> Succeed at what?
Dismantling government. Look up the "network state":
* https://thenetworkstate.com/preamble
> All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
> The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.
[…]
> The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/395646/trump-inauguration...
Also:
* "Why big tech turned right": https://www.vox.com/politics/397525/trump-big-tech-musk-bezo...
* "The crypto bros who dream of crowdfunding a new country": https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171lyewo
Have you ever read cyberpunk, especially William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (starting with Neuromancer) where corporations are the government? Basically that.
Yep, here's a pretty good summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
Indeed I believe that the current administration's end-goal is the collapse of the US as we know it. Thiel and other billionaires need the collapse to create their own cyberpunk states inside current US territory. The remaining territory will be probably taken by Project 2025 guys, who want to rule it as a Christian theocracy / far-right utopia.
Another possibility is that the uber-rich techbros can see that, if we keep heading the way we're going, the whole thing comes crashing down. We've been speedrunning a far-left utopia for quite a while now, and it's not going well. Whether it's some kind of currency collapse, internal civil war, or something else, this is a death slide towards something bad.
Assuming that's the explanation, then radical change isn't surprising. How radical can be argued, but turning the rudder on the ship of state can't be.
Depends from the definition of "far-left utopia" I guess.
I admit that I'm an outsider, but in terms of social welfare and equality, the US still seems closer to capitalist dystopia than a far-left utopia. Expensive healthcare mostly tied to work / insurance, very expensive education, high wealth inequality and pretty poor social safety nets.
At the same time, on many "culture war" issues America has seemed too extreme for my taste. For instance, discriminating people based on their "race" in university admissions is absolutely insane. But the solution to fixing these crazy ideas shouldn't be going all the way to far-right, with its own crazies like anti-vaxxers, Putin fanboys and climate-change deniers. I miss the times when most popular politicians were centrists.
> speedrunning a far-left utopia
What the fuck are you talking about? We don’t even have socialized medicine in this country.
> What the fuck are you talking about? We don’t even have socialized medicine in this country.
And in a lot of the countries in Europe where things are further along the 'speedrunning' spectrum things don't seem too bad.
Heck, Sweden has more billionaires per capita and a wider social safety net:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
I'm so mad you just injected the term broligarch into my brain.