Lyta Gold’s cultural profile for Current Affairs of “the fake nerd boys of Silicon Valley” (via Paris Marx) pretty much is impossible to summarize, which in this case is a good thing. I’ll just drop this one paragraph, for its final two sentences. Emphasis mine.
As long as we live under capitalism, new hardware and software will only have two real purposes: to collect data, and to sell it. Inventors and investors can claim whatever specific inspiration from Tolkien they like, but every single one of the enchanted objects in our midst is a palantir. Suburban neighbors use Google Nest or the aptly named Amazon Ring to spy on each other (and to let the police spy on them); employers use a variety of techniques to monitor their employees’ every move. As Nicole Aschoff writes in Jacobin, “Microchips, mobile spyware, and perpetual, individualized monitoring are all part of capital’s fantasy of twenty-first-century scientific management—a future in which our movements, impulses, and rhythms are perfectly adapted to the needs of profit-making.” ’The future’—our present—is capital’s fantasy, and that’s why it’s a nightmare. We live in a hell of black magic, and it’s not even composed of original or imaginative spells: just random objects dragged out of previous works and remembered for us, half-sale.