The Big Con: Science Fiction as National Mythology
The operation to create a permanent tech bro dynasty is in plain sight.
Dotcom Days
I was in my 20s during the dotcom boom. I found myself, a self-taught high-school graduate, as the co-founder and CTO of an internet 3D startup in 1996. For several years, there were massive neon techno parties every weekend, money was no object, and any idea you could connect to the internet could get funded. The Jetsons-like future we had been promised had finally arrived.
While I had no reference for any of it—having moved to San Francisco from Maryland in the early 90s to play in a band—there was an undeniable energy about the whole scene. In many ways, it really was a great meeting of the minds, and historic value really was being created.
But as the market got more and more absurdly valued, it became all about chasing investment, and telling a story, instead of building a product or creating a revenue stream. I watched people raise investment funds to throw parties to attract more investors—so they could throw more parties, and so on—for years.
Until, in 2001, the music stopped.
A few of those companies went on to become the Amazons of the world, a few became the Enrons, and some were the Ciscos—companies that managed to survive the bubble but took twenty years to recover their value.
Most companies created in the dotcom period, however, just quietly disappeared, leaving a huge overhang on the economy. Remember Webvan, Flooz.com, Pets.com, eToys, Boo.com, and on and on?
This statement by FCC Chairman Michael Powell in 2002 explains how the existing telecom sector “amassed a staggering amount of debt in building near identical networks.” The reason: “the Internet Gold Rush.”
Chatbot.com
If you swap a few words from Powell’s statement—change “telecommunications” and “fiber” to “artificial intelligence” and “data centers”—you will get a glimpse of the near future being forced on us by the American oligarchy. This is a repeat of the dotcom bubble—but far larger.
As one glaring example of their overreach, the company OpenAI, which builds the ChatGPT chatbot, has by itself committed to $1.4 trillion in “compute services” over the next 8 years.
OpenAI says it will buy enough AI processing by 2033 that it will require the same amount of energy to power as India—and twice as much as ExxonMobil.
Nevertheless, OpenAI’s current revenue is reported to be just $13 billion in 2025—a hundred times lower than its committed costs. To help keep it afloat through this wild spending spree, Amazon is reportedly investing $10 billion, and Larry Ellison’s Oracle group will invest $300 billion in data centers leased to OpenAI.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is one of the main promoters of the “AI revolution” we keep hearing about. His prognostications about the futuristic world we can expect from his technology have helped open the wallets of countless investors, both professional and retail: cancer will be cured; unlimited energy sources will be found; and humans won’t have to worry our pretty little heads about much anymore.
Who is Sam Altman?
Sam Altman is essentially a professional conman, groomed by none other than Peter Thiel—who gave Altman money to start his own venture fund fifteen years ago.
Altman also took a job running Thiel’s venture fund YCombinator—just after Altman had scammed his way through a failed dotcom startup called “Loopt.” Altman is also a major investor in Reddit, and made a deal to give all its content to OpenAI for training AI models.
This video is well worth watching. This story is a mirror of what happened 25 years ago in Silicon Valley—just before the bubble burst.
Altman’s fantastical stories about the inevitable ascent of his AI into a kind of benevolent super-scientist that will absolve humanity of the need to work—or think for ourselves—is the same kind of self-serving nonsense promoted throughout the dotcom era.
2000: Adding .com to anything automatically makes it better.
2025: Adding a chatbot to anything automatically makes it better.
In both cases, a real technical innovation with real applications gets hijacked by people who prefer to sell a future fantasy instead of a product—no matter who gets hurt in the process.
Asked by white supremacist podcaster Tucker Carlson about whether he’s amassing too much power, Altman says he “used to worry about something like that much more” but since everyone can play with his chatbot now, he doesn’t.
The Parasitic Class
The reality behind OpenAI is darker than just Sam Altman’s con. It’s a vehicle for the richest people on the planet to manipulate the world towards their anti-human worldviews. These five people people are collectively worth more than a trillion dollars—and control companies valued by the market at more than $10 trillion.
On the world’s richest list, eight of the top ten people are in American technology, each heavily invested in AI. This is a remarkably clear sign of a wild imbalance in the markets—and of a de facto global oligarchy formed out of a single sector in a single country.
Musk
Elon Musk, now the world’s richest human by far, is at the forefront of this AI-driven sci-fi fantasy, constantly promoting the idea that AI and robots will create a kind of economic perpetual motion machine: “sustainable abundance.”
However, despite this allegedly abundant future, the infinite cooperation of our AI-robot overlords, and Elon Musk’s $642 billion, he claims there is no room for Somalis in Minnesota because they cost more than the GDP of Somalia.
This is, of course, just more of his increasingly frantic project to make America more white—a goal shared by Thiel’s longtime minion, JD Vance.
Ellison
Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, has been in the top few wealthiest people for many years, including a long stint at the top of the list. But Ellison, who has made his right-wing politics known before but largely avoided flaunting it, has now joined his fellow oligarchs as a full-blown member of the authoritarian cult of billionaires conspiring to take down American democracy.
Ellison’s group just successfully purchased TikTok, after Trump made it clear who the buyer should be to the owners. And Ellison’s son David, who now runs Paramount and CBS, hired Bari Weiss—an avid promoter of Thiel’s for a decade—to run CBS News.
Weiss’s first project at CBS was a week devoted to promoting Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow.
Just after the 2024 election, Weiss hosted Thiel on her Substack podcast, and asked about Elon Musk’s role in swinging the election to Trump: “Was he the critical ingredient? Did Elon give people cover?”
Thiel’s response is telling:
“Yeah obviously Elon gave people a great deal of cover. It certainly seemed incredibly dangerous to me what he did. Incredibly courageous. You know what would have happened to him if Trump would have lost.”
Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are “close friends”—Ellison is on Tesla’s Board of Directors. Thiel and Ellison have done business for decades—and Oracle and Palantir have recently become even more entwined through “mission-critical AI solutions.”
Ellison’s attitude towards technology is chilling. In 2024, he made a full-throated argument for a totalist surveillance state of the kind offered by Palantir—a society where everyone is constantly monitored—whether they like it or not.
“The truth is we don’t turn it off…”
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Ellison’s group is not satisfied with controlling TikTok, Paramount, and CBS. It also wants to control CNN and Warner Brothers—a deal that Trump is trying make happen over the objections of the parties involved, because Trump is unhappy with CNN’s coverage of his disastrous presidency.
Tech Bro Dynasty
The true goal of the operation to control the media was revealed on Friday at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point “AmericaFest” convention. Three years before the next presidential election, Erika Kirk endorsed JD Vance, the heir-apparent of the tech bro dynasty.
Tellingly, at Kirk’s supposedly Christian, youth-oriented event, the racist, antidemocratic books of Dark Enlightenment co-founders Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land are being sold—and their neo-Nazi publisher Jonathan “L0m3z” Keeperman was given a speaking role.
This is the fusion of Christianity, white supremacy, and science fiction being sold to Trump’s base as the future of America: an AI-surveilled, white Christian ethnostate, controlled by technology oligarchs through captured media.
But it’s just a big con—a complex fraud by a very few people to seize control of America’s wealth for themselves. They want to own your TV channels, your social media, and your AI, not to better inform you, but to create an alternate reality where handing over your rights, resources, and labor to them seems like the only rational choice.
But we do have a choice: Delete CBS. Delete TikTok. If they buy CNN, delete that too. This is a psychological war. Defend your mind—and dig in for a long, brutal fight.
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I find myself in a quandary. I absorb and (try to) understand all Jim says, here and other times--but especially today--and am filled with great anger, against these selfish stupid idiots who've grabbed power and great horror and sadness. I don't want to feel that way! Especially the anger (now I can understand why revolutionaries blow things up). But it is the only sane response, to people taking away all the good in our world. The people who truly love freedom are the ones who are left standing. Thanks, Jim.
I consider myself very lucky that I have never used TikTok or X or even Instagram. Never watch network tv except for occasional sports. Never watch CNN.
Thanks for all your hard work, Jim. Yours is the newsletter I most look forward to.
May your holidays be peaceful.