I titled a recent Editors’ Blog post The Age of Monsters. I’ve been thinking about that post and theme again because I keep seeing more confirmation, more evidence of this dimension of the world we are currently living in. I stress again that the idea here is not that these “monsters” are bad people, though I would say that most of them are in varying degrees. The issue is their gigantism. They are so much more powerful than ordinary people, mostly but not in every case because of wealth, that they distort the whole fabric of society and politics. They are like big, clumsy and lumbering oafs who nonetheless have power that make if not the whole game than all the center of gravity be about them.
In many ways, the peace deal in Israel-Palestine, if that’s what it turns out to be, is an example of that. As I argued last week, it’s a good outcome or far, far less bad outcome, that comes from bad things: the fact that the U.S. and the Gulf monarchies are now tightly tethered together by authoritarianism and high-level monetary corruption. This is about Trump and Mohammed bin Salman and the princes of the United Arab Emirates. If it works, great. But we shouldn’t forget a big reason why Trump has been able to push this through.
Then I saw news about Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce. He’s also been the owner of Time magazine since not long before the pandemic. I’m no expert on the politics of Silicon Valley titans. But he’s generally been seen as on the more liberal end of the spectrum, and spent a lot of money on good works in San Francisco. A few days he announced he’s now 100% behind Donald Trump. He even said he would love to see Trump send troops into San Francisco.
Is this just to protect his company? Did he shift with the overall “vibe shift”? Who knows, and a big part of the equation is that I would like to not have to care. I referred to these men (in almost every case) “big, clumsy and lumbering oafs.” This was not just to get in some pot shots. I am repeatedly reminded how the political and economic ideas and record of these guys are, collectively, not great. About the level of thinking of the average guy you meet, only they’re the equivalent of a duke or an earl in our new Age of Monsters system.
And then we get to AI.
One of the big emerging issues right now is electricity costs. You’ve probably seen this discussed in recent news stories or in your electrical bill. It’s driven by a number of factors, a lot of which is just under-investment in the electrical grid and new power generation. But in a climate of already mounting electricity prices, the addition of huge levels of new demand from AI server centers is going to be a very, very big deal, even if their impact on the current prices is not that great. We come back to the question of who is driving the AI push? Just because there may be an AI bubble doesn’t mean AI is a bust. There was a huge internet bubble but that wasn’t the end of the internet. But again, though the drivers are complicated, you have a huge, huge part of the today’s economy being influenced by the decisions of a relatively small and fairly bubble-contained group of people. Do we as a society want to go full steam ahead with AI at the price of massively higher electricity bills? I tend to doubt it.
These are disparate examples. Perhaps some would dispute that they are even examples of any single thing. I try to remain focused on the fact that there have always been super powerful individuals. To a degree, the difference today is that so many of these men are characters in the Trumpian public drama. One of them simply vents his id all day on his own social media platform. (Without more information you can’t even be totally sure who I’m talking about in that last sentence.) But there’s no question that democracy is not only menaced by a wave of authoritarianism but the entwined issue of social, economic and political gigantism, the small population of monsters who bestride and dominate the country and the planet and can only be constrained by the most concerted acts of public will.