Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

Until now, the mere effort of striving and forward motion has been enough to help many of the world’s most aggressive conquerors and capitalists avoid the negative effects of their own activities.

Behavioral economics is really just a euphemism for marketing psychology, from an even more programmatic perspective.

Players at this level are pursuing a very particular kind of wealth. It’s not based on dividends, regenerative markets, or the circulation of money through the system. It’s simple conquest and extraction. Find either a new territory to conquer and dominate, or a new technology through which to extract more than you already do.

We are not products of these platforms so much as the labor force. We dutifully read, click, post, and retweet; we become enraged, scandalized, and indignant; and we go on to complain, attack, or cancel. That’s work.

It’s not a matter of banishing linearity and progress altogether, but rather integrating it within the greater cycles that define our existence. Not a line or a circle, but a spiral, with history never quite repeating but almost always rhyming as it moves forward through time.

By refusing to recognize anything that can’t be quantized to a one or zero, this analysis misses everything in between. It depicts an autotuned reality, where every note must be averaged up or down to the nearest quantized notch. The subtleties of a vocalist’s interpretation—what true music lovers listen for most—are discounted as “noise.” The emph

The financiers had abstracted the marketplace so many times that they had reduced real-world company stocks not just to derivatives of derivatives, but to memes. And memes are in no one’s control.

This drive toward totalitarian technocracy is what educator and media theorist Neil Postman called technopoly, the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”

At some point, manufacturing hits the hard limits of human labor and physical matter itself.

Entrepreneurship today has less to do with innovating a product than innovating on the business model for growth. Never is the growth itself questioned.