Mountainhead, or The Oligarchs
History warns us about the kinds of unchecked power that Jesse Armstrong’s new movie shows us
This weekend, the director behind Succession released Mountainhead, a thinly veiled satire about the tech oligarchs who dominate our lives. These billionaires, flush with obscene wealth accumulated in the technological miracle of the last two decades, believe in their own inherent superiority – powered by the notion that their coding skills grant them a kind of divine right to rule.
Steve Carell’s elder statesman Randall epitomizes this hubris. Early in the film, he sits on a private jet receiving a cancer diagnosis, and he chastises his doctor for succumbing to a myth of human mortality, convinced that his command over technology will eradicate the flaws in human biology or the laws of nature. It’s a stark look at how these men see themselves: not as mere mortals, but as modern-day gods wielding code and capital to reshape reality itself.
They are obsessed with quantification – the injection of data into every part of our lives. Every human experience must be tracked, logged, and commodified. Our running routes, our learning from disaster, or the quality of our sleep. We’ve reached a point where basic human functions have become stressful metrics that must always show improvement, scrutinized in public by these companies or even strangers online. Life reduced to numbers breeds an exhausting, relentless competition that saps joy from even our most personal moments.
When a social media platform owned by one of the billionaires at the movie’s mountain retreat begins to rent the world apart through its wildfire of hyperpersonalizedmisinformation, they lean into the mantra that “the antidote to bad tech is good tech”. It’s a chilling reflection. These oligarchs thrive on anger-driven engagement metrics, knowing that they can set the world on fire and drown us in misinformation to get us using their platforms eve more.
These men are so detached from daily life that they don’t understand what it’s like to live as a normal person anymore. We expect our politicians to show up in our communities, to have at least a moment away from the power and glamour to think about what our lives must be like. And yet, the fan clubs of these billionaires idolize them for their very disconnection. They are gods above mere mortals, fuelling their own egomania.
You need only spend a few minutes on LinkedIn or Twitter to see these fan clubs in action, convinced that by emulating and celebrating this theology of superintelligence, some of the windfall will come their way. I once wrote a column here about the authoritarian tech-right, and nearly all the emails I got after were from these fan clubs offended that I might dare insult their kings.
It's a kind of ideology that looks a lot like the divine right of kings, claiming the gospel of IQ and innovation as justification for unchecked power. I lived in San Francisco for years – one of my favorite places on earth – and I learned that Silicon Valley, often thought to be some liberal bastion, is at its core, libertarian. The prevailing attitude is that governments and regulations are pesky and burdensome, that they only serve to obstruct technology progress. This founder mindset sees public servants as incapable of contributing anything meaningful – in part because they see salary as equivalent to influence.
History warns us about this kind of unchecked power. Railroad tycoons founded many of the Bay Area institutions that have driven this ideology, many also working to dictate social direction. One of them – Andrew Mellon, heir to the Standard Oil fortune – was the US Secretary of the Treasury in the decade leading up the Great Depression. Today’s tech moguls wield a mor insidious type of power, aiming to not work with or through governments but to dominate every aspect of our daily lives, drawn from the content and data that they addict us to. Presidents and Prime Ministers are forced to declare fealty to these billionaires.
Democracy rejects this concentration of power. No one individual should possess such sweeping control. At the heart of democratic systems is the recognition that humans, by our nature, are drawn toward power, and the only way to limit that is by using one person’s drive toward power to check another’s. It’s why our governments have branches - checks and balances. Legitimacy emerges because of the ongoing friction of competing voices. When a handful of boygeniusesamass the ability to shape what billions of people see, think, feel, and can pay attention to – without any oversight or accountability – they short-circuit the premise of democratic life. They eliminate the ways that we can contest power, replacing democratic pluralism with their own control, public reason with algorithmic manipulation.
These disconnected billionaires casually view social upheaval as an opportunity for market disruption, treating the consequences of war as inconveniences applicable only to those less fortunate.
Beneath all this bravado is a palpable fear of mortality. Death, to them, should be reserved only for the poor. This fear drives their relentless pursuit of power and immortality.
Innovation, often essential and sometimes miraculous, can improve our lives dramatically – when it functions in the interests of the people whose lives it touches. The billionaire architects are so far removed from our reality that their decisions bear consequences inconceivable to them in human terms. Their platforms exploit our psychology for their own benefit, leaving us stressed, distracted, and chronically engaged.
The movie’s title deliberately echoes The Fountainhead, a favorite among the tech elite. It follows Ayn Rand’s typical brand of selfish individualism as the panacea for society’s ills. That if only the genius of a few good men could be unleashed in the absence of government overreach, all our problems will be solved. The main character of the book is an architect battling against public institutions afraid of his own innovation. Donald Trump once cited it as one of his favoritebooks, though I doubt he’s ever actually read it. Rand’s myth, echoed by the modern tech right, neglects the suffering inflicted when individualistic greed supersedes the collective good.
Technology, when thoughtfully regulated and democratically governed, can genuinely improve society. Unchecked, and in the hands of unaccountable oligarchs convinced of their own divine infallibility, it poses existential threats to our humanity. The challenge lies in reclaiming our attention and the shifting of human dignity from merely sources of data to be aggregated and sold off to the unquantifiable existence that should be available to all of us.