Tech-Right Meltdown
and the most important story you didn't hear about this year
Welcome back to the Sunday edition of Josh’s newsletter. This usually involves me getting zooted out of my mind on coffee and nicotine while desperately pulling at conspiratorial threads across niche internet ideologies. Good news, that’s exactly what we’re doing this week. First, we round up some of the recent right-wing infighting on Twitter and then explore the most important story you didn’t hear about this year.
There’s a new episode of Doomscroll coming out next week with a highly anticipated guest. Among the topics we discuss are the roles and responsibilities of online personalities during the collapse of establishment media. I ask, when do we begin to apply the ethics of legacy journalism to ourselves? Or should this new paradigm disregard those rules entirely?
Friendly reminder, Peter Thiel has shut off all funding to Doomscroll and George Soros is also pulling his support. If you appreciate this newsletter, want access to the full archive including My Political Journey and 20 Interviews or you’d like to support new episodes of the show, you can become a paid subscriber today:
This week, Twitter has stumbled across an ongoing rivalry between the United States and China. Every year, these superpower nations stage elaborate holiday drone displays to demonstrate new and innovative ways to kill each other. The New Cold War is unexpectedly festive.
Meanwhile, the Tech Right, personified by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are feuding with the Nationalist Right to preserve and expand H-1B visas. Tech companies want to hire the best people from around the world and that often means accessing a global pool of talent from developing nations. H-1B visas allow people to immigrate to the US for “specialty occupations” such as elite professional jobs in the tech sector. American nationalists have pushed back and demanded that Musk and Ramaswamy stick to their populist commitments and hire only American workers. It turns out that the unstable alliance between racist guys and libertarian monetarists will be as short lived as we might expect.
The drone memes started when Balaji Srinivasan, author of The Network State, decided to weigh in by posting the following:
Brain-draining talent from your geopolitical competitors is undoubtedly an effective tactic but it will negatively impact the labor market at home. Which side of this conflict may win is yet to be seen.
While just recently posted in this context, the drone display in Srinivasan’s tweet is actually footage from Shenzhen’s annual Dragon Boat Festival in 2023. Each year over 1,500 drones are deployed in an elaborate seasonal display.
Voices among the tech right, such as Marko Jukic, who writes for the Thiel-funded Palladium Magazine, have long commented on the implicit subtext of these demonstrations. His original tweet, which has since become a meme format unto itself, was posted back in September of this year:
To say the quiet part loud, the implication here is that these individual drones could be equipped with portable explosives and penetrate nearly any line of defense.
On the heels of another online panic (possible drone sightings in the skies over New Jersey), the United States responded with a delightfully decorative video of its own. Here we can see a drone adeptly floating down the hallways of the White House in 4k video:
Daniel Keller is a post-internet artist and I highly recommend following him on Twitter. (Find him on a recent episode of Doomscroll.)
While Keller is certainly invoking the meme, he is also probably right that between the holiday wishes is a not so subtle reminder that the United States has the capability to send these drones to your house, navigate through complex interior passages, avoid obstacles, make abrupt turns and circle around your bedroom within a matter of seconds. This is in fact what is demonstrated in the choreography of the video.
Every drone video is also a de facto display of military capabilities. This is what Siegfried Kracauer, a Marxist writer living in Wiemar Germany, and others have called “the dual face of modernity”. In May of 1930, in an essay titled “Organized Happiness: On the Reopening of the Lunapark”, originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer describes the mechanism of a roller coaster at an upper class amusement park. As the roller coaster cart cranks upward, reaching the top of its track before the inevitable drop, Kracauer is able to peak over the walls of the park. For a brief moment, he can see the skyline of the city of Berlin and witnesses its expansive ghettos and industrial workhouses. It dawns on him that the same mechanisms present in the roller coaster track are also at work in the factory assembly lines outside the park. Industrial gears crank forward to convey the production of commodities or to create entertainment. The very same tools that allow for the wealth of the affluent amusement park goers are also responsbile the misery of the working people on whom their wealth depends. Our tools are themselves agnostic and can be used toward different ends. They may be used for both entertainment and for work. We cannot have one without the other. Chatting over text Keller writes, “literally every drone is dual use and I am legit terrified by them.”
In simpler times, a brief holiday greetings video from our leaders might have sufficed. But why pass up the opportunity to make a public demonstration of wartime capabilities? Better yet, make it a viral meme so that it can be seen by everyone on the world’s stage.
Memetic Contagion
While our super power states are not yet engaged in a hot military conflict, the New Cold War has already incurred civilian casualties elsewhere. One of the most important but under reported stories of the past year is the Pentagon’s psyop meme campaign to dissuade people from getting vaccinated in the Philippines. (This is real.)
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines… It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China.
Intelligence operatives in the United States produced memes and propaganda to wage an information and influence war, deploying over 300 sock puppet accounts and using hashtags such as #ChinaAngVirus, which translates to “China is the virus”.
TRANSLATION:
#China Is The Virus
Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China
Now, you’re probably thinking that this seems like an especially strange and hypocritical tactic considering the huge number of people who were deplatformed from American social media (at the request of the US government) for posting vaccine disinformation. But more importantly, given the vast military budget of the United States, can we not hire some more skilled graphic designers? This is embarrassing on an international scale. I know like a dozen BFA students who would do a better job. Perhaps we should write Boot Boyz into the 2025 Pentagon budget?
Additionally, US operatives attempted to convince the Philippine’s Muslim population that COVID-19 vaccines were produced using pork gelatin. If true, receiving such an injection would constitute haram and an untold number of people may have avoided getting the injection entirely.
In 2021, a year into the Pentagon’s disinformation campaign, the Philippines had the worst inoculation rate in Southeast Asia (less than 2% of its total population) and experienced one of the worst death rates in the region. How many elderly people died as a result of disinformation posted by the United States government?
One might wonder why the US particularly cared about whether people in another country got vaccinated? Oddly enough, China had been supplying the Philippines with an early formulation of the vaccine, a product called Sinovac, and US intelligence worried that China’s relief efforts would curry favor with Philippines’ president Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi [leader of the Chinese Communist Party] that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington.
The Pentagon worried that strengthened relations between the Philippines and China could result in the US losing access to strategic and geopolitically significant territory. Rather than donating vaccines of our own, the US decided to undermine China’s efforts and render thousands of Filipinos expendable.
No one seems to have heard about this story but it sets many important precedents. You can read the full piece on Reuters.
The New Cold War refers to an era of heightened geopolitical tensions and superpower competition between the US and China in the 21st century. Our holiday celebrations, memes, Hollywood films and platforms (such as TikTok) are all game pieces in this mounting conflict.
On behalf of everyone at Doomscroll, we’d like to wish you a happy new year. There’s a new episode coming out next week. I’ll see you all in 2025!
Last thing to mention, my favorite art writer is now on Substack. Give him a follow at
. I’m excited for what he puts out this year.
Good overview piece. The psyop in the Phillipines was particularly egregious but received almost no coverage.
You mention that a huge number of people were deplatformed for a vaccine disinformation during the pandemic. I genuinely do t remember that? Is there a good empirical piece detailing this?