A conversation about billionaires, fascism, security and new technology reshaping the world order
Viola Köster (VK)
Dear Alex, your lead character, the tech giant Ava Park, has developed a form of software that enables people to predict the future statistically. She has earned a lot of money doing business with governments and security agencies and is now busy, together with Tara, her architect and security consultant, building an underground bunker complex in the desert in case times get tougher. This is where she meets the famous documentary filmmaker Noah Finch for an interview. Noah has a daughter, June, who is an anti-fascist activist and has been jailed, possibly identified before even committing the crime by Ava’s “Atlas Analytics”. She is on hunger strike and of course, Noah is extremely worried about her and wants to get her out of prison. At the same time, however, he wants to record this interview with Ava for his new film. And then there’s Billy, the executive power in what’s called “the zone”, who has the bunker complex guarded by his security staff. What made you write MONEYLAND? What is it that fascinates you about this tech world?
Alexander Kerlin (AK)
I’ve been looking at Silicon Valley, this comparatively small area in the USA that leads the world in technology, for quite a while. This region is a force field that has been sending its products all around the world for a long time. It’s now where software and hardware that dominate our lives are developed – often by thirty-year-old multi-millionaires in Smashing Pumpkins t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops. I stumbled across a book, “Survival of the Richest” by Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and critic of capitalism, who describes being invited to the desert to give a lecture. Initially he thinks he’s going to speak to a large audience about technology and society but instead, he meets a handful of the super rich at a luxury resort, fenced off among the mountains in the middle of the desert. Of course, these billionaires have no interest at all in his Marxist analysis and are preoccupied with their own concerns: which would he recommend, Bitcoin or Ethereum? And what they want most of all is his advice on how to ensure that the security staff in the private bunkers that they are building in New Zealand, for example, remain loyal in the event of an apocalypse. I could smell a theatrical situation in this weird confrontation between a left-wing intellectual and tech capitalists who are preparing for the end of the world.
VK There was another non-fiction book that would inspire you later: “Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy” by Quinn Slobodian. This is about special economic zones like Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and the City of London.
AK Bunkers are places of refuge for bodies, and these special economic zones are places of refuge for money. Capital also wants to be secure and able to multiply in peace. For me, this is the idea of a virtual kingdom that I have called “Moneyland” where both the bodies and the capital of the rich are safe. But of course, these rich people are also like the creature in Kafka’s “The Burrow”; their project is never-ending, they can never be safe enough, they can never be sufficiently isolated, to the point of madness.
VK Rushkoff’s book focuses on warnings and criticisms. And the podcasts that Deutschlandfunk produces about Peter Thiel and Sam Altman take a similarly critical tone. I get the feeling that with you there’s also a strong fascination in there along with the criticism. In one of our earlier conversations, you said that what interests you so much about this tech world is its power to revolutionise the world people live in at a stroke.
AK My main motivation in writing is always to try to understand something, to immerse myself in other lived realities and to try to look at the world from a different perspective. Here I did this with the character Ava Park, who thinks in a similar way to the businessman and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, whom everyone is talking about right now. He is a big opponent of government in the tradition of the anarcho-capitalists and thinkers like Murray Rothbard. One fetish in Silicon Valley is disruption, the notion of an idea, a technical innovation, a product that will turn the whole world upside down. Young Stanford dropouts set off into the start-up world with this dream and say: now I want to develop this app that I can then sell for a vast price. Genuine shocks are rare, but they happen, and when they do, the consequences are enormous. Facebook was one of these major turning points in communication. Uber, Netflix and now ChatGPT. I find it both fascinating and shocking how my daughters are exposed to addictive algorithms that have been consciously developed on the other side of the globe to cultivate their addiction. That is a monstrous power that teenagers cannot easily resist – even for us adults it’s incredibly difficult. And so, every day we are confronted with the question: what kind of energy is radiating out into the world from California? What are the ideologies that lie behind it? Now, when the possibility of humanity being wiped out by AI is so heavily featured in the media, that doesn’t feel like a minor issue.
VK When you talk about this kind of disruption, it seems to include both destruction and renewal. In their new book “Zerstörungslust. Elemente des demokratischen Faschismus”, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey examine the different types of authoritarian libertarians and also talk about the difference between renewers and destroyers.
AK That’s right, the idea of disruption also includes the idea of destruction. Uber could only be so revolutionary because it completely undermined the traditional taxi business. With this idea of complete destruction being the only way of allowing innovation, we are already heading into the ideological territory of anti-modernism and not far from ideologues like Steve Bannon. I think in this theatre of Silicon Valley, or to be more accurate, in this theatre of technological escalation, there are a couple of classic villains, but if you look more closely this division between good and evil isn’t so easy. For example, if we talk about Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, there’s a bit of him that sincerely believes that he’s making the world a better place with his product. And he’s partly right. AI is very probably going to help introduce a new era in medicine and solve a lot of problems. But it is very difficult right now to judge what is going to come. Bill Gates recently wrote that AI “will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice.” And recently this statistic has been wandering through the media like a ghost that there is a 10% probability of humanity being exterminated by AI in the near future. If that represents the range of our potential futures…
VK In MONEYLAND you have established a world with repeated glitches, malfunctions in the reality the characters experience. I get the feeling that what takes place only represents one possible option of what might happen. Maybe it’s really happening, maybe it’s not, but it could happen, it is conceivable.
AK I wanted to build a virtuality into the events. The characters find themselves in some kind of reconstruction of reality, not in reality itself. This existential uncertainty infects them like a virus. Noah tries but fails to track down where reality lies. He arrives at this bunker already fatigued from the long journey and the situation with his daughter. Not to mention his excitement about meeting Ava Park and being able to make a film about her. It’s like suddenly having access to Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, as a filmmaker, you don’t want to mess that up. So he gets there and he can tell something’s not right here, but he can’t put his finger on it. His perception of the world starts to fall apart, parts of his body are doing strange things, he claims that his feet set off without him, his hands hurt for no reason. Something is wrong with his body the whole time. I’m someone who obsessively watches what is happening to his own perception. And I can quickly start to doubt whether reality is real. In that sense the structuralists left a strong echo in me with their questioning of the real. There’s this idea from Marshall McLuhan that we also use in the play: when a new technology comes into the world, it creates a new environment that radically changes our sensory equilibrium. For me, Noah’s loss of contact with the world is a sign of the times. Right now, we still haven’t properly processed the “present shock” (Rushkoff) brought about by social media. And the next one is already here with AI. Our bodies find it hard to keep up. As living creatures with only a limited capacity to view ourselves with composure and humour, we haven’t yet arrived in this world with its multiple additional layers of reality. And that leads to uncertainty, fear and depression.
VK The first level of reality no longer has complete control over the other levels of reality? The autonomous subject is no longer master/mistress of its own perceptions?
AK Yes, but what is the first, the foremost level of reality? Is it me on my smartphone or me in the world? At the moment I still feel sure of who I am. It’s summer, it’s hot, I go swimming. That’s reality, isn’t it? But there are an increasing number of moments when I look up from my smartphone, for example in the U-Bahn, and the first thing I have to do is work out where I am. Where am I exactly? Sometimes brief after-images of the online world still glowing on my retina insert themselves into my field of vision. The realities of social media distract and fragment me. And now on top of that there’s the problem that I can no longer be sure whether a picture shows an object that genuinely exists or whether it is AI-generated. This leads to an existential mistrust of everything I see. If that’s not a blatant watershed in human history, I don’t know what is! Sight was always the sense that provided us with the most conclusive evidence. I find this moment of collective madness in societies that must process a new technological development absolutely fascinating. When telegraphy and photography were invented in the 19th century, and cinema a little later, suddenly people had to cope with their own bodies having an entirely new relationship to spatial distance and to time. In public debate that sort of thing is rarely treated as a subject that causes pain. We need time and patience to be able to develop the necessary cultural techniques to be able to cope as a species with the horror of technological upheaval of this kind.
VK In MONEYLAND you take this disconcertion to the point that the simulation room in Ava’s bunker to which Noah is sent several times can even access his subconscious.
AK The bunker AI Samantha seems to be able to read Noah in every detail. She has access to everything he has ever left online, and she is watching and evaluating him constantly. This is no dystopia: it’s reality. AI bots sometimes know our strengths and weaknesses better than we do ourselves. MONEYLAND is also an exploration of storytelling in the time of AI. During the writing process I even used AI for two scenes, to write Samantha’s parts of conversations and for Billy’s final monologue that should have this automatic AI tone, a dystopic vision of the world where Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” has been run through Claude. And so we – me included – keep on feeding AIs permanently with our devices, giving them access to our pulse rate, our blood test results, our medical history and our most intimate worries.
VK Our dreams and traumas ... What is the world view – or to use the jargon of the start-up world – what is the mindset behind the enormous success of these tech giants? Your protagonists also talk for example about Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan. But Nietzsche with his concept of the superhuman and Kant with his theory of autonomy also shine through. And, of course, the novelist Ayn Rand, whom libertarian America continues to idolise.
AK In Silicon Valley there is a complex tangle of ideological concepts. One of the most influential is certainly still the “invisible hand of the marketplace” that goes back to Adam Smith. The basic idea is roughly that if I pursue my own interests, then as a by-product under certain circumstances I will benefit the world. As a result, these tech capitalists have no problem being untroubled by their own accumulation of wealth because they are convinced that their products are fundamentally improving other people’s lives.
Secondly, we are still working through the questions raised by cybernetics in the first half of the 20th century. The word cyberspace was taken from cybernetics: its derivation comes from the Greek word for helmsman: the science of how to control and regulate complex systems. This has then been extended in social psychology to apply to large groups of people: how can one predict what they will do and persuade them to behave as one wishes? The future will literally belong to whoever can come up with the best answer to this question: they will have the power. Alexander Karp’s company Palantir is the current global market leader in predicting the future for policing purposes: its software is used by US secret services and the Israeli military as well as by the German states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Hessen.
Thirdly, there is Max Weber and his analysis of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: the idea that the success I have had in life is a sign that at the very beginning of my life I was chosen to go to Heaven. In my view this aligns very happily with a crude social Darwinism that despises weakness and failure.
And lastly, there is a big fetish for freedom in the Valley. Liberty, especially in terms of business, is considered a more important value than, for example, equality. I’m not going to be told what to do by anyone, least of all the state. Paradoxically, this has its origins in the Californian counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, the druggy subculture that the hacker scene grew out of and also articulated the first utopian ideas for the internet. That continues to resonate today and it offers a good historical example of how left-wing anti-government attitudes can become right-wing ones.
However, in “The Technological Republic” Alexander Karp of Palantir has made clear that not everyone in the Valley is a genuine libertarian in the tradition of the economist Milton Friedman. After all, many of them set up their businesses with the help of the state and its infrastructure. This is especially true of Elon Musk, though that doesn’t stop him posing with a chain saw as the destroyer of government bureaucracy. Alexander Karp makes no secret of his proximity to government: he tends to look disparagingly on Silicon Valley with its cheap anti-government stance and focus on ridiculous consumer goods. He says that we must co-operate with the government because it protects and supports us and that we must also work together with it politically and militarily.
VK On one hand there are the neoliberal economists who say for God’s sake the state should be as small as possible – and on the other there are the authoritarian politicians who say the state must assert itself with sanctions and harsh regulations. And those two spheres now form a new conglomeration of power.
AK That has been happening for some time. Look at space travel. Over the last two decades the means of production have moved gradually from the hands of the state into private hands. Private companies such as SpaceX take over roles that used to be organised by the state. The skies belong predominantly to the satellites owned by Elon Musk, a single businessman who gets to decide which warring party has access to them: Russia or Ukraine?
VK It seems to me that an uncontrollable gap is developing there between power and its legitimacy and supervision. Perhaps the special economic zones that Quinn Slobodian writes about will give rise to the states of tomorrow? But these would no longer be democracies, they would be oligarchies, new forms of feudal rule.
AK It would be possible to take the map of nation states and superimpose a map of special economic zones on it, producing a different image of the world. There are more of them every year, including in Europe. Companies are subject to different laws there than in the rest of the country. Each of these special jurisdictions or small states such as Hong Kong, Dubai or Liechtenstein can open the gateway to Moneyland for the super rich. It is a form of subdivision that people like Peter Thiel are fond of. They hate large international organizations like the WHO or the EU or the UN that seek to enforce universal rules. They see these as a nascent authoritarian world government that wishes to enforce green and woke ideals – and whose first victim will be the freedom of the individual and their right to property. And that is why they believe that the more states and special economic zones exist, the better: then they have more options to keep their money safe from high taxation.
VK There is also an interesting contradiction between saying, I’m going to the zone, to a very small territory because I’m not primarily interested in spatial power. But of course, I still want to have a say outside the zone, like Elon Musk, for example, with his role for a while in the Trump administration.
AK It’s no longer just a matter of ruling over land, but over data and above all the global digital infrastructure. The businessman Michael Saylor has compared buying bitcoin now with land acquisition in the 19th century. Blockchain is the digital land that people are securing now to be able to harvest riches later. The earth’s surface has been explored and divided up down to the last inch: to gain new territory, you need to wage war, like Putin. That’s why everyone who is the conquering type has now moved on to colonising the web, to blockchains, to building data centres – and in the physical world their interest is directed towards space, orbits, the moon and Mars.
VK And as a result, ultimately words mean different things. Now when we say territory, what are we talking about? Do we still mean the Earth we are standing on? Or are we talking about bodies that produce data?
AK From the point of view of Muskism, our bodies are points in digital space emitting data. A notion like human dignity might really strike the new kings in their bunkers as rather anachronistic.
VK This new form of rule is no longer limited by the fundamental rights that a state governed by the rule of law guarantees its citizens. Or by the human rights that the United Nations declared in 1948. The moment we understand the extent of this danger; don’t we have to resist? This is another question you have included in your play. On one hand there is Billy, who puts up a form of ultra conservative to radical right-wing resistance, while on the other there is June, who sees herself as an anti-fascist activist. In the end Ava and June will confront each other as opponents. Is this the duel of the future?
AK A few days ago I was talking to a young female director, and it became clear to me that June isn’t a fantasy. The director is 25 years old and says that the main difference between her and her parents is that she is not a pacifist. She doesn’t rule out violence as a means to an end. That’s not something we would say when we were 25. Of course, the question is which forms of violence could be justified? And which ones can actually achieve their objective? Whether the murder of Charlie Kirk or the shots fired at Donald Trump have really helped the left or any cause is at the very least doubtful. Can resistance be smarter than this? Are activists not better served by entering the virtual space themselves? But what does that actually mean: what can we do there?
VK Left-wing liberal theoreticians and practitioners repeatedly emphasise that we need other virtual spaces, other networks and tools that aren’t controlled and owned by tech giants: ones that are ultimately democratic spaces that belong to everyone and will remain open. Communications networks such as Mastodon and Eurosky. The problem with these alternatives is obvious: so far, too few people have registered for them to be able to take any power away from the large networks.
AK Not yet perhaps. But we’re definitely not the only people who long for digital places that aren’t ruled by these oracular algorithms that now dominate all the major commercial platforms. The harmless examples of these oracles only predict what I am going to buy; the less harmless ones predict who is going to be arrested, or which target a grenade is going to be launched at. For the theatre these produce exciting narratives that have been familiar in the same or similar forms since ancient times. Great questions of fate. Take Oedipus, for example: the prophecy could only come true because his parents tried to outwit it. The paradox is that predicting the future itself interferes with fate – it doesn’t predict the future, it plays a role in creating it. What does this tell us about Palantir’s predictive policing?
VK Another kind of resistance would be not to conform to these predictions. As an autonomous individual in the Kantian sense, to put it simply, I follow the laws provided by reason itself and not those laws that some earthly ruler, a software programme, an oracle or any other kind of god imposes on me.
AK We now have to be attentive enough to insert ourselves between two moments: the point at which we receive a little prediction of the future (“this will interest you!”) and the moment when we follow that prediction with our actions by scrolling and clicking. Our difficult, daily and constant task is to put a moment of autonomous reflection between them and make a conscious decision. In MONEYLAND Noah doesn’t manage to do this: he follows Samantha, the oracle, the algorithm. All he can do is shout out: this is the opposite of freedom, but he can’t explain why he still obeys.
VK The father doesn’t manage it, but maybe the daughter does, using violence. I believe that we could counter the power of the tech companies with more state and international regulations than has been the case so far. And what can we do ourselves? Personally, I increasingly use old-fashioned “search engines” such as libraries. Perhaps the enduringly interesting and important knowledge that will eventually outlive us isn’t stored online or by AI on its vast servers but in libraries, in archives, in museums and in the memories of resistant individuals or groups. I am convinced that a collective that is united in wanting to curb the power of certain persons or institutions is also capable of doing that. But to come back to the play again: is Billy, the arch-conservative boss of the bunker’s security operation, also someone who resists Ava’s system or is he someone who serves Ava?
AK Billy is a country-dweller from the white underclass. A hillbilly – whom no one takes seriously or pays any attention to until he suddenly becomes Vice President. “Hillbilly Elegy” is an autobiographical work by J.D. Vance. And by this roundabout route religion and particularly Catholicism come back into play, which has traditionally been more of an outsider religion in the USA. How is it then possible to reconcile a belief in God and loving thy neighbour with mass deportations of migrants and building prison camps? I have no idea!
VK Here the term fascism is slowly coming into play. On the one hand, we have somebody like Billy with his Catholic faith and a certain roughness, maybe also an inclination towards cruelty, and on the other, a university-educated libertarian businesswoman like Ava Park, whose view of the world is based on philosophers. Ideologies are converging there.
AK South Africa is one example that Slobodian cites of how easily these ways of thinking are compatible even if at first they appear very different. The libertarian thinking of favourable tax zones aligns wonderfully with segregation and racist ideas. They did experiments with these zones there – and what happened? Suddenly there were working-class people with one skin colour labouring in dire poverty in the tax-free zones to make profits for people with a different skin colour. Two things coincided here that at first glance one would think were entirely different: apartheid and a zone freed from state control. Conversely, one could draw the conclusion that integration and guaranteeing equal opportunities are objectives that only a democratic state can achieve. When people are left to their own devices, then segregation will occur along the lines of wealth inequalities and differences in identity.
VK Would you say that Ava Park in MONEYLAND is ultimately a fascist, like June says?
AK Fortunately we’re not writing an academic paper, and I don’t have to decide. The characters are allowed to have different opinions about this. I would not say that Sam Altman is a fascist. Nor would I say that Alexander Karp is a fascist. They strike me as capitalists whose sense of mission is dominated by narcissism, who are somehow prepared to accept the bad in order to bring the good to market.
VK I think it’s Karp’s thesis no. 22 where he writes something along the lines of: “We have spent the last decades defining who we as the West want to integrate but we have completely forgotten who we actually are.” And this identitarian thinking is then coupled with a striving for power, technological hegemony and a new desire for co-operation with the state and its security agencies on defence against everybody who is different. I can already see a development towards fascist thinking and behaviour in there.
AK Karp would presumably say that we need to defend our liberal systems against radical powers such as religious extremists or extremist states like North Korea or Iran. But this creation of “us and them” can, of course, quickly lead to authoritarian structures. And software can then reinforce this construction of friend and foe.
VK The moment I publicly defend my own freedom with armed force, I have to accept that I will be asked whether what I am defending is still freedom. Don’t the means I use ultimately undermine the end? In her current book “Dieser Drang nach Härte”, Eva von Redecker writes: “At the core of fascism lies an unbounded logic of property. Its counterparts are not human beings, but things, and its enemies are not opponents, but thieves.” Here she addresses the compatibility of fascist and free-market ideas. The freedom of those who have made it will be defended with full force against the others who supposedly thwart those who are successful, the ones who cannot keep up. That is also one of Ava’s key arguments. And I would agree with Redecker by saying that it is fascist. It is crazy to believe that I can somehow stop the others who aren’t allowed to play in my game of Monopoly from fighting me. To think that I’m going to retreat to my bunker, rule the world and I’ll manage to deal with the others somehow.
AK Fordism was clever enough to leave the working class just sufficiently affluent that they would not revolt. When Sam Altman says, “My AI will ensure that a farmer in Nigeria can finally set up his own online business,” then I think he means exactly what he says. Bill Gates has recently confirmed that the greatest advantages of AI will be in agriculture in the Global South, for small and medium-sized farms. If that is correct, there won’t be any revolution.
VK But when Ava retreats to her bunker she admits it is possible that acceptance will fade and the revolution will happen.
AK Ava Park believes that AI can achieve what human beings cannot achieve alone. And I would be interested in how we can avoid throwing the idea of property entirely overboard. Because property is also, like freedom, a fundamental right. To know that the things that belong to me cannot simply be taken away from me by the state.
VK I disagree about this, but I do understand, of course, that it is tempting to say that there is a difference between the seizure of land and unrestrained rule on one hand and the right to own my own little house on the other. Only: where do you draw the line? How is that distinction regulated politically? Simply to claim along the lines of social Darwinism: “nature does not discuss, it selects,” doesn’t regulate anything. At the same time, it’s a killer argument against any form of democratic ideas such as equal rights, justice, diversity, co-determination and integration.
AK Ava uses that line to justify violence retrospectively, to brand the crime as being unavoidable. She absolves Billy: you’re not the murderer, it was the victim’s nature, he was simply too weak. Now that is a fascist argument.
VK If I start to see human beings as things, as winners and losers, to see fellow humans as either useful or superfluous to me, as data points and clients who offer me advantages over my competitors, then I fail to see their humanity. Suddenly we have arrived at Primo Levi’s ambiguous question “Is that a man?”, the title of his book about his time in Auschwitz. In Aya Jaff’s book “Broligarchie” there is a chapter entitled “The Black Box of War” in which she challenges the argument put forward by advocates of AI-supported wars. Does AI really prevent civilian casualties? Jaff considers this a specious argument because, for example, on the evidence of current wars it became obvious that more targets are attacked in a shorter time as soon as AI is involved. Ever more and ever smaller targets are identified, so there is no conceivable end to the war anymore. AI-guided drones might not only allow power plants, airports and weapons factories to be seen, but also individual combatants in homes and hospitals. The more one can see, the more one could and should continue to attack more and more. And, of course, this technology is produced by companies that ultimately have little interest in these wars ending because they are their markets.
AK This is also something June accuses Ava of, profiting from war. However, there are also success stories about Palantir, told, for example, by interior ministers of German federal states: that using their software has prevented terror attacks that would otherwise have caused considerable damage and cost human lives. That the software meant that the attackers could be arrested before they could cause untold suffering. Both are probably part of the reality.