Examining the techno-libertarian heroism that's unravelling our world
Our world was built by and for The Hero’s myth. That myth is a myth of initiation through trials, death, descent and ultimate victory. It’s the myth of a lone man, cast out from normalcy and tasked to prove himself. But colonialism has populated its wilds. Modernity has neutered the lineages and life-ways that once held its initiatory core intact. Hollywood and Marvel put the hero on a dopamine treadmill. And, late stage capitalism gutted his moral heart. There’s is a particular version of the hero’s journey being told at civilizational scale — through the escapades of tech billionaires and political elites and the ideologies of those who believe that intelligence confers the right to power. It’s a Hero’s Journey that sounds and tastes like the well worn monomyth. It moves through the same sequence of wound and calling, descent and return, ordeal and apotheosis that Joseph Campbell mapped in the myths of a hundred cultures. But something has happened to it on the way through the machine. It became the story of the techno-libertarian, the surveillance capitalist authoritarian, the power-drunk narcissist convinced he is the hero of his own story, regardless of who he tramples on the way to the top. The grammar is intact; the values have inverted.
This is very, very good.
