The Dividing Line
Hannah Arendt | Defending The Abundance Agenda | The Tech Oligarchs Are Repeating History
The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences.
| Hannah Arendt, Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship
Defending The Abundance Agenda
In The Abundance Agenda Has Its Own Theory of Power (or my annotated version), Ezra Klein recounts some conversations he’s had about themes in his new book (with Derek Thompson), The Abundance Agenda.
His Abundance politics is some sort ordoliberal utopian vision, downplaying the rapacity of oligarchs and corporations in the hope of unstitching the regulatory environment of mostly blue government so we can do big things again, like housing and high-speed rail. It's a slightly +off left vision, since he's willing to dismantle some of the checks on corporate actors when it lines up with policies that are good for people.
I still think Klein is planning to run for office.
The Tech Oligarchs Are Repeating History
John Ganz sketches out that the tech oligarchs are repeating history. In What Happened Here (or my annotated version), he maps the shift of the tech oligarchs from liberalism to reactionaries. This is Marx’s gravediggers thesis, when the petite bourgeoisie realize that creating a class of industrial workers -- using techniques intended to control them (worker competition, commodification of work, and the precarity of wage labor) -- fairly quickly leads to solidarity and a struggle for power.
The industrial age oligarchs responded by creating and supporting reactionary governments to resist the people's demands. Today, the tech oligarchs are going down the same path, joining Trump's crusade, attempting to steer him to break the power of the workers, before it's too late.
They read the changes: new technologies -- like the internet -- led to a greater ability in the tech workforce to organize and agitate for changes within tech corporations, and the owners decided to move first, because they had no real control of the passions of their progressive employees, despite the posters in the cafeterias. The oligarchs swung right in reaction, and labeled their workers 'Marxists', 'woke', and 'socialists'. The oligarchs struck first -- mass layoffs, increased precarity, seeking to end WFH -- and then attacking wokeness -- DEI, trans rights, green policies, and other progressive aspects of tech work culture. The oligarchs joined with Trump's rabble to take that agenda nationwide, leading to DOGE, and dismantling large chunks of the institutional bureaucracy that enabled the tech overlords to become edgelords. But maybe they moved too soon.
My question: Can the various circles of Trump's Venn diagram remain overlapping, or will the backlash from policies that immiserate Trump's rabble -- the ‘disaffected’ -- lead them and other circles to reject illiberalism, and return to the left, or at least some ‘off left’ version of it?