Wait…are we an oligarchy now?

Read the full essay as a member

But this isn’t sci-fi

We’re all living in the 90s straight-to-dvd version

of a future that could have been so much more a-mazing

“A government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.” Bernie Sanders

What does it mean when Apple CEO Tim Cook makes a *personal* donation to Donald Trump’s inauguration of $1 million dollars?

Or when Disney CEO Bob Eiger comes out to virtue signal that the hypercapitalist entertainment corporation really isn’t WOKE?

What does it mean when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, still in his uniform…as…a section leader of Branch Davidian?

…announces a humiliating reversal of Facebook’s moderation policies

Anti-vaxxers are back in, protections for trans people…out.

I’m guessing the billionaire MMA bout actually happened and Elon choked the little twerp out until he capitulated.

What does it mean when a cartoon of Jeff Bezos “bending the knee” to a giant Trump is banned from the Washington Post?

I think it means the Washington Post is wholly owned and controlled by Jeff Bezos?

And what does it mean when Elon Musk, having spent a measly $280 million dollars to buy the election, became the first American President to throw a fascist salute at his own inauguration?

As the tired old reality tv star currently employed as Elon’s sock puppet watched on from the sidelines.

Defenders of Musk claimed it was a Roman, not a fascist, salute. Seemingly unaware that Italian fascists adopted that salute from the brutal slave owning empire they, and Elon, apparently, want to replace democracy with.

What does it mean when the elderly caretaker of a crumbling democracy makes a warning on last his day as the top broom

Does it mean, as those who know their history are wondering, that we’re now a Roman style oligarchy?

Or something even worse?

Many of the more conspiratorial out there will be shouting “what the hell…America has always been an oligarchy!”

To test that assertion, let’s check with the OG

ORIGINAL GREEK

of political philosophy and the first to give a description of oligarchy

In his Republic, Plato examinied the histories of Athens, Sparta and other Greek city states, and found there a cycle of political history

Democracy gives way to tyranny, tyranny becomes aristocracy, aristocracy becomes oligarchy

stopping along the way at Timocracy…

…which I guess explains why Tim gave Donald that money?

I mean that could be worse, right?

Plato’s cycle was later expanded by Polybius into a historical “anacyclosis” that influenced political philosophers for millennia to come.

Each part of society, the aristocracy, the demos, or the oligarchy, are always present in society, but take power at different stages of the cycle.

So we always have oligarchs, but we aren’t always an oligarchy.

Worth noting that Plato and Polybius are NOT democrats. They see rule by the demos as unstable and chaotic.

But P and P really LOVE aristocracy.

Aristo in ancient Greek means EXCELLENT

Aristocracy then is rule by the most excellent, the wisest and the most virtuous. In a shocking twist, if you ask philosophers who they think should be king…we say philosophers.

And the thing to understand about today’s American oligarchs is they THINK they are aristocrats. They think they are the wise.

Which is funny because…hahahahaha…they really aren’t

Which is why the first thing wannabe oligarchs do when they have their first few million is publish a book.

Like Balaji Srinivasan’s How To Hand Your Democracy Over To Oligarchs

er…sorry…”Network State”

Or Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which is to professional philosophy as Terence Howard is to professional physics.

“Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy.” Aristotle

But the most detailed analysis of oligarchy came from Plato’s most famous student.

Aristotle

Who literally has the word EXCELLENT in his name, in case you had any doubts about how damn smart he is.

Aristotle lived in Athens after the age of the Four Hundred, a group of

oligarchs

who betrayed Athens to its Spartan enemies, leading to the fall of Athenian democracy.

Oligarchy means rule by the rich. But Plato, Polybius and Aristotle had little respect for the wealthy. Rich people were a necessary evil, but made very bad leaders.

Because oligarchs think only of money, and are ignorant of philosophy. They believe in answers to political problems that are “clear, simple and wrong”

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H L Mencken

Worse, the rich have no real loyalty to the state, the nation, or to the people. They have more in common with the rich people of other nations.

The four hundred Athenian oligarchs so admired Spartan oligarchy that they overthrew their own democracy on behalf of Athens great enemy

That’s a lesson from history

That we could certainly learn from today

Ancient history teaches one lesson about oligarchy, but modern history can teach us another.

Soon after the collapse of the Berlin wall then the Soviet Union, a new class of oligarchs emerged in Russia and Eastern Europe

For decades Soviet citizens had been propagandised with with storie of the socialist state leading to communist utopia

Today we think of socialism and communism as political ideologies. But they began as visions of a better world imagined in response to the brutal lives of workers in the industrial revolution

Across Europe stories like Etienne Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov and Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita imagined socialist utopias

Socialism and communism emerged from the mythos of humankind

And then faded like dreams when the decades long Soviet project to realise these fantasies collapsed in on itself

Capitalism had destroyed communism, and was swiftly adopted in its neo-liberal form, mass privatisations of state assets, free markets, and corporate control

Russiam oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were able to “purchase” former state assets, becoming super-rich to own and operate vast swathes of the economy as private monopolies

But the capitalist Western world, lead by the United States, had its own fantasies

of how science, technological progress, and the economic engine of capitalism, were going to make a better future

The Golden Age of science fiction gave us dreams.of abundant nuclear energy, rocket ships, flying cars, android house maids, teleportation, colonies on other planets.

The reason so many Boomers wonder “what happened to my jetpack” is because they were literally told they really were getting a jetpack!

In the 90s shows like Star Trek The Next Generation showed Western liberal values colonising the stars….with warp drives.

Gen-Xers obsessed with pseudo-scientific Alcubierre Drives are just trying to make the Enterprise-D real!

As the 21st century began the promises of our scifi future became even more extravagant.

Automation would lead to material abundance and a post-scarcity civilization.

Technologies of transhumanism would allow us to customise our genes and even become immortal.

Computers would simulate perfect virtual realities and we would upload the information structures of human consciousness to Silicon Heaven

in a Rapture of the Nerds

Then in the 2020s the long awaited AI finally arrived, AGI would soon unleash super-intelligence

exponential technological development would bring humankind to the Singularity

and a Starship might even take us to Mars

But as the 21st century grinds on Millenials and Zoomers have begun to notice that the scifi future your parents were promised hasn’t shown up

Instead of abundant energy we got climate change. Instead of post-scarcity we got gig-work and side hustles. The AI super-intelligence is just a bunch of dumb chatbots.

yes ok we did Roombas

but no house for them to clean

the steady manufacturing and office jobs that let their parents buy houses and have families were gone

house prices hyperinflated so only the few with inherited wealth could get on the ladder

and all the real money was in the hands of fewer and fewer people

until just a dozen men had more money than half of Americans combined

Neo-liberal capitalism screwed Americans just as hard as it had screwed Russians

and the scifi dreams turned out to be

bullsh*t

technobullsh*t

spun by billionaire

technogarchs

Bill Gates was just 20 when he founded Microsoft, establishing the myth of the enfant terrible tech founder.

The Seattle based Microsoft projected an image of “slacker chic*, grunge music and Starbucks coffee stores, boosted by Wired magazine and Douglas Coupland novels.

Yes, Microsoft actually seemed cool in the 90s.

Windows was bringing the power of computing to the masses. It may be hard to believe 30 years later, but the launch of Windows 95 created a wave of public hysteria as consumers clamored to get copies.

In reality Microsoft’s true business was

bureaucracy.

In the space of a decade Microsoft products either fully automated or augmented government and corporate bureaucracies worldwide

Everytime you hit a blue screen of death while trying to buy a train ticket or complete a government form

That’s the power of Microsoft

Automating millions of middle class jobs out of existence made Gates the tech industries first “world’s richest man”, but far from its last.

On his personal blog in November 2022 Gates recounts reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land as a teenager. It’s not hard to see how the story of a Martian who comes to Earth to save humanity, but never really understands humanity, might have influenced the Microsoft founder.

Apple’s famous 1984 launch ad for the Mac, inspired by Steve Jobs reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, made Apple computers a symbol of liberation.

First the Macbook, then the iPod and iPhone became symbols of the new creator class, individuals liberated by technology, to escape the office for the coffee shop, and swap mundane work for creative careers like coding or web design.

The young Jobs truly defined the tech entrepreneur. On his return to Apple, phase 2 Jobs was famed for his “one more thing” moments that launched the iPhone.

But in his austere black polo necks Steve Jobs also defined the calculating technogarch.

Jobs pioneered the exploitation of low paid Chinese workers to make high tech gadgets at vast factory sites operated by Foxxcon and others. The “communist” Chinese government ensured these workers had zero rights or powers to unionise.

The shiny laptops of the Western creator class, came at the cost of the global working class.

And it seems Steve Jobs, like so many other technogarchs, was fascinated with Nineteen Eighty Four not as a warning, but as a handbook.

Apple didn’t free us from Big Brother.

It put Big Brother on every iPhone.

The Golden Age of American science fiction created the technobullsh*t scifi fantasies exploited by today’s technogarchy

But later science fiction writers like Philip K Dick, authors of the New Wave such as JG Ballard, and the cyberpunks lead by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson

warned against building the torment nexus

but the technogarchs will built it anyway

Mark Zuckerberg was a dual honours Harvard student when he created The Facebook. Zuckerberg famously used his computer science skills to code a skeezy Hot or Not website.

But Mark Zuckerberg’s real major was psychology.

Facebook and now Meta are many businesses. But at their core is one business. And Zuckerberg has to be given credit for consistently winning at the hardest business there is.

Grabbing and holding human attention.

Facebook pioneered the use of algorithmic media to hack human attention. Many of Facebook’s tricks were publicised in the Social Dilemma. But really they all boil down to one trick.

Your smartphone connects you to a network of powerful algorithms that constantly monitor you, andnuse that data to pump out a stream of content and alerts to hook and rehook your attention.

Facebook “disrupted” large swathes of local and national media. In place of true stories vetted by professional journalists we have fake news and multi-level marketing scams pumped out at you by algorithms.

Mark Zuckerberg recommends that everyone should read The Player of Games by Iain M Banks. So they can get with his plan of using algorithmic media to control you like a piece on a board.

The older Millennials out there will remember a cool indie bookseller that would post books direct to your home called Amazon.

Founded in 1996, Amazon was among the few survivors of the dot com boom and bust, because its founder always understood that Amazon was more than a books business.

Jeff Bezos saw that the entire retail ecology of stores, shopping malls and logistics was going to be destroyed by the internet, and set out to be the one to destroy them.

Amazon is the biggest and most rapacious monopoly in human history, out competing almost anyone who sells anything anywhere in the world. Businesses either sell via Amazon, paying a huge rent to Bezos, or Amazon replicates their business and drives them out of it.

Amazon fulfilment.centres are dystopian workplace that scifi long predicted. Biometric monitors track every moment of each employee’s time, and drivers’ delivery schedules are so tight they have to pee into canisters while on the go.

Jeff’s love of science fiction has lead him to make plans to move millions of humans off-planet into artificial O’Neill cylinders

which is one way to staff Amazon’s orbital fulfilment centres

Marc Andreessen’s second appearance on our technogarch top list is as one of the brains behind the venture capital funding model that helps Silicon Valley to “move fast and break things*

The things being broken are the industries that employ millions of people with hard won labour rights and union protections, and the fast movement is the replacement of those jobs with precarious gig work.

Andreessen Horowitz ventures like Lyft, Instacart and AirBnb, and other VC startups from Uber to Upwork, disintermediate workers from our rights and protections, while keeping ownership in the hands of the super-wealthy investors who can access VC funds.

Andreeseen is on record as an admirer of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, a cyberpunk novel where the elite use biotech and uploading to make themselves literally immortal. Be ready for an a16z startup to offer this service soon.

Peter Thiel is an OG member of the PayPal mafia and today the founder of Palantir, a main provider of algorithmic surveillance technology to security services, named after the all seeing magical stones of Lord of the Rings.

If you’re currently being monitored by secret police, there’s a good chance Peter Thiel gave them that power

Thiel is on record as having read Lord of the Rings more than ten times

Imagine reading JRR Tolkien and thinking

“I want to be just like Sauron”

But the big kahuna of today’s technogarchy is of course Elon Musk

At each stage of his legendary rise to power Musk’s businesses have become more and more dependent on technobullsh*t.

PayPal was inspired by cypherpunk ideas of decentralising finance. Tesla was built on a quest to stop human extinction from climate change. NeuraLink aims to fulfill the cyberpunk vision of jacking-in to our machinery and computers.

Space-X was sold to the generations who had grown up expecting to get a jetpack, excited by moon landings and shuttle launches, then grown old and disappointed as the space program collapsed. Now they could cheer again at self-landing rockets.

In reality Space-X is a military contractor, established to compete with giants like Raytheon. For all their bluster about private enterprise and bootstrapping, our technogarch billionaires all suck as much form the teat of tax payer funding as they can get.

Musk has praised the Culture novels of Iain M Banks as a vision of the future he imagines his businesses will make a reality

Iain M Banks would have despised Musk and his fellow technogarchs with every fiber of his socialist soul

Those suckered in by the technogarchs, their fanboys and useful idiots, believe that these men represent science and progress

But the technogarch vision of the future is a scifi fantasy, and the reality it covers is only a better world for the technogarchs

The lesser technogarchs have a plan

They see a future where the problems that pestered the oligarchs who came before them

Workers rights, labour unions, government regulations, capital controls and general taxation

Have been destroyed by disruptive technology

Where ordinary workers are employed through apps, that disintermediates workers from our hard won rights.

Where ordinary people are monitored 24/7 by cameras, drones and biometrics, making us powerless serfs in the new power structure of techno-feudalism

under the absolute rule of the technogarchy

a future where you will own nothing

like it or not

because the oligarchs own it all

But where the lesser oligarchs have a plan, Elon Musk has a vision

We have to give Elon credit, he has studied those scifi movies

He truly is the villain from every one of them

Elon doesn’t just want to control your work or even your life

He wants to control your consciousness

Elon Musk wants to make you a creature of the transhuman revolution

jacked directly into the machine, a procesor unit of the super-intelligence

Elon is a servant of a higher power

A true believer in the coming techno-capitalist singularity

That he believes will make him a god

But it won’t

In the next video essay we’ll explore the destruction of Elon Musk

and the future that Accelerationists want