“Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly!” — not a surrealist pamphlet upon obvious improvements to the game of chess, but rather a phrase in Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, in which he diagnoses a version of the game of chess that would appeal to Sam Bankman-Fried. In the context of the chapter, this is an expression of his twitchy nature; his need for constantly changing, adapting stimuli in games as much as in business; his dislike for the antiquated and for any mode of stasis. But most essentially, this detail — and several others — determines a key signifier in the brain of Sam Bankman-Fried: that of sacrilege. For such a man, there is nothing intrinsically valuable in the game of chess; if the game of chess could be optimized, or in some way amended, there would be no loss to humankind in making the necessary changes. Fundamentally, there is only a subjective value in the age-old game of chess, and a subjective value is objectively uninteresting.
We might take Sam Bankman-Fried’s analysis of Shakespeare, as quoted in the same book. Following a reasonably surface-level analysis of Much Ado About Nothing — in which he criticizes its lack of realism — Bankman-Fried provides this pithy paragraph:
“I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare… but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate — probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.”
This is a neat expression of the STEM-brained, quantifiable approach to the universe, by which the staggering unlikelihood of Shakespeare being the greatest writer in probabilistic terms is sufficient to dismiss the claim out of hand. The content of the claim, which is to say, the aesthetic and ethical judgement, need not itself be engaged because the odds of it being accurate are so vanishingly slim. But, of course, this approach is founded on several assumptions: for instance, that it is possible to quantify the “greatest” author, and that the primary factor in establishing the greatness of an author is a flat probability versus the literate population. Perhaps this is an exquisitely neat retread of the Hamlet-typing monkeys thought experiment: in which the production of the greatest, or ever greater, authors is determined simply by quantity of produced output. Out of ten million thinking monkeys, one wrote Hamlet. But what if we were to give a billion thinking-monkeys the same opportunity? Surely the one-in-ten-million monkey is much less impressive than the one-in-a-billion monkey.
However discomfiting Sam Bankman-Fried’s vision of art and the world might be, we cannot say it is inconsistent, or without a breed of logic. It seems this form of thinking is the natural corollary of an intellectual climate in which brute mechanistic materialism is the order of the day; if the entire contents of the universe can be reduced to a predictable, physical algorithm (in which life is a chemical expression of swinging pendulums and mathematical inevitabilities), then it follows that one might then throw out not only religious presuppositions, or presuppositions of the spirit, but indeed all notions that do not present an obviously quantifiable function. In this frame, Shakespeare is a natural casualty; the rules of chess — sublimely logical though they seem — are given no guardrails in the face of the more impressive Chess 2 as dreamt in Silicon Valley. But the question that follows, especially but not exclusively with regard to Sam Bankman-Fried, is that of morality. In a quantifiable universe, on what basis is a moral judgement made, if any such judgement can be made at all? In the case of Bankman-Fried, he attached himself (how sincerely one cannot say) to the burgeoning Effective Altruist creed, a moral system spun off from Peter Singer’s utilitarian applied ethics. The concept, spearheaded by Oxford scholar William MacAskill, is simple: to figure out and then apply the means by which the maximum good can be achieved for the maximum number. So far, so Bentham-Mill; the innovation is in realizing that a billion-dollar corporate job could affect more good than a lifetime spent doctoring in urgent care; if corporate Babylon is squeezed, and her infinite wealth pointed to genuinely effective organs of charity, then it appears the Effective Altruists have “hacked” capitalism so as to provide the general good. But we stumble at similar blocks first posed by Shakespeare’s dismissal. First, the means by which we evaluate good over evil. But more pressingly, the means by which the greatest good is calculated. With the same mechanistic grace that destroys the beauty of Shakespeare, the mathematics prodigy is capable of assessing that, on a certain probabilistic logic, it is more rational to devote billions of dollars to preventing distant-future apocalyptic scenarios in which a low likelihood of occurrence is countered by the absolute highest level of suffering if the low likelihood does come to pass) than in furnishing the poor with malaria nets, or modifying any of the predatory systems by which such vast wealth is acquired in the first place. This is an ethical code for people who are not disposed to do good, so much as they are disposed to calculate a means by which to defeat life’s ultimate antagonist; this is an ethical code for people who are more fascinated with the calculation than any individual who might benefit from it.
Why such a long run-in belongs to a review of Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead may be the question now dangling before the discerning mind. It is, admittedly, reasonably adjacent to the film itself. While Armstrong was inspired by Sam Bankman-Fried in approaching his subject, it cannot be said that SBF is himself clearly represented in the film (save, perhaps, one offhand reference), nor that Armstrong is willing to expose Effective Altruism, or any of its similar iterations, to serious scrutiny. But the real underbelly of Mountainhead must resort to the conclusion sketched above: that this new oligarchy of tech billionaires are distinguished most of all by their devotion to sacrilege, and the complete absence of a functional philosophical conceit to replace those things they so happily tread upon. And much in the way that Sam Bankman-Fried is something of a vacant, vapid figure, so too does Armstrong find at the bottom of this heap of sin a fundamentally hollow ring. These men are not like the great capitalist grabbers of the previous generation — the Roys of Succession — who were so concerned with concrete wealth and power that ideological concerns became an extension of their acquisition. Nor are they much like kings or dictators, for whom a sturdy (if bogus) ideology came to define their relationship to society. Mountainhead begins at the point at which questions of wealth and power are nugatory; these men have an essentially unlimited money tap and an essentially unquestioned influence on global affairs, without being especially integrated or loyal to any particular ideological force that provided them either of these things. The question, then, is what these people will do with the unlimited resource that arrives for them; and perhaps more pressingly, why they would do it.
The film is itself a single-location four-hander, imagining a bro-coded poker night held between 3.5 tech billionaires out in Utah. (One of the billionaires is only valued at $0.5 billion, hence his halving.) These billionaires are not specifically mapped onto personalities we recognize: they are a vague amalgamation of various types who now dominate information streams. Venis (Cory Michael Smith, his character name pronounced like the canal-city) represents the psychopathic, king-of-the-universe impulse; Randall (Steve Carrell) is the slightly old-school venture capitalist, a man who has read several summaries of several philosophical treatises, a so-called Dark Money Gandalf; Jeff (Ramy Youssef) marks himself as the supposedly reasonable new-kid-on-the-AI-block; and, runt of the litter, Hugo (Jason Schwartzman) is an incompetent whose amassed wealth (half a billion dollars) amounts to handouts from wealthy friends — they just like having him around. Ven has recently launched new tools for his generative AI that allow the (apparently uninhibited) creation of photorealistic video — global chaos follows. Jeff holds the key to global relaxation: an AI model capable of discerning between authentic video and genAI. Ven wants to buy this model; Jeff, whose net worth spikes in the shadow of disaster, is reluctant to bail his friend out. Randall, recently hearing that his cancer is incurable, is keen on accelerating technological progress to enable post-human consciousness upload (Ven can promise a five-year development timescale, best case). Hugo, hosting his wealthy friends, wants someone to bust a b(illion)-nut into his latest wellness app. These are the stakes. These are the dramatic motivations on the surface.
Through the contours of this drama many unusual things happen. For instance, in the face of distant government collapse, it’s decided that Hugo be installed as president/CEO of Argentina. (We might think to Sam Bankman-Fried mulling the possibility of paying The Bahamas’ $9 billion debt as a similar instinct to nation-building.) Ven, who is not entirely sure that the worldwide chaos has not, itself, been generated on his own AI, justifies the mass slaughter/arson/assassination as the fundamental quality of a paradigm-shift. These men stand at the precipice of a revolution; it will not be bloodless. Jeff, who must represent a querulous voice of reason, begins to feel that global collapse is not inherently a good thing; perhaps the nation-state still has a few years left in the tank? Randall looks to encourage the revolutionary feeling, though his rationale is not entirely straightforward: it seems that he is willing to entertain Ven’s fantasy on the proviso that Ven really is a few years out from uploading Randall-mind to the cloud — anything that prevents Ven’s whims are an act against the infinite persistence of Randall’s thought. For all this farcical pass-around, the overwhelming feeling is one, not only of intellectual incoherence, but rather a total grasping at ideological threads. These are men that want to destroy the “nation-state” — and replace it with what? A vague corporatist system of governance, or a revolutionary technocratic world-empire, or a generalized chaos until the New World Order emerges. Ven is certain his technology will bring peace between all peoples for no particular reason; because an Israeli kid will generate some wacko image and so the Palestinian kid will realize they aren’t so different after all.
Of course, much of this is Armstrong riffing — zippy one-liners firing between all participants — but it signals to the deeper problem at the foot of our new tech-overlords: that they have no real interest or understanding of the world as it exists, or the people who exist within it. They have, by random chance of a new abstract means of wealth acquisition (these guys would be the fodder of Marcus Aurelius’ Rome), found themselves in the seats of the Philosopher Kings, in such a scenario in which the Philosopher Kings weren’t very good at philosophy. Randall frequently paraphrases Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Marcus, but understands none of their ideas; it is the philosophical decoration of a garbled mind. At one point Randall announces his devotion to Kantian deontology, after which Ven expresses, in agreement, the virtue of utilitarianism — to which Randall agrees yet more fiercely. The keys to the kingdom have not merely fallen to the greedy and the cruel, but to a group of people who exist on a cloud of nonsense, the jargon towering so high that an entirely intelligible, and entirely meaningless, language has been built from this abstract grammar. Armstrong is sharpest on this point: in the same week that Elon Musk criticized a journalist for her “NPC dialogue tree” questioning, and indeed the same week that Google released its own photorealistic genAI tool in Veo, Armstrong has tapped into the bizarre meld of nerd-bro-finance talk that makes up the vocabulary of the world’s most important children.
But Armstrong does not merely level the indirect accusation of incoherence against these various insipid moneymen, but in fact provides them a specific harness through which to test their philosophical nous. Realizing that Jeff is looking to turn against Ven — and so imperil Ven’s promise of grid-based conscious upload — Randall proposes to the other two men a possible solution. The solution, worded as a placeholder, is to kill Jeff. After testing this proposal — a placeholder — according to first principles (whatever those may be), it occurs that the best possible course of action is, indeed, to literally kill Jeff. Here we encounter that amusing exchange regarding Kant and utilitarianism; here we must observe as three goons Effective Altruist their way into a justified and justifiable killing. It’s curious with these people — and it seems important — that they cannot merely act outside of a quantifiable framework; whatever evil they propose to do must, ultimately, find some credible and objective basis. This premise is the basic matter of the techno-oligarchy: a sense that these men are not merely rich or powerful, but that they are operating on an objective foundation by which eventual ends always justify immediate means. Perhaps it is true, as Randall implies, that the trillions who will be uploaded to the grid would be peeved if Jeff’s meddling prevents their ability to convert their consciousness into infinite life; but, like SBF’s Shakespeare conclusion, and all the mathematics of the Effective Altruists, this arithmetic is based on so many falsifiable assumptions, and these assumptions are themselves built not from objective foundations but rather prejudices (that Randall, himself, would like to live) and dreamt-up placeholder numbers (like Ven’s ballpark figure on a technological advance that is, very credibly, a fundamental impossibility). We must wonder to what degree these men think they are fooling each other, and to what degree they are rather fooling themselves. Does Randall really believe he understands any of the philosophy he spouts? Does Ven believe that post-humanism is a few iterative steps away? Does Elon Musk think that he’ll stand on Mars; does Mark Zuckerberg think we’ll befriend robots in the Metaverse; did Sam Bankman-Fried think he was going to bankroll the rescue of the world from AI-gone-bad? Or are these just half-dreamt ideas, based on a mind that doesn’t fully understand — and perhaps does not fully care about — any of the claims or ideas being made? In the end, the high principles of these men swiftly descend to old-fashioned murder; and there is some exquisite comedy to be won in the difficulties that can be experienced in the taking of a life. It’s as though Armstrong has invited his film to return to primordial head-thwacking, but with a principal cast incapable of the proper thwacking of heads.
Perhaps there’s something there of the deleted ending to Dr. Strangelove, in which the War Room was supposed to devolve into a melee of pie-throwing — the abstract question is made ludicrously immediate, and the squabbling politicians are made to fend for themselves. Much of Dr. Strangelove runs through the blood of Mountainhead — both are apocalypse narratives taken from the angle of those passively (and actively) causing the apocalypse — though in this comparison is also, perhaps, the weakness of Armstrong’s film. Much has been said of the swiftness of its turnaround — seven months from conception to release — but this brag is also a confession. There is a haphazard, slightly weak-wristed feeling in much of the first half; a barrage of hot lines whisking around not very much of a narrative. Perhaps it is the vision of an episode of Succession absent of its strong motivating line; here is a version that whizzes between ideas at such a rate that several seem to fall by the wayside, or are swallowed up by more immediate concerns. The running gag in which Hugo is planted on the civic throne of Argentina is one such; where Strangelove is a work whose many strands all knot at a single end, Armstrong must flail this way and that, and seems to scramble in search of an ending. We learn these men are not trustworthy — perhaps less gratifying than Dr. Strangelove’s true finale, in which apocalypse is guaranteed and the nuclear arms race is immediately replaced by competition in mine-shaft construction. And where Kubrick’s film is so compelling in its general theme of sexual impotency, Armstrong’s fails to land on any real unifying motivation outside of general disdain for his subjects; only Randall’s death anxiety seems like a definitive idea beneath a character. Jeff is perhaps the least effective: he is given a “I hope my girlfriend isn’t at a Mexican sex party” background gag, and must serve as the audience surrogate for most of the movie, making the obvious anti-statement to any insane thing said by any other character. This antagonism is essentially necessary for Armstrong’s style — is Peep Show (referenced once directly, once obliquely) not itself a basically dialectical form, in which Mark and Jez trade in opposites for so many years? But Jeff must act as a kind of anchor: he is a frequent “don’t you realize that’s insane?” button to remind us of what is, in fact, insane. There is a limit to how compelling such a character can be, no matter how much moral confusion appears later on. The closest equivalent in Strangelove is Mandrake, the nervous RAF Group Captain who tries to talk down Ripper from Global Apocalypse. But there is something amusingly pathetic in Mandrake’s predicament that is not felt in Jeff; there is something missing.
That said, Armstrong can nonetheless muster sufficient energy to see the thing through. Adam McKay donated his coverage style to Succession in its pilot episode; Armstrong now picks it up for his own directorial debut. Marcel Zyskind’s cameras are relatively freeform and handheld; this is not so much a film concerned with form as it is capturing the material, generally shot with two simultaneous cameras to allow for improvisational gags over a very tight shooting schedule. Armstrong is not working so much with images, but with words and with actors; perhaps in this respect his mood is still fundamentally televisual. If that is true, then it’s appropriate that Mountainhead occupies the now-ambiguous label of “TV Movie,” which perhaps means less “a movie on TV” than it does “TV in a movie.” It’s not, in the end, any of its aesthetic components that will mark the success or failure of Mountainhead. Even its comedy, which is — especially at first — quite inconsistent, seems surplus to the meat Armstrong is gnawing on. The idea isn’t merely to warp these characters into an annoying satire, but rather to understand the vacancy they represent. Like Sam Bankman-Fried, we might not even be entirely sure that they are, really, malicious, because there doesn’t seem to be a clear motivation for their actions; beyond wealth and influence — already achieved — these characters are either governed by petty anxieties or by the outlandish materialist utopias that seem to occur to them on a whim. The means by which their technologies will do anything except self-proliferate are unknown; the why of any of this is a hurricane of meaningless verbiage. It is this fundamental absence that exists at the very center of the techno-paradise project; an incoherent attempt to inherit the world, and to save it, and to live forever. But these are not men capable of these goals, even if they have the resources. It is not merely that they cannot answer the question of living, but that they cannot properly ask it.
DIRECTOR: Jesse Armstrong; CAST: Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, Andrew Daly; DISTRIBUTOR: Max; STREAMING: May 31; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min.
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