Surviving the Next Four Years of Tech

James Poulos:

As immortalized by ruling-class paeans around the time of Obama’s second term to the power of “data” (read: teched-up experts) to “save politics,” the established Left planned—long before the advent of Trump or COVID—to use the power of digital technology to consolidate world mindshare around their dreamed-up ethical framework. Trump’s election signaled strongly to the teched-up elite that the machines had betrayed them and required an all-new level of national and global control.

The present focus of that reaction has been on Trump himself, but also on Trump’s supporters, who are “even worse” because they can’t be thrown out of office. But a growing populist wing of the Left recognizes that routine plebiscitary rubber stamps on compliance mandates issued by technologized woke autocrats is not, in fact, liberal or democratic, and is certainly not America. Despite obvious ideological cleavages, another Trump term will hold open the Overton window needed by loyal Americans of diverse beliefs who understand that the appropriation of all speech and thought space into an elite-managed virtual world is fatal to our flourishing.

Things will be different under a Biden (read: Harris) administration. Due to Trump and COVID, the teched-up elite will go into overdrive toward what is now commonly known as a “great reset”—a top-down seizure of control over both wayward “bots” and humans, neither of whom have evinced an attitude of sufficient compliance with the ethical framework of the woke managerial class.

This is a realm of life where no degree of “de-polarization” or “re-normalization” in political rhetoric will change the vector of virtualization and consolidation of spiritual power in America and beyond. The goal is to implement the psychic transformation of the “Never Trump” worldview into a “Never Again” worldview. The means is to ensure that political support for any political figure strong enough even to delay or disrupt the “great reset” can no longer be organized—or even dreamed of.