If there's anything the last week in tech news has taught us aside from don't mess with the SEC and if you do plead guilty as fast as possible it's that tech news is almost as surreal as the timeline we apparently inhabit.
Not content with the potential spectacle of two billionaires threatening each other to fisticuffs we now had the quickest attempted coup and since Wagner marched on Moscow. The interesting part about all this really is not in the wording of the dismissal, the immediate resignations or even the investors that put all their weight behind the reinstatement, it's that the narrative of the genius billionaire just gets stronger. Looking at the coverage one thing was immediately clear.
You can't run a multibillion. dollar company without a king. It doesn't really matter about the incumbent CEO, apparently, she was one of the last to know. I can't even remember the name of the poor woman apparently in charge of X. It just doesn't matter. We moved from the post-truth era to the post-reality era and one thing is becoming clearer. Uncertainty is no longer predicated on results, it's built on the cult of personality.
We're entering an everything-as-content UGC miasma that seems to be leading to a collective need for saviours. These favoured people are not constrained by things that bother mere mortals like truth. They embody a set of simple values that are easy to rally behind. Look at the insanity below any Elon post on X and it's clear we're living in the hinterland of a shared reality.
With AI pressing ever onwards, will this failed coup mark the last point of sanity before our irreversible fall into the neo-dark age or will it just be another bump along the road that ends in a CyberPunk or Mad Max future? It's getting harder to tell whether the line between fiction and reality was just a shared construct only present since the enlightenment and we will go back to the days of myth and magic.
Let's see. The path to madness or salvation is now more than ever in the realm of celebrity tech. Maybe people will start to crave an immutable digital identity such as those afforded by blockchain technology or maybe we will all just end up as simulated NPCs, ghosts in an ever more unstable machine.
Matthew Buxton
Comments