What must it be like to be a billionaire? How must it feel to be head of a modern kleptocracy? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping: What thoughts go through the minds of men who’ve been able to build lives in which no one ever tells them “no”? 

What happens is you just make shit up about your products based on whatever pops into your brain. You decide you’ve identified the characteristics of the Antichrist, a thing you believe in. You state confidently millions of people will live in outer space within 20 years. You knock down half the seat of government to build a wedding reception hall. You talk to one another about how you’re going to live to be 150.

In other words, you go insane. Stark raving mad. Crazier than a shithouse rat. You’ve amassed more power than virtually any human beings in history, and you have a grasp on reality comparable to a Batman villain’s. 

It is my belief that a system that drives people crazier the richer and more powerful it makes them is bad.

In this episode of Pluribus, we see that humanity’s new collective consciousness has done exactly that. It/we/they/us/whatever have reprogrammed the entire planet to operate for the care and comfort of the 12 human beings who were not absorbed into the hivemind along with everyone else. In short order, the people that we meet:

• grow stupefied and complacent

• prove unable to focus on important matters in favor of trivia

• opt to assimilate with the new totalitarian consciousness rather than fight

• indulge their basest instincts and become sex creeps

• kill millions of people

Find a behavior in that list that does not reflect how the ultra-powerful and unaccountable actually run things. I’ll wait.