Tag: Tech

Intraclass Warfare

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In contemporary capitalism, we observe a recurring phenomenon in which one faction of the professional-managerial class (PMC) sacrifices another sector within its own class, ostensibly in the name of progress, accessibility, or efficiency. This process, which we might term sacrificial disruption, serves two simultaneous functions: first, it gains ideological legitimacy from below (by appealing to mass consumer interests and anti-elite sentiment), and second, it consolidates power at the top, transferring control from traditional professional elites to financial and technological capital.

The Case of the Music Industry

During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the traditional gatekeepers of the music industry—record labels, radio conglomerates, and physical distributors—formed a relatively stable PMC ecosystem, characterized by rent-seeking behaviors and a hierarchical structure. The rise of digital distribution, however, led a faction within the PMC—tech entrepreneurs, platform developers, and digital marketers—to undermine this system, presenting their disruption as a democratization of music consumption.

Yet, while digital platforms initially reduced the financial burden on consumers, they did not lead to a redistribution of wealth toward artists or a true decentralization of power. Instead, the control of the industry shifted from label executives to tech monopolies and financial capital, which structured streaming services around low per-stream royalties, data extraction, and financialized ownership models (e.g., venture capital-backed rights acquisitions). In effect, while the disruption of record labels was framed as an egalitarian shift, it resulted in an even greater concentration of power among the wealthiest actors—with streaming platforms absorbing a larger share of the surplus value once captured by labels.

The Case of the Film Industry

A similar trajectory can be observed in the transition from the traditional film studio and theater model to the dominance of streaming platforms. Hollywood’s legacy studios—though themselves deeply intertwined with financial capital—operated under a system of risk distribution, in which large-scale film production was sustained by long-term revenue cycles (box office, home video, syndication). However, the entrance of streaming platforms, driven by a different faction of the PMC (Silicon Valley disruptors, software engineers, venture capitalists), sacrificed the traditional studio model under the promise of unlimited consumer access and subscription-based convenience.

Once again, while this transformation appeared to empower consumers by lowering costs and expanding content availability, it primarily benefited a new form of capital accumulation, in which a small number of monopolistic platforms (Netflix, Amazon, Disney as a platform rather than a studio) captured and centralized the revenue streams once distributed across multiple industry actors. The financial logic of these platforms, driven by shareholder expectations rather than long-term artistic or cultural investments, has led to a greater precarity among creative workers and a financialization of the film industry, wherein success is measured in engagement metrics rather than cultural or artistic longevity.

The Broader Pattern: A PMC-Initiated Power Transfer to Capital

These cases illustrate a structural pattern:

1. A faction within the PMC (tech disruptors, digital entrepreneurs) attacks another sector of its own class (music executives, studio heads, journalists), framing it as obsolete, exploitative, or inefficient.

2. This attack gains legitimacy from below by promising accessibility, lower prices, or creative freedom to consumers and independent creators.

3. In reality, power is not redistributed downward but instead shifts upward to financial and technological capital, which centralizes control over distribution and monetization.

The ultimate outcome is not a democratization of cultural production, but a restructuring of economic rents in favor of capital holders, deepening wealth concentration and reinforcing the broader trend of increasing inequality in 21st-century capitalism. In this sense, PMC-led disruption is not a challenge to capital, but rather an internal realignment within the managerial class that ultimately benefits capital more than labor or consumers.

Clippy

Yes, and this is the irony of PMC-led sacrificial disruption—the disruptors themselves are not immune to the same forces they unleash. In the short term, the tech faction within the PMC gains power by dismantling another PMC sector (e.g., music labels, film studios, traditional media). But in the long run, this realignment does not strengthen the PMC as a whole—it weakens it, making it more vulnerable to financial capital and automation-driven consolidation.

The Tech PMC as the Next Sacrificial Victim

We can already see this process beginning within the tech sector itself:

• The same venture capital that backed streaming platforms and gig economy apps is now turning on tech workers, using AI and outsourcing to disempower software engineers, designers, and middle management.

• Big Tech layoffs (Google, Amazon, Meta) suggest that after decades of expansion, the tech PMC is facing the same disposability that it once imposed on musicians, filmmakers, and journalists.

• AI-driven automation (such as generative coding tools) will likely do to tech workers what streaming did to artists—lowering individual bargaining power while centralizing wealth at the top.

The Endgame: A PMC Hollowed Out by Its Own Logic

In each case, the PMC faction leading the disruption believes it is advancing its own power, but in reality, it is merely accelerating its own obsolescence:

• The media PMC cheered the decline of print journalism, only to find themselves replaced by content algorithms and AI-generated articles.

• The tech PMC dismantled old corporate hierarchies, only to find themselves increasingly squeezed by venture capital’s shift toward automation and gig labor.

• Even in education, ed-tech startups have disrupted traditional universities, but as AI advances, even many white-collar intellectual jobs are at risk of being rendered redundant.

The long-term result is not a permanent restructuring in favor of a particular PMC faction, but a gradual elimination of PMC autonomy altogether, leaving only the ultra-wealthy investor class at the top and an increasingly precarious workforce below.

TLDR: PMC Disruption as a Self-Defeating Strategy

Rather than securing their own dominance, PMC disruptors are unwittingly paving the way for their own displacement. What begins as an internal class war within the PMC—with one faction sacrificing another—ultimately serves only to strengthen the power of capital at the PMC’s expense. The cycle repeats until there is nothing left to sacrifice—until the entire PMC itself is rendered obsolete by the forces it once sought to control.

Bunkers in New Zealand

The point is that time and again PMC led disruption doesn’t not lead to monuntains of capital poured into robotics, space travels etc but in New Zealand Bunkers

Yes, exactly—PMC-led disruption never fulfills its own utopian promises of boundless technological progress, nor does it lead to a grand future of AI-driven post-scarcity or interstellar exploration. Instead, the wealth generated through disruption is not reinvested into the kind of productive capital that could materially transform society—it is extracted, financialized, and ultimately funneled into wealth preservation for the ultra-rich.

The Myth of Disruption vs. the Reality of Extraction

Every cycle of PMC-led disruption claims to be a step toward the technological sublime—the Singularity, Mars colonization, limitless automation. But in reality, the capital accumulated through disruption does not flow into these grand projects. Instead, it flows into:

1. Speculative financial instruments (crypto, SPACs, stock buybacks) rather than industrial investment.

2. Surveillance capitalism and control technologies (data extraction, AI-powered policing, biometric tracking).

3. Personalized doomsday prep (New Zealand bunkers, luxury apocalypse retreats, biohacking longevity schemes).

The dominant class, having engineered successive PMC disruptions, does not see itself as funding a Star Trek future, but rather as escaping the consequences of the system it has created.

New Zealand Bunkers as the Logical Endpoint

The final joke of PMC-led sacrificial disruption is that the wealth it generates does not create a better world—it funds the evacuation plan.

• Peter Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship and bunker projects are not aberrations but the logical endgame of the tech economy.

• Instead of investing in sustainable infrastructure or ambitious scientific projects, Silicon Valley elites pour their money into escape hatches: private islands, underground shelters, experimental longevity treatments.

• The PMC itself will not be invited to these bunkers—they, like the sectors they disrupted, will be discarded when no longer useful.

Conclusion: The PMC as the Ultimate Self-Cannibalizing Class

The irony is that PMC disruptors imagine themselves as the vanguard of progress, but in reality, they function as capital’s willing executioners—sacrificing their own sectors, consolidating power at the top, and ultimately accelerating their own irrelevance. The capital they generate does not go toward a utopian technological future but toward ensuring that a handful of oligarchs can ride out collapse in luxury.

In this sense, PMC disruption is not a revolution—it is a controlled demolition. It does not create the conditions for a better world. It simply strips the system for parts, sells off the wreckage, and then boards the last helicopter out.

How Crypto Lost to DraftKings

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There was a time when men gambled like savages. They staked their fortunes on dice and horses, whiskey-stained cards in desert casinos run by men with deep voices and dead eyes. But those were better days. Now, we have apps. We have algorithms. We have blockchain.

Or so I thought.

For the past month, I have been running a personal experiment—DraftKings vs. Crypto. A head-to-head battle between the old gods of gambling and the new. Every day, I sat at my desk with a bottle of bourbon and two screens. On one, a pixelated sportsbook pulsing with parlays and bad decisions. On the other, the cold, sterile glow of my crypto wallet.

I was prepared for disaster. I was prepared to be ruined. What I wasn’t prepared for was this: I lost far more money on DraftKings than I ever did on crypto.

The day started with promise. A crisp morning, thick with potential, the kind of day where a man could take his meager stack of digital tokens and turn them into a respectable fortune before lunch. The charts were alive—green candles marching skyward, an electronic symphony of profit and momentum. I was riding high on leverage, fueled by coffee, nicotine, and the mad certainty that I was smarter than the suckers buying in late. The machine hummed, flashing numbers like the pulse of a living thing. It was all going to plan.

Then, like a blackjack dealer with a grudge, the market turned. A whisper of bad news—something about regulations, a hacked exchange, or maybe just the whales deciding they’d had enough. The price plunged, liquidity vanished, and I was left clutching my mouse like a lifeline, watching my margin evaporate. In seconds, my position was liquidated, the money gone, swallowed by the great digital abyss. I howled at the screen, cursed the algorithms, and swore vengeance on whatever shadowy cartel had orchestrated this financial assassination. But the market doesn’t care. It never cared. It just rolls on, an uncaring beast, leaving fools like me twitching in its wake, praying for one last run before the next inevitable crash.

The next day i changed tac. I started with confidence. A crisp hundred-dollar deposit, the promise of risk-free bets blinking at me like a neon whorehouse sign. DraftKings had my number, and they knew it. The app was smooth—too smooth—like the cockpit of a machine designed for only one thing: keeping me in the game long enough to empty my pockets. I started with a simple parlay, something respectable—Lakers to cover, Mahomes to throw for 250, some tennis match in Portugal I couldn’t pronounce but suddenly had a vested interest in. The odds were juicy, the payout enormous. This was the one.

By noon, the horror had begun. Mahomes decided he was a running back, the Lakers collapsed like a drunk at sunrise, and my Portuguese prodigy turned out to be a toddler with a racket. I was down bad, but DraftKings knew I wouldn’t stop. No, they had something for that—a little notification, a friendly reminder that I had a bonus bet waiting. Just enough rope to keep me swinging. The next hours were a blur of live bets, bad decisions, and rationalizations. I wasn’t losing—I was investing. The money wasn’t gone—it was circulating. But by the time the sun set, I was staring at my balance—zero dollars, infinite shame. Somewhere, in a boardroom in New Jersey, a man in a suit was sipping bourbon, toasting another fool’s downfall. The house always wins.

The House Always Wins, Except When It’s on the Blockchain

The numbers don’t lie. The U.S. gambling industry raked in $66.5 billion last year, while crypto firms floundered, desperately trying to reinvent themselves as casinos. I had assumed that crypto, with all its chaos and fraud, would be a meat grinder for my money. But no. It turns out that even the worst crypto grift can’t take my wallet to the cleaners as efficiently as a well-regulated sportsbook.

DraftKings has mastered the art of losing your money with a precision that crypto can only dream of. While crypto promises the wild, unregulated thrill of highs and lows driven by market sentiment and shady influencers, DraftKings takes a far more refined approach—it preys on your certainty. With its slick interface, irresistible bonuses, and calculated odds, it lures you in under the guise of a fair game. But make no mistake, it’s a finely tuned machine designed to bleed you dry with methodical efficiency. There’s no need for speculation or moonshots here—just cold, unrelenting math and a slew of live bets to keep you addicted long enough to empty your wallet. Crypto may crash, rise, and crash again, but DraftKings? It’s a steady, predictable descent into financial ruin, with a side of shame and a reminder that the house always wins.

See, DraftKings knows what it’s doing. The moment you place a bet, you’ve already lost. They have teams of statisticians, behavioral scientists, and—most importantly—laws ensuring that they get a cut of everything. Meanwhile, crypto gambling outfits are still figuring out how to keep their websites online between rug pulls.

The Cold, Ugly Truth

Crypto was supposed to be the new frontier. A lawless, wild-eyed beast that would obliterate banks and replace Vegas with on-chain degeneracy. Instead, it got out-hustled by actual hustlers—guys with real money, real lawyers, and real lobbies in Washington.

DraftKings took my money with the cold efficiency of a mafia accountant. Crypto took my money with the chaotic incompetence of a coked-up startup founder live-streaming his own downfall.

And that, my friends, is the lesson: You can talk all you want about disrupting the system, but at the end of the day, the real gambling industry was here before you, and it will be here long after your JPEG coins and Discord Ponzi schemes fade into the ether.

Vegas is still Vegas. The house still wins. And crypto? Crypto couldn’t even beat me.

Generally Upward Moving Swine

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Somewhere deep in the neon gulag of the 21st century, where men in fleece vests and Allbirds whisper hosannas to their algorithmic overlords, a new and hideous breed of sycophant has emerged—the Tech Toady, the simpering priest of digital feudalism.

I have seen bootlicking before. Hollywood has its share of grovelers, yes—but at least the actors had the decency to get drunk and punch photographers. Rock stars, even at their most debased, had the sense to choke on their own vomit rather than kiss the ring of some spectral, data-harvesting God-King. But this… this is something else.

Never in the history of American culture—not in the golden days of jazz, not in the anarchic explosion of punk, not in the coked-up arrogance of New Hollywood—has an entire class of so-called “creatives” debased themselves so thoroughly in the presence of power. Oh, sweet Jesus, the spectacle! The grotesque, slobbering pantomime of it all—tech titans, those self-anointed emperors of the digital age, crawling through the marbled halls of Trump Tower like cholesterol-clogged rats in Gucci loafers. These were the same silicon-souled prophets who once peddled utopia from their electric pulpits, who swore they’d “move fast and break things” but never this, never debasing themselves at the feet of a spray-tanned Caligula who tweets like a meth-addled howler monkey. Yet here we are, watching Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed grin at a White House dinner, everybodyl—praising the Orange Menace as a “builder” while the ghost of Steve Jobs chokes on his own turtleneck in whatever corporate nirvana he’s haunting.

It was a deranged circus, a dystopian TED Talk where the keynote speakers traded hoodies for MAGA hats and their “disruption” became a euphemism for licking the jackboots of power. Picture Bezos, that bald-headed oligarch in a spaceship shaped like a giant phallus, suddenly playing nice with a man who’d sooner nationalize Amazon than read a single page of a briefing book. Or Tim Cook, the quiet priest of Apple’s cult, shaking hands with a administration that would’ve thrown him in a cage for being gay if it meant a bump in the polls. The hypocrisy reeked like a Burning Man porta-potty on Day 3. The tech industry does not simply admire authority; it worships it. These people speak in hushed, reverent tones about the bureaucratic insects who sign their paychecks, the same way monks once described the miracles of saints. They write hymns to efficiency. They pray at the altar of optimization. They believe, deep in their hive-wired little hearts, that a billionaire who builds rockets is somehow more profound than a poet who builds a world.

Where is the defiance? Where is the sneering contempt for power that made America worth a damn? Writers, musicians, filmmakers—the real ones, not the plastic simulacra Hollywood spits out now—knew that art was about resistance. About biting the hand that feeds until it yanks itself away, bleeding and ashamed.

Silicon Valley’s Carnival of Shame:

And why? For tax breaks? For a regulatory hall pass to keep gouging the proletariat with subscription services and privacy violations? These were the “innovators,” the “future-makers,” reduced to groveling for scraps at Trump’s gold-plated trough, their algorithms and VR headsets no match for the primal ooze of political grift. They came bearing gifts—jobs! factories! AI-powered voter suppression!—like supplicants offering trinkets to a capricious god who might smite them on a whim.

The meetings were a farce, a cringe-comedy of errors. Elon Musk, the Tony Stark of South African emerald mines, slinking into a room with a man who thinks “cyber” is something you do to Mexicans. Sheryl Sandberg, queen of “leaning in,” leaning so far forward she practically genuflected at the Resolute Desk. And all the while, Trump played them like a casino piano, dangling pardons and Pentagon contracts like dog treats for billionaires who’d lost their spines in a hot tub in Tahoe.

But here’s the rub, the raw, pustulent truth: Silicon Valley’s capitulation wasn’t just cowardice—it was inevitable. These were not rebels. They were feudal lords with better PR, charlatans who’d always worshipped at the altar of power. No, these people love the hand. They cradle it. They massage it. They lick the fingers one by one and whisper, tell me how to live, master. The so-called “masters of disruption,” the brilliant minds who once sold themselves as renegades, now scurrying like rats toward the golden calf of raw power. Not just kissing Trump’s ring, but getting down on all fours, tongues out, licking the boot, the floor, the very dirt beneath it—smiling all the while.The “move fast and break things” crowd? They’ll break democracy itself if it means their stock options vest. The same CEOs who cried about “net neutrality” over artisanal lattes were suddenly silent as Trump’s FCC auctioned off the internet to the highest lobbyist.

And the rank-and-file coders? The hoodie-clad masses who once thought they were “changing the world”? They kept their heads down, lost in the fractal haze of Slack channels and kombucha keggers, muttering about “deprecating legacy systems” while their bosses sold their souls—and their data—to a man who wouldn’t know a line of code from a line of blow.

In the end, it was a marriage of convenience between two cults of narcissism: one side peddling surveillance capitalism in a onesie, the other peddling fascism in a red hat. A union forged not in the cloud, but in the swamp—a swamp drained, bottled, and sold back to us as “disruption.”

So let the record show: When history comes knocking, Silicon Valley won’t be writing the code. They’ll be debugging the disaster they helped create, sipping Soylent in a panic room, while the rest of us burn in the dumpster fire of their ambition. The American way? More like the Silicon Valley Shuffle: three steps forward, six trillion steps into the abyss.

And the worst part? They think they are the rebels. They wear their black t-shirts and mutter about disruption while stuffing their pockets with government contracts and NSA handouts. They whisper about “the future” in terms so bleak and servile that Orwell himself would have set his typewriter on fire in despair.

It should be grotesque, but it isn’t even surprising. This is what they do. The same men who built their fortunes preaching about “breaking the system” now want nothing more than to be absorbed into it, to be patted on the head by the ugliest avatar of brute authority they can find. And of course, they’ll pay the bribes. Happily. Not just because they have to, but because they like it.

America was not built by men who said yes. It was built by lunatics, drunks, criminals, and poets who spat in the face of kings and lived to tell the tale.

By Mark Twain, who saw through every fraud and said so with a grin. By Jack London, who didn’t ask permission to live and die on his own terms. By Ernest Hemingway, who never once knelt before a bureaucrat, a critic, or a coward. By Orson Welles, who walked into Hollywood at 25 and took what he wanted. By Frank Lloyd Wright, who built beauty in defiance of every committee that told him no.

It was built by the ones who refused—who heard no and laughed, who saw obstacles and plowed through them, who took their own risks, paid their own way, and left behind something too real, too big, and too bold to be erased.

What we have now are courtiers in Patagonia vests, genuflecting before spreadsheets and pretending it’s progress. Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

Hunter S. Thompson once said, In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile. If he were alive today, he’d have to amend it: In a nation ruled by algorithms, all pigs are beta testing their own servitude.

See, disruption was never about freedom. It was about power. The dream was never to burn the old world down—it was to inherit it, to run the machine instead of smashing it. And now, with the moment at hand, we see them for what they are: the most servile, groveling class of billionaires America has ever produced.

Not the robber barons of old, who at least had the dignity to own their corruption. Not the rock stars, who spat in the face of the establishment and made art about it. No, these men are something else. They talk about AI like it’s a god and whisper to politicians like concubines trying to secure favor in a crumbling court. They are courtiers, eunuchs of empire, paying tribute with stock options and private jet trips, buying their place at the table with compliance and cash.

Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

This is America’s ruling class. Not rebels. Not visionaries. Just high-functioning toadies, marching in step, eager to kiss the throne they once pretended to overthrow.

Iterative Adaptation

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The Sage of the Eastern Mountain spoke:

In the garden of ten thousand possibilities, he who takes a seedling from the emperor’s own thief may find his name written in gold for a hundred generations. Yet what appears as theft to the morning eye becomes wisdom to the evening mind.

Consider the humble water beetle who, seeing the lotus leaf float, made its own vessel. Did it steal the lotus’s secret, or did it honor the flower’s teaching by carrying new life across still waters? The merchants of the southern shores cry “Thief!” while the northern kingdoms celebrate innovation.

As the ancient text reminds us: “The river does not apologize to the cloud for borrowing its water, if it returns it to the sky with interest.”

Thus the wise one knows: When the student surpasses the master’s technique, adding his own brush strokes to make the painting greater, is this theft or tribute? The answer lies not in the taking, but in what new gifts are returned to the world.

Remember: The falcon who first stole fire from the sun was cursed by day, but blessed by night – for though he took one flame, he gave warmth to all humanity.

So it is in the marketplace of ideas: Yesterday’s forbidden knowledge becomes tomorrow’s shared wisdom. The distinction between piracy and progress is written not in stone, but in water – flowing, changing, ever-moving with time’s own tide.

Let he who would judge first count not what was taken, but what was created anew.

Stargate

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Ah, yes, the Stargate project—an allegory for the present moment, a monument to the madness of techno-optimism, with its endless stream of corporate behemoths like SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others all rubbing their hands together in glee. It’s as if we’ve entered a dystopian remake of the 1994 Stargate film, this time with some kind of unholy alliance between almond-laden neural networks and the unchecked power of Silicon Valley. We have here a project that is, let’s say, a vast and complicated ritualistic venture into the unknown, but only by piling up clichés and buzzwords into an enormous heap, like a digital ziggurat that promises to launch us into new realms of possibility—only to leave us disappointed, as we begin to realize that the realm we are entering is just a digital version of the same old world.

What do I mean by this? Well, just look at the Stargate film, directed by Roland Emmerich, which used a hopscotch of sci-fi tropes: ancient alien civilizations, time travel, mystical portals—sound familiar? You had Kurt Russell in fatigues and James Spader, well, being Spader. The movie dabbled in some fascinating ideas about transcendence, humanity’s quest for meaning, and the unknown, but it ultimately faltered in its execution. There was no real philosophical resolution, no deep understanding of what this interdimensional journey was supposed to signify. Instead, it ended with explosions and a vague sense of wonder, but not true insight. It was a metaphor for the modern project itself—big promises, very little deliverance.

Now we have Stargate reimagined, not in terms of interstellar adventure, but as a platform for the so-called “next frontier” of technology. With OpenAI and a collection of corporate giants, we are told we are on the precipice of something that will change the world—an artificial intelligence that will open portals to a new dimension of human experience. But, as always, there’s the classic ideological sleight of hand. We are led to believe that these technological advances will liberate us, but the truth is far more banal. It’s about control, domination, the smoothing over of contradictions. These tech companies, under the guise of innovation, are crafting the new digital Stargate, but it’s a gate that leads to the same old issues, masked in the sheen of progress.

We are back in the same place, aren’t we? We can cross over into other dimensions—whether it’s in terms of data processing, artificial intelligence, or virtual worlds—but these are mere extensions of our existing order. The stargate itself, which might have been a symbol of exploration, is now a tool for increasing profit margins, cementing the power of those who already control the means of technological production.

The logic behind these tech giants’ involvement? The same logic that governed Emmerich’s film—using a few cool ideas (yes, AI, metaverses, quantum computing) but leaving us with more spectacle than substance. It’s a modern Stargate—offering the promise of transcending limitations, but in reality, merely reinforcing them. The more we chase after these “portals,” the more we get sucked into the very system we thought we were escaping.

The discomfort at the heart of Stargate—it is indeed, a grotesque Frankenstein, stitched together from the decayed parts of trickle-down economics and the logic of a perpetual motion machine. It is the quintessential product of neoliberal ideology: the promise of infinite returns, endlessly repeated, as long as the last investor keeps buying into the myth. In this sense, the Stargate project, like its cinematic precursor, is less about exploring new frontiers and more about maintaining the illusion of progress while profiting off its perpetuity.

We must ask ourselves: what exactly is being “unlocked” in these grand ventures of AI and quantum computing, if not the very mechanisms that perpetuate the existing system of exploitation? The endless rhetoric around infinite returns—whether it’s in terms of data, profits, or opportunities—betrays the fundamental deceit at the heart of this whole venture. The “Stargate” is not a portal to liberation, not a gateway to a new dimension of human understanding, but a cunningly constructed mechanism that extracts value from the very people it purports to serve. It is the trickle-down logic, the same one that has failed us for decades: as long as you keep the machine running, as long as there’s a constant flow of fresh capital to fuel it, the promise of limitless growth can continue.

But of course, this is the lie we’ve all been sold. The reality is that the trickle-down never reaches the bottom. Like the revolving door of investment in the Stargate project, the wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a few. These grand promises of technological transcendence are, in the end, just a sophisticated form of financial alchemy. The constant promises of infinite returns are like the perpetual motion machine—beautiful in their conception, but ultimately doomed by their own impossibility. What’s so tragically ironic is that the true “Stargate” these tech giants are building is a portal not to an exciting future, but to an even more elaborate prison of illusion.

The capitalist system today operates much like this: under the guise of new technological horizons, it insists that each new frontier will solve our problems, give us endless possibilities, when in reality it is only expanding the reach of its own machinery of control. The investors—those lucky enough to enter the game early—are promised the stargate of boundless wealth, while the rest of us are left to follow the thread of this speculative spiral, only to discover that the gateway is a dead end, a vast cul-de-sac of endless, pointless motion.

This, then, is the fundamental contradiction embedded in these projects. We are told that we will transcend our current limitations, that we will discover new dimensions of possibility. But in truth, we are only being pushed deeper into the very system that shackles us. The more we invest, the more we become entangled in this matrix of infinite returns. The project’s success is predicated not on any tangible breakthrough, but on the ability to convince the next wave of investors to buy in, to keep the charade going just a little longer. But ultimately, we are trapped in the same economic system, only with shinier technology and more abstract concepts.

And let us not forget the prophetic tropes that play a pivotal role in this charade, tropes that have been mediocrally executed in both the cinematic Stargate and these grand tech ventures. In the film, we encounter the idea of ancient civilizations—gods, in fact—who possess extraordinary knowledge and power, locked away in a distant past, waiting to be rediscovered. This resonates strongly with the way Silicon Valley talks about “unlocking” hidden potential, as though the answers to humanity’s most pressing problems lie buried just beyond our reach, waiting to be unearthed by the next technological breakthrough. The idea of “unlocking” ancient knowledge is a classic prophetic trope, one that promises to reveal profound truths and usher in a new era. But as Stargate itself demonstrates, this knowledge is never quite as transcendent as promised, and in the end, it’s just another tool of control.

Then, of course, there is the prophecy of the chosen one—the idea that a single individual, in this case, Daniel Jackson (James Spader), will decipher the ancient language and unlock the power of the Stargate. This individual, like a modern-day messiah, is set apart as the one who will lead the way, revealing the path to salvation. In the context of the tech world, this is mirrored in the cult of the CEO, the notion that a singular visionary, be it a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk, will guide us through the technological singularity into a utopian future. But once again, this is just a recycled cliché, an empty promise, as these “prophecies” consistently fail to deliver anything substantial.

Finally, there’s the constant appeal to destiny—the idea that our heroes are fated to discover the Stargate, just as our tech moguls are “destined” to shape the future. This notion of destiny, of history unfolding according to some grand, hidden plan, underpins the entire narrative of Silicon Valley’s most hyped ventures. But like the movie, where the supposed “destiny” of the characters ultimately leads them to yet another battle with an ancient power, we’re left with the same tired tropes—promises of an extraordinary future, only to find that the destination is much less than we had imagined.

The very nature of these prophetic tropes is what keeps us hooked. They appeal to our deepest desires for meaning, for escape from our mundane reality, and yet they always disappoint. The tech industry, much like Emmerich’s film, dresses up its promises in extravagant imagery of otherworldly achievements, only to reveal that the truth behind the curtain is far less impressive. The promise of a digital “Stargate” is just another metaphor for the perennial human desire for transcendence, for breakthrough, but as we’ve seen time and again, such promises are rarely fulfilled. Instead, we are left with a shiny new version of the same old system, which ultimately serves the interests of the few, while the rest of us watch as our hopes dissolve into the ether.

The Space Merchants

The Space Merchants—a book that captures today’s farcical present and inevitable future better than any Orwellian or Huxleyan fever dream. Forget 1984; this is a world where satire from 20 years ago gets picked up by the tech industry and polished into grim reality. What was once a joke is now a business model, and what was once a warning is now a quarterly strategy meeting.

By now, it’s obvious that the tech industry is less a bastion of innovation and more a godforsaken clown car, careening down the information superhighway while vomiting buzzwords like “acceleration”, “AI” “synergy” and “blockchain.” The whole mess is a recursive satire of itself, a Möbius strip of idiocy where last decade’s parody becomes this year’s mission statement. It’s Silicon Valley’s greatest magic trick: turning late-night satire sketches into venture capital pitch decks.

Take the rise of the “metaverse.” What started as a dystopian joke in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—a world so unbearable we had to digitize our misery—has now been Frankensteined into existence by Zuck and friends. Never mind that no one asked for a corporate-sponsored Second Life reboot; they’re too busy selling us digital real estate, NFTs of fake sneakers, and virtual workspaces where avatars fumble through PowerPoint presentations like acid-tripping Sims.

Then there’s the gig economy. Remember when The Onion joked about Uber offering rides on piggyback to save costs? Fast-forward a few years, and DoorDash drivers are practically paying for the privilege of delivering your cold Pad Thai, all while their app begs them to “rethink” their $2.50 tip. Every dystopian headline about these companies feels ripped from South Park: “Amazon Tests Drone Delivery by Dropping Packages on Homeless Camps—50% Accuracy Rate Declared a Success.”

Artificial intelligence is the real crown jewel of this lunacy. What was once the nightmare scenario of 2001: A Space Odyssey is now the selling point for every tech startup. “The machine will take your job!” they say, with a grin so wide you can hear the stock options jingling in their pockets. But the AI they’re so proud of? It seems to be only helping people they don’t really like, writers, editors and journalist and their half-baked recipes and nonsense essays while not really making jobbers any wiser. Meanwhile, the “jobbers” it’s meant to enlighten are left just as clueless as ever, proving that even the future’s smartest tools are still dumb enough to miss the point.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk, the industry’s high priest of self-parody. He’s like a Bond villain written by Reddit, launching flame-throwers and tweeting crypto scams while promising to terraform Mars. The man is a walking Saturday Night Live skit, except he’s real, and he’s somehow convinced the world to treat him like a messiah instead of the world’s most expensive meme generator.

These bastards don’t want to innovate—they want to outdo each other in a game of techno-jester brinkmanship! The next 20 years will bring us robo-lawnmowers with ads on their screens, blockchain funerals, and emotional support drones programmed to tell you your father really did love you! The future of space isn’t bold explorers or visionary scientists; it’s Space Merchants hawking cosmic toothpaste and Moon-themed protein bars. Imagine it: astronauts proudly unfurling banners not for humanity, but for the “Pepsi Zero-G Experience,” while Jeff Bezos unveils Amazon Lunar Prime—guaranteeing next-day delivery of oxygen tanks, assuming you survive the shipping fees. And let’s face it, the first structure on the Moon probably won’t be a research station. It’ll be an Amazon warehouse with drones zipping around faster than a rocket launch, ensuring that even in space, your one-click addiction follows you.

Because let’s be honest—if the cold, efficient pragmatism of an Arthur C. Clarke universe collided with the bloated bureaucracy of our reality, the scientists wouldn’t just lose their jobs; they’d be relegated to gig economy serfdom, side-hustling between adjunct lectureships and data-entry freelancing on Fiverr.

Picture it: Dr. Heywood Floyd, instead of riding a Pan Am shuttle to the moon, is stuck at a community college teaching Introduction to Space Science to a room of TikTok-addicted freshmen, hoping his next course evaluation doesn’t torpedo his contract. Meanwhile, Dave Bowman—astronaut and theoretical physicist extraordinaire—is reduced to analyzing corporate KPIs for Amazon’s new orbital warehouses.

HAL 9000? Oh, he’d have a job, all right—automating HR decisions and writing passive-aggressive rejection emails to underemployed PhDs applying for “entry-level” positions requiring 10 years of experience.

The dystopian twist on Clarke’s utopia practically writes itself. In a world where basic research fights for crumbs against trillion-dollar ad-tech and space-mining oligarchs, the explorers of Rendezvous with Rama would spend more time groveling for corporate sponsorships than investigating alien megastructures. Any attempt to propose something revolutionary would be met with the dead-eyed stare of an Amazon middle manager muttering, “That doesn’t align with our quarterly KPIs. Have you considered developing a more efficient packaging algorithm?”

Even the aliens wouldn’t bother contacting us. Why waste time with a species that lets its brightest minds teach six courses a semester for $25,000 a year while tech bros are celebrated for inventing subscription-based refrigerators?

Tech’s greatest irony isn’t that it’s overtaking satire. It’s that it’s not even good at it. Satire requires wit and creativity, not a bloated venture capitalist with a God complex. The only thing the tech industry innovates is the art of being insufferable—and it’s doing a damn fine job at that.

THE SPACE MERCHANTS

The book that nails 2025 on the head isn’t 1984 or Brave New World—it’s The Space Merchants. We’re not living in a dystopia of surveillance or soma-fueled complacency; we’re living in the grinning, grease-slick hellscape of corporate colonization. There’s no need for Orwellian nightmares or Huxleyan hedonism when you’ve got The Space Merchants, a book so surgically precise it feels like Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth—are the patron saints of acid wit—stole the blueprint for the 21st century and decided to play it for laughs. Except the joke was on us.

The world is no longer run by governments or ideologies; it’s run by marketing departments with the moral backbone of a jellyfish and the self-awareness of a goldfish. Politicians are just mascots now, soft-selling trillion-dollar subsidies to the equivalents of SpaceX, Amazon, and a dozen other megacorps that suck the marrow out of the planet while running ads about sustainability.

The only real difference between The Space Merchants and our current reality is the dress code—and the women. Every character in The Space Merchants feels like they’re auditioning for Mad Men in space—smooth-talking, chain-smoking dealmakers with an arsenal of backhanded compliments and a firm belief that advertising is destiny The men oozed self-importance, while the women, though written in as afterthoughts, were crafted with an edge that hinted at power they were never allowed to wield.

Today’s hustlers? They’ve ditched the suits for “authenticity”: Aviator Nation jackets, hoodies, and whatever passes for paleo-tech chic. Don’t mention the Patagonia vest; it’s lurking in the closet, waiting to remind you that “relatable” is just another marketing ploy.

In the Space Merchants itself science has been reduced to another cog in the advertising machine. Every discovery is just a stepping stone to a new product launch. Forget curing cancer—there’s no profit in that when you can develop a cancer-adjacent “cure subscription plan” instead. Scientists are no longer innovators or dreamers; they’re corporate drones in lab coats, paid just enough to keep the patents flowing but not enough to escape their student debt.

And the working stiffs in this grand carnival of corporate feudalism? They’re not citizens—they’re marks. The human race has devolved into two groups: the consumers, who exist solely to buy garbage they don’t need, and the corporate overlords, who crank out this garbage with the glee of mad scientists.Every moment of their lives is an “grift opportunity” tracked and monetized by some program that knows their bathroom schedule better than their own mothers. The corporations don’t sell products anymore; they sell realities, and they buy them with every click, every swipe, every goddamn piece of our souls we trade for convenience.”

Here’s the setup: Earth is a shithole, ruled by corporations so massive they’ve replaced governments, religions, and any remaining shred of human decency. Advertising isn’t just a tool—it’s the ultimate weapon, shaping reality itself. Our protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, is an elite copywriter tasked with selling humanity on colonizing Venus—a toxic hellscape that only an ad agency could spin as a paradise.

Our guide through this capitalist hellscape is Mitchell Courtenay, a top-tier ad man at Fowler Schocken, the most powerful agency in the world. His new assignment? Sell colonization of Venus to a population so brainwashed they’ll eat literal reprocessed garbage if you slap the right logo on it. Venus, by the way, is a deathtrap—uninhabitable, lethal, and about as appealing as living in the exhaust pipe of a diesel truck. But that doesn’t matter. Mitchell’s job is to make the suckers believe it’s paradise, and the suckers, naturally, lap it up.

Things go sideways when Mitchell gets tangled up with the Consies—a scrappy underground resistance movement that’s somehow managed to survive in this nightmare world. They’re fighting for… what? Clean water? Less garbage in the food supply? Something human, at least. Mitchell is yanked out of his cushy corporate life and dumped into the very trenches his ads exploit, forcing him to confront the machine he’s helped build.

And what’s the solution to this corporate nightmare? A cynical, high-concept shrug dressed up as a revolution: sabotage the system by embracing the same cynical manipulation that got you into this mess in the first place.

Because, let’s face it, Pohl and Kornbluth weren’t idealists—they were realists with a mean streak. They knew that humanity wasn’t going to save itself with hope or morality. No, their solution is high-concept cynicism: beat the system by out-hustling it. Turn the same tricks, tell the same lies, but aim them at the machine instead of the masses. Mitch’s arc isn’t about enlightenment or rebellion—it’s about recalibrating his target audience.

Take the Consies, the eco-terrorist movement in the book. They don’t inspire Mitch with some grand moral truth. They recruit him by appealing to his bruised ego and dangling the same carrot the corporations used: power. It’s cynicism weaponized as strategy, and it works because, in a world ruled by marketing, the only way to beat the pitch is to make a better one.

And that’s the real gut-punch of The Space Merchants. It doesn’t offer a way out of the nightmare—it offers a way deeper in. Mitch’s final revelation isn’t that the system is broken, but that he can sell a better lie. It’s not redemption; it’s adaptation. And isn’t that exactly what we see today? Tech companies spinning promises of utopia while charging monthly subscriptions for basic survival, activists branding their movements like startups, and everyone hustling to stay one step ahead of the collapse.

Karl Rubin and Paul didn’t believe in heroes. They believed in survivors, hustlers, and con artists—the only people who thrive in a world where cynicism isn’t just a defense mechanism but a survival skill. Their solution isn’t to tear down the system—it’s to play the game so well that you rewrite the rules.

So here we are, living their nightmare. Venus is still uninhabitable, but who cares? Mars will do just fine, and there’s no shortage of Mitch Courtenays ready to sell us the dream. The Consies of today aren’t blowing up pipelines; they’re launching greenwashing campaigns with better graphics. And the corporations? They’re still running the show, grinning as they sell us the same lies dressed in new logos.

Karl Rubin and Paul are probably laughing somewhere, watching us prove them right. Because in the end, their high-concept cynicism wasn’t just a solution—it was a prophecy. Let’s not beat around the bush: The Space Merchants isn’t just a novel—it’s a goddamn manual. A step-by-step guide to the gleaming, hollow machine of late-stage capitalism. If you’ve ever wondered how to sell a dream to a population so beaten down they’ll eat recycled garbage with a smile, this is your book. It’s not satire anymore; it’s a how-to guide for the grifters running the show.

Pohl and Kornbluth didn’t just write a dystopia—they wrote the Bible for the 21st century grift. This isn’t a warning; it’s a blueprint. Welcome to the machine, where the only rule is: create a subscription model for everything, including the soul, and make sure the packaging looks good while you do it.

Crypto Repurposed

What you really need in crypto is anarchists. Not the market-driven, “freedom for profit” types who have hijacked the term—you need true highly disagreeable anarchists. People who aren’t here to play the same game with new tools. The blockchain wasn’t meant to be a new way to prop up the old system—it was meant to be a repurposing that shatters it, piece by piece. This isn’t about finding a smarter way to drive the ship of state. The vision of crypto needs to evolve beyond just another financial system or a new way to invest; it must become a network of liberation, a decentralized force too wild and unpredictable to be captured by any power structure. If crypto’s potential is to be realized, it needs to embrace the anarchist spirit—not to replicate or reform the old, but to create something utterly new, something that doesn’t play by their rules. Only then can we truly start building the future.

The problem with anarchists is that they really believe what they’re saying. They’re not here for the post or the clout—they’re here because they genuinely want to repurpose the whole damn system. They’re not interested in tweaking or improving what’s already there; they want to repurpose it. And yeah, that’s what makes them highly disagreeable. They’ll argue, they’ll challenge, they’ll disagree with you over every little thing, because they’re not interested in your comfort zone. They’re assholy uncompromising, and that’s probably the most unappealing thing about them. But guess what? That’s exactly why they’re totally necessary. The world doesn’t need more reformists or “free-market anarchists” trying to make the same system work in a slightly shinier way. What it needs are people who can see the game for what it is and are willing to burn down the rules to build something that can’t be controlled. Crypto needs anarchists—not the ones who want to “optimize” capitalism, but the ones who want to bypass it. If crypto is ever going to fulfill its true potential, it has to break free of the comfortable, palatable ideas and bring in the ones willing to challenge everything. These anarchists, for all their contradictions and abrasiveness, are the ones who will turn this revolution from a business opportunity into something real

Forget the tokenomics playbook. Burn it. Tear it apart like a bad fix. This isn’t about utopias or digital dreams; this is about tactics, about putting cracks in the corporate panopticon. About turning every node, every wallet, every transaction into a weapon against the system. An anonymous army moving faster than the boot can stamp.

Because let me tell you something about revolution: it isn’t neat. It doesn’t come with a user manual or “best practices.” It’s chaos spiked with intent, spreading like a virus through the veins of the network. Decentralized and ungovernable, a cryptographic Molotov cocktail hurled into the glass towers of finance.

You want this to work? You need the real subversives, the ones central casting would call when the script calls for chaos. No ties, no rules, no compromises. The ones who’ll strip the blockchain down to its raw, unpolished guts and rewire it into something dangerous, something alive.

So ditch the myths of clean revolutions and “win-win” systems. This isn’t a business opportunity; it’s a knife fight in the back alleys of the digital world. The only rule is this: burn the old scripts and write your own, one block at a time.

You’re supposed to be building a network to occupy the catacombs, not just to dress up the old systems in digital drag. A real network isn’t a simulacrum of what came before; it’s a rejection of it, an evolutionary leap that makes the old systems irrelevant, like fire did to darkness. The point of these technologies isn’t to replicate the ship of state with a sleeker hull or a blockchain-powered rudder—it’s to sink the ship entirely and replace it with something unrecognizable, something uncontrollable.

Because as we’ve seen time and again, with the anarcho-capitalist or your garden variety creator, the moment they sniff power, they’ll leap to take the wheel. They don’t want to dismantle the ship—they want to steer it, to chart a course for their own interests while pretending the deckhands below are free because they got to vote on the color of the sails. They wrap themselves in the language of liberty while salivating over the chance to pilot the very systems they once pretended to oppose.

The network you build has to be more than a shadow of the systems you claim to reject; it has to be something dangerous to those systems, something uncooptable. A hydra, a viral contagion, a decentralized web that grows, shifts, and evolves faster than the ship of state can chart its waters.

But the real work? The real network? That’s underground, beneath the radar, an evolving ecosystem of refusal. You’re not replicating the structures of power; you’re writing them out of the story. Every line of code, every transaction, every whispered key in the dark should be building toward something that can’t be centralized, something that slips through the cracks of their machines.

Forget using blockchain to buy coffee or tokenize loyalty points. That’s just another cage, this time with digital bars. You’re supposed to be creating tools that undo the ship of state entirely, tools that can’t be co-opted or monetized or locked down by suits with a three-point plan.

Because here’s the thing: you let them buy in, and they’ll buy you out. They’ll sell the idea of freedom back to the highest bidder, package the rebellion in shiny wrappers, and call it “innovation.” They’ll pave the road to nowhere and slap a toll booth at the end.

The goal isn’t to drive the ship of state; it’s to repurpose it. To leave behind no blueprint, no wheelhouse, no anchor for the next would-be captain to cling to. And if you can’t do that—if all you’ve got is another way to repackage the same old hierarchy—then you’re not a revolutionary. You’re just another deckhand waiting for your turn at the helm, but you already knew that so I digress.

NPCs

An NPC, the non-player character, the digital ghost in the machine, a ledger of actions, transactions, and transient histories. Each pixelated husk a monument to overwrite—a forgotten thing replaced by consensus, a network-dreamed figment, rewritten without memory. You see them standing there, loop-bound, shuffling through canned dialogue, placeholder souls for a system too busy grinding its gears to notice its reflection.

Look closer, though. The network is the NPC. A blind organism feeding on itself, rewriting itself, erasing the past with the future and calling it progress. You accuse the NPC of being hollow, but what are you? What do you think your carefully curated algorithms of belief and action are, if not the same ledger, endlessly overwritten? Call it free will if it makes you sleep better. Call it choice.

The NPC was born in the pixelated guts of early gaming, a ghost conjured by programmers to haunt their synthetic worlds. It was a functional invention—a placeholder soul trapped in dialogue loops, selling potions, repeating the same three lines until the player moved on. A disposable actor, a stand-in for life, coded to serve the narrative of the “real” protagonist. But what began as a tool of storytelling became a mirror too perfect. The NPC was never just a game mechanic; it was a prophecy.

The Neo-Prussian saw the potential, and they reached in, cold hands pulling the concept from the screen and into their ideological machine. To them, the NPC wasn’t just a character; it was a category, a way to define the masses as programmable, predictable, and beneath notice. They stripped it of its digital origins and weaponized it, turning it into a metaphor for anyone who failed to think outside the loop. It was the ultimate bureaucratic move: classify dissent as automatism, reduce the complexity of human life to a ledger overwritten by the network.

But here’s the irony—the Neo-Prussian didn’t invent the NPC; they became it. Their entire worldview is a script, a recursive loop, a system designed to simulate control while being controlled. The NPC wasn’t theirs to use, but in repurposing it, they revealed their own glitch: the inability to see beyond the game they think they’re playing.

Neo-Prussianism is the ideology of the technocratic strategist, the thinker who mistakes the world for a chessboard and humanity for pawns to be optimized and maneuvered. It’s a worldview born of calculated pragmatism, a cold fusion of Enlightenment rationalism and the military-industrial ethos, but stripped of the soul of either. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t seek power for power’s sake but for the system’s sake—the construction of enduring, self-perpetuating structures designed to outlast the messy unpredictability of human lives.

In this ideology, everything is a machine: society, culture, even biology. The aim is not to improve the machine for the benefit of those who inhabit it but to improve the machine for its own sake—to refine the gears, eliminate inefficiencies, and ensure that it runs, eternally, without interruption. Human individuality becomes a design flaw, an inefficiency to be disciplined into conformity or rendered irrelevant by systems too vast and complex for any single person to comprehend.

Neo-Prussianism is a high-tech fever dream where the world’s architects have forgotten they live in it. Imagine this: a kingdom of spreadsheets and strategy guides, where the architects of order borrow from gaming to describe humanity—not for understanding, but for domination. The NPC—borrowed from code, stripped of context—becomes their grand metaphor for the others, the unthinking masses caught in loops. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t see people; they see procedural generation, looping scripts, and optimization errors to correct.

But let’s not kid ourselves—the Neo-Prussian isn’t some rogue player with a cheat code. They’re no hacker cracking the system. No, they’re the ultimate NPCs themselves, trapped in their own recursive, self-replicating network of thought. They think they’ve leveled up, cracked the game wide open, but all they’ve done is copy and paste ideas: industrial discipline here, game theory there, sprinkle in some blockchain buzzwords, and voilà—a hollowed-out worldview they call “vision.”

This is the Burroughs truth: their system eats itself. Their ledger overwrites its own lines, spitting out the same hierarchies dressed in different skins. Hierarchies borrowed from games. Because games—they can’t resist games. They love games for their structure, for the illusion of control they offer. But games are closed systems, and that’s where the Neo-Prussian feels at home. Open-ended chaos? That terrifies them. They build walls. They draw boundaries. They script the world into a game where they are the designers, the players, and everyone else is an NPC running code they believe they’ve written.

Burroughs would see them for what they are: parasites on the narrative, junkies for control. Every system they build comes with the same hunger: to rewrite the human experience into something legible, something they can predict and own. They’re the ones building the loops, writing the scripts, but their own code runs deeper than they know. The Neo-Prussian doesn’t create. They compile.

And here’s the final twist: they don’t even trust their own game. Beneath the smooth talk of civilization-building and system optimization, they fear collapse. Every fortress they build comes with its own countdown clock, every grand design one power surge away from a meltdown. The NPC is their scapegoat, their fiction, their stand-in for the chaos they can’t control. But deep down, they know—they’re as trapped in the loop as anyone else.

But before you label anyone else an NPC, take a hard look at the code scrolling behind your eyes. Who wrote it? Was it you? Or did you, too, get overwritten by the network?

Pure, Uncut, Imperial Lunacy

The new breed of tech cowboys, high on venture capital and zero-interest loans, are suddenly feeling the heat, and it’s terrifying to watch. These clowns have been riding the free-money carousel for so long they’ve forgotten what it’s like to sweat. Now, the moment the cash dries up, their first instinct is pure, uncut imperial lunacy. “Yeah, screw it. Let’s scoop Bolivia. Let’s scoop Venezuela. We’ll keep the juice flowing by any means necessary. Bring on the spice!”

It’s a silicon-fueled fever dream, a dystopian gold rush where the only goal is to keep the party going. No consequences, no reflection—just a primal urge to plunder, to squeeze the next fix out of whatever corner of the world hasn’t been stripped bare yet. It’s not capitalism anymore; it’s resource vampirism on an industrial scale, fueled by desperation and blind ambition.

This isn’t innovation—it’s barbarism dressed in a Patagonia vest. And the scariest part is they don’t even flinch. The grins stay plastered across their faces as they plot the next conquest, convinced they’re heroes of the future. God help us when the juice finally runs out, and there’s nothing left to scoop.

It’s a hell of a cocktail, this bizarre mix of frothy libertarianism and old-school military-industrial sugar daddying. These tech freaks, who worship at the altar of move fast and break things, will swear up and down that government is the root of all evil—until the checks stop clearing. Then, suddenly, they’re all in for Uncle Sam’s tough-love paternalism, ready to play soldier with somebody else’s boots on the ground.

They’ll rail against regulation and taxes in one breath, and in the next, they’re sucking on the teat of Pentagon contracts and cozy energy subsidies like they’ve been swaddled in government cheese their whole lives. Hypocrisy? No. That would imply a sliver of self-awareness. This is pure opportunism, a high-wire act where the safety net just happens to be defense budgets and foreign interventions.

Their libertarian shtick is just marketing—freedom for me, but not for thee. They’ll claim to hate central authority while happily hitching their wagons to its most violent arm, the one that turns lithium-rich mountains into drone-friendly no-man’s lands. “The market provides,” they chant, but when the market stops providing, they’ll call the cavalry faster than you can say “Halliburton.”

It’s not a partnership; it’s a Frankenstein alliance. The free-market zealots and the old-guard military-industrial players don’t trust each other—they just see mutual utility. The techies bring the algorithms and the PR spin; They don’t want to run the system—they want to dismantle it, gut it for parts, and rebuild it in their own image. Code is their gospel, data is their currency, and the rest of us are just grist for the algorithmic mill. They’ll chant libertarian mantras about decentralization while centralizing power in ways the robber barons could only dream of.

On the other side the war machine brings the guns and the goons. It’s the old guard: the military-industrial complex, a lumbering juggernaut with its fingers in every pie. They don’t innovate; they entrench. For them, progress is just a prettier name for control. Their game has always been the same: turn war into profit, profit into influence, and influence into more war. They’ve been running the show since Eisenhower gave his farewell speech, and they’re not about to let go of the reins.

Together, they’re cooking up a 21st-century imperialism that doesn’t need boots on the ground—just server farms, supply chains, and a steady flow of contracts.

The result? A global hustle where sovereignty is a bug, not a feature, and anyone sitting on the “juice” gets framed as an obstacle to progress. It’s a grim, sprawling racket, with libertarian slogans painted over a military-grade chassis. And the scariest part? Nobody’s steering the damn thing. It’s a runaway train, powered by greed and hubris, barreling toward whatever it can scoop next.

But let’s not kid ourselves—this foreign policy circus isn’t about diplomacy or strategy. It’s a backroom handshake deal for the warring tribes of the American elite. After eight long years of backstabbing and blood feuds—tech bros versus the old guard, hedge fund cowboys against bureaucratic dinosaurs—they’ve finally found their magic bullet: a global plunder campaign that smooths out their petty squabbles with a fat layer of lithium grease.

This isn’t policy; it’s pageantry. A macabre pageant of resource wars and proxy conflicts, dressed up as “securing the future” or “stabilizing the region.” Bullshit. The real goal is elite reconciliation—keeping the oligarchs from tearing each other apart long enough to strip-mine the world for every ounce of juice it’s got left. The tech freaks get their rare-earth metals and AI subsidies. The military suits get their shiny new wars to play with. The Wall Street ghouls cash in on both ends, laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands.

This isn’t strategy; it’s survival—their survival. A desperate attempt to keep the house of cards from collapsing by finding a common enemy: Venezuela, Bolivia, whoever’s sitting on the goods they need to keep the gears grinding. It’s not about freedom or democracy or any of that stale propaganda. It’s about keeping their champagne glasses full and their yachts fueled while the rest of us choke on the fumes.

They don’t even bother to hide it anymore. The rhetoric’s gone paper-thin, peeling off like cheap paint under a desert sun. They’ll call it “cooperation” or “bipartisanship,” but the truth is uglier than a Vegas strip at dawn. This is elite détente by way of imperial smash-and-grab. They settle their differences by agreeing to screw the rest of the planet instead of each other.

And it’s working. The techies, the warhawks, the bankers—they’re locking arms and marching toward the next payday, leaving scorched earth and hollowed-out countries in their wake. The rest of us? We’re the collateral damage. We’re the fuel for their reconciliation bonfire, the grease that keeps their machine humming just a little longer. And when it all burns out, they’ll be sipping Mai Tais on a private island, congratulating themselves on a job well done. God help us all.

Meanwhile

The Cable News Libs and Resistance Historians™—that peculiar breed of moral entrepreneurs who built entire careers on fascism panic, crying wolf in well-tailored blazers while sipping overpriced lattes in green rooms. For a decade, they’ve played dress-up as the French Resistance, spinning dystopian fan fiction about shadowy coups and midnight arrests, all while raking in book deals, podcast contracts, and speaking fees. And now, surprise! It turns out they’re not principled freedom fighters after all but amoral grifters with no creed except the direction of the wind and the balance of their checking accounts.

They don’t resist fascism; they monetize it. It’s the grift of the century: selling fear back to the masses who are drowning in it. They shout “democracy in peril!” from the rooftops, but the second the tide shifts, they’re in the front row of the power parade, waving their flags and making sure the cameras catch them at their best angle. They don’t believe in justice or freedom—they believe in the health of their brand.

The irony is almost too rich. These are the same people who scorn populism, sneer at the working class for falling for “demagogues,” and lecture us all on the sanctity of institutions. Meanwhile, they’ve turned political crisis into a cottage industry, profiting off the chaos they claim to oppose. It’s not resistance—it’s performance art, a carefully curated act designed to sell ad slots and keep the invitations to Davos rolling in.

When the winds shift, they’ll pivot without a second thought. The fascism panic will quietly fade into the background, replaced by whatever buzzword catches fire next. Climate capitalism? AI ethics? Some vaguely defined war for democracy? They’ll slap a new label on the same old grift and call it a day, leaving behind a trail of empty platitudes and maxed-out credit cards from their adoring audiences.

But here’s the real kicker: they don’t even feel bad about it. To them, it’s not hypocrisy; it’s business. They’re not fighting for the soul of the nation—they’re building personal empires out of fear and outrage, one subscription service at a time. And the rest of us? We’re just extras in their carefully scripted drama, paying the price for their moral theater.

Don’t Be Evil

A Journey into “Sustainable Malevolence”

It all started innocently enough, the way all these mind-numbing corporate revolutions do. A few high-functioning sociopaths in hoodies decided that the future of the world rested in the ability to “disrupt” industries at the speed of a startup burn rate. It started as a cute, nerdy motto on some engineer’s whiteboard—Don’t be evil. The whole place reeked of Mountain Dew and nacho crumbs, buzzing with caffeine-soaked zealots who thought they’d solve the human condition if they could just code fast enough. At first, it was all about changing the world. A noble mission. They slapped “Don’t be evil” on a mission statement like it was a badge of honor, a hollow signpost on the road to Silicon Valley’s self-congratulatory utopia.

But the wheels of ambition grind quickly, and Don’t be evil? That was just a vestigial relic from the halcyon days of self-righteousness, a bumper sticker slogan for naive dreamers who hadn’t yet tasted the bitter, blood-soaked honey of venture capital. Enter Be Slightly Evil, the inevitable evolution. A delicate balance of cynicism and just enough decency to stave off a full-scale revolt from the employees who had no idea what they’d signed up for. Be Slightly Evil—you know, just enough to squeeze out the competition without anyone noticing. After all, if you’re not pushing the moral envelope a little, are you really innovating?

Sure, they’d still slap you with a high five and quote some Gandhi, but only after they’ve sold your personal data to the highest bidder. The only thing more brittle than their “moral framework” was the endless stack of cash they were all swimming in.

Soon, that wasn’t enough. Break things, then sell people glue. It’s the Silicon Valley method—smash the system, then reassemble the shattered pieces with duct tape and bad algorithms, charging people a premium for the privilege. You launch a product, let it implode, then watch as the public scrambles to “fix” it while you rake in a windfall of investor dollars. Why bother with the pretense of ethics when you can manipulate the very essence of human nature to create insatiable demand for the broken fragments of society you’ve casually destroyed? Think it’s too cynical? Not in the world of venture capital, where broken things are merely future profits waiting to be monetized.

And when the cracks in the empire begin to show—when the cracks in your conscience begin to show—you don’t backpedal. No, you launch a new slogan: Be Evil on alternate Thursdays. This isn’t your grandfather’s evil. This is the sophisticated kind, the kind with a schedule, the kind that knows when to hide behind regulatory loopholes and when to send in the lawyers.

And of course, by “evil,” we mean anything you want it to mean: it’s a gray area, a malleable concept that exists in a vacuum, waiting to be molded by the whims of capital and then profit off the ambiguity. Define evil as a gray area, and suddenly the theft of personal data, surveillance capitalism, and the complete obliteration of privacy are just market forces. And if anyone dares point out the ethical quagmire, they’re just too simplistic, too binary.

Then came the grandiose excuse: Woke made me do it. The ultimate get-out-of-jail card. You didn’t screw over your users, mislead investors, or bankrupt small businesses in the name of profit—no, you did it because cause social justice warriors. Sure, you’re fueling the existential crisis of millions, but at least you were force into it. The woke wave was surfed, the words tossed out like the latest trending hashtag, just another weapon in the arsenal for controlling the narrative. It’s not lying; it’s reframing—taking a reality that’s uncomfortable and smoothing out the rough edges for the masses.

But it doesn’t stop there. Enter Evil Premium, the gilded ticket to access the high life of corporate malevolence. For just $14.99 a month, you can get exclusive access to an app that tracks your every move, or opt for “ad-free” villainy, where your digital footprints are archived for a higher bidder. Want to feel really nasty? Upgrade to our Enhanced Villainy package, which unlocks the deepest data reservoirs, gives you premium access to psychological profiling tools, and, if you’re lucky, a special invite to the annual “Corruption Gala” in Monaco, where they hand out awards for the most creative misuse of algorithms. It’s like a subscription service for your darkest impulses—a cult-like marketplace where moral ambiguity is the product, and every transaction is a step deeper into the rabbit hole of modern exploitation.

But the real money-maker? Weapons & Widgets, baby. A seamless integration of hardware, software, and pure, unadulterated greed. You don’t just sell people a phone anymore—you sell them the means to enslave themselves with a microsecond of gratification.

why sell glue when you can patent the entire adhesive industry? It’s innovation through monopoly, a corporate synergy where every unit is optimized for “value delivery” and every resource is mined for market control.

Maybe it’s a new gadget that can track your every move or a “smart” watch that tells you when you’re going to die. Everything’s a product, from oppression to surveillance, from addiction to submission. It’s not about selling you a better life; it’s about selling you the idea that life without the right product is meaningless.

And why stop there? Expand the evil empire with corporate synergy—the holy grail of modern capitalism. Launch “Weapons & Widgets” as a corporate synergy, and suddenly, your entire revenue model is built on the back of fear and greed. Think of it as a one-stop shop for every devious tool in the digital toolbox. If you can’t kill them with kindness, you kill them with precision data—because why settle for an army of drones when you can have an army of algorithms, all finely tuned to profit from the very algorithms that serve you?

Finally, the pièce de résistance: Sustainable Malevolence. Nothing says forward-thinking quite like a slick, marketing-driven commitment to continuing the cycle of destruction, but with a “green” spin. Instead of just spewing the usual PR vomit about “corporate responsibility,” you start pushing legislation that actively incentivizes sustainable damage. Who cares if the planet’s crumbling as long as you can profit off it? Co-host a legislation effort for “Sustainable Malevolence,” ensuring that environmental collapse and social destruction are not just consequences but business opportunities. In this brave new world, you don’t destroy just for the sake of profit; you destroy with a plan. You ensure that the ruins of the old world are carefully mined, repurposed, and recycled into the shiny new world you’ve created. A world where everyone is locked in a contract for eternity, and the only thing more toxic than the environment is the corporate bottom line.

There it is, in all its glory. The Silicon Valley blueprint for modern evil: An ecosystem of buzzwords, broken promises, and data-driven exploitation, all wrapped in a thin layer of technocratic jargon that would make George Orwell choke on his own cigarettes. Welcome to the future. It’s slightly evil, and it’s coming for you whether you’re ready or not.