Pluralistic: The billionaires aren't OK (24 Sep 2025)


Today's links


An oil painting of a French king atop a throne, draped in sumptuous robes. His head has been replaced with a screaming, toothless man wearing a top-hat. Over his shoulder looms the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

The billionaires aren't OK (permalink)

Billionaires don't think we're real. How could they? How could you inflict the kind of vast misery that generates billions of dollars while still feeling even a twinge of empathy for the sufferer in your extractive enterprise. No wonder Elon Musk calls us "NPCs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

Ever notice how people get palpably stupider as they gain riches and power? Musk went from a cringe doofus to a world-class credulous dolt, and it seems like he loses five IQ points for every $10b that's added to his net worth. Sergey Brin used to be the kind of guy who'd pull his whole company of out China overnight after a state hack-attack on dissidents triggered his own traumatic memories of his Soviet childhood:

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/brin-drove-google-to-pull-back-in-china/

He retired, got a hell of a lot richer through passive gains to his investment portfolio, then came back to run Google, presiding over the precipitous decline of search quality, which he responded to by telling his workers that he expected them to put in 60 hours/week:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

One of the strangely satisfying aspects of the Trump presidency is that every now and then, he'll pick a random billionaire (say, the CEO of Intel) and publicly call him an asshole for a couple of days, generally to prompt that particular billionaire to bend the knee to him:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/intel-ceo-trump-lip-bu-tan.html

Sometimes, he'll force these billionaires to publicly humiliate themselves for him – like when he made Tim Apple hand-build a little gold participation trophy for dictators on camera and then present it to him, groveling all the while:

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

The reason this makes such great TV is that we all know that normally, these guys never have to tolerate any criticism. They live in hermetically sealed bubble of sycophancy. This is what makes them so, so stupid (it's also why Trump so so unbelievably fucking stupid). Look, I come up with stupid ideas all the time, but I've learned the hard way that if I open my teeth and let these mental farts escape from my face, the people around me will tell me that I'm an asshole and make me feel bad. Trump, on the other hand, can tell us to all inject bleach and claim that solar panels are killing bunny rabbits and everyone around him tells him he's a genius:

https://www.eenews.net/articles/fact-checking-trumps-claims-about-rabbits-caught-in-solar-projects/

He's got a button on his desk that summons Diet Cokes. This is a guy who brazenly cheats at golf, on camera, without any pushback. This is a recipe for crawling up your own asshole and dying:

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-golf-cheating-viral-video-2104940

As the moral philosopher David St Hubbins said, "It's such a fine line between 'clever' and 'stupid.'" If you want to come up with interesting ideas, you have to entertain some outlandish ones. But if you live in a world of yes-anding improv partners who get fired if they break character in the Mad King LARP you're paying them to play, then your bad ideas will inexorably devour your good ones.

Give Howard Hughes some constraints and he'll build you a bunch of cool airplanes. Take away those constraints and he'll start wearing kleenex boxes on his feet, growing his fingernails real long, and saving his piss in jars. Constraints are frustrating, but they're good for you.

Billionaires are on a relentless quest to isolate themselves from the rest of us. The yacht industry, private space exploration, seasteading, luxury bunkers – their whole thing is escaping the constraints imposed by others. They want to be "sovereign" – that is, toddlers:

https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/lever-time/0b05d150-ba7d-013a-d90c-0acc26574db2/the-grotesque-fruits-of-your-labor-with-evan-osnos/754796e8-7356-4cd0-9979-78005984b7fb

The more isolated they get, the stupider they get. No one's telling them no. Sergey Brin has gotten unmistakably stupider since he stopped going to Town Hall meetings where Google's once-valued engineering staff got to criticize the company. Zuckerberg's whole manophere/surfer dude rebrand coincided with his decision to stop attending the company-wide engineering meetings, which he called "Not a good use of my time."

One thing all these guys have in common: they love chatbots. Why not? A chatbot is the perfect lickspittle. Ask one to generate a gnarly regular expression, try it, then paste the resulting (inevitable) error message into the chat, and the bot will positively cower in contrition: "You're absolutely right, I'm really stupid and you're very smart for noticing. I forgot to put in a curly brace. Please, if you can see your way clear to giving me another chance, could I pretty pretty please try again? I mean, only if you don't want me to kill myself instead."

Sure, an AI isn't real – but remember, as far as billionaires are concerned, almost everyone is an "NPC."

Not so long ago, nearly every human/AI contact was a ritual humiliation in which the computer said no. No, you can't have that drug your doctor prescribed, the AI says no. No, you can't get bail, the AI said no. No, you can't keep your kids, the computer said no.

The rise of consumer-facing LLMs has given us all a taste of what it's like to be a billionaire. Like William Gibson said, the future was there, it just wasn't evenly distributed. Tech lords invented a machine for lowering your IQ. It's not AI psychosis, it's billionaire's disease:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

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)

#20yrsago TiVo breaks devices, then charges you $150 if you don’t like the new deal https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/24/tivo-breaks-devices-then-charges-you-150-if-you-dont-like-the-new-deal/

#15yrsago Microsoft’s DRM makes your computer vulnerable to attack https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/15061

#15yrsago Tim Wu on Net Neutrality/Google-Verizon betrayal https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-24-engadget-explains-net-neutrality-and-our-full-interview-with.html

#15yrsago Multinational copyright companies will require French ISPs turn over 150,000 subscriber names and addresses per day https://torrentfreak.com/france-starts-reporting-millions-of-file-sharers-100921/

#10yrsago Cox cable: Rightscorp is a mass copyright infringer https://torrentfreak.com/cox-accuses-rightscorp-of-mass-copyright-infringement-150924/

#10yrsago Kentucky Republican state Senator: the First Amendment protects my right to receive bribes https://theintercept.com/2015/09/24/state-senator-files-lawsuit-says-ban-lobbyist-gifts-violates-freedom-speech/

#10yrsago GOP Vice Chair of House Energy committee is a climate denier and creationist https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34342808

#10yrsago Walt Disney’s plan for the FBI of tomorrow https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/24/walt-disneys-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Dooce quits mommyblogging amid toxic pressure from advertisers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/sep/23/heather-armstrong-leaving-dooce-mommy-blog-advertisers

#10yrsago The shape of the Internet (according to patent drawings) https://noahveltman.com/internet-shape/

#5yrsago Faulty TV behind daily, town-wide internet outages https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/24/attack-surface-tour/#shine-on

#5yrsago WV's deabeat governor now owes $140m https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/24/attack-surface-tour/#in-justice

#1yrago Margaret Killjoy's "The Sapling Cage" https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/24/daughters-of-the-empty-throne/#witchy

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

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:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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