The Umbrella Academy of Silicon Valley

Oligarchs & Burning Bubbles: the Illusion of Good and Evil

DISCLAIMER: Forget political parties and flags. Power doesn’t lie in ideology — it lies in money, laws, and pipelines.

Not an actionable Oligarchy

I write from Palo Alto. Outside of here, “tech oligarchy” sounds like an obvious diagnosis. Bernie Sanders uses it often: it’s his umbrella word to describe the economic power that crushes wages, healthcare, opportunity. I get the intent. But “oligarchy” flattens reality, simplifying it for those who want a ready-made enemy.

Keith Teare, himself a two-time unicorn founder, flips the frame: there is no directorate ruling technology. There is influence, yes, but above all brutal competition.

And that’s the point. Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Andreessen, Bezos, Cook (and the list could go on) do not act as a block. They look more like the dysfunctional family from the series The Umbrella Academy. Born on the same day — the boom of modern tech — each with destructive superpowers. Like in the show, every attempt to “save the world” puts it at greater risk. Toxic sibling dynamics always prevail over any common mission.

Disruption frightens those who live through it — but it also leaves another trace.

Bubbles Leave Tracks

The concentration of wealth and power worries me — and it should worry you too. Anything can go wrong at any moment — and when it does, the price to pay will fall disproportionately along the axis of wealth. In this climate, Zuckerberg compared today’s AI hype to the railroad and internet booms. He’s right.

Bubbles are not mistakes. They burn money, yes, but they leave infrastructures behind. The Transcontinental Railroad was never just steel. It built markets, towns, logistics standards — and it erased cultures along the way.

Leland and Jane Stanford turned their fortune, and personal tragedy, into Stanford University. That seed grew into Silicon Valley. The rails of then are the data centers and AI models of today.

Sci-Fi Born Childpoets

I have to admit: like them, I’ve been deeply shaped by science fiction. The difference is in which stories you choose to carry with you. Musk draws from Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, a utopia of abundance projected into space. Bezos blends Lord of the Rings with the orbital utopias of O’Neill cylinders. Altman takes Spike Jonze’s Her as prophecy for conversational AI. Zuckerberg latches onto Ready Player One — a dystopian satire — as if they were design specs for the metaverse.

The canon is shared, but the readings couldn’t be more different. That’s the point.

They aren’t demons — they’re architects shaped by sci-fi daydreams, building infrastructures that mirror their chosen myths.
It is the mind of the child-poet, holding tools and resources powerful enough to shape the world. There’s a disturbing pattern here: turning dystopian warnings into roadmaps. Zuckerberg treats Snow Crash as a manual for the metaverse, while Altman borrows from Her to justify conversational AI.

The confusion between politics and sci-fi isn’t just metaphorical — it’s now official iconography. On May 4, 2025, the White House itself posted an AI-generated image of the president wielding a red lightsaber to celebrate Star Wars Day. The irony is sharp: the red saber is the weapon of the Sith, the “evil” side against which the rebels of Star Wars fight across generations.

Steve Jobs’ Revelation

Jobs once said his greatest revelation was realizing that the rules of the world, and everything he could desire or buy, were made by people no smarter than him.
No demons, no gods. Just humans juggling talents, abominable ambitions, and weaknesses.

And the golden dinners with politicians? IMAO: Nerds and politicians are immiscible: the rest is chatter and photo ops. Maybe one day the “oligarchs” will align on something, but today they don’t. In countless sci-fi films, the villain was once the hero — or the hero created the nemesis. Let’s not make the mistake of creating our own monsters.

The illusion is to believe that a simple for/against morality is enough to shape the future. The real fracture is between those who design infrastructures without paying their long-term costs, and those who inhabit them without ever choosing them.

In between are us: citizens, designers, founders, policymakers. Less judgment, more technical and institutional engineering.

At those levels, there are no lasting friends.
When even one coopetitor amasses enough resources to buy the system, no conspiracy is needed — corruption is enough.
The tools to resist it are already there: institutions, laws, ballots. If they don’t work, it’s not because “they” are too smart. It’s because we stopped using them.

I learned years ago that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from politics.” We cannot avoid acting with that awareness.

The only real work is keeping humanity from derailing — and not ending as just another vanished society in Drake’s equation, stuck behind the Great Filter.

Rails outlast the bubbles, and the pipeline decides their direction: FORWARD.
#Star Trek is inevitable.