Not best buds - What Anti-Musk Democrats Can Learn From Steve Bannon
"Bannon: Musk ‘wants to impose his freak experiments’ on US"
By Ross Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
“They’re all technofeudalists, they don’t give a flying fuck about the human being. And I don’t care if you’re Black, White, Hispanic, Chinese — they don’t care,” a prominent political commentator recently told New York Times columnist .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/steve-bannon-on-broligarchs-vs-populism.html .. Ross Douthat. “They don’t believe in this country. They believe in this country right now because it protects them and provides some benefits to them.”
The commentator continued: “And the apartheid state of Silicon Valley thinks we don’t need our greatest resource, which is the American citizen. They’d rather import basically indentured servants to work for a third less and have an apartheid state. And then as soon as they can replace them with digital serfs, they will do it.”
Beyond the Times, Bannon has found many other opportunities to lash Musk. In an Italian newspaper, he called Musk a “truly evil person” and brought forth, most notably, his claim that he and his allies are “technofeudalists.” Bannon’s attacks are potentially potent because he understands the stakes of this battle. Put simply, Musk cares far more about his business and tech interests than the fate of working-class America. Bannon also knows Musk is more vulnerable than he looks. If the Democratic Party hopes to cut him down, they’ll have to do more than bray about his fortune and his “co-presidency” with Trump.
The left’s instinct to attack Musk, at least, is correct: There are plenty of signs the world’s richest man is not terribly popular, and DOGE’s assault on the federal bureaucracy is not something most Americans are overly excited about. Musk isn’t any kind of folk hero or Ozymandias brought to life. Onstage, he exudes a striking anti-charisma, and he’s probably among the worst public speakers ever handed a prominent role in any presidential administration.
Democrats make a few mistakes with Musk. For one, they play into his myth. Yes, he is an oligarch, but he is spoken about more as a world-historical dark genius than what he truly is: a uniquely ambitious but ultimately very lucky man. He has feasted on government contracts for decades. Tesla is a successful electric-car company, but that’s all it is — a car company. Plenty of Americans still drive Fords, Chryslers, Mitsubishis, and Hyundais, and their CEOs are not treated as hypermodern gods. SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company, is impressive for what it is, but it’s notable that much of what it accomplishes is only possible because the federal government decided to offload many of NASA’s former responsibilities to the private sector. More than a half-century ago, federal engineers took us to the moon, and now Musk wins wild plaudits for sending rockets and satellites into low orbit—that is, when they don’t explode. Neuralink might be the most remarkable .. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/08/elon-musk-chip-paralysed-man-noland-arbaugh-chip-brain-neuralink .. of his innovations, if one that is still far away from wide-scale application.
Bannon, in his interview with Douthat, did compare Musk to a 21st-century Thomas Edison, infusing the South African–born CEO with more of an aura than is warranted. But then Bannon cut to the heart of the matter: Musk is a globalist of the first order with only a tenuous loyalty to the United States. He does enormous business .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/11/tesla-china-battery-factory/ . with China .. and rarely, if ever, criticizes its regime. He does not care if cheap Chinese goods flood the U.S. and undermine American manufacturers. The plight of the American worker is of little interest to him.
The “technofeudalist” critique is one that professional Democrats, for all their feints toward populism during the Biden years, have yet to effectively make. This is because the Democratic Party, broadly, was closely tied to Silicon Valley during Barack Obama’s presidency and most of the first Trump term. Tech titans allied themselves with Democrats, and the center left strained to show it was future facing — in part by embracing Apple, Meta, Alphabet, and Twitter. When Bernie Sanders first ran for president, fissures began to form in this alliance. When Trump shocked Hillary Clinton and won the presidency, they grew, with many on the left blaming Facebook for fueling Trump’s rise.
The alliance broke for good during Joe Biden’s presidency, when he appointed Lina Khan .. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/lina-khans-rough-year-running-the-federal-trade-commission.html .. chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Rohit Chopra as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Chopra’s CFPB was the first to effectively adhere to Elizabeth Warren’s muscular vision of imposing stricter, consumer-friendly rules on banks and big businesses, and Khan’s FTC enthusiastically sued Google and Amazon, attempting the first vigorous turn toward antitrust policy in many decades.
But Democrats never quite knew how to sell this agenda. Biden, dimming in his 80s, was unable to adequately explain it to the public. When pressed, Kamala Harris seemed wary of the Biden administration’s historic antitrust agenda. She would not commit to keeping Khan at the FTC if she won and had little to say about reining in tech monopolies. Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, doesn’t seem so different; he recently said the Democrats can still take cash .. https://x.com/AlanDettlaff/status/1885861413056389214 .. from “good” billionaires who support their causes.
Of course, the Democratic Party can’t unilaterally disarm against an onslaught of Musk, Peter Thiel, and Miriam Adelson cash. What the left must understand, though, is that it cannot be everything to everyone. Trump’s GOP is a brand, and few Americans are confused about what it stands for: restricted immigration, tariffs, anti-elitism, and deep social conservatism that, with the exception of opposition to trans rights, has been somewhat downplayed by Trump since he came back into office. Nate Silver, referring to a recent social-media post, put it rather succinctly .. https://www.natesilver.net/p/democrats-need-a-billionaire-strategy : The Democrats can be the party of either Mark Cuban or Lina Khan. It’s very difficult to be both.
What Bannon understands is that Silicon Valley, in the last decade, has grown increasingly anti-human. Its newest marvels, like AI, are no longer greeted with universal acclaim. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which attached significant blame to the big tech companies for the mental-health crisis among young Americans, dominated best-seller lists, and school systems across the country moved to ban phone usage in the classroom.
In his 1992 book, Technopoly, the sociologist Neil Postman defined the United States as the very first “technopoly,” a nation where the “deification of technology” would lead to a culture that takes its very orders from tech itself. “This requires,” Postman wrote in his book “the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs.” Under technopoly, there are no “moral underpinnings,” no room for ruminating on how these advances might affect the human mind and spirit. Tech oligarchs like Musk celebrate the concept of drastically decreasing human agency. Advertisements for AI programs conceive of the modern human as singularly slothful and shallow, unable to even compose a straightforward work email without the help of an advanced machine.
A few well-known Democrats, like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman, have spoken about the challenges facing the working class in a dimension not dissimilar from Bannon’s, warning of a “spiritual unspooling” that has made the world’s richest country a land of startling unease and despair. They don’t traffic in Bannon’s rank nativism, either, which is refreshing. What is largely missing, though, is Bannon’s evident fury at elites — very much including the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, despite the fact that they stand behind a president he supports. Even if it’s all performative (Bannon himself is very wealthy), it would behoove Democrats to take the side of the working class against tech oligarchs with that much force and feeling. For now, Musk and his allies are ascendant. Beating back technopoly will be the fight of our time.
Lawmakers worldwide want to talk to the Meta insider whose memoir is a US bestseller – after Zuckerberg took her to court
"Bannon: Musk ‘wants to impose his freak experiments’ on US [...]“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant,” he said during an interview with the website UnHerd. “He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values.”"
Published: March 25, 2025 10.22am AEDT
Author John Hawkins Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra
Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to muzzle his former employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, once director of global public policy at Meta, seem to have created a bestseller.
While Meta’s legal action successfully prevented Wynn-Williams (who worked there from 2011–17) from promoting her memoir, Careless People, her publisher has continued to promote it without her.
In the week of its release, the book sold 60,000 copies in the United States. In the United Kingdom, it sold 1,000 copies a day for the first three days.
“This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book,” Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan, told the Guardian last week.
The court order that prevents Wynn-Williams from promoting her memoir may also prevent her from responding to requests from lawmakers in several countries to discuss her time at the company, formerly known as Facebook, and “issues of public concern”, her lawyers believe.
Requests have come from members of the US Congress, the parliament of the UK, the parliament of the European Union and other sources, reports CNN.
This comes as Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, has committed the company, as Trump’s second term begins, to “free expression”. “Too much harmless content” is being censored, he says. In practice, this means getting rid of fact-checkers, in favour of a Community Notes program like the one on X, which Zuckerberg cites as a model.
Tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk at the second inauguration of US president Donald Trump. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Pool/AAP
Meta claims Wynn-Williams, a former diplomat born in New Zealand who convinced the company to create her global position, has broken a non-disparagement agreement: signed, it says, after she was dismissed for poor performance. Last week, it called the book
a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.
A true insider account
Last year, tech journalist Kara Swisher, in her memoir Burn Book, summed up Zuckerberg as “one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology” – interestingly, given this memoir’s title. She also referred to Facebook as “anti-social media”.
There have been other books about the company too, such as Facebook: the Inside Story by tech journalist Steven Levy in 2020 and An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang in 2021.
Some of the company’s misdeeds were discussed in these books. But whereas they are based on interviews with unnamed sources, Wynn-Williams, a senior insider, has put her name to them. She refers to the protagonists by their first names, reflecting the rapport they once shared.
Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book is unique in referring to protagonists like Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg by their first name, reflecting their one-time rapport. Facebook/AAP
From shark attack to Facebook
Careless People starts with Wynn-Williams’ story of narrowly surviving a shark attack as a child, despite the complacency of her family and the local doctor. This may be to indicate her strength and resolve. Or perhaps it is a metaphor for the viciousness and indifference she would later encounter at Facebook.
She was initially a big fan of the company, which she saw as a potential force for good. An example of the good work of Facebook in its early days was a randomised control experiment before the 2010 US midterm elections. Some subscribers were sent a message at the top of their newsfeed encouraging them to vote, with a link to polling places and an “I voted” button they could click. This led to an additional 340,000 voters.
Every employee joining Facebook was given a Little Red Book written by Zuckerberg. As Wynn-Williams comments, the book represents “core principles from the supreme leader” who she calls “another MZ channeling his own peculiar form of Maoist zeal”.
Over time, Wynn-Williams’ admiration for Zuckerberg would wane. Her book is also rather unflattering about Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg’s then deputy. The Lean In author is described as drawing people in “like moths to a flame” and expecting female staff to spend evenings helping to promote her book. This was particularly galling, as her book was about empowering women in the workplace.
Sandberg was such a demanding boss, Wynn-Williams was sending her talking points for a meeting at Davos while giving birth. Her doctor was saying: “you should be pushing – but not pushing ‘send’!”
Sheryl Sandberg was such a demanding boss, Wynn-Williams was sending her talking points for a Davos meeting while giving birth. Jean Christophe Bott/AAP
Losing faith and breaking things
Wynn-Williams started to question her faith in Facebook (which changed its name to Meta in 2021) when she realised parents working there did not allow their own teens to have mobile phones. “These executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds,” she writes.
In 2017, an internal memo revealed Facebook was offering advertisers the opportunity to target teenagers when their posts revealed low self esteem. For example, beauty products could be targeted to young women when they deleted a selfie. The company was increasingly adding features that were “addictive by design”, as they sought to maximise engagement at all costs.
The company was adopting an aggressive stance towards traditional media. Zuckerberg attacked one of his staff for “compromising with a dying industry rather than dominating it, crushing it”.
In its drive for global domination, Facebook thought, in the words of one senior colleague, that “the first billion users are the easy billion”. Beyond that, there were the technical problems of expanding into countries with low or poor internet coverage. There were also ethical questions about collaborating with autocratic governments.
Wynn-Williams was perturbed when Facebook told China it could help “promote safe and secure social order”.
A United Nations investigator described how Facebook played a critical role in spreading hatred of Rohingya and Muslims within Myanmar.
In 2018, the chairman of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar told reporters that Facebook “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict” in the public, including “hate speech”.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, centre, talks with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, right. Ted S. Warren/AAP
She also worried about the role Facebook played in the first election of Donald Trump, in 2016. It allowed the Trump campaign to target misinformation to people it would most likely influence, she writes. The campaign also used it to discourage groups less attracted to Trump from voting. She was disgusted when Zuckerberg, rather than being upset about this, admired “the ingenuity” of Trump’s campaign.
After a meeting with President Barack Obama, Zuckerberg was furious at being accused, accurately, of not taking seriously the problem of untrue stories being widely promoted.
The author warns that, unlike the global leaders he increasingly mixed with, Zuckerberg (now aged 40) could stay in his current position “for another fifty years”. His potential longevity is compared to Queen Elizabeth II.
At one stage, Zuckerberg seemed to be musing about a presidential run. Unlike Elon Musk, Zuckerberg was born in the US, so is eligible. But as Levy put it in his book, “no country on Earth has a population as big as Facebook; the presidency would be a step down”. Unanswered questions
Wynn-Williams feels this emphasis on maximising profits at all costs is unnecessary. Had they wished, the senior people at the company could have been incredibly rich while still displaying some basic human decency.
Meta’s famous slogan is “move fast and break things”. But increasingly, Wynn-Williams concluded one of the things being broken was community health.
The book is easy to read and the author writes engagingly. But unanswered questions remain. Readers may wonder why the author stayed at Meta as long as she did once she developed misgivings about its impact.
She mentions her serious health issues: she feared losing her health insurance. But surely she had been on a large salary package and could afford to look after herself. She may have been in denial, unwilling to admit her initial admiration for Zuckerberg had been misplaced. Her husband’s explanation was she suffered from Stockholm syndrome.
The book would be a more useful reference if it had a bibliography and an index. But it does reveal some important insights about the attitudes of some careless –but very powerful – people.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
