Latest / EnvironMental with Dandelion / The Extractive Tapestry Part 2: The Technocrats | EnvironMental Podcast
Transcript
- Aub Wallace: Got a booster seat. ⁓ okay. Alright. I've always wanted to have one of these entrances where I'm like You know, I don't know if this booster seat is really gonna work out for me, but you know, and then like somebody walks in and they like fix my thing. I don't know. That sounds like fun. let me see how does the sound sound because I'm a bit far. I want this all the way up and this all the way up. That should do it, huh? All right. Mm in the green. Hold on. Okay. You know sometimes you just need to drink water. It's it's hot out right now, so Drink water. your body's made up of eighty percent water. Okay, let's get serious. Hi Regan. Ready for this one? I'm not ready for this one. We're gonna do it. Let's give you like the technocrats. We're talking about the technocrats. And maybe like some stuff for like other I don't know. It look like I'm looking down. I don't know. I'm kind of looking down. I might be looking actually eye-level for the first time. What do you think about my new drying rack? By the way. ⁓ it's the first time I so I made I made it. Because I'm out of drying racks and they're fucking expensive. Okay. Anyway, so I made one. I'm in the middle of making another one. Cause I just like don't have enough drying space. This is, you know, when you're like When your crash out conspiracy office also doubles as your apothecary, like this is what happens. I try to clean it before every episode. Anyway, Aubrey. Sorry. Love you. My tiny dog is here. ⁓ hold on. I'm gonna make like a Well Yeah. She's helping. ⁓ Okay. Rawl, here's the deal. Actually I need to close this door a little bit, so please don't be too barksy. You know, she's probably gonna go right outside and do big girl barksing because she's an asshole. but that's how Dachshunds are, so okay. Let's go. Imagine you've woken up refreshed. Boy, that would be nice, wouldn't it? That would be really nice. Anyway, you've woken up refreshed and you say good morning to your partner and your dog, and you're just lounging in bed, chilling before your day really starts. You reach for your phone to check in. What's in the family chat? ⁓ did your friends make it home after game night last night? How did yesterday's post do? What's today's latest trend? Who's cancelled? What did the president say now? Should you share that funny dinosaur meme? Does anyone care what you're thinking about? Does anyone care what you're thinking about? Should you take down the post? It didn't have very much engagement. Maybe it isn't interesting. That opinion post did get a lot more attention though. Maybe you should do that again. Whew! ⁓ Whether you want to believe it or not, social media impacts you. It impacts what you think about, tells you what to be concerned about, gives you an indication of how well liked you are, and it plays a part in shaping your wants and needs. Now, I think the jury is out on whether or not this was an intentional part of it all when it started, but it certainly is now. Now, today Social media is a form of social control. And that's what I'm talking about today on Environmental with Dandelion. If this is your first time tuning in, hi hello, I'm Aub, your host and the chief cultivator here at Dandelion Branding. Here at Dandelion. My team and I are the folks behind the curtain for the brands whose sustainability stories actually make a difference in the world. And you? Yes, you. You're the eco-curious baddie who's been called an alarmist hippie your whole life, and now that the world is literally burning, the I Told You So doesn't feel like the flex we thought it would. As a reminder, if you want to dive deeper into any of the information I share in my episodes, you can always find the link in my show notes. Now, before we start naming names. I am obligated to remind you that subscribing, liking, and commenting go a very long way for me as a small creator, especially since the topics I cover on this podcast are not popular and in fact have been called the enemy of the techno optimist. I'm not making that up. We're gonna talk about it later today in this episode. So if you're into sticking it to the man, if you're Hold on, pause. Bummer. Stay Hushidi. Macha I'm gonna have to put her in barks an hour. Hold on, let me put her in barks an hour. That was a great take and I'm pissed. Lite, I fucking knew it. Ma che Hey no. You Stay hush, Matcha. I need you to like quiet for an hour. I know she's never quiet for an hour when she's in this mood. She's been in this mood for days. Okay, ⁓ my little booster seat. I'm not making that up, we'll talk about it later. So if you're into sticking it to the man in any sense of that word, please subscribe to the channel. Honestly, all jokes aside, thank you so much. It does make a big difference it thank you so much. It really makes a big difference. It helps a lot. This is part two of the Shadow Architect series where I'm answering the question: who's doing this? Who is stopping the progress to a more sustainable future? Is it intentional fuckery or is it a byproduct of inertia? Part one was about the gatekeepers, the people who are keeping the destruction of our planet legal. I covered the US system there because I have two degrees focused on the US systems and government, criminal justice, my degrees are in criminal justice and Interdisciplinary and I have an interdisciplinary degree focused on governance, advocacy, and sociology more broadly. So the government so the US government is kind of my bag. It is by no means relegated there. You know what? Hey, I am a podcaster with a criminal justice degree. So maybe if Kash Money Patel needs replacing, I can slot in. Just kidding. I'm not qualified for that job, and neither is he. Watch the last episode if you want to learn more about that. Another reminder here is that my intention with this series is not to name every single person involved. That is a long list, but it's to give you concrete examples of how this works in different sectors and ask that you start looking for these patterns in your thinking or in your industry so that we can call attention to how our decisions are shaped personally and in groups, so that we can actually start shifting this paradigm. For the better, for a more sustainable future. In future episodes, we're gonna cover everything from military industrial complex and influencers to religion and entertainment. I wanna point the fingers, I wanna name the names because there are people behind these industries, and we should know who they are so we know who not to follow, who not to believe in. Today we're talking about the architects. These are the people who believe the unsustainable. I got behind on myself. Today, today we're talking about the architects, the people who build the unsustainable systems that we are forced to use. And yes, I'm using the word forced here lightly. In today's society, these people are known as the technocrats. I'm gonna call them that. And things around that. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you. Having lived in the Bay Area and dated in the Bay Area, the Techno the Tech Pro Mecha, in case you didn't know, for years, I'm gonna tell you that this episode has been triggering to write and record. Not only does it take me back to the worst, most offensive conversations I have ever had. Actually think. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you. Having lived and dated in the Bay Area, the Tech Bro Mecca, in case you didn't know, for many years, I am telling you this episode has been very triggering to write research to record. Not only does it take me back to the worst, most offensive conversations I've ever had, it showed me where that influence came from and how intentional the attitude towards women it Equality, sustainability, Black Lives Matter, you name it. It showed me how intentional that attitude is. In fact, for reading for this episode, I came across Foucault's Discipline and Punishment, which is a picture of modern disciplinary society with three intermingling techniques for control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. This type of social control is based on Jeremy Bentham's model for a literal prison. It's called a panoptica. Hi, are you back? You're back to be beautiful and good and nice. You like the for the for the past three days we've been doing nothing. We've been hanging out all the time. It's hot, I wanna be outside. You can wait till after I'm done recording. And the longer you keep coming in here and making me feel like you're gonna do barks and stuff, the longer it's gonna take. So you have to wait. That's good. ⁓ what I think I need to do is make it bigger. And stretch it like this. Who's buzzing on me? This type of societal control is based on Jeremy Bentham's model for a littoral prison. It's called a panopticon, which is basically how prisons are built now, where there's a guard tower in the center that looks over the common area, and then all the cell doors face inward so that if a guard wanted to, they can see everyone in all the spaces. Since inmates always can be watched, but never know whether they are being watched, there becomes a natural internal monitoring system, like within the inmates, and they start to behave as if they are always being watched. Foucault took this from inside the institution and applied the same thinking to society, saying that it could work with any system. Of power. And that is what we're seeing with social media, right? If you post something and it doesn't get attention, you are less likely to post the same way again. I kind of make my whole living on this, right? If you post something and your feed blows up, good or bad, you've cracked an engagement spiral and you'll tend to follow down that path again. That's where we're normalizing judgment and the examination. The hierarchical observ observation part of this, well, that is done by the technocrats, the meta people. They're not watching everything. They can't watch everything. But they might be. So be careful. You know. We're gonna go further into this later, but ask yourself, what happens when they start weighing that engagement differently? When they put a finger on the scale and tip attention and engagement towards The angry face. And I hear you right now. Like, I hear you being like, this sounds like you're about to go into a crazy conspiracy spiral. Are we gonna have a crash out? They're not doing that. Yeah, they are. Yeah, they are. And it's impacting the vibe of the entire world. Now I want to put a disclaimer here because I'm part of all of these systems. I'm obviously sharing this information with you using these systems because it's what we have. That doesn't mean that this isn't important to know, right? How did we get here? How did we get here? Sometimes I go off book and then I have to start back at the bottom. Okay. How did we get here? Okay, but how did we get here? Who pulled these strings of influence? Who's building this infrastructure that we are in? So originally I really wanted to start this podcast with Zuckerberg and Meta because that's where we are today. That's what I'm interested in because it's in current events, it's also a huge part of my work. But there is an earlier generation to cover first so that we are All on the same page. Honestly, I honestly felt like a red string Maven connecting dots in the research page here. It's so overwhelming. Really, like I got woofed. So I decided to write this as kind of a timeline. And it starts in the mid-90s because what we're seeing now is 30 years in the making. So let's start with Peter Thiel. His life is actually pretty impressive, so I'd give him some flowers there, but he'd just crush them in the palm of his hand because they don't matter, and neither I to the and neither do I to this guy. So let's set the stage. He was born in Germany and he moved to South Africa when his father got a job in gem mining. No, we're not talking about musk. The the South African town that he was raised in was very pro-German nationalist movement. And let's just say it was one of the very few safe harbors for the Nazis, for Nazis post-war World War Two. Do that again. The South African town he was raised in was very pro-German nationalist movement. So let's just say this was one of the very few safe harbors for Nazis post-World War II. He was raised on apartheid and the dreams of shaping the world how he wanted it. Mm-mm. Then he moved to the Bay Area and went to Stanford, which was a hotbed for the hippie movement. Can you imagine? The culture shock of German nationalist to Bay Area vibe living. Kinda can't. Whoa. There he studied philosophy and he started the Stanford Review, which is still active today with the mission to prevent Jesus Christ. I don't know why. It's it's because I keep like adding stuff, which I think is fine. This was a hard one. There he studied philosophy. And started the Stanford Review, which is still active today with the mission to present alternative views on a wide range of issues, create a forum for rational debate on campus, and challenge those who disagree to participate. The Stanford Review was created as a forum to be contrarian to the Bay Area culture. Now I can't say that this is nefarious, not yet, because I'm pro-critical thinking and moral debate, right? I don't agree with Peter Thiel's point of view, which is anti-social progress, racially motivated, and mul and anti-multicultural, even in the earliest stage. Where I think this his story gets interesting is in the dot-com boom. Thiel along with several other people he met through the Stanford Review, started PayPal. Now there's a whole wild backstory here, but for brevity, I'll cliff notes it for you. But for the long version, go look up the PayPal Wars. So what happened, what matters here is that PayPal and another company, X, became direct competitors. X was owned by none other than Elon Musk. Yes, the X today was not the first X. I'm gonna park Musk here actually, because obviously he'll be back, but he went heads down for a while for this part. Anyway, X and PayPal decided that they needed to merge in order to grow to where they wanted to be until et al. literally took over the company from Musk while he was on a plane to his honeymoon, thus ending X number one. Then in 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and the PayPal mafia was born. This has names like The PayPal Mafia was born. This has names that you may or may not know, like Chad Hurley, David Sachs, Reed Hoffman. There's like 20 of them. Okay, Peter T. Lewon Musk, there's 20 of these dudes. They're not all men, but maybe they are. Anyway, all of the original founders left after the purchase, but they all ended up founding and funding the largest and biggest names in tech today. This is like And tech today. This is like YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, Lyft, Spotify, OpenAI, Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, Wise, Palantir, Reddit, Tumblr, blah blah blah blah blah blah. This list literally goes on forever. And if you want to investigate any of this stuff, I've linked Fleximize in the resources article. It has this like really cool thing. It's very cool. But while most of these technocrats went on to found direct-to-consumer companies, Thiel takes a different approach. He starts a bunch of venture capitalists where a bunch he starts VCs where he can invest in and have influence on the big tech companies. I'm gonna stop here because I hear you going like, we haven't talked about sustainability in this episode. Because this series is about influence and where the in where that influence comes from. In this case, it is deep-seated, and sustainability doesn't actually come into play until later. But I think it starts here. Because Peter Thiel started a newspaper that serves the contrarian opinion in the Bay Area of California. And that body of work is used as a tech bro farm to this day. That means that from the beginning, the folks that run the largest, most lucrative industry in the world. That influence our culture and the way we consume have been at odds with the sustainable alarmist hickbee eco-curious movement from the jump. Peter Thiel is a very smart man. His philosophy degree gives him an edge into how people think and the moral questions they ask. From the beginning, this guy has been aiming for power and control for himself and people like him. German nationalist movement. I gotta take a I have to take breaks when we're this recording and drink water. In 2003, Palantir with his buddies Alex Karp. In 2003, Thiel started Palantir with his buddies Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Nathan Gettings. We really only hear about Karp anymore. It's always been focused on data integration and analysis, and in fact, most small businesses today use some version of this for things like cold emails, data scraping. I think that's why he was the first investor in Facebook, why and why he sits on the board today. He knew the best way to collect data on the individual. In 2004, Thiel invested invested in Facebook. And moreover, he invested in a young Harvard student who stole the concept for a social media platform and then sabotaged his co-founder so that he would be the main owner with the most decision-making power. Didn't make that up in his biography. Okay. Do we think Thiel saw a bit of himself in Zuckerberg? Musk takeover, Facebook like, you know, PayPal takeover. Facebook takeover? Yeah, we do. Now, you and I, we don't know the conversations that were had in those backrooms, but I can tell you that at this point, Thiel and Zuck had already shown their aptitude for manipulation. This is where I think it started to become clear, like really clear, that social media, Facebook at that point, could be used as way more than just a tool to connect with friends. It can steer people and culture. It can it can be a digital panopticon. And you know what? We all played right into it. Like, do you remember early Facebook? It was like, I had food today. Like, you know, anyway. Then Like do you remember early Facebook? Cause I do. I do. I was there. ⁓ yeah. It was even now, you people put shit on social media. Like, come on, we're playing into it. Anyway, in the 2008-2010 era of Facebook, like when it jumped from college only to like everybody's allowed, another important name pops up, Marc Andreessen Seeing he saw the potential and he invested millions into Facebook, and not only that, he convinced Zuckerberg to never sell. I think this is because they saw the limitless potential for power here. Andreessen is also going to come back into this later, but know that he's in the background with Thiel, like making deals, investing in tech, and they're both just getting richer than any human ought to be. Okay. It's also around this time that. where their colors really start to show. Cause remember around this time Obama became president and there's a blue wave. ⁓ God, that was so refreshing. Thiel P like it was refreshing then. Okay, wait, hold on. It was refreshing then. But in like we were coming off of like what, George W? Like Remember what ⁓ I can't believe I will I would ever miss George W. Bush, but like please. ⁓ anyway. Anyway, there was a blue wave. It's at this time that Thiel pens the education of a libertarian in this is two thousand and nine, where he laments that democracy and capitalism cannot coexist, saying Saying quote Since nineteen twenty, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women, two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron. Welfare and women make democracy and capitalism not work well together, is what he's saying. In the same article, he decides that he's gonna go all in on protecting capitalism from the same downfall. He talks about building cyberspace, out space, and in seasteading, like water world, basically. He says the f quote, the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds and propagates the machinery of freedom that makes worlds safe for capitalism. Listen, I'm gonna read that to you again. So that all you folks who are cleaning or whatever ADHD side quests you're on right now, so that you can tune back in. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. ⁓ a world safe for capitalism, safe from women, democracy, and welfare, at least. Call you yo, this is 2009. It was 17 years ago. And he's talking about himself and he's talking about his power and his money and like look where we are in the world. Look around you. Or like look at the news. Around this time, he also starts being openly into Dark Enlightenment and Nick Land, who is another philosopher known as the father of accelerationism. Accelerationism. He's gonna come. Back into this later, too. And here the picture actually gets quite a bit clearer. Because this guy is in control of our social panopticon. You know, but you you really don't have to take my word for it though, because Cambridge Analytica literally came out and gave us the blueprints for how they won the 2026 election for Trump. using intensive survey research, data modeling, and performance optimizing algorithms to target more than 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. Do you remember those like little surveys that were like, what kind of dog are you? Or which brat doll are you? Yeah, those surveys. And the data from sites like Facebook and Snapchat and Twitter gave them All the information they needed as a proof of concept to not just shape an election, but to win an election in a massive upset. ⁓ but don't worry, don't worry about that because the government charged Facebook five billion dollars and just kind of like let them keep on carrying on. But do you think Facebook stopped there? No, no, because remember that was proof of concept. Because while Zuckerberg said in a 2025 interview with Cleo Abram, social media is not a driver of polarization. What he actually meant is social media is not a large driver of polarization until we fuck with it. There have been reports from within Facebook that they tested what happens when that little angry face is weighed five more times than that OG thumbs up. You know what happens? Flame wars. Engagement goes up because people are pissed off. I call that polarization, baby. Okay. I do. I do. I do. And here's where I'm gonna talk about sustainability. Alright. And it this is my personal story. I work in marketing and storytelling for brands who want to do things more sustainably. I have been since 2024, and I can tell you that at least Since 2018, Facebook and now Meta has not allowed brands to talk about sustainability in ads. Like, you cannot use their words on imagery, you cannot use them in the copy, you cannot talk about sustainability or really anything that could be considered anti-capitalist ever. I also like I can't prove this part because like sh they say shadow banning isn't real. But I've seen for years creators on platforms who talk about sustainability just don't get the visibility of other creators unless everyday users, the people, push the message forward, which is why I talk about people power all the time. This is to the point now where brands and creators they start using other words with smaller signals that are harder to pick up on. It washes out their brand voice, makes it harder to stand on their mission because they can't use the words they typically use, which ultimately makes social media like less impactful for sustainability focused businesses altogether, all while fast fashion, cheap plastic, shitty knockoffs, they run rampant on Facebook through ads. And why? Well, I can tell you why. They say that sustainability is too political of a topic. Literally, I have had clients who have had their accounts suspended because their topics are too political when all they really want to do is sell a sustainable product or service and they want to use their real brand voice. Okay, but if yes, yeah, you heard me right. Facebook is literally okay with being used to win a presidential election, but not to promote sustainability because of politics. And whose politics is that? Peter Thiel and the Technocrats. Because sustainability has a direct correlation with a paradigm shift towards spending less, repairing things before buying, buying once and buying better, democracy, women in charge, and putting people in he putting people ahead of profits. I.e. anti-capitalism. Not making this up. I promise I'm not making this up. Between 2009's like protect capitalism diatribe from Thiel the 2016 election of a world-known, like kind of shitty businessman, not kind of like very shitty businessman, and the 2023 Techno Optimist Manifesto penned by Mark Andresen. This is clear. In case you don't know, the Techno Optimist Manifesto is a long, rambling look into the mind and values of this type of person. In case you don't know, the Techno Optimist is a long rambling look into the mind and the values of this type of human being. Andreessen is a major proponent of that Landian accelerationism that we talked about earlier. This is like pushing capitalism as far and as fast as it can go so we can replace it with a post human intelligence. It is very anti woke. Altright conservatism. It didn't start that way, but it is now. This is the same stuff we're seeing in the Stanford Review, but like on the 2020s drama Steroids. He's even named Nick Land as a patron saint of techno-optimism. Yeah, I know it. In this manifesto, which unfortunately I do think you should read because it's very long, and I'm Gonna cherry pick it here because it's all I've got time for. Andresen starts with We are being lied to. We are being lied. It's very dramatic. He's setting the stage for you to buy into this philosophy around technology, which is quote, the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential. Okay, you know. He believes that the planet is underpopulated, that the free market is the only way to lift people out of poverty, and that, quote, the techno capital machine is an engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance. He thinks that artificial and augmented intelligence are the universal problem solvers and they will allow us to grow with no upper bound. No upper bound. He also shares the values. Of the techno optimist. Here's a few quotes. We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness, strength. We believe I don't know why this voice, but it this is what it feels like. We believe in embracing variance, in increasing interestingness. Interestingness. We believe in competition because we believe in evolution. We believe in evolution. Because we believe in life. We believe in the truth. It goes on. We believe it's like a real thing. We believe rich is better than poor, cheap is better than expensive, abundant is better than scarce. We believe in making everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant. Uh-huh. It's real. This is what it says. ⁓ But there's also a section called The Enemy. It's it's also long, it's very interesting, but this is how it starts. We have enemies. Our enemies are not bad people, but rather bad ideas. I I just like can't not do the voice. It's like I'm just it's like Performative philosophy. So we're just gonna, I'm just gonna stick with it. Our present society has been subjected to mass demoralization campaign for six decades against technology and against life, under varying names like existential risk, sustainability, ESG, sustainable development goals, social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism, precautionary principle, trust and safety, tech ethics, risk. Management, de growth, the limits of growth. That's the beginning of the enemies. Right? So I'm really not making this up. This isn't the ramblings of some random dude. This is Mark Andresen. He's the inventor of the first web browser. He's a tech billionaire on the board of Meta, and he's an advisor to the Trump administration. He is one of the most well-known investors in Silicon Valley, and his portfolio honestly is damn impressive. His company has their fingers in everything you know, Slack. Asana, Meta, WISE, Airbnb, Lyft, SpaceX, Reddit, and Everything You Also Don't Know, which all have these like super sci-fi names like Asimov, Human Genetic Design and Matten Bioengineering, Genesis, operating system for small molecular, I got a lot of words here. Lyft, SpaceX, Reddit. And everything you don't know, which all have these like sci-fi names that I would like if it wasn't like this. Asimov, a human genetic design and bioengineering company, Genesis AI operating system for small molecule drug discovery, third arc bio, more bioengineering. Human AP, health data infrastructure platform that aggregates patient data, and Tessera, which is a lot of stuff focused on achieving singularity, basically. This is this guy's manifesto. So when I'm here and I'm talking to you about how our social structures are set up to tank sustainability, I'm not kidding. It's built into the foundation of our communication because this guy, this guy has influence and really deep pockets. Like really deep pockets. And the agenda here is still clear. Protect capitalism at all cost. And like honestly, based on all of the bioengineering stuff, live forever to enjoy the to enjoy it. I yeah. How are they doing this? Okay. It's time to talk about Palantir, Doge, and Musk's infiltration of the government. Okay, now. Okay, now I'm actually gonna cover the military industrial complex in part three of the Shadow Architect series, so this will likely come back up. Like I said, way back, however many minutes ago, Peter Thiel started Palantir in 2003. That means it's been flying under the radar for more than 20 years, collecting data and being used by the government as a data mining and profile tool. Do I think? Thiel invested in Facebook because the best way to collect data on people is to have them hand it over to you. Yes, of course, that's the best way. I think that's a brilliant move if you want to protect capitalism and replace democracy with an unseen social control mechanism. Because Thiel knows something important. It's the same thing that Musk knows, that Trump knows, that Epstein knew. All these people knew him too. Nothing is worth more than information. And Palantir is a privately owned company that rents out service to government ended entities like the CIA, police stations, and ⁓ yeah. ICE. All of your data. Where are the preppers? All of this. All of this. Everything in this box that you are watching on. And you're looking into investments and potentially? ⁓ wait. And ⁓ yeah, ice. This is like all of your data. I don't know where the preppers are here, that they're like into this guy and into these people, but I mean all of this. All of this. Everything in this box where you're watching me from or listening, if you're listening on Spotify, everything you've ever done digitally, and when I'm looking into the investments, I also think And looking into the investments from Andresen, I also think that potentially all of your health information too, all of it. It is known and aggregated in Palantir. And they use that information to find terrorists. And Tino also be terrorists on the street, black bagging people and carting them off to literal warehouses. Do you think I'm on a list? Yes, me too. I'm ⁓ I'm probably on a list. I'm not sorry. But Literal warehouses. I'm probably on a list. So I'm telling you right now that I am not going anywhere for a while. I don't have plans to do anything to myself, just so you know. Okay? Okay. And okay, while we're here. I'm just gonna tell you that JD Bance is bought, paid for, and promoted by Peter Thiel. Because if you can't control the main guy because he's lazy, control the vice president. Look it up. Okay. Uh-huh. I said we would come full circle back to Musk, and here we are, because he's the guy that opened the door for Palantir, for the Palantir in Ice ship. Now there is ⁓ there's a fantastic interview. Alright, well I I just keep getting into my own talking points. Actually, I shouldn't do like that. There is a fantastic interview on Jacobin from Doug Henwood interviewing Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Solob. Slobodian, Quim Slobodian about their book Muskism. Sorry to butcher all these names. Like I have a lot of languages floating around in my brain. So I kind of mix everything together. This interview is fantastic insight into the radical change we've seen in Musk over the past few years. So after the original X thing, where Thiel Lork like pushed him out of PayPal. Musk had this like I'll show you vibe. He went and he started Tesla and SpaceX. He invested in a ton of tech. He started open AI with Sam Altman and he started Neurolink both as safeguards against this intelligent AI apocalypse he saw coming on. Then he bought Twitter and renamed it X. The renaming this like X 2.0 tells me that he never got over that original thing. And while he is a technocrat, Musk Isn't taking the same approach as Thiel, whose philosophy is capitalism at all costs. It kind of is. Musk is like, I need to be part of the biggest, most important thing. So he's not actually dismantling democracy, he's using it to his benefit. And you can see that because he inserted himself into the government last year as the head of Doge, which most people would definitely not say was any level of success. But I actually really like. This quote from that Muskism interview. Hold on, I need I wanna get a drink of water before I pause before I go. From that from that Muskism interview. Quote: If you look at what the Doge folks were doing when they went from agency to agency, one of the main themes was their effort to integrate desperate data sources both within and across agencies into common repositories. When you integrate data in such a way, it becomes queryable in new ways. And it becomes possible to interface with automated systems in new ways. Palantir was probably the single biggest beneficiary of Doge in terms of the number of contracts it managed to acquire. Now, despite their like you know, falling out, Musk and Palantir founder Thiel have been allies for 30 years. They made each other rich as hell. Musk has XAI, which plugs directly into Palantir. And honey, what does this have to do with sustainability? I know, I know it feels like I'm having a fever dream, and like, where's the point here? Do you understand the computing power and rat race this has caused? To do this level of surveillance, we need data centers. And if you watched the last episode or any of them before, You'll see that the whole of the US government is paving their way for more data centers. Not only that, but Sam Altman and OpenAI came out with this whole like compute infrastructure plan with promises of this huge computing power in January of this year, which means basically huge energy bills. And in case you missed it. The whole focus on the AI power infrastructure is centered around extractive fossil fuel burning, water resource using, accelerationist culture. They can do it more sustainably. We've talked about that in the past in March's episode, but they won't because sustainability, any part of it, is the antithesis of the techno optimist. And the fossil fuel infrastructures already exist, and then they don't have to add questions or have Data permits, you know. And then they don't have to like have build permits because that's all part of it. Like it is all part of a culture. And in creating this accelerationist run for computer power, they're undermining the permitting, which is fine, I guess, because the EPA just like doesn't exist anymore. For example, Musk's Colossus Supercomputer in South Memphis, which is a heavily marginalized community. He just like trucked 46 unpermitted illegal methane gas turbines to power this like AI data center that's poisoning the air. With formaldehyde. Formaldehyde! Because you know, gerrymandering can just happen if it's not racially motivated, but it's politically motivated. But you know. Good luck voting that out. And because they're so damn scared of losing a foothold in the race to extinction, anthropic, which was supposed to be a safe alternative to ch to open AI, leased the whole damn thing. They leased the whole damn illegal data center. Y'all ⁓ I can't with this shit. Like, I know we just covered 30 years of tomfoolery, and there wasn't very much time or space for like nuance. I'm not the girl that's gonna get into that. That's not what we're here for. But this is how we get here. It matters because this is how we get under social control. It's how we get a criminal, ultra-capitalist in the US White House, and it's how we get billionaires going to political meetings instead. Of representatives. It's how the fight for sustainability gets written out of history, and it's how we're trained to focus on consumption and made to feel ashamed when we question the status quo. It's an intentional plan with promoting capitalism as the goal and the ESG as the literal enemy. I'm letting it sink in. I've never felt smaller, but I've also never felt more informed. When you trace the line from 1995 to your social scroll this very morning, or night, or whatever time it is a day that you're reading this, you can see a terrifyingly clear picture. The technocrat autocracy isn't just about cool new gadgets or search results, it is a cultivated generation-spanning architecture. Technocratic autocracy isn't about just like cool new gadgets and better search results. It is a calculated generation-spanning architecture built for complete human and resource dominance. That sounds wild, but it's true. They want us trapped inside of our digit inside of their digital panopticon, obsessing over engagement metrics, modifying our behavior. living inside virtual overlays so that we don't notice or care about their actions that are frying the physical planet to power the servers to give them more power. I mean, listen, the cat is out of the bag. Right? I mean, look, the cat's out of the bag, right? We cannot unmine the silicon. We cannot delete the code. But we can absolutely refuse to behave like passive data points waiting to be optimized for their system. So here's how you can step out of this weird social control matrix and make a difference in 25 seconds. One, fight the super fight the supercomputer cartels. The race for AI power is happening at the local municipal level. Technocrats are counting on us staying silent while they rush data center construction. Look into your local zoning laws and city council meetings. Demand strict environmental moratoriums on data centers, because the EPA is not gonna do that. Support organizations like the NAACP and Earth Justice, who are legally fighting back against tech conglomerates, rolling underpermitted, rolling unpermitted methane gas turbines into marginalized communities. If they want to build the future, fine, but they don't get to poison our neighborhoods to do it. starve Panopticon. sorry, you gotta stop with the flame wars. But remember Folkalt's lesson. The system only works if you internalize their judgment. So stop policing your thoughts, your opinions, and your sustainability stories to please an algorith to please an algorithm that Mark Andersen explicitly built to suppress you. Furthermore, treat your digital use like real-world resource consumption. Every trivial AI chatbot query, every AI-generated image for a giggle uses physical gallons of water and cool. This is a this is a lot of la la la Every trivial AI chatbot query, every AI generated image for a quick giggle, uses physical gallons of water for server cooling and pups of carbon. Be discerning with your queries and consider working with a company like Offset AI to help you understand the real physical impacts of AI searches to create. I actually do work with Offset AI and I think they're great. Choose dirt. Or like basketball or something. I don't know why I use basketball. I think because ⁓ One Tree Hill is on Netflix right now. So anyway. Marc Andreessen, he wants you numb. Netflix, not on Netflix right now, I know. I I never watched it when it first came out, so I was like, what's the hype? Anyway, anyway, sorry. This is long. Marc Andreessen wants you numb, hyper-consuming, and plugged into this augmented reality overlay. Mark Zuckerberg wants you viewing the physical world through data mining, Orion glasses, while Peter Thiel and Elon Musk get kickbacks every time you give more information to their machines. The ultimate act of rebellion here against this technocr the ultimate act of rebellion here is to look away from the screen. Step into your backyard, build a new pond, fix your clothes, visit a local farmer, roll around in the freaking grass or something, protect real complex, messy atoms of your local ecosystem. Because you are a human signal, not a line of code. Y'all, I know this series is not my typical sustainability update. I've been just I I've just been doing this for so long, right? Like I know the solutions are out there and that the transition to a more sustainable future is possible because I've spent years working with and interviewing the folks making it happen. And I need to know why it isn't happening. I need to know who is stopping it and how they're influencing society to keep us in this extraction age. And this is a really big this was a really big one. It was way bigger than I expected it to be for sure. Like This was a really big one. It was way bigger actually than I even expected it to be. And it feels like I I'm off the rails. ⁓ but I'm gonna keep going. Because next time we're moving from these corporate server farms to the literal battlefield. We're gonna call out the industry. I'm gonna call out the industry that consumes more carbon than entire nations while staying totally off-grid. Like off, well, they're not off-grid. They're consuming the grid. In part three of the Shadow Architect series, we're covering the carbon cost of conflict. ⁓ Now take a deep breath. I don't know honestly I don't know if that was for you or me. Whew. Okay. That's it for today. If no one told you lately, thank you so much for the work you're doing, especially if the work is on yourself. And I will see you next time. Bye.