Kim-Mai Cutler

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The two short quotes below are from Stanford media historian Fred Turner, who sat for a very smart Medium interview conducted by Kim-Mai Cutler. In the Q&A, Turner explains how the very type of tools developed to combat fascism wound up being subverted in this era of fake news, often a tactic of white nationalists. The academic also places Donald Trump on a continuum of tyrants, including Mussolini, who caused catastrophic carnage in the last century.


“Some key elements of fascism include the following:

  1. A reversionary desire to return to an imagined state of greatness from the past.
  2. A celebration of heterosexual masculinity. You could think of Vladimir Putin’s need to take off his shirt or Donald Trump’s obsession with the size of his hands.
  3. A charismatic leadership style.
  4. An absolute disregard for facts and a celebration of myth.
  5. An integration of the corporation and the state, which is what Mussolini wanted to do and feels reminiscent of what Trump wants to do today.
  6. A deep, structural racism. There is always someone on the outs. In Japan, it was particular minority groups. In Germany, it was obviously the Jews, but it was also gypsies, queers and communists, among others. And you can see that kind of racism, that kind of in-group and out-group dynamic here, with Trump.

Many people have called Donald Trump a populist. I don’t think that’s quite right. His anti-elitist rhetoric is certainly in that vein, but his racism, his sexism, and his emphasis on a return to a formerly great America, belong to the fascist line.

To me, the constellation of forces that he’s put into play look like early Mussolini. The key difference is that Mussolini and Hitler came to power by essentially building parties first. Trump has used the media to take over an existing state apparatus. Whether he’s able to do what he wants or not, whether he’s competent or not, and whether institutions will resist him, that’s an open question. I don’t think he’s Andrew Jackson though.”•


“One of the things we see with Trump and the Twitter-sphere is that when new technologies come on the scene, they don’t replace old technologies. They layer onto older technologies.

Twitter and its liberating potential is already mass mediated. It’s already commercial. When Donald tweets, he isn’t just tweeting to a general populace. He’s generating stories for CBS and NBC, and for that matter, Facebook. He’s generating stories that create an entire media sphere on their own. That is the source of his power. He is using the old fascist charisma, but he’s doing it in a media environment in which the social and the commercial, the individual and the mass, are already completely entwined.”•

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factoryautomation8

Everybody could be wrong. It’s wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe the new technologies will birth plentiful jobs and industries we just can’t yet imagine. Or perhaps we will have to radically think our economy in a climate that favors machine labor over the human kind. 

It’s striking that the worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. seem almost alternative universes, with a growing number in the former acknowledging that Guaranteed Basic Income may need become a reality, and the latter, represented last night by the GOP debate, in which it’s not even part of the conversation. I believe Marco Rubio spoke up against the minimum-wage hike because it would make “people more expensive than machines,” which glancingly acknowledges the actual world we’re living in, but doesn’t offer any sort of solution. Be poor or automation will make you poorer isn’t the best we can do.

From Kim-Mai Cutler at Techcrunch:

In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman have spoken up in favor of a universal basic income that would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce enough decently compensated work for everyone.

A mix of technologists, policy wonks and creatives are trying to kickstart a bigger movement around that idea this coming weekend with a Basic Income Createathon.

“Everyone in the country having jobs is not going to make sense anymore because we’re going to have computers and robots doing what we’re doing most of what we’re doing today,” said Jim Pugh, who got a Ph.D in distributed robotics before he worked on the original 2008 Obama campaign. “If you accept that as a premise, what we need to do as a society is not made up of small changes. It’s actually a fairly radical change and basic income seems to be an elegant solution for doing that.”

A basic income is a kind of Social Security system where all citizens or residents get an unconditional amount of money on top of whatever their wages are from elsewhere. It assumes that, above this minimum level of income, people will still be motivated to work for more money or on more meaningful projects. …

Pugh said the point of the Createathon is to build energy for a broader political movement that will advocate for universal basic income and push for small pilots to test the idea out in the United States.

To be fair, not everyone prominent in the tech industry agrees with the premise that there won’t be enough jobs for everyone.•

 

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