Artifice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
By Jacob Silverman
Bloomsbury Continuum
Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia
By David Z. Morris
Repeater
Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted desperately to be president. As a Democrat from Texas, this ambition required him to win the trust of both the racist power brokers who controlled the Jim Crow South and their determined opponents committed to civil rights. Johnson’s ability to find a way owes in part to the work ethic that helped him escape poverty in the Hill Country, as well as his gift for reading and persuading people. But it does not discredit these genuine qualities—or a legacy that includes landmark civil rights legislation—to note that Johnson was also a master of manipulation and deception.
As historian and biographer Robert Caro has shown, Johnson was extraordinarily skilled at telling people what they wanted to hear. Progressives and New Dealers believed that, at his core, Johnson shared their commitment to civil rights, even as their segregationist opponents were just as certain that in his heart, he agreed with them. The economic and social justice achievements that we celebrate today seem not to have been Johnson’s foremost goal. Instead, he had “a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will,” Caro writes in the first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Caro’s masterpiece is both a work of history and a psychological profile. It is an articulation of what a lust for power looks like when it manifests in someone skilled enough to wield it. And its timeliness is underscored by two new books, which together illuminate that our vulnerability to artifice persists in the age of artificial intelligence.
Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley is a wide-ranging chronicle of how the politics of Silicon Valley curdled into reactionary Trumpism, exposing authoritarian impulses that were lurking there all along. David Z. Morris’s Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia explores the saga of the imprisoned con man and aspiring political influencer to demonstrate that the bankruptcy of his fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange is matched only by the emptiness of the philosophy that shaped him.
Today’s tech elites might appear largely unconnected to the 36th president, beyond the fact that their favorite politicians are determined to roll back as much of his legacy as possible. Yet it is impossible to understand the tech world’s antidemocratic fervor, and the precarity of this moment in history, without understanding their shared mindset. These are people who so ravenously crave power and control that they will say and do whatever it takes to acquire it. They believe that, to paraphrase Peter Thiel’s infamous claim about competition, the truth is for losers. Their end goal was never crypto or ChatGPT or free speech or free markets. “The goal,” as U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan said of Bankman-Fried before sentencing him to 25 years in federal prison, “was power and influence.”
A FEW DAYS BEFORE TRUMP WAS SWORN IN for a second term—assisted by an astonishing volume of crypto industry cash—The New York Times published an interview with billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. He was fuming about what he called “the Deal, with a capital D,” though this deal was not the kind that Silicon Valley VCs were obsessed with. “Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood,” Andreessen said. Under the terms of this unwritten agreement, Silverman writes, “Tech guys would innovate, build cool stuff, and get rich. They’d pay some of it back via foundations and philanthropic work and, sure, the minimum legally required tax payment. The government and regulatory state would cheer from the sidelines and clear the runway for takeoff.”
Andreessen was undoubtedly correct that many Obama-era Democrats idolized Silicon Valley enough to enable its empire-building in exchange for its money. (Some still do.) But Andreessen and his elite peers seemed to feel entitled not only to appreciation and acclaim, but to control: the latitude to run their companies however they wanted. And as the companies got bigger and the industries more concentrated and Big Tech’s tentacles further invaded everyday life, their expectations expanded accordingly. Andreessen accused the Biden administration of an “incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto,” and “a similar campaign to try to kill AI.” What many people saw as the government doing a largely inadequate job of reining in industries rife with predatory scams, Andreessen described as an “exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power.”
To understand the tech mindset is to see that the ultimate goal is domination.
Gilded Rage explores the contradictions between the reality and the resentment of Silicon Valley, between billionaires running the most powerful leviathans in the history of the world and simultaneously remaining so perpetually aggrieved. Two such contradictions: The founders who lamented attacks on “free speech” were the most eager cancelers of opinions that triggered them, and those who complained about government leveraging the legal system to drain them of resources were the most aggressive weaponizers of big-money litigation. Another: The VCs who moaned endlessly about the Biden administration suffocating crypto also ginned up an “elite hysteria,” as Silverman calls it, to demand federal taxpayer money to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. Silverman aptly summarizes this fiasco as a crisis “created by politically influential elites, who would soon be saved by the politicians they influenced but still resented, with their losses socialized among the American people.” (In tech, this is a popular business model.)
For Democrats still tempted to make deals with Big Tech, the obvious lesson is that only total capitulation will placate these executives, so operate accordingly. If you insist on negotiating with the tech industry, do not expect to encounter a good-faith partner.
More fundamentally, though, to understand the tech mindset is to see that the ultimate goal is domination. Silicon Valley elites apply a different standard to themselves because, quite simply, they believe that they deserve a different set of rules and expectations. Such an entitlement mentality might justify, say, stealing all of humanity’s creative endeavors to feed large language models. It would certainly justify spinning up disingenuous narratives about hypothetical threats, if such stories happened to serve their interests.
SHORTLY BEFORE THANKSGIVING 2023, the board of artificial intelligence giant OpenAI (temporarily) fired co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, issuing a brief statement accusing him of not being “consistently candid in his communications.” That turned out to be a euphemism for what one (soon to be former) board member would later describe as “outright lying.” As Karen Hao demonstrates in a revelatory book published earlier this year, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, this appeared to reflect a lifelong pattern. “Sam remembers all these details about you,” a former colleague of Altman tells Hao. “But then part of it is he uses that to figure out how to influence you in different ways.”
Altman long maintained that OpenAI was not really a corporation but a public service, designed to protect humanity from runaway “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI in tech-speak. Hao shows that while AGI is a largely meaningless term, the idea of AGI is extremely useful. “In a vacuum of agreed-upon meaning,” she writes, “‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘artificial general intelligence’ can be whatever OpenAI wants.” Altman has called AGI “a ridiculous and meaningless term,” but the meaninglessness appears to be the point. A threat that is existential, inevitable, and entirely theoretical is the ideal cover for when you quietly turn your public service into a for-profit company, as OpenAI did this October.
Sam Bankman-Fried deployed this same tendency for maneuvering and manipulating, for eagerly telling people what they wanted to hear, to great effect. Some aspects of the crypto tycoon’s fraud are complex, and in Stealing the Future Morris, a longtime tech and finance reporter, untangles them admirably. In short, FTX skyrocketed to a $32 billion valuation based largely on hype, all while Bankman-Friend was stealing customers’ deposits and using them for … whatever he felt like doing.
But Morris is just as appalled by the FTX founder’s ability “to become what other people wanted him to be.” He was outwardly charming—he “trained himself to smile more,” Morris notes—and internally calculating, carefully crafting a disarming reputation for awkward intellectual brilliance and philanthropic earnestness. He recognized the media and cultural ecosystem that conflates wealth with genius, and in high-profile speaking gigs and public appearances, he “played the media like a harp from Hell,” Morris writes.
Morris’s account of Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall is riveting. But the book is even more compelling for exposing the hollowness of the myths cultivated by “techno-utopians,” as Morris refers to them, as well as the enablers who cash in on their hype and look the other way (or double down) as the lies and inconsistencies pile up.
The ideology of effective altruism, or EA, was key to Bankman-Fried’s narrative, along with many tech leaders. EA purports to do the “most” good by calculating and measuring how much “value” different types of do-goodery will generate in the future. By this logic, everything that matters can be calculated and measured (a bleak perspective that is nevertheless taken as gospel in much of the corporate world). Bankman-Fried said repeatedly that his goal was to make as much money as possible, in order to give it away to self-determined good causes, a strategy effective altruists call “earning to give.” He was explicit that it did not matter how he made the money. “More is always better,” Bankman-Fried said.
It is not difficult to see how the tenets of EA, much like the vague promise/threat of AGI, could become a justification for pretty much anything. Indeed, there is a “convenient alignment between techno-utopianism’s baseline indifference to present economic conditions and their funders’ hypercapitalist self-interests,” Morris writes. Yet there’s something especially dangerous about this worldview: If you can make other people believe that you are uniquely qualified to calculate and predict the moral value of different futures, then there is no public consultation or consent required. This is the leap that turns an odd, somewhat pitiful collection of beliefs into an authoritarian undertaking.
In the techno-utopian’s mind, he possesses unique foresight—and “those with foresight,” Morris writes, “would be justified in gathering to themselves vast undemocratic power.” Seeing the future is a prerequisite for stealing it.
IN A LOT OF CASES, THE PRODIGIOUS WEALTH held in the offshore bank accounts and crypto wallets of the tech elites is nearly as fake as Bankman-Fried’s egregious fraud, derived simply from hyping and financializing and speculating and selling at the right time. As Silverman writes in Gilded Rage, “The mega-rich kept getting richer, but most did it without doing much at all—through the miracle of passive income, capital gains, management fees, or inventing digital tokens.”
Yet being part of the ruling class falls short of actually ruling. Tech tycoons are plainly unable to tolerate being subject, even glancingly, to the same laws, regulations, and societal standards as the rest of us. Bankman-Fried complained that American courtrooms were “mini dictatorships, these little fiefdoms.” Prominent CEOs were driven into sputtering frenzies by former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan daring to actively challenge their empires. “I disagree with the idea of unions,” Musk said in 2023. “I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants kind of thing.” (This statement, Silverman notes, came from someone who anointed himself “Technoking.”)
It was probably inevitable, then, that tech would enter another fundamentally performative business: politics. Campaigning is not dissimilar from raising a round of venture capital: You can succeed in the present by offering convincing but ultimately insincere promises about the future. And when you win an election, power is yours immediately. “Power is self-certifying,” Silverman writes. “It legitimizes its wielder.”
Tech elites like Musk and Altman and Bankman-Fried and Peter Thiel and former venture capitalist (and habitual identity-reinventor) JD Vance seem to share this instinct. To witness their smug backing of Trump and MAGA is to see through some of the artifice that helped obscure their true ambitions for so long. Ironically, it is in their alliance with a compulsive liar that these compulsive liars appear to be at their most honest and authentic.
Gilded Rage and Stealing the Future join Empire of AI as among the most important books of the year. Their articulation of the performative pursuit of power pairs well with an iconic work of philosophy originally published nearly 40 years ago, but newly reissued this year. In On Bullshit, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt argues that liars know what the truth is but intentionally falsify it; bullshitters operate with “an indifference to how things really are.”
In a new postscript, Frankfurt clarifies that these two categories are not mutually exclusive. Using the example of a cigarette advertiser, Frankfurt points out that the advertiser is both a liar and a bullshitter. The advertiser knows that cigarettes are deadly, and he is trying to deceive you by saying that they are safe. But his main goal is just to sell cigarettes. “The bullshitting advertiser probably wouldn’t mind if what he tells people is true,” Frankfurt writes. “On the other hand, he doesn’t really care one way or the other.”
Near the end of the postscript, Frankfurt warns of the consequences of such indifference. Unlike the wry tone that characterizes much of On Bullshit, here Frankfurt turns earnestly serious. “Indifference to the truth is extremely dangerous,” he intones. “The conduct of civilized life, and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false.” To dismiss this distinction, Frankfurt says, is to forfeit “an indispensable human treasure.”
Today’s tech billionaires do not treasure humanity but instead see human beings as treasure, as generators of data and money, as resources to be manipulated and commodified and plundered. The stories they tell may be amorphous and illusory. Their project is not. They are counting on our indifference.
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