A powerful class of tech billionaires believes democracy is an obstacle — not a value.
From crypto empires and AI dominance to “network states” and effective altruism, a growing broligarchy envisions a future ruled by elites, insulated from accountability and untethered from democratic norms.
David Z. Morris — longtime technology and finance journalist and author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia — joins the show to expose how Epstein’s elite network, Silicon Valley power players, and crypto utopians are reshaping politics in ways that threaten democratic institutions worldwide.
http://thelefthook.substack.com/
#EpsteinFiles #TechFascism #CryptoBros #SiliconValley #BillionaireClass #DavidZMorris #AIpolitics #Authoritarianism #democracyunderthreat #trump #news #breakingnews #trending
I want to highlight this moment:
https://youtu.be/9gnv101gTBg?t=1285
Where Waj and David make the through line to GamerGate. If you are someone who has first hand experience/ knowledge/ was around on reddit when the gamergate thing was blowing up (read, not looking for second hand accounts) and followed it while it was happening, can you please reach out to me either here or via DM’s?
I was around on “the bad place” when GamerGate was blowing up, but I was very confused by the whole thing, and considered it static at the time. It was so deeply embedded in jargon that I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it at the time. I considered it static, and in a world of infinite things to pay attention to, I just didn’t give that one focus. However, since then I’ve seen multiple people (both here, on lemmy and elsewhere) make the argument that the modern alt-right movement finds its origins in gamergate; that there is a throughline from gamergate -> pizzagate -> Qanon -> our current moment, with maybe r/The_Donald forking off there at some point. What Waj is arguing here is that there is also a connection to Epstein/ Bannon at the origination of gamer gate, and David seems to agree.
There are archives of reddit going back almost 2 decades, and I’m wondering if there are traces of evidence in these data from that time period, and if they could be corroborated with data from the Epstein files.
So if you were there for it, if you remember these moments, would very much like to hear from you if you are interested in speaking.
In terms of the terminally online, yes, GamerGate was absolutely a critical point of radicalization of young males and the metastasis of far-right fascist thought. In the greater culture it was a blip, but it swayed a lot of guys who were previously either politically inactive or broadly liberal to pivot into misogyny and anti-woke conspiracy.
This isn’t particularly difficult to research – if you want primary sources it is, but there are a ton of video essays and other media exploring this exact phenomenon. For a perspective published as it was actively developing, I recommend this video by Folding Ideas.
Appreciate that link. Thanks for that as a starting point.
I don’t consider this an easy thing to research; the word gamergate itself becomes a verb/ adjective in the dialectic around the conversation very quickly. I’ve gone so far as to pull the entirety of the reddit archive from 2005-2022, which includes subs like r/kotakuinaction, r/antigamergate. There is a whole language and vocabulary these communities glommed on to, which for an outsider, is practically incomprehensible. I mean even this video you’ve posted (which I’m listening to as I respond) is already drifting into the phenomenology of logic and epistemology. Six minutes and they haven’t even mentioned gamergate, and as soon as they do, there is this assumption I know what actually happened.
I would hardly call the topic of researching gamergate as easy. For example, very soon in the conversation we come into terms like “pro-gamergate” and “anti-gamergate”…
I mean…
There are a lot less of them than us
