Marvel Arthurianism, CEO assassination, and populist resistance in the age of techno-oligarchic feudalism
On January 20th, a would-be king strode onto the inauguration/coronation stage and declared the dawn of America’s “Golden Age”. No miracle, no heavenly sword pulled from a stone, had graced his rule with a divine mandate. It had been a knockdown, dragout fight. The pretender and his knights had fought it dirty and without chivalric pretensions, and some of his detractors had even countered with failed attempts to shoot him from his high horse.
The new heralded Golden Age harkened back not so much to JFK’s Camelot as to the Gilded Age of William McKinley – but might be likened to a dystopian version of the Arthurian original. Today’s Robber Barons evoke some twisted, future-tech version of the fabled knights of the Round Table. A certain logic sees the technology corporations that characterize our age’s oligarchy as Iron Man suits of armor, each to be controlled by a single homunculus. They are thus increasingly “personified”: Meta is Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla is Elon Musk, Amazon is Jeff Bezos, OpenAI is Sam Altman, Trump is, well, Trump, etc. Elon Musk is of course known to be one of the models for Robert Downey, Jr’s portrayal of Marvel’s film adaptation of Tony Stark, the tech mogul inside the Iron Man suit. And just as in the Iron Man comics’ “Superior Iron Man” storyline, there is always the danger that the hero will become deranged or slide into evil, as the Tesla bumper sticker campaign suggests. And if he does, how can the rest of us resist his superstrength?
One prospective and depressing answer came on the morning of December 4, 2024. While only a small percentage of the public had heard the name Brian Thompson before his tragic assassination, his targeting conforms to this logic equating the corporation, and all of its alleged faults, to the man (and it’s usually a man) at the top.
American oligarchy is nothing new. The Gilded Age notwithstanding, empirical evidence confirmed the existence of American oligarchy over a decade ago. The permeation of the American economy by kleptocratic financial flows facilitated by anonymous shell company networks, as well as banks and investment houses more than willing to turn a blind eye, has been amply documented (here and here and here, for instance). And large corporations are growing increasingly powerful relative to government, as ratios of corporate market capitalization to GDP demonstrate.
US stock market capitalization as a percentage of GDP, 1975-2020, Federal Reserve Economic Data
And now the resulting turbo-charged Iron Man knights – with their control of globally important media and technology corporations – are a breed apart.
Who’s on the Marvel Round Table roster, then? Musk is, of course, the king’s champion, Sir LancElon, having won the key battle of Pennsylvania for his liege. But others abound in the tech / fintech space: PayPal’s Peter Thiel (a kind of faithful Sir Bedivere, there from the beginning), Palantir’s Alex Karp, TD Ameritrade’s Joe Ricketts, Interactive Brokers’ Thomas Peterffy, Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman. Still others are seeking induction to the circle, shifting allegiances from Astolat or wherever. Mark Zuckerberg has made a bid with his recent dismantlement of social media fact-checking, offer to help Trump take on censorious governments, and $25 million check to Trump for account suspensions associated with the January 6th riot. Sam Altman attended the inauguration following the release of a “blueprint” tying the corporation’s health to the nation’s economic growth and security. Despite a rocky past relationship, Jeff Bezos may yet get in good with the king, given his nixing of the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president (“Democracy dies in darkness”) and his licensing of an Amazon documentary about Melania Trump.
Corporate gigantism makes economic sense in a high-tech world in which natural monopolies or oligopolies are common, even at the global scale. But that size also gives corporations unprecedented leverage vis-à-vis their clients and customers, and begs important questions about regulation in an era of government fecklessness, political impasse and, increasingly, capture by the oligarchical class. In the face of these Iron Man knights, the Luigi Mangiones of the world – coming from privileged backgrounds or not – may begin to resemble populist peasants.
One irony of all this Iron Man-ery is that Trump’s MAGA movement relies on a base that are not – have no chance of ever being – inducted into this tech bro Marvel Comics Round Table. The fact that the tech sector’s acceleration of automation contributes much more to domestic wage inequality than the highly politicized issues of free trade or immigration that the MAGA movement thrives on wraps the irony onion in another layer.
Preventing the peasants from seeing themselves as united in a potentially winnable common cause of wealth redistribution is essential. So the knightly class must have a strong king. The king needs to be an Iron Man knight in his own right, of course, capable of enforcing the feudal system and expanding the borders of the kingdom. And of course he needs to be able to raise revenues for his court.
Luckily on this front, our king is well-connected to royalty abroad. A 2017 Reuters investigation found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses bought nearly $100 million of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, raising obvious questions about political influence and money laundering. Donald Trump’s dual position as head of a family of businesses that may facilitate the stripping of wealth from around the world to park it in U.S. real estate, and his role as once-and-future transactional president of that same nation, raise equally obvious questions about conflicts of interest. Such deals, along with the support of other faithful oligarchs, have helped Trump become America’s oligarch-in-chief. (Russia’s Vladimir Putin was empowered to serve Russia’s oligarchic classes in much the same way, but likewise wound up tethering them in service of his own hybrid business-political enterprise.)
But the king doesn’t need to be as accomplished as his knights. He’s no Sir LancElon, after all. He’s the one who oversees the other knights occupying themselves in various bread-and-circus-y ways: tilting against each other at tournaments, vanquishing the knights of contrary fealty (let’s cast George Soros as Sir Turquine here) and, if things get too dull, being tasked with invented quests of mythic importance. He’s also a canny political operator, concocting phantasmal enemies both foreign and domestic – from the neighboring evil kingdoms of Canada and Mexico (?!?), to the trickster faeries of the American press, to the black-robed wizards of the American judiciary. These holy wars distract the peasantry from the underlying economic inequality that has so concentrated wealth in the hands of America’s royalty.
This playbook has worked in other oligarchic kingdoms (ahem, Russia?), and may yet work in the U.S.
But what if it doesn’t?
Anti-corporate resistance may vary in intensity or take different forms (including violent ones) as a function of our ability to hold corporations to account otherwise, whether by way of policy and regulation, the courts, or public opinion. Traditionally, anti-corporate resistance has taken various forms: strikes by employees or boycotts by customers or protests by other stakeholders or lobbying of legislative representatives and government agencies capable of reining them in. Not assassinations of their leaders. Social movement theorist Erica Chenoweth has famously made the argument that non-violent social movements are almost invariably more successful than violent ones – even in non-democratic settings.
But today’s corporate Iron Men knights are capable of out-muscling most legal challengers, or of buying political cover, or simply of absorbing the costs of litigation without changing their business model. All of them have billions of dollars to their names, and at least one suit of corporate armor (Musk has six!). Many hold huge media sway (over, say, X, Facebook, Instagram, the Washington Post, and of course Truth Social), making it difficult to hold them accountable in any public square. The public squares aren’t public, after all, but belong to the lord, by the grace of their liege.
The incoming Trump cabinet roster augurs poorly for the ability of government to continue to regulate the corporate Iron Men flying into its own halls of power. The consumer protections of an earlier era were looking quaintly underpowered even before Trump’s pick of Andrew Ferguson to head the Federal Trade Commission, promising laxer enforcement practices with America’s largest companies.
This all makes nonviolent social movement and traditional lobbying tactics less attractive to the malcontent. Violent movements are of course designed to raise the costs of corporate unwillingness to compromise. They may also make those pushing for change in non-violent ways appear more attractive interlocutors than they might otherwise have seemed – especially if the violent and non-violent factions are seen as separate, rather than coordinated entities.
One particularly heinous method of anti-corporate resistance – that of assassination – may have borne fruit: in the wake of CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield rescinded a highly unpopular policy change of its own that would have restricted its reimbursement for surgical anesthesia to its clients. And while Anthem did not specifically cite the Thompson assassination as a motivating factor in its reversal, the timing might suggest it was. If so, the assassination may have provoked a corporate policy change that Anthem BCBS’s own customer feedback had not succeeded in provoking alone.
While the motivation behind the Thompson assassination has its own idiosyncrasies, it nevertheless appears to be emblematic of – and resonant with – wider frustrations with corporate profiteering at the expense of the well-being of most people. It also confirmed the growing fears of corporate leaders. These have begun to spend millions on their own protection – $42 million annually for personal security details for just 10 prominent S&P 500 CEOs. Some even fret about their own paid security guards ultimately turning against them. And while there aren’t that many recent cases in the developed world of CEO assassination, the wake of the Thompson killing saw popular “hit lists” of CEOs compiled and shared in various ways, including a wanted poster campaign.
The stereotypical Second Amendment-backing, pickup truck-driving, gun-toting MAGA supporter may now root for these world-bestriding Iron Man demigods who can defy gravity as easily as evade the taxes that would otherwise pay for our future social security or healthcare. But they share a potential common cause, and a common anger, with many (like Thompson’s charged assailant, Luigi Mangione) on the other side of the political spectrum.
What happens if these peasants who disagree on so much else collectively take up their pitchforks to assassinate the Iron Men knights? And – more hopefully – could a refashioned Democratic party channel their anger into a non-violent siege of a thoroughly rotten Camelot?
