While dear readers tackle a possible turkey dinner – nicknamed, in my family, animal chayote – let us remember how the year 2025 cemented the dominance of human chayotes? Sensible and bizarre, the “broligarchs” reign supreme.
“Broligarchy,” for those who have spent the year distracted, is the disproportionate influence of tech billionaires on the economy, government mechanisms, and citizens’ lives. He buys influence, destroys privacy protections, manipulates our access to information, and is more allergic to economic competition than a 1980s Libelu activist.
It is a totality which, like Louis 15, does not hide the conviction that “the State is half a dozen of us”. But this statism ignores the sovereignty of states when they try to regulate their activities, while their representatives buy vast tracts of virgin land in countries dissatisfied with their power, such as New Zealand.
This gallery of men most of us would avoid as company at the holiday dinner is sometimes nicknamed the “PayPal Mafia,” in reference to the digital payments company’s founders, partners or former employees like Peter Thiel, David Sacks and Elon Musk. But there is no shortage of vacancies for humanoids like Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta, who is now building his bunker in Hawaii, just in case.
In this pivotal year of artificial intelligence, the brother oligarchs have made it clear that the reality shared by those who do not claim to be Napoleon Bonaparte must be treated as an insolent obstacle and ruthlessly neutralized by their algorithms.
In January, Zuckerberg offered us an “amuse-bouche” (a taste) of his admirable necrotic world, by announcing that Facebook would get rid of fact-checkers and delegate information hygiene to “communities”, as Musk did on the X platform – we know what the result was throughout the year.
The justification? Those responsible for distinguishing lies from facts “act as censors.” It’s like when your three-year-old son shows up with a huge chocolate mustache, denies having eaten all the crossing guards and you conclude that pointing out the obvious is repression.
Every dystopia offers monetization opportunities. In “broligarchy,” mere mortals find lucrative work promoting polarization or producing 100% false content about celebrities and other public figures.
And you don’t have to pay stratospheric rents in San Francisco or New York. From any hinterland with decent wifi, producers of conspiratorial content about politics, particularly American politics, using AI-generated imagery, can be compensated by platforms that embrace “slop,” a Gramacho dump, in the digital, globalized version.
The “broligarchy” would not have gained so much political power without the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which allowed donors to influence U.S. electoral politics with a fury not seen since the golden age of the “robber barons” in the late 19th century (see series of the same name on HBO Max).
But the “robber barons” left a civic legacy. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie funded more than 1,600 public libraries that revolutionized popular access to scientific and literary knowledge. Marie Antoinette Zuckerberg prefers that the poorest eat memes.
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