“Today’s Thirsty Oligarch”
“But what a fool believes he sees/ No wise man has the power to reason away.”
“What A Fool Believes” ——-Michael McDonald
A couple of weeks ago, at forty-eight years of age, in the year 2025, I felt compelled by the current circumstances to get a combination measles/mumps/rubella shot. Apparently the measles outbreaks have reached Indiana.
The shot was free and it didn’t take very long, but it sure felt pretty dead-on as a lazy metaphor goes: to have to literally inoculate myself against the incompetence of our current wretched administration.
In a recent essay, Ben Ansell broke down a central tension of this moment where Trump and the tech oligarchs are concerned, as tech bros have recently tried their hands at shadow governance in the stooped shadow of their sundowning Trojan Horse.
The (Non)Gamification of Real Life - by Ben Ansell
What if you can't actually hack your way to social status?
“You see the problem is that you can accrue unprecedented riches and people can still be mean to you on Twitter. Your employees can still insist that if you sexually harass someone you can be fired. Or that you moderate your language around the workplace. And your kid still might not get into Stanford or Harvard.”
Games as occasionally misleading proxy for reality among the generations that have spent most of their leisure time playing video games is certainly a very compelling argument. I have never progressed beyond Ms. Pac-Man, and I really don’t have any personal issue with video games, but the linear progression of their design does hinge on “leveling up” by design, whereas life is a multiple console affair, one in which you can “level up” in one regard, and suffer your battle ship sinking in another.
Seemingly Trump, Musk, the folks in the Andreessen chat group, and the spectacularly whiny Sam Banks Friedman all have the same Achilles Heel: money, power and influence are not sufficient for their greedy, puerile, thirsty imaginations. They additionally seem to want to be universally lauded and at that, humously.
And dialing up the hubris to eleven, they not only want to be regarded as great men, they want to be beloved.
And as any authoritarian set up has historically shown, you can demand fealty and even compel massive public displays of affection, but love can neither be bought nor compelled. The great couplet in Tim Rice’s score for Evita comes to mind: “Thought the more that loved me / the more loved I'd be/ But such things cannot be multiplied.” And Eva Peron actually was beloved at some scale at a certain point.
So now compulsory affection, which is definitely not a load-bearing proposition, has seemingly become the great white whale for men whose absurd wealth far surpasses their mental capacity or utility. A hyper-affluenza, if you will.
What this has come to mean for us normal folks punching the clock, as these men who have made ridiculous amounts of money in an industry that should have been properly regulated in the nineties pursue Yarvinian utopia, is that they are chasing the dragon at our expense: at the expense of the environment (A.I., unlike rational human synthesis is going to destroy our ecosystem at about the same speed as it goes the way of NFT’s and the metaverse), our research institutions:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/opinion/venture-capital-musk-investments.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShareand our basic subjective autonomy.
All of the hand-wringing about “free speech” for the last few decades on the right was, shockingly, not actually a good faith project in the first place. If you aren’t actually seeking the space and attention to offer your views, but rather wish to be given free rein to impose your views on everyone else, and also expect to be thanked, you are not a “free speech absolutist,” you are just a coercive jerk, and your definition of “freedom” presupposes an untenable license that ends well past the nose of others.
Like many vaguely plausible bad faith arguments, “free speech absolutism” had a bit more discursive plausibility pre-Charlottesville, and certainly before the transphobic, racist, sexist and homophobic “war on woke” started in earnest, but seeking compulsory agreement in the supposed “marketplace of ideas” is as laughable as demanding compulsory love. You can compel silence by sowing fear and demanding performance of adulation, but what Trump and the reactionary tech billionaires seem to want is the real thing, which is well beyond their grasp. The distortion of their narcissism cannot elide their primal fear of never really being known or loved.
That wealthy man, whose name I’ve mercifully forgotten, whose current life mission is to purport that he will cheat death, is a salient example, because, spoiler, he’s not going to, and will die just like everyone else, and unless masochism is truly his kink, he’s just making himself miserable in the process, while looking like a self-obsessed twerp.
Beyond the baked-in reality that we all have our intellectual limits, this childish waterfall chasing, this desire to not just be considered great but also to be genuinely beloved, is a hankering for something that can’t be bought.
Of course, like a cat dragging a mouse onto the porch in its mouth, these creeps think their cosmically insignificant actions in this world should presuppose their adulation, but the one undeniably salient factor in being liked is being likeable, or even just relatable enough from a safe distance, and they are decidedly neither.
This is why the current hodgepodge of interests governing us for the time being cannot ultimately realize their rotten ambitions. Trump is only a politician in so far as entertainment has engulfed politics, and as an entertainer at his core, he craves love writ large on a pathological level, and that hurdle is even higher than being liked, and certainly nothing he has done in office excites real ardor in anyone besides his biggest fans, who will buy any bill of goods, as long as it is branded his.
An immediate wholesale campaign of well-targeted repression, show trials and gratuitous violence was necessary from day one to upend this Republic, but their desire to be liked pulled that punch, and we’re well past the fifty-third day mark where Hitler managed to consolidate absolute power.
Yes, the mayor of Newark being temporarily disappeared is incredibly troubling, but tactically, it’s like pouring sugar in your teacher’s gas tank after you have already failed the exam; lousy behavior, but very obviously rooted in nihilism and desperation.
Is the impossibility of this administration ever achieving ultimate success at consolidating and retaining power because an administration stocked with Noems, Bondis Hegseths and the worst scion of the Kennedy name since Joseph Senior have the intellectual abilities and heft of the Manhattan Institute on its worst day? For sure.
But what dooms them all ultimately isn’t just that they push terrible, reactionary ideas badly and ham-handedly, it is that they want to be loved for it, to be included in the anthology (I’m talking to you Thomas Chatterton Williams) and to be put in A.I. King or Pope’s clothing, when they are nothing more than lazy, cranky, needy lounge performers whose acts will never bring them the historical relevance they so obviously crave, beyond being viewed as a cautionary tale, let alone the love they wish their banal performances of self might organically inspire if they wish for it hard enough.