The American Dream is believed to be the national ethos of the United States. Of course, not all Americans agree. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, says, historians conjured the American dream, Hollywood fortified that dream. And it was gilded by novels and adventure stories. And “dreamers continue to believe a lie at black people’s expense.” There are also dreamers of a dangerous kind who are pursuing their fanciful ideas. Ours is the age of epic wealth disparity.
More than 2,000 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 per cent of the world’s population. In the dreamland alone, one can embrace dystopia and engage in fantasy worldbuilding. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote decades ago, everything that has been played out and destroyed in Europe in the name of Revolution has been realised in America. “Utopia has been achieved here and anti-utopia is being achieved,” he added. Tech billionaires are funnelling enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money to support their dystopian ventures. Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars, nothing less! Peter Thiel and Larry Page want to live forever.
Thiel is funding research on immortality. Andreessen Horowitz has published a technooptimist manifesto. Virtual nation-states are the next frontier of technotopia. Anarcho-capitalist plutocrats are now wanting to build a country in the cloud. Patri Friedman received funds from Peter Thiel to establish the Seasteading Institute in San Francisco. A libertarian group is dedicated to building independent floating cities on the high seas. Heartless technooligarchy is clearly their goal. Jonathan Taplin in his book, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto has come down heavily on the dystopian ventures of Peter Thiel, Marc Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen and Elon Musk.
Every technology in the world, and more so in the US, contains a hidden and not so hidden political agenda. The tech billionaires subscribe to what Timnit Gebru, computer scientist and Emile Torres, American philosopher, calls TESCREAL ( transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism). Balaji Srinivasan’s book, The Network State, tells us how to start a new country. He is a strong advocate of migrating our life onto the internet. His book is a manual on exiting democracy and establishing new sovereign territories. Srinivasan visualizes the return of terra incognita and ‘Pax Bitcoinica’.
Where are these ideas coming from? Srinivasan is a leader of a strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. To him, the US has become “the Microsoft of nations: outdated and obsolescent.” He has been proudly calling for “tech Zionism.” Many of his critics dismiss him as a “clown.” The experience with Trump tells us that a clown can be dangerous. He wants a parallel media controlled by tech oligarchs. Musk must be his hero. Why would one build a country on the cloud or create a non-territorial state with floating communities? If one has to believe the tech oligarchs, public institutions have become incompetent. They believe government regulations stifle innovation.
The Musks and Thiels of the world have compulsions to escape the “tyranny of the state.” Referendum, secession and revolution are not in their rulebook. They want “The Network State” of Srinivasan’s making. Bye-bye to our shared nationality! Here comes a state based on shared interests! Nationhood in the sense it existed has withered away. The new philosophy is “cloud first, land last.” A country on the cloud represents the ultimate Silicon Valley approach to governance.
Its proponents conceptualise a society as a technology that can be hacked and innovated upon as simply as an operating system. The autonomy of such a state will be beyond the jurisdiction of any courts or law of any country. If politics is a distraction, so is business. Tech billionaires live in their own world. They want to become god. They create their own, enchanted, self-contained world. Metaverse, X and other such platforms transmogrify reality. The Musks and Thiels are pursuing their own kind of truth. As South Korea-born philosopher Byung-Chui Han says, the obsession with oneself makes others disappear. There was a time when thinkers took upon themselves the task of rebuilding the world. In the US today, celebrities hire their own judge to increase their privacy. As far as tech billionaires are concerned, they don’t see themselves as humans. They are now new angels jostling to outangel one another.
Cyber World War Three, many believe, is the next big frontier of warfare. Can wars be avoided in a country on the cloud? Srinivasan may have to write another book to explain. The greatest nation in the world is imagination. What tech billionaires are attempting is fantasy, not imagination. Our imagination of what will come tomorrow is a mirror of our attitudes about today. Fear is always magnified at a distance. A country on the cloud will not be a new frontier of life. It seems to be disillusionment with the liberal state and perhaps a ploy to take their billions to safer places. The proponents of a virtual state maintain that a cloud country will have attributes of nation-states like civic pride, shared identity and few vulnerabilities. What happened to the crypto-currency? An analysis by the World Economic Forum says that the otherwise good and neutral technologies get “coopted by bad actors and those ever-present human follies of greed, nescience, risks of opportunity or outright criminality.”
Will the fate of a country on the cloud be any different? Footloose capitalism promised to lift all boats but ended up lifting only yachts of the superrich. Tech billionaires make no such promises. We live in a world in which bad guys are winning. Zuckerberg says, “I am here to build something for the long term. Anything else is distraction.” Why should the world be distracted by his distraction? Who will stop them from making a country without citizens in any case? The paradise will be for them. We mortals don’t covet their paradise. We will go by the advice of Victor Hugo, “an intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
(The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi)