Does OA Feed Fascism?

A recent essay attempting to explain some of the forces driving the incoming Trump Administration and their questionable Cabinet nominees brought to mind how the OA movement has contained seeds of an insurrection of our own. In fact, taking two of the last three paragraphs from the essay and swapping out only a few words, it translates over quite well:

But the MAGA science policy agenda represents something novel in our national politics, blending discontents from the right and the left. It remains, at this stage, more a bundle of instincts than a coherent agenda, reflecting a coalition of forces marked by internal tensions and even contradictions.

If there’s a thread tying this coalition together, it’s a suspicion that expert authority hides elite power. This points to a future of science shaped by clashes between the establishment and its challengers. The distrust driving this new politics of science is a response to the technocratic hubris and at times gross incompetence that have too often characterized America’s institutions in recent years. Were this animus channeled into constructive policies and reforms, it could offer a needed corrective. In its unvarnished form, however, it is more radical than conservative, more destructive than constructive, and more corrosive than restorative.

These ideas of a movement blending political right and left extremism (“syncretism”) in an inchoate mélange of anti-government and anti-democratic impulses come up as central defining features of the political forces at work in the online world via a new book — Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology.

This study of recent history brings a lot together in a way that Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power did for data, advertising, and intrusive tech five years ago.

However, this is not a book review, but rather a reflection on how what the author describes fits well with the transgressive tendencies in our own professional spaces.