Trump is a symptom of legacy systems imploding under their own inertia—hollow institutions, broadcast-era media, industrial politics held together by branding, grievance, and pure spectacle. He didn’t innovate. He extracted. Extracted attention, legitimacy, airtime, votes—then torched the machinery he climbed in on.

Same with proprietary late stage Tech, grinning with that same glazed stare. Different vocabulary, same function. Platform logic, data laundering, AI hallucinations sold as wisdom—another system optimized for maximum throughput, minimum responsibility. Where Trump strip-mined the post-war order for personal gain, these systems do it to culture itself. Both operate as parasitic feedback loops, surviving by consuming the very thing they pretend to represent.

Antiques dealer, machine psychologist. http://www.musicinphasespace.com

If you can’t see the symmetry, you’re not paying attention. One is a man. The other is a protocol. But the architecture is identical: erode trust, flatten nuance, displace labor, accumulate power, and let the collateral damage write its own obituary.

Trump was the ghost of broadcast politics; Proprietary AI is the apex predator of posthuman creativity. Both are outcomes, not outliers. Both are extraction engines wrapped in the costume of progress.