The Age of Hill People and the rise of 'Technofeudalism'

Two events shook up the last week politically. Donald Trump announced his vice-presidential candidate, who became J.D. Vance. This senator from the U.S. state of Ohio was not more widely known to people outside the US, unless they watched a tearful melodrama on Netflix based loosely on his autobiography ‘Hillbilly Elegy’.

The second event- Elon Musk pledged $45 million to Trump's campaign.

What does one have to do with the other? Quite a lot, in my opinion.

First of all, let's look at who is J.D. Vance? I asked Chat GPT about him:

?James David Vance grew up in a working-class family with a challenging upbringing, which he later detailed in his memoir. Vance served in the U.S. Marine Corps, including a tour in Iraq, before attending Ohio State University for his undergraduate degree and then earning a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Vance is best known for his memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," published in 2016. The book explores the struggles of white working-class Americans through the lens of his own family’s history. It became a bestseller and was widely discussed as a lens into the socioeconomic issues facing the Rust Belt and Appalachia. In 2020, "Hillbilly Elegy" was adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard.

After law school, Vance worked in Silicon Valley as a principal at Mithril Capital Management, a venture capital firm. He later became a partner at Revolution LLC, a firm led by AOL co-founder Steve Case.

Vance entered politics and announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2021. Running as a Republican, he received the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Vance focused his campaign on issues such as economic revitalization, conservative values, and critiquing what he views as the negative impacts of globalization and elite policymaking on middle America. He won the Ohio Senate seat in the 2022 midterm elections.”

So much for Chat GPT-always politically correct. I am less correct.

I realised I had once watched this film on Netflix and decided to watch it again. Well, and I'll admit it, I bought the book. As much as I watched the film, I am not able to finish the book. Because it is a ‘quasi-pornographic’ description of social pathology. I don't want to dwell on it, but a few examples:

J.D.'s grandparents flee to the city from the “hills” at 13 and 16 - the grandmother is pregnant;

At 12, grandmother (?Mamaw”) shoots a man, luckily misses;

Strong alcohol pours in streams, then heroin enters the family;

The law of vendetta is the basis of social coexistence-someone has insulted your mother/sister you are to give them a beating. Then they are to give you a beating. We are not in medieval Albania, we are in 20th century Appalachia;

There is a law, but there is always baseball bat as well, to settle things.

What is striking is that, under the guise of calling for help for the ‘hillbillies’, Vance shows how valuable their ‘values’ are. There is a striking scene in the book when his grandmother punches him in the face with her fist at his request, after which she says to young J.D.- ‘Well see, did it hurt like that?’ ‘No’ “Then don't be afraid to fist-fight”.

In the film, on the other hand, there are a lot of scenes that show that things are done within the family. Outside the police, outside the system.?

The grandmother, created as a brave and positive character, says at one point: ‘We are Hill People’.

There is also racism - there is a disgusting joke about Poles in the film. I recall that one of the Fathers of American Independence was a Pole - Thaddeus Kosciuszko.

If JD Vance did not exist it should have been created. Although it's a PR and marketing creation anyway. Just like his eventual boss Trump. Trump’s family history is also full of abuse and at least psychological violence.

So, ?Cui prodest”?

‘Hill people’ are not only in the Appalachians. Hill people are in all western countries. In America, Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand.?

BTW-The word ‘hillbilly’ comes from old Scotch-English and did not originally have a pejorative meaning.

In the Western world (including in my country) we see an offensive by populists like Trump and Vance. Questions: Do the populists have any agenda to help ‘hill people’? In my opinion, absolutely not.

So why am I linking all this to Elon Musk?

Greek economist, Yannis Varoufakis, talks about the coming 'technofeudalism'. About how digital monopolies are destroying traditional capitalism based on markets and profits.

Today, it is not necessarily about profit. It's about who owns the most data. And cloud computing.

In this model, a few megafirms become ?medieval age empires”.

Varoufakis cites another economist, John Kenneth Galbraitch, author of the term 'technostructure' (1967).

'Technostructure' is a post-war structure of cooperation between government, big corporations, the working class. For 30-40 years it guaranteed everyone what they wanted: social peace, profit, good living conditions. This is what is now collapsing.

This is why the future ‘technobarons’ are paying into campaign of the ‘king of the hill people’. They want to fortify their position.

Worse all the ‘hill people of the western world’ are destroying democracy as we know it.

And if one day they ever rise up with their baseball bats against technobarons?