Oligarch Wine in a New Bro Bottle

Techno-optimism, information power, and the rise of the broligarchs 

By Greg Guma

 The Alienation Index is rising, and reveals deep disenchantment with the power structure. My favorite pollster was explaining statistics I barely understood. The new AI, he explained, had replaced the old Misery Index, which was calculated by adding the unemployment and inflation rates. But as the Marmot Poll made plain, expectations concerning the constructive use of government power were cratering. It had happened before and I wasn’t surprised.

”People are as mad as hell,” he explained, “but they’re also seriously bummed out.”

I admitted to feeling alienated myself. But as a senile US Senator recently said, “people will get used to it.” Perhaps. Yet I wondered, could this matter and mean something?

The answer was quick and brutal. “It means that the people know exactly what’s going on around here,” Jack said. That’s not his name, but what I call him. “They’re seriously pissed about not being able to make a difference anymore, here at home or anywhere else. Sure, they feel guilty about the past, you know the racism, invasions and all that. But they really enjoyed how we used to be the envy of the world, and think this is being purposely eroded. They feel hurt, forgotten, betrayed, and powerless to do anything about it. I call this syndrome RS — Reality Shock.”

Billionaire Row at the Trump Inauguration

”But how? Why? Isn’t Trump starting to get things under control? Bombing Iran, neutralizing enemies, co-opting critics, the deportation round ups, putting alligators back to work. It’s a reptilian renaissance.”

Jack found my attitude vaguely amusing. “People aren’t that dense, despite their voting choices — or their belief in our reptile overlords. They see things being changed, disrupted. And it doesn’t look much like what they were promised. The system is being rearranged, with techno-optimism, redistribution to the top, and the rise of the broligarchy.”

”You’ve lost me. What’s all this?”

My iPhone went silent. Then he whispered, “I can’t talk here. Meet me at the old place.” And hung up.

We rendezvoused in an abandoned mall whose location I won’t reveal, where I briefly felt a slight case of RS myself. There used to be consumers and thriving businesses in this place. But my resignation was followed by paranoid awareness.

Jack started with a wry observation about how, the last time we met here, my big concern was the Trilateral Commission, the old school corporate league that tried to control the world through power sharing by key governments. David Rockefeller was the kingpin then, with the help of OGs like Kissinger and Brzezinski. How naive and short-sighted.

”It’s no longer about oil and resource scarcity. Now it’s all about the algorithms and the whole ROTTEN alliance.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “What’s ROTTEN?”

”Just an acronym. Rich Oligarchs Tech Titans Egomaniacs and Narcissists, the real global power players today.”

”They call themselves that?”

”They prefer Broligarchs. They don’t agree on everything, but enough. And they have an ideology called techno-optimism. The basic idea is that technological innovation will save humanity and nothing should stand in the way, especially governments or elections. It was laid out in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. That’s a 5,000 word blog post written by Marc Andreessen. He’s the venture capitalist who co-founded Netscape. Used to be known as a Silicon Valley kingmaker, but financially they’ve moved way beyond him.”

“Ok, I’ll bite. What do they believe?”

”Unfettered free speech, at least for themselves. Artificial Intelligence, contempt for old media, and deep skepticism about diversity quotas, political correctness, and the elite consensus, all that DEI stuff. It meshes well with Trump’s agenda. Techno-optimism is about growth at all costs. Move fast and break things, that’s what they say. Regulations, safety, even sanity just get in the way of innovation. If we don’t watch out, it could replace liberal humanism.”

“Sounds delusional. Who are these guys?”

“Call them crazy, but they are all billionaires. It started about twenty years ago with the PayPal Mafia.”

”Now you’re just making things up!”

”Hardly. I’m talking about the co-founders, executives and engineers of PayPal. Elon Musk was one of them, and David Sachs, who became the White House crypto cazar. And Peter Thiel. He’s not one of the richest in the group, but he is a key player. Co-founded PayPal, then Palantir, that big data analysis business that’s begun taking over government systems. He was also the first outside investor in Facebook and jump started J.D. Vances’s career. Plus, he secretly funded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that took down Gawker. Seriously far Right.

“After PayPal made them rich, they started a ton of other companies, invested in each other's projects, sat on each other's boards. If you wanted to make it in Silicon Valley, you needed that Mafia. They were so sure of themselves they once posed for a Fortune photo shoot. Thirteen of them, dressed as mobsters — track suits, leather jackets, shoulder pads, gold chains, cigars, slicked back hair, poker chips and whiskey. Then I noticed, several were from South Africa, born during apartheid. They started out with vast privilege — in an authoritarian regime.”

“Maybe they were just kidding around,” I protested. “I need more, real proof of a conspiracy.”

“You want receipts, Ok. I’ve already mentioned Musk, Sachs, Andreessen, and Thiel. You can add Mark Zuckerberg, the second richest person in the world after Musk. And Jeff Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Larry Page, Microsoft’s Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer. They’re numbers 3 through 6 in global wealth. Bill Gates was also part of the gang, but he’s broken away, somewhat. Put them together and you have Tesla, Space X, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Alphabet, Oracle, and Microsoft. The techno-industrial complex.”

”That doesn’t mean they’re working together.”

“They meet often enough. Take the annual Sun Valley Conference, a modern Bohemian Grove. They’re usually all there in Idaho. It’s known as Summer Camp for Billionaires. They also attend private dinners and smaller gatherings, networking, building relationships. Plus all the one-on-one meetings and invitation-only sessions, ‘pods’ for peer-to-peer exchanges. They’re rarely announced.

“And don’t forget the conferences and summits: CES — which calls itself the world’s most powerful tech event, MWC Barcelona — which bills itself the most influential connectivity event, the Web Summit, SXSW, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, or the ones on AI. These are chances for them to network, discuss trends, reach consensus.

“Of course you know, five of the world’s ten wealthiest people were at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page, Thiel, Andreessen, all of them and more were there — France’s Bernard Arnault of LVMH, India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Group, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi.”

“OK, I get it,” I said. “But where is all this going?”

“Depends on who you ask. Some call it techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, cyber populism, or authoritarian technocracy. But those are just words. Basically, their claim is that the internet, social media and all the technological innovations ahead can be tools of freedom. But it’s actually about more wealth and giving them the power to decide how the future looks.

“After World War II, techno-optimism fueled the government’s investment in technologies the broligarchs now control. Since then the dynamic has changed. Now the emphasis is on their close ties with military systems, border security, and mass surveillance. New forms of communication are putting capitalism on cyber-steroids, high tech forms of knowledge extraction and manipulation. The Bros despise any attempts to restrain their vision of progress. Even the restrictions of nationalism, which their agenda could make obsolete. It’s like a new global religion, one that absolves them of moral or civic duty, or any serious consideration of the real social costs.”

Some call this evolutionary humanism. Related to Darwinian evolutionary theory, it says that conflict is essential, inevitable, and pushes us forward. When forces collide, the smartest and fittest should simply press forward, regardless of popular resistance. It’s good that shrewd, brilliant innovators push restrictions aside, they say. It makes us stronger and more prosperous.

Evolution never ends. The argument goes: If we hold back extraordinary people, the result could be degeneration, even extinction. It’s the kind of thinking that unfortunately led to the rise of the Nazis. Yet that isn’t the inevitable result. If combined with an evolution of consciousness, positive values and peaceful means, evolutionary humanism could help us to meet the serious challenges we face. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Confronting adversity can lead to positive change and resilience, helping us to honestly face future challenges. But not necessarily.

I was exhausted and even more alienated and confused than when our conversation started. The current crisis has made the old conspiracies look quaint, the era when groups like the Council of Foreign Relations or Trilateral Commission thought they could manage or renovate international relations through elite meetings, position papers, and clever policies. The Broligarchs are leading us toward a society in which it will be impossible to disconnect from all-knowing networks. Humanity is in danger of being stripped of its basic autonomy and free will. Yet millions of people are passively accepting this future. I can remember a time, decades ago, when the very idea of using social security numbers as universal identifiers, an early way to create a national data bank, was considered unthinkable. How quaint.

A few weeks after we met, I called Jack again late one night. It was after the announcement that Trump had chosen Palantir, the company Thiel founded, to implement an Executive Order instructing government agencies to share their data and create a master database that can keep track of everyone in the country. They started off with $133 million in government money, but recently had been given another $795 million.

Palantir was talking with the Social Security Administration and IRS about buying its technology, and was already working with the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies. What began with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was continuing to gain momentum. His departure made no difference.

“How’s that affecting the Alienation Index? Are people beginning to wake up and do something?”

“They’re concerned about misinformation and deep fakes, but hesitate to express their opinions,” he explained. “Their big fears are criticism, retaliation, and being physically attacked. They’re overwhelmed by the complexity of protecting their privacy. Most people feel they have little control nowadays over how their personal data is collected and used. Sure, they’d like more protection, but they’re afraid of crime and terrorism, and willing to sacrifice more privacy to feel secure.”

”Why don’t journalists write more about this? We don’t hear much about the dangers.”

”According to the polling, it would only increase the Alienation Index. And that means even more Reality Shock.”

Dawn of the Decadent

Christopher Lasch and our culture of narcissism 

An excerpt from Witness to the Fall

Long before Donald Trump’s malignant narcissism plunged the United States and the world into a hall of mirrors, thought leaders like Christopher Lasch warned about an emerging psychic assault on humanity and a breakdown of culture.

Most of the population has been reduced to incompetence by professional elites, Lasch charged in a controversial book, The Culture of Narcissism, while the family is simultaneously being undermined by advanced capitalism. The personality itself is under attack, he argued, by bureaucracy, a therapeutic culture, and “the domination of our whole experience by fabricated images.”

As Michiko Kakutani explained in his 2019 book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, Lasch was ahead of his time in defining narcissism as a “defensive reaction to social change and instability.” A cynical “ethic of self-preservation and psychic survival” afflicted the nation, Lasch believed. It was the symptom of a country grappling at the time with defeat in Vietnam, growing pessimism, a media culture centered on fame and celebrity, and “centrifugal forces that were shrinking the role families played in the transmission of culture.”

Shortly before Lasch helped President Jimmy Carter write his memorable, televised “malaise” speech in 1979 (Carter didn’t actually use the word), I taped and published an interview with the historian about his analysis of contemporary society. “It’s almost as if we can’t experience things directly anymore,” he explained, more than a decade before the Internet went public.

“Something only becomes real when it’s recorded in the form of a photographic image, a recording of the human voice, or whatever. The result is that our whole perception is colored, and I think it has a mirror-like effect. People find it difficult to establish a sense of self unless it’s reflected back in the reaction of others or in the form of images.”

In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch extended the word’s definition to include “dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and unsatisfied oral cravings.” He also added secondary traits like “pseudo self-insight, calculated seductiveness, nervous self-deprecating humor… intense fear of old age and death, altered sense of time, fascination with celebrity, fear of competition, decline of play spirit, deteriorating relations between men and women.”

Even more disturbing, he asserted that the narcissistic personality was ideally suited for positions of power, a callous, superficial climber who sells him or herself to win at any price.

Today, all of this rings like a prediction about the shape of political leaders to come.

Since Lasch also argued that capitalism was part of the problem, specifically by turning the selling of oneself into a form of work, I asked him to explain. “Capitalism takes bureaucratic form,” he said. “Advancement and success depends upon the ability to project one’s personality and to project a winning image, rather than competence in any given job. Your own personality becomes the principal resource to be marketed.” More than 40 years later, this sounds very much like the Trump-ist mindset.

Mass media were largely responsible, Lasch said, since they create both a sense of “chronic tension” and a “cynical detachment” from reality. And it wasn’t just the advertisements. “By treating everything as parody, a lot of TV shows reflect the same distancing techniques,” he explained. “Everything is a put-on, a take-off. And nothing is to be taken altogether seriously. We now have a whole genre that parodies other popular forms, creating a kind of endless hall of mirrors effect. It becomes very difficult to distinguish reality from images. Finally, the distinction collapses altogether.”

Somewhat depressed by this diagnosis, I tried to refocus on the bright side by asking about the difference between the debilitating detachment he had described and a more healthy skepticism.

“A person could even experience both reactions at different times,” Lasch replied. “This raises a very important political question too, because the thrust of institutions might have a very healthy political effect in reducing people’s dependence on big organizations, making people more willing to solve their own problems. But, on the other hand, it has so far expressed itself as a crippling cynicism in the whole political process: no change is possible at all, and all politicians are corrupt.”

Worse yet, he asserted that the modern American family promoted the development of narcissistic people. Many mothers are no longer confident of their ability to raise children, he said, and many fathers no longer have work that provides an example to follow. “The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence in one area after another and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies. Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence.”

Popular culture feeds as a parasite on the narcissist’s primitive fantasies, Lasch continued. It encourages delusions of omnipotence while at the same time affirming feelings of dependence and blocking the expression of strong emotion. The bland and empty disco-supermarket-mall-mellow facade of mass existence can be overwhelming. Yet within people there was also enormous anger for which bureaucratic society provided few outlets.

Lasch was expressing harsh and then-contrarian views, some that liberals, conservatives, and even radicals hesitated to embrace at the time. For example, he believed that American society was fast approaching a point of moral dissolution, but charged that both the “welfare state” and permissiveness were among the causes of the impending collapse. At the same time, he saw hope in the potential for resistance among working people who retained religious, family, and neighborhood roots.

One of his targets was the “awareness” movement. In that regard, when I asked what Lasch thought about Erhard Seminars Training (Est), an extension of the human potential movement, he offered that it did have some appeal as an “antidote” to narcissism. Yet his reason was chilling. “It entails a certain amount of arbitrary discipline, a kind of submission to authority that you find in some religious cults, too,” he said. “People who lack meaning and structure are likely to turn to some sort of authoritarian solution.”

In view of this, I wondered where he thought the necessary vision for change would come from. “There is more resistance among people who really don’t have much stake in the present economic system, people who are victimized by it,” he replied. “Their working environment is not invaded by bureaucracy in the same way. And the second thing is that they have some cultural resources, like religion, that help to counteract this. Of course, all these things are often sneered at as evidence of the backward mentality of American workers. We’re going to have to view that in a much more positive light.

“One of the problems I see is an erosion of any sense of moral responsibility. That’s closely linked to the loss of competence. And religion is one impulse that helps to keep alive the sense that people are responsible for what they do. It represents a sort of moral realism that is very important now.”

But the family, church, neighborhoods and institutions were all under assault, Lasch warned. And, although somewhat skeptical about what he viewed as a gradual shift toward state socialism, he acknowledged that “the state is going to have to play a larger role,” particularly in areas like energy and resource allocation.

On the other hand, he also foresaw a risk that turned out to be all too real: that an expansion of the state’s role, combined with exploitation of reactionary tendencies in the family and church, could spark the authoritarian surge he feared.