Moscow Musk and the "new" Technocracy

Q: So this is why Musk seemingly “overpaid” for Twitter? He and his backers want to use it as a tool of information warfare, to kill off the dollar and help usher in Putin’s “multipolar world?”

A: Yes, that’s why they “overpaid” for Twitter. Because the end goals have nothing to do with Twitter or its ad model by itself. It’s merely a means to an end. Musk is likely to join forces with Trump’s Truth Social and Kanye West’s Parler to try to control much of the information space. And they’ve got the threat of Putin’s nukes to force the issue.
~ Investigative journalist Dave Troy, explaining Elon Musk's true motives for buying Twitter

Fourteen years ago, just ahead of the 2008 US presidential election and in the midst of a terrible global financial crisis, I published a post about the Technocracy movement, and I facetiously suggested Technocracy as a possible bailout plan for the modern day, or at least as a basis for the New-Wage scams I used to write about so much. In light of recent developments, perhaps it's time to drag that old post out again.

Technocracy had its roots in the years immediately following World War I, but didn't really come to fruition until the Great Depression, when folks were desperate for solutions to their financial misery. In essence, Technocracy proposed the control of society by an elite corps of technical experts, who would determine what was best for everyone else. Everyone would be taken care of, and all of their needs met, through the application of sound scientific and engineering principles. Yet Technocrats weren't motivated by altruism, morality, or ethics, and they scoffed at the idea of democracy. And although their stated goals included equality and fairness (by their definition of fairness, anyway), they were disturbingly elitist. At its core Technocracy, like the various forms of autocracy also scorned by Technocrats, was still about power and control in the hands of a few.

Technocracy was a raging fad among many elites and elite wannabes during the lean Depression years and even into World War II, but its star dimmed considerably in the prosperous years after the war. But Technocracy never really went away. In fact it could easily be said -- and it actually has been said -- that egomaniacal multibillionaire Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, is a Technocrat.

It would seem to run in the family. Musk's grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was very big in the Technocracy movement in Canada back in the day. From a November 2021 piece on the Business Live site:

Believing that science and technology could cure all ills, Haldeman campaigned for the capitalist monetary infrastructure to be replaced by a new universal currency, based on a unit of heat, to be known as the erg. The technocrats even wanted an end to prices, in the view that scientists could handle distribution within society far better than the market.

Such concepts seemed dangerous to the Canadian government, which banned the movement over its opposition to World War 2. The belief system faded away with the growth of prosperity after the war. But similar ideas are inspiring the current excitement over meme stocks, cryptocurrency and the man who now calls himself “Technoking”.

To [Harvard University historian Jill] Lepore, Musk’s ideology seems to flow from these outlandish — and outmoded — views. In Lepore’s words, his ambition is an “extravagant, extreme” even “extraterrestrial capitalism, driven by fantasies that come from science fiction”.

Professor Lepore's theory is that Musk's stated mission to colonize Mars is a reflection of Technocratic philosophy. That makes sense. What also makes sense is the notion that Musk's recent takeover of a popular social media platform is rooted in Technocratic philosophy, among other related motives that are even more disturbing.

"The bird is freed" (and even if it crashes into a window, Musk will probably get fatter on the splatter)
As almost everyone must surely know by now, Elon Musk's deal to buy Twitter finally went through this past week. This was a hotly discussed and debated topic for many months, and I even tackled it on this Whirled, though in a broader context than the basic will-he-or-won't-he-go-through-with-it debate.

Not surprisingly, the right wingnuts and conspiranoids and hatemongers have been giddy with delight since Musk liberated the bird: they are rolling over and wetting themselves praising their Overlord as they celebrate the "return of free speech" and the "end of wokeness" on Twitter. Many have expressed their great joy by reportedly flooding the forum with the N-word, just because, like naughty kindergartners, they can. The Neo-Nazis and their ilk seem to be having a field day too.

Many others, not so happy, are just waiting for Twitter to fail, and are taking great gulps from their chilled bottles of schadenfreude because they believe Musk made a laughably horrible deal, paying far more for Twitter than it is worth. Many are also vowing to leave Twitter, perhaps migrating to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's nascent Bluesky forum, as if that'll show Elon.

I'm holding off on the schadenfreude myself, because I think Musk is invested in a long game that has little to do with the success or failure of Twitter, by conventional standards of success and failure (e.g., ad revenue and whatnot). And I plan to stay on Twitter -- after all, I'm pretty much of a nobody there anyway, and everyone just leaves me alone. I certainly have no plans to hop onto Bluesky. That would only be helping the dude who played a key role in Musk's deal to take Twitter private, and who happens to be good friends with Musk rather than his rival: Jack Dorsey.

Everyone who is at all concerned about Twitter, the future of actual free speech (online and off), and especially about the future of democracy, should read investigative journalist Dave Troy's October 29, 2022 piece on Medium, 'No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating.' Troy explains that he has followed Twitter closely since its inception, and has had a chance to talk in depth about technical topics with Jack Dorsey and the company's other founders over the years. Accordingly, he has views that differ from the "well-intentioned but poorly-informed commentary and analysis" that we've seen all over the media.

To those who think Musk's purchase of Twitter is crazy because he's sure to lose tons of money, Troy counters that Musk and his backers have far broader goals than making a profit.

The goals are more ideological in nature. Musk and his backers believe that the global geopolitical arena was being warped by too much “woke” ideology and censorship, and wanted to fix that by first restoring voices that had previously been silenced —and then implementing technical and algorithmic solutions that allow each user to get the experience they want. They think this can “solve” the problems that people cite about social media content. Making money, they figure, will come from the secondary effects of enabling “free speech” and the possibility of building other services like payments and replacing government on top of such an app. Plus the company’s social graph data is a goldmine for other businesses that may wish to benefit from detailed knowledge of the makeup of society.

And that's where the Technocracy angle comes in, where Twitter is concerned. Dave Troy believes it's completely naive to think that there is a technical solution to harmful content, which is likely to lead to more radicalization and cultish behavior.

...they are being willfully ignorant of the harmful side effects of content. It is a kind of tech fundamentalist solutionism that posits that for any difficult problem, there must be a technical solution. Many sociologists and cultural scholars would argue differently.

But the Technocracy aspect goes far beyond Twitter, and out into the further reaches of Space. Troy points out that back in April of this year, Dorsey wrote:

In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.

Wow. That sounds pretty spiritual, especially for a sociopathic ego-tripper like Musk -- although, come to think of it, this blog is littered with posts about sociopathic ego-trippers who talk a good game about "light" and "consciousness" (this guy and this guy, for instance), so never mind. In any case, Troy explains what Dorsey really meant by "the light of consciousness."

This is a reference to “longtermism,” the heavily marketed philosophy being promoted by Musk and his friend William MacAskill that asserts the only thing that matters is humanity’s future in space, and that the only goal of the living is to maximize the number of future humans alive, as well as the number of artificial intelligence instances that could possibly exist in the future. This mandate is most often used to brush aside calls for improving conditions and alleviating suffering among the living here on Earth now. Because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn’t likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a rocket to Mars. Longtermism is heavily influenced by “Russian Cosmism” and is also directly adjacent to “Effective Altruism.” Musk’s stated mission, which he intends to fulfill in his lifetime, is to “make humanity a multiplanetary species.” The anti-democratic urge in longtermism is rooted in the belief that “mob rule” will lead to nuclear annihilation; we should, Musk thinks, be guided by “wiser” minds — like his and Putin’s apparently.

What it all seems to boil down to is that Elon Musk is a Technocrat of the worst sort, putting all of his faith in technological solutions to everything, but caring far less about applying those solutions to the suffering masses on Earth today than to future generations of multiplanetary humans. And making him an even worse sort of Technocrat -- and human being -- is his malignant narcissism. All of his grandiose plans and pronouncements seem to be chiefly a means of drawing attention to himself, enabling him to suck all the oxygen out of the room, much like another malignant narcissist we know of promised, in so many words, to do years ago. (That guy has fulfilled his promise, or rather his threat, many times over, of course.)

In any case, Elon's Mars thing is in the future. Meanwhile back on Earth, in the present day, Moscow Musk is cozying up to Vlad and the MAGAs and other foul characters.

Musk also seems pretty interested in helping advance Putin’s “multipolar world order,” which is why he plays footsie with QAnon and MAGA accounts, and pals around with Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. “How are things going in Bakhmut?,” Musk asked Medvedev.

Nice guy.

Troy ends with a warning to all of us:

Ultimately what we are dealing with is the fact that social engineering through control of the information environment is an inevitable reality—the only question is who has the means and moral authority to do it.

If democracy-minded people don’t seize control of the information environment, powerful sociopathic autocrats will do so instead. We leave a power vacuum open at our peril, and at the moment, Musk and Putin are the ones with the most will to fill it.

Again, I urge you to read Troy's entire piece on Medium. Here's that link again. Read it. And don't forget to vote, if you're eligible and registered.

 

13 years after James Arthur Ray's deadly sweat lodge, cults are still a danger

Today, October 8, 2022, is the 13th anniversary of the day that sociopathic New-Wage/McSpirituality guru/cult leader James Arthur Ray killed two of his followers: Kirby Brown and James Shore, and set in motion the death, nine days later, of a third follower, Liz Neuman. The instrument of their deaths was a fake and utterly reckless "sweat lodge" ceremony in Sedona, Arizona, that also injured dozens of other participants. The phony sweat lodge was the "final challenge" at Ray's pricey "Spiritual Warrior" workshop.

Ray, who had shot to fame following his appearance in the simplistic and crassly materialistic New-Wage moviemercial The Secret, was convicted of negligent homicide for the three deaths in Sedona -- and consequently served less than two years in an Arizona state prison -- but he was never criminally charged in the death of yet another follower, Colleen Conaway, at a San Diego Ray event a couple of months before Sedona.

Every year since October 8, 2009, I've commemorated the horror in Sedona on this blog, and this year is no exception. But this year, I'm going to inject some politics into my annual observation, because, unfortunately, cults and cultishness have slithered their way into American (right-wing) politics, and I don't think the threat that they represent can be overstated.

In a way, this is a tale of two Virginias, and I only hope that the Virginia I greatly admire will not be insulted by appearing in the same blog post as the "other" Virginia, for whom I have nothing but contempt. Let's get that "other" V out of the way first.

Virginia Thomas: there and back again -- from cult member, to anti-cult crusader, back to cult member
Today Virginia "Ginni" Thomas is best known as the conspiracy-mongering -- and possibly seditious -- wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence "Long Dong Silver" Thomas. But not everyone is aware that Ginni was once a member of a cult, and at some point became aware that it was a cult, and underwent "deprogramming," after which she became an anti-cult crusader for years.

The cult with which Ginni, then known by her maiden name of Virginia Lamp, was involved was a Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT): the now-defunct Lifespring, a product of the "human potential movement" that began in the late 1960s and came to fruition in the 70s and 80s. Lifespring was founded by several colleagues of Werner Erhard, the perpetrator of the even more infamous Erhard Seminars Training, or est (which later became The Forum, which later became Landmark Forum, which later became Landmark Education, which is now Landmark Worldwide).

NBC News was one of several media outlets covering Ginni's journey there and back again. A June 14, 2022 article on the NBC News web site offers a brief summary of what Lifespring was and did (and in the process, I couldn't help but notice, mentions Ray's "sweat lodge").

Lifespring, like NXIVM and “Sweat Lodge Guru” James Arthur Ray’s course that led to three deaths in 2009, are what some experts call Large Group Awareness Trainings, New Age self-help programs that paradoxically promise to deliver almost superhuman mental abilities that can be achieved only through total submission.

Lifespring put inductees through grueling multiday “educational” sessions where they were psychologically broken down. In a 1987 Washington Post exposé of the group, Thomas gave an interview describing one session in which trainees were made to strip down to bathing suits and subjected to body shaming.

“The emphasis was upon abandonment to an undifferentiated, unknowable other,” psychologist Janice Haaken and sociologist Richard Adams wrote in an academic journal article on Lifespring. They participated in a 1981 training in Seattle where they witnessed a man have a psychotic break while organizers berated him, concluding that the impact of the training “was essentially pathological” for even the people who enjoyed the experience.

Several trainees died, including a 27-year-old model who was refused medical attention during an asthma attack, leading to a $450,000 settlement with her family, according to a 1987 article in The Washington Post. The group, which claimed to have trained hundreds of thousands, went defunct in the 1990s after a series of lawsuits.

Following Ginni Lamp's realization that Lifespring was a destructive cult, and her escape/deprogramming, she became a force for good -- for a while, anyway. From the NBC piece cited above:

“When you come away from a cult, you’ve got to find a balance in your life as far as getting involved with fighting the cult or exposing it,” Thomas told attendees at a 1986 Cult Awareness Network panel in Kansas City, Missouri. “And kind of the other angle is getting a sense of yourself and what was it that made you get into that group. And what open questions are there that still need to be answered.”

It’s difficult to reconcile Thomas then and now, four people who worked with her at the height of her anti-cult activism through the late 1980s said in interviews. After she spent years trying to expose cults, these people found Thomas’ efforts to promote outlandish plans to overturn the 2020 results, particularly the text messages and emails in which she referenced false election conspiracies that originated in QAnon circles on the internet, surprising. Democrats and Republicans alike have said QAnon supporters exhibit cult-like behavior.

“Ginni Thomas was out there active in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and then she really went a different path,” said Rick Ross, a prominent expert on cults and a former “deprogrammer” who knew Thomas through their anti-cult activism. “I admire the work she did back in the ‘80s. And she should be given credit for that.”

No disrespect intended to Rick Ross, whose work I've long supported, and I've always been willing to give credit where credit is due, but isn't there a point at which today's awful deeds cancel out yesterday's good ones? In any case, at the risk of overstating the obvious, Ginni Thomas née Lamp is in an even worse cult now -- not just QAnon in particular, as noted by various media outlets that have explored her curious journey, but the Trumpcult in general. Ginni loves her Trump, and apparently the love is returned.

While Ginni Thomas is a high-profile example, her story isn't all that unusual; for many folks, susceptibility to cults and manipulation is apparently a lifelong condition, somewhat like traditional recovery circles claim is the case with alcoholism and other drug addictions. In my previous post, and in a different though related context, I quoted myself quoting my pal Jason "Salty Droid" Jones, but I think another quotation of a quotation of a quotation is in order here.

...None of this is really surprising.... As my pal Salty Droid has both documented on his blog and has mentioned in private correspondence, quitting one manipulative scam or scammer doesn't cure one of the thinking pattern errors that got them sucked in in the first place. "Manipulation causes susceptibility to manipulation as a side effect," sez Salty.

Indeed. A July 24, 2022 piece on the Business Insider site not only suggests that Ginni Thomas has "fallen back into old habits" but also offers some insight from cult expert Steven Hassan, himself a former cult member who worked with Ginni back in her anti-cult activism days. Hassan said he actually wasn't surprised by Ginni's apparent infatuation with QAnon.

"Ginni Thomas was in a cult, and anyone who has ever been in a cult is vulnerable to another cult if they haven't properly counseled and done their homework," Hassan said...

..."I haven't called [Ginni Thomas] stupid or crazy, which the media does, because I know that she's been unduly influenced into these beliefs. She's a very intelligent, educated person, but her brain has been hacked," [Hassan] claimed. 

With all due respect to Steven Hassan, while Ginni is almost certainly not stupid, she is, in my unprofessional opinion, bat-crap crazy.

Unfortunately, she's far from the only American who believes in QAnon's batty conspiracy narratives. A PRRI Report from February of this year revealed that nearly one in five Americans in general, and one in four republicans in particular, still believe in QAnon conspiracy theories. And Americans who most trust far-right "news" are nearly five times more likely to be QAnon believers than those who lean towards mainstream news media. It would be all be merely humorous, were it not for the fact that this deep toxic ocean of irrationality threatens to drown American democracy.

So you really can't talk about cults in general without injecting a little bit of politix in the mix.

Virginia Brown: turning profound grief into a force for good
Now we come to the Virginia I admire: Virginia "Ginny" Brown, mother of one of James Arthur Ray's death lodge victims, Kirby Brown.

The families and friends of the four people killed by Ray have all learned to cope with their losses in their own ways. One of the ways that Kirby Brown's family chose was to found a nonprofit organization, SEEK Safely to help educate the public, hold self-help leaders accountable, and hopefully avoid more deaths and injuries at the hands of reckless gurus.

Given the context of this post, I should probably emphasize that SEEK Safely is not a partisan political organization, the only connection with politics being an ongoing campaign for responsible legislation to rein in the self-help industry. Nor, contrary to what some might expect, is the organization anti-self-help. Rather, its message and mission center around empowerment, in the best sense of that egregiously overused word, i.e., by helping people make informed decisions when choosing to go the self-help-seminar route. I urge you to visit the SEEK Safely site, which is continually expanding. You will find a wealth of useful information, as well as opportunities to get involved if you're so inclined.

Yet another way the Brown family found to come to terms with Kirby's death, while helping many other people who are dealing with profound loss and pain, was through the 2020 memoir, This Sweet Life: How We Lived After Kirby Died, by Ginny and her younger daughter Jean. It is truly a lovely and haunting book, which I read shortly after it came out and have yet to keep my commitment to fully review here -- but never mind my own negligence; I urge you to read the book.

Before I wrap this up I also want to make the distinction between self-help cults (or cultlike organizations) and the whole QAnon/Trumpcult phenomenon, particularly regarding their respective followers. I think that many if not most of the people who get sucked in, to the point of harm, by charismatic self-help gurus have good intentions themselves, despite the malevolent intentions of the "leaders" they look up to, and that their original motivation for becoming involved is simply to improve their lives in some way. (This of course applies to those who get involved voluntarily and not because they were required to do so by employers or coerced by loved ones.) Many LGAT attendees are highly educated, high-achieving, even adventurous souls who like to challenge themselves and be challenged. Even Ginni Lamp Thomas, who was highly educated when she got into Lifespring, was reportedly drawn to the LGAT by a desire to improve her life.

QAnon, on the other hand, attracts a wide range of fringe "thinkers" and nutcakes, many of whom aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, and it's also a convenient weapon wielded by power-hungry cynics who don't actually believe the wackadoodle conspiracy theories pushed by Q but are all too happy to exploit the gullibility of those who do believe. Unlike many LGATs, and for that matter the Trumpcult, QAnon doesn't have a single specific high-profile cult leader at the helm, but the conspiranoid narratives pushed by Q advocates are in many ways more destructive than anything any LGAT guru could wreak. And the Trumpcult, which is fed by and feeds into the Q cult, poses an even greater danger than Q alone.

That said, it would be a mistake to underestimate the danger of self-help cults led by malignant narcissists. Like James Arthur Ray, for instance.

For Ray, the daze of the four- and five-figure live events such as the Spiritual Warrior travesty that culminated in the death lodge would seem to be over, and that's a good thing. Though he has been struggling to make a comeback since his release from prison, framing the whole Sedona thing as a super-major trial and tribulation for him, his audience has shriveled like the balls of a long-time steroid user.

Today Ray merrily tweeted about something he calls "Steps to the Economy of Mind #5," which is apparently part of his "Modern Alchemy" shtick. He advises, "ONLY put things in your mind that cause YOU to improve." Spoken like a true narcissist. He didn't even mention the death lodge anniversary, not that I would expect him to, since putting that thought in his mind and out in the Twitterverse would most likely not cause him -- or his bottom line -- to improve, at least not by his definition of improvement. In any case, today's tweet, like most of his nuggets of wisdumb on Twitter, has earned very few likes, and zero responses so far. Even so, James Arthur Ray still has a fan base, and as long as he is in the business, he remains a danger, no matter how minor that danger may seem at the moment.

The takeaway: Whether it's a McSpirituality/selfish-help cult or a far-right political one, cults remain a threat. Do what you can to protect yourself and those you care about from their influence. (And make sure you're registered to vote, if you're eligible.)

And... never forget.

Related musings from the Whirled archives:

• March 2010: Self-help regulation: necessary safeguard, or Nanny-state nonsense?
  A long (and long-ago) post that explores questions raised in the wake of the death lodge debacle, regarding the need to regulate the self-help industry. Of particular interest for overall context of the "human potential movement": the segment under the subhead, "Going back in time: a little 'historical perspective." Several of the links are no longer active, but this is, after all, the Internet, and 2010 was a long time ago.
• October 2010: Musings on a tragedy and its meanings
  Another long post, published on the one-year anniversary of Sedona and doubling as a review of former James Ray follower Connie Joy's book, Tragedy in Sedona: My Life in James Arthur Ray's Inner Circle.