat China.
And get that what-ifism out of here—you know the one, I’ve seen “how’s that protest vote going for you?” at least a dozen times in the past two months. I can’t imagine that The Valley wouldn’t have managed a coup to replace the American system with half-baked AI systems even if Kamala had been holding office. The coup would have been softer, of course, but it’s not like Harris wasn’t actively selling her campaign to them.
“Elections have consequences,” and sure—I won’t get into the weeds about the American electoral system being a Cruel Optimism par excellence here—but I have a feeling this particular consequence, the overthrow of the American state by the tech world, was coming no matter who won the election. The only difference, in my eyes, between modern Republicans and modern Democrats is that while Republicans delight in flaunting their cruelty, Democrats cautiously hide theirs. The same things would have gone on, though slower and more quiet.
For instance, I would be surprised if even the Democrat’s in D.C. weren’t quietly excited about Trump’s plan to clear out Gaza’s Palestinian population completely while also handwringing about how making it an American territory is ohhh maybe too far, that land should go to Israel instead, shouldn’t it?
D.C. has been ready and waiting with their arms they somehow managed to tie themselves behind their backs. They’ve been waiting oh so patiently ever since that one Davos Conference in the 1970s—I don’t remember the year and I’m too lazy to look it up—where it was declared that corporations ought to become the world’s preeminent political entities, that they have a contract with the world’s citizenry to keep their interests in mind, and that elected officials ought to play a secondary role of encouraging such a role for corporate leaders into reality. This, unfortunately, did not work (obviously grifting won out above any betterment of conditions for humanity). Since this realization came to gradually settle over the country like a misting of noxious gas, D.C. has been waiting for a strong breeze to bring all of the federal government down around them. Well, that breeze finally arrived. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, that Mitch McConnell doesn’t yearn for the sweet release of death. D.C. has slowly atrophied under the sagging weight of thousands of politicians who are too old to understand the modern world and too emancipated from action by their donors’ requirements to do much of anything and most will likely trust any gaggle of twenty-something recent MBA grads (Musk’s DOGE hit squads) who, in passing resemblance, look like a grandson or nephew who one time helped them install an adblocker onto their work laptop.
Both parties have been in on the slow dismantlement of the federal government since the 1970s; neither is good but also neither is bad—calling them good or bad would be like calling a vulture bad for eating roadkill. The parties are what they are, and that in America it doesn’t matter too much: both are a middlemen to corral the people in favor of the economic interests, domestic and abroad.
And I think the greatest indicator of all this is the fact that the Democratic party leaders, Schumer and Pelosi, are so quiet in response to all of this. All Klobuchar seems capable talking about is the price of eggs—which I should remind you, the price of eggs was a topic they refused to bring up under Biden’s admin—they’re not ringing the alarm bells about dismantling of the government to be sold off for parts like they should be.
Perhaps they’re crossing their arms waiting for Trump to sink his own ship so they can coast through the 2026 midterms. Perhaps they think that the average American is too dumb for such topics to land, but then again that would be even more of an indictment against them as they continue to very clearly look down their noses at the American people in a mirror reflection to the Republicans’ gaze, like that of an abusive step-father. They see the American people and wonder if the American People really do need to be faced with massive cruelty to get them productive enough to maintain American hegemony in the face of China. And when asked whether their policies are bad and ineffectual, they respond, ignoring the critique, that the Democrats only need to shore up their messaging to show that they “understand the pain of the American people.” Well pain is coming, and the Democrats seem content to sit out this fight and come back into the ring after Trump sinks the ship and millions suffer greatly enough to come back to the Democrat’s lame policy table that excludes any materialist solutions to anything.
viii. let’s talk about the tariffs
There’s been a good bit of hay thrown about online about Trump’s proposed tariffs—which he’s had on his mind since the 80s when he was a C-list “rich guy” celebrity.” The old guard economics people writing on Forbes and the Wall Street Journal have mostly seen the tariffs as a negotiating strategy—and that’s a big part of it—but there’s more to the picture to be taken into account.
I’m not hugely knowledgeable about economic policy or theory but after a small bit of research on my end, I’m going to hazard a guess at what his aim with the tariffs is and how it coincides with a return to not just a gold standard, but to a US dollar that’s backed by both gold and cryptocurrency. Let me explain...
Sidenote here: I’m so sorry to be writing about economics here on this blog that’s usually about, idk, being a person—I’m still going with the bit that this blog is about huffing glue with your friends but that bit seems tentative here in this post. But anyways, I think if you want to understand what the plan here is, beyond the noise, it’s also bound up in international transatlantic trade network and that’s important, I think.
This plan has been laid out sparsely online—here, for instance, is Hudson Bay Capital’s plan titled A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, which is a title that should send shivers down anyone’s spine when it’s uttered from the caviar stained mouth of a head member of an American multi-strategy investment firm. The paper was published days after the election. The man who wrote it is now one of Trump’s main guys in his private economic council.
The plan is in part based off of the Plaza Accords performed under the Reagan administration which crippled Japan’s economy through currency manipulation,—Stephan Miran, the author of the above article, calls this newer plan the Mar-a-lago Accords (eye-roll). The Plaza Accords worked like this (or so I’ve pieced together in my very barebones understanding of economics): devaluing the American dollar, slinging over an American asset bubble to Japan (out of fear of their economic ascendency at the time), forcing them to invest in American industries and abandon their own and offshore their production to us while the asset bubble then intensely overvalued the Japanese yen until the japanese economy popped like a pimple being squeezed. The yen and the Japanese market have still not recovered from this squeeze and that was an intentional move by Reagan’s administration.
But why would Trump want to devalue the American dollar?
phrases it like this: “Weakening the dollar tackles each of Trump’s economic objectives simultaneously; it makes American exports more competitive, foreign made products more expensive, and also lowers production costs, potentially enough to repatriate offshored manufacturing jobs.”The international trade plan of Trump II, As Liz Franczak phrases it, “would basically use tariffs to bring all countries under the US security umbrella, from vassal state to far colony, bring them all under to come together to the Trump-gold negotiating table and the US would then offer trade relief and security guarantees so long as other countries agree to appreciate their currency against the dollar. So it’s a way to force devaluing the dollar, putting a gun to other country’s heads.”
The goal, then, as with everything in Trumpworld, is to find a mark and weaken it in order to prop ourselves up. Franczak thinks the European Union is likely to be Trump’s mark and perhaps this is true. I can certainly see it. Macron, for instance, seems overly eager for this kind of surgical operation of France with his claims of reclaiming western values or whatever,—he called for a EU emergency conference the other day in Paris, we’ll see if he shows any backbone at all; LVMH, the fashion conglomerate that currently owns the country of France, opened a factory in Texas under Trump I, and if the US does force European industry to relocate production to the United States, satisfying Trump’s MAGA base that wants American reindustrialization (no idea what that would look like), it would work under a similar principle to the Plaza Accords: namely, find another country that’s subservient to the United States and hold their head under water, forcing them to offshore their production to us and then private equity can swoop in to nibble the bones of whatever is left. Then, by forcing Europe (and Canada, probably too) to put up more blocks on Chinese goods under threat of increased tariffs, the United States can comfortably push its software and cars onto its colonies-in-all-but-name without having to compete with China’s increasingly cheaper (and better) production.
Going back to Liz Franczak,—because (1) the TrueAnon podcast got me through a rough patch in my life and (2) I’m stupid and need podcasts, maybe the ~worst~ way to consume information, to understand and put together ideas sometimes—she lays out her theory on what the Trump administration’s endgoals here seem to be in a nice step-by-step:
shock the global system with universal tariffs to reduce reliance on the dollar.
a hard money reset with a new regieme of gold, or gold and bitcoin.
So the goal is to restore a gold standard—the US treasury, for instance, is releasing a fifty year bond that’s convertible to gold or “other commodity holdings.” Not to mince words but this is insane. Truly insane. What else would “other commodity holdings” be besides, you know, *ding ding* cryptocurrency. It seems as if everyone in the executive wants to put the Treasury on “the blockchain” and the only ones who might be able to stop them are nervous bankers and old-heads of wall street.
If the tariff war is waged as it aims to be—it might legitimately be time to start stocking up on canned food. Not to be too doomer about all of it, but if the 25% tariffs are placed against Mexico—as Trump aims to do—the food prices in the United States will go up higher than we’ve ever seen before in this country, and likely there will be massive shortages. Most of our produce comes from Mexico. We would not be ready. It’d a good time to revisit Naomi Watts’s The Shock Doctrine, because that’s still the playbook being deployed—we’re not ready for it to be used in broad and economic terms domestically.
ix. conclusion(?)
We think we’re forced under the waters of American tech now, just wait until the state itself is a technocapitalist monstrosity. And don’t you think, for one second, that the weapons of surveillance warfare pioneered by companies like Palantir won’t be used against us too.
Another note that’s important to keep in mind: RFK’s claim that 70% of Americans are sick may actually be true. There is a sickness over this country, an apathetic lethargy that we can’t help but notice even if we try to avoid making eye contact. But the sources of that sickness are not the sources those that are being expunged from the Federal government and all the sources of that sickness are being streamlined into efficient deregulations that will drive the sickness we feel, the sickness that has been driving Trump’s base insane since his 2016 candidacy, into unknown (likely turbulent) waters. All of this is going to backfire dramatically, but the information ecosystem is such a hazy fog of war that we won’t know how bad things are until they explode into our day-to-day living.
In short, it’s going to be a long couple years but ignorance is not the answer. Look after your neighbors and coworkers. If a coworker or neighbor doesn’t speak english and needs help knowing their rights against ICE, there’re materials to be passed along. Don’t trust the institutions and don’t praise them; the institutions aren’t going to protect you if they’re on the side of your oppressors, which they have been but are now more streamlined in their being against you. The constitution has been misread before to support slavery, apartheid, and the genocide of native americans in this country, it can be misread to support a technocapitalist austerity doom spiral too.
We’re going to be driving shittier cars, using shittier apps, running shittier computers, living underneath shittier programs, eating shittier food, year after year, while the rich get richer keeping anything that isn’t a grift away from the country. Like many Americans, I’ve always thought the University system would stick around—that might not be the case. Like. many Americans, I’ve always thought public education would stick around—that might not be the case. Do you want to go to Graduate School? Honestly, you might have to think again. The program you want to apply to might not exist in two years’ time. Welcome to the austerity doom loop. Come on in! The water is fine—salted, putrid, and getting hotter!
I will say, in all transparency, as someone who may be considered at least partially as a loser, I do plan my weekly meals with ChatGPT and for that purpose it’s been perfect so far, even if the program seems to be getting worse and worse. Without an easily achievable plan for meals, I tend to go hungry instead or eat half a dozen frozen pizzas in a week’s time, neither of which are good or healthy.
Here’s a good piece in Foreign Affairs that details how an anticompetetive electoral system might come about and what it means (it doesn’t mean free elections).
read this in the bath and kept going back and forth between wanting to drown myself and cackling.
this was the perfect train read