TECH THUGS TAKE CONTROL

Plutocracy, or rule by the wealthy, has been around since ancient Rome. We saw it flourish in the Italian city-states of Venice, Florence and Genoa, and in America in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Today, wealthy elites control Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China.

And now we’re witnessing Trump and his tech thugs working to transform the United States into the biggest plutocracy of them all.

It’s not yet clear in this bizarre Disney remake whether Trump is playing the role of Mickey Mouse, with Musk as his pet dog Pluto, or vice versa. What is clear is that there’s no director, they’ve thrown away the script and they’re in full improv mode.

Strangely, while Pluto derives from the Greek word for wealth (ploutos), it also has origins in ancient mythology as the Latin name for the Greek god Hades, who ruled the underworld.

In Trump’s case these origins combine to make perfect sense in a Truman Show where stupendously wealthy individuals control an impenetrable tech underworld and are hellbent on disrupting democratic structures and ideals that would limit their powers and future wealth.

At the rate at which Trump is blundering ahead with multiple daily executive orders, we should soon see whether the dog is wagging its tail, or vice versa.