Bastards of DOGE feat. Quinn Slobodian
Added 2025-02-25 16:07:13 +0000 UTCIt's the free one!
Quinn Slobodian joins us to discuss his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right - which traces the syncretic relationship of scientific racism, techno-solutionism, and the quest to destroy the cathedral to Neoliberalism’s crisis of mission in the 1990s.
Check out HAYEK’S BASTARDS here!
Comments
Did you see this episode of the podcast got mentioned by David Runciman in the lrb? (I would describe it as "mildly derogatory")
Nathaniel Mordain
2025-05-20 11:23:06 +0000 UTCArbitration. These libertarian guys always bring it up and I think it’s telling. How do these people think all of it works? Who do they think arbitrators are? They can have their little Khmer Rouge moment, but any society that can support their wealth is going to have accountants, lawyers, commercial bankers, engineers, etc and these are always going to be the same sort of people as we have now. Their little silly society is just going to reinvent the PMC bureaucracy just like these morons always reinvent the central bank and the bus. These things exist for a reason independent of ideology.
Oliver Elliott
2025-02-27 15:46:28 +0000 UTCI know this is an unoriginal observation, but it's funny that the constant invocation of Markets by these guys just comes down to monopoly and rent seeking. I think this is the inevitable result of thinking that market exchange has more viability than it had in the pre-capitalist age. It's far more stupid than these 'revealed preference' libertarians think. That is both its blessing and its curse: easy to deploy, impossible to universalise.
The Inner Moon
2025-02-27 05:34:20 +0000 UTCit even has a section where the nerd hero gets into a spat with his seattle-coded girlfriend and she writes an academic paper about the inherent masculine toxicity of having a mustache and then later he gets into a relation with a tacticool military family girl firstnamed America. its insane how TODAY Cryotonomicon is for a novel from the 90s
etienne
2025-02-27 01:49:31 +0000 UTCI for one am proud to be a simulation NPC in Elon Musk’s personal Hell.
Elsie Hupp
2025-02-27 00:38:59 +0000 UTCI feel like Medicare by Amazon is already quite close given their current attempts to take over telehealth and pharmacy. Grim.
jamin
2025-02-26 22:21:42 +0000 UTCwhy have a fake virus when we can have a real one?
jamin
2025-02-26 22:20:17 +0000 UTCthe evolutionary psychology mind virus strikes again
d'egg
2025-02-26 22:14:06 +0000 UTCWe must eradicate the woke mind virus and replace it with measles
Man2quilla
2025-02-26 20:25:42 +0000 UTCY’all need to stop hawking excellent sounding books on this pod I am so behind on reading
Uriah Wilson
2025-02-26 18:50:03 +0000 UTCOff-topic, but I’m curious how much of a predatory scam this is: https://www.wrkreceipts.com/ (via New York Subway ad, an evergreen source of weird startup apps)
Elsie Hupp
2025-02-26 18:29:22 +0000 UTCLiv agar
Alex Anderson
2025-02-26 15:51:21 +0000 UTCMaybe so, but even if they could enact their vision of severe austerity for the next four years in the US the pushback from the public would be immense and I don’t think they have the fortitude to create a truly draconian police apparatus to keep discontent from challenging their power. I also have less faith in a visionary leader channeling that discontent into true changes to the system. It’s seems likely that an opposition Democratic Party would attempt to reinstate social services in new public/private entities that are administered by tech companies. Social Security administered by PayPal and Medicare administered by Amazon. Single payer to a conglomerate of private companies situation.
Sam Schick
2025-02-26 14:49:11 +0000 UTCThe thing about elites being afraid of cities I think extends more generally throughout the US suburban petit bourgeois. I worked as a tour guide in Berlin and whenever I was asked if homeless people in Berlin are dangerous or if the city has many homeless 80% of the time they were from the US, and a suburb or countryside at that. You got the sense that they were terrified of being in an inner city and wanted to avoid public interaction at all costs; paying for expensive taxis instead of taking public transport even if the latter was quicker because then they'd be avoiding the 'dangerous' U-Bahn.
Reuben
2025-02-26 14:34:20 +0000 UTCthank you, Quinn, for bringing the term ‘libidinal pleasure’ back into the podcast
Nina
2025-02-26 10:06:15 +0000 UTCyou credit them with too much intelligence.
SpookyPenguin
2025-02-26 07:11:29 +0000 UTCI’m not so sure tech is as ideologically committed to permanently dismantling the state as their libertarian and conservative colleagues have historically been. They’re a victim of their overcapitalization and are in desperate need of actual products and clients to service, I think dismantling the administrative state gives them the opportunity to permanent insert themselves and get those sweet government contracts. Same goes for the MIC, they need that money. I think just want to turn the fed into both their VC and client, and I doubt they’d really care if they disappointed this particular shareholder or end user.
Sam Schick
2025-02-26 03:51:53 +0000 UTCOops, make that $9
Shivvy
2025-02-26 03:28:32 +0000 UTCI have friends in your position Joshua, best of luck 🫡
Shivvy
2025-02-26 03:27:30 +0000 UTCNuke the internet! TrashFuture on AM radio!
Pilfering Kibble
2025-02-26 02:49:30 +0000 UTCits crazy to me that no one took a stab at filming Cryptonomicon, it's about a startup that wants to do cryptocurrency in a oil monarchy and the invention of signint, it's so insanely in the zeitgeist of the late 10s
etienne
2025-02-26 02:43:15 +0000 UTCMusk ‘s unique ripple is that he never read it but did skim the werid page for the book so he knows what other guys are talking about
John Leavitt
2025-02-26 01:13:59 +0000 UTCYes
John Harwood
2025-02-26 00:58:20 +0000 UTCDoes Elon think the mind virus thing from Snow Crash is real?
TJ Barke
2025-02-26 00:53:04 +0000 UTCI've been wondering how responsible Mr Stephenson's work (of which I am fond) is responsible for the current state of affairs for a while, but was more thinking these freaks had only read Snow Crash and maybe Fall.
Athena Von Tharsis
2025-02-26 00:34:50 +0000 UTCI've often thought of something similar, but I doubt any of this lot believes in the simple and ethical beauty of the slop delivery machine the thetes had access to. If anything, they'd find it just as offensive as the continued existence of a far-left phyle, no matter how harmless it was in that world.
Andrew Davis
2025-02-26 00:12:59 +0000 UTCRiley taking about the insularity of elites has a parallel among middle class suburbanites. Like the elites, the suburbanites are also convinced Manhattan is still like something out of "Escape From New York", rather than the Disneyland for adults its been for tourists since the 1990s.
Hugh Kearney
2025-02-25 23:43:25 +0000 UTC“…more Victorian” and then the penny dropped for me: these guys are all the right age to have read THE DIAMOND AGE when it came out
John Leavitt
2025-02-25 22:51:42 +0000 UTCThanks for the on the ground information. Hope you make it through alright!
jamin
2025-02-25 22:19:04 +0000 UTCThey’re doing Chuck Palaniuck’s Adjustment Day
MCL
2025-02-25 22:18:49 +0000 UTCThe purge is definitely real in some agencies. In addition to USAID, the forestry service and NPS have been hit hard. The NSF lost a significant chunk of their employees. They are trying to bring some people back to the USDA and NIH because they realized in retrospect that they're completely fucked with those people leaving without even a thimble of continuity of service. I work for the Feds and was in meetings for 4 hours last Thursday because we had no idea if our 350+ probationary employees would be fired Friday morning or not, myself included. That said, they are just wildly incompetent in general. They are just sending out random firings and changes without any concept of what they are doing. Like jamin says, very similar to what happened to Twitter.
Joshua G
2025-02-25 22:00:07 +0000 UTCI just want to be able to speak to dolphins
Jake Garrod
2025-02-25 21:35:10 +0000 UTCIt would be interesting to listen to you interview Sen Kanner, who led the strike against Klarna during their mass firings.
neurocursed
2025-02-25 21:24:16 +0000 UTCMore so even than their terror of biology is their terror of EVOLUTION. A major pillar of the entire ideology is the replacement of evolution, the major force directing life on this planet for billions of years, with intelligence.
Roger Peet
2025-02-25 21:12:56 +0000 UTCI think the central tension of this question is between the media and bureaucracy. The media is incentivized in the attention economy to be as alarmist and outraged as possible in order to keep people from scrolling through their coverage. Meanwhile, bureaucratic processes are slow and involve lots of people incentivized to double and triple their own and their colleagues work so they can minimize fuckups and having to do it again. The media acts like the beginning and middle parts of a story are actually the climax of whatever story they're covering. Ironically, if DOGE wanted to make the government more efficient it would be smarter to hire a bunch more bureaucrats to make the workflow for bureaucratic workflow faster and prone to less mistakes.
Crispined Glover Potato Snacks
2025-02-25 20:54:41 +0000 UTCI have some ideas but I don't know if they'll make you fear better. The simplest one is that Musk hasn't really thought any of this through and doesn't really care. He's thwarted by being Musk. It's like a lot of soulless managers, they don't really care about anything or have any ideas. The hypothesis here is that DOGE is like Musk and Twitter. Get the the thing, shake it up and throw everyone out to the wind and keep it running in degraded form but it makes him feel better about it and move to the next thing. Yes these people are all nazi's so it's not very comforting but they also want to replace the government with AI, a thing that cannot be done. Of course events could prove me wrong, or the right tweet could set Musk off, and I might have to come back after finishing this episode even to eat my words.
jamin
2025-02-25 20:02:27 +0000 UTCthe thing i still can't get my head around is, why does DOGE seem one minute like a terrifying authoritarian takeover of the governing institutions of the world hegemon and the next minute like a paper tiger that can't even coerce a bunch of low-level federal employees to resign? Musk is a moron sure but they've already taken over the internal payments infrastructure, haven't they? if he feels like he's being thwarted, who by? The President is giving him free reign and it's not like any judge has the means to force him to stop doing the very illegal things he continues to do. Have the various new heads of the federal departments suddenly decided they quite like being the cathedral actually, even though they're all ultra-Trump loyalists? is Musk making genuine missteps in his plan or is he just trying to sow fear and panic in the federal workforce? is any of this apparent purge real???
marilyn
2025-02-25 19:14:50 +0000 UTCI'm sure our combined missing $6 was the tipping point and not the lack of- everything else... Sorry guys.
jamin
2025-02-25 17:47:15 +0000 UTCDidn't give them $3 though, so my bad everybody
Mike Kangal
2025-02-25 17:39:51 +0000 UTCI voted for "no plans, strategy, charisma or courage but at least we won't be actual Nazis" and I stand by that
Mike Kangal
2025-02-25 17:39:31 +0000 UTC"trying to game the outcome of Time Machine" kinda hits something ive been feeling for a while too of like, the way these people talk and the wayt the seem to *want* humans to function makes me think the world theyre trying to make (whether they realize it or not) is the one from that one serbian video game SCORN. like in that all the power disparities are manufactured and biological and without any veneer of kindness on top. but like i dont think these guys want a body horror nightmare world like how scorn actually looks visually
Lain of the Wired
2025-02-25 16:37:43 +0000 UTCBuying your groceries on an installment plan. I fucking love modern day.
kiwi
2025-02-25 16:18:09 +0000 UTCGuys we wouldn't be here right now if we had all only given Democrats 3 dollars... I know they have no plans, strategy, charisma, or courage...but imagine how much of that they could have bought with YOUR $3!!!
kiwi
2025-02-25 16:13:44 +0000 UTCFull roster! Yaaaay!
Sparky
2025-02-25 16:09:01 +0000 UTC
