Cédric Durand in Sidecar:
In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, the army general Stumm von Bordwehr asks, ‘How can those directly involved in what’s happening know beforehand whether it will turn out to be a great event?’ His answer is that ‘all they can do is pretend to themselves that it is! If I may indulge in a paradox, I’d say that the history of the world is written before it happens; it always starts off as a kind of gossip.’ Last week, with Donald Trump’s return to power, gossip swirled as the giants of the tech industry gathered at his inauguration. Front-row seats were reserved for Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tesla’s Elon Musk, with Apple’s Tim Cook, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Tik Tok’s Shou Zi Chew sitting further back. Only a few years ago, the vast majority of these billionaires were outspoken supporters of Biden and the Democrats. ‘They were all with him’, Trump recalled, ‘every one of them, and now they’re all with me’. The crucial question concerns the nature of this realignment: is it a simple opportunistic turnaround, within the same systemic parameters? Or is this a moment of rupture worthy of being called a great event in history? Let us risk this second hypothesis.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.