🟧 The revenge of elitism - One Thing

Everywhere I look I see elites, which is to say, people who already have power (or clout, fame, and capital) leveraging their power to gain more of it and to exert authority over other people. What’s more, the top-down hierarchy has become somehow cool — desirable or at least inescapable and thus ripe for adoption and appropriation. The crackpot tech philosopher Curtis Yarvin calls for an American king, which Trump acts like anyway. The Trump family forms a royal court that is busily extracting money from their demesne like any crew of evil princes of centuries past. Hangers-on compete to get closer to the center, or they just go to Butterworth’s in DC to bask in the elitist aura. (Even as government workers, the non-elites, are forced out of their jobs and lives.) In culture, print magazines are getting new, young editors-in-chief: see Noah Johnson at Highsnobiety, Mark Guiducci at Vanity Fair, and Chloe Malle at Vogue, who instantly become power brokers themselves. People genuinely c

Everywhere I look I see elites, which is to say, people who already have power (or clout, fame, and capital) leveraging their power to gain more of it and to exert authority over other people. What’s more, the top-down hierarchy has become somehow cool — desirable or at least inescapable and thus ripe for adoption and appropriation. The crackpot tech philosopher Curtis Yarvin calls for an American king, which Trump acts like anyway. The Trump family forms a royal court that is busily extracting money from their demesne like any crew of evil princes of centuries past. Hangers-on compete to get