Cyberpunk, but Make it Suck

Our country isn't just becoming a corporation – we're a corporation getting taken over by private equity.

I haven’t written for awhile, because like you, I’ve been watching Trump and Musk flood the zone, practicing the fine art of compartmentalization, and waiting to see what gets shot down and what sticks before wasting too much energy on any one destructive, unconstitutional executive order. So far, 2/10.

I’ve been hesitating to write consistently, because I don’t want this Substack to become another reactionary political blog (plenty of people are more qualified to do that). I work in comedy, but none of this is funny. It’s not. But if there’s one thing that connects what I do with this space, it’s a focus on naming what is changing in our world, and the problems or shifts in thinking it might cause. This is what we’ve always done in satire when we’re doing it right. So if you want to see a satirical take on what’s happening, look at Reductress. But there’s only so much you can say in a headline. And with things changing so quickly I don’t think we have a shared understanding of reality on which to satirize what exactly is happening. So, here I am, writing sincerely in the hopes that I can articulate these changes for myself and my own sanity.

Do I still want to explore these things satirically…eventually? Yes. But today, I want to focus on how the foundations of our society are changing in front of our eyes. Our future is being reshaped by a new class of tech billionaires that make other million and billionaires seem quaint in comparison – like a cyberpunk novel without any of the cool parts.

A lot of smart people are reporting on the impacts of immigration policy, racism, and transphobia that Trump is using to inflame its base. This reporting is essential to all of the communities I am part of and hold dear, and there isn’t much I can add that these writers and reporters have already said. We’ve also had conservative swings in the U.S every decade or two, and I think what we’re seeing now is a combination of a typical conservative cultural swing with something much bigger that will affect us for much longer, entirely being led by Musk and the tech billionaire ethos. Musk has exploited this conservative swing and its supporters to remake the government in his own image. He will only support it as far as it is valuable to his own ends.

So while the FBI is being gutted, a trans identity is no longer being recognized, and 20 other things that may have gotten worse or been halted by the time you read this, one of the strangest and least-reported news is that the U.S. is joining the ranks of China, and Saudi Arabia by creating a sovereign wealth fund. You know, like a hedge fund, but for a country. What could possibly go wrong?

Saudi Arabia might be most recognizable one up until now, as they used their surplus funds to perform a hostile takeover of the PGA Tour last year. When we think about hostile takeovers by nations, we might think of Russia’s old-school imperialist attempt to take Ukraine. We don’t usually see a nation take over a corporation, especially by poaching away its talent with high-value offers to effectively bring it to its knees. And why? Just to diversify their assets a bit. Any cutthroat investor – I mean, country – would do the same, right? Right??

The U.S. sovereign wealth fund is mostly being reported on as a way for the U.S. to take over Tiktok – and sure, maybe that will happen – but if the Saudis can tell us anything about how these types of funds are utilized by less-than-democratic nations, it will be to conduct hostile business as a hostile corporation across the globe.

Okay, so instead of rubber-seeking colonialism or oil-seeking imperialism, we have hostile corporate takeovers of golf leagues and Tiktok. So what?

It’s a good reminder that what the modern idea of a nation state is only a few hundred years old. The first officially recognized nation state began in 1648 as feudalism was collapsing in England, but they didn’t become common until over 100 years later. Before that, we didn’t have “countries” as much as we had little feudal kingdoms with shared beliefs and maybe a shared bloodline. I’m not sure folks in say, 1702, understood fully what would soon become ubiquitous form of governance and national identity that changed how we relate to physical space and other humans forever. It also isn’t a mistake that capitalism and the modern nation state took over the world at roughly the same time. Everything that a feudal farmer understood about land, time, “borders”, and the value of money would become more irrelevant by the day. An entirely new system was slowly being laid upon the former one, and the people who saw it took advantage of it, and the people who did not continued to be exploited.

Now that the U.S. is involved, this slow but steady shift from nation to corporation is finally gaining momentum, and this new way of understanding the world is not just interesting to think about, but might be essential to surviving in it.

It didn’t just start with sovereign wealth funds, of course. We have already seen universities like NYU and Harvard actually operate more like hedge funds or real estate companies who happen to provide education. We call them one thing, but what they actually do is something else entirely. Nobody would be able to run such an organization without knowing that. In theory, this arrangement can work if the profits are reinvested in the org’s original intent (like education, or in the case of the sovereign wealth fund of Norway, socialism!) but again – we’re talking about the Trump administration here. It seems more likely that investments are going to be reinvested in the same tech billionaire class that has indirectly created it, and has no financial imperative to “help people” any more than your average tech company “helps people” today. The “benefits” they offer are only for the talent they need to pursue their goals. If you’ve ever worked for a large corporation, you know that all you have is leverage, and with few exceptions, nobody is going to save you because it’s “the right thing to do”. You could argue that the U.S. government has been doing this since the beginning, offering just enough to prevent a massive revolt, but we have to acknowledge how much worse it can get from here.

If this country fully transitions to operating as a corporate entity, We won’t have a nation that fights for its national interests, has a national culture, or even a national border as we understand it today. We won’t even have a nation. We all knew the idea of national pride and identity was a myth that had enough truth to it that it made us fight wars together, but it was a structure that – whether we agreed with it or not – shaped our shared understanding of the world around us. If that’s gone, what’s left? What new myth will replace it and keep the structure intact? Probably, that the world is infinitely dangerous and financially insecure. Every man is out for himself, and other people cannot be trusted. That seems like a myth with enough truth to it that it would temper any resistance. It’s capitalism, but worse.

A lot of people will leave this country thinking they are escaping something, when they will actually be reinforcing the antidemocratic structures that will develop around the world. The moderately wealthy will colonize the more “free” countries like Portugal, Costa Rica, Thailand, and Mexico, only to leave behind a class that has no ability to leave or to fight back. In other words, ideal workers. But that person who may still hold a U.S. passport might become completely uninvolved with the politics of their homeland or their current country because they make just enough money not to care. In other words, ideal non-voters. The tracks are being laid for an oligarchy in its purest form – one where there aren’t nearly enough people fighting against it, because the incentives laid out by the oligarchs will only uphold the structure.

But the U.S. doesn’t even have surplus cash to invest, because we are in debt. Which means that we’d have to sell off whatever national resources we have, or devalue the dollar by printing more money. It sounds a lot like what happens when you sell a company to private equity, because it is – just like every debt-ridden corporation, consultants will extract value at the cost of the humans who inhabit it. Everyone will hate it and want to quit, except for the people who can’t afford to, or the people who are making too much money from it to justify ever leaving. The world will become infinitely more free for those on top, and less free for those on the bottom. It’s all roughly the same shape of what we live in today, but infinitely worse for more people, and infinitely better for even fewer people than before.

But this will only happen if it works as intended. Kara Swisher reminded us that these tech billionaires are (and I’m paraphrasing) fucking idiots with a high risk tolerance, and the mantra of “moving fast and breaking things” will inevitably backfire when the incompetent narcissists running this country decide to sell our national forests and go all in on Bitcoin or something.

We all remember 2008. We know who pays when the billionaire class fucks up. Sovereign wealth funds only work when they are run well, or when there is enough surplus to allow for a few missteps. We have neither of those things, but we’re hurdling into this future with blinders on, regardless.