Neoliberalism. Named after the late 20th century economic theory that the rich should exercise total control over all aspects of society, and lie about it.
When the Neoliberals conquered the Earth, it wasn’t in face-to-face military battles like the ancient Romans or British used. Instead, the Neoliberals won by destabilizing and corrupting all competing power structures. Conquest is expensive. Tearing down is easy. To invade and occupy a nation-state would require planning, resources, and intelligence. To disrupt it? That only requires the technological high ground and a total lack of scruples. Destroy the power stations and water pumps. Sabotage their data networks, use your vast financial wealth to bribe political parties to betray their nation, block them from the international financial system, ensure that the mainstream media 24/7 slander and belittle and ignore the patriots.
The primary strength of the Neoliberals was their total lack of shame. You could catch them in lies, or contradictions, they could screw up totally, or rob you blind, and they wouldn’t care. They would just go on saying whatever they wanted to say and doing whatever they wanted to do. Neoliberalism is the application of power without moral restraint. You cannot debate them, you cannot reason with them. You can suck up to them and hope to be rewarded. You can do nothing and they will crush you into abject slavery. Oppose them in the slightest way, and they will destroy you by any means possible. Appeals to conscience are as useful as fighting cancer by asking for sympathy. Ultimately, the only winning strategy for dealing with Neoliberalism is to kill it
Thank you for this fiercely written piece, and the anger driving it is entirely earned. The shamelessness is real. The capture of democratic institutions by financial power is real. The weaponisation of media is real. You've named genuine pathologies. But I want to push back on the frame, because I think it makes the error my essay was trying to diagnose.
You've described neoliberalism as a conquering army — organised, directed, strategically unified. But the neoliberal turn was less a conquest than a contagion. It spread because it served the short-term interests of enough powerful actors simultaneously, not because those actors were coordinating from a secret room. Thatcher and Reagan were true believers. The Chicago economists thought they were right. That's what made it so effective and so difficult to reverse — it didn't require conspiracy because it had conviction.
Which brings me to your conclusion: the only winning strategy is to kill it. Kill what, exactly? Kill whom? If the problem is an operating logic so thoroughly embedded in law, finance, accounting, and governance that it reproduces itself through institutions and incentives regardless of who is nominally in charge, then "kill it" is a slogan in search of a target.
Your cancer analogy is more apt than you perhaps intended. You don't kill cancer by finding the person responsible and removing them. You change the conditions in which it grows. That is the harder, less satisfying work. But it's the actual task — building the successor logic, the institutions, and the ways of measuring value and obligation — that make the current operating system's reproduction impossible. Your rage is right. I would suggest that your strategy needs to go one level deeper.
Turning attention to "the actual task — building the successor logic, the institutions, and the ways of measuring value and obligation — that make the current operating system's reproduction impossible" seems daunting, but must be mapped. Somewhat akin to a Doomsday Clock, but multifaceted, exposing the source data, participatory and gamified. The Doomsday Clock is about to have its 80th birthday, less than a decade before John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence." AI can help with a project like this, but perhaps the biggest challenge in creating the necessary multiple DIKW pyramids is the erasure or prohibition of access to classes of raw data by authoritarian actors. That said, the ability to note where raw data has been censored is important in itself. Such an undertaking calls for the leadership of a tragic genius, a Shoeless Joe Jackson. Perhaps if you build it, he will come.
Neoliberalism. Named after the late 20th century economic theory that the rich should exercise total control over all aspects of society, and lie about it.
When the Neoliberals conquered the Earth, it wasn’t in face-to-face military battles like the ancient Romans or British used. Instead, the Neoliberals won by destabilizing and corrupting all competing power structures. Conquest is expensive. Tearing down is easy. To invade and occupy a nation-state would require planning, resources, and intelligence. To disrupt it? That only requires the technological high ground and a total lack of scruples. Destroy the power stations and water pumps. Sabotage their data networks, use your vast financial wealth to bribe political parties to betray their nation, block them from the international financial system, ensure that the mainstream media 24/7 slander and belittle and ignore the patriots.
The primary strength of the Neoliberals was their total lack of shame. You could catch them in lies, or contradictions, they could screw up totally, or rob you blind, and they wouldn’t care. They would just go on saying whatever they wanted to say and doing whatever they wanted to do. Neoliberalism is the application of power without moral restraint. You cannot debate them, you cannot reason with them. You can suck up to them and hope to be rewarded. You can do nothing and they will crush you into abject slavery. Oppose them in the slightest way, and they will destroy you by any means possible. Appeals to conscience are as useful as fighting cancer by asking for sympathy. Ultimately, the only winning strategy for dealing with Neoliberalism is to kill it
Thank you for this fiercely written piece, and the anger driving it is entirely earned. The shamelessness is real. The capture of democratic institutions by financial power is real. The weaponisation of media is real. You've named genuine pathologies. But I want to push back on the frame, because I think it makes the error my essay was trying to diagnose.
You've described neoliberalism as a conquering army — organised, directed, strategically unified. But the neoliberal turn was less a conquest than a contagion. It spread because it served the short-term interests of enough powerful actors simultaneously, not because those actors were coordinating from a secret room. Thatcher and Reagan were true believers. The Chicago economists thought they were right. That's what made it so effective and so difficult to reverse — it didn't require conspiracy because it had conviction.
Which brings me to your conclusion: the only winning strategy is to kill it. Kill what, exactly? Kill whom? If the problem is an operating logic so thoroughly embedded in law, finance, accounting, and governance that it reproduces itself through institutions and incentives regardless of who is nominally in charge, then "kill it" is a slogan in search of a target.
Your cancer analogy is more apt than you perhaps intended. You don't kill cancer by finding the person responsible and removing them. You change the conditions in which it grows. That is the harder, less satisfying work. But it's the actual task — building the successor logic, the institutions, and the ways of measuring value and obligation — that make the current operating system's reproduction impossible. Your rage is right. I would suggest that your strategy needs to go one level deeper.
Your reply is more prose than can be written in 4 minutes by the average biological life form.
Also, see “Splendid Apocalypse: The Fall of Old Earth” by Timothy J. Gawne, from which the above rant was largely adapted-
Yes indeed. I use a voice-to-text app these days because of my arthritis. So every piece you read is sung into existence.
Turning attention to "the actual task — building the successor logic, the institutions, and the ways of measuring value and obligation — that make the current operating system's reproduction impossible" seems daunting, but must be mapped. Somewhat akin to a Doomsday Clock, but multifaceted, exposing the source data, participatory and gamified. The Doomsday Clock is about to have its 80th birthday, less than a decade before John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence." AI can help with a project like this, but perhaps the biggest challenge in creating the necessary multiple DIKW pyramids is the erasure or prohibition of access to classes of raw data by authoritarian actors. That said, the ability to note where raw data has been censored is important in itself. Such an undertaking calls for the leadership of a tragic genius, a Shoeless Joe Jackson. Perhaps if you build it, he will come.
(quote)
"the ability to note where raw data has been censored is important in itself."
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"The data is holy, the index is sacred"?
Electronic censorship via corrupting search engines to make data invisible is the new book burning.