Donald Trump is all in on the gray gods of artificial intelligence. In retrospect, I suppose this was inevitable. “It is a superpower and you want to be right at the beginning of it, but it is very disconcerting,” Trump told the algo-boosted elder-abuser Jake Paul last month. “It’s going to happen. And if it’s going to happen, we have to take the lead over China.”
Technology is power, so naturally, most politicians will gravitate to it.
For decades, Silicon Valley and the Pentagon have appealed to “competition” and “survival” to justify total digitization. During the contactless Covid panic, digitized survival was a core principle of the global Great Reset agenda: unplug at your own peril. As we saw during that debacle, the real world manifestation of tech fantasies looked more like sorry hominids crippled by algorithmic parasites than an archaeofuturist blend of starships and classical architecture. But optimists insist technology is “neutral” and can ultimately be steered toward nobler ends.
Steve Bannon tried to warn Trump against this progressive influence. For the most part, he was a lone Luddite in MAGA circles, raging against a two-faced Machine that would “inevitably” pick up steam. Soon after Steve was hauled off as a political prisoner, a cohort of tech accelerationists publicly attached themselves to Trump like self-assembling nano-circuits in a schizoid’s brain.
Following the botched assassination attempt on Trump—and seeing his heroic self-possession—the cyborg car dealer Elon Musk endorsed him and pledged $45 million a month to his campaign. Now that Musk’s xAI supercluster has been fired up in Memphis, Tenn., and his X headquarters is moving to join Neuralink and SpaceX in Austin, Tex., it makes sense this Gray alien would commit himself to the MAGA wing of the Red Tribe. The vibe has shifted so hard, you can feel it in your screen-worn fingertips.
Tech acceleration has become a mind virus floating in the air, along with cow farts and microplastic particles. It infects “liberals” and “conservatives” alike. If you want to compete against other individuals in your field, the future-volk insist, you have to augment yourself with the latest devices and software, especially artificial intelligence. Good luck becoming a middle manager or a superstar YouTuber with that boomer-grade flip phone. The same goes for your company as you compete with other companies, or your nation striving against other nations.
You have to fight adversarial algorithms with better algorithms. You must combat drone swarms with ever larger swarms of swarms.
There’s an unavoidable logic to this materialist paradigm. It’s a god eat god world, the thinking goes, and social Darwinism favors those blessed by digital deities. In such an ecosystem—constructed entirely by megacorporations who repurpose military technology for mass markets—you either adapt or die. By the end of this process, you’ll probably mutate into something that barely resembles a human being. But who needs a soul when your numbers are up?
Read More: MAGA 2.0: The Conservative Case for a Transhuman Future™
