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we're in bigger trouble than most people
actually want to think about we've got
an economic system that no longer works
well enough for everybody
many people ask how is my child have a
better life than I do in the developed
world and can't now that they can't come
up with an answer nor can the political
and technocratic elites that make the
decisions they don't have an answer
either so the economy we have
evaporating consent for democracy for
the rule of law for the concept of
universal human rights
a third crisis again not well enough
understood but there is that what I call
the crisis of algorithmic control elites
and States are increasingly able to use
the vast asymmetries of power and
information between them and us to not
only know our thoughts and behaviors as
you will know to use Google or Facebook
or Amazon but increasingly to predict
them and therefore to control them and
this triple crisis of economic stasis of
falling consent for the old institutions
and for rising use of algorithmic and
machine control of human beings
constitutes to me a whole a big thing
that we can link together starting in
2008 with the Lehman Brothers crisis
morphing into the 2011 uprisings from
Egypt to Spain to Greece Occupy Wall
Street and no the attack on truth and
the war on truth I came to the
conclusion that the crisis of the
neoliberal system has resulted in a
crisis of the neoliberal self
neoliberalism for me is the coercive
introduction by the state of market
norms of behavior into all parts of
everyday life Michel Foucault writing at
the dawn of the neoliberal era warned us
what we will become entrepreneurs of the
self as the neoliberal system embedded
itself into our lives we increasingly
conformed and performed into this Kabuki
theater style of interaction we became
two-dimensional in the literal sense of
Homo economicus for Mill & Co and Homo
economicus was a thought experiment what
if people only judged everything in
terms
of market interactions but the selves we
built to cope with the violent
introduction of neoliberalism were
selves that actually did non
metaphorically interact in this way a
great example of that would be supposing
someone in your town you know decides
that they want to build a new library
you know from the local newspaper to the
librarian to the local councillor the
question would be is it good for the
economy of Swindon or whatever we
learned not to ask the question is it is
it good just because we want to read
more books it's almost become a
knee-jerk that we that we reduce
everything to the homoeconomicus
form of of questioning but the problem
here became that the outcome would be
that we became eminent League governor
ball who has agency in that photograph
everybody's just taking photos of him
there's one person with agency in that
photograph Hannah Arendt called this the
temporary Alliance of the elite and the
mob and that's what we're seeing all
over the world what the elite wants can
be summed up by one word chaos chaos
from which they prosper if you are
Renaissance Technologies Robert Mercer
Trump's biggest backer to the tune of
millions releases technologies has a
machine that understands the world
better than anybody else does it's it's
a neural linguistically programmed
artificial intelligence and it can trade
volatility better than anybody else
ergo the more volatility there is the
better
Steve Bannon owned Breitbart Breitbart
trades on fear and chaos that's what it
reports all rapes in Sweden are migrant
rapes for format for Breitbart
the more the better for business and for
the Koch Industries they didn't back
Trump when they backed the Republicans
in the last election again you could say
what what if you are an avowed
anarcho-capitalist who believes the
government should literally not exist
and that the survival of the fittest
should literally govern everybody's
lives
then again what you want is chaos and
this guy Trump is just the wrecking ball
he is the chaos engine but what do the
mob want what are the people holding up
the chanting the c-word
Clinton and the rest what do they want
well what when you interview them what
they want is white supremacy misogyny
homophobia climate denial anti anti
vaccination that's that's their meat and
drink of their ideology but Arendt in
the full quote says something I think we
should learn from she says about the
Nazis what the mob wanted and what
Goebbels gave them was access to history
even at the price of destruction it's a
pregnant phrase they want the reversal
of history the man I interviewed on the
Trump inauguration who could not accept
climate change could not accept it
because he was a cattle farmer from
Tennessee
he said if climate change is right I
have to give up my I have to pay a tax
and if I have to pay a tax my children
don't get my wealth at the end so
climate change can't be right and
haven't you heard about the camel
skeleton that was been recently found
under the Antarctic we are asked to be
sympathetic to such people to worry
about the bleak lives that they live in
flyover country in America and about
their supported poverty but there's
enough evidence drawn from surveys that
it's not poverty or bleakness on its own
than is driving people in this direction
it is the desire to reverse history just
as aren't predicted but what makes it
possible for them to win as I say the
important thing about this picture is
that we are looking at at a state where
only elites have agency this is not an
aberration from the neoliberal era Trump
himself is merely a national neoliberal
he is a this is Thatcherism in one
country because of the crisis of the
global economy it's become necessary for
the elites to compete with each other
using deregulation rather than to
cooperate with each other using direct
deregulation that's what Trump is emboss
and yarrow Orban brexit to me is but
what they are required to play on is a
thing that neoliberalism itself created
a folk religion of fatalism
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