Currently spearheaded by Lonely Stinker (you can work out who I'm talking about), the... we need a pithy name for them... the Techno-Libertarians share the idea that democracy, that governments should be responsive to and guided by the public, is obsolete, if not entirely broken. (Apparently this became popular around 2008, when the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy caused a financial crisis.) But instead of fixing what's broke, they want to trash it, and replace it with some form of feudalism.

Hoppe [in his 2001 book "Democracy: The God That Failed"] envisioned a new order—one where governance was privatized, where societies functioned as “covenant communities” owned and operated by property-holders rather than elected officials. In this world, citizenship was a matter of contract, not birthright. Voting was unnecessary. Rule was left to those with the most capital at stake. It was libertarian thought taken to its most extreme conclusion: a society governed not by political equality, but by property rights alone.

We all know how corporations work. They are authoritarian hierarchies. There's the chief officers and executives at the top, if you don't include the greedy dragon gods called shareholders. Then there are ranks of overseer-managers, each one overseeing the others. And so it goes, down down down until there's the overworked serfs at the bottom, the only ones doing the useful work keeping the corporation afloat, and hated for it.

Silicon Valley elites who had built successful companies began to view democratic processes not just as inefficient, but as fundamentally irrational—the product of what they saw as emotional decision-making by non-technical people. This merged perfectly with Hoppe's critique: if democracy was simply a collection of “feeling-based” choices made by the uninformed masses, surely it could be replaced by something more “rational”—specifically, the kind of data-driven, engineering-focused governance these tech leaders practiced in their own companies.

But here's a problem. Corporations can and will fire unproductive workers. But how can you fire a citizen? And if you can, where can that person go? Do they just get bundled on a truck or plane and dumped across the border? Or are they carted off to a disposal facility?

Here's another. If you take Hoppe's idea of contract-based citizenship, how can a newborn baby sign a contract? What is its status? How old does a person have to be before they understand enough to sign a contract of citizenship? What happens if the person is born with severe deficits, mental or physical, and will never be able to understand a contract? What happens if they suffer severe injury rendering them unable to work? What happens when they grow too old to work? Are either of those breaches of contract?

But I get the impression the TechnoLibs (ah! that's more punchy, and if bandied about enough should turn the MAGAs against them) haven't thought about this, and won't. They have a model - the companies they run - and they cannot see how running a country is any different. I shudder to think how they run their families.

Here's one more problem.

Corporations are run on a for-profit basis, usually involving minimising costs. If you run a country on a for-profit basis, where is the profit going? And how do you minimise costs? It's not like you can dissolve, say, Kentucky, and offer its residents new positions elsewhere, or a state's worth of PIPs, or severance.

But these idiots don't see that. They're convinced they're smarter than everyone else, because data driven solutions! or worse, AI! running on proprietary systems that are totally opaque to outsiders.

An aristocracy of rich technocrats, atop a stack of overseer-serfs, believing Vox Machina Vox Dei.

The pipeline from techno-libertarianism to neo-reaction often follows a predictable path: It begins with a libertarian critique of government inefficiency and overreach. This evolves into a broader skepticism of all democratic institutions, seen as slow and irrational compared to the speed and logic of technology. Eventually, this leads to the conclusion that democracy itself is an outdated system, incompatible with rapid technological progress. The final step is embracing the idea that democracy should be replaced entirely with more “efficient” forms of governance, often modeled on corporate structures or technological systems.

In my mind there is no difference between the TechnoLibs, and the Project 2025 theocrats. Both have lost faith in democracy as she is spoke in the USA, so much so, that they want to ditch it entirely and replace it with feudalism. Both groups believe they alone are smart and principled enough to run the country. Both believe that Vox Populi Vox Diabolus. Both want to demote the common American citizen to the position of serf or lower. Human resources to be harvested, beaten into the desired shape, exploited, and finally discarded.

So if you're wondering what the hell is going on with the Lonely Stinker and his fake "department", wonder no more. The idiot in the Oval Office will be quietly sidelined, no doubt kept happy with fake orders to sign and fake reports salving his ego. And Musk, along with his foreign backers and fellow techno-aristocrats, will lord it over a nation of serfs, all desperately working in fear of being fired - one way or another.

As the Brookings Institution noted in a 2023 analysis: “Tech leaders increasingly adopt neo-feudal framing of users-as-serfs, reflecting a broader shift away from democratic conceptions of citizenship.”

And to be frank, I believe strongly that the United States' governmental systems need renovation. The systems that reinforce "safe seats", where one's vote is virtually irrelevant because the incumbent party is always voted back in, need to be replaced. The current Congress and Senate need to be purged of the elderly, reactionary, and careerist individuals who have shirked their duties to their constituents in favour of holding on to power - red and blue both. The USA needs politicians that understand they are civil servants, appointed to serve the people of the United States without discrimination.

However, I am well aware that this is not just a matter of kicking out the bad apples, or repealing Citizens United and other high-level decisions. It also requires a concentrated effort to uplift the worst performing states in the nation. It requires sustained effort to undo decades of anti-American and anti-democratic propaganda. It requires unrelenting political war against not just the individuals behind the TechnoLibs and Project 2025, but against entire corrupt corporations and the ideologies that misinform them - and the hostile actors who will come to their aid.

Look, I'm so concerned about the United States, I'd run for president myself, if it wasn't for a couple of issues that disqualify me: I'm not a US citizen, and I have no experience in politics. The last thing I want, along with so many others within the US and outside, is to see that country die, to