Blood and the machine

(...) What typified the thought of the Conservative Revolutionaries and a set of right-wing engineers in Weimar and then the ideologists of the Third Reich was not a rejection of modernity so much as the search for an alternative modernity: a vision of high technics and industrial productivity without liberalism, democracy, and egalitarianism. Technology in the service of a hierarchical society and an authoritarian politics, or rather, hierarchical society and authoritarian politics in the service of technology, as the correct pathway to unfettered progress and development.

(...) We can see many of the themes of the reactionary modernist tradition popping up in the contemporary tech world, from what the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called Ungleichzeitigkeit—non-contemporaneity—the coxistence of the archaic and the futuristic, in Curtis Yarvin’s techno-monarchism, to what Klaus Theweleit called the “utopia of the totally mechanized body” in the so-called “rationalist community,” transhumanists, and sadistic A.I. fetishism.

https://lnkd.in/eFKgCZ5H

#reactionary #modernism #ideology #SiliconValley #tech #bigtech #modernity