The zero-interest rate era was the golden age of bullshit—a financial acid trip where the laws of physics, economics, and basic human decency went out the window. It was like some mad billionaire handed out Monopoly money at a rave and told everyone they could fly. And boy, did they try. Instead of building rockets to Mars or rewiring the rusted-out skeleton of America’s power grid, we sank it all into a goddamn superhero LARP.
Hollywood became the altar of this grotesque religion, where CGI-fueled demigods did battle in the name of escapism. The capes, the spandex, the endless swirling vortex of special effects—this was the cinematic equivalent of printing money and throwing it into the void. It mirrored the economic landscape perfectly: infinite liquidity, zero substance. Why waste time on real progress when you can simulate it with enough green screen and post-production wizardry to make the moon landing look like a student film?
Lacan would have a field day with this. The superhero isn’t just a character; it’s a projection of the méconnaissance, the great misrecognition. The Average Joe gazes into the mirror of modern culture, and what does he see? Not himself, but a grotesque distortion, a mythologized version of his own desires: the hero, the savior, the all-powerful individual who can reshape reality through sheer will.
This transmogrification isn’t accidental; it’s the bait in the con job. The promise is seductive: You’re not just an Average Joe. You’re special, you’re powerful, you’re a superhero in waiting. The narrative flatters, inflates, and redirects the subject’s sense of lack—the symbolic wound that drives human ambition—into a fantastical identification with an impossible ideal. But in doing so, it obscures the real game being played.
Because while the Average Joe is busy imagining himself as Iron Man, the 1% is slipping out the back door with all the pie. This isn’t just exploitation; it’s a masterstroke of ideological manipulation. Convince the middle and lower classes that they’re not oppressed but empowered, that they’re on the verge of greatness, and you can rob them blind without them even noticing.
And let’s not forget the real trick here: the superhero fantasy isn’t just aspirational—it’s anesthetizing. It replaces genuine agency with a simulation of power, the illusion of action. The Average Joe isn’t organizing, unionizing, or storming the gates; he’s sitting on his couch, identifying with the invincible demigods on screen, believing that somehow, he’s already won.
In Lacanian terms, the superhero is the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire, endlessly deferred. The subject chases it, invests in it, but never attains it. And that chase keeps him distracted, pacified, even as the real levers of power—the wealth, the supply chains, the pie itself—are pulled farther and farther out of reach.
It’s the perfect con: convince someone they’re more powerful than they are, and you can take everything from them without a fight. The Average Joe gets the fantasy; the 1% gets the reality. And when the credits roll, only one of them is left standing.
The entire spectacle was an orgy of hyperreality, a flickering neon distraction from the fact that we had all the resources in the world to do something meaningful and pissed it away on branded lunchboxes and Funko Pops. We could’ve built new worlds—hell, we could’ve saved this one—but no. We chose to watch Iron Man punch Thanos in the face for the seventh time, mistaking this digital pantomime for heroism.
This was the bastard child of cheap money and a culture addicted to spectacle. The superheroes weren’t just metaphors—they were the gods of a zero-interest rate economy, avatars of unearned power, where the only skill that mattered was convincing people to buy into the illusion. And buy in we did, like lemmings marching off a cliff, with popcorn in one hand and a credit card in the other.
Of course, there were people who saw it coming. There always are. They’re the ones who didn’t waste their time on the cape-and-cowl circus or buy into the collective hallucination that this time it’s different. They sat in their quiet fortresses of cynicism, sharpening their knives and biding their time. While the rest of us were drooling over superhero fantasies and digital explosions, they were building real empires—not with spandex, but with cold, ruthless efficiency.
These were the architects of the new world order. Not the builders of Mars colonies or the revolutionaries of clean energy—no, those people got crowded out by the noise. These were the ones who took the bonanza, the wild flow of free money, and used it to carve out fortresses of data, influence, and control.
They don’t need a doomsday device or an army of henchmen. They’re weaponized boredom: algorithms, patents, infrastructure nobody understands but everybody depends on. They learned how to extract power from entropy, how to siphon wealth from chaos without drawing attention. And now they sit in the shadows, watching the rest of us scavenge through the ruins of what could’ve been a golden age.
Exactly. They’re the ones who didn’t just build moats—they built labyrinths. And not around castles, but around supply chains. The veins and arteries of the modern world. They understood that power wasn’t in the spectacle or even the product—it was in controlling the flow. Oil, semiconductors, lithium, grain—hell, even the shipping containers themselves. They wrapped their hands around the global choke points while the rest of us were hypnotized by cinematic nonsense about fictional heroes saving fictional worlds.
These people played a long game. While everyone else was on a sugar-high from cheap money and endless content, they were buying up ports, factories, and patents. They turned raw materials into a weapon, logistics into a religion, and bottlenecks into leverage. They didn’t care about public adoration or even moral high ground—they were too busy consolidating.
Now, if you want to build a car, you go through them. Want to make a battery? Good luck finding the cobalt. They turned the global supply chain into their personal fortress, an invisible empire guarded not by dragons, but by bureaucracies, fine print, and the sheer impossibility of getting anything done without them.
They’re the new lords of scarcity, thriving in a world where nothing can move without their blessing. They don’t need to larp as superheroes or even show their faces. Their power is so embedded in the machinery of modern life, so fundamental, that we don’t even think to question it. It’s not evil in the comic book sense—it’s worse than that. It’s banal, procedural, and utterly inescapable.
And when the next crisis comes—because it always does—they’ll tighten the noose a little more, muttering about “supply chain disruptions” while the rest of us scramble to figure out why the shelves are empty. These aren’t the bad guys you can punch in the face or overthrow with a dramatic speech. They’re the system itself, and we’re all just stuck in their web.
They’re not superheroes, and they’re not traditional villains either. They’re something worse—a product of our collective failure to use the years of abundance for anything meaningful. While we were busy worshipping fake gods in capes, they built the real myths of tomorrow. And the worst part? By the time we notice, it’ll be too late.
