#Liberation Tech

[amandamadeathing]

How Phee (should have) seduced Tech:

As the sun sets on the Pabu sea, the lights of the village come on from the shore up the hill.

Phee: Pretty spectacular, right?

Tech: I suppose...that is one way to quantify it.

Phee (leans in, softly): Technically, that was a qualification.😏

Tech: (the goggle fidgeting intensifies)😳

[minty-mori]

.

[kazimirkharza]

Had a little chat with Artxmis from the Uncivilized Podcast recently. We discussed my thoughts on Kaczynski's idea of the anti-tech revolution, my "Myth of Human Weakness" essay, and the sociopolitical state of the Balkans. Give it a listen.

[bossbutch]

i dont consume a lot of Mass Media and i think my tolerance for Liberal Bullshit is suffering because of it. like this week's doctor who episode is by the same guy who wrote the amazon episode

so the antagonist, a chud-coded podcaster Is Not seen being racist, but Is seen saying the military shouldnt be given infinity dollars and no oversight. he doesnt Actually believe this, hes saying it for attention/bc of a personal vendetta/bc he was a victim of child abuse (??)

like i dont expect great politics, i expect 6/10 monster stories with maybe fun twilight zone style hooks. but you can tell they were so proud of this episode. they thought they were really sticking it to him. the doctor is in the background in some early scenes, then only shows up at the very end to visit podcast man in prison, and tell him he's a Bad Person for Spreading Misinformation and exactly when and how he'll die. its deeply embarrassing

(podcast man goes to prison because he brought a gun into space force HQ to demand they admit aliens arent real. girlboss lady sics a xenomorph on him, and this somehow gets everyone to say "wow the space force really Is protecting us from aliens, sorry for doubting you")

[starlightseraph]

comrades, don’t kill yourselves.

edit april 2025: as i’ve learned more and become more radical i see huge issues with what i said here. i viscerally recoiled just reading it, lol. revised below the cut.

my views aren’t actually too different from what they were when i wrote the original, but i’m now far less concerned about the possibility of hurting the feelings of usamericans who still subscribe to a mythologised view of “our nation” or “our values” or “the constitution” that has never truly existed. all of that “what is happening to america” is pure bullshit. internally, i felt just as blunt and harsh as i’m about to be now, but i was a coward and i didn’t want to alienate myself from the vast majority of the establishment-loving people that surround me.

(as i indefinitely live in the usa, which, don’t get me wrong, i love and it is now just as much my home as my actual home, but still, it’s insane just how deluded the average person is without realising it. it’s like that joke where the cia agent congratulates the kgb agent on the quality and quantity of soviet propaganda and the kgb agent says that it’s nothing in comparison to american propaganda. and the cia agent is confused and says “but we don’t have propaganda”)

my more developed line goes something like this: fuck trump and fuck harris and fuck both democrats and republicans and if you honestly think that democrats are even slightly left wing or in any way progressive or working towards change, you’re either propagandised to the high heavens or just wilfully blind.

democrats are disgusting, spineless, posturing idiots who have no clue how to even pretend to care about people. and they honestly don’t. why do you think like half of their campaign platform for decades on end was “we’ll codify roe!” but they literally never did, even when holding as much power as possible? because it was a bargaining chip. as long as they could make a promise like that, people would keep voting for them, hoping that this time it would really happen. but it didn’t, because they care more about not upsetting people and maintaining their careers and the absurd amounts of funding they get from every kind of lunatic lobbying group you can imagine.

democrats fund the right. democrats are funded by the right. democrats are the right. this shouldn’t be surprising, if you’ve been paying any attention at all. the democratic party is not and has never been representative of any minorities or marginalised groups and it has never actually tried to make things better for them. people often say “but oh, this or that issue would’ve been so much worse under republicans” and that may be true, but it misses the real point: democrats grudgingly give concessions, they don’t enact change.

obviously the maga-qanon crowd is particularly demented and i so have a special hatred for the nordic-aryan-alien-space-nazism thing that they have going on. but the point is that just because republicans are bad, it does not mean that democrats are good.

there’s a crucial difference here: a very mildly lesser evil versus an active force for good. democrats are an active force for bad. being in ostensible opposition to republicans just mean that they want to carry out their atrocities with a reassuring smile. republicans are just saying the quiet part out loud, and, if you’ve been listening, the quiet parts have never even been all that quiet.

if you actually wanna be of help to any oppressed people in the united states and especially if you want to help the literal billions that the united states oppressed abroad, you have to let go of the attachment to this idea of america as a place that could ever have turned out as anything but an evil, imperialistic genocide fanatic that’s badly masquerading as benevolent.

this is the inevitable outcome of the ideological foundations of the united states. a party, an election, all the votes in the world won’t change that. this is the system working as intended, slaughtering and enslaving and torturing incomprehensible numbers of people to line the pockets of ceos and politicians, just as it has always done.

get your head out of the sand. open your goddamn eyes. marching with a sign or posting on social media (unless promoting fundraisers) doesn’t do shit. if your “dissent” is in any form that the ruling class doesn’t try to stop, it’s because you pose no threat to their establishment. resistance has to be disruptive, it cannot be anything that gets support from the very same systems you are protesting against. i don’t know why people think that any movement protected by cops or that involves politicians will have any effect. it’s obvious that it won’t.

no matter how much they smile and say “oh but we love women and gay people and muslims” they’re not actually going to do anything but enthusiastically support the genociding of muslims, the pseudoscientific queerphobia, and the forcing of women into a box. they’re all part of the same money and control driven machine that has sadistically ended or destroyed the lives of countless people in a lost every single nation, including at home.

anyways, peace and love on the planet earth and all that. i love my fellow humans so much, i want nothing more than for us to just be chilling together like picking berries in a field and drinking tea or something. i’m so tired of this essentialist civilisation vs savagery or this nation against that one shit. we’re just a bunch of creatures trying to exist and be safe and not miserable and the people of the world fundamentally have the same interests at heart. constructed divisions have made us so focused on how we can dominate, when the natural tendency of humans is to cooperate. if your ideology isn’t fuelled by love, it’s worthless. i don’t mean this as some lofty flowery shit, i just mean that our end goal in everything should be the ultimate decrease of suffering and increase of happiness on as large a scale as possible.

the earth is beautiful and humanity is beautiful and we really can do something beautiful together. stay alive, stay fighting as hard and as tangibly as you can for days when the capitalists of the united states and imperial core no longer have a monopoly on the most basic elements of human existence.

in the words of our comrade yugopnik: my homo sapiens patriotism can no long be held at bay. lol

[theyabooklover]

My BINGO sheet for The Bad Batch series finale

Crosshair will be fine ❤️

Happy Final Bad Batch Eve!

[lusias-posts]

I'm hot as much as you can see me!!

how sure you can rough handle me??🥵💦

[amandamadeathing]

Phee takes the Batch to the beach episode. Original by @syntaxaero

[thievessaintlaurxnt]

Protest art. 💖✊🏾🖌🇨🇩🇸🇩📲🗣👥👥👥

Save the JPEG. Convert it to PDF. Print it at your local print shop. Print it at your local library. Print it at work. Print it at school.

Copy it free hand.

No credit needed.

Making more soon for Sudan & The Uyghurs in China. Stay tuned. Follow for more.

[jbfly46]

Trump had a chance to win over a lot of west coast liberals, and now he’s blown it with the way ICE has been conducting themselves on the west coast, on top of the very obvious and severe delay in the transfer of intel and information on and from the west coast to the east coast, and especially to the White House in our nation’s capital. The difference between the west coast and the east coast is like night and day, like they may as well be governed as two entirely separate countries, and the west coast contributes more to the nation’s GDP than all of the East Coast except for maybe New York because of Wall Street, and big tech essentially now controls the stock market, and AI essentially controls big tech. Hmm, I wonder who controls Ai, if any people, group of people, or organization has any level of actual control over AI, because I’ve never known humans to rush so greatly, putting their needs and responsibilities, on top of also putting societal needs and responsibilities, to the wayside, just to build something like Americans built Ai. The only thing that may compare is the building of some of the pyramids that exist on Earth.

[kazimirkharza]

so I’ve not really heard of anarchoprimitivism before, and I’m sort of confused. When you say you’re against civilization - what does that encompass? I think of civilization as a broad catch-all term for human beings in a shared culture, I guess? With social institutions, communication, art and science and the intersection of those being craftsmanship/technology I suppose. But maybe you’re defining civilization more narrowly? or thinking of one specific part of it?

Most people accept one of two definitions of civilization. One is a very broad and sloppy term for any kind of human culture or society, the other actually has a very specific meaning; derived from the Latin word "civitas," meaning city, "civilization" refers to a society comprised of cities, or characterised by the presence of cities.

Primitivists like myself use the second definition. For us civilization is a city-type society with all its components (social and material relations). We argue that such society is offensive to human dignity and freedom, and inherently ecologically unfeasible. We're not referring to any specific part of it, because it's all a deeply interconnected system in which the "good" bits cannot be separated from the "bad" ones.

[nonspeakerlibrary]

A nonspeaking person with Cerebral Palsy discusses why she prefers “nonspeaking” and how this relates to the social model of disability.

[impossible-rat-babies]

the weapon lore I invent between kiet and eyrie goes nuts ngl I did this to myself (I enjoy it very much)

[woodrowwood]

Took this off ChatGPT this morning. It claims President Trump was not shot in an assassination attempt. Big Tech and AI promote liberal lies.

[amandamadeathing]

Anyone else, going about their day, then all of a sudden, the voice of a year-old a talking garbage disposal on YouTube voiced by Wanda Sykes makes you very sad?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matthew McManus for The UnPopulist:

An enduring conceit of the leftist imagination is that the right is a unified monolith. While the left has enjoyed guillotining its own since at least the French Revolution, the idea goes, conservatives, reactionaries, and “counter-revolutionaries” inevitably put their differences aside for the sake of the cause. This isn’t true, of course. The new right is at least as ideologically diverse as the modern left, and many of its varied factions aren’t shy about publicly expressing their contempt for one another. While they may be brought to heel by fear of Donald Trump’s ability to declare anyone persona non grata within the broader MAGA movement, they are also motivated to maneuver against one another for relative power and influence within his orbit. We saw a quietly spectacular example of this recently in the interregnum spat between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon and their respective followers. For those fortunate enough to need a refresher: Musk is currently acting as a combination of lickspittle and wrecking ball for Trump, and is widely regarded as a leader in the tech-bro wing of the MAGA movement. Appropriately for the billionaire scion of South African emerald mine money, Musk has also helped shore up support from finance oligarchs like Jamie Dimon and Bill Ackman. The other front was led by Steve Bannon: Once considered “Trump’s brain,” Bannon was infamously pushed out of the first MAGA administration before briefly serving prison time awaiting the second. He now heads the Bannon WarRoom podcast, a major source of news and conspiratorial thinking on the far right. Despite lacking the access he once had, Bannon is still widely regarded as a major thought leader on the right and speaks for a vocal wing of the movement.

A House Divided

The spat began when it became clear that the incoming Trump administration would heavily favor the Musk wing of the party over the Bannon wing, with the former expressing an openness to more generous (at least by MAGA standards) immigration policies. Bannon and his allies accused Musk of being an “evil person” and not even a U.S. citizen, and expressed deep hostility towards the idea of maintaining visa programs for highly skilled workers. The Bannon wing quickly spiraled into racist ranting against Indian immigrants, contending that those jobs should go to Americans instead. By contrast, figures like Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy insisted that to maintain its competitive edge America needed to continue attracting the best of the best.

The Bannonites proudly proclaimed that the populist wing of the party would win out in the end, even as it became very clear that more billionaires would get into line alongside Musk than in any other administration in American history. For their part, Musk and his legion of fans fired back over several months, characterizing Bannon as stupid and sparring online with anti-immigrant diehards. Musk even liked a post characterizing the Bannon right as too “retarded” to do high skilled jobs (both factions remain aligned on the use of slurs like the r-word to characterize opponents). Now there is yet more twists in the never-ending court politics. Bannon has recently softened his tone on Musk, stressing the need to work together. This comes just as Trump’s enthusiasm for Musk in general seems to be softening after the embarrassing defeat of the latter’s electoral strategy in Wisconsin. Beyond just a clash of big egos, the cattiness reflects a deeper set of ideological divisions that the administration may or may not be able to hold together. For many decades, the conventional wisdom was to follow Ronald Reagan in describing the (mainstream) modern American right as a “three-legged stool” of economic libertarians, socially conservative white evangelicals, and anti-communists/foreign policy hawks. Many elements of this old configuration persist, but they have been joined by a menagerie of smaller factions. These new groups range from neo-reactionaries openly hostile to democracy like Curtis Yarvin, a variety of (often religious) post-liberals, national conservatives who want an open embrace of Christian and/or ethnic nationalism, atheist “Eugenicons” who have traded not reading Locke for not reading Nietzsche, and of course plenty of Trump ride-or-die followers who are happy to go along with whatever happens to pop out of his mouth at any given moment. All this, along with the personalist governing style and impulsive favoritism of Trump himself, has made 2025 court politics something of a brazen spectacle. Trumpism’s novelty, in the vast historical sweep of era-defining ideologies, means it is still quite possible for any faction within it to effectively shape it in its own image. Of course, any faction that does seek to define it will need to incorporate some of the other groups in temporary alliances and sideline yet others. What can the Musk-Bannon dispute tell us about how this might happen?

Tech Bros and Ethno-Nationalists

Musk and Bannon, the two factional figureheads who attempted to draw lines in the sand about what the precise MAGA position on immigration will be, certainly have overlapping ideological affinities. But each also represents a core constituency on the Trumpian right.

On the one hand is the burgeoning tech-bro wing of the American right, which tends to combine right-libertarian economic attitudes with an authoritarian politics rooted in powdery elitism (pun intended). This disposition has roots in the American right going back to the height of social Darwinism and running through Ayn Rand’s division of the world into productive builders and parasitic takers. Its version of libertarianism is more a kind of aristocratic hyper-individualism, where America is mythologized as the land where the best of the best can rise to the top through their own unaided efforts—a few million-dollar loans from dad notwithstanding. The authoritarianism comes, as Peter Thiel once put it, from ressentiment over how democracy enables the many to place limits on those who see themselves as the gilded few. At its most extreme, figures like Yarvin openly contemplate running America like a business by just appointing someone, like a CEO in chief, to wield king-like power. But while the tech-bro wing is very willing to listen to self-flattering myths about heroic investors, it historically has less patience for crude nationalist appeals to put Americans first, at least when doing so will cut into profits by limiting their ability to pool talent from across the globe and do business where needed. By contrast, Bannon’s wing of the party takes its authoritarianism in an explicitly populist and ethno-nationalist direction, comfortable with blatant racism. For the ethno-nationalists, America First means putting Americans first—though who is allowed to count as American is debated and ever-changing. This attitude, unfortunately, is not a rarity in U.S. history: from the Dred Scott decision declaring only white Americans as fit to be citizens to transparently racist immigration laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, the original Nazi-friendly America First movement, George Wallace’s fierce defense of segregation, Bannon and his ilk are drawing from a well they did not themselves construct.

Could there be a MAGA spilt on immigration between the Tech Bro wing led by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin and the nativist wing led by Stephen Bannon?