Revenge of the Nerds
Will the emerging tech counter-elite manage to complete their dominance and capture culture?
Caligula would have blushed at the excess. The people have revolted. The charred remains of our former insitutions lay bare as the people sift through the ashes. “Give them bread and circuses,” no longer remains viable as the ruling elite scramble to figure out how Donald Trump reclaimed the oval office.
What will lie ahead? Intra-elite competition. A war between Shape Rotators and Wordcells. STEM nerds vs humanities majors. The emerging counter-elite of Sillicon Valley vs the incumbent academic and press elites.
MARC ANDREESON ON THE COUNTER-ELITE AND THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY:
What he makes clear in his piece is that the tech world has emerged as the triumphant counter-elite after years of hesitation: “The obvious successor (to finance) should have been the tech industry: the centerpiece of the American economy, growth-driver of the last decade. Yet libertarian-minded Silicon Valley was, until recently, wary of taking on the role.”
The 2024 election was a marked divergence from their once timid, and ambivalent approach to politics. We’ve never seen an administration with this level of influence from Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers and leaders. Make what you will about the results, what it should signal is that a majority of the public has lost faith in the current ruling class, the institutions they inhabit, and their ability to adequately govern.
One of the key battles in this war we already see taking shape is obvious: institutional recapture.
Elon did just that with X. Though the user experience might be worse for a lot of people depending on who you ask, X is a more accurate representation of global thought now more than ever. The app is riddled with racist diatribes and engagement farming OF models, but then again, so is the world. What X does by turning a blind eye to moderation is provide a more accurate assessment of the climate. X has proved to be a bellwether in global trends and more importantly in American politics. Those that shape culture, media, and policy are utterly addicted to that app no matter what they tell you, and as a result, it plays an outsized role IRL. You’re not always gonna like what the weather is but its better to know what to wear than to be caught in a blizzard with a tee shirt and shorts on. It seems reasonable to conclude that the changes Elon has made at X played a significant role in the outcome of the election and if you’re an X user, you may have seen the signals that hinted at a decisive Trump victory before others. It’s one step closer to a capture of culture, and an important stronghold the incumbent elite lost.
Monahan posits that in order to be a coherent elite, they must possess significant cultural influence defined by taste, narratives and status. And while the tech industry clearly has 2 of 3 requisites in social and financial capital, it has a significant deficit in taste making. Nerds were never good at influencing culture, art, literature, aesthetic trends, or fashion…
The visuals of the cyber punk future as promised by Elon Musk and Tesla are polarizing at best, and I can’t imagine people accepting it readily with open arms. Although, you can’t write off our tech overlords entirely – Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive managed to spark a revolution through their work and influenced design thinking in ways no one could have imagined.
So while the emerging tech counter-elites significantly lack cultural capital, it isn’t difficult to imagine them recapturing the institutions that shape our aesthetic landscape. Dean Kissick’s incisive commentary in Painted Politics: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art describes a modern art world rife with identity politics and severely lacking in substance. In an interview discussing the article, he said “there was once this idea that artists are on the fringes of society, but now that’s been turned inside out. Now museums see artists at the centre of society, promoting good values, teaching us how to be better people, better citizens, and what’s on the fringes of society is generally considered abhorrent in all kinds of ways, whether politically abhorent or aesthetically.” The ideological project of our incumbent academic and press elite, whatever you want to call it, wokeness, applied critical theory, identity politics, etc… has yielded art and literature completely devoid of substance and gravitas. “Once, we had painters of modern life; now we have painters of contemporary identities. And it is the fact of those identities—not the way they are expressed—that is understood to give value to our art.” Clearly there’s opportunity here for the next great art patron to be someone from tech.
The other path in The Great Shape Rotator Wordcell War is to rebuild parallel institutions from the ground up. One of the most consequential and exciting new tech startups right now is the betting platform Polymarket.
Founded in 2020 by 26 year old Shayne Coplan, Polymarket is a household name, with many arguing that it’s the most accurate way to determine the likely outcome of an election or future historical event. Where the polls so obviously failed, Polymarket stepped in to provide a much clearer idea of who was going to win. Most have come to the conclusion that polls have been a tool of propaganda and perception management for a long time, but this election practically all but confirmed it. The reality is that Kamala’s internal polling showed her trailing Donald Trump the entire campaign and yet the unfiltered truth would have been more apparent to people had they paid more attention to betting markets and less attention to polls. Remember Ann Seltzer’s bombshell poll showing Iowa +3 Harris? What the shape rotators did with Polymarket was successfully build a better, viable alternative to the dubious and often propagandistic tool of political polling. In 2028, I can guarantee that we will see a dramatic shift in emphasis on betting markets, and specifically Polymarket. Polls will simply be another data point, while betting markets will effectively agreggate all of the existing data to point to a specific outcome.
X and Polymarket are a glimpse of what's to come. Control over insitutions will be the defining feature of the Great Shape Rotator-Wordcell War, and the next 12 years of American political life. The biggest and most consequential fights will be over cultural capital – an area in which wordcells have a natural advantage as the predominant purveyors of art.
If you’re the wordcells, you’re clawing on to the insitutions you have left while racing to rebuild the ones you’ve lost – namely media. (How many articles and X posts did you see about the left needing their own Joe Rogan).
If you’re the shape rotators, you’re taking a victory lap after your first win and getting ready to defend your newly acquired power. They better hope DOGE shapes up to be all that’s promised…
To the victor go the spoils.
Great post Sibi, very well put.