It was a breaking news alert to lift the spirits and make the heart sing. A tech billionaire arrested as he stepped off his private jet and detained by the French authorities. Happy days! Because while the UK police have been charging individuals who incited violence online during this summer’s riots, the man who helped to fuel its flames – Elon Musk – has simply tweeted his way through it.
It turned out – because you can’t have it all – that the man arrested and subsequently charged in France this week was not Elon. It was his bro-in-arms, Pavel Durov, an Elon-alike who founded the encrypted messaging app Telegram, though for the casual observer it can be hard to tell where Durov ends and Musk begins.
Just as the flattening effect of algorithms means that coffee shops in Brooklyn and Bristol look the same these days, so it is with the bros. From Wim Hof ice baths to a diet of grass-fed beef, social media algorithms have created a tech-masculine ideal and tech-masculine lifestyle fuelled by the kind of basic strongmen they both seem to admire, chief among them Vladimir Putin.
Musk has form for chatting with Putin on the phone and while Durov claims to have been driven into exile by the Russian government, it’s hard to square that with the stream of supportive statements from Russian ministers last week demanding his “rescue”.
Both labour under the apparent eugenicist belief that a man of superior intelligence has a duty to spread his seed as widely as possible – it was revealed earlier this year that Durov has fathered 100 children by sperm donation while Musk uses more traditional methods such as impregnating his employees. Crucially, although Musk was born in South Africa and Durov in St Petersburg, the language they speak is the same: specious, self-serving lies dressed up as ideology.
Last week saw perhaps the first major showdown between the pseudo cryptolibertarianism they both espouse and that old-fashioned, resolutely analogue concept known as the nation state. For anyone who has spent any time pondering the intergalactic levels of entitlement among the tech broligarchy and the – until now – total impunity they’ve faced, the arrest and subsequent charging of Durov was a singular moment…..
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Kojin Karatani’s theorising on modes of exchange and the ring of Capital-Nation-State
The New Associationist Movement
Noam Chomsky: Savage capitalist lunatics are running the asylum
After the truth-shower 