Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

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I just don’t think that pointing to the direction of travel and jumping to the conclusion is politically astute. It’s not an immediate threat and it turns the average person away from political involvement, not towards it.

All the things you pointed out have also been part of other authoritarian movements.

Capital-F Fascism will only come in Western nations after they experience a massive humiliation, not before. This precipitates the broad nationalist anger that’s required. The present course is taking us towards a different kind of totalitarianism, one that doesn’t really have a historical parallel.

Edit: I also think it’s a mistake to equate fascism with some kind of mystical “ultimate evil”. With modern technology, it’s quite possible for us to dream up a future that looks very different than fascism but is somehow even worse. Positioning every political struggle in terms of “fascism” or “anti-fascism” just makes this more likely, because it creates blind spots for new horrors.

Well, I think that pointing to the direction of travel is necessary, because that's where these folks want to go - and if we don't end up there, it's not because they had a change of heart, but because not enough people jumped on their bandwagon.

As I said, I also think that "fascism" is overused as a label, but that it fits in this case and is one of the right labels. Calling the modern revenant by the name of one of its previous forms is not wrong, and should be goddamn possible, at the very least. That was my point. I won't pursue it here anymore, because I agree that it probably does not _work_. It doesn't work because it's wrong, but because it seems like there are simply no words at all that work. This name, that label, new, old, short, long - enough people just don't care, don't see, will not see what they are supporting and voting for. It sucks.

I do agree with you here except on one thing: I don’t think they do want to go towards fascism. The neofeudal “network state” idea that we’re iterating towards is the antithesis of any known state. In abstract it’s another silly ancap experiment that’s bound to fail, but in practice the goal is to splinter any organized resistance to capital into tiny economic zones.

If you want to look at it another way, fascism was domination by national capital using the organs of the state, and it relied on strengthening and centralizing the state. Neofeudalism is domination by transnational capital, with the state reduced to a powerless vestigial remnant.

I think that people do oppose this—see the growing opposition to Flock and data centers, which are small components of the overall picture—but they don’t understand it, and they don’t know what to call it. Personally, I think neofeudalism works well. It even has a Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism

Edit: I will add nuance here by saying that there is a subset of the right that wants something more akin to an American fascism, mostly a small but vocal group of internet posters, but they are subordinate to both the neofeudalists and the religious nuts and they only get fed scraps from the table. If the AI bubble collapses and drags the economy down with it, the dynamic may flip on its head, depending on how prepared both groups are. Either way, misunderstanding the neofeudalists as fascists allows them to carry out their work in the dark.

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