The Emperors’ New Clothes

EmpiresEmpires—national, corporate, and the technological empiresTechnological empires that are built on large-scale technological systemsLarge-scale technological systems—are the topic of this chapter. We describe the relationship between imperial domination and decadence, the decay of ideals of humanity’s salvation into profit opportunities. As large-scale technologies become dominant beginning in the nineteenth century with railways, and now in the twenty-first century embracing numerous systems including online platforms and social mediaSocial media, colonial domination and decadence increasingly becomes ubiquitous and taken for granted. We draw attention of the performative aspect to empiresEmpires as institutionsInstitutions, whether in the bread and circuses of the Romans or the strutting of Elon Musk. Emperors understand at some level that they have to razzle-dazzle and delight their subjects, and staging this razzle-dazzle is part of their power. Perhaps the ultimate technological performance today isCryptocurrency “cryptocurrency,” the “mining” of virtual tokens of value and units of account through blockchain, a set of complex calculations requiring immense computing power, a technology that took off in the second decade of the twenty-first century. CryptocurrencyCryptocurrency likewise is about razzle-dazzle more than true economic values.