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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from The Bond Villain Archetype
  • I'm trying to capture this idea that the leaders of the technofascist movement (Thiel, Andreesen, Alex Karp, Musk) all are really good matches to the Bond Villian archetype – if that is an archetype. Surely the apparent applicability to both fictional and real world is an indicator of something.
    • This is an interesting analytical question, and I think you're onto something real, but it's worth being precise about what the archetype actually captures versus where the comparison gets sloppy.

    • What the Bond Villain Archetype Actually Consists Of

    • Genuine exceptional intelligence/competence
    • Wealth enabling action outside normal institutional constraints
    • Explicitly articulated alternative vision for social order
    • Contempt for existing democratic/legal structures as inefficient or corrupt
    • A kind of radical transparency about wanting power that normal politicians hide
    • Island/compound/bunker separatism
    • Surrounding themselves with loyal technical specialists

    • Where the Comparison Has Real Analytical Bite

    • These figures actually say out loud what previous oligarchs kept quiet. Thiel explicitly advocates against democracy. Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto reads almost like a villain monologue. Karp sells surveillance infrastructure while philosophizing about it. This ideological explicitness is genuinely unusual and important.

    • Where I'd Push Back on Your Framing

    • The "technofascist" label might actually obscure more than it reveals - these figures have significant ideological differences from each other, and the Bond Villain frame risks making them seem more cartoonishly defeatable than they are.
    • Real villains are boring and bureaucratic. These people are genuinely more dangerous than the archetype suggests.
from A Sense of Rebellion
  • He build on this dichotomy in the final episode, contrasting Brodey's vision with that of Buckminster Fuller as more alive, less involved with the evils of the corporate world. Fuller, Stewart Brand , Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, all on the bad side of some divide, as is "solutionism". Brodey was more radical in this view, he envisioned using technology for a genuine positive transformation of the human, not mere products or corporate tools. But he was also a complete failure and narcissist, which at least lets him retain the purity of his vision.
from More Everything Forever
  • My new book, More Everything Forever, is about the terrible plans that tech billionaires have for the future and why they don’t work. Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by fantastical technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs. These are wildly implausible and profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass.
    • – from author's site
Twin Pages

Elon Musk

22 Jun 2026 - 10 Oct 2026
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