The weird outliers from the basement have taken over the joint

There’s something I’ve avoided saying out loud, but now feel I can. And should.

Over coming months I will build on and flesh out some of the themes from The Book Serialisation (you can catch up on it here), applying them to issues that are on our laps. Today I’ll touch top-line on the oligarchical takeover.

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Something very particular is happening to the world. A certain, very narrowly orientated type of man is taking over the means of production and commodifying our attention (the new labour). They are stealing our information (both personal and creative), our social security details and passwords; they’re stripping our rights and fashioning a new existence that is unapologetically fascist and works to eugenicist principles. Their end goal does not seem to be wealth accumulation. It’s more about power and mastery over…the rest of us. It’s supremacism. It’s psychopathic.

In the case of Elon Musk it increasingly appears at least not entirely implausible that his modus operandi is to strip the US of funds and funnel them into his project to get to Mars.

Stripping us - the masses - of our identity, agency and wellbeing along the way aids this project in the sense it is likely to embroil us in mass civil unrest. While we get knotted up in the chaos of surviving and defending, we won’t notice the rocket ships taking off without us.

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Look, it feels insane to write this. But many close to Musk vouch for his megalomania and this myopic Mars goal.

And, truly, the parameters of sanity have shifted.

Either way, what we are witnessing is extreme and alarming and the upshot is that we’re left believing the world has gone mad and bad, which really is the most existentially lonely thought a good soul can have.

But I have another take, the one that I’ve thus far failed to vocalise…

Men (people?) like Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel and Bezos have always existed. They were often the “kid who played Dungeons and Dragons in their parents basement” (to use a trope from my era), surfacing only when Mum dragged them to the table when guests came. They tended to lack social skills and empathy; perhaps they existed on an end of some problematic behavioural spectrum [Please note: I have edited the preceding sentence for clarity, adding the words “problematic behavioural” to ensure my point is not misconstrued as a statement about neurodivergence; I have also made some amendments elsewhere where the words could easily have been read as a comment on anything but the dangerous outcomes of giving people lacking empathy and human skills outlandish power]. The ones I knew from school (I often shared a bunsen burner with them in chemistry) found meaning in death metal lyrics and were often brilliant, in an extreme but sometimes scary, not-at-all-pro-social, left-brain way.

The thing is, in the digital age a whole bunch of these men were suddenly handed a whole lot of sparkly relevancy and vast sums of coin and humans to manage. Largely psychologically and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with such responsibilities, they - dot-dot-dot - wound up cage fight shirt-fronting, Nazi saluting and taking over the planet like they were playing a round of World Conquest.

So, my point is that there are not more dangerously dysfunctional humans on the planet [nor, to be clear, that all boys who played Dungeons and Dragons and/or are anti-social are dangerously dysfunctional]. It’s just that a whole lot of ill-equipped ones have been surfaced from the metaphorical basement overnight and given dumb amounts of power.

I have a similar theory on everyday bigoted online commenters. It can be easy to think that the world has suddenly been overrun by moronic cruelty. And this is a despairing place to land. But in fact, again, moronically cruel and bigoted folk have always existed. But we were largely spared their outpourings. Such people might front up to the pub and mouth off their vitriol from time to time. But the locals would tell them to pull their head in.

We are programmed to be repelled by destabilising, anti-social cruelty and will mobilise to quash it for the sake of the common good. But today these destabilising types, too, have been given too much relevancy and power. Indeed, the psychopathic tech bros’ “world conquering” algorithms have handed these everyday trolls a megaphone and pride of place in the pub and we are forced, against our instincts, to bear their cruelty and conspiracies.

I suppose it’s cold comfort to think that humans are no more evil today but that, instead, it’s just a matter of the scary outliers having taken over the joint.

However, I think it’s super important we continue to look at things squarely. Our repulsion is real and required. We must honour it. If we don’t, we are giving up on “the stunning possibility” of our humanity.

We must increasingly quit the pub where the trolls hang out. We need to increasingly, incrementally, but committedly refuse to play the dark games of the tech bros. Just stop buying things on Amazon. We quit social media platforms as soon as is plausible. Don’t shop at Wholefoods. We, as Ezra Klein says in relation to Trump and Co, don’t believe them. Don’t drink their KoolAid.

And pay attention. Our most valuable asset is our attention. MTK on this.

Sarah xx