Delete or Die
Notes from the World Governments Summit, the Tucker Carlson Summit, and The Brutalist
Last week I left the comfort of my bubble — and I can’t wait to return to it. Going from the United States to the “Davos of the Middle East,” the World Governments Summit in Dubai, I was fed with a double dose of Trump & Co.’s world. The culmination came on the closing day of the Summit, with eight hours of, among others, Elon Musk, Viktor Orbán, Tucker Carlson, and Jeffrey Sachs — all while, closer to home, Trump was selling out Ukraine and J.D. Vance was giving Europe the middle finger at the Munich Security Conference.
It’s an all-out war on intellect, art, and beauty. The sequence is predictable: the undermining of small symbolic rituals and the demolition of truth will be followed by the defiance of law, the introduction of martial law, the destruction of liberal institutions, the persecution and arrest of dissidents, then their friends, then their friends’ friends and sympathizers, and finally the installment of an AI-based government making “optimal” decisions, and, of course, continued grift.
“Tech Support”
At his video appearance at the World Governments Summit, Musk — wearing a “Tech Support” T-shirt and starting the conversation with an episode of awkward laughter — was pretty blunt about his plan, referring to Brave New World — Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel — while projecting a future in which the smartest dominate the rest and only a small fraction of total intelligence will be human (“1 to 2 percent”). Musk’s version of the Great Replacement Theory leaves only one conclusion: “I hope the machines will be nice to us.” You know the “soft authoritarian social revolution” that according to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen had infiltrated the US and the Western World in the past decade? The techno-autocrats are giddy now that it’s making way for a hard authoritarian one.At the heart of the attack: Europe.
Following the Real Men® from Silicon Valley, later that day, were former Fox News and now YouTube right-wing influencer and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson in conversation with the prime minister of Hungary, the longest serving leader of an EU nation, Viktor Orbán. “You have to hear what they have to say,” a fellow European attendee uttered to me in the lobby, discreetly. And I defended my attendance with “it’s better to be in the room with them than not.”
Was it, though? “The Tucker Carlson Summit,” as it was called, was sparsely attended — it was for the screens anyway — but that didn’t stop a sick feeling from setting in. It’s one thing to intellectualize strongmen’s tactics from afar; it’s another to see them up close. Orbán making fun of the “hypocrisy” of the European Union earned him timid laughter, and his self-portrayal as the man who understands the street earned him applause. Orbán, who touts his Hungary as an “illiberal democracy,” is the quintessential populist, and his playbook is well known.
The Hungarian-American journalist, writer, and pro-democracy activist Kati Marton, who had socialized with Orbán before he became radicalized, put it best when she warned of Trump being Orbán’s American twin. “Even as American journalists debate whether to take Mr. Trump seriously or literally, I recall Voltaire’s warning, ‘He who can persuade you to believe absurdities can persuade you to commit atrocities,’” she wrote on November 30 last year.
On stage in Dubai and later that week in a radio address, Orbán predicted Trump would link Russia back to the economies and energy networks of Western countries if the war in Ukraine came to an end. The oddsmakers today think he’s right. Without a stronger European military and nuclear deterrence Russia sits on Europe’s doorstep. It won’t require the invasion that some predict for it to begin steering the course of liberal democracies in what we today call our free, humanistic societies.
The Great Realignment
The Great Realignment is happening, and at dizzying speed. A new geopolitical alliance (a global “Mob”) is forming, and long-held Western values and doctrines of stability are being shown the door, if not the window. Solidarity is considered a sentimental flaw of the weak. In its place we are being served hyper-machismo, jingoism, brute force, and efficiency over accuracy and decency. I saw it up close in Dubai, where more than 2,000 government heads, policy makers, and business and civil society leaders huddled in the Trump/Musk shadow.
It reminded me of something a friend told me about the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos earlier this year. During a session on health, the host asked attendees to raise their hands if they were concerned about the US leaving the World Health Organization, a decision Trump had announced the day before. Only one hand went up — that of the sound engineer in the back of the room. Then the host asked: “Now raise your hand if you did not raise it before because you were concerned with the potential ramifications of criticizing the US.” Every single hand in the room went up, and the CEOs, nonprofit leaders, politicians, and academics in attendance looked at each other in disbelief. It is one of the core strengths of authoritarian movements that they create a culture in which self-censorship and pre-emptive surrender ensure that they do not even have to wield their authority.
This is their soft power, and it was on show in Dubai. I had several conversations with other participants that took an awkward turn because they seemed unwilling to say a critical word about what they had heard from Musk, instead glorifying him as a “genius” and “visionary entrepreneur.” “He’s getting stuff done,” they gushed. “The system needed disruption.” “Wasteful government spending is like stealing money from the people.” “I’m glad Musk is addressing this.” One media executive told me: “I don’t like him personally. And I don’t like his politics. But I like his leadership style.”
Dark Mode
This political change is accompanied by a profound cultural shift that denigrates virtue and rewards vice. The cultural theorist and strategist Matt Klein and the designer and social critic Edmond Lau describe this shift as “dark mode” replacing “light mode.” For the last 15 years, “the prevailing perception was that there was light at the end of the tunnel — whatever that meant.” This has now changed. They write:
“If you think the ‘vibe shift’ is sudden, you weren’t paying attention. The ‘light’ was always struggling to flicker, but now it’s being enveloped by the dark. The flame is struggling for oxygen. Across the spectrum: fashion, music, and of course, politics now find themselves unable to suppress a dark undercurrent. Signals like hedonistic club culture and sex parties, ‘FKA Twigs being FKA Twigs,’ hyper-individualism, Trump’s re-election and the ‘Boom Boom’ era, represent a milieu of equal parts exhaustion, betrayal over broken liberal democratic utopian promises, and cathartic liberation. The conclusion that many are coming to is: If ‘the game’ was always rigged, then nothing matters. Therefore, everything’s now fair game.”
Everything is not in its right place. Meaning is perverted, in the best Orwellian manner. And the old narratives and instruments are not going to save us. What we are facing is unprecedented, and our language, our emotions, our spirit cannot keep up. It’s the next and final stage of our co-evolution with technology:
First, technology subverted our physical sovereignty by means of industrial production and mass transportation; then the Internet, and social media in particular, undermined our emotional sovereignty and broke our heart by relegating it to the smart engines of mass persuasion and dopamine addiction; now AI is substituting our brain with neural networks. Body, heart, and mind; how we move, feel, and think — all outsourced.
We are gradually being deleted, and it is not without irony that one of the last bulwarks against that deletion is government bureaucracy. Make no mistake, the techno-fascists’ contempt for our governmental exoskeleton is no more than a pretext to replace it with their own, which is in essence an AI-fueled surveillance state on steroids — a “war on human agency,” as Kyle Chayka calls it in The New Yorker. Efficiency is just the Trojan horse for complete and utter destruction of anything civil. If we are no longer allowed and able to do the unnecessary, there’ll no longer be a place for individual discretion, for mercy.
“Maximum Truth-Seeking”
A few months before Dubai, Musk had once again attacked Katherine Maher, the president and CEO of NPR, the public broadcasting network in the US, this time posting a video of a talk she had given at the House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon in 2021 (a reprise of her TED talk from the same year), which made it all the more personal for me. It felt like an attack on our community. Maher, at the time, had just left her role as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that governs Wikimedia. Her talk was a nuanced reflection on how we construct truth and how, in a free society, consensus was only possible if we each conceded the idea of an absolute truth.
Musk, on the other hand, demanded in Dubai that AI be “maximum truth-seeking” instead of being trained to lie, say, due to political correctness. Oh, the irony: Musk, who has no problem with making false claims or outright lying (“some of the things that I say will be incorrect”), is worried about an AI that lies. But an AI that is pursuing the truth at all costs is inhumane. As I pointed out before, we are human because we can lie. We have to accept that truth is always subjective. Paradoxically, we may only protect and preserve it if we accept that one singular objective truth does not exist. This should not excuse liars and demagogues, but it might help us realize that their moral failure is not in their bending the truth, but to what end they are bending it. Imagine the new dystopia where we’re not lied to by the government, but where we’re no longer allowed to lie.
The Hard Core of Beauty
Most of the current generation in power in the West hasn’t experienced any real suffering; we haven’t seen the horror that led to the formation of our Western liberal consensus and institutions. Before the new horror arrives with full vengeance, we must take some time to remember. Last night, I finally saw The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe winning epic portrait of Holocaust survivor, Hungarian Bauhaus-trained architect László Tóth, with the mesmerizing Adrien Brody starring in the main role. Among the key ideas are that “The presence of the past” is too heavy to escape from, and that exile means inner exile: freedom is an illusion. “Contrary to what the poets tell you,” Tóth’s cousin declares in the final scene, an homage to her uncle’s lifetime opus at the Venice Architecture Biennale, “it’s not the journey that matters, it’s the destination.”
A not-so-subtle rebuke of the German idealists and romantics, this last one sticks, and it’s emblematic of the film as a whole. Tóth, for his aesthetic orthodoxy and take-no-prisoner style, is not the only brutalist in this story. America, on its own individualist, capitalist, and exceptionalist terms, is his match. Brutal is the battle between dehumanizing transactionalism and imagination and art, between the ugly and the beautiful. The ugly can disrupt, dismantle, and demolish, but it can’t create anything that lasts. The Brutalist takes us to the eternal marble mountains of Carrara, reminding us that “the hard core of beauty” is the only defense against “the rape of Europe.”
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I flew home from Dubai disturbed, borderline paralyzed. For all I’ve written so far, the truth is I have no words for what I’ve seen. I’m oscillating between depression and the trance-like exhilaration of a moment in which panic is the only answer. As our societies are entering uncharted territory, each of us must redraw our maps. What are the systems and practices we — I — must delete to create space for something new? Which ones are worth clinging to — fighting for?
One thing I know: This is not a time for softness, but for conviction. Musk and his underlings play the “inevitability card,” depicting the future as alternative-less. It is critical that the rest of us insist that another world is possible. It must be more imaginative, more exciting, more disruptive than theirs.
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Join us this year for The PolyOpportunity, a collaborative initiative that aims to create a new story, economic system, and leadership culture for an era in which humans no longer monopolize center stage. Taking place between March and June, The PolyOpportunity program includes four in-person events across four continents — The Berlin Salon (March 21–22), The New York Retreat (April 11–13), The Tangier Festival (May 15–17), and The Istanbul Bootcamp (June 19–20) — a 12-week online learning course, and free virtual forums (Open Houses). Pick and choose, or take part in it all.
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This essay was first published as House of Beautiful Business Beauty Shot. Subscribe here.
