TESCREAL Is an Op so We Don’t Call It Fascism

TESCREAL. I was truly, truly hoping this bullshit would dry up, but as it is becoming fodder for book deals, personal careerism and platforms, social media clout, and reformist non-profits, I feel forced to address it, even though even engaging with this *obvious OP*, makes me quite literally feel sick to my stomach. But this is a very instructive moment to see how opportunism from what is supposedly “our side”, causes massive damage, and keeps essential information from a public that doesn’t know any better. 

The implications of making this nonsense acronym the accepted ideological classification of venture capital and tech, keeps us from naming the ONLY *essential* and *fundamental* ideology at play here. While mentioning a large assortment of fascist ideology, “TESCREAL” purposefully misattributes them to some new, invented crap, rather than reporting clearly and accurately, that the ideology displayed is fascism. 

Venture capitalists are FASCISTS. They meet the technical criteria for fascism, which has been discussed extensively in this blog: building of a national utopia, revolutionary overturning of the existing order, complete discrediting of state authority, anti-intellectualism and pseudo-science, race science, imperialist drive for world takeover, the concept of a “new man” divided in lines of inherent superiority, a dictatorial “one leader”, the manufacture of enemies (poor people, political progressives), an obsession with community decline, militarization, suppression of the free press and the intelligentsia, newspeak and anti-intellectualism, goals of internal cleansing and outward colonial expansion, the creation of a policing apparatus, and suppression of trade union liberty. This, is a small sampling of the HUGE, storied, careful, thoughtful, and communally developed scholarship on fascism, and venture capital ticks every motherfucking box. (For your citations, here’s a piece on tech as fascism, parts one and parts two, and one of the development of tech into a fascist state, and there’s much more in all these posts tagged fascism). 

And indeed, many of these concepts appear in the discourse and shoring up of the asinine “TESCREAL”. Instead of being called fascists, PROPERLY IDENTIFIED AS FASCISTS by the most visible analysis on this topic, the word fascism is conspicuously ABSENT in either the first post with a formal description of the term by one of its “coiners” (opportunists), in the according social media thread describing the term, and in a follow up post calling a “code red warning” for TESCRAEL. Similarly, popular articles about this, such as this piece in The Nation, ALSO do not mention fascism. Again, the ONLY accurate and necessary, indispensable and required category, for what is happen with tech and venture capitalists is 

FASCISM 

F

A

S

C

I

S

M

 Instead what they describe is:

 “TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism)”

Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME. Tell me a CIA officer didn’t come up with that, I dare you. 

Let us look at the reality of having this as the “terminology” for what is going on. First of all, that is literally seven, almost entirely unknown, fringe concepts from pockets of the venture capital agenda, most of them culture ops, that each, on their own, requires an explanation of those seven, almost entirely unknown, fringe concepts, which are then explained primarily through the lens of AI and using AI debate as their arena, and THEN asks people to look at the interrelations for all of that. 

You could literally not design a more obscure, useless, alienating, academic double-speak, pseudo-intellectual, abstracted and vaporous terminology if you sat down in a lab and tried. 

Which is exactly what the people behind this are doing. 

Do you see why this is a problem when we are trying to stop fascists? TESCREAL devotes itself to one ideological mission: to not say “fascism”. 

To NOT diagnose fascism and take the relevant measures, in fact to take ANY ROUTE POSSIBLE not to say the word “fascism”; its incredibly suspicious and obvious exclusion from this platform, has “operation” all over it. Instead, the creators of this abomination, wraps very carefully, every clearly fascist element, inside an inscrutable fucking mess of half assed research. I mean it is truly remarkable and thus definitely intentional that the words fascism/fascist don’t appear in this constellation. 

The ONLY material result of this acronym is we are not talking about fascism, we are not identifying fascism, we are not raising the public alarm about fascism, we are not acting and responding as fascism demands us to. In fact, TESCREAL is comfortably anti-action. Let the academics spin up a podcast about it! Nothing to see here. TESCREAL leaves no lasting impression except as a fucking black hole of meaning, not even memorable except for its gross obtuseness, to wonder at the marvels of academic fog machinery. 

It is truly difficult to imagine that even any personal lime-light seeking by the people who not only came up with this bullshit but are now building entire careers on it — there’s always a market for a lukewarm take that allows the public to sidestep action —  is sufficient to explain what is outright sabotage of recognizing the fascist threat that venture capitalists poses. HOW is this not explained even as many of the elements of fascism are rather rearranged, re-configured, made unrecognizable, detached from history and from the vast body of ideological research and analysis, a perfectly fine and widely, globally, understood terminology, left in the shadows of a fucking monstrous intellectual fraud, a linguistic abomination. This has been DESIGNED to be inaccessible, vaporous, vague, in-actionable, a bath for a bunch of academic birdbrains to whet their beaks. 

Doing this type of analysis is not a creative exercise, it is not the moment to be worried about academic accolades, news appearances, conference stages, podcasts and book deals. It is an extremely solemn undertaking, and a profound responsibility, to identify the ideology of extremist groups and conspiracies, especially one of this size and scale. It isn’t a place for amateur hour and any scholar who meaningfully cares about describing an ideological phenomenon, would not even use this terminology, as it is willfully and even gleefully obtuse, the attempt to mystify and faux-intellectualize, the fascism that the majority of the human race has been educated on, because of the extreme importance of specifically recognizing the rise of fascism. 

To turn away from this, to risk this fucking alphabet soup of bullshit seeking relevancy, becoming the slogan of this phenomenon, has literally deadly results. The failure to correctly identify fascism, the failure to name it, forms the basis of global educational programs — because it is specifically urgent for us to identify the fascist threat, to not let it hide in the silence of fascism. 

TESCREAL is the silence of fascism. 

 And not only does this miss the mark, it uses some of the most deliberately opaque terminology in the world. No one can remember, spell, or pronounce “TESCREAL”. No one will be able to even say what each of its initials stand for. I’ve been tracking venture capital like a fucking hawk for over 10 years and NONE of the words they are using here are meaningfully and consistently descriptive, nor are they necessary. These are just little games that venture capitalists play, turned into a platform for academics whose ambitions far exceed their capabilities.  

TESCREAL is, sorry I’m choking here, a “bundle” of ideologies purportedly displayed by the tech elite — and I will say, the “ethicists” (emphasize on the quotations) put together an extremely sloppy grouping of them to sample size. The ideology can actually be isolated down to a specific formation of people, whereas “TESCREAL” is, on yet another dimension, hopelessly vague and amorphous. We are dealing with material fascist conspiracies that have material lines, and even the removal of the description of the ideology from a material one to a vaporous, immaterial “vibe”, FUCKS us. This is a matter of life or death and you have fucking supposed ethicists and academics fucking around because they want their name on a conference paper, they don’t have the guts to actually say or do the thing, literally doing acrobatics, air shows, mime performances, Vegas shows and line dancing to avoid saying fascist.  

So embarrassing. 

Sloppiness is extremely characteristic of the TESCREAL analysis, and for something that parades as precise (as if acronyms are inherently precise), the fact that they couldn’t even properly group the camps of the tech elite as they are clearly delineated. And that is, specifically, there is the tech giants, and separately, we have a combination of Founder’s Fund and a16z venture capitalists and their base of startups and the entities in their economic instrument, which is who ACTUALLY embodies the ideology that is so sloppily approximated here and where the fascism is ACTUALLY coming from. Words means things. This TESCREAL bullshit distracts from an identifiable fascist conspiracy, where we can identify who it is, what they are doing, how they are working together, the financial vehicles they have, what money is going through it, what alliances materially exist, and so on. TESCREAL makes even an unholy mess of this. 

In order to discuss these things in rigorous depth and from a position of authority, without mentioning fascism or leveling the charge of fascism, in order for that to not come up here, you have to be reallyyyyy going out of your fucking way. Like it is literally impossibly to be deeply engaged in the venture capital ideology and the conspiracy forwarding it and NOT come to fascism. You would literally have to dodge, weave, bend, BREAK, transmute, cover up, lie, ignore, water down, pervert and run away, literally HIDE from the existing scholarship; it means you are in there IGNORING Kershaw, Orwell, Eco, Gentile, Griffen and MANY other scholars, that you are inserting your arrogance, your ladder climbing, your clout chasing, you are burying the truth and the truth of the scholarship behind these lies. 

We can speculate as to the motives here. The absolutely MOST generous one is that here are two people who have been primarily motivated by the desire to make up new works and concepts. This has a great deal of clout in academia. The thing is, we coin terms as the result of rigorous, rigorous work and excellence and tracking over time; we don’t so much “coin” terms as we come to them via materialism. And that is not what happened here. There was ZERO need to invent this fucking anti-intellectual, distracting, minimizing, dangerous crap; they are fucking fascists and the only thing that this TESCREAL nonsense has done, is bury the fascism under layers and layers and layers of self-important, self-congratulatory mess. 

What TESCREAL is, is that it is an analysis. It is an analysis of tech and venture capital ideology. And it wrong. It is an incorrect formal analysis. It is dangerous, it is misleading, it is minimizing. 

What is happening is fascism. These are simply fascists with computers. And anyone who looks at the situation and sees: Wow, I can build my career making up a totally opaque acronym that will only attract other self-important fools, is a fucking criminal. This is the rise of fucking fascism and the “ethicists” and “academics” are fucking around at a moment of global emergency. 

Fuck. You. 

The *only* material result of TESCREAL discourse is that it strips out fascism, it REMOVES fascism, the ONLY indispensable framework, it DISTRACTS from the fascist threat, it MISLEADS about why we are facing. Which is why I strongly believe that corporations or an intelligence agency came up with this. I strongly feel that the people behind this are deeply compromised. The damage of this faulty, immoral, irresponsible and unethical, misclassification, purposefully dim-witting and opaque, embarrassing excuse for academic work, is that we are once more, not talking about, or responding to, the fascist threat. And again, this is the *only* material result outside of some fucking CIA agent’s book deal. 

The shiny baubles here — artificial intelligence foremost among them — are just new tools and instruments and excuses and vehicles of fascism. These are just fascists with computers and the computers do not change the material core of a fascist ideology, they simply express it.  

PLEASE stop spreading TESCREAL fake scholarship. That is part of the silence of fascism: when you won’t even say the fucking word.