One-Third Cyberselfish,
One-Third Ayn Rand,
One-Third Idiocracy
The three-part operating system of American power in 2026
American politics presently appears incomprehensible if one assumes that it is still governed by recognizable doctrines such as conservatism, free-market economics, isolationism or fiscal restraint. A president elected partly on a promise to avoid new wars has plunged into an open-ended war with Iran. An administration that celebrates business has launched a trade war against Canada, one of the United States’ largest customers and the country most thoroughly integrated into its industrial economy. Technology billionaires who spent decades denouncing government interference now seek federal protection, subsidies, energy, land, defense contracts and exemption from state regulation. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars circulate through an artificial-intelligence economy whose financing increasingly seems to depend upon the proposition that no amount of spending can be excessive because AI will eventually make all previous financial measurements irrelevant.
There may be a formula that explains much of this:
American politics is now one-third Cyberselfish, one-third Ayn Rand and one-third Idiocracy.
The proportions are not meant literally. The three ingredients also overlap and react with one another. But each identifies a different part of the political machinery. Cyberselfish describes the emerging ruling class. Ayn Rand supplies its moral mythology. Idiocracy describes the degraded information environment through which its ambitions are converted into public policy.
Together, they explain a surprising amount.
Cyberselfish: The Sociology of the New Elite
Cyberselfish is a 2000 book by technology journalist Paulina Borsook, who had worked around Northern California’s computer industry since the early 1980s. Borsook was neither a technological innocent nor a conventional anti-technology scold. She had written software documentation, covered networking companies and contributed to the original Wired. What disturbed her was not the computer but the belief system forming around it.
Growing up in Pasadena among Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory families, Borsook had known an earlier scientific elite. These people were often politically liberal, civically minded and conscious that their careers rested upon universities, defense research, public infrastructure and the enormous federal investment in postwar science. When she later encountered Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture, she was struck by a peculiar contradiction: few groups had received more from government, yet few spoke of government with greater contempt.
In Cyberselfish, Borsook described a culture that confused financial success with superior intelligence, regarded regulation as an assault upon creativity and treated dependence upon other people as an embarrassing design defect. Computers were controllable, logical and responsive in ways that human beings and democratic societies could never be. A person accustomed to commanding a machine could begin imagining that society itself should operate like software: eliminate friction, remove constraints, delete malfunctioning components and let the intelligent designer take charge.
Borsook also recognized the hostility toward empathy embedded within this worldview. Public obligations were portrayed as coercion. Those needing help became evidence of defective choices. The enormously successful individual owed little to the society that educated his employees, financed the original research, protected his patents, supplied his electricity and maintained the legal and financial system in which his fortune existed. In a July 2026 interview, Borsook explained that she had intended to describe a peculiar subculture. She had not anticipated that it would become the dominant ideology of some of the world’s most powerful people.
That is the Cyberselfish contribution to our formula: private command resting upon public support, accompanied by denial that the public contributed anything.
Ayn Rand: The Moral Mythology
Ayn Rand was the Russian-born American novelist who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and developed a philosophy she called Objectivism. Rand celebrated reason, productive achievement, individual rights and the pursuit of one’s own happiness. Her ideal figure was the independent creator—the architect, industrialist or inventor who refuses to surrender his judgment to a mediocre collective. In Atlas Shrugged, society’s productive geniuses withdraw their labor after becoming exhausted by politicians, regulators and dependents whom Rand divides into “looters” and “moochers.”
Rand’s actual philosophy was more complicated than its popular caricature. She regarded objective reality and rigorous reason as absolutes. She defended individual liberty and laissez-faire capitalism, which means she would almost certainly have opposed Trump’s tariffs and much of his arbitrary use of state power. The Ayn Rand in contemporary politics is therefore not the complete philosopher. It is Rand as metabolized by American business culture: the heroic billionaire, the parasitic regulator, the undeserving recipient of public assistance and the presumption that market success constitutes a moral verdict.
This simplified Rand supplies something Cyberselfish alone does not: a justification. The billionaire is not simply wealthy; he is a superior producer. Regulation is not merely inconvenient; it is the revenge of inferiors. Taxes are not a contribution to the system that made the fortune possible; they are confiscation. If other people suffer when a factory closes, a benefit disappears or an automated system eliminates their work, their suffering does not create an obligation. It demonstrates that they failed to adapt.
Rand’s novels turn economic power into a heroic narrative. Contemporary billionaire culture performs the same conversion. Wealth becomes evidence of wisdom, and wisdom becomes a license to exercise power far outside the field in which the fortune was made. Success in software, electric automobiles or venture capital becomes an implied qualification to reorganize public health, education, warfare, transportation and democratic government.
The Randian ingredient is therefore wealth transformed into virtue, and virtue transformed into authority.
Idiocracy: The Public Operating System
Idiocracy is Mike Judge’s 2006 film about an exceptionally ordinary man who awakens 500 years in the future and discovers that American society has lost the capacity to think. Language has deteriorated, entertainment has swallowed politics and corporate brands have replaced civic institutions. The president is a professional wrestler. Hospitals resemble degrading game shows. Crops are dying because they are being irrigated with a sports drink called Brawndo, but no one can contemplate giving plants water because Brawndo “has electrolytes.”
The film’s opening explanation, which attributes the catastrophe partly to differential reproduction between intelligent and unintelligent people, is crude and has aged badly. Its more enduring insight is institutional rather than genetic. A society becomes idiotic when every system rewards simplification, spectacle, aggression and immediate gratification while punishing expertise, complexity and delayed consequences.
Our own version of Idiocracy is not populated entirely by stupid people. Indeed, many of the people designing it are highly intelligent. Platforms discovered that outrage and absurdity hold attention more reliably than qualified explanation. Politicians learned that a memorable falsehood can defeat a complicated truth. Financial markets reward announcements before results arrive. Expertise becomes suspicious precisely because experts introduce caveats, probabilities and constraints into a culture that wants total certainty by the next commercial break.
Idiocracy supplies the interface through which the other two forces reach the public. It converts oligarchic ambition into slogans, dominance into entertainment and policy failure into another episode of the show. Its essential principle is not that everyone has become unintelligent. It is that the system has learned to make intelligence politically disadvantageous.
The Three Ingredients Do Different Jobs
The triplet works because the ingredients are complementary.
Cyberselfish tells us who increasingly possesses economic and technological power. Ayn Rand explains why those people may believe their power is deserved and morally instructive. Idiocracy explains how their interests are sold to a public whose information environment has been stripped of memory, context and causal reasoning.
Or, more simply:
Cyberselfish supplies the ruling class.
Ayn Rand supplies the theology.
Idiocracy supplies the operating system.
This also explains why contemporary politics is so ideologically inconsistent. Tariffs are not free-market economics. Industrial subsidies are not libertarianism. Politically directed corporate punishment is not limited government. A trillion-dollar defense and surveillance establishment is not the stateless world imagined by early cyberlibertarians.
But consistency is unnecessary. “Government is bad” never really meant that patent protection, defense procurement, police power, federal land, electrical infrastructure and rescue during a financial crisis were bad. It meant that democratic government should not constrain the people who consider themselves society’s producers. The desired state is not necessarily small. It is powerful in the directions favored by its owners and absent in the directions needed by everyone else.
Iran: Warfare as a Technology Demonstration
Nothing in this argument requires sympathy for the Iranian regime. Iran is an authoritarian state with a history of repression, proxy warfare and nuclear deception. The question is not whether Iran presents genuine dangers. It is how the United States transformed those dangers into the bizarre, open-ended conflict now underway.
On February 28, 2026, while nuclear diplomacy was still active, the United States and Israel launched a massive attack on Iran. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeted nuclear, military and governmental facilities. The announced purposes subsequently ranged from preventing a nuclear weapon to destroying Iran’s missiles and navy, eliminating its support for armed proxies and encouraging regime change. Iran retaliated against Israel, American bases and Gulf states and asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Six months later, the promised demonstration of overwhelming power has become what Reuters describes as energy trench warfare. Large-scale fighting has intermittently stopped, restarted and stopped again. Ceasefires have been announced and then collapsed. Oil traffic through Hormuz has fallen drastically, energy costs remain elevated, thousands are dead and the central disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions and the strait remain unresolved. The administration’s original language of obliteration and annihilation has not yielded an attainable political end state.
The Cyberselfish element is the belief that a complex society can be treated as an engineering problem. Identify the dangerous nodes, destroy them with precision technology and expect the system to reboot in a more desirable configuration. The same culture that promises software will “disrupt” an industry imagines that air power can disrupt a nation into political compliance. Human beings, historical memory, religious authority, nationalism and the capacity of an attacked population to become more hostile are treated as irritating legacy systems.
The Randian contribution is the fantasy of unconstrained will. The strong actor demonstrates strength by refusing limits; negotiation becomes evidence of weakness. Opponents are not parties with interests that must eventually be accommodated but irrational obstacles to be broken. Admitting that military superiority does not automatically produce a political settlement would threaten the mythology of the heroic decision-maker.
Then Idiocracy packages the war. “Operation Epic Fury” sounds less like a strategy than a video game expansion. Targets destroyed, ships sunk and leaders killed become visible points on a scoreboard. The harder questions—what government follows, who controls the strait, how escalation ends and what concessions the United States will ultimately accept—do not fit easily into a post or rally speech. Tactical spectacle substitutes for strategy.
It is war conducted partly as content: extraordinarily sophisticated weapons serving an increasingly primitive theory of politics.
Canada: A Trade War Against the Friendly Supply Chain
The trade war with Canada is in some respects even stranger because there is no hostile regime, nuclear program or proxy army to invoke. Canada is a treaty ally and one of America’s largest trading partners. The two economies exchanged approximately $872 billion in goods and services last year. Canada supplies about four million barrels of crude oil daily to the United States, as well as enormous shares of American aluminum, potash, electricity and automotive components. Many products do not so much cross the border as move repeatedly back and forth through a continental production system.
Nevertheless, President Trump insists that the United States does not need Canada. Following the breakdown of negotiations in August, the administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on approximately $20 billion of Canadian goods and threatened comparable tariffs on Canadian automobiles and parts. Canada announced matching retaliation. Provinces have removed American alcohol from public stores, Canadian tourism to the United States has fallen, and Canada is accelerating efforts to redirect trade and security relationships toward Europe. The economic facts stubbornly contradict the claim that America can simply detach itself from Canada.
This is not Randian economics; Rand favored voluntary exchange and would have regarded tariffs as government interference. It is Randian drama. One nation is cast as the productive giant and the other as an ungrateful dependent taking advantage of it. Trade becomes a test of personal dominance rather than a mutually beneficial system. A negotiated compromise looks like humiliation because the heroic actor must never require anything from anyone else.
The Cyberselfish mistake is the inability to comprehend interdependence. A supply chain appears on a computer as a series of discrete transactions, making it easy to imagine that each can be terminated, repriced or rerouted without disturbing the whole. The social capital accumulated through decades of treaties, joint production, predictable rules and ordinary trust is invisible because it does not appear as a quarterly asset.
Idiocracy supplies the economic theory: tariffs are imagined as bills paid by foreigners rather than taxes initially paid by domestic importers and eventually distributed among businesses, workers and consumers. Canada can be commanded like a vendor whose contract is being renegotiated. If the price of aluminum, fertilizer, automobiles or toilet paper rises, the consequences arrive months later and can be blamed upon someone else.
The point of the trade war may no longer be an identifiable trade objective. It is the performance of leverage itself. Canada must be made to yield because yielding proves that America is powerful. The economic damage is merely an externality of the show.
Artificial Intelligence: Brawndo With a Capital Budget
Artificial intelligence is real, useful and potentially transformative. The financial mania surrounding it can also be real. Railroads, automobiles and the internet changed the world while simultaneously generating spectacular bubbles. A technology need not be fraudulent for every investment made in its name to be rational.
The scale of the present buildout is difficult to absorb. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend more than $730 billion this year, much of it on AI infrastructure. Technology companies that historically financed expansion from abundant cash are increasingly issuing debt and moving obligations through special-purpose vehicles and long-term leases. Reuters recently noted that purchase commitments, leases and other off-balance-sheet obligations could make the actual infrastructure commitment trillions of dollars larger than conventional capital-expenditure figures suggest.
The revenues are not imaginary. Nvidia just reported quarterly revenue of approximately $96 billion, with $89 billion coming from data centers. But the financing increasingly forms a self-reinforcing circle. Chip companies invest in AI developers, which commit to purchase or lease chips, which supports the suppliers’ revenues, which validates higher valuations and produces financing for the next round. Anthropic reportedly plans to spend $45 billion renting computing capacity from a data-center company over six years while projecting explosive future revenue growth. Each transaction becomes evidence justifying the next transaction.
This is Cyberselfish in almost pure form. The supposedly independent private sector requires public electricity grids, water, tax incentives, federal land, accelerated permits, government contracts and occasionally the suppression of state and local restrictions. The White House AI Action Plan explicitly joins deregulation, massive infrastructure construction and national-security policy. The gains remain private while the physical and financial risks spread outward to utilities, ratepayers, communities, lenders and eventually government.
Ayn Rand supplies the founder mythology. AI executives are not merely corporate managers selling a product; they are portrayed as architects of the next stage of human evolution. Ordinary methods of valuation seem almost insulting when applied to such historic figures. If the founder says his company will generate $200 billion in revenue within two years, questioning the assumption can be portrayed as a failure of imagination. Capital does not merely finance the vision. The availability of capital is treated as proof that the vision must be true.
Idiocracy contributes the magical word itself. “AI” increasingly performs the function that “electrolytes” performs in the film: a technical-sounding substance whose invocation ends the discussion. Companies need an AI strategy because AI is what valuations crave. Governments need an AI strategy because otherwise China will win the AI race. Utilities must build more generation because AI requires electricity. Environmental review must be shortened because the race cannot pause. Every objection becomes evidence that the objector does not understand the future.
The genuinely intelligent question is not whether AI will matter. It plainly will. The question is which applications justify their costs, who assumes the financial risk, who supplies the energy and water, who receives the gains, and what happens if the enormous revenue projections fail to arrive on schedule. Those are precisely the questions the combined ideology is designed to dismiss.
Why the Bizarre Has Become Normal
The formula helps explain why events now feel simultaneously sophisticated and insane. The United States can deploy extraordinarily advanced weapons without possessing a coherent theory of how the resulting war ends. It can build the most powerful AI systems in history while financing them through arrangements that few citizens—and perhaps few regulators—can fully see. It can maintain an intricately integrated continental economy while speaking of its closest trading partner as though it were an irritating tenant.
The system is not uniformly stupid. It is often brilliant at extracting wealth, attracting attention and concentrating power. Its stupidity appears at the level of collective purpose. It can optimize the advertisement while degrading the information environment, maximize the transaction while destroying the relationship and win the military engagement while losing control of the war.
That is where the three ingredients finally converge. Cyberselfish removes the obligation to society. Ayn Rand converts dominance into moral desert. Idiocracy removes the feedback that might reveal failure.
In Mike Judge’s film, the supposedly idiotic President Camacho at least recognizes that Joe may know something he does not and gives him responsibility for solving the agricultural crisis. Our version may be darker. Expertise is frequently available, but acknowledging it would place limits upon the heroic leader, the billionaire founder and the spectacle required by the audience.
We are not living entirely inside Cyberselfish, Atlas Shrugged or Idiocracy. We are living inside a merger of all three. Brawndo has completed a venture round. Its founder has been declared a genius. Its data centers have received expedited federal permits. Its software has secured a defense contract. And when the crops continue to die, the company will explain that the problem was excessive regulation, insufficient scale and the failure of ordinary people to believe strongly enough in the future.
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SIDEBAR
Sidebar: Spengler and the Winter of the West
A darker and much longer historical shadow hangs over this triplet: Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922 and conventionally translated as The Decline of the West. The German title carries a suggestion not only of decline but of going under, sunset and disappearance. Yet Spengler did not principally mean that the West would suddenly collapse. He believed that every great culture passes through an organic life cycle—birth, growth, creative maturity and eventual hardening into what he called “Civilization.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Spengler’s system as a theory in which civilizations pass through stages of youth, maturity and senescence.
For Spengler, “Culture” and “Civilization” were almost opposites. Culture is the living period: religion, art, architecture, philosophy and political forms arise from a shared understanding of the world. Civilization is what remains when those creative energies have been exhausted. It can be immensely wealthy, technically brilliant and militarily powerful, but it increasingly substitutes scale for meaning, administration for statesmanship, entertainment for art and technical capability for any serious answer to the question of what that capability is for.
Spengler called the Western culture “Faustian.” Its defining impulse was the conquest of infinity: limitless space, limitless knowledge, limitless expansion and ultimately limitless power over nature. The Gothic cathedral reaches upward; perspective painting opens an infinite visual field; calculus masters motion; the ocean voyage crosses the horizon; modern finance converts the future into present value. Technology is not merely a collection of useful tools. It is an expression of the Western desire to make the entire world measurable, penetrable and controllable.
Artificial intelligence may be the purest Faustian project yet devised. It seeks to convert language, judgment, creativity and perhaps consciousness itself into computation. Its recurring command is to scale: more data, more chips, more electricity, more capital, larger models and ever more extravagant claims about the future. The destination continually recedes because the point is not arrival. The point is infinite striving.
Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish can therefore be read as a close-up field report from Spengler’s late Faustian civilization. She observed a technologically empowered class that had lost any sense of historical inheritance or civic obligation. Its members imagined themselves as autonomous creators even while depending upon accumulated science, public infrastructure, universities, government procurement and an elaborate legal order. They inherited the achievements of a civilization and mistook possession for authorship.
Ayn Rand supplies this late Faustian elite with its heroic self-portrait. Her architect, industrialist and inventor stand above the crowd, refusing all limits upon their productive will. In its simplified business-culture form, Rand’s philosophy becomes Faustian ambition with the tragedy removed: endless creation without dependence, power without inheritance and wealth without obligation. The billionaire appears not as the beneficiary of a mature civilization but as the solitary man who created it.
Idiocracy, meanwhile, is Spenglerian mass civilization rendered as comedy. Public language has deteriorated into slogans, politics into spectacle and knowledge into corporate branding. Citizens remain surrounded by machines whose underlying workings they cannot understand and institutions they can no longer operate. This is not the absence of technology. It is technological abundance combined with cultural exhaustion. The society can still manufacture astonishing products; it has simply lost the capacity to decide intelligently what they should be used for.
Spengler also anticipated a political transition especially relevant to the present. In late civilization, he argued, democratic institutions become increasingly hollow. Money dominates elections, parties and the press, while formal political debate conceals the actual distribution of power. Eventually, public exhaustion produces “Caesarism”: personal rulers who bypass weakening institutions and govern through will, loyalty, force and theatrical demonstrations of command.
The wars with Iran and Canada make more sense when understood as Caesarist performances. The Iran war employs extraordinary technology but lacks a stable political objective. Its visible achievements are targets destroyed, leaders killed and weapons demonstrated. The trade war with Canada disregards economic interdependence because its true subject is not trade. It is submission. Canada must yield so that the ruler can be seen making Canada yield. In both cases, the performance of power begins to replace the achievement of a rational national purpose.
Spengler expected Caesarism eventually to defeat the rule of money. Our version is more peculiar: Caesar and the billionaires have formed a joint venture. Technology magnates supply money, communications systems, surveillance, artificial intelligence and heroic mythology. The Caesarist state supplies contracts, deregulation, land, energy, military power and protection from democratic interference. The supposedly anti-government entrepreneur and the government strongman discover that they have no fundamental quarrel. Each wants public institutions weakened sufficiently that personal power can move without obstruction.
This is where Cyberselfish, Ayn Rand and Idiocracy become not merely three contemporary influences but three symptoms of a Spenglerian transformation. Cyberselfish represents technique emancipated from civic responsibility. Rand represents the Faustian will converted into billionaire self-worship. Idiocracy represents a mass public culture in which words, facts and institutions have become empty shells. Caesarism binds them together through direct, personalized power.
Spengler’s grand cycle was highly deterministic, historically questionable and politically reactionary. He treated decline as destiny and had little sympathy for liberal democracy. We need not accept either his politics or his fatalism to recognize the force of his diagnosis. A society can remain wealthy, inventive and militarily formidable while losing the habits that made its power worth possessing. Decline does not necessarily look like ruins. It can look like record stock-market valuations, magnificent weapons, enormous data centers and political leaders speaking confidently through institutions they are steadily hollowing out.
The triplet describes what the present system is made of. Spengler explains why its ingredients belong together: money without measure, technology without purpose, politics without institutions and power without restraint.
Spengler believed this was the West’s destiny. The democratic answer must be that it remains a choice.
