Parodies Lost
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong recently released his latest project, a movie called Mountainhead that follows four narcissistic, egomaniacal tech bros as they manipulate world affairs, chat petulantly with world leaders, and casually ponder the takeovers of each other’s companies along with several countries around the world that they’re quite convinced (a lack of experience and expertise aside) they could run better than their existing governments. It’s not a great movie, but in fairness to the filmmakers, they were attempting an impossible task. You can’t parody the intersection between tech billionaires and geopolitics. No matter how ridiculous and offensive the scenarios you manage to conjure from even the darkest and most devilish recesses of your imagination, reality will blow it away.
+ Indeed, it took less than a week for our sadly non-fiction state of affairs to bring us an all too real fight between a criminal billionaire president and an evil super billionaire tech bro, each armed with their own social media platforms as they engaged in a flame war that shook governments, moved markets, gripped the media, and enraptured the world. Even though the devolution of the world’s most world-damaging bromance was predictable (spoiler alert: no town is big enough for that much sociopathic malignant narcissism), its actual realization left me nostalgic for the quaint world depicted in parodies and satires, and even more so for the days when the worst thing you saw on social media was someone trying to make their family vacation look a little better than it actually was.
+ While the flame war was funny, its underlying meaning is anything but. It’s a reflection of where we are in America, with way too much power and wealth in the hands of a few—and the wrong few at that. Does the future of America come down to an evil billionaire vs an evil dictator? Maybe we all need some ketamine. This is a lose-lose fight with the American people coming out as the biggest losers of all. The only interested parties who came out of yesterday’s skirmish unscathed are CyberTruck drivers, and that’s only because they couldn’t look any worse than they already did…
+ “Musk had, it seems, kicked off an attentional spectacle without precedent. You have the world’s richest man, who is terminally online and whose brain has been addled by social media and, reportedly, other substances. He is one of the most prolific and erratic high-profile posters, so much so that he purchased his favorite social network to mold it in his image. He is squaring off against Trump, arguably the most consequential, off-the-cuff poster of all time and, one must note, the current president of the United States. If it weren’t for the other, both men would be peerless in their ability to troll, outrage, and command news cycles via their fragile, mercurial egos.” Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Super Bowl of Internet Beefs. (Except in this Super Bowl, you’re rooting against both teams, you don’t know when the game will end, and there’s no way to turn it off.)
+ The fight-induced plunge in Tesla’s stock is evidence of the level of corruption that has taken hold in America. The exchange of threats about SpaceX is evidence of the government-like power Elon Musk has amassed. The content of the fight is evidence that these guys don’t really like each other and are both habitual liars and manipulators. And everything about 2025 so far is evidence that Trump and Musk are likely to patch things up and work together toward the common bad once more. After all, that’s the worst possible outcome.
