Howard Anglin: Mountainhead: Or Elon Musk must die

If you enjoy Succession, you’ll probably enjoy Mountainhead in the same way that I imagine if you enjoy heroin, you’ll probably enjoy methadone. Jesse Armstrong’s new movie about four tech titans enjoying a “brewsters” (their slang) weekend at a mountaintop McMansion while the world outside is convulsed in violence caused by deep-fake technology that one of the four has just rolled out on his social media app, provides something of the same high as his savagely funny hit series, but not enough to satisfy.

Halfway through Mountainhead, I found myself missing the amusingly dysfunctional Roy children (and the better actors in the Succession cast) and dreading another hour with these emotionally sterile tech bros trading wisecracks that even they don’t seem to find funny. The characters in Succession may have been just as obnoxious, but four seasons gave us time to get to know and even, in a perverse way, like them. There’s nothing likeable about any of the characters in Mountainhead, and I suppose that’s the point.

Armstrong obviously loathes his characters and the real-world oligarchs they are thinly based on. I don’t blame him. We are saddled with the most pathetic elite in human history. Nero left monuments we still gawk at two thousand years later; these guys can’t even build a nice house. One character watches his net worth tick up by the billions but can’t stop his girlfriend from flying to a Mexican “fuck party” without him. Another becomes literally homicidal when he learns his dream of transhuman immortality might not save his life.

Never has “a little learning” been such a dangerous thing as in the hands of characters who appear to have studied philosophy via the Daily Stoic’s page-a-day quote calendar. Steve Carrell’s character may take Kant “really fucking seriously,” but when his own interests are threatened the categorical imperative is no match for effective altruism’s utilitarianism on ketamine. He’d have been better off studying Heidegger, Ellul, or Spengler on technology’s relationship to truth and reality.

The movie is an effective and timely warning about the dangers of runaway technology, and generative AI in particular, in the hands of men whose only concern is how much it can juice their paper net worth or their real-world power. But, intentionally or not, it also shows that the real threat to peace is what it’s always been: tribal divisions between flesh and blood humans. And the combination of the two in multicultural societies with growing numbers of incompletely integrated newcomers? That’s really terrifying.

The power to control the algorithms is the power to put whole societies on marionette strings and make them dance or convulse, intentionally or (just as ominously) incidentally. We’ve already seen how the rapid spread of anti-Israel propaganda, some of it using crudely manipulated or decontextualised images and videos, has made antisemitism go viral. If Jesse Armstrong is right, what we’ve seen is just the beginning of the new technology’s potential to inflame religious, ethnic, and national violence.

So, what are we doing to stop it? Or rather “them”—the baby-faced CEOs who boast about moving fast and smashing things, without stopping to see if one of those things might be Pandora’s Box. In the West, our response has been passive acceptance of technological control. China has gone the other way, with the state co-opting the technology for global influence and domestic control. Oddly, no one has tried accountability, as we belatedly did with the tobacco companies and their similarly damaging and addictive products.

I suspect that our reluctance to regulate is because technology has conditioned us not to see it as the problem. We became so used to thinking of it as our helpmeet that we didn’t notice the relationship flipped. We still think of ourselves as users of technology, when it’s more accurate to say technology is using us and adapting us to its needs. What was once a matter of convenience—a faster way to order a pizza or to pay at the till—is now compulsory. Try spending a day without your phone and see whether technology has liberated or enslaved us.

A friend of mine just got back from China, where he reports you can no longer function without a phone and the right government-approved apps. To get through the mundane tasks of life requires endlessly scanning QR codes to read menus, pay for services, and get around. Everything is cashless, of course, which means a complete lack of privacy as every purchase and movement is tracked—by Big Government or Big Tech, doesn’t really matter anymore. Maybe that is the future. Or, just maybe, China has got it wrong.

What if the long-term competitive advantage is to lean out on technology? Kill the AI bots, end auto scroll, and ban algorithms on social media. Hit the enemy where it’s most vulnerable: the monetisation of our private lives. Stop the storage of personal data and the linking of data across platforms. Let people find things for themselves or use word of mouth as we did just fine until five minutes ago. Make cash transactions a right. Hold the creators of deep fake video and voice strictly liable for the damage they cause.

Inefficiency could be a competitive edge, leaving space for the human between us and our technology, between us and other humans, and most importantly, between us and ourselves. Humanity is only inefficient if we measure efficiency in inhuman terms. For most of history, efficiency has been a civilisational advantage, but we were too successful. As we developed ever more complex machines, at some point we adopted the machines’ perspective, in which we now look like inefficient machines. And what’s the point of an inefficient machine?

During the last Cold War, the West championed the free society because we believed it was a civilisational advantage to have men and women who think for themselves and are able to challenge orthodoxy, whether of the state or just the senseless orders of their own boss. Now we happily turn over our thinking over to apps and outsource our decisions to algorithms. The Soviet Union was an open society by comparison to the one we are building every time we upgrade our phones and adopt a new AI “tool.”

Let China reap the short-term riches that will come from the blind adoption of every new convenience—and let them suffer the long-term weakness of a society of minds warped to fit technology and dependent on it to process reality. Let them accelerate into the cyborg world, upgrading endlessly unto their own obsolescence. Why would we join a race that can only be “won” on the machines’ terms, by trading more and more of what makes us human until we finally merge with the machines and become transhuman—literally inhuman?