A Conspiracy Theory? You decide.

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ‘t.   —  Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I

A new book by Giulano da Empoli entitled “The Hour of the Predator” paints a bleak but credible landscape in which the bloom of technology distracts us from the realities of what’s happening around us and empowers technocrat billionaires to assume power over our lives. He traces these plutocratic power grabs in history from when the Spanish Conquistadors first arrived in Mexico where they and their innovations were greeted with curiosity and interest by Moctezuma and the Aztec nation. Several decades later there was little trace of Aztec society, a signal metaphor for the arrival of technocrats whose innovations distract us from their quiet assumption of power.

In 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World.” In this darkly premonitory novel, Huxley predicts technical and scientific innovations that enable psychological manipulation of citizens in his “brave new world.” Castes are defined at birth and rigidly managed by a class of “alpha leaders.”

In 1949, George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel 1984 about the emergence of totalitarianism, coining the words, “doublethink’ and “thought police.” It defined the term that rings true today, “a cult of personality,” enforced by “thought police.” A later essay by Orwell summarizes the theory of his contemporary theorist James Burnham, who had recently published The Managerial Revolution.

“Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society such that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.”

In a prescient 1967 look at emerging media technology, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The Medium is the Message,” meaning simply that more is conveyed by the medium of transmission than by the message itself. He later changed it to “The Medium is the Massage,” implying that the medium of delivery is a source of pleasure and distraction rather than its content.

Then in 1985, Neil Postman wrote his landmark book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” in which he warns us that, unlike the print medium, modern technological programming avoids rational argument in favor of selling and influencing. Although “influencers” are a relatively recent phenomenon, Postman argues that most emerging electronic media eschews rationality in favor of “sales and influence.” Politics is no longer about rational debate of challenges, ideas, and solutions, but rather easily digestible nostrums and appearances.

The” predators” to which da Empoli alludes are tech billionaires such as: Peter Thiel (Palantir), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Michael Dell (Dell), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Page (Alphabet/Google), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), and Sergey Brin (Alphabet/Google).

Stephen Miller, who came from wealth but did not augment it, is Trump’s current White House deputy chief of staff for policy and an architect of much of the philosophy behind the prevailing technocracy. President Donald Trump, a billionaire though not from tech, is merely the hood ornament for this vehicle and is rapidly losing his luster as such.

As the five authors warn us, we are seeing (or not) the clear erosion of democracy as we have known it in favor of a ruling class of plutocrats who believe they can better manage society once they control it.

Education, free speech, fact-based news, taxation, and regulation all represent threats to their ascendancy.

Trump’s efforts to control public education and colleges under the ruse of eliminating “racism” as expressed in DEI principles and fighting antisemitism (of which Donald Trump has been credibly accused) essentially “weaponize” the accusation of “antisemitism” to simply declare war on free speech. Antisemitism has nothing to do with legitimate criticism of the policies of Israel under Netanyahu or expressing empathy for Palestinians.

In this time of unregulated social media on smartphones, “influencers” and pedophiles on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, we must reimagine our public education curriculum to include media literacy, ban smartphones from schools altogether, and bring our young people into real positions of leadership in which they can exert power over their own future.

In Trump’s current attack on news, he has either threatened or sued The Associated Press, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, ABC, The Des Moines Register, CBS “60 Minutes,” CNN, and has defunded the PBS network.

An informed citizenry is a threat to plutocracy.

Another central goal in wealth-expansion for the elite is privatizing many government functions such as the U.S. Postal System (USPS), the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA), The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), Medicare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Air Traffic Control, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) among others and to sell to commercial interests the National Parks System, close the Department of Education (DOE)  and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)  devolving what’s left to the states. Another goal is to eliminate regulations aimed at preventing further global warming while growing the fossil-fuel economy which causes it.

The Project 2025 Tracker tells the story of progress on conservative efforts to diminish democratic government, free the technocrats of troublesome regulations and create vast new private sector business opportunities.

Yet again, the profit motive trumps the common good.

Adding to this is the technocrats’ $104B investment in artificial intelligence (AI) in the first half of this year which matches their total investment in 2024. Microsoft partnered with OpenAI. Meta just invested $14.9B in Scale AI. Nvidia invested in over 50 AI startups in 2024. Google (Alphabet) and Amazon (AWS) are investing through partnerships and acquisitions, focusing on internal AI development like their Gemini model. Meanwhile, Trump has issued an executive order “removing barriers to American Leadership in AI,” rescinding President Biden’s earlier order for “the Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI.”

AI facilities’ projected electricity demand from data centers worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. Electricity demand from AI-optimized data centers is projected to more than quadruple by 2030, raising the questions of where all this power will come from and who will own the power producers.

Finally, the Gini Quotient is the metric for measuring income inequality within a country or defined population. Already 30% of American households try to live on incomes of under $50,000 a year. These same households favored Trump over Harris by 50 to 48%. In my home state of Vermont, MIT calculates a livable, after-tax income for a family with two parents working and two kids is $122,956.

Factoring in its tax provisions and cuts in benefits, Trump’s budget bill will incur a net financial loss for the bottom 30% of American households by income, whereas the bill that passed will benefit the wealthy  a $12,000 increase in net income, on average, for households in the top 10% who earn above $692,000 a year. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the top 0.1% – those with incomes over $3.3m – would receive tax cuts of $103,500 on average.

Impoverish the many to enrich the few.

Perhaps the darkest manifestation of what is happening before our eyes is the use of the Epstein affair as a political football by both political parties.

Excuse me…the Epstein affair is about the criminal sexual abuse of countless young people; it’s not about political winners and losers. It may well be a serious threat to plutocrats, but we once defined ourselves as a “nation of laws.” Countless young people’s lives have been damaged by the un-mitigating trauma of sexual abuse. Who will speak for them? Will they see justice done?

In a time when Congress and the Supreme Court are genuflecting to plutocracy’s orange hood-ornament and his managers, we Americans must keep paying attention to trustworthy news sources, talk with one another, not at one another, and use the unique tools we each have to support democracy if we’re going to evade the fate forecast by our 20^th century visionaries.

• Bill Schubart

“Lord, what fools these mortals be…” — Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 3, Scene 2)