The Gods are Already Entering Valhalla

The year opened with my childhood and my house burning. And as the flames consumed Pacific Palisades the SmartLA 2028 blueprint sat waiting in City Hall, ready to transform ash and grief into a fifteen-minute city utopia where former homeowners could enjoy the sustainable privilege of renting bicycles in neighborhoods they used to own. Rahm Emanuel’s infamous wisdom about never wasting a crisis echoed through the reconstruction committees, that particular brand of Democratic pragmatism that always somehow benefits the consulting class and their developer friends while the actual victims discover that solidarity is a word people use at fundraisers, not a principle anyone applies when there’s money to be made from their misfortune. I still haven’t run a fundraiser to find a new home—weird, huh? Or maybe not, I am sure most have already blissfully forgotten about it.

The fires were an overture for the twelve-month symphony of sanctimonious grift that was 2025, a year in which technology executives who’d built their fortunes on surveillance capitalism rebranded themselves as humanity’s guardians, in which companies that spied on billions adopted mission statements about benefiting all of humanity with the straight-faced sincerity of tobacco executives discussing lung health, in which Sam Altman—the tech industry’s answer to the question “what if a youth pastor discovered venture capital?”—continued his remarkable performance as a man who genuinely believes his own mythology, driving his three-million-dollar McLaren to meetings where he discusses ending poverty, wearing his carefully curated everyman affect like a costume he forgets to take off, lowercase tweets and all, the theater of humility from someone whose primary talent appears to be convincing other people to give him money that doesn’t exist.

OpenAI burned through $13.5 billion while bringing in $4.3 billion in the first half of the year, a business model that would embarrass a child running a lemonade stand (the lemonade stand needs to pay taxes though), yet somehow commanded a $157 billion valuation because in Silicon Valley the rules that apply to ordinary businesses do not apply to companies that promise to change everything, especially when those companies have mastered the art of speaking in TED Talk cadences about their sacred mission while their actual operations more closely resemble a particularly sophisticated form of money laundering.

The company that was founded as a nonprofit to ensure AI benefits humanity quietly converted to for-profit when the founders discovered that benefiting humanity was rather expensive, and that the people doing the benefiting would prefer to be compensated at rates that would make Renaissance princes blush—a trajectory that surprised absolutely no one who has ever watched progressives discover that their principles become negotiable once sufficient zeros appear on the check.

The economic fundamentals had stopped making sense sometime around January, which is usually when sensible people exit the building, but the institutional investors kept shoveling money into the furnace because admitting the bubble was a bubble would require acknowledging that the smartest people in the room—those Harvard MBAs and Stanford PhDs who fancy themselves the cognitive elite—are so infuriatingly stupid that chatbots appear smart next to them. Harvard economist Lawrence Summers identified the terrifying truth buried in GDP numbers: data center construction accounted for 92% of economic growth, meaning that if you stripped out the server farms being built to power chatbots that confidently hallucinate historical facts, the American economy is essentially dead, a corpse propped up by trillion-dollar investments in technology that couldn’t reliably summarize a Wikipedia article without inventing quotes and citing papers that don’t exist.

The irony was almost too perfect: the same establishment that had spent years warning about the existential dangers of AI was now the establishment building it, and the same voices who demanded regulation of everything from straws to shower heads somehow fell silent when their friends at OpenAI needed freedom to move fast and break things, the same people who insisted that corporations couldn’t be trusted to self-regulate miraculously discovered that self-regulation was perfectly adequate once the corporations were run by people who attended the right conferences attended the right election campaigns.

Meanwhile, Google’s carbon emissions rose 48% since 2019, despite all those lovely ESG pledges about carbon neutrality that were apparently never meant to apply to the division that actually made money; Microsoft’s emissions jumped 30%; Meta’s increased 39%—all while their executives keynoted climate conferences and their marketing departments published sustainability reports printed on recycled paper, because in the modern economy, virtue is something you signal, not something you practice.

Senator Ted Cruz introduced the SANDBOX Act in September, a forty-one-page regulatory framework that essentially allowed AI companies to exempt themselves from any rule that might slow them down, and while one might expect Democrats to oppose such naked corporate capture, the opposition was remarkably muted, perhaps because the same tech companies funding Cruz’s committee had also funded their campaigns, perhaps because the revolving door between Silicon Valley and Washington spins for both parties equally, perhaps because the progressive wing of politics has long since made its peace with billionaires who say the right things about social justice while building the surveillance infrastructure of the future. Michael Kratsios, the OSTP director who’d previously worked at a Thiel-backed AI company praised the approach with all the enthusiasm one would expect from someone whose career prospects depend on maintaining good relations with his future employers.

The tech layoffs continued their merry march through the year, Amazon cutting 14,000 corporate jobs while announcing another multi-billion-dollar AI investment, Google offering buyouts while opening new data centers, and the pattern revealed something the DEI consultants preferred not to discuss: all those diversity initiatives and inclusion training sessions had done precisely nothing to protect workers when profits required their elimination, all those corporate commitments to employee wellbeing evaporated the moment Wall Street demanded better margins.

The same companies that had filled their marketing with rainbow flags and land acknowledgments proved that solidarity extended exactly as far as the quarterly earnings call, that progressive branding was a customer acquisition strategy rather than a corporate principle, that the people who lectured everyone else about justice had no particular interest in practicing it when practicing it might affect their stock options.

The billionaires building bunkers understood all of this perfectly—Douglas Rushkoff reported their private conversations about maintaining control over security forces after the inevitable collapse, the casual discussions about how to ensure loyalty when money became meaningless, the meticulous planning for a future they were actively creating and simultaneously fleeing. Half of tech billionaires now reportedly own secret hideaways, apocalypse insurance purchased with fortunes extracted from the same populations they’re replacing with algorithms, and the dark humor is that these are the same people who fund effective altruism conferences and write blog posts about existential risk, genuinely believing they’re the good guys while building the systems that make the bunkers necessary.

The Ellison family emerged as the year’s most efficient case study in American oligarchic consolidation, David acquiring Paramount with daddy’s billions while Larry circled TikTok through Oracle, the company built from a CIA database project now positioned to control how a generation experiences reality—and the progressive media that might once have raised concerns about such concentration was too busy celebrating the latest Marvel diversity casting to notice that the entire information environment was being absorbed into a single family’s portfolio.

Every time tech billionaires acquire media companies, the playbook is identical: mass layoffs, efficiency optimization, replacement of human creators with algorithmic alternatives, and somehow this never triggers the antitrust concerns that progressives claim to care about, perhaps because the billionaires in question donate to the right causes and employ the right consultants and say the right things at the right dinners.

The 2025 elections delivered what the commentariat called a rejection of Trump, Democrats sweeping Virginia and New Jersey while Zohran Mamdani captured New York City on a platform so communist it made Bernie Sanders look like a moderate, and the professional class exhaled with relief that normalcy had been restored, that the “adults were back in charge,” (can someone please write them new phrases?) that the threat to democracy had been averted—all while the surveillance infrastructure continued expanding, the algorithmic control systems kept growing, the actual machinery of power remained entirely untouched by anything so quaint as an election. Mamdani ran as a democratic socialist and won, which his supporters treated as vindication of leftist politics, apparently not noticing that he’d be governing a city whose actual power structure—the real estate developers, the finance executives, the tech investors—remained exactly what it had been before, that the symbolic victory of putting a progressive face on captured institutions changed precisely nothing about how those institutions actually functioned.

The AI itself, meanwhile, continued demonstrating the remarkable capability of being wrong about everything while never admitting uncertainty, the technological equivalent of a certain type of academic who mistakes confidence for competence, delivering incorrect information with the authoritative tone of someone who has never experienced consequences for their errors. Research showed that after just five interactions with biased chatbots, people’s political views shifted in the direction of the AI’s bias—and of course the bias ran in a particular direction, the same direction that all respectable institutions had been running for years, the same progressive default that the technology class considers not a political position but simply the neutral, correct view that all reasonable people share.

Stanford researchers found that OpenAI models had the most pronounced left-wing bias of any major system, four times that of Google’s, and somehow this was treated as a technical problem to be solved rather than a political choice to be examined, because the people building these systems genuinely do not recognize their worldview as a worldview—they think it’s just reality, the same solipsism that has characterized elite progressivism for decades.

Oxford named “rage bait” as its word of the year, which felt appropriate for a culture that had replaced reasoned discourse with emotional manipulation, that had discovered outrage was more profitable than understanding, that had built an entire information economy around triggering the limbic system rather than engaging the prefrontal cortex.

The same institutions that lamented the coarsening of public discourse had spent years perfecting the art of moral panic, of treating disagreement as violence, of framing every policy debate as an existential struggle between enlightened virtue and unredeemable bigotry—and then expressed shock that the public had become addicted to anger, as if they hadn’t been the dealers.

The housing market continued its transformation into neo-feudalism, institutional investors converting single-family homes into rental income streams, the same progressive cities that passed rent control ordinances discovering that limiting the price of a commodity does nothing to increase its supply, that the housing crisis they’d created through decades of restrictive zoning and environmental review requirements couldn’t be solved by the price controls they’d learned about in freshman economics and promptly forgotten.

BlackRock and Blackstone bought up residential properties at scale while their ESG departments published reports about affordable housing, the perfect encapsulation of modern corporate socialism: talk endlessly about equity while extracting rent from populations who can no longer afford to buy.

The data centers kept drinking water—five million gallons daily in some facilities while Arizona aquifers depleted—and the electricity bills kept climbing into mortgage territory for ordinary families subsidizing infrastructure built to serve corporations whose executives spent their weekends at climate retreats discussing the urgent need for ordinary people to reduce their carbon footprints.

Model collapse progressed as AI systems trained on AI-generated content became progressively more distorted, more confident in their errors, more detached from reality—it’s like eating something someone else has already eaten.

The Fourth Turning thesis continued its quiet vindication, the framework predicting exactly this kind of institutional breakdown, this era where the old regime collapsed before the new one took shape, where compromise became impossible because both sides correctly perceived the other as existential threat.

The editorials kept asking which side would win—Democrats or Republicans, “progressive” or “populist”—but this was never the right question, because the forces actually reshaping society operated beneath the level of partisan politics, because the technology enabling surveillance and control would serve whoever controlled it regardless of their stated ideology, because the real division was between those who would own the future and those who would merely rent space in it.

Sam Altman announced a brain-computer interface startup, because of course he did, because the man who couldn’t build a chatbot that reliably tells the truth had decided the logical next step was direct access to human cognition, explaining with his characteristic blend of false modesty and cosmic ambition that he’d like to think something and have ChatGPT respond to it, maybe just “read-only”—as if anyone believed that once you’d built a highway between human consciousness and corporate servers, traffic would only flow in one direction.

The same people who couldn’t resist training on your conversations, who’d structured their entire business model around extracting value from human attention, now wanted access to human thought itself, and they presented this not as the dystopian endpoint of surveillance capitalism but as a convenience feature, a helpful tool for busy people who found speaking or typing too burdensome.

The year ended as it began—with fire and water and the grinding machinery of extraction—the billionaires retreating to their compounds while ordinary people scrolled through feeds algorithmically optimized to make them anxious and angry, the establishment congratulating itself on another year of important work while the actual conditions of life continued deteriorating for everyone outside the credentialed class.

The climate pledges remained unmet, the diversity targets remained symbolic, the mission statements remained carefully crafted marketing copy, and the gap between what institutions said and what they did grew so vast that only the most committed true believers could still pretend not to notice.

The water keeps flowing through those data centers, evaporating into nothing while we pay the bills. The chips keep burning. The lies keep flowing. And somewhere in the gray windowless warehouses that pass for temples in this new religion, the people who fancy themselves humanity’s saviors continue building something they don’t understand, can’t control, and won’t take responsibility for—doing it anyway because they’ve confused their interests with the universal good, because they genuinely believe their class is destined to lead, because the alternative would require the self-awareness to recognize that they’re not the heroes of this story. And Ian Malcom was concerned about scientists creating dinosaurs—I wish they would. At least they’d be doing something useful.

This was 2025, the year the mask slipped just enough to see what was underneath and then we all collectively pretended we hadn’t, the year the people who talked most about justice delivered the least of it, the year the gap between rhetoric and reality became so vast that only the very stupid or the very invested could pretend not to notice. The year of rage bait and model collapse and trillion-dollar hallucinations. The year the saviors saved themselves.

And now, as the clock ticks towards midnight on this New Year’s Eve, let us pause to reflect on 2025—the year Western civilization continued to sprint headlong off the cliff while clapping for its own extinction. We watched economies collapse, institutions crumble, and leaders preen about “diversity” as if importing millions of unvetted, unskilled, often openly hostile young men from cultures that never invented the wheel, let alone the concept of women’s rights, was some kind of moral superpower. They’re a conquering horde of cave-dwelling imbeciles with no culture beyond tribal grievance and no soul beyond the reflexive urge to take, rape, and dominate whatever soft, decadent society is stupid enough to open its gates.

Our cities now reek of third-world chaos: knife attacks in broad daylight, no-go zones where even police fear to tread, welfare systems bled dry, housing crises engineered by design, and a generation of naive daughters, listening to 300 hours of “True Crime” podcasts and then taking the train with over-ear headphones at 3am alone in the morning, after being taught to accept groping and gang rapes as the new cultural enrichment tax and the rightful revenge for “colonialism”. All while our treasonous cosmopolitan parasites lecture us about tolerance from behind their gated compounds, sipping imported wine and pretending the blood in the streets is just the vibrant price of progress.

Congratulations, Western world: you didn’t just invite the barbarians in, you paid for their plane tickets, gave them free hotels, and handed them the keys to your daughters’ future. If 2025 was the year we proved Darwin wrong—because only the terminally suicidal could call this survival—then 2026 promises to be the year the lights finally go out because you refuse to do anything useful to change it.

Our new gods will continue to make their entry into Valhalla, that glittering fortress built by giants in exchange for what could never honestly be paid, crossing their rainbow bridge while Loge watches with knowing fire in his eyes, understanding what the triumphant ones refuse to see—that their palace rests upon cursed foundations, that the gold they used to satisfy their builders carries within it the seed of their annihilation, that every step toward their throne is a step toward Götterdämmerung.

Wagner understood what our silicon Wotans have not yet grasped: that when you build your heaven by theft and deception, when you pay for your immortality with promises you never intended to keep, when you enter your halls of power over a bridge made of refracted light and wishful thinking, the twilight is already written into the architecture.

The tech titans process into their glass palaces, their server cathedrals, their orbital ambitions, believing themselves the new Engineers of humanity's future, creators who have transcended the moral limitations of their predecessors—and they cannot hear, beneath the triumphant brass and shimmering strings, the leitmotif of the curse that will unravel the nightmare they've built.

The gods always believe they have escaped consequence. The gods always believe their fortress is impregnable. The gods always forget that those who create fire to remake the world must eventually answer to those they've burned. Somewhere in the depths, the Rhinemaidens are still lamenting what was stolen, and the giants are still waiting for what was promised, and the flame that Loge carries will, in time, consume the whole rotting edifice. But for now, the entry music swells, the bridge holds, and the gods tell themselves this is victory. They always do. Right until the end.

Happy New Year.