Surfer-author Peter Maguire’s one-man war against Tech Moguls aka The Gilded Dorks

"History will regard the AI boom as the greatest financial circle jerk in human history."

Last month, Anthropic, the makers of the AI assistant Claude, paid 1.5 billion dollars to settle Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 500,000 authors and publishers whose copywritten books they stole. Although more than 90% of the authors accepted the settlement, I am one of the 350 who rejected it and reserved my right to sue this “Public Benefit Corporation” for the grand larceny of my intellectual property. When Anthropic goes public this October, its valuation could reach $2 trillion according to CNBC’s Jim Cramer. This would make their $1.5 billion payout just 0.075% of the company’s total worth. Worse than getting my books Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, and Thai Stick stolen, was getting punked by punks like Anthropic owner Dario Amodei and the Gilded Dorks of Monopoly Capitalism.

On the heels of this win, Anthropic has moved on to “watermarking” my purloined work that their AI assistant Claude has been outputting and monetizing since 2023. As George Orwell pointed out in his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” if thought corrupts language, language “can also corrupt thought.” If nothing else, the professional scholars and wordsmiths, upon whose back this AI fortune was made, must redefine the terms of this debate. Let’s start by replacing the expression “AI training” with “the grand larceny of copywritten intellectual property.” Next, let’s substitute “watermark” with “copyright.” After all, we are talking about intellectual property, not stationery. I thought long and hard about the word “Data Center.” In the end, I borrowed from Marx and Engels and from this day forward will call them, “The Great Water and Power-Consuming Computer Factories.”

We must never forget that all the Monopoly Capitalists—the Tech Mongols, the Hedge Fund Visigoths, and the Private Equity Barbarians—are the latest in a long line of American hucksters. Little more than book smart, but slightly autistic versions of P.T. Barnum, whose words should never be taken at face value. Like their patron saint, the late Jeffrey Epstein, Monopoly Capitalists have a Straussian belief in their innate superiority over the common man and the necessity of the noble lie. As they say in Silicon Valley, “Fake it till you make it.”

The half truths Bill Gates told in his House Oversight Committee testimony about Jeffrey Epstein pale compared to the lie he and his partner, Paul Allen, told Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems in 1975. The Microsoft founders claimed to have built software for a computer they had never even touched.

Not to be out done, in 2017 Sam Altman told U.S. intelligence officials that China had launched an AI Manhattan Project and requested government funds to lead a counteroffensive. When asked for evidence, he replied, “I’ve heard things.” One of the intelligence officials later told The New Yorker, “It was just being used as a sales pitch.” Microsoft senior executives who worked with Altman described him as a person who “misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements.” One even predicted that there was a “small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

Elon Musk has yet to build the Hyperlink transport system that he claimed in 2013 would take passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in 35 minutes. In 2018, the South African tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Musk was later charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for this Tweet and had to pay a 20 million dollar fine. The judge wrote, “there was nothing concrete about [the] funding.” Although Space X has yet to get a human on Mars as Musk announced they would by 2024, he is now planning to spent 100 billion on a “spaceport” in Louisiana. “How are they funding this?” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas asked this week in a client note. “Large capex numbers are easy to announce on paper, but the growth needs to materialize for SpaceX and the debt markets to continue to justify it.”

Lest we forget Mark Zuckerberg and his Aspergers like testimony before Congress in 2024. Under oath, the Zuck told Senators: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a cause or a link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” “He knew he was lying,” said Senator Martha Blackburn. 

This week, Meta settled People of the State of California, et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. for 18 billion dollars. This landmark federal lawsuit was brought by a bipartisan group of state attorneys general who accused Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children, unlawfully collecting the minors’ data, then misleading the public about the mental health risks of their products.

While the Tech Mongols might have cornered the market on internet intellectual slop, their faux philosophical writings are little more than fluffed up public relations copy. Disingenuous utopian screeds like—Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic, Marc Andreessen’s Techno Optimist Manifesto, Sam Altman’s The Intelligence Age, Mark Zuckerberg’s The Future is For Everyone, and Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness—would make even Candide’s idealistic Professor Pangloss cringe.

Today, the most daunting challenge facing the Tech Mongols is not moral; it is financial. Soon they will die by the same monopoly capitalist sword that they live by. History will regard the AI boom as the greatest financial circle jerk in human history and it will make all previous examples of insider trading pale in comparison. Put very simply, how can AI companies that have never turned an annual profit, ever turn one at the rate they are spending? “What the AI bubble has become is the world’s largest marketing campaign. The next three and a half years, we’re going to need 800 [billion] to 1.7 trillion data center demand and I have found about 130 billion,” said British Tech critic and author Ed Zitron. “The moment they stop spending money on CapEx, they crash markets.”

We are presently living through the Age of the Gilded Dork. While they excel at coding and artful new forms of financial manipulation, the Monopoly Capitalists are life’s non-impact players. As I wrote in my forthcoming novel Point Douche:

“Life for them was also an exercise in revenge and schadenfreude because they had never tasted glory and never would.

“Despite their vast fortunes and trappings of power, until recently, they had been life’s non-impact players. They never got to score the winning touchdown, fuck the cheerleader, save a life in the sea, or kill a man on a battlefield. No amount of MMA training with UFC champions, yoga retreats with Ashtanga gurus, or Ayahuasca trips with Peruvian shamans could ever change that fact.”

Although the Gilded Dorks hold the greatest concentration of wealth in human history, they are not content. Now they are coming for our jobs, our water, and our power. This is a bridge too far.

While I am heartened by the nonpartisan rebellion against the construction of The Great Water and Power- Consuming Computer Factories that is spreading across the nation like wildfire, I’m even more heartened by Gen Z’s rebellion against a Tech-dictated future.

They seem to know instinctively what I know empirically: that the greatest things in life cannot be found on a screen. AI did not convince my beautiful and beloved wife Annabelle Lee to marry me, earn my doctorate or black belts, catch set waves for me on the North Shore, conceive my two sons, or help me save lives in the sea.

Just as conservative author Rod Dehrer offered a strategy for Christians to go outside of traditional politics and build a counterculture to preserve their faith in a secular and increasingly nihilistic world in his book The Benedict Option, soon I will present The Analog Option. This guide will help those who want to reclaim their freedom and do not want to live as Tech Serfs under the Gilded Dork’s iron heel.

Unlike Bolshevik or Jacobin revolts, this will be a quiet rebellion that begins by consciously slowing down and accepting the fact that to take control of your life, you must do more with less. Because the Monopoly Capitalists have made it virtually impossible to live without Tech, the Luddite’s path of simply unplugging is untenable. Better to rebel quietly. Whenever possible, at the airport, bank, or market, choose to interact with a human. Try not to download the app. When “nudged,” “nudge” back with the noble lie, “I don’t have a smartphone.”

My cars—a 2015 Toyota Forerunner and 1995 BMW—are old but well maintained. My knives, real steel. My guns, simple, but sturdy. My surfboards, all glassed with the heaviest cloth possible.

I still write checks, use cash and barter whenever possible. I cook most of my family’s meals and we often sit at the table, with real plates, use silverware, and talk without a phone in sight. If I am speaking to someone and they constantly look at their binging, buzzing phone, I tell them to silence and turn it over their phone or our conversation is over. On cool offshore mornings, I paddle out before the sun comes up and watch the sun rise. I try not to wait for weddings or funerals to get together with friends. Over snacks and drinks, we celebrate the wins, lament the losses and laugh about the absurdity of it all.

Although I am not a traditionally religious person, I draw a great deal of inspiration from the Amish. Not only do they lead simple, dignified lives on their own terms, but they remind us that freedom is not free. Despite remarkably low cancer, heart disease, and obesity rates, the Amish are now under government pressure to vaccinate their children. The Amish have no anti-vax movement. Some chose to vaccinate their children and others do not. However, what they insist on is having freedom of choice. Amish elder Ezra Wengerd, who was elected by his community to represent them in this matter, put it plainly, “The Amish will choose prison time or a martyr’s death before going against their convictions.”

The Amish remind us all that freedom is not free. As I wrote in my 2024 essay, “The Lamb’s Freedom”:

“After 9/11, democrats and republicans joined forces to redefine the word into a timid, fear-based concept whose highest values are subjective (and individual) definitions of ‘comfort’ and ‘safety.’ They have succeeded.”

The supposed “freedom” Americans now supposedly enjoy was best described by my former teacher, novelist Mary McCarthy, as “the lamb’s freedom.” The lambs’ fear of being eaten by predators relegates them to a life of submission—getting nipped at by dogs, eating when the shepherd decides, and bleating out numbered days until the inevitable pre-Easter slaughter. The lion, McCarthy pointed out, has a much more robust definition of freedom that works off the assumption that true freedom is inherently dangerous. Even the biggest, baddest male lion gets ripped limb from limb by the hyenas if he breaks a leg. “Do we want a bold society geared to the lion’s freedom, or a mild, timid society based on the lamb’s fear of being eaten?” asked McCarthy. Sadly, after 9/11, Americans chose the latter and the reign of the Gilded Dorks is our bitter harvest. However, it is not too late to change this.

Just like the KGB could not save the Soviets, the Red Guards could not protect Mao, and the Stassi could not prop up East Germany, Palantir, Clearview, Flock cameras and a handful of over-the-hill Tier 1 operators cannot protect the Monopoly Capitalists from the coming Tech Serf rebellion. As I wrote in my open to letter to Epstein class Tech Mongol Reid Hoffman:

“While Big Tech’s string of victories has been impressive, with it came the rope you are presently hanging yourselves with. Who wants an AI doctor, bank teller, travel agent, much less a dishwasher with Wifi, or a car that snitches on you for speeding and won’t let you do donuts? I want no part of a dystopian future that includes genetically engineered babies, dimming the sun to stop global warming, biohacking, AI commanded armies, lab grown food, social credit scores, or personality prediction algorithms because it is inhumane. The British, Russian and American empires were not driven out of Afghanistan by superior weapons, soldiers, or tactics; they were defeated by the human spirit.”

While my expectations are low, I plan to take legal action against Anthropic for stealing my intellectual property. Six of my fellow authors have already filed lawsuits against the AI company. Perhaps me and the other 349 authors and publishers who opted out of the settlement will become a wimpy, egghead version of the 300 Spartans who stopped 100,000 Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC). If nothing else, hope dies last. Like Spartan King Leonidas said on the eve of the battle, “If you men think that I rely on numbers, then all Greece is not sufficient, for it is but a small fraction of their numbers; but if on men’s valor, then this number will do.”

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