Technological Republic Quotes

The tools that would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a republic based roughly on the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.

You will never touch the hearts of others, if it does not emerge from your own.

Some have predicted that language models with as many synapses as exist in the human brain—some 100 trillion connections—will be constructed within the decade.

One should be able to decide whether a descriptive claim is true without knowing anything about who is making it.

The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals.

unjustly treated,” Parsons noted, is “not only a balm to one’s sense of resentment, it is an alibi for failure.

an increase in the workers’ productivity, but exclusively the development of technology, and this depended neither on the working class nor on the bourgeoisie, but on the scientists.

An overly timid engagement with the debates of our time will rob one of the ferocity of feeling that is necessary to move the world. "If you do not feel it, you will not get it by hunting for it

His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.

further refine online advertising algorithms could instead be directed to addressing glaring innovation gaps across education, medicine, national defense, and basic science in the United States and abroad.

Since violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago),2 the revolution of technology, a revolution in toolmaking, was especially marked in warfare.

An entire generation of software engineers, capable of building the next generation of AI weaponry, has turned its back on the nation-state, disinterested in the messiness and moral complexity of geopolitics.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

The public will forgive many failures and sins of the political class. But the electorate will not overlook a systemic inability to harness technology for the purpose of effectively delivering the goods and services that are essential to our lives.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social media platforms that have come to dominate

Our entire defense establishment and military procurement complex were built to supply soldiers for a type of war—on grand battlefields and with clashes of masses of humans—that may never again be fought. This next era of conflict will be won or lost with software.

We have withdrawn just as much from making ethical judgments about the good life as we have aesthetic jugdments about beauty. The postmodern disinclination to make normative claims and value judgments has begun to erode our collective ability to make descriptive claims about truth as well.

10 fundamental lessons of history: 1. We do not learn from history. 2. Science and technology do not make us immune to the laws of history. 3. Freedom is not a universal value. 4. Power is the universal value. 5. The Middle East is the crucible of conflict and the graveyard of empires. 6. The United States shares the destinies of the great democracies, the republics, and the superpowers of the past. 7. Along with the lust for power, religion and spirituality are the most profound motivators in human history. 8. Great nations rise and fall because of human decisions made by individual leaders. 9. The statesman is distinguished from a mere politician by four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to create a consensus to achieve that vision. 10. Throughout its history, the United States has charted a unique role in history.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?

The software and early computing devices that Felsenstein and others were building in Silicon Valley were intended to serve as a challenge to state power, not to enable it. They were not building software systems for defense and intelligence agencies, and they were certainly not building bombs.

The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to

Rather than resist, we might see this next era as one of collaboration, between two species of intelligence, our own and the synthetic. The relinquishment of control over certain creative endeavors may even relieve us of the need to define our worth and sense of self in this world solely through production and output.

When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before”; and the only reason his prophecy did not come true was the constitutional restraint of the nation-state, while today our only hope that it will not come true in the future is based on the constitutional restraints of the American republic plus the technological restraints of the nuclear age.

Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society’s norms.

We live in a society that is based on 30-second sound bites. We have technology that puts all of the information of humankind at our fingertips, but we have the attention span of a three-year-old at a carnival midway on the Fourth of July. We throw around a lot of words like democracy, federal, republic, nationalist, socialist, liberal, and right-wing—but do we really know what they mean?

The reluctance of several generations of educators, in particular, but also our political and business leaders, to venture into a discussion about the good, as opposed to merely the right, has left a gap that risks being filled by others, demagogues from both the left and the right. Such reluctance was born of a desire to accommodate all views and values. But a tolerance of everything has the tendency to devolve into support for nothing.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley30 has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society’s norms. Vivid depictions of the suffering wrought by slavery, sadistic punishments, war, and cruelty to children and animals preceded the reforms that outlawed or reduced those practices. Though chronology does not prove causation, the laboratory studies showing that hearing or reading a first-person narrative can enhance people’s sympathy for the narrator at least make it plausible (chapter 9).

The parallels, however, between improvisational theater and the plunge into the abyss that is founding or working at a startup are numerous. To expose oneself on the stage, and to inhabit a character, require an embrace of serendipity and a level of psychological flexibility that are essential in building and navigating the growth of a company that seeks to serve a new market, and indeed participate in the creation of that market, rather than merely accommodate the needs and demands of existing ones. There is a breathless, improvisational quality to building technology. Jerry Seinfeld has said, “In comedy, you do anything that you think might work. Anything.” The same is true in tech. The construction of software and technology is an observational art and science, not a theoretical one. One needs to constantly abandon perceived notions of what ought to work in favor of what does work. It is that sensitivity to the audience, the public, and the customer that allows us to build.

Although the founders were often good classicists, they took as a model for the American republic the pre-Julius Caesar Roman Republic. For the record, our word democracy comes from the Greek demokratia, which means, literally, “people-power.” History’s only democracy was instituted at Athens in 508 B.C. by Cleisthenes. Every male citizen over eighteen years of age was a citizen, able to gather with his fellows on a hillside, where, after listening to various demagogues, he could vote with the other citizens on matters of war and peace and anything else that happened to be introduced that day. In 322 B.C. Alexander of Macedon conquered Athens and eliminated their democracy, which was never again to be tried by a proper state (as opposed to an occasional New England town meeting). Current publicists for the American Empire have convinced themselves that if other nations, living as they do in utter darkness, would only hold numerous elections at enormous cost to their polity’s plutocracy (or to the benign empire back of these exercises), perfect government would henceforward obtain as The People had Been Heard: one million votes for Saddam Hussein, let us say, to five against. Although the Athenian system might now be revived through technology, voting through some sort of “safe” cybersystem, no one would wish an uneducated, misinformed majority to launch a war, much less do something meaningful like balance the budget of Orange County, California. One interesting aspect of the Athenian system was the rotation of offices. When Pericles told Sophocles, the poet-dramatist, that it was his turn to be postmaster general or some such dull office, Sophocles said he was busy with a play and that, besides, politics was not his business. To which the great Pericles responded, the man who says politics is no business of his has no business.

Continetti concludes: "An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation… The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities. There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist "agendas" and "policies." They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear… The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on earth." You can see why anarchists might find this sort of thing refreshingly honest. The author makes no secret of his desire to see us all in prison, but at least he’s willing to make an honest assessment of what the stakes are. Still, there is one screamingly dishonest theme that runs throughout the Weekly Standard piece: the intentional conflation of "democracy" with "everyday politics," that is, lobbying, fund-raising, working for electoral campaigns, and otherwise participating in the current American political system. The premise is that the author stands in favor of democracy, and that occupiers, in rejecting the existing system, are against it. In fact, the conservative tradition that produced and sustains journals like The Weekly Stand is profoundly antidemocratic. Its heroes, from Plato to Edmund Burke, are, almost uniformly, men who opposed democracy on principle, and its readers are still fond of statements like "America is not a democracy, it’s a republic." What’s more, the sort of arguments Continetti breaks out here--that anarchist-inspire movements are unstable, confused, threaten established orders of property, and must necessarily lead to violence--are precisely the arguments that have, for centuries. been leveled by conservatives against democracy itself. In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy that conservatives like Continetti have always staunchly opposed. Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy--or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most American have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions. The reason it’s difficult to see this is because the word "democracy" has had such an endlessly contested history: so much so that most American pundits and politicians, for instance, now use the term to refer to a form of government established with the explicit purpose of ensuring what John Adams once called "the horrors of democracy" would never come about. (p. 153-154)

Niobe earned the ire of the gods by bragging about her seven lovely daughters and seven “handsome sons—whom the easily offended Olympians soon slaughtered for her impertinence. Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. Still, while elusiveness and loss tortured Tantalus and Niobe, it is actually a surfeit of their namesake elements that has decimated central Africa. There’s a good chance you have tantalum or niobium in your pocket right now. Like their periodic table neighbors, both are dense, heat-resistant, noncorrosive metals that hold a charge well—qualities that make them vital for compact cell phones. In the mid-1990s cell phone designers started demanding both metals, especially tantalum, from the world’s largest supplier, the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire. Congo sits next to Rwanda in central Africa, and most of us probably remember the Rwandan butchery of the 1990s. But none of us likely remembers the day in 1996 when the ousted Rwandan government of ethnic Hutus spilled into Congo seeking “refuge. At the time it seemed just to extend the Rwandan conflict a few miles west, but in retrospect it was a brush fire blown right into a decade of accumulated racial kindling. Eventually, nine countries and two hundred ethnic tribes, each with its own ancient alliances and unsettled grudges, were warring in the dense jungles. Nonetheless, if only major armies had been involved, the Congo conflict likely would have petered out. Larger than Alaska and dense as Brazil, Congo is even less accessible than either by roads, meaning it’s not ideal for waging a protracted war. Plus, poor villagers can’t afford to go off and fight unless there’s money at stake. Enter tantalum, niobium, and cellular technology. Now, I don’t mean to impute direct blame. Clearly, cell phones didn’t cause the war—hatred and grudges did. But just as clearly, the infusion of cash perpetuated the brawl. Congo has 60 percent of the world’s supply of the two metals, which blend together in the ground in a mineral called coltan. Once cell phones caught on—sales rose from virtually zero in 1991 to more than a billion by 2001—the West’s hunger proved as strong as Tantalus’s, and coltan’s price grew tenfold. People purchasing ore for cell phone makers didn’t ask and didn’t care where the coltan came from, and Congolese miners had no idea what the mineral was used for, knowing only that white people paid for it and that they could use the profits to support their favorite militias. Oddly, tantalum and niobium proved so noxious because coltan was so democratic. Unlike the days when crooked Belgians ran Congo’s diamond and gold mines, no conglomerates controlled coltan, and no backhoes and dump trucks were necessary to mine it. Any commoner with a shovel and a good back could dig up whole pounds of the stuff in creek beds (it looks like thick mud). In just hours, a farmer could earn twenty times what his neighbor did all year, and as profits swelled, men abandoned their farms for prospecting. This upset Congo’s already shaky food supply, and people began hunting gorillas for meat, virtually wiping them out, as if they were so many buffalo. But gorilla deaths were nothing compared to the human atrocities. It’s not a good thing when money pours into a country with no government.

The men on the plain at Shinar make a technological discovery... As after so many other technological advances, they immediately conclude that they now have the power of gods. They are no longer subject to nature. They have become its masters. They will storm the heavens. Their man-made environment - the city with its ziggurat or artificial mountain - will replicate the structure of the cosmos, but here they will rule, not God. It is a supreme act of hubris, committed time and again in history - from the Sumerian city-states, to Plato's Republic, to empires, ancient and modern, to the Soviet Union. It is the attempt to impose a man-made unity on divinely created diversity. That is what is wrong with universalism.

Such distrust regarding democracy was also very widespread in the United States in the era of the supposed “Founding Fathers.” Ralph Ketcham perfectly summarized this situation by writing that “virtually all shades of opinion reviled monarchy and democracy, and, publicly at least, supported republicanism.” In effect, the distinction between democratic government and republican government was of the utmost importance (even if there were semantic variations), and politicians such as James Madison condemned the error consisting in confounding “a republic with a democracy.” He opposed, for his part, the qualities of republics, founded on representation and better adapted to large states, to the flaws of democracies, which are incapable of stretching across vast territories or of protecting themselves against pernicious factions. In a similar fashion, Alexander Hamilton called for the unification of the states into a “confederate republic” rather than into a democracy, which he described as being unstable and imprudent. William Cobbett, the editor of a pro-Federalist paper, went further still by expressing himself with remarkable candor: “O base democracy! Why, it is absolutely worse than street-sweepings, or the filth of the common sewers.” Yet it is perhaps John Adams who, better than anyone, lucidly summarized the dangers of democracy in the eyes of the most powerful statesmen. For he feared that the majority, who were very poor, would wish to redistribute goods and establish material equality.

Socialism praise and admire the usage, or application of technology and the implementation of scientific approach before anything else.

Despite all its difficulties and errors, the country was steadily growing in economic power, cultural vigor, and social stability. In letters and science, the United States was already presenting the world with fruits in which it might take pride. In its economic development, a business enterprise of identifiably American type was beginning to emerge with technologies unlike those of Europe. In a hundred other fields, the initiative, self-reliance, and optimism of the people were writing a record of almost unexampled vigor and color. Energy, versatility, progressiveness — these were the traits of the young republic.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Following the company’s announcement that it would discontinue public sales of the wearable technology, Google officials confirmed Monday that all unsold units of Google Glass would be donated to underprivileged assholes in Africa. “We are committed to positively impacting the lives of poverty-stricken smug pricks by distributing the surplus inventory of Google Glass to self-important fucks throughout sub-Saharan Africa,” a statement released by the company read in part, adding that the program will provide the optical head-mounted technology, as well as professional training sessions, to destitute communities of conceited dicks from Sierra Leone, to Somalia, to Botswana. “This gesture will help tens of thousands of poor and needy men, women, and children across the continent who have never had the opportunity to walk around looking like a pompous jackass all day long. From the moment they turn on their new Google Glass in clear view of others, they’ll immediately start experiencing the undeserved sense of superiority currently lacking in their lives.” At press time, Google confirmed that the first devices had been presented to an indigent family of complete fucking jerkoffs from the Republic of Guinea.

Over the last generation, journalism has slowly been swallowed. The ascendant media companies of our era don’t think of themselves as heirs to a great ink-stained tradition. Some prefer to call themselves technology firms. This redefinition isn’t just a bit of fashionable branding. Silicon Valley has infiltrated the profession, from both within and without. Over the past decade, journalism has come to depend unhealthily on Facebook and Google. The big tech companies supply journalism with an enormous percentage of its audience—and therefore a big chunk of revenue. This gives Silicon Valley influence over the entire profession, and it has made the most of its power. Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media to ink terrible deals, which look like self-preserving necessities, but really just allow Facebook and Google to hold them even tighter. Media will grant Facebook the right to sell advertising or give Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. They like to shift quickly in a radically different direction, which is great for their bottom line, but terrible for all the media companies dependent on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or that its users prefer ideologically pleasing propaganda to hard news. When Facebook shifts direction like this or when Google tweaks its algorithm, they instantly crash Web traffic flowing to media, with all the rippling revenue ramifications that follow. Media know they should flee the grasp of Facebook, but dependence also breeds cowardice. The prisoner lies on the cot dreaming of escape plans that will never hatch. Dependence on the big tech companies is increasingly the plight of the worker and the entrepreneur. Drivers maintain erratic patterns of sleep because of Uber’s shifting whims. Companies that manufacture tchotchkes sold on Amazon watch their businesses collapse when Amazon’s algorithms detect the profitability of their item, leading the giant to manufacture the goods itself at a lower price. The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability. It’s the way in which the tech companies dictate the patterns of work, the way in which their influence can shift the ethos of an entire profession to suit their needs—lowering standards of quality, eroding ethical protections. I saw this up close during my time at the New Republic. I watched how dependence on the tech companies undermined the very integrity of journalism. At the very beginning of that chapter in my career, I never imagined that we would go down that path.

The proximate cause of the rise of Italian capitalism was freedom from the rapacious rulers who repressed and consumed economic progress in most of the world, including most of Europe. Although their political life often was turbulent, these city states were true republics able to sustain the freedom required by capitalism. Second, centuries of technological progress had laid the necessary foundations for the rise of capitalism, especially the agricultural surpluses needed to sustain cities and to permit specialization.

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” —Plutarch

Our fascination with change won’t, of itself, make it more likely or more rapid. Come 2020, I’m confident that Australia will still have one of the world’s strongest economies because the current yearning for magic-pudding economics will turn out to be short-lived. The United States will remain the world’s strongest country by far, and our partnership with America will still be the foundation of our security. We will still be a ‘crowned republic’ because we will have concluded (perhaps reluctantly) that it’s actually the least imperfect system of government. We will be more cosmopolitan than ever but perhaps less multicultural because there will be more stress on unity than on diversity. Some progress will have been made towards ‘closing the gap’ between Aboriginal and other Australians’ standards of living (largely because fewer Aboriginal people will live in welfare villages and more of them will have received a good general education). Families won’t break up any more often, because old-fashioned notions about making the most of imperfect situations will have made something of a comeback. Finally, there will have been bigger fires, more extensive floods and more ferocious storms because records are always being broken. But sea levels will be much the same, desert boundaries will not have changed much, and technology, rather than economic self-denial, will be starting to cut down atmospheric pollution.

As soon as the edifice of the knowledge of the ancients had been shaken in the minds of the most inquisitive, questions upon questions arose which now demanded technology, including -- crucially -- the invention of the telescope and the microscope, enabling a generation of scholars to see clearly things which had been absolutely invisible to their forefathers. It was a thrilling, and dangerous, time to be alive.

When the Roman Republic was at its height in the mid-first century B.C., when Pompey the Great solidified his conquests in the East, Julius Caesar conquered and annexed Gaul in the West, Roman armies dominated the Mediterranean world, and riches were pouring into the city, neither the leaders nor the people of Rome thought that the structure of their society was about to fall apart. They did not know that two decades of civil war was upon them, that their political system would be uprooted, and their previously guaranteed civil liberties, property rights, and freedoms were to be lost. The United States is now viewed as the dominant world power, the wealthiest nation on earth with the strongest economy, with military installations and naval patrols around the world, and with astounding technological capabilities. Yet, recent challenges and troubling developments have raised the question of whether what happened to the Roman Republic will happen to ours." - Rome and America: The Great Republics

Page 61-2 ... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems. Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses." Page 64-5: The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002. This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries. Page 68: In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production. Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.

What remains under consideration is how Cincinnatus, the early Republic, and the other examples, cultures, and structures of governance will be considered in future decisions of how human beings will live in a globally connected commercial, technological, and cultural world.

Deep State”—the Invisible Government The terms “invisible government,” “shadow government,” and more recently “Deep State” have been used to describe the secretive, occult, and international banking and business families that control financial institutions, both political parties, and cabals within various intelligence agencies in Britain and America. Edward L. Bernays, a pioneer in the field of propaganda, spoke of the “invisible government” as the “true ruling power of our country.” He said, “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”40 “The political process of the United States of America [is] under attack by intelligence agencies and individuals in those agencies,” U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said. “You have politicization of agencies that is resulting in leaks from anonymous, unknown people, and the intention is to take down a president. Now, this is very dangerous to America. It’s a threat to our republic; it constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life.”41 Emotional Contagion One of the reasons why the Deep State has been able to hide in plain sight is because it controls the mainstream media in the United States. Despite the growing evidence of its existence, the media largely denies this reality. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, wrote an article titled, “There Is No Deep State: The Problem in Washington Is Not a Conspiracy Against the President; It’s the President Himself.” Like the “thought police” in George Orwell’s 1984—a classic book about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed by a totalitarian regime—the Deep State uses the media to program the population according to the dictates of Big Brother and tell people in effect that “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”42 Many of the largest social media platforms are used by the Deep State for surveillance and to influence the masses. Many people think social media is just for personal fun and networking with friends, family, and business associates. However, this innocent activity enables powerful computer networks to create detailed profiles of people’s political and moral beliefs and buying habits, as well as a deep analysis of their psychological conflicts, emotional problems, and pretty much anything Big Brother wants to know. Most people don’t understand the true extent of surveillance now occurring. For at least a decade, digital flat-screen televisions, cell phones and smartphones, laptop computers, and most devices with a camera and microphone could be used to spy on you without your knowledge. Even if the power on one of these devices was off, you could still be recorded by supercomputers collecting “mega-data” for potential use later. These technologies are also used to transform

The experience of economic growth during the Roman Republic was impressive, as were other examples of growth under extractive institutions, such as the Soviet Union. But that growth was limited and was not sustained, even when it is taken into account that it occurred under partially inclusive institutions. Growth was based on relatively high agricultural productivity, significant tribute from the provinces, and long-distance trade, but it was not underpinned by technological progress or creative destruction.

There were vast expanses of opportunity that had been passed over by the wisdom of the crowds and the market.

The problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.

To put it another way, each American republic has been destabilized by a wave of technology-driven change. The gap between a rapidly evolving society and an outmoded political order grows for several decades. Finally, during a war or depression or both, the outmoded political order crumbles and a new American republic is constructed, built on the ruins of its predecessor.

Nancy was accused of being unscientific, an enemy of free speech, and a “hysteric,” in the words of the syndicated columnist George Will. The Atlantic dismissed her and other women who objected to Summers as “feminist careerists” seeking “thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends.” In the New Republic, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor and author whose book had helped inform Summers, worried that efforts against sex discrimination might push young women into “lines of work they don’t enjoy.” Almost two decades later, there’s still work to do. A landmark report in 2018 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that 50 percent of female faculty members had experienced sexual harassment, and that the biggest complaint was not “sexual coercion” but put-downs about their intelligence, exclusion, and the kind of marginalization that the women of MIT had described twenty years earlier. But the progress is also undeniable. The MIT report was followed by an explosion in scholarship examining the reasons for the disproportionately low numbers of women in science, technology, engineering, and math, and in strategies to increase their representation and treat them as full participants in their fields. Those efforts have expanded beyond women to include others from traditionally marginalized groups.

the reliance on slaves that hindered Rome’s technological improvement and contributed to its downfall

act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing

In the 1990, there was a rock band in Russia called Bakhyt-Kompot, and they had a song that was musically terrible but an important expression of punk philosophy that articulated one of my own main preoccupations. The chorus went like this: "How come the Czechs have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Poles have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Germans have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it?" All the countries of the Soviet bloc and the Baltic republics were managing to "crack it," but not us. We had the oil, the gas, the ores and timber, infrastructure of sorts, and industry. We had a lot of highly educated people but it didn't help. I'm not talking about "like in America"; it wasn't even like in Poland. According to current official statistics, 13 percent of people were living below the poverty line; in terms of the average wage, we had been overtaken by China, Lebanon, and Panama. Someday I believe it will all work out and everything will be fine, but we have to face the fact that from the early 1990s to the 2020s, the life of the nation has been wasted moronically, a time of degeneration and failing to keep up. There is good reason why people like me, and those five or ten years older, are called a cursed and lost generation. We are the people who should have been the main beneficiaries of market and political freedom. We could have adapted readily to a new world in a way that was beyond the ability of most earlier generations. Fifteen percent of us should have become entrepreneurs, "like in America." But Russia didn't crack it. No one doubts we are living better now than we were in 1990, but, excuse me, thirty years have passed. Even in North Korea people are living better now than they did then. Scientific and technological progress, whole new branches of the economy, communications, the internet, ATMs, computers . . . Those who claim the rise in living standards relative to the 1990s is due to the exertions and achievements of the Putin regime re like stock joke characters saying, "Thank heaven for Putin! Under his rule the speed of computers has increased a millionfold." The comparison should not be between us as we were in 1990 and us as we are now, but between how we are now and how we could have been if we had grown at just the average global growth rate. We would easily have achieved what we watched in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, and South Korea achieve. That is a comparison about which we can only feel sad. This is not some abstract exercise, but thirty years of our lives. And God knows how many more such lost and stolen years lie ahead. For as long as Putin's group is in power, we will count the missed opportunities and be noticing how other countries have overtaken us in per capita GDP, and how those we have always looked down as little better than beggars have overtaken us in terms of their national average income.

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The rise of artificial intelligence, which for the first time in history presents a plausible challenge to our species for creative supremacy in the world, has only heightened the urgency of revisiting questions of national identity and purpose that many had thought could be safely cast aside. We might have muddled through for years if not decades, dodging these more essential matters, if the rise of advanced AI, from large language models to the coming swarms of autonomous robots, had not threatened to upend the global order. The moment, however, to decide who we are and what we aspire to be, as a society and a civilization, is now.

Western liberal democracies have lived off the borrowed capital of the church for centuries.” If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state?

the rejection of the moral point of view was in many ways a precondition of the Enlightenment and indeed the scientific revolution that made Silicon Valley possible, writing that “moral obtuseness,” a relinquishing or at least pause in the search for a definition of good and evil, “is the necessary condition for scientific analysis.

This abandonment of an aesthetic point of view is lethal to building technology. The construction of software requires taste, both in crafting the programs involved and in selecting the personalities required to build them. It

The radical suggestion to build technology that served the needs of U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, instead of merely catering to the consumer, began with Peter Thiel, who sensed the diminished ambition of Silicon Valley

2,327 U.S. companies over a ten-year period from 1992 to 2002, of which 361 were run by a founder as opposed to a professional or appointed CEO. He found that an investment approach that purchased shares solely in companies run by founders would have earned an excess annual return of 10.7 percent, or 4.4 percent more per year

The task of maintaining human communities with significantly more than 150 or so individuals, of forming direct social relationships and

lasting bonds with that many people, is exceedingly difficult.

The leaders of Silicon Valley are drawn from a disembodied generation of talent in America that is committed to little more than vehement secularism, but beyond that nothing much of substance.

Our Republic is based on the drive and willpower of human beings. So the Emperor and Senate are dedicated to making sure our technology doesn’t replace our people.” Hannah remembered Laurentia bristling at the suggestion that she should have robots perform the Amica implant procedure. She had seemed almost insulted by the idea, explaining to Hannah that she wasn’t helpless. Later, Hannah received an Amica-delivered history lesson that put this into even sharper focus. “What do you think, Hannah? Do you think we’re being unnecessarily cautious in this regard? “Actually, not at all. I think you’re providing a great example for our world. Human beings need to be occupied, productive, to be happy. Unfortunately, many on my world have forgotten this obvious truism.” “How so?” “Many have become lazy. Seeking comfort rather than accomplishment. Many want to have as much work done for them as possible.” “Which won’t make them happy,” said the Primus knowingly. “No. Even worse. Too much leisure often makes people miserable, although they rarely admit it, even to themselves. When Homo sapiens has too much idle time, too much time for unnecessary introspection, we tend to invent problems. Spin out of control over perceived slights. Lack of purpose—true purpose—is causing an unprecedented mental health crisis on my world.” Severus nodded. “You show great insight. Humans are wired to achieve. To be productive. To have a useful purpose.

A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

In this book, we make the case that the technology sector has an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible. A renewed embrace of the public interest will be essential if the software industry is to rebuild trust with the country

The central argument that we advance in the pages that follow is that the software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face.

They believe, to be sure, but principally in themselves and in the power of their creations, stopping short of entering into a discourse with the most significant questions of our time, including the broader project of the nation and its reason for being.

The principal affiliation of this generation of builders was to the businesses they themselves were building.

in the decades since 1970, technological developments “have mostly occurred in a narrow sphere of activity having to do with entertainment, communications and the collection and processing of information,” whereas “for the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress has slowed.

The risk is that a generation’s disenchantment with the nation-state and disinterest in our collective defense have resulted in an unquestioned yet massive redirection of resources, both intellectual and financial, to sating the often capricious needs of capitalism’s consumer culture.

A more intimate collaboration between the state and the technology sector, and a closer alignment of vision between the two, will be required if the United States and its allies are to maintain an advantage that will constrain our adversaries over the long term. The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war.

The technological class instinctively rushes to raise capital for video-sharing apps and social media platforms, advertising algorithms and online shopping websites. They do not hesitate to track and monetize our every movement online, burrowing their way into our lives. Yet these same engineers, and the Silicon Valley giants they have built, often balk when it comes to working with the U.S. military.

The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield—

The failing of that early internet era was its rush to serve the needs of the consumer at the expense of those of the nation-state or public. And that focus on the consumer endures to this day. The lack of ambition from many startups today is and remains striking. Far too much capital, intellectual and otherwise, has been dedicated to sating the often capricious and passing needs of late capitalism’s hordes.

The entrepreneurial energy of a generation was essentially redirected toward creating the lifestyle technology that would enable the highly educated classes at the helms of these firms and writing the code for their apps to feel as if they had more income than they did.

is no mediation of the information captured by the scouts once they return to the hive. And the starlings do not have to seek permission from higher-ups before they signal to their neighbors that the flock is turning. There are no weekly reports to middle management, no presentations to more senior leaders. No meetings or conference calls to prepare for other meetings. The bee swarms and flocks of starlings do not consist of layers upon layers of vice presidents and deputy

vice presidents, directing the work of subgroups of individuals and managing the perceptions of their superiors. There is only the flock or the swarm. And it is within those whirls of motion that a certain type of improvisation, and looseness, is allowed to take form.

At most human organizations, from government bureaucracies to large corporations, an enormous amount of the energy and talent of individuals is directed at jockeying for position, claiming credit for success, and often desperately avoiding blame for failure. The vital and scarce creative output of those involved in an endeavor is far too often misdirected to crafting self-serving hierarchies and patrolling who reports to whom. Among the bees, however, there

Our educational institutions and broader culture have enabled a new class of leaders who are not merely neutral, or agnostic, but whose capacity for forming their own authentic beliefs about the world has been severely diminished. And that absence leaves them vulnerable to becoming instruments for the plans and designs of others.

Every few generations, the familiar American republic falls apart and must be rebuilt in a generation-long struggle. To date, each American republic has provided more freedom and more opportunity than the one that preceded it. The First Republic abolished aristocracy and feudalism on American soil. The Second Republic abolished slavery. The Third Republic eliminated widespread destitution and sought to suppress the exploitation of wage labor. And each republic has used the technological tools of its era to create a more productive economy with gains shared by more Americans.

millions? Or makes us laugh out loud?[*] Or paints a portrait that endures for decades? Or directs and produces a film that captures the hearts of festival critics? Is the beauty or truth expressed in such works any less powerful or authentic merely because they sprang from the mind of a machine?