CRITIQUE OF INFINITE FREEDOM

Why are tech bros restless?

A few months ago, a retired tech entrepreneur, a co-founder of Loom (a video software company), wrote a short essay titled: “I am rich and I have no idea what to do with my life.” The author seems to be a young guy, maybe in his thirties, who sold his company and then found himself in an unfamiliar state of not having to work ever again. To write an essay with such a provocative title in this day and age, could’ve just been a deliberate attempt at trolling or engagement farming, collecting spiky replies and tiny violin GIFs in the comments. But it wasn’t that. The short text comes across as an earnest, almost despairing grappling for answers that are existential in nature.

I think it could be the first time this young tech bro found himself in a situation where a tech-trained brain and a ‘can-do’ entrepreneurial spirit that were essential in the task of building his company fail to provide any sort of meaningful guidance. He is perplexed to find out that ‘infinite freedom’ that he now has, a kind of quintessential American Holy Grail, does not deliver the blissful, carefree ever after. Naturally, he first deals with this unexplained ennui as a problem to be solved. He dives head first into action.

His enthusiasm lasted for two weeks.

There are flashes of insight in this short essay that a reader should take seriously. Here is a rich tech bro, set for life, who is in a position to ignore the opinion of sheep if he wants to, but also someone who displays a capability for introspection and an interest in sincere inquiry. The guy has a healthy degree of self-reflection to admit that he looked cringe trying to cosplay Musk, and that points at the right intellectual and moral instinct, even though, at the moment, that instinct has no clear outlet.

The young man suffers from an existential problem, but he’d been steeped for too long in a tech-heavy ecosystem to try anything outside a set of formulaic ‘if x then y’ solutions. He doesn’t know where to begin, what to do, how to think about this new reality. For now, this young man had retreated to Hawaii to study physics.

And what can one do after he’s been on top of the world? It’s a precarious, unstable mental place. There’s a disorienting emptiness mixed with residual dynamism that’s built up from the years of hustle and combat and that now lacks an outlet and direction. There is a creeping dread borne out of unexpected idleness. The restless mind longs for action, like a street fighter, flexing muscles and crackling knuckles, looking to beat up the next villain. But there’s no villain to beat up this time. You are alone with your thoughts and with nothing to do. The problem is unidentifiable. There’s no solution. This is a state that can create monstrosities.

LIMITS OF INFINITE FREEDOM

Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Andreessen, Altman––these men have a degree of freedom that is limited only in a sense that they can’t commit murder in broad daylight. None of their other ambitions, assisted and facilitated by lawyers, powerful connections, friendly lawmakers, favorable legislation, and weak or non-existent law enforcement, meet resistance or accountability. What could and does prevent them from fully realizing their grand schemes into reality and from experiencing absolute freedom, are obstacles of amorphous and capricious nature that are difficult to single out and attack: irrational human behavior, fickle customer loyalties, collective skepticism of or disenchantment with the products that they’re selling, public mockery of their ideas and egos, elections that don’t go their way, etc. These phenomena can’t be harnessed and corralled by a corporate decree or by an army of lawyers or by money thrown at it. To have almost no institutional or legal restraints coming up to this point, and then to suddenly face these volatile, unpredictable masses who deny them their due respect, who refuse to acknowledge their unrivalled acumen, and who question the usefulness of their inventions, makes them feel confused, frustrated, and unfree.

What can’t Musk do at this point? He has more money than God. He has our attention. He can have as much sex as he wants, he can buy a US president, he can go into space. He has Putin on speed dial. He can get access to your personal data. He can get away with naming his kids Techno Mechanicus and X AE A-12. But he’s still unhappy. He’s still striving. He still feels like a victim.

Musk is famously sensitive to being stifled. Paranoidally, he sees an insidious censure coming at him from all sides. His algorithms on X are set so that his own tweets reach the most audience. Well, he gets our attention, but then what does he do with it? All these elaborate tweaks in the algorithm, all the billions spent, all these free speech proclamations––all of this, so that he can peddle conspiracy theories and tell 420/69 jokes. Why would a billionaire many times over, owning a bunch of other, more serious companies, would spend most of his waking hours on this platform, getting into juvenile name-calling, spats with libs, and retweeting Catturd? Is it not enough for him to lord over us? Does he also want us to think he’s witty, cool, and funny? Does he also want to be loved?

Love then, whether public or private, is the elusive final frontier of a centi-billionaire. Like Trump, Musk is not entirely unloved. Both are leaders of cults with millions of followers, and yet they’re dissatisfied. They’re loved, yes, but by the wrong people. Somewhere deep in their hearts they both know that the people who worship them have been suckered into it. They don’t want the love of dimwits and morons––of the marks. They want to be loved by the smart and serious set, by the kind that could be invited to a black-tie event without risk of embarrassment, by the NYT opinion page, by the Nobel Peace Prize committee, by the European leaders, by bond traders––people and entities who are not swayed by the silly theatrics, who are immune to bluster. But Wall Street, once a lonely pocket of tepid support among the smart set, is second-guessing them now. The inability to control this slice of important reality, while dominating everything else, can derail Musk and Trump into feeling helpless. And it is this helplessness that brings about feeling of unfreedom, of unjust restraint. And when they feel unfree they seek an exit, any exit by any means.

THE ROAD TO BATSHIT

I think, in a way it was quite inevitable that Musk would venture out, like Trump, into the public sphere. There were no questions left in the business world and the world of engineering about Musk’s abilities. There, he was God-like. So it was a natural next move for him to step outside the familiar zone of tech entrepreneurship and try his hand at public works.

Musk and Trump want to make policy. But they’re both constitutionally (as in temperamentally) incapable of being bogged down in policy details. It’s like that time, during Trump’s first term, when he thought that he could write a new ‘bigger and better’ healthcare bill to replace Obamacare in two weeks. One look at a Cybertruck, and you know how it was designed: Musk drew it on a paper napkin, handed it to his engineer, and told him “make it look like this.” The engineer didn’t dare to ask further questions. Their policy is a feeling, a shapeless, broad-strokes sketching, a ten-thousand foot view. A size of the government must be cut. How? They’re not going to go into minutia. “Boom-boom-boom-bing”––that’s how.

So it was also inevitable that Musk would soon get bored with it. Entering public service exposed him to having to deal with those very amorphous forces that frustrated him in his business life, but now more prevalent and more entrenched, and lacking due deference. He was accustomed to rule by decree, to cutting costs and personnel without any remorse, but here, in the public sector, the riffraff, the immanent, cretinous masses, the unproductive, the retarded, have the nerve to talk back, demanding to know how they will benefit from his grand vision. They want to know how cutting Medicaid will help improve their health and other such silly things. And Musk can’t just tell the ingrates to take a hike, because the whole purpose of a billionaire entering public spotlight is, supposedly, to show the rubes how great he is.

He is mocked, unloved, and prevented from showing us what a great guy he is. What good are billions if you have no control over these things? What a guy to do?

Awkward jokes with punchlines revolving around boobs, a certain sexual act, and weed. Weird prancing dances. Obsession with the letter X. Telling clients to go fuck themselves. Histrionics with a chainsaw. Performance, more batshit with every iteration, is what comes after all the tools and means of dominance, all the contraptions to keep the audience in awe don’t seem to be working.

The other day, Trump posted on his social media platform, in all seriousness (or just trolling the libs, it’s hard to say at this point), an AI-generated image of himself as the next Pope. The very next day, he posted another picture, him as a Jedi knight. Whether a joke or not, these childish acts speak of deep internal frustration. What’s there left for him to strive for? Maybe he’ll want to relocate to Mars and build some condos there and declare himself Emperor? One can hope.

These people, Trump and Musk and other billionaires with an opinion who lost their minds on Twitter in the last couple of years, are on a different plane. They refuse to acknowledge that there’s a limit to their ambitions, that they have reached the end of the road, a brick wall. They believe that if they just try hard enough, if they just wish it badly enough, that if they fake it and paint the road on the brick wall, like in Road Runner cartoons, and pretend to walk on it, then that road will become real. What they do now is not an action, but an act. A batshit, Norma Desmond-esque act.

WANTING LESS

In the last few days, we’ve been hearing a weird change of narrative coming from this administration and its adjacent quarters: Americans should try to consume less, because it is a patriotic thing to do and will set us on a path of independence. When asked what he’d say to a little girl who will have two dolls instead of twenty-five because of tariffs, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, replied that he’d tell her that due to these minor deprivations she will have a better future than her parents. It’s a stunningly half-baked, blatantly dishonest about-face for an administration that sold itself to voters as business- and market-friendly and that routinely mocks Democrats as commies.

It’s hard, then, to take their drastic change of heart about such fundamental issue seriously. But let’s indulge them for a moment, and say they were sincere. If we’ve already ventured out so far as to suggest that it is patriotic to be frugal, then the same sacrificial ask––to want less things––should be extended to our tech billionaires. Billionaires’ wants are different from ours: it’s not conspicuous consumption that they’re after. It’s the total control over our lives and thoughts; it is engineering of and monetizing our behaviors, our outrages. Their desires and products bring about a different, almost apocalyptic degree of harm to both our public and private (and cultural, and emotional, and economic) lives than an overindulgent consumer. AI is destroying our education; social media had already atrophied our cognitive abilities; crypto is now a slick enrichment and bribery scheme for Trump and his family. If we’re asked to get by with two pairs of shoes a year, surely then, the tech bros, too, could be compelled to rein in their ends. Some average schmo can’t just be the only party who has to show restraint and civic-mindedness for nation’s sake.

As an idea, as a philosophy, wanting less is not a new or controversial notion. Ancient Stoics emphasized the importance of self-restraint and focusing only on things one can control, like our own thoughts and actions. Centuries later, Arthur Schopenhauer identified the unending series of wants as the source of our unhappiness. When our wants are unfulfilled we are unhappy; when our wants are fulfilled we are only happy for a brief moment. Soon, another desire pops up and demands to be satisfied, and so on. Thus we’re condemned to live in a cycle of constant dissatisfaction. Around the same time, Kierkegaard, echoing Blaise Pascal (“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”), singled out boredom as the root of all evil.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

But we can’t really compel billionaires to curb their ambitions and wants by appealing to their patriotism. Such appeals will land on deaf ears because a different calculus is at work there. We can’t tax them, like we did in the 1950s, no such bill has a chance in Congress. We can’t expect them to curtail their businesses voluntarily. What we can do is appeal to their discontent. Our calls on them to lead a more austere, more restrained life should be presented as a remedy to their existential ennui. By wanting less, we should argue, they shall escape the mental rut they’re in and become truly free.

And there’s an opening here. Tech bros love philosophy––even if their scholarship is mostly limited to Aristotle, Sun Tzu, and 20^th century analytic philosophers. They’re stuck in an ideologically comfortable but epistemologically ossified dead end where the same limited collection of tools and proposals––primacy of logic, conquest, utilitarianism––is applied to a wide set of social, cultural, economic and political problems. But the same set of tools does not work when applied to the problems of existential nature. Solving a trolley problem won’t resolve one’s unexplained malaise. And I think on some level they know this.

So here is, perhaps, a naïve proposal. The restless billionaires who feel stifled, unfree and emotionally lost, should try to expand their cache of intellectual references to include existentialists philosophers and writers. Reading writers like Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky is therapeutic not in a sense that they will give you any answers. They won’t. What they’ll do is cool off your industrial fervor, loosen the grip of your will on your psyche. They will give you a permission to cease constant striving and not feel bad about it. They’ll make you interested in ethics not out of some externally-imposed duty but out of curiosity as to why we have them.

Dostoyevsky, who had a highly attuned understanding of and sympathy towards a fallible, pitiful man, may help you understand the roots of Musk’s erratic behavior and avoid the same fate. I think that if Dostoyevsky looked at Musk, he’d see a man experiencing a cosmic lostness, someone without a firm ontological footing, someone grasping for some mental, and maybe even moral, anchor. He’d look at his increasingly bizarre contrivances and utterings to keep our attention, at his public exaltations and meltdowns that are beyond cringe, and he’d detect immediately that Musk is in pain, and that the source of that pain is Musk’s feverish struggle to prove to the world, and to himself, that he is not a cog, that he is a free man with agency. And that if he has to do irrational things, stupid things to prove his agency, then so be it.

Musk might be too far gone. But there’s hope for our young retired tech bro. When studying physics will fail to satisfy his metaphysical inquiries, he can, via a long chain of references (something like, and I’m just spit-balling here: physics->quantum physics->Heisenberg->Godel->Leibniz->Kant, from where on it’s all wide open directionally) come out a different man on the other end, someone with an awareness of our earthly messiness and ineptitude and finality. Someone who doesn’t try to solve our ills but mitigate them. Someone with intuition and empathy, not cold calculation.

Perhaps it’s a fool’s hope. Tech bros could be in too deep, beyond the event horizon. They’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars, their identities are now linked to their creations. So they press on. They are a robot that walked itself into a corner and keeps bumping against the wall, its gears whirring, unable to turn around. They’re stochastic parrots, unable to understand the meaning of words, subjects to statistics and algorithms. They’ve become their own creation: a line of code lacking discernment, empathy and intuition.

And how can they ask us to love a code?

P.S. If you like this post, you’ll like my novel “The Hermit”. It’s built around these themes.