Why everything feels a bit… off.
How Big Tech rewired society’s nervous system and set the stage for a human renaissance. Will the Tech Broligarchy create a new feudal order? Or will we, the people, use AI to build a new economy?
Life’s been feeling a little… off. Not just lately. Honestly, it feels like it’s been off for a while. Hard to say exactly when it started. Somewhere in the last decade or so we slipped into a version of reality increasingly shaped by algorithms. Our feeds, our jobs, our dating lives - all gently nudged by big tech.
And of course we can't forget about the pandemic. That left some societal scar tissue, didn’t it? Oh well, at least we can work from home now. You know how it goes. An average Wednesday morning. While we let AI draft our emails, stray thoughts drift through our minds. Before we know it, we’re five cat TikToks deep. Oooh nice, some kitchen hacks. Influencers performing the latest dance trend. A whispery ASMR voice. And some buff guy aggressively pitching stock tips in front of a rented Lamborghini.
Nope. Close app.
Wait, what was I doing again? No clue. Might as well check the news real quick.
Ok uhm, why is the Tesla guy waving a chainsaw above his head?
We place the phone face-down, rub our eyes, and stare out the window.
Where are we?
Your daily dystopia.
It’s not just you. That low-grade fatigue. The quiet anxiety. The feeling that something meaningful is missing. For many of us, life has started to feel like an endless loop: wake up, check notifications, scroll, repeat. Our screens follow us from morning routines to midnight doomscrolls. And somewhere along the way, the apps and platforms that once promised to connect us began rewiring how we think, feel, and relate. Algorithms now shape what we see, what we believe, even who we think we are. Not nudging us toward personal well-being, but toward whatever keeps us clicking.
That sense of unease, it runs deep. It’s not just digital. It’s economic, ecological, and political. Wages lag behind inflation. Housing feels unattainable. Climate collapse is no longer a future threat, but a present reality. Democracies are tearing at the seams, pulled by polarization and drowned in disinformation. And behind it all, global tensions are rising. Russia’s war in Ukraine, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, a sharpening conflict in the South China Sea, Israel and Iran playing badminton with ballistic missiles, and the USA slipping quite rapidly into authoritarianism. It’s no longer unthinkable to ask: is a global war inevitable?
When you try to escape reality by diving into your screen, the unsettling feeling only gets worse. Politicians perform on X like it's reality TV, fueling gossip instead of governance. Buffed-up crypto bro’s talk you into their crash course on escaping the 9-to-5. YouTubers become kickboxers. Kickboxers become YouTubers, driving Bugatti’s and shouting misogynistic hot takes. People turning to OnlyFans in a desperate attempt to pay off student loans or overdue rent. AI-generated videos of president Trump transforming Gaza into a Dubai-style paradise.
Yes, life feels off.
Reality seems to be glitching, like we’ve stumbled into a ‘Black Mirror’ episode and the only way to survive in tomorrow’s economy is by winning a Mr. Beast challenge. Big tech hasn’t just changed our habits, it’s taken hold of our nervous systems. From nudging impulse buys to shaping public opinion, tech platforms influence how billions of people feel, think, and vote. That unease you’ve been sensing? The feeling that life seems off? Sometimes a bit surreal? It’s because big tech has been stirring up global order. Our sense of what is ‘normal’ has slowly been kneaded into a surreal reality. And it’s become difficult to distinguish what’s ‘normal’ and ‘not ok’. The best place to experience it is at the epicenter of it all: Silicon Valley.
A wrong turn into modern dark ages.
Walk into real life Mordor and make your way up to the Eye of Sauron. Piercing through the fog, the Salesforce Tower rises above the San Francisco skyline, watching over the bay of billion dollar start-up valuations. At its base lies a business square crawling with dripped-out Patagucci tech-bro’s. They look like fleece-wrapped knights roaming the castle grounds. Head down a block and you’ve entered the Tenderloin, land of the peasants. Outside the castle district, tents line the sidewalks and drugged-out people slump in doorways. How is it that one of the richest and most innovative places on Earth sits shoulder to shoulder with this level of human despair? Hop on a Lime scooter and cruise around the area for five minutes and it feels like you're in the prologue of a dystopian cyberpunk blockbuster.
Ideas once sparked in Palo Alto garages have grown into billion dollar tech empires. Bright tech wizards who harnessed emerging technologies faster and more boldly than anyone else created products that didn’t just innovate, they rewrote the rules. These success stories have been told time and time again to inspire the next generation of talent to pursue a career in tech and entrepreneurship. But the vibe around these stories is shifting. A handful of these heroic tech wizards are turning into modern day robber barons. Cementing monopolies, gobbling up competitors and cozying up to a conservative government eager to maintain the status quo. It’s no longer about moving fast and breaking things. It’s about consolidating power and making sure no one else can move at all.
We’re witnessing the rise of the Tech Broligarchy. A new feudal order controlled by Emperor Elon, Sir Zuck, Baron Bezos and Silicon Valley’s Dark Lord; Peter Thiel. For those unfamiliar with the latter, Lord Thiel was part of the PayPal Mafia, Facebook’s first angel investor, Vice President J.D. Vance’s mentor and co-founder of the USA’s most advanced AI-powered warhammer ‘Palatir’. As AI becomes the next great lever of influence, these tech bro oligarchs are poised to entrench their dominance even further. With access to massive data sets, infrastructure, and regulatory backchannels, they’re building something that looks less like a free market and more like a digital feudal system.
“Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse. it’s no longer the global finance system that shapes us, but the ‘fiefdoms’ of tech firms. Jeff Bezos doesn’t produce capital, he charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism.”
- Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism
Full interview with Varoufakis
It feels like we’re heading toward modern day dark ages. A future where the Tech Broligarchy own the models and infrastructure, the vassals rent the API’s to build out AI-powered start-ups and we, the ‘data serfs’, supply unpaid labor through personal data extraction.
What are we getting in return?
After years of paying with our attention, habits, and personal data, the reward isn’t digital freedom. What began as clicks and scrolls has evolved into a dragnet of behavioral prediction and algorithmic control. Either being used to nudge us towards another online purchase, and now far worse; mass surveillance. Companies like Palantir are now embedded deep within government operations, powering predictive policing and global surveillance. The very data trails we’ve unknowingly left behind are being weaponized to monitor and manage society in ways that often escape public scrutiny. And it doesn’t stop in the cloud, we’re experiencing the effects on the ground as well. As AI infrastructure expands, the data centers fueling it require massive amounts of water, often drawn from public supplies meant for local communities. While the Tech Broligarchy fortifies their digital strongholds, the peasants provide not only the data, but the natural resources too. It's not just a metaphor anymore. The system is starting to extract from all sides.
History repeats itself.
Over a century ago, another generation of men harnessed a different wave of technology to seize unprecedented power. During the Gilded Age, titans like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt didn’t just ride the wave of industrialization. They engineered it to serve their empires.
Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a near-monopoly by undercutting competitors, cutting secret deals with railroads, and obscuring his control through complex corporate trusts. Carnegie amassed vast wealth through steel, profiting off brutal labor conditions, including the violent suppression of the Homestead Strike. Vanderbilt manipulated rail markets, bought off legislators, and crushed rivals with tactical aggression. These men didn’t just disrupt. They dominated. Their power wasn’t merely economic. It was systemic. They helped shape the infrastructure, politics, and social contracts of their time.
Sound familiar? Today’s Tech Broligarchy is following the same blueprint. The tools have changed, but the playbook hasn’t. Instead of oil, steel, or railroads, it’s data, algorithms, and AI. Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos aren’t anomalies. They are the modern incarnation of a familiar archetype. Powerful men who know how to convert emerging technology into monopolistic control. Just like during the Gilded Age, their rise is transforming how society functions.
And perhaps most interestingly, how people feel within it.
Expressionism 2.0
Expressionism began in the early 1900s as a raw, emotional response to an industrializing world. Cities were growing fast, machines were replacing people at work, and the first signs of global war were on the horizon. Life was speeding up, and people were starting to feel lost in the system. In response, artists turned away from realistic art. Instead of painting what they saw, they painted what they felt. They used bold colors, twisted shapes, and emotional intensity to reconnect with their sense of self in a world that was starting to feel inhuman.
Fast forward to today, and we’re in a surprisingly similar place.
We face massive global challenges; climate change, political division, military conflicts and a growing sense of disconnection.
Add AI to the mix and our reality gets distorted even more. It blurs the line between what’s real and what’s synthetic. Not just in the content we consume, but in how we relate to ourselves and one another. As generative models increasingly mimic human expression, we’re left wondering what remains truly human.
This is why we could enter a new era of expressionism. This time, it’s not confined to a canvas. It’s a cultural and psychological response to the pressures of algorithmic life. We’re craving meaning. We’re seeking depth. We want to feel something real. Connection that goes beyond likes, metrics and algorithms.
This moment could mark the beginning of the Transformation Economy. A shift toward valuing personal growth, emotional richness, and a more sustainable way of living. In this new economy, being human, with all our messiness, subjectivity and contradicting feelings, becomes a strength, not a weakness.
Let’s re-route towards a brighter path.
Every few decades, a revolutionary technology emerges that doesn’t just disrupt business but transforms the entire economic landscape. In the late 1990s, Pine and Gilmore captured the pattern of these macro shifts in their Progression of Economic Value (HBR). These shifts in technology consistently reshape how we live, work, and relate to one another.
Today, Pine is exploring an extrapolated version of their model, looking into a fifth dimension; the Transformation Economy. You can read about it in my previous article. We can trace Pine’s updated model along a rough timeline from industrialization to digitalization. The invention of the steam engine and electricity drew people from farms into cities, shifting labor from agriculture to factories and eventually to the first modern offices. Later, in the late 20th century, the rise of computing and the internet expanded white-collar employment, further moving the workforce from physical production into desk-based knowledge work.
As we head into the 2030s, we’re approaching a critical fork in the road. One path veers right, toward Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism, a future where 21st-century Rockefellers use AI to tighten control and strip away our ability to think, choose, and act for ourselves. The other path turns left, into a new age economy where technology helps people move forward, realize their aspirations and shape a better tomorrow; the Transformation Economy.
By this point in the article, it might feel like we’ve already taken a wrong turn. But humans are remarkably good at course correction. We've escaped fiefdoms before. Perhaps it’s time for another Renaissance, before the modern dark ages fully descend.
Technofeudal resistance is already happening. In 2024, UnitedHealth’s CEO was fatally shot in New York City. The suspect, reportedly motivated by outrage over algorithm-driven care denials, framed the act as retaliation against a system that prioritizes profit over patients. The insurer had come under fire for using AI tools with alarmingly high error rates to automate treatment denials. In the weeks following, online support for the attacker surged, with many viewing the act as a desperate strike against a faceless and unaccountable system. More recently, anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles set fire to Google’s Waymo taxis, in part responding to reports that police have been using self-driving car footage as video evidence (Bloomberg).
Photo from Brian Merchant - The weaponization of Waymo.
These examples portray how public opinion towards big tech is changing. That said, reclaiming our humanity shouldn’t require a modern-day ‘Storming of the Bastille’. Violence cannot be justified. Rerouting our way to the Transformation Economy can be done in a positive way. Through creativity, purpose, and human-centered tech. It’s time for business and society to call upon the ‘Renaissance-(wo)men’, a.k.a. the ‘polymath’.
Renaissance figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei and René Descartes will make a comeback. Think of a designer who ‘vibe-codes’ whilst being a philosopher who understands systems theory. They are often described as ‘comb-shaped’ minds. People with depth in multiple domains, stitched together by breadth, curiosity, and the ability to synthesize. In contrast to narrow expertise, polymaths thrive in ambiguity and complexity, two things the 21st century is serving in abundance.
And AI amplifies their edge. While specialists may worry about being automated, polymaths can use AI as a creative co-pilot. It helps them accelerate learning, prototype ideas, and make unexpected connections. The more breadth you bring, the more AI becomes a multiplier rather than a threat. This is why the future may not belong to the person who knows the most, but to the one who knows how to combine the most.
“In their 2025 investment thesis, Y Combinator just said the quiet part out loud: designers are the next wave of founders. The next billion-dollar companies won’t be built by technical founders. They’ll be built by creatives. Not the pixel-pushers. Not “make it pretty” designers. But creative polymaths, the ones who have the ability to connect the dots across art, culture, business, and tech.” - R.J. Abbott on Linkedin
What’s worth exploring, and perhaps a golden tip for recruiters and parents guiding the next generation of students: shift your focus from the beta disciplines toward the gamma fields, like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Today’s young talent is inherently tech-native. They’ve grown up using digital tools in playful and intuitive ways. From building Roblox worlds to A/B testing their hashtags on TikTok. They are wired to explore, remix, and collaborate across platforms. Synthesizing information faster than any generation previously could.
The polymaths of the next generation don’t wait for permission to build and express themselves. In an algorithmic world obsessed with metrics, their advantage lies in a ‘comb-shaped’ profile that blends technical fluency with a deep understanding of people, culture, and context. Behavioral and cognitive sciences don’t just transfer knowledge. They develop lateral thinking, emotional intelligence, and most importantly, curiosity. The kind of curiosity that asks better questions, explores unknowns, and ventures into fields where outcomes aren’t easily quantified. It’s where intuition meets inquiry. A sweet spot where true innovation is born. The modern polymath is a key profile for us to venture into the Transformation Economy. A future shaped not just by smarter tech, but by wiser humans.
Because the next revolution won’t be automated.
It will be human.
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