I rather strongly dislike Chris Hedges, but I have to admit that sometimes he makes a good point.

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. There’s a great comic-horror movie that made this same point: The Death of Stalin. In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, the people who profited from the tyrant’s death bumble about, scrambling to take over his role, and it’s simultaneously horrifying and hilarious, because you know that every childlike tantrum and backstabbing pratfall is concealing death and famine and riots and futility. It portrays the bureaucrats of the Soviet Union as a mob of idiots.

There’s a new movie out that has the same vibe, Mountainhead. It’s not as good as The Death of Stalin, but it’s only fair that it turns the stiletto against American idiots, the privileged CEOs and VCs of Silicon Valley. The premise is that a group of 4 fictional billionaires are getting together for a poker game (which they never get around to) at an isolated mansion in the mountains. One of them, who is kind of a blend of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, has just unleashed an AI on his social media company that makes it easy to create deepfakes and spoof other users — it turns out to be very popular and is also creating total chaos around the world, with assassinations, wars, and riots breaking out everywhere. He is publicly unconcerned, and actually suggests it’s a good thing, and suggests that we all need to push through and do more, promoting accelerationism. He’s actually experiencing visible anxiety as everyone at the meeting has their eyes locked to their phones.

What he wants to do is buy some AI-filtering technology from another of the attendees, Jeff, who doesn’t want to give it up. He just surpassed the others in net worth, and doesn’t want to surrender his baby. So they all decide that the solution is to murder Jeff so they can steal his tech. They aren’t at all competent at doing real world action, trying to shove him over a railing, clubbing him to death, etc., and their efforts all fail as Jeff flees into a sauna. They lock him in and pour gasoline on the floor, using their hands to try and push it under the door so they can set him on fire.

One of the amusing sides of the conflict is that all of them are using techbro buzzwords. The pompous elder “statesman” of the group is frequently invoking Kant and Hegel and Nietzche and Marcus Aurelius to defend his decisions, while clearly not comprehending what they actually wrote. They shout slogans like “Transhuman world harmony!” and declare themselves the smartest men in America, while struggling to figure out how to boil an egg. They have such an inflated sense of their own importance that they plan to “coup out” America and rule the world from their cell phones.

They’re idiots.

One flaw to the movie is that the jargon and references are flying so thickly that it might be a bit obscure to the general public. Fortunately, I had just read More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, so I was au courant on the lingo. It made the movie doubly depressing because it was so accurate. That’s actually how these assholes think: they value the hypothetical lives of future trillions over the existence of peons here and now. It’s easier to digest the stupidity when it’s coming from fictional characters, rather than real people like Yudkowsky and MacAskill and Andreesen and Gates and Ray Kurzweil (unfortunately, Becker twice says that Kurzweil is neither stupid nor crazy — sorry, he’s one or both of those). Fiction might make the infamous go down a little more smoothly, but non-fiction makes it all jagged and sharp and horrible.

Tech is the new religion. Écrasez l’infâme.