Movie Review: Mountainhead

"Eat the chaos."

I told myself I wouldn't watch this. I told friends I wouldn't watch it. Then I told myself I'd try it for 15 minutes, and immediately got sucked into this excellent, hilarious, brutal movie about the most terrible people in the world, directed by subject-matter expert Jesse Armstrong of Succession.

Mountainhead follows four extraordinarily wealthy men on a weekend retreat in the mountains. They're a mini-fraternity of Silicon Valley success stories. The only rule of their get-togethers is "no meals, no deals, no high heels." In other words: no servants to prepare real food, no actual business deals, and no women. They break this rule numerous times as convenient. The quantity, speed, and tone of the wheeling-and-dealing are as breakneck as anything Succession had to offer, although there's more actual comedy, of the bleakest sort.

Steve Carell plays Randall, the "papa bear" of this little gang of cubs, who got them all started on their path to wealth, and whose own wealth comes from the sort of tech we often don't realize we're using. His character is also dying of incurable cancer, which he thinks is a secret, but everybody already knows. (Carell is amazing in this role, by the way.)

Cory Michael Smith as Ven is a social-media guru who just released a new generative-AI function that is so good at producing deep fakes, various countries are going to war. Jason Schwartzman plays Souper, the loser of the bunch: worth only 521 million dollars—not even a single billion!—he runs a wellness app. His name isn't even "Souper": his friends call him that as a shortening of his nickname, Soup Kitchen. Because, you see, he is so poor.

Jeff is played by Ramy Youssef, and he's the trickiest of the bunch. His AI actually works well, and he runs a different social media app: think of Bluesky rather than Twitter, or maybe Jack Dorsey on a good day. Jeff's AI could stop Ven's AI from destroying the world, but Jeff keeps holding out. Morals? Desire for profit? Just wanting to get revenge for whatever broke up his partnership with Ven? TBD.

All these characters are cobbled together from the spare parts of real-life people like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Sam Altman, etc etc. A recent article in The Guardian described Armstrong's approach to understanding our overlords: "[Jesse Armstrong] read biographies and hoovered up podcasts. Amid the oligarchs' tales of favorite Roman emperors, he kept finding a common thread: a willful positivity about their own effect on the world."

I spend more time thinking about these types of guys than I ought to, and I often fall into the trap of thinking of them as very lucky idiots. That's wrong. They're not stupid. They do have a narrow set of cultural touchstones, of course; it's mostly social media, weirdo messianic views of the future, and a few iconic philosophical perspectives. They love the Stoics, or what they think the Stoics said.

But I recently encountered a more useful stance in a book review by John Ganz, where he quoted the sociologist Michael Mann: "Fascism was a movement of the lesser intelligentsia." Mann was discussing WWII-era fascism, not our current American homegrown variety, which obviously isn't any kind of intelligentsia. But I find the idea of "the lesser intelligentsia" a useful way to think about the rationalist-anarcho-libertarian accelerationists that this movie focuses on.

What does that mean, you ask?

In More Everything Forever, Adam Becker discusses the men who run the world, or are trying to. Sam Altman wants to get rid of the fiat US dollar and replace it with a timeshare arrangement so we can all just 3D-print whatever we need, using AI. Elon Musk wants us to go to Mars, even though that's hard to do, and kinda silly. According to Becker, to make Mars self-sustainable, 1,000,000,000 people would need to live there. Ray Kurzweil wants us to achieve the "singularity" by means of the creation of an Artificial General Intelligence that would give us the ability to use all of the entire universe as the energy source for a massive computer into which all "people" would be digitally uploaded to "live" forever. Nick Bostrom thinks we're already living in a simulation. I'm not even going to talk about the Rationalists.

All—or at least most—of these real-life men are accelerationists. That means they want to hasten the singularity, no matter the cost (in money or lives). Think: Leninist strategies combined with an oligarch ethos. Or, as Armstrong paraphrases their ideas: "[I]t must be delightful to really believe, 'You know what? It's going to be fine. AI's going to cure cancer, and don't worry about burning up the planet powering the AI to do it, because we'll just fix that too.'"

In this film, most of the characters think these are great ideas. For example, they spend a long time discussing whether they can use the crises created by Ven's AI to "coup-fuck" Argentina, or maybe even the US, as part of their larger plan to destroy nations which will, somehow, help them achieve the singularity, which coincidentally will also allow Randall to avoid truly "dying" of cancer. (To "___-fuck" something is a common linguistic construct among these men. To "grin-fuck" someone, for instance, is to smile at them, not because you mean it, but because you want to manipulate them.)

They don't see the irony. (Minor spoilers below)

Eventually, the other three turn on Jeff when he suggests that, maybe just maybe, we don't want to abandon the concept of the nation-state, shed our human bodies, and live in a digital cloud powered by stardust right away. They accuse him of being a "decel" (that is, a decelerationist). That leads to Randall, Ven, and Souper deciding that Jeff must be killed, or if not killed, negated in some way equivalent to death.

These are the "lesser intelligentsia," though, so they do give the idea of murder some thought. Randall brings up moral law and natural law, as well as Kant's moral imperative. And by "brings up" I mean he namechecks them. Soup points out that Randall is misapplying Kant, but that discussion doesn't go anywhere. Ven, of course, takes the utilitarian approach of pointing out that killing a decelerationist might save billions of potential future lives in a hypothetical singularity-focused future, and therefore is a logical, even moral next step. I'll let you watch the movie to see how that all plays out.

I hadn't wanted to watch this movie because, delicate snowflake that I am, I find the idea of a digital apocalypse masterminded by the lesser intelligentsia with more power than they, or anyone, deserves, to be rather triggering. But I'm extremely glad I did watch it, for the same reason that I'm glad I read Adam Becker's book. The more you know about these guys, the more they look like serious danger...and also like pie-in-the-sky dreamers who probably won't pull off their master plan. Not only because they're just not smart enough, but also because many of those plans aren't very likely to happen, either.

Above all, Armstrong does something here that makes watching this movie more pleasant than Succession: that show held the comedy of repetition at a distance; many viewers didn't seem to realize the characters in that show were meant to be mocked. This movie, which includes more than a little slapstick and a lot of intentionally cringy one-liners, allows us to laugh at these guys.

I've quoted Mel Brooks before on this site, but it's worth repeating here. He said: "Listen, get on a soapbox with Hitler, you're gonna lose—he was a great orator. But if you can make fun of him, if you can have people laugh at him, you win." None of our tech overlords are great orators. They're also not Hitler. But they have more power than they should, and laughing at them is both productive and very, very fun.

Four out of Ayn Rand novels.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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