“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 of $1 million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration?
Or when Disney CEO Bob Iger comes out to virtue signal that the hypercapitalist entertainment corporation really isn’t “woke”?
What does it mean when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—still dressed like a section leader of the Branch Davidians—announces a humiliating reversal of Facebook’s moderation policies? Anti-vaxxers are back in; protections for trans people are out. (I’m guessing that 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 killed at 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 an election, throws a fascist salute at his own inauguration while the tired old reality TV star currently employed as Elon’s sock puppet watches on from the sidelines?
Defenders claimed it was a Roman, not a fascist salute—seemingly unaware that Italian fascists adopted that exact salute from the brutal, slave-owning empire they (and Elon) apparently want to replace democracy with.
When the elderly caretaker of a crumbling democracy issues a grave warning on his last day as top broom, what does it mean? Does it mean, as those who know their history are wondering, that we’re now a Roman-style oligarchy?
Or something even worse?
The OG Oligarchs: Plato, Aristotle, and the Delusion of the “Wise”
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—the first to give a systematic description of oligarchy.
In his Republic, Plato examined the histories of Athens, Sparta, and other Greek city-states, uncovering a repeating cycle of political history:
$$\text{Democracy} \longrightarrow \text{Tyranny} \longrightarrow \text{Aristocracy} \longrightarrow \text{Oligarchy}$$
(Stopping along the way at Timocracy… which I guess explains why Tim gave Donald that money?)
Plato’s cycle was later expanded by Polybius into an anacyclosis—a historical cycle that influenced political philosophers for millennia. Each part of society—the aristocracy, the demos, or the oligarchs—is always present, but takes power at different stages.
We always have oligarchs, but we aren’t always an oligarchy.
It’s worth noting that Plato and Polybius were not democrats. They saw rule by the demos (the general public) as unstable and chaotic. But they loved aristocracy. In ancient Greek, Aristo means excellent. Aristocracy, in its pure sense, is rule by the most excellent, the wisest, and the most virtuous.
(In a shocking twist, if you ask philosophers who should be king, we say philosophers.)
The key to understanding today’s American oligarchs is that they think they are aristocrats. They truly believe they are the wise. Which is hilarious, because… well, they really aren’t.
That’s why the first thing wannabe oligarchs do when they make their first few hundred million is write a book:
- Like Balaji Srinivasan’s How To Hand Your Democracy Over To Oligarchs (er, sorry… The Network State).
- Or Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto—which is to professional philosophy what 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
The most detailed analysis of oligarchy came from Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle (who literally has the word “excellent” built into his name).
Aristotle lived in Athens after the era of the “Four Hundred”—a group of oligarchs who betrayed Athens to its Spartan enemies, leading to the fall of Athenian democracy.
To the ancient Greeks, rich people were a necessary evil, but terrible leaders. Oligarchs think only of money and are utterly ignorant of philosophy. They fall for political solutions 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 super-rich have no real loyalty to their nation or its people. They have far more in common with the rich people of enemy nations. The Four Hundred Athenian oligarchs admired Spartan oligarchy so much they overthrew their own democracy on its behalf.
That is a lesson from history we would do well to learn today.
From Soviet Collapse to “Technobullsh*t”
Ancient history teaches us one lesson about oligarchy, but modern history teaches another.
When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a new class of oligarchs emerged in Eastern Europe. For decades, Soviet citizens had been fed stories of a socialist state leading to a communist utopia.
Socialism and communism began as visions of a better world imagined in response to the brutal realities of the Industrial Revolution. Across Europe, stories like Étienne Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, and Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita imagined grand socialist utopias.
They emerged from the mythos of humankind—and then faded like dreams when the Soviet project collapsed. Capitalism destroyed communism and was swiftly installed in its neoliberal form: mass privatization of state assets, deregulation, and corporate control. Russian oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky “purchased” former state assets on the cheap, operating vast swathes of the economy as private monopolies.
But the Western World Had Its Own Fantasies
The Golden Age of American science fiction gave us grand dreams: abundant nuclear energy, rocket ships, flying cars, android housemaids, teleportation, and off-world colonies. The reason so many Boomers wonder “Where is my jetpack?” is because they were explicitly promised one.
- In the ’90s: Shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation showed Western liberal values colonizing the stars with warp drives. (Gen-Xers obsessed with Alcubierre Drives are just trying to make the Enterprise-D real.)
- In the 2000s: The promises became even wilder. Automation would bring post-scarcity abundance. Transhumanism would let us edit our genes and live forever. Virtual reality would let us upload our consciousness to Silicon Heaven in a true “Rapture of the Nerds.”
- In the 2020s: AI arrived. AGI was supposed to unleash super-intelligence, exponential technological growth, the Singularity, and a Starship to Mars.
Instead, Millennials and Gen Z woke up to a reality where none of these sci-fi promises showed up.
- Instead of abundant energy, we got climate change.
- Instead of post-scarcity, we got gig work and side hustles.
- Instead of super-intelligence, we got dumb chatbots.
- (Okay, fine—we got Roombas. But no houses to clean them in.)
The stable manufacturing and office jobs that allowed previous generations to buy homes were wiped out. Housing hyper-inflated until only those with inherited wealth could get on the ladder. Real wealth concentrated until a dozen men owned more than half of America combined.
Neoliberal capitalism screwed Americans just as hard as it screwed post-Soviet Russians. The sci-fi dreams turned out to be technobullsh*t spun by billionaire technogarchs.
The Technogarch Hall of Fame
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ THE TECHNOGARCH ARCHETYPES │├─────────────────┬───────────────────┬────────────────────┤│ Technogarch │ Business Model │ Sci-Fi Inspiration │├─────────────────┼───────────────────┼────────────────────┤│ Bill Gates │ Corporate Grid │ Heinlein ││ Steve Jobs │ Sweatshop iMonarch│ Orwell (1984) ││ Mark Zuckerberg │ Attention Economy │ Iain M. Banks ││ Jeff Bezos │ Monopolistic Grid │ O'Neill Cylinders ││ Marc Andreessen │ VC Disintermediation│ Altered Carbon ││ Peter Thiel │ Surveillance State│ Lord of the Rings ││ Elon Musk │ Techno-Feudalism │ Sci-Fi Villains │└─────────────────┴───────────────────┴────────────────────┘
1. Bill Gates: The Bureaucrat
Bill Gates was just 20 when he founded Microsoft, establishing the myth of the enfant terrible tech founder.
In the ’90s, Microsoft projected an image of “slacker chic”—grunge music, Seattle coffee, Wired magazine, and Douglas Coupland novels. Microsoft actually seemed cool. Windows 95 launched with public hysteria.
In reality, Microsoft’s true business was bureaucracy. In a single decade, Microsoft products automated or augmented corporate and government paper-pushing worldwide. Every time you hit a Blue Screen of Death buying a train ticket, that’s the power of Microsoft. Automating middle-class jobs out of existence made Gates the first tech “richest man in the world.”
On his blog in 2022, Gates recalled reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as a teen. It’s not hard to see how the story of a Martian who comes to Earth to save humanity—but never actually understands human beings—influenced him.
2. Steve Jobs: Big Brother’s Architect
Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad painted the Macintosh as a symbol of liberation. MacBooks, iPods, and iPhones became badges of the “creator class”—individuals liberated from office cubicles to work in coffee shops.
Phase 2 Steve Jobs defined the calculating technogarch. Jobs pioneered the exploitation of low-paid Chinese labor at massive, high-surveillance Foxconn facilities, where the “communist” government ensured workers had zero rights to unionize.
The shiny laptops of the Western creator class came on the backs of the global working class. It turns out Jobs didn’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning—he read it as an operations manual.
Apple didn’t free us from Big Brother. It put Big Brother in everyone’s pocket.
3. Mark Zuckerberg: The Attention Farmer
Zuckerberg started with a skeezy “Hot or Not” website at Harvard. But his real mastery wasn’t just computer science—it was psychological manipulation.
Meta’s core business is simple: grabbing and holding human attention. Facebook pioneered algorithmic media to hack human psychology, connecting your smartphone to real-time data feeds that stream outrage and alerts to keep you hooked.
In the process, Meta disrupted local and investigative journalism, replacing verified facts with fake news and multi-level marketing scams. Zuckerberg has recommended reading Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games—seemingly so he can use algorithmic media to play the public like pieces on a board.
4. Jeff Bezos: The Warehouse King
Founded in 1996, Amazon survived the dot-com crash because Bezos understood retail architecture better than anyone else. He saw that the physical ecosystem of storefronts, malls, and supply chains could be dismantled by the internet.
Amazon became the most aggressive monopoly in history. Businesses either pay Bezos rent to sell on his platform, or Amazon copies their product and runs them out of business.
Inside Amazon fulfillment centers, employees wear biometric trackers that log every second of movement, and delivery drivers are forced to pee in bottles to meet quotas. Bezos’s dream of moving humanity off-planet into artificial O’Neill cylinders isn’t about exploration—it’s just a way to staff orbital fulfillment centers.
5. Marc Andreessen: The Labor Disrupter
As a venture capitalist at a16z, Andreessen helped popularize the Silicon Valley mantra: “Move fast and break things.”
The “things” being broken are industries with hard-won labor protections and union contracts. The “fast movement” is replacing stable employment with precarious, app-based gig work (Lyft, Instacart, Airbnb). Workers are separated from their rights, while the profits flow directly to super-rich VC investors.
Andreessen is an open fan of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon—a cyberpunk novel where immortal elites use biotech to live forever. Expect an a16z startup offering that exact service soon.
6. Peter Thiel: Sauron in a Suit
Peter Thiel—PayPal co-founder and creator of Palantir—built a empire supplying algorithmic surveillance technology to global security services.
If secret police or military intelligence are monitoring your data right now, there is a very good chance Palantir is running the software. Thiel has reportedly read The Lord of the Rings more than ten times.
Imagine reading Tolkien a dozen times and walking away thinking:
“I want to be Sauron.”
The Final Boss: Elon Musk and the Techno-Feudal Dream
At the top of the technogarchy sits Elon Musk. At every stage of his rise, his businesses have leaned heavily on sci-fi mythmaking:
- PayPal borrowed from cypherpunk ideas of decentralized finance.
- Tesla was sold as a green quest to save humanity from climate change.
- Neuralink promises the cyberpunk vision of direct brain-computer interfaces.
- SpaceX reignited the spacefaring dreams of generations disappointed by the end of the Apollo era.
In reality, SpaceX is a massive defense contractor competing with Raytheon. For all their talk about free markets and bootstrapping, technogarchs feed greedily off taxpayer subsidies.
Musk often praises the socialist sci-fi of Iain M. Banks—an author who would have despised Musk with every fiber of his soul. Fans and useful idiots believe these men represent scientific progress. In reality, their vision of the future is a fantasy designed to serve only themselves.
The Technogarch Masterplan
The lesser technogarchs have a practical plan:
- Strip away labor unions, government regulation, capital controls, and corporate taxes.
- Force ordinary workers into app-based gig platforms.
- Monitor the public 24/7 via cameras, biometric data, and predictive algorithms.
The result is Techno-Feudalism: a world where you own nothing, have no privacy, and answer directly to the absolute rule of corporate technogarchs.
Elon’s Vision
Where others have a plan, Elon Musk has a crusade. He has studied the sci-fi movies—and decided to become the villain in all of them.
Musk doesn’t just want to control your job; he wants to control your consciousness. He envisions a transhumanist revolution where human minds are wired directly into the machine as processing units for an artificial super-intelligence.
He is a devout servant of the coming techno-capitalist Singularity—a event he believes will elevate him to godhood.
(Spoiler alert: It won’t.)
In the next essay, we’ll explore the fall of Elon Musk, the collapse of the accelerationist movement, and the real future we can build instead.
Damien Walter 