Cummings sez: raze this to the ground – metaphorically, of course …

 

Now then – as promised, here’s my ‘take’ on Dominic Cummings’ latest ‘project’. The fact that yesterday facebook and accretions went down, worldwide (link), provides a hugely ironic, unexpected perspective. I was quite eager to see what Cummings had been working on, out of the public glare. Disclaimer: since I’m not on Twitter I have no idea if and when he tweeted about whatever occupied his mind. Also, I’m a lowly, non-paying subscriber to his ‘substack’ site which he now uses instead of his blog. I do get ‘announcements’ now and then but it’s a ‘pay to play’ setup, and without shelling out a cool £100 you don’t get to engage with the man, e.g. in the form of comments. 

Firstly and briefly, let’s recollect past events. Having left or been kicked out of Johnson’s government last year Cummings dropped quite a few bombshells in the process. We mentioned some of them here and here, as well as those relating to his hearing of the HoC Joint Select Committees, pre-chewed over by the MSM before the hearing, here and here. The hearing itself took place on the 26th of May. 2021. I duly did a write-up the following day – here – without recourse to whatever spin the MSM gave the hearing.

So imagine my amazement when Cummings posted the link to his latest work in an email, making it accessible to non-payers! I was looking forward to some brilliant new ideas – but the title alone made me gulp, twice:

“Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley – start a project NOW to write the plan for the next GOP candidate – The goal is not ‘reform’ but *a government that actually controls the government* (link)

What the fluff? Hasn’t ‘Silicon Valley’ already done sufficient damage by pushing Biden into the White House? His ‘project’, at first glance, is about ‘preventing Trump’ from running again. Well, each to his own and if Cummings has it in for Johnson and Trump – fair enough, it’s still a free country. However, when he writes that a Trump run in 2024 would be ‘a disaster’ because it could lead to another four years of Biden/Harris I wonder if he has the faintest clue about US politics.

Things became clear(er) when I delved deeper into his script. Cummings’ proposals are not about politics, muddy, bloody and disgusting as they are. They are not about politics as they affect us dumb plebs in the real, non-Cummings world. Even the ‘prevent Trump’ argument is a bit of a straw man. Cummings’ project is about building a government run by technocrats, IT technocrats at that. 

Cummings, convinced of the power of IT intellects, proposes that ‘Silicon Valley’, that some IT entrepreneurs, band together to create a group of ‘the like minded’, to select a suitable GOP candidate who then would scrap Washington institutions and rebuild them from scratch. Why he thinks a steering group of IT technocrats can do this, via a suitable GOP sock puppet – and that’s what his proposal implies – is beyond me.

He then explains what he has in mind and why. Under the segment title “America needs ‘a government that controls the government’: close & replace with startups, don’t ‘reform’” he writes that:

“America, like the rest of the West, is mostly run by permanent bureaucracies. Elections are to a large extent bad showbiz. The noise is high but the stakes often amazingly low. The parties scream about each other but generally whether X or Y wins changes an amazingly small fraction of policy, money, or real power — and has little effect on the permanent bureaucracies.” (link)

Who’d argue with that – but then he uses the EU referendum as example. According to Cummings he won that by himself … well, ok, with the help of some focus groups, ‘Vote Leave’ and that Johnson person. All the rest of us who remember the EU Referendum campaign very well indeed might remember ‘a different reality’.  

I’m sorry but he sounds like a little boy who, having lost a game once – i.e. been kicked out of No 10 – insists that the whole playing board be trashed. In order to get rid of those permanent bureaucracies the must all be scrapped, razed to the ground, giving a somewhat facile reason with a sting in the tail: 

“When nobody is in charge, you have chaos. Nobody is in charge of western governments. We see chaos everywhere. We see a chronic inability to think about hard problems under extreme uncertainty, decide and act at speed and scale.” (link)

For ‘a chronic inability to think’ read: they’re too stupid. Neither the President nor the PM are ‘in charge’ – because, he insinuates, they’re too thick. His solution? To let clever IT minds from Silicon Valley take on ‘governing the government’, scrapping e.g. the Pentagon, root and branch, and by extension the MoD and Whitehall and then rebuild them from scratch, like an IT Start-Up. I note in the margin that clever Cummings doesn’t mention with one word Our Sacred Cow. Strange, that – I’d have thought this would’ve been an ideal candidate!

The question of how to maintain national security doesn’t arise, as far as Cummings is concerned. One comment poster pointed out that start-ups often fail, it’s in the nature of things. So what would happen if a start-up Pentagon, a start-up MoD failed? Silence …! It is certainly ironic that the eponymous ‘tech giant’, facebook and its accretions, just happened to go down yesterday – across the world, allegedly due to a server update having been bungled (link). Has Cummings never heard of ‘Murphy’s Law’? Does he think that something similar could never happen in a MoD or Pentagon razed and rebuilt from scratch because those ‘great IT intellects’ would prevent this?

Moving on, Cummings deservedly disses the MSM here and in the USA as well as party politicians in the USA and here. He then gives the details of his ‘project’, proposing that a group of ten or so like-minded IT people should get together, now, each putting about $200,000 into a kitty. That group should select a compliant GOP candidate who would win and then proceed to scrap e.g. the Pentagon. After reiterating that ‘start-up’ is better than reform, after relating again his experiences both as “Brexit winner” and in Johnson’s cabinet (lots of hurty-feelz!) he lists how to spend this money. It’s both illuminating and worrying:

“250-500k buys you a lot of focus groups. — If you hire the right people, ~500-750k (depending on data costs) will buy you the best predictive model of the electorate. — <10 salaries until ~Christmas 2022, by which time the project is morphing into a campaign or folding. — Some data costs — I don’t know how to estimate these for the US but say 500k. — Some cash for specific people to do specific work. — Throw in ~200k for some expenses and logistics. — So ~$2-3 million for a tight focused project. Ten people could chuck in 200k each after dinner and fund most of it. And in practice if someone serious decides to do this and gets a few other serious people involved, money will not be a limiting factor.” (link)

Have you noticed what vital ‘ingredient’ is missing here? Yes, it’s us, the stupid people! Apparently, we’re only good for being herded like sheep by the likes of people as clever as Cummings. The mental arrogance on display here is worse than that of any Whitehall Mandarin. And then there’s his chilling vision of such ‘government governing government’, run by IT technocrats who’ll scrap every ministry to set up ‘re-starts’. Reform, it seems, is too tedious a concept for Cummings who only believes in the alleged purity and power of IT intellects. He finally lets the cat out of the bag, describing what his project really is about:

“So there must be a clear mandate for controlling and closing parts of the government when the candidate wins, but this agenda must not be confused with a winning campaign message as it will interest only a few, and that’s fine.” (link)

In other words: drive the sheep to vote as desired by clever campaign strategists but keep the goal of that campaign hidden from view, so as not to confuse the stupid, dumb idiots. It’s astounding that clever Cummings seems to believe that this ‘project’, with a suitable sock-puppet at the top, will survive the first contact with harsh reality. I don’t mean the reality of that permanent bureaucracy over there or here in Whitehall which he wants to demolish. I mean the every-day reality of our lives, from getting petrol to getting food to getting paid, never mind safeguarding our national security. Yesterday’s downing of facebook and consorts is a stark reminder of what can happen in this, the real life.

Cummings’ proposal is so chilling because he is advocating a ‘government by intellect’, based on a very small selection of ‘Cummings approved’ intellectuals. It’s so chilling because he denigrates all of us as being too stupid to be permitted to have an input into this future – except via ‘selected focus groups’. Elections, Parliament – they’ll become superfluous in Cumming’s brave new IT technocracy.

I don’t need to emphasise how deeply I loathe the intellectual arrogance Cummings displays. I wonder if Cummings, drifting on the heights of ‘pure thought’, has lost all touch with reality – the reality of the life we all have to live through. He should reflect on the fact that normal, ‘stupid’ people who haven’t read his esoteric literature usually know more about the facts of life than he ever will. 

KBO!

 

Photo by gregwest98

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