(2024-12-06) Monahan The Counterelite Won The Meme War

Sean Monahan: The Counter-Elite Won the Meme War. A friend brings me to an inappropriately young Halloween party in Laurel Canyon..

CALIFORNIA CASUAL AFFLUENCE

living a casually affluent lifestyle in the Hills

It’s not rustic like it’s East Coast cousin. Its cues are suburban rather than rural.

I’m introduced to the host, one of the boys in a suit. He’s excited to tell me he has just returned from Hereticon...Organized by Mike Solana

the event draws the likes of cyberpunk pop star Grimes, anti-aging activist Bryan Johnson, the Vatican’s Chief Exorcist in Washington DC, the founder of the defense-tech start-up, Anduril, Palmer Luckey, along with tradwives, seasteaders, pro-natalists, and other right-coded dissident Twitterati.

The host is implicitly confident Donald Trump will win. He tells me Peter Thiel (partner at Founder’s Fund) will appoint the cabinet.

Unlike the Thielbucks scare of Dimes Square circa 2021-2022, in which the downtown scene sought to distance itself from the controversial billionaire, these twenty-somethings were scheming to get into his orbit.

To clarify, unlike Hereticon, this wasn’t a ‘dissident right’ party. When politics came up in conversation, most people I spoke with were incredulous. How could Trump still be a competitive candidate after everything that had happened? Which for me, makes the phenomenon all the more interesting.

It’s not obvious to me how true any of the speculation is

It’s more an indication of which way the wind is blowing. In 2016, I knew precisely zero Donald Trump voters, let alone people clout-chasing positions in the future Trump White House. Now people brag about connections, out loud, in the presence of Democrats, and no scenes have ensued.

What’s especially interesting here is the post-election fixation on Thiel—even though he publicly stated he did not donate to the Trump campaign this cycle. He has become a symbol, a meme, a synecdoche of the counter-elite,

It’s an interesting framing, the term ‘counter-elite.’

Why not the new elites?
It implies an admission that the current elites cannot be displaced or co-opted.

In my report Live Players, I addressed the conspicuous lack of a coherent elite in the United States. In my opinion (heavily cribbed from the work of Pierre Bourdieu), a coherent elite has to possess three forms of capital: social capital (trust and relationships), cultural capital (status and institutions), and financial capital (money and assets). Ever since finance lost the mandate of heaven in 2008—nobody trusts banks anymore—no industry has ascended to the vacant throne. ((2023-11-30) Monahan Live Players )

The obvious successor should have been the tech industry

Yet libertarian-minded Silicon Valley was, until recently, wary of taking on the role. Maybe it was the global ambitions tech had for its products. Maybe it was their shape rotator aversion to the wheeling-dealing, wordcel quality of political and cultural life.

Over the last decade, Silicon Valley’s ambivalence has worn thin. Over and over, tech has learned you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you

It’s easy to explain away famous tech billionaires donating to political candidates as just another example of oligarchs currying favor with wealth. But there are other examples that make me think the shift is emblematic of a deeper reappraisal.

How then, do we square this situation with the crime, disorder and drugs that have tarnished San Francisco’s brand worldwide? No one thinks of Fisherman’s Wharf when the city is mentioned. They think of a homeless encampment.

Traditionally, rising industries have intuited the triad of capital laid out by Pierre Bourdieu. They were stewards of politics and patrons of the arts i.e. they participated in the creation and maintenance of social and cultural capital. That strategy has failed. Tech may have all the money, but it has none of the influence.

The Bay Area hosts the world’s pre-eminent tech cluster. Three trillion dollar companies—and their well compensated employees—call the region home. The tremendous heat this industry throws off has filled the tax coffers for a over a decade.

The counter-elite has thus far had an aesthetic problem. The dystopian cyberpunk aesthetics of Blade Runner are great for entertainment products. But nobody wants to live there.

the homes of tech billionaires and hundred millionaires I’ve seen (online and otherwise) aren’t much better: generically white and minimal, rectilinear shapes in monochromatic fabrics. You get the sense you are in a third-world luxury hotel that didn’t know you were supposed to hire an interior designer.

As I said in VIBE SHIFT AMERICA, the counter-elites are being given a chance at bat because a substantial portion of the public no longer trusts incumbent elites to govern well.

Whether or not the public trusts the counter-elites to govern long term depends on whether or not they can transform their victory in the 2024 meme war into lasting aesthetic peace. The counter-elite have been given a probationary period. After that, all bet’s are off.