Surveilled 94 - the ideological movement that culminated in DOGE
The ideological movement that culminated in DOGE
Slobodian, Q. (2023). Crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy. Penguin.
Sometimes a book comes along that ends up opening your mind far wider than you’d expected based on the cover. Ostensibly, Crack-up Capitalism is a look at capitalism’s evolution towards free zones, like Free Trade Zones (FTZ). It provides a comprehensive history of such zones, explaining how Hong Kong benefited economically from its light regulation, how Dubai first created and then leveraged its free trade zones for political influence, and even how Canary Wharf appears to be in the city, but is not quite part of the city. This history alone is reason enough to read it.
But beyond that, Crack-up Capitalism also brings out the various intellectual sources and influences that tie together the strands of the neoliberal movement since after World War 2. This encompasses the usual suspects, such as the academics and think tanks traditionally associated with the movement: Milton Friedman, The Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. But more interestingly, the book also happens to bring out the influence these ideas have had on Silicon Valley and its self-anointed luminaries, be it Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel.
After reading this book, you will walk away with significantly more understanding of the reasons and motivations, the intellectual framework as it were, behind seemingly unconnected actions and decisions of some of these players. Although the book was published in early 2024, thereby predating the second Trump administration by a number of years, it nonetheless brings out all the elements that can explain Elon Musk’s intentions and actions with DOGE, for example.
The effect of the book is even more powerful when read in conjunction with other tomes critical of neoliberalism or the tech industry, such as Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. A common theme across both books is the logic of accumulation and appropriation that is at the heart of capitalism. Surveillance Capitalism focuses on the effects thereof on society and the rights of individuals, through the loss of privacy. Crack-up Capitalism focuses on how this logic pushes wealthy tech entrepreneurs to attempt to secede from existing nation states, and move to or even create low regulation and low taxation countries.
Most of these attempts have floundered, but their appeal has not lessened, perhaps on the contrary. One main reason is the Austrian school and Friedman’s view that smaller government is better. This view has found ready supporters in today’s tech entrepreneurs, who at heart want to get out from under the burden of regulation and taxes. Along the way, some became more radical, and started experimenting with more extreme forms of governance, relying only on private contracts for example, including for policing and security.
Crack-up Capitalism is filled with engrossing stories about ideas floated over the last 50 years in the name of reinventing the state. Slobodian mentions ideas such as “portable Hong Kongs”, or the attempt to deal with the tensions of apartheid in South Africa by atomising the state in enclaves where like-minded—and often alike-looking—people could congregate. Curiously, South Africa seems to loom large in the minds of many in positions of influence in the US today—witness the tongue-lashing South African president Cyril Ramaphosa received in Trump’s Oval Office. Crack-up Capitalism provides some fascinating clues as to why that may be the case.
Another common thread among all the stories dug up by Slobodian is the neoliberals’ and anarcho-capitalists’ admiration for authoritarian regimes. This is quite overt in some cases, such as the “Dark Enlightenment” movement spearheaded by Silicon Valley developer Curtis Yarvin, and which counts Musk and Peter Thiel as fans and supporters. It is implicit in the admiration professed for Hong Kong or Singapore, which are held up as dynamic examples for the languishing West to follow.
The neoliberal advocates’ stories are usually highly selective or ignorant of the historical and geopolitical context that gave rise to these role model countries. Paeans to Singapore conveniently ignore that more than 80% of the population there lives in government-provided housing, and more importantly, that its economic development was thanks to the government’s interventionist industrial policy.
Such important caveats haven’t impeded the neoliberal narrative though. In the end, Crack-up Capitalism expertly shows how the relentless efforts to push neoliberalism have succeeded, sometimes spectacularly in the case of the Silicon Valley. More worryingly, it also shows how they are contributing to the erosion of the social democracies that we live in today. Unfortunately, faced with an atomised information landscape and ever more polarisation, it is hard to see where effective opposition to this ideology will come from. Not only social democracy, but the idea of a nation state itself is under increasing threat. Who would have thought that something as innocent-sounding as a Free Trade Zone would have such far-reaching consequences.