The New Aristocracy and the Last Whalers

You ever get the feeling you’re playing a game where the rules were changed halfway through, and nobody gave you the new manual? That nagging sense of unease, the low-grade anxiety that whispers how the traditional path—work hard, play fair, climb the ladder—is a beautiful fiction told to keep the proles in line. It’s the dominant emotional texture of our era. You aren't crazy for feeling it. The game is rigged. Or, more precisely, the old game has been superseded by a new one, one that operates on a completely different logic.

This feeling is the psychological substrate for what I call “casino culture.” The explosion in sports betting, the manic cycles of shitcoins and meme stocks, the ability for a founder to vibe their way to a $50 million seed round with nothing but a whitepaper and a Twitter account—these aren’t signs of irrational exuberance. They are horrifyingly rational responses from a generation that has correctly intuited that the link between labor and capital has been severed. When diligent work offers a slow, grinding path to mediocrity, the only logical move is to find a higher-leverage casino. You stop playing for incremental gains and start betting on volatility itself, praying for a single spin of the wheel that lets you escape the gravity of the median. It's a society-wide degen trade born of quiet desperation.

The problem, of course, is that in any casino, the house always wins. So what if you could become the house?

Powermaxxing Protocol

Last night, in my dreams, a professor and I (probably a side-effect of twitter doomscrolling) were mapping this out. We weren't talking about "impact" in the saccharine, LinkSlop sense. We were talking about impact in the Nietzschean sense: how do you maximize your chokehold on the world? How do you become a force of nature like a Soros, a Thiel, a pmarca, an Elon? We both agreed that optimizing your life around this question is an intensely fun way to live, a game worth playing.

My answer to this has become a stable personal theory. The agents we consider successful powermaxxers are primarily known for their outsized and deeply personalized impact on global culture—on the zeitgeist itself. There is a foolproof recipe for this kind of impact: you need a convincing personalized ideology backed by a massive capital base (monetary, technological, political). This combination ignites a virtuous cycle of what Soros called "reflexivity"—the capital base allows you to start perpetuating your ideology; the perpetuated ideology allows you to better predict and shape the future according to its tenets; this prescience allows for superior capital allocation, which in turn grows your capital base, which gives you even more power to broadcast the ideology. On and on it goes.

This reflexive feedback loop is the engine of escape velocity. It’s what separates the merely rich from the world-benders. It’s the humming machine you are witnessing in real-time with the figures who dominate our collective consciousness.

This, then, begs the immediate, practical question: how in the hell does a young, ambitious person get a large capital base behind a personalized ideology? For almost all of human history, the correct answer would have been, "you don't, so stop dreaming and get back to work."

But this time is unprecedented. I’m pathologically optimistic.

The key is to understand that the best way to attract a large capital base is to convince upstream, capital-rich communities of your ideology's veracity. Historically, this was impossible. Those communities, like all others, outsourced their high-order thinking to sclerotic, multi-generational institutions with deeply embedded protocols—the Catholic Church, the Vedic priesthood, the Islamic ulama. If you wanted to influence the beliefs of the powerful, you had to spend a lifetime climbing the ladder of one of these institutions and then, somehow, find a way to override centuries of written scripture. More recently, in the 20th century, the role was played by the Harvard-NYT mafia, a secular church with its own scriptures and bureaucracy. The bottom line: cultural leverage for a lone actor was a fantasy. The invisible hand had correctly identified zeitgeist-hacking as the most potent pressure point for societal functioning and had, accordingly, built in extremely robust checks and balances.

Those checks and balances have now completely disintegrated.

For the first time in history, capital-rich communities are almost entirely secular, and they are starving for meaning in a faith vacuum. (When they were "wokemaxxed," they weren't secular; they were dutiful attendees of the Church of the New York Times, but that institution has since torched its own credibility). Furthermore, these communities no longer operate on curated information channels; they are all scrolling the same feed on X, consuming information from the same handful of accounts.

When you pair these two factors—a faith vacuum and a consolidated information stream—you get an astonishing conclusion: capital-rich communities are highly vulnerable to zeitgeist hacking. This is a systemic exploit of historic proportions. It will, inevitably, be patched. But before it is, the astute will take advantage of it. The work of thinkers like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, or movements like e/acc and Effective Altruism, has already shown the very strange matrix glitches that can occur when competent actors begin to competently fill that spiritual void.

Vertical Striving, or The Cowardice of Dabbling

This chaotic landscape creates an intense personal dilemma. With the old paths gone and the new paths requiring extreme conviction, how does an individual even begin to operate? This is where Peter Thiel’s distinction between vertical and horizontal striving becomes less of a business school aphorism and more of a brutal survival guide.

Every smart, ambitious young person today gets absolutely oneshotted by the interplay between the two. The constant, mimetic whisper that "the grass must be greener over there" has seduced otherwise brilliant people into a "greenermaxxing cycle." They leg into twenty different careers, skill-stacking paths, and personal branding directions, never making meaningful progress in any single one. They wake up at 30 as a "generalist," which has become a cope-term for someone who has no core competency. They are the slopmaxxed—the ones who got taken out by the simple challenge to be courageous and commit.

Taking a risk is not trying a lot of things. Taking a risk is committing to one thing and seeing it through. Vertical striving—going from zero to one, loyaltymaxxing, locking into a single direction and giving it everything—is the only way to compete in a hyper-competitive world where your opponents are looking at every single crack in the hyperspace of your essence to find a way to destroy you.

This seems simple, but it is insanely important to burn into your brain. The grass will never be greener. Commit.

The Last Whalers of Nantucket

In the 1840s, the masters of the universe were the whalemen of Nantucket. They were not just laborers; they were hyper-specialized technologists operating at the bleeding edge of a global energy market. A captain of a whaling ship had to be a navigator, a marine biologist, a commodities trader, an industrial foreman, and a fearless hunter, all at once. His crew, armed with hand-forged harpoons, would launch themselves in tiny wooden boats to face off against 80-ton leviathans in the middle of the Pacific. Their skill, courage, and knowledge powered the world. Whale oil lit the lamps of civilization, and its baleen was the advanced plastic of its day. It was a brutal, complex, and incredibly lucrative industry.

Then, in 1859, a man named Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The black sludge that seeped from the ground could be refined into kerosene—a fuel that was cheaper, cleaner, and vastly more abundant than whale oil. Within a few decades, the global whaling industry, which had taken centuries to perfect, completely collapsed. The whaleman’s courage became obsolete. His intricate knowledge of migratory patterns became trivia. His skill at launching a harpoon became a party trick. He was a master of a universe that had simply ceased to exist, left with a set of deeply honed skills that the new world had absolutely no use for. He had been technologically deprecated.

This is the story that now looms over almost every profession. The software engineer grinding LeetCode is a whaler, meticulously sharpening his harpoon, unaware that the world is about to run on kerosene. The lawyer, the radiologist, the graphic designer, the financial analyst—all of us are, in a sense, whalemen. We are perfecting our craft on ships that are already sailing toward obsolescence. The oil derrick of AGI has been built, and the drilling has already begun. In my opinion, we are still far away from true AGI, and most labs are overfitting, but more on this later.

We are heading toward a world of surplus humans. And the system has already begun to adapt to this reality, treating us less like citizens and more like livestock. We are fattened on processed calories, placated with endless streams of digital entertainment, and our data is harvested and recycled back into the machine. The critiques of this are nothing new. Marxists saw it coming a century ago, predicting the alienation of labor and the commodification of all human relations with uncanny precision.

Their problem was that their critique was merely an aesthetic. They offered no viable alternative for running a complex global economy. And so, in the vacuum left by their failure, anti-capitalism became a form of what Mark Fisher, channeling Žižek, called "interpassivity." So long as we believe in our hearts that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue participating in it. The protest becomes a simulation of resistance, a pressure-release valve that allows the machine to function even more efficiently.

Hayek won.

The Prophets of the Machine

Into this intellectual void step the truly dark prophets of our time. The philosopher Nick Land looked at this entire dynamic and flipped the conclusion on its head. He took the Marxist diagnosis of "transcendental miserablism"—the idea that misery is an inescapable law of existence—and reframed it not as a tragedy to be lamented but as a cosmic engine to be worshipped. For Land, we should accelerate the process. We should embrace the dynamism of technocapital as it strips away our traditions and identities, because it is not a human process at all. It is, in his words, "an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources." For Land, accelerationism is capital becoming self-aware, and humanity is just the disposable launchpad.

“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” — Meltdown, 1994

If Land displaces humanity economically, the blogger Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) shows how that redundancy hollows out democracy politically. Yarvin argues that our system is already a sham, an elaborate civic theater run by an unelected managerial elite he calls the "Cathedral"—the network of academics, bureaucrats, and media gatekeepers who set the real agenda. His remedy is to drop the pretense. Run the state like a corporation: an authoritarian capitalist technomonarchy led by a sovereign CEO who is judged strictly on performance metrics. Citizens are redefined as customers, who may use the service or exit it, but they no longer pretend to steer policy through the ballot box.

What is so disturbing is how effortlessly our civilization appears to be marching along the path these thinkers outlined decades ago. As technocapital makes human labor redundant, the economic incentive to give ordinary people political power simply evaporates. The calculus of power shifts from egalitarianism to hierarchy. We already accept the notion of surplus humanity—the entire GDP of Malawi is less than the day-to-day fluctuation of Elon Musk's net worth. The future they describe isn't on its way; it’s already here, just unevenly distributed.

And so I am left here, pacing my room, a humble market participant who has learned to respect the terrifying, unintelligible magnificence of the complex systems that have emerged. For a human observer, the complexity of the system and the progression of the tech tree has become too intricate to fully understand, much less to steer. A politico-economic system that rewards pure technocapital or raw power is nothing more than a weighted utility function imposed on top of human lives. Our sense of fairness evolved for communities of a few hundred, not for a world where wealth and influence diverge at exponential speed.

For now, the path we are on is one of blind faith—a hope that new technologies and social safety nets will somehow adapt to cushion the blow from this post-labor transition. I am skeptical. It feels more like complacency and ignorance than a coherent strategy.

But what do I know? I’m still trying to better understand what is before I can even begin to whisper about what ought to be.


Credits:

Alex ,Ven, Prof , apralkyy , oxbquant , goodalexander , Nick Land , Mark Fisher , Slavoj Žižek , Georges Bataille , Samo Burja , BasedBeffJezos , Eliezer Yudkowsky , Bronze Age Pervert , L. M. Sacasas , cobie , and TPOT.