The Silicon Valley types, along with the tech bros, are showing us that they are actively trying to re-instate slavery, through robotics and Agentic AI. It is a demonstration of their disdain of anything that isn’t of their class and their need to be “served” anything and everything, at anytime. It exposes their belief in an imaginary hierarchy of society and the logical conclusion of the Ayn Rand philosophy of individualism put in practice. It is a violent assault on humanity. Welcome to the Digital Plantation.

In Martinique in the 19th Century, a statue was erected to celebrate the life of Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais. She was born on the island into a rich slave-owning family. Slavery was not her fault. Of course, she had no choice into which family she was born. But she decided to do the unthinkable. She lobbied for, and obtained, the re-instatement of slavery on the island in 1802, when slavery was about to be castigated in the dark annals of history of the island. She, and her cohorts, couldn’t imagine a world without slaves doing anything and everything for her, at anytime. Of course, the fruits of that forced labour were purely for her and her families’ profit. At great pain and expense of the forcibly expatriated and enslaved Africans.

A crime against humanity warranted a statue in her name, apparently.

It was beheaded one day in 1991, and was left in this state for over a decade. Then, on another day, red paint, symbolising the blood of the people she personally enslaved, was smeared on it. Until its ultimate fate was decided, as it was toppled and damaged beyond repair, in what any decent human can only describe as a fitting final act for a symbol of entitlement, inhumanity, and violence.1

Like the old slave masters, the broligarchy will end at some point, possibly even violently. Statues or symbols of their power may be erected both physically and digitally in this time, that symbolise their power and privilege, and boast of their prowess. But they too will be toppled and destroyed.

  1. Those who committed the act were charged with vandalism, but ultimately the trial collapsed as it was, rightly, deemed as an act of political expression. ↩︎