alt Hacker News> Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy
Several people (maybe all, I do not know for sure) on that list are pretty hard core right wing populists, correct? Isn't that completely at odds with technocracy? Or are you thinking that they are just taking advantage of a populist movement but are themselves technocrats?
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They wish primarily to use technology to control government/people more fully. Their current angle is to side with a populist government. But they were making deals with Obama and Biden as well. The only populist in my reckoning is trump, who truly seems to like the power for its own sake and will whip people into a frenzy to get it.
Think it over. No one who leads a populist movement is ever ultimately sincere in his populism. But where, excuse me, where on Earth did you get the idea that any of those guys is a populist?
They are trumpist, because Trump is highly narcissistic and disgusted by _weakness_ in others. They are elitist Nietzschean social darwinists at heart and believe IQ should determine social status.
The populism stuff doesn't mean "We're protecting the little guy from elites who conspire against him." It means "We're protecting ourselves from other elites who conspire against us - but the little guy will still be better off with us as the authoritarian elite."
Zero of them are right-wing populists. They share absolutely no characteristics or policies with anyone who had ever been called populist before 2015, both when the term was invented (as a description of left-wing people against plutocrats), or when it was later bastardized by plutocrats (as a description of anyone who thought the happiness of the population should have any affect on policy.) There is no resemblance between any position they hold and the positions of the People's Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States))
> The "Demands" adopted by the Ocala convention called for the abolition of national banks; the establishment of sub-treasuries or depositories in every state, which would make low interest direct loans to farmers and property owners; the increase of money in circulation to not less than $50 per capita; the abolishment of futures of all agricultural and mechanical productions; the introduction of free silver; the prohibition of alien ownership of land, the reclamation of all lands held by railroads and other corporations in excess of what was actually used and needed by them, held for actual settlers only; legislation to ensure that one industry would not be built up at the expense of another; removal of the tariff tax on necessities of life; a graduated income tax; the limitation of all national and state revenues to the necessary expenses of the government economically and honestly administered; strict regulation or ownership of the means of public communication and transportation; and an amendment of the United States Constitution providing for the direct election of United States senators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocala_Demands
People need to stop discussing reality through weird propagandistic brand names that people were literally paid to come up with, and talk specifically about material differences in policy.
Did you read tfa?
The key word here is populism. Finding scapegoats (immigrants, woke feminists, lazy unemployed people) to explain away societal ills caused by inequality. Of course tech billionaires prefer blaming the scapegoats to blaming themselves. It serves as a political shield, so that they can continue to hoard wealth and control.
In the 30s, industry leaders aligned themselves with Hitler and Mussolini. They both focused on technology as a means of control. Capitalists also see the benefit of cheap labor and a war economy.
Right wing populism and technocracy are a match made in heaven, because fascism is good for the bottom line.
Openness to technology use and to technological progress is a separate axis. The whole left-right thing is a convenient grouping mechanism and doesn't have explanatory power. If you dissolve it into multiple axes (openness to tech, authority beliefs/morals/economics, tradition, etc) you can show much tighter groups of beliefs with more distinct boundaries, but in practice they are lumped into "left" or "right" at a given moment, even though some of those clusters have switched from one side to the other (and even back!) in living memory. See also "horseshoe theory", which is what happens when you try really hard to put everyone on a single axis.
In contrast, populism is a style, not a set of beliefs.