This is not an essay. It is an opinion that would not survive any empirical scrutiny whatsoever. These are merely feelings I am putting into words in the hope of delivering a hefty kick in the solar plexus to the right people at the right moment.
I am doing so in a style that seems tailor-made for our times, so I might as well appeal directly to your gut feelings.
How ugly do you think Elon Musk is? With hair, without hair, after a few weeks at the gym… None of that really matters. Concentrate mainly on his facial expressions and then consider just how ugly the man is on a scale from one to ten.
Do the same with Mark Zuckerberg. At first glance, he is less ugly than Elon Musk, but once he starts talking, you quickly get the feeling that there is no genuine biological life inside him. At least none of a kind familiar to us.
Bezos is harder to judge, because with the help of a considerable number of medical procedures he has managed to work his way towards a reasonably human-looking appearance. But once he starts talking, it immediately becomes obvious again that something is missing, something neither the gym nor medical intervention has been able to improve.
If you squint, Sam Altman could almost pass for the ideal son-in-law, although he does have a slightly whiny look about him. You can tell that life is constantly difficult for him, but whatever sympathy that might evoke in the listener disappears the moment he sits down to calculate what percentage of humanity might possibly be wiped out by his products, without showing any visible emotion whatsoever.
Then there is Nvidia’s leather-jacketed jumping frog. Definitely human, and not entirely unattractive. The fact that he came up with the idea that a comparatively small component of a PC can perfectly well cost three or five times as much as the entire PC or laptop makes him almost a joke compared with the first two. Just a clever wheeler-dealer.
An increasingly impoverished global population objects mainly to the wealth these men have accumulated. The same wealth that makes all their explanations of why things cost what they cost – whether in money or in data – immediately that little bit less credible.
I do not resent these men because of their wealth. They operate in a free market, and in a free market you are allowed to blindside the competition if doing so gives you an advantage. Abolish that system and something even worse will undoubtedly take its place.
What I do resent is the power they exercise over the media and over culture. When I was sixteen, I already wrote an essay in school: “Ugly people make ugly noises.”
And now we have finally reached that point.
We are living in an as-yet unnumbered sequel to Revenge of the Nerds.
That needs to end soon.