Pluralistic: Maga's boss class think they are immune to American carnage (13 Aug 2025)


Today's links


A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.

Maga's boss class think they are immune to American carnage (permalink)

It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (something he wasn't allowed to do, even under Texas law); it's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's own abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her and her sister:

https://archive.is/20250812192203/https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/abortion-murder-charge-district-attorney-20812966.php

This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Maga is a coalition of turkeys voting for Christmas, and ax-sharpening farmers planning to make a meal out of them. The Maga base wants a bunch of stuff that the Maga elites would never tolerate, but that's OK, because the Maga elites are pretty sure they will never have to suffer under the laws they pass for others. Peter Theil is happy to support a political movement whose dominant factions would like to put him – and every other gay man – in a concentration camp, because he's pretty sure that only applies to the poor gays, not the billionaire gays.

Financiers who back Trump know that they can afford to transport their daughters, wives, mistresses and the housekeepers, babysitters and teenagers they impregnate across state lines (or national borders) to get an abortion should the need arise. Their participation in Maga was a bet that after victory was attained, the base could be made to settle for performative cruelty against people other than them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

The finance sector is the critical faction in Maga, because the financialized ideal is to accumulate wealth and power without exposure to any real-world risks. As Doug Rushkoff writes in Survival of the Richest, the finance move is to "go meta" – don't drive a taxi, buy a medallion and rent it to a taxi driver. Don't buy a medallion, start a rideshare company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Crypto is as meta as it gets, so no wonder crypto bros are all-in on Trump, and no wonder Trump is all-in on crypto. As Hamilton Nolan writes:

Crypto coins… are pure speculative baubles, endowed with value only to the extent that you can convince another person to pay you more for them than you paid. They are a claim on nothing. They are the grandest embodiment of Greater Fool Theory ever invented by mankind.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/scams-and-bribery-are-becoming-the

Trump's tariffs are blowing up the economy and wiping out the agricultural sector. All those rural, Christmas-voting turkeys are getting it in the neck:

https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/tariffs-wiping-out-american-farmers

Trump's answer to this is to fire the government statisticians and replace them with work-for-hire fiction hacks who'll publish whatever numbers he tells them to:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-08-13-cooking-inflation-jobs-numbers-trump-bls/

You'd think that this would worry the finance sector, but fake numbers are actually good for finance, provided you're on the right side of them. Plenty of people got dynastically rich off of the fake numbers that propped up the pre-2008 housing bubble and the pre-2001 dotcom bubble. Those same people – and their ideological heirs – are now all-in on AI. It's impossible to overstate how structurally important AI is to the US economy. AI bubble companies now account for the value of 35% of the US stock market:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

The instant that bubble pops, the US economy gets a 35% amputation. It's no surprise that, under Trump, the FTC and DoJ have brought the Biden administration's antitrust enforcement against Big Tech to a screeching halt:

https://www.citizen.org/article/deleting-enforcement-trump-big-tech-billion-report/

Nothing would be worse for the AI bubble than antitrust and securities-law enforcement. Companies that cook their balance sheets and suck up hundreds of billions in investment capital cannot function in a world with an orderly market system overseen by publicly accountable referees charged with keeping everyday people from having their life's savings stolen.

And indeed, Trump's enforcers are running away from their duties, as fast as they can. The latest wheeze is to change the rules so that you can "invest" your retirement savings in cryptocurrency and private equity funds (two tired old swindles whose ropers are scraping the barrel looking for new marks):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-06-13-retirement-crisis-401k-private-equity-scrambled/

Not that AI is much better. AI is hemorrhaging money and bringing in pennies:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/

And things are looking grimmer for AI by the day. It's not just that Openai's latest, "fifth-generation" model was such a spectacular flop that they've been forced to bring back the old version. Far more important is the utter uselessness of AI as a way of realizing cost-savings for the companies that try it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/business/ai-business-payoff-lags.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d08.Re3i.TDnOyE2FgyNJ&smid=url-share

After all, AI is implicitly a bet on firing workers. The hundreds of billions in investment, the trillions in valuation – these can't be realized by merely making workers' jobs easier or more satisfying. AI isn't a bet on making radiologists better at diagnosing solid-mass lung tumors: it's a bet on firing nearly all the radiologists and using the remainder to be "humans in the loop" for AI, in order to absorb the blame when you die of cancer. There are plenty of radiologists who might welcome AI as a tool they use alongside their traditional workflow – but their bosses aren't about to hand over vast fortunes just to make those workers happier.

This is why AI users often sound like they're using totally different technologies. Workers who get to decide whether and how to incorporate AI into their jobs are doubtless finding lots of utility and delight from the new tool. These workers are "centaurs" – people assisted by machines.

The workers who describe their on-the-job AI as a hellish monstrosity are being ordered to use AI, in workplaces where mass firings have terrified the survivors, who are told they must use the AI to make up for their jobless former colleagues. They are reverse-centaurs: machines assisted by human workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

There is no way that AI can be worth 35% of the economy if all it does is produce some happy centaurs. The only way that 35% bet pays off is if half the workers get fired and replaced by AI, which is a thing that AI pitchmen are promising, to the letter (a letter that is credulously repeated by the dutiful stenographers of the press):

https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/dario-amodei-ai-entry-level-jobs

The problem is that when businesses fire a bunch of workers and replace them with AI, they don't get the promised savings. Instead, they end up with a system that's so broken that all the wage savings are incinerated by the cost of making good on the AI's failures.

But for Maga's finance wing, this is all OK. They're going meta. Don't hire workers, hire AI. Don't hire AI, make AI. Don't make AI, invest in AI. So long as the number keeps going up, finance wins, even if that's only because every structurally important firm in America is being thimblerigged into filling their walls with AI-powered, immortal asbestos that is destined to transform their firms into Superfund sites.

They're betting that when the bubble finally bursts, that they will have become too big to fail, and will thus be in for the bailouts that rescued the finance sector in 2008. They think that so long as they curry favor with Trump, he'll make sure they're all OK, because they are the people the law protects, but does not bind.

This is a pretty good bet. Trump's a gangster capitalist, and fascists love a "dual state" – a system where the law is followed to the letter, except when it suits someone with the protection of the ruling clique to wipe their ass with it:

https://archive.ph/8T8of

And bailouts for finance crooks are a bipartisan consensus. Remember, it was Obama, not Bush, who took his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's advice to allow the bailed-out banks to steal their borrowers homes and trigger the foreclosure crisis, because this would "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

The Obama wing of the party insists that they're the responsible adults in the room, the ones that will govern wisely and hold their gigadonors to account when they wreck the economy. They tell us Zohran Mamdani is – despite all evidence to the contrary – too unpopular to win an election:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

They ratfucked Katie Porter, one of finance's most savage and talented opponents, teaming up with the crypto-bros who are Maga's bagmen. Joke's on them, because it looks like Porter is gonna be California's next governor:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-08-13-establishment-struggles-control-california-governors-race/

(I donated $100 I can't afford to her campaign; maybe you will donate, too?)

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/kpg_web

Maga's finance wing are convinced that the game is rigged in their favor – heads they win and the law protects them, tails we lose and the law binds us. But if there's one thing we know about gangster capitalism, it's that the capo isn't shy about seizing the fortunes of his various underbosses when the mood suits him. One day he's demanding that you quit your job as CEO, the next day he imposes a 15% tax on your products:

https://www.firstpost.com/world/trump-meets-intel-chief-calls-him-a-success-days-after-demanding-his-resignation-13923838.html

You can bet your ass that if it looks like Trump is gonna lose his grip on power, they'll come sleazing over the Democrats, demanding the defenstration of Mamdani, Porter, and anyone who wants a habitable and just world, rather than a system designed to convert the planet's resources to something that can be sequestered in a luxury bunker or on a private island.

Because for all that they moan about "wokeness," they wouldn't want their kids to have to tolerate a shitty boss; they wouldn't want their kids to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. They wanna live out their cuckold fantasies in peace:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/02/stephen-miller-wife-musk/

They don't have any problem with living in a world where there's lip service to social values and Pricewaterhousecooper has a cringe Pride parade float. They'll happily save a couple bucks on the nanny's abortion by going down to the corner Planned Parenthood rather than flying her to Toronto on the private jet. All that performative cruelty was just a shuck to get some of the dumber surviving turkeys to pull the lever for Christmas. So long as they can live in a world where the law protects them, but does not bind them, they're happy as pigs in shit.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Kenk: graphic novel humanizes Toronto’s most notorious bike-thief without apologising for him https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/13/kenk-graphic-novel-humanizes-torontos-most-notorious-bike-thief-without-apologising-for-him/

#10yrsago Lenovo preloaded laptops with reformat-resistant perpetual crapware https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo-used-windows-anti-theft-feature-to-install-persistent-crapware/

#10yrsago Hilariously terrifying talk about security https://vimeo.com/135347162

#10yrsago Income inequality turns “neglected tropic diseases” into American diseases of “the poor living among the wealthy” https://web.archive.org/web/20150820045551/http://mosaicscience.com/story/america-tropical-disease

#10yrsago Rightscorp teams up with lawyers to mass-sue people who ignore blackmail letters https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-deal-turns-dmca-notices-into-piracy-lawsuits-150812/

#10yrsago Inside the Machine: a visual history of electronics, technology and art https://meganprelinger.com/book/inside-the-machine-art-and-invention-in-the-electronic-age/

#10yrsago Twitter snoop-requests from UK cops/gov’t more than double in 2015 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33882688

#10yrsago The failed writer who became NSA’s in-house “philosopher” https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/surveillance-philosopher-nsa/

#10yrsago Internet filters considered harmful https://web.archive.org/web/20150809023346/http://knowledgequest.aasl.org/latest-internet-filtering-ala/

#10yrsago FBI opened a file on George Carlin for telling “bad taste” Hoover jokeshttps://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/13/george-carlins-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Caveman Science Fiction https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

#5yrsago Florida sheriff bans masks https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#death-cult

#5yrsago "Less lethal" is a euphemism, too https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

#5yrsago My origin story https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

#5yrsago Trump's Solicitor General says bribery is legal https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#backhanders-r-us

#5yrsago Payday lenders are CFPB's pandemic aid https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#cfpb-quislings

#5yrsago Sorting machines snatched from post offices https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#machine-breakers

#5yrsago Marvel's $0.10 mini-comics https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#tiny-heroes

#5yrsago Failed State https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#chris-brown

#5yrsago Mexico's terrible copyright is in trouble https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#viva-mexico

#1yrago The paradox of choice screens https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already

#1yrago Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses' https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/13/influencers/#affective-computing

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Alice Taylor, Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1086 words yesterday, 29915 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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