NM's blog

“Under the banner of " patriotic tech ", this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call  the Authoritarian Stack.  It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules…. “The revolving door no longer spins between government and industry—it locks them together into a new architecture of power .  “Unlike old authoritarianism built on fear and force, this new system rules through code, capital, and infrastructure — making resistance feel architecturally impossible.” Once again 'capitalism' is delinked from 'democracy'. In listing the capitalist companies and individuals, the author use the word democracy seperate from capitalism, implying that we have had 'democracy' (nit capitalist democracy), but now it is under threat. 

Sean Starrs’s key points : The global nature of US-led capitalism since 1945, and especially since the 1990s, means that some states can extract vast resources from others. GDP tells us where the world’s production of goods and services is geographically concentrated, but in the age of globalization, it does not tell us who owns and therefore profits from it. Global profit share is a more appropriate measure of national economic power, as it encompasses the global profits stemming from production and finance owned abroad, not just within the home territory. The global dominance of Wall Street (financial services in figure two), for example, helps to ensure that the US dollar remains the de facto world currency. The dominance of American tech firms helps to ensure the continued supremacy of the US military, while the dominance of American media helps to ensure that the US state can shape the ideological narrative (including support for US capitalism and imperialism). The United States c...