”Those who challenge the capitalist order tend to be publicly labelled as criminals generally falling into the terrorist category.” Steve Kurtz (World-InfoCon Brussels (2000): An Annotated Report)

In memory of Steve Kurtz [1958-2025]

Steve Kurtz was an American artist, professor and co-founder of the pioneering art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Formed in 1987, CAE is a collective of tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.

Kurtz was caught in the post-9/11 gears. He fell into the crack between security and paranoia — a crack that widened after planes hit the Twin Towers.

In the fall of 2018 I contacted Steve Kurtz, founding member of Critical Art Ensemble, to ask him for permission to translate The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere, a chapter taken from Molecular Invasion published in 2002, a transgressive book that developed biotechnology as a contestational tool for the expansion of Flesh Machine Control; after all the kind guidance and approval, I mentioned that the book is a key anchor to track the hell Steve had to go through from 2004 to 2008. Years later the answer Kurtz unravelled about CAE being targeted by the FBI didn’t disappoint.

Every time I revisit Critical Art Ensemble’s work, I immediately remember the footage that circulated in news outlets in 2004 of the FBI, specifically the Joint Task Force on Terrorism wearing hazmat suits, making effective a search warrant, purposefully turned into a media spectacle of fear.

The Kafkaesque nightmare as described by Kevin Jon Heller, started in May 11th 2004, when Steve called 911 to report the sudden death of his wife, Hope Kurtz, editor, writer, and member of CAE. As The Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office clearly stated, Hope died of natural causes, heart failure at the age of 45. As soon as the paramedics arrived and found petri dishes, lab equipment and bacteria samples for an upcoming exhibition, not convinced with Kurtz’ explanation, they decided to contact the Buffalo Police Department to investigate further, which led them to call the FBI. What followed cemented the real intentions of the FBI to justify a baseless prosecution: illegal detentions, dubious allegations and a search warrant.

With the seal search warrant approved, the FBI had full access Steve’s personal belongings, computers, lab equipment, documents, passports, books, networks, notes and CAE’s archives, enough material to elaborate a profile that fulfilled the Department of Justice’s agenda. The case had international media exposure, with some media outlets eating federal agents suspicion of Kurtz and Dr. Bob Ferrell as a potential bioterrorists.

Even though the charges evolved into mail and wire fraud under the PATRIOT Act, these early accusations targeting Kurtz worked perfectly for the launch of a post 9/11 era of surveillance and punishment, his case was unprecedented and weaponized as a public effort to intimidate and criminalize Critical Art Ensemble’s practice and the communities attached to it. The message was clear and loud, anybody who holds “anti-American sentiments” and everything that doesn’t fit into the white cube gallery model, will become the primer example of the what to NOT to do, of what NOT to say, the enemy. As Steve shared in a phone call in May of this year talking about the subject: “They can bring ridiculous charges and still make your life miserable, even if at the end the charges are dismissed.”

This case also showed how communities can overcome control and authoritarian  amage, CAE Defence Fund emerged as a definitive collective force that allowed Kurtz to get financial, legal support and proper media exposure, Strange Culture (2008), the documentary directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson helped to defy the narrative the FBI tried to impose in the press, audiences understood the obscene amounts of tax money wasted to prosecute Kurtz and Ferrell, and most importantly, this created a chain effect regarding the alarming threats towards freedom of expression in cultural, scientific and academic institutions in the USA under the Bush Administration.

Yes, Steve was cleared of all charges by the DoJ in 2008, finally vindicated, but the four years taken from his life never returned, the press release was painful to digest:

“I don’t have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?”

Not allowing Steve Kurtz to mourn Hope Kurtz as any of us  eserve, all the stress, the abuses, the pressure, the public scrutiny, his private life, health and anonymity compromised…

Twenty years later after, I often wonder:Who got more resources?
Who got handsomely rewarded?
Who got promoted?

THE FBI OWES STEVE KURTZ AN APOLOGY

José López / H C-(M)

Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080914150359/http://caedefensefund.org/releases/cleared_6_11_08.html
http://critical-art.net/defense/press/BuffNews_BigBrother.pdf
http://critical-art.net/defense/press/BuffNews_Dabkowski.pdf
http://critical-art.net/defense/press.html
https://opiniojuris.org/2008/05/25/the-collapse-of-the-bioterror-case-against-dr-steven-kurtz/
https://www.lightresearch.net/interviews/kurtz/kurtz.pdf
https://www.wired.com/2004/06/twisted-tale-of-art-death-dna/
https://fnewsmagazine.com/2004/09/steve-kurtz-artist-patriotfelon-2/

Theory on Demand #59

Paritance: A Philosophical Investigation Behind Cognition and Simulation

By Henry Warwick

This work advances the idea of Paritance—the acceptance of parity—as a funda­mental operation of human cognition and culture. Warwick argues that the capacity to recognize a copy, model, or simulation as ontologically sufficient to its referent underlies cultural practices, such as simply hearing a recording as music up to the plausibility of artificial intelligence. Far from being a merely technical phenomenon, this acceptance reveals deep continuities between modern technologies of reproduction and premodern metaphysical and occult practices.

Through a critical and sometimes deeply personal genealogy spanning medieval necromancy, ritual evocation, and demonology, the book demonstrates how contem­porary uses of computers recapitulate occult logics of animation, invocation, and resurrection. In this framing, AI appears less as an unprecedented rupture than as an uncanny rearticulation of an ancient aspiration: the conjuration and “resurrection” of a dead god in machinic digital form.

Grounded in both philosophical analysis and experiential insight derived from Zen training and decades of musical practice, Paritance situates cognition and simulation within a transhistorical discussion on thought, representation, and creativity. It accesses a wide variety of disciplines including philosophy of mind, media theory, occult studies, and critical technology studies, offering an original account of the hidden logics that structure contemporary human invention.

Henry Warwick is an Associate Professor in the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University where he teaches media theory and sound synthesis. His research often focuses on media infrastructures, information politics, and the cultural history of electronic sound. He is the author of The Radical Tactics of the Offline Library (INC, 2014). Alongside his scholarship, he has released more than twenty albums of ambient and avant-garde electronic music, maintaining a practice that bridges theory and sound.

Edited by: Tripta Chandola

Cover Design: Katja van Stiphout

Design and EPUB development: Klaudia Orczykowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2025

ISBN: 978-90-83520-98-8

Contact:
Institute of Network Cultures
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

Order a copy or download this publication for free at: www.networkcultures.org/publications

This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0./

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I have always found it quite reasonable to think that the large-scale use of do-it-all machines produces collective value that deserves to be fairly distributed. In my cyborg anthropology, citizens, now emancipated thanks to the reprogrammable infrastructures that they always carry with them, are economically supported by the state to be able to contribute to the management of public affairs. Constantly reeducated by the informational reverb they feed on, like arendtian Greek aristocrats they move into action to fulfill themselves in the public sphere. At the same time, they contribute to the real-time emergence of the volonté générale in a perfect synthesis between direct and representative democracy. The good news is that this redistributive universal basic income already exists. In Italy, it takes the perverse forms of early retirements, permanent positions with an extremely low productivity rate, and in my case, of modest unemployment benefits for precarious university researchers. Having now reached the age of Our Lord and guided by a well-established antiwork faith, faced with the devastating idea of spending yet another winter in northeastern Italy, with the fog and particulate levels far above the legal limit, I remind myself that the scraps of the sweet welfare state are urging me to travel abroad to affordable destinations. That little bit of extra passive income helps; all that remains for me is to organize a local network of people. I chose the South American continent for linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical reasons. The big question the native asks Jared Diamond — why does Europe have so much cargo? — is explained by Cortés’s competitive advantage: the conquistadores arrive in the Americas with steel weapons and immunity to disease thanks to livestock domestication. Fascinating geographical determinism. South America, a vast and messy continent, ends up looking sufficiently uniform to European eyes. Go to South America, thus my friend Jordi, and you’ll see what capitalism without a welfare state looks like. A modern Chatwin with a smartphone and the fear of having it stolen, I tell myself as I pedal over the cobblestones of the limited traffic zone in a former Renaissance city. In search of the Milodon and on the threshold of the breakdown of the United States’ accumulation cycle. Empires in decline have always fought tooth and nail, thus Fidel Castro to Allende who, faithful to democratic principles, sacrificed his life to fascists backed by the CIA, I tell myself as I sit at lunch at my aunt’s, an excellent menu unchanged for generations: tagliatelle, sides simmering in pots, Merlot. Yes, researching the trajectories of digital sovereignty in the region has many advantages; it’s a good story, captivating, marketable. Understanding its struggles, its spaces of resistance and emancipation, the stories of those who live in it from a pharmacological perspective. Even better, its tribulations, I tell myself, a special word when pronounced in Veneto dialect by my creationist grandmother with Parkinson’s: no sta farme tribolar – where, because of the tremor, the sentence seemed to emanate not from her mouth but from her hands. A phrase later taken up by my mother: te ghe trent’ani e anca adesso te mantengo; par mi te sì na preocupassion; te me fa tribolar. (You’re thirty and I still have to provide for you; you’re a burden on my mind; you make me struggle). A word present in Revelation 7:14, where the Great Tribulation is the period our Lord speaks of to indicate the time of the end. Which I read as the end of the suffering arising from the concern of having to sustain oneself financially, from the specter of having to stay soto paròn (under a boss) in a region where the too rapid shift from a peasant society to wealth, the Catholic inheritance, and the land consumption of a choke-chain progress have led to immense disasters. There is no real work without suffering. It’s better to think of a Plan B.

There is something obvious with our obsession with computation. With the invention of the wheel, humans began to imagine the entire world as a spinning wheel, an endless cycle of seasons, lives, and realms. In Indian cosmology there is samsara, the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through which living beings pass. With the invention of writing, the whole world becomes a book. In Judaism, God is the Author of Being and inscribes our names in the Book of Life. Saint Augustine speaks of the Liber mundi as the incarnation of the divine word, with human beings as sentences running between margins already drawn. The parchment medium becomes the message: in the beginning was the logos. With the invention of the engine, a gear turning on other gears, the entire world becomes mechanical. God is the Divine Watchmaker, the planets revolve along predetermined trajectories, and the universe is reduced to a precision machine. Leibniz imagines the cosmos itself as a calculating machine. It is no accident, then, that we now ask what computation means for the organization of society, what are the consequences of computation, and that we are inclined to think of the world as simulacrum. Truth be told, it took very little for us to fall in love with digital technologies in the name of efficiency. In North America, in 1964, during the Berkeley protests, Mario Savio still used the metaphor of the bureaucratic and military machine in a negative sense, calling on people to throw their bodies upon the gears to stop it. But only a few years later, the computer had become a tool of emancipation and community-building, celebrated by the counterculture of experimentation. In the Soviet Union, computers moved, starting in the 1950s, from being dismissed as a product of American pseudoscience to being hailed as machines of communism. Nowadays’ calculation, central both to centralized planning processes and to the market economy, operates at planetary scale and at the speed of electrical immediacy. And Stafford Beer’s early‑1970s insight remains unsurpassed: to use computation only to optimize and streamline firms is a great waste. It must be collectivized to rethink the bases of sociality and to guarantee freedom that is effective and computable. A project naturally implemented by the malign genius of capital through advertising in a formidable process of self‑renewal that has made both users and state forms dependent on digital rentiers. In this journey, digital tribulations name the lived struggles created by platforms whose business is to arbitrage human time, certain states’ attempts to redirect platformization – the quest for digital sovereignty – and popular organization that seeks to reclaim time and autonomy.

There is something mesmerizing about the artworks currently exhibited at POST Arnhem. In the exhibition ‘Embodied Encryption’ you will find weirdly morphing videos of deepfake drag performances, abstract closeup visualizations of motherhood based on poetic scripts, and gender non-binary portraits generated from archive paintings of the Qajar dynasty. However, the exhibition in general does not come across as conceptually complex or abstract as this may sound. The overall decor is simple and the atmosphere at POST is rather serene. What stands out is the intriguing visual quality of the topical work, still on display until mid-December. 

Like with previous POST exhibition in Nijmegen, I think the particular relevance of this exhibition should be emphasized. We currently live in a time of strict image regimes that confine and police how we see ourselves and others. Patrick Nathan described this in his book Image Control and points at the current resurgence of fascist aesthetics. In the brochure of the exhibition, Lieke Wouters uses the example of a 2024 twitter post by Geert Wilders with an AI generated false ‘epitome’ of the traditional white family. The post coincided with a government’s agreement on the most restrictive asylum procedures ever. The AI system can as such becomes an extrapolation and feedback loop for oppressive worldviews. We definitely need creative interruptions to counter invasive and politically fraught images and specific image environments. Better flagging generated content or further improving the existing regulations and data moderation is not enough. We have to be more inquisitive and experiment with creative resistance that actual deals with underlying structural political issues and systemic injustice. How can we take artistic experimentation with encryption and glitching towards reimagining political alternatives? The presented artworks can be seen as preliminary artistic answers to this question, and that is exactly what makes the POST exhibition so intriguing. Especially as the works seem to revive interesting lineages of performative experimentation and artistic interventionism for current algorithmic society.

A clear example is the work ‘in transitu’: by posting bare chest photos on Instagram while transitioning Ada Ada Ada probes the interpretation of gender by algorithmic platforms. The work combines brave and vulnerable experimentation with generative models and critical investigation of platform categorizations. Also the work of Jake Elwes called The Zizi Show is a case in point, involving the London drag scene to create a new datasets of specific movements form drag performances. Elwes’ exhibited life size videos were produced with mutual consent, drag kings and queens were synthesized through deepfakes, exploring ‘what AI can teach us about drag, and what drag can teach us about AI’. It activates performative queer art in relation to current generative AI and algorithmic platforms. It unemphatically and cleverly interrupts binary notions and uses glitches and generated visuals to oppose reductive technological imaginations.

Cut outs from The Zizi Show by Jake Elwes.

Still, if these artworks merely offer critical perspectives or stimulate discussion, this would be rather unsatisfying. The reference of Legacy Russels ‘glitch feminism’ in the catalogue helps to set the tone for a more clear political stance, but Russels manifesto risks encompassing too vague and somewhat fragmented notions like ghostly, cosmic, shady, virus like, refusal. The reception of the exhibited work could benefit, I think, from emphasizing more concrete lineages of creative resistance and more explicit political ambitions. 

As Dominique Routhier suggests in With and Against, “our own spectacular moment in time – where automation discourse is yet again a defining feature – has a history, and, more importantly, a history of contestation”. He traces such history from the surrealists to Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis with a specific focus on the work of the Situationist International. Recent forms of glitch art or engagement with technical failures indeed also can be understood as deriving from this ‘avant-garde’ history (even if they were working in analogue media then) as Michael Betancourt stresses in his book Glitch Theory. Part of this history is also the work of the surrealist women recently described as Militant Muses which are especially important in relation to the exhibited work at POST. Specifically, the work of Claude Cahun which consists of shifting portraits also with a mesmerizing and haunting quality, that resolutely intervened in the imagination and ideologies of the time. During fascist oppression, through secrecy and dangerous subordinations, Cahun and others created false documents and ‘paper bullets’ and experimented with performative identities, intriguing depictions, and indirect action. Cahun’s work and life interrupted codes and identities, and “reveled in ambiguity and sought disruption”, writes Gavin James Bower, as “a way to reconceptualize society”.

Collage of work from Claude Cahun.

The strategic interruption of codes and identities to reconceptualize society, related to what José Estoban Muñoz calls disidentification, is different from the more limited pleas for more visibility for queer and marginalized groups or calls to expand rich data sets for more inclusion. The latter would mean further adaptation and cooptation into what still will be a “heteronormatively constructed and oppressive social system” as the Queer AI introduction of the seminal Queer reflections on AI book phrases it. According to these reflections, artistic experimentation should rather be a “notion of refusal that articulates itself against binaries of all kinds”. Or more positively framed, like in Shabbar’s project Queer-Alt-Delete, art can interlace “algorithmic uncertainty with subjectivity in ways that facilitate an experimentation with new political becomings”. 

This can push the works in the exhibition even more fascinating directions. Like the abstract visual narratives with evocative and visceral images of motherhood that Beverley Hood presents. The work becomes especially poignant when it helps to redefine what counts as motherhood and actively opposes naïve and regressive imaginations of what a mother is and should be. Just like the surrealist militant muses that already used different tropes to fight restrictive labels put on women, and countered prejudices around childcare and stereotypical women work, as surrealist covens summarized. We could see reimaginations of motherhood then having everyday implications and constitute more profound personal and political consequences. Maybe this could be further provoked by imagining radical alternatives like the “queer polymaternalism” proposed by Sophie Lewis, that speaks to “all those comradely gestators, midwives, and other sundry interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction”. 

Or as a final example, this could push Rodell Warner’s Artificial Archive, also part of the POST exhibition, to even more firmly engagement with anticolonial work. Historical colonial databases that Warner works with often reaffirm stereotypical aesthetics of spectacular, exotic, otherworldly views and landscapes that await exploitation and subjugation. The exhibited work imagines what could have existed outside this extractive gaze. Taking a queer and surprising turn in relation to for example Albuquerque Paula’s work with colonial archives included in the just published Slow Technology reader, it use a similar more slow and deliberating approach, remediating inherent bias and stereotypes, resulting in the type of ideation that also the AIxDesign festival On Slow AI seemed to praise. Just like Moreshin Allahyari’s generated portraits of ‘moon faces’ it is a shame if this lacks any more substantial idea of what invokes ‘genderless’ spiritual experiences or abstains from the political implications of more firm anticolonialism. Surrealists ‘scorning of white supremacy, patriotism, religion, colonialism’ that Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley highlight, can be a reminder to work towards more elaborate and politically solid but still seductive and enchanting creative resistance. 

Examples from Artificial Archive by Rodell Warner.

As I already proposed during EsArts in Barcelona, expanding on surrealist experiments of symbolic sabotage and war on work we might furthermore subvert the creative industries’ rush towards enhancing commercial creative work with algorithmic technologies. Artistic experimentation to exist otherwise  and readapting the surrealist look for today’s algorithmically mediated world can counter image recognition and surveillance of the eye of the master. The radical surrealist dreams that already resurfaced in later cultural countermovements and riots of the 60s and 70s, as Abigail Susik and Elliot H. King argue in their beautiful recent book, could resurface again as part of current radical investigations and creative disruptions of today’s high-tech world. And for opposing the fascist resurgence within the current pervasive image regimes, we can benefit from surrealists creative legacy of resistance and persistent antifascism, central to the late Lenbachhaus exhibition impressively documented in the companying anthology.

Future artistic experimentation thus should, I think, embrace the impulse of militant muses to develop a firmer embodied antifascist and anticolonial queer and poetic resistance. Maybe not all the artists presented at POST are willing to engage in such a thing. Maybe some of the works now fail to live up to such promise. But if it fails, let it be a queer art of failure (taking Jack Halberstams famous assertion somewhat out of context). Especially in exhibitions like this, far removed from the more usual pretentious immersive and hyped experiential places like NXT Amsterdam and more intimate then the spacious artworks currently on display for Gogbot x RMT at Rijksmuseum Twente, this inconclusive experimentation can be sympathetically pushed and possibly further politicized. This should certainly not become yet another (oppositional) image spectacle. The attentive, accessible, but still gripping and glitchy moving visuals at POST might just one of the gateways towards future bold imaginations and generated visualizations for what could end up as embodied radical political alternatives. 

Dear Geert—

Greetings from a Los Angeles that while no longer reeling from assaults like the devastating fires, appalling abductions by masked federal agents, and occupying troops, cannot be described as having recovered from these past ten months. Instead, we are numbed and in remove. Southern California feels very far from Washington where the lords of chaos flood the zone with shit every day. Yet, we feel equally distant from Northern California where the next round of techno-social disruption is being beta-tested, as well as from New York where both the stock market and mainstream media insist that the house isn’t on fire, it’s just the drapes. Meanwhile, on my home campus, even the Mediterranean climate and ever-present sunshine are insufficient to alleviate the existential dread of a 1.2 billion dollar fine demanded of us by the Trump administration. While we at UCLA hope for TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), we’ve seen private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Brown, and Cornell shell out over 300 million dollars so far to placate the grift. I queried Google’s AI engine about how high a stack of one billion, one-dollar bills would be. It’s 100 kilometers, high enough to pass through the atmosphere’s Kármán line, and enter outer space.

This has made me think about the nature of vast wealth in the 21^st century. It’s a commonplace that we’re in a New Gilded Age, but that doesn’t work as a metaphor anymore. Not when Trump hosts a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago complete with hired showgirls vamping it up in rotating, human-scaled champagne coupes while the government was literally shut down and food assistance to the poor was being curtailed. Not when he has literally slathered the Oval Office with gold-plated kitsch. Trump is demonstrating that 21^st century wealth is not “like” a gilded object, it “is” a gilded object. This in turn may explain something that perplexes me, an American with little exposure to royalty, but that may seem less head-scratching to Europeans with residual monarchies.

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by the idea of “fuck you money.” This meant that capitalism, or luck, or even theft could garner enough cash to tell anyone to go fuck themselves, that grit and moxie can triumph over bloodlines and connections. At the lower end of the economy, there was the outlaw country song, “Take This Job and Shove It,” a working-class classic about telling the boss to fuck off. The 1977 version by Johnny Paycheck has been on honky-tonk jukeboxes ever since, and stories abound of workers toting boom boxes and Bluetooth speakers to blast this anti-boss anthem through their workplaces as they quit. Further up the income ladder were Reagan era yuppies striving to be masters of the universe. The assumption was that if you were ferocious enough, and fully embraced greed, you’d become like Gordon Gekko, the slick haired plutocrat played by Michael Douglas in the Oliver Sone film, Wall Street (1987).

Hungry young associates dressed in padded shoulder suits and ties from Charivari not for the entry-level jobs they had, but for the power they wanted. The women striding to work in LA Gear sneakers with pumps in their attaches were right behind them, with their own champagne wishes and caviar dreams. The fantasy was to access the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, after a syndicated television show of that name hosted by an oleaginous Brit with the pitch-perfect name Robin Leach. The show ran from 1984-1994, in no small measure because Leach showcased the rewards of an all-consuming id, with his Gekko-adjacent subjects always giving—and never taking—orders. This sort of plutopornography was standard content for the Internet influencers of the aughts and teens and also focused on the freedom that wealth offers. Even if it’s just the freedom rent a studio that looks like an airplane interior—complete with artificial window lights—to host a fake-it-til-you-make-it photoshoot of a “private jet trip” to Vegas, complete with a posse. The entourage understands, even if they have to take a van to get to Sin City to shoot more content of their baller, high value lives.

Far above them is a ruling class literally richer than any in American, nay indeed, human history. Yet, we see that true autonomy for them is just as much a mirage as the influencers’ “private jets.” Here’s some numbers and actions regarding the three richest men in America as Donald Trump was installed in 2017 as the nation’s 45^th president (call it T45): Jeff Bezos was worth 67 billion dollars and bought the Washington Post newspaper to go after the president-elect, giving it a new, anti-authoritarian motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Mark Zuckerberg, worth 55 billion dollars, hired whole teams of fact checkers to combat fake news and suspended Trump’s posting privileges on Facebook and Instagram on January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot. Elon Musk, then worth 12 billion, publicly criticized the Republican National Committee for nominating Trump, reportedly called him a “fucking moron” in private, and resigned from two advisory committees over disagreements with the first term president.

In that first Trump term, I thought that each of these tech bros had enough billions to truly claim fuck you status. Yet fast forward eight years (T45 plus the interregnum) to 2025, and there’s a photo of the three of them sitting in a row yucking it up at Trump’s second inauguration as the nation’s 47^th president (T47). Bezos is now worth 239 billion (personal wealth up by 250%) and has fired/retired dozens of the Post’s columnists and journalists to shift its editorial focus to the “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Bezos’ company, Amazon, donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc. Zuckerberg at 211 billion (up 283%) eviscerated his social media fact checkers, reinstated Trump’s accounts, and his company, Meta, matched Amazon, also donating $1,000,000 to the inaugural. As for Musk at 433 billion (up 3425%—no that is not a typo), the South African-born, Canadian-educated tycoon supported the reelection campaign with a quarter billion of his own fortune and became the returned strongman’s most visible plutocratic enabler. Things have moved so fast and so ruthlessly in less than a year, that we need to be reminded that the richest man in the world savaged the world’s poorest children during his disastrous helming of the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was a department that wasn’t a department, named after a speculative cryptocurrency, that was in turn inspired by a Shibu Inu dog meme that peaked in the early teens. All of this would be comic if it were funny, it would be tragic if any of the people involved had an interiority worth considering, but in the end, it was simply heartbreaking because so many suffered and so much damage continues to be done.

 Bezos and Zuckerberg were joined in Washington by other non-MAGA billionaires almost too numerous to count, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple’s Tim Cook. Thus it was, during the T47 inauguration, Americans saw their wealthiest countrymen bend at the knee and kiss the ring of someone they had claimed to oppose and despise, and the one third of the electorate that is MAGA reveled at the spectacle of this subjugation. There’s a quote misattributed to the novelist John Steinbeck about why socialism never had much of a foothold in the U.S.: the poor in America see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. But what happened to that dream of fuck you money? Don’t these millions of embarrassed Americans lust for the chance to tell the boss to stuff it, move to the beach, and drink margaritas while raising their middle fingers to pencil-neck bureaucrats and penny-ante politicians? Apparently not anymore, as MAGA cheered the sight of obeisance and obedience.

Most people don’t give much consideration to the precarious relationship between money and power in autocracies. A few just-slightly-left-of-center media outlets like The Atlantic and The New Yorker pointed out the morphological similarities of Trump’s alliance with the tech bros to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his ever-shifting cadre of oligarchs. Putin’s vassals, however, have an unfortunate habit of falling out of windows to their deaths when they put up even the slightest resistance to the Kremlin’s rule. Yet new money men are always waiting in line to cozy up to Putin, no matter the risk to their freedoms or their lives. Even the biggest moths are drawn to the flame because they confuse its light with the stars they use to navigate at night. That confusion often leads them to ruin, as they self-immolate in the fire. Billionaires, it seems, are just as thoughtless as moths.

As anyone familiar with the story of German industrial giants during the run-up to WWII should realize, great wealth gravitates towards might, and enormous wealth is remarkably comfortable when it’s next to absolute power. The Nazi party was in economic trouble in the early 1930s, and it was saved in large measure by the intervention of industrial giants like I.G. Farben and Krupp. Both companies became active supporters of Hitler’s regime and the Third Reich’s armed forces. Not coincidentally, Farben and Krupp executives were among the few civilians brought up on war crimes charges during the Nuremberg Tribunals after the victory of the Allies.

I have no idea how well-versed Bezos and Zuckerberg are about the fate of these C-Suite Germans, but we know that Musk thinks about the Third Reich a lot, too much, in fact. When he purchased Twitter, Musk reinstated Trump’s and other insurrectionists’ banned accounts, and then opened the service, now rebranded X, to Nazis, of both the neo- and paleo- varieties. There are now so many of them on X, that when he trained Grok, his AI chatbot, on his own site’s content, Grok started to refer to itself as MechaHitler and spewed antisemitic posts. Musk disavowed all of this as glitches and “satire,” because apology and empathy are dead to him. But do Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the other accommodating billionaires ever look at the high windows in their office complexes and worry? Are they certain that there will be no tribunals in the future, even that discursive one we call the judgement of history? Is there any amount of money that would give them the cojones to tell Trump, a septua-moving-on-octogenarian, and his ghoulish henchmen to go fuck themselves? The ratio of greed to courage in these men is appalling.

Since we’ve been talking about gelding and gilding, I’ll close with a metallurgical juxtaposition. In New York, lines of people queued up at Sotheby’s for a glimpse of Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture, America (2016), before it sold at auction. In 2017, 100,000 people saw Cattelan’s functioning, 225 pound, 18 karat solid gold toilet when it was installed at the Guggenheim. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Cattelan, the Italian provocateur, chose to show his resplendent throne in New York on the hundredth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. After Duchamp turned a urinal upside-down, signed it, and declared the object a readymade, he claimed that the “only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.” This comment came to mind when Trump asked the Guggenheim for a loan of a Van Gogh painting to hang in his private rooms during his first term. After they declined this request, one of the curators offered him the solid gold toilet instead. There is no record of a response from the T45 White House, but perhaps we can see in this anecdote an explanation for the vindictive fury with which T47 has treated America’s cultural institutions, including the national treasures in the Smithsonian.

After all this notoriety, America is worth far more than the four million dollars it would sell for by weight. The same cannot be said for the humble penny. A week before Sotheby’s auctioned off the golden toilet, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia pressed the last copper penny, ending a tradition dating back to 1793, because it now costs almost four cents to manufacture each one cent coin (even after its composition moved to 97.5% zinc with a thin 2.5% copper plating decades ago). The end of the penny as currency augurs the end of the penny as a symbol of thrift and value. “Mind the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves” and “a penny saved is a penny earned” already seems like useless advice to young people who inhabit a speculative economy revolving around cryptocurrencies, sports betting, and meme stocks. Unfortunately, the last word belongs to Donald Trump who told the Chicago Tribune in 1989, before T45 and T47 were a gleam in his eye, “Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” Therein lies the problem in a gilded nutshell.