We Can't Afford Billionaires

Well kids, we live in a world built for billionaires and narcissists, and we pretty much have our whole lives. I know this isn't news to people of awareness such as yourselves, but the proof is in the pudding now, and the pudding is on fire.

Narcissism is something that is being understood more and more, at levels we've never seen before, and people say it is doing an incredible job and they're saying it very strongly. In case you aren't aware, narcissism is a sickness that cuts people off from key features of their basic humanity and all normal human decency—things like empathy and compassion and a sense of other people as human beings in their own right. It's a sickness that captures as much of the naturally occurring empathy and compassion as it can find coming from others and sucks it up into the void of itself, consuming it for its own need and leaving nothing behind; it's a sickness that makes those who have it engage in patterns of ceaseless lies and braggadocio and horrific emotional and sometimes physical abuse of those close to them, in order to satisfy the bottomless pits of their own egos; and yes, it's a sickness that makes a person very likely to be extremely successful in our world. You may have noticed.

So that's narcissism. It's a personal sickness and a societal one. At societal scale it's known as fascism, which is an extremely popular form of government in the United States, as we've learned.

But it should be understood what I mean when I say "billionaire." A billion is a number, after all, so there may be in the fixed nature of integers some confusion that what I'm talking about is numerically bound. There was a time when a billion dollars wasn't an attainable figure, and even the richest 19th-century robber barons "only" had fortunes in the hundreds of millions, but of course in the child's fantasy that is our economy, the numbers are always on the move just like global coastlines are about to be, so there's a certain amount of deliberate erosion of value happening. The robber barons were billionaires by my meaning, and soon enough somebody will inevitably amass a fortune of a trillion U.S. dollars (to use two other make-believe terms) and whoever that is (probably the rapidly aging little rich boy and government leech Elon Musk) will still be a billionaire, too. And there are plenty of people out there who don't even have enough to live on who are billionaires, too, in the way I mean when I say it.

A "billionaire," by my meaning, is somebody infected with the sickness of billionairism—a sickness very closely correlated with narcissism.

A "billionaire" is somebody who infects themselves daily with the sick need to amass so much money that they no longer are constrained by societal demands and expectations, but rather are able to impose their own demands and expectations upon society. A billionaire utilizes this power in order to modify society so that even more money comes to them, leaving them even further above the demands and expectations of society, allowing them to impose their will over society to an even greater extent, and so on and so forth. It's a grave sickness, billionairism—a self-inflicted one, I think I mentioned—and what's worse is that it's a sickness whose worst symptoms billionaires force the rest of us to suffer. That's the first way that billionairism resembles narcissism.

And we should talk about what billionaires do. What they do is get themselves in proximity to the natural value generated by our natural human system—value created by humans simply by being human and living together in proximity to one another, the structure known as "society," in other words, from which all possible value springs—and then steal it for themselves and only themselves. They capture certain parts of natural generative human value—some human enterprise or process or concept, something other that has been made possible only through the existence of human society, and has only become successful within that context by generating value for other humans—and use their unnaturally stolen value to own it, and then pervert it so that it increasingly stops providing value to others but only sends value to themselves. They then use the stolen value that they have hoarded all for themselves as proof that they are exceptionally valuable people. Meanwhile, there is a certain amount of that stolen value that they still have to give back in order to keep the mechanism of their theft going—an amount that they call "cost," which they greatly resent—which they use as proof that they are the beneficent source of all value anyone receives.

And the billionaire uses the vast stores of value that they have stolen in order to create new mechanisms of theft—theft even of our awareness. This they do by buying up existing and trusted modes information sharing, then doing with them what they do with everything else, which is to pervert them until they serve not the society that allowed them to succeed in the first place, but themselves. So we increasingly find our legacy news media promulgating pervasive frameworks for seeing the world, frameworks that present billionairism's unsustainable and false perspectives about human value as not only a sane and safe possibility, but as the only possible reality that can ever be imagined. And so it comes to pass that we can find vast numbers of people who are not billionaires and have scant hopes of ever becoming billionaires, who infect themselves with the sickness of billionairism, and defend billionaires from any critique; who fear a world in which a symptom of terrible social disease, like the existence of a billionaire, would not be possible; who consider anyone imagining such a world to be engaged in a profane and radical act. They look at the very people who have robbed them of their natural human birthright and consider them geniuses and benefactors, rightful owners of the world and proof that the world is a fair and meritorious place.

And, in fact, being a billionaire isn't just something that makes somebody successful; it's the way our society defines successfulness.

Anyway, billionairism is a grotesque and cruel perversion of our natural human systems. It's also unsustainable, because it is based on tremendous lies. It kills people by the millions, and it benefits nobody, not even billionaires in the end, who make such grotesque monsters of themselves that they live divorced from the humanity of shared society and even the humanity within themselves. We can't afford such unsustainable cruelty anymore. We should end it.

This will be difficult, because, again, we live in a world optimized to accommodate the sicknesses of billionaires and narcissists. But it won't be impossible, because we also live in a world of human beings, and it is human beings who create all the value that billionaires suck up.

We might find ways to steal pieces of ourselves back from those who have stolen us.

Bluesky is poppin', you may have noticed.

Let's talk about Elon Musk.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you subscribe to independent journalists and writers instead. This week I'm suggesting you support Radley Balko, a journalist dedicated to documenting the abuses of the institution of policing in his newsletter, The Watch. Radley does the important work of real journalism without being beholden to billionaire interests.

(If you also want to support The Reframe, there are buttons to do so all over the place and whatnot.)

Elon Musk is a sad little boy who more than anything else wanted people to think he was funny. Musk was born steeped in myths of white supremacy and racial eugenics, which means that his mind was badly warped by abuses of privilege. This turned him into a sort of ingrown hair of a human being; a spiritual cyst that fails to go anywhere productive and creates nothing but pain for everything in his vicinity. Because he is cruel and empty, his jokes, like everything he is and everything he does, are cruel and empty. Because his jokes are cruel and empty, the only people who find him funny and admirable are cruel and empty people. And they all found each other on social media, which connects people together—even cruel and empty people. And together they have helped each other become crueler and emptier until, when you look beyond the surface of cruelty, there appears to be nothing there at all.

One day Elon Musk bought his favorite social media platform, which was called Twitter then, and he did with it what people who infect themselves with billionairism do, which is to corrupt it from something that provided value to many into something that provides value only to him—and, I suppose, to the cruel and empty people who find Elon Musk funny. And this destroyed the platform. Not all at once, of course, because the thing Musk bought had great value and the demolition of value always takes time. It's not even now entirely destroyed. If you visit, you can still see the shell of it.

And, because we live in a society that optimizes to enable narcissists and billionaires, because we live in a society that helps narcissists avoid paying any cost for abuse, because we live in a society that helps billionaires avoid any expectations of a natural human society whatsoever, it just so happens that buying a valuable platform for far too much money and then destroying it is not only possible but looks like it was even a good profitable strategy, because once I am free from my own humanity and the constraints of society, I can only fail upward, and the person best positioned to profit from the mess I have created is the person who planned to create it in the first place, which is me.

So it has come to pass that the destruction of Twitter's value helped mainstream the Nazi beliefs that Musk now shares openly, and which we should probably suspect he always held. And it helped him empower an even more successful narcissist, Donald Trump. By "more successful" I mean that Trump probably wasn't even a billionaire when he started, but he was able to project that reality and make everyone else live in it. It's an amazing trick. And he's got people believing he's strong even though he's feeble, and smart even though he's almost unimaginably ignorant on every topic, and moral even though he's one of the most awful humans to ever live, and a business genius even though his only real genius is realizing that if you don't pay your bills, then you still have the money and the people you owe don't.

Back to Musk. Our sad little funny boy used his ruined social media platform to get Trump elected, and so now he's attached himself to Trump's asshole like a tapeworm and gets to head a made-up scam government department that also serves as an advertisement for his made-up scam currency, and his wealth has exploded even while he's contributed nothing of value whatsoever, even while he has in fact robbed us all blind of shared societal value. And, if it turns out he can use his made-up scam government department to actually do things (which seems quite likely), then he (and the fellow billionaires who are rushing to join him) will be able to demolish the structures of our shared society at a scale we honestly never have seen before, and this will position him very nicely to own whatever the replacements to the functional things he's demolished will be. It's an almost cosmic level of corruption, enacted by unelected bureaucrats, in the name of freeing us from unelected bureaucrats. It's going to create an almost unimaginable amount of government waste, which we can hardly afford, in the name of preventing government waste. I suppose we could call it trillionairism.

But something interesting has happened as a result of Musk's demolition. There's a social media platform that sprang up in recent years called Bluesky, and in recent weeks it has exploded in users even as people have X'd out of the former Twitter. It's surged past other pretenders to the Twitter-replacement game, including one owned by another prominent society-destroying social media billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. And the billionaires, well, they are concerned, because there is something of apparent value that has sprung up, as naturally as any other valuable thing that humans have ever generated. This thing of value is a thing they don't control yet, because they haven't yet stolen it. Hence their concern.

We should be clear that Bluesky isn't perfect. It has its own ties to its own billionaires, but it is still instructive to see what has made it successful. There are a couple tactical things they did early on, which involve cultivating an early usership of high-value users, and utilizing branding that suggests the old Twitter. However, I think the main things they've done is, first, to make it open—a sort of hub that can be adopted and used—and, second and most crucially, to make it a place that is counter-cultural, which is to say not optimized for narcissistic assholes. They listened to what the humans that were using it wanted, then created the structures that delivered the supercharged moderation that humans wanted, and this created a natural value that is available to all humans, which is how natural human systems work.

As a result of this work, when all the abusive bigoted online dickbags follow us to Bluesky seeking their narcissistic supply, they're getting nuclear blocked. And notice! Because our society is optimized to accommodate bigoted dickbags, the billionaire-owned newspapers are full of the usual concerned hand-wringing that Bluesky is making itself into an echo chamber by not wanting to expose itself to "opposing ideas," which is what you call being an abusive bag of dicks when you want to obscure what it is you're actually talking about. It's a parallel to all the very concerned op-eds that worry about people who don't want to expose themselves to the abuse of abusive family members over the holidays, and are just staying home instead.

I don't know what the future of Bluesky is. I assume that if it continues to grow in natural human value, the billionaires will work to destroy it, which they will do by attempting to own it, and, if they can't own it, by criminalizing it. Given how optimized for billionaires and other narcissists our society clearly is, they will likely eventually be successful to one degree or another.

What a downer that would be to end upon!

So here's the good news: The value of Bluesky has the same source as old Twitter, and the same source as any value that can be found anywhere, and that's us.

We are the value and we always were. What we create is generative; what gets created around it is just a way to harness our value.

They need us. We don't need them. If the billionaires and other narcissists ruin Bluesky like they've ruined so much else, our goal is the same as ever: Find each other and hold on.

People are the value. Platforms are unimportant.

We are the value. We are the value.

It occurs to me that nothing damages billionaires and other narcissists like human community, which is probably why they work so hard to destroy it.

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Any social platform needs humans providing our creativity and our insight and our perspective. Without us, a platform is nothing—less than nothing. With us, it's something valuable.

This is instructive when it comes to how we end the criminal social disease of billionairism. Nobody—nobody—needs billionaires. Nobody needs a parasitic and corrupting thief of every good thing. Nor does anybody needs a narcissist. Nobody needs a person who captures as much of the naturally occurring empathy and compassion for others as it can find and sucks it up into the void of itself, consuming it for itself and leaving nothing behind. They are the ones who, through their own choice to abandon their own humanity, contribute absolutely nothing to society.

But billionaires need us. Without us, there's no value to steal. With us, there's a lot.

Other types of narcissists need us, too—conservative Christians and racists and transphobes and other types of people who have made gods of their self-loving bigotries. Without us, there's no basic human decency to consume. With us, there's a lot.

They know this, by the way—billionaires and other narcissists.

To the degree it is possible, we should take ourselves away from them. I say to the degree it is possible, because billionaires have, like any parasite, become enmeshed into our lives, and our desire is to hurt them, not ourselves. We should expunge the parasite, but we should find ways of doing it that don't involve killing the body. We should remove ourselves in ways that hurt them, not us.

But, to the degree it is possible, we should remove ourselves from them. There are a lot of ways this can happen. There are boycotts and lifestyle changes and practices and strategies. I hope to write more about this soon, but there's no rush; I don't think we need to find them all at once. There's a danger of seeking magic bullets. We have to decide we want to do it, as a first priority. Then we can try out one thing or another. If our thing works for us, let's keep it and tell others, because it might work for them, too If it doesn't, try something else.

But I think the most damaging thing anyone can do to billionaires and narcissists is to build community without them. That's what this newsletter is, incidentally. You and me. You may have noticed that when Musk bought Twitter he killed the Twitter-owned platform that hosted The Reframe, but that didn't kill The Reframe. And then, when a year later, it came out that Substack was monetizing Nazis, I decided that the newsletter couldn't stay there, and moved it again, and it didn't kill the newsletter.

The moves were things that were forced on me by circumstance. The "not killing the newsletter" part? That was you. All of you who stayed. You chose. It was you, not me. You are the generative value of this newsletter. You are the reason I am not just a fool out in the desert yelling about white supremacy to cacti and rattlesnakes.

This Thanksgiving weekend, I'm very thankful for you. You have no idea.

So here's what I think we should do: let's find each other and hold on.

You've been my readers. I think I'd like to see if we can get something like community going here, by building channels for conversation.

Some of you support my work financially and most of you don't get a single thing for it. This is because I have always wanted to keep this newsletter free—that's one of the billionaire-combatting practices I've committed to. Now I'd like to add one thing that you get.

What I'd like to do is follow you all on social media, if you want that. Whether you are a Founding Member or you pay a buck a month or less, look for an email in about a week telling you how to choose your desired platform (I'm on pretty much all of them) and other details.

Again, I'm opening this to all platforms I'm on (and I'm on most of them) but I am probably going to recommend Bluesky. One great community-building thing Bluesky does is allow users to set up starter packs, which people can use to mass-follow recommended accounts. So I'm planning to make a Patrons of The Reframe starter pack and let people opt into it—look for those instructions in the same email.

But still, I find am allergic to paywalling anything. My instinct is to open this up. If you are a reader of The Reframe paid or unpaid (and whether you subscribe to the emails through Ghost or not, I don't have time to check and I don't care anyway), just go to my Bluesky account and reply to this post with a single emoji. I'll add you to a "Readers of The Reframe" starter pack, and once I've got these starter packs set up, I'll promote them to anybody who wants to use it to follow or create a feed.

And there are other things that occur to me we might try. I have people in my life who have had great results on group-chat sites like Discord. Maybe as we begin the conversation, we'll find that's something that will appeal to some of us, and we can figure something out.

There are plenty of things we can do to remove ourselves from the billionaires—those impossibly expensive and cruel luxuries that we simply cannot afford—and other narcissists. Let's keep looking for them.

But first, let's move into the awareness that we are the value. Let's reach out and find each other. And let's hold on.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He still remembers mama with her apron and her pad, feeding all the boys at Ed's Cafe.