Related Articles
Disrupt the blood. Hack the hate. In Mountainhead, written, directed, and produced by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, these are just a few of the technocratisms bandied about by the four tech bros (played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith) who have gathered at a mountaintop redoubt for a good old-fashioned weekend of ketamine and contempt. Offstage, the world is literally burning, thanks to AI launched by one of the characters’ companies. Inside the compound, the chaos is construed as a scalable opportunity (“That’s why I’m so excited about these atrocities,” one says with glee).
Rolling Stone recently spoke with Armstrong about skewering the broligarchs’ worldview.
When Mountainhead came out, I was wrapping up reporting for a Rolling Stone story on the technocrats and had spent the past few months sort of living in the headspace of these guys. Seeing the film was so gratifying.
Well, I was just enjoying rereading the piece. It’s really a lot of the [same] ideas about what it does to people to be in that position of wealth and power. It’s like the film is a fictional companion piece to the article.
Is there anything you think I got wrong?
Oh, that’s a good question. I can be slightly contrary like the tech people, but I think I was nodding all the way through. Like the piece suggests, I tend to think the way they live is really important to how they’ve ended up, rather than [their characteristics] being necessarily innate.
This is a question that I asked almost everyone I interviewed — and I’ve gotten different answers — but do you think these guys are psychologically … well?
To a certain degree, the ones who, quote-unquote, are doing well, that may be just because they have adapted their psychology to an extraordinarily unhealthy level of wealth and power. The fact that they’re fine with it might be quite adaptive for them, but it doesn’t speak well of how they interact with the world.
One thing Mountainhead portrays so well is the amount of antipathy that’s baked into this Silicon Valley C-suite vibe, and the extreme levels of isolation that these people have. Even if they’re surrounded by other people, they’re not getting real feedback. They’re not getting good reality testing.
Yes, I totally agree.
I’m fascinated by how these people who are so concerned with optimizing themselves justify the selfishness baked into the Silicon Valley vibe. Who wants to live forever if you don’t have any friends?
And who wants to live a joyless life of eating sea kelp and working out and getting up at 3 a.m.? Like, “Great, yeah, you’ve lived to 150, but you’ve just been working out and sucking on amoeba for sustenance.”
But one of the themes that stuck out to me in your piece was about how appealing it is to brush aside real problems. You mentioned climate change, but also maybe the problem of human connection: How do you keep a group of friends? How do you maintain friendships if you’re turning your company into a unicorn? All those really dirty, grubby [concerns]. It’s so much easier if you claim to yourself you’re saving humanity and getting to Mars. And that maybe relates to their interaction with government, and especially the parts of government which have to deal with messy human beings and all their needs rather than, you know, laser-targeted munitions. Because the bombs are a lot easier than the hospitals.
But these guys do seem to give themselves this sort of messianic quality, right?
Yes.
And I don’t get the sense that many of them are cynical about it. I think they are true believers.
Agreed. Reading that Michael Lewis book about Sam Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism [a data-driven but controversial approach to philanthropy] is one of the sparks for me for writing about these people. I think there were cynical elements about Sam Bankman-Fried, but to me it’s a tragic story of somebody who gets sidetracked by power and wealth. That worldview that it is better to become a banker than a doctor — because you can then pay all the doctors — it’s like a logical conjuring trick to allow you to do a thing that you maybe want to do anyway, which is earn a huge amount of money.
I think it’s also easy to believe in something that makes you gazillions of dollars, where you can tell yourself that what you’re doing is the most important thing, and you’re the one who’s going to bring about some sort of godlike AI that saves humanity and ushers in technological utopia.
I wonder how much of the utopianism is a way of not thinking about the wildfires and scorched ground and increasingly hot days in front of your eyes. It’s hard for any of us to keep our focus on that.
Sam Altman just did this blog post called “The Gentle Singularity,” and in it, he says that one ChatGPT search only uses the energy that a high-powered oven uses for one second while it’s cooking. He puts that in as a sort of, “Don’t worry about it too much.” But I thought, “Jesus Christ!” If you think of all the people who are just using that [energy] casually to make up, you know, “What would it sound like if T.S. Eliot wrote Sex and the City?” And they’re just burning all these ovens on kind of nothing? It’s really, really extraordinary. But the distraction element must be pretty compelling, right? It’s fun to have a way to not think about difficult things,
For sure. I’m often like, “Oh, it’d be so nice to be a climate-change denier. It’d be so nice not to have to worry about that existential threat all of the time.”
Yeah, especially if you were going to float a company that profited from it. But I guess that when Sam Altman says [in a recent Financial Times interview], “I may be doing the coolest, most important job in history,” there’s a chance he’s right. Like, we could be on the brink of unbelievable technological, computer-powered change, right? So it’s a weird thing to think that these guys’ concerns seem to be adolescent and not fully, in the most rounded sense, human, but that it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong about their estimation of where their technology is going to take us in the next 10 or 20 years. I feel, in my bones, skeptical that we’re not going to need money or jobs soon, and that cancer and climate change and nuclear fusion will all be quickly fixed. But you quickly become used to large language models [like ChatGPT], and it’s pretty extraordinary technology, [despite] its deficiencies and its hallucinations. So there is a chance that their big picture is right, in a certain way.
Well, I tend to be more of a skeptic of tech. I don’t think anyone who’s coding this stuff would say that we’re going to reach consciousness from it.
No, no.
But the power that these tools have, or could have, is a good lead-in for another question. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Steve Carell’s character is plotting a worldwide coup while trying unsuccessfully to boil an egg. How scared do you think we should be of these guys’ — and they’re all mostly guys — forays into the political sphere?
Even with how incredibly rich and powerful they are, they still have to spend money to try to influence politics. I think that I’m more scared of [J.D.] Vance’s speech about AI and the let-it-rip attitude of politicians than I am of any single individual in the tech world. Because it feels like [with] our capability of boring democratic pushback and regulations — which will automatically be wrong and be too tight in one place and too lax in the other — the only [hope] the population as a whole has to get its arms around the problem is to eventually get a politician who can explain to us what we want the world to look like, and then try and affect that. [It’s] the only solution there ever is that’s worthwhile. So, I’m more worried about politics than tech.
You’ve said before that people who lack self-knowledge are good for comedy, which is one of the things that makes Succession and Mountainhead so darkly funny. And research shows that the more wealthy someone is, the more they misjudge their own abilities, and the more they think their abilities are transferable from one skill to another. That obviously has the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) written all over it.
I’m often asked, “Why are you so obsessed with writing about rich people?” I always say, “Oh, I’m not. I’m more interested in power,” which I think is true. But it may also be that they are just better comic targets because lack of self-awareness is always good for comedy.
The people in Mountainhead, with the exception of Jason Schwarzman’s character, all feel like they’ve done it. And just as you say in your piece, if you’re successful, the sense that you have been responsible for that success is so compelling to human beings. It’s really hard for anyone to believe that they haven’t done it themselves, even if they’ve [been given an unfair advantage]. And Logan [Roy, from Succession] has that. He has that confidence. It’s why, in a way that was quite worrying to me, some people found him the hero of that show. But because he has a confidence in [his impact] on the world, I think he’s the only one who is similar to the Mountainhead guys.
And although [the technocrats] have some linguistic similarities with some of the Kendall Roy bullshit, they actually use language in a different way. The [technocrats] think they’re using it all forensically to dissemble the world and examine it, whereas the Roy children were really using language mostly as a sort of protective barrier between themselves and reality.
When it comes to references to long-termism or uploading brains to the grid or the importance of the future happiness of trillions of potential future humans, did you struggle with how to satirize that so-called galaxy brain? I was watching the movie with my partner, and some of this stuff sounds so out there that I had to be like, “No, that’s real. They really believe that. The movie’s not making it up.”
That’s sort of a craft question of what you do as a writer to find your way in. As soon as I read about Effective Altruism — the idea of taking a proposition to its logical and mad conclusions is a comic mainstay. And, as well as being quite scary, their worldview just always seemed to me really, really funny. You know, seasteading and Mars kingdoms, underworld kingdoms, all the kind of really adolescent utopianism is not maybe a super comfy watch, but it’s a very easy write in terms of a satirical approach.
