Buying the Ruins

On Demolishing Democracy and Etching Your Name in the Rubble

Work continues on the demolition of a part of the East Wing of the White House, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, in Washington, before construction of a new ballroom. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Heavy equipment is tearing down the East Wing of the White House as we watch—steel teeth grinding through plaster that once framed the daily work of democracy. Dust rises over the South Lawn. The people’s house is being gutted in broad daylight.

Not renovating. Not restoring. Demolishing.

The part Eleanor Roosevelt used to champion labor rights. The offices where Lady Bird Johnson coordinated civil rights outreach. The nerve center of public service—reduced to rubble to make room for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that will dwarf the building it’s attached to.

And paying for it? Apple and Amazon. Google and Meta. Microsoft, Palantir, Coinbase, Ripple, Tether—the Winklevoss twins too. The empire’s benefactors, writing checks to history’s undoing.

The same oligarchs who destroyed American democracy through algorithmic manipulation are now literally purchasing its architecture. They’re not just funding authoritarianism—they’re renovating it. Etching their names into it. Building monuments to their own power on the bones of institutions designed for public service.

Let’s be precise about what’s happening here.

Mark Zuckerberg—who buried research showing Instagram drove teenage girls to suicide while optimizing engagement to maximize the harm—is paying to demolish the part of the White House built for governance and replace it with a space built for spectacle. The man who made shared reality obsolete is now building a palace for the autocrat ruling its ruins.

Tim Cook, CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies, arrived at the White House in August with trembling hands to present Trump a custom glass plaque set in a 24-karat gold base. Tribute for the strongman.

The man who inherited Steve Jobs’s dream—computers as bicycles for the mind, tools for liberation—stood there offering gold to a man demolishing the very institutions that make liberation possible. Jobs built tools for thinking. Cook builds altars for obedience. Now he’s buying his way into the literal architecture of American dominance. Imagine gold-leaf ceilings, chrome lighting rigs, a gallery of donor plaques where orientation maps once hung—the perfect monument to how far Apple has fallen from “think different” to “bow correctly.”

The crypto barons—Coinbase, Ripple, Tether, the Winklevoss twins—whose “currencies” exist primarily to evade regulation and fund authoritarian consolidation, are carving their names into the people’s house. Literally. The pledge forms suggest donors get “recognition” potentially etched into the structure itself.

Palantir, which is helping the Trump administration build comprehensive files on American citizens—a digital Stasi for the algorithmic age—is paying to gut the offices where constitutional governance once functioned and replace them with a monument to algorithmic administration.

It isn’t even corruption in the traditional sense.

It’s conquest disguised as construction.

They built platforms that shattered public reason.

Now they build palaces for its conquerors.

They optimized consciousness out of existence.

Now they optimize the state for performance.

They destroyed the conditions democracy requires—then bought the ruins to decorate with their names.

There’s a reason autocrats build ballrooms and democrats build libraries, as historian

Alexis Coe

notes. One invites applause; the other invites reflection. One celebrates power; the other serves the public. One is monument; the other is function.

The East Wing wasn’t designed for grandeur. It was workspace. Public reception entry. The symbol of accessibility rather than excess. For over a century it embodied civic service—the unglamorous labor of governance, the daily work of democracy.

Now it’s rubble. And rising in its place: a 90,000-square-foot ballroom built for up to 1,000 guests. A space scaled for oligarchic tribute, not democratic governance. A monument funded by the men who made monuments necessary by destroying the conditions where functional governance was possible.

The obscenity is complete. The same oligarchs who fragmented public consciousness through algorithmic manipulation are now literally erasing the architecture of public service and replacing it with spaces designed for private power. They’re not just complicit in authoritarian consolidation—they’re its contractors.

And they want their names carved into it. Recognition for their contributions. Monuments to their vision. Their brands etched into the structure of government itself.

But here’s what they miscalculate: people are watching.

The educated and the capable—the systematically betrayed—see what’s being built in their name. They understand systems; they understand failure. They can code, write, organize. They recognize propaganda because they once built it.

And they’re leaving the platforms the oligarchs control. They’re touching grass. They’re meeting in libraries and basements. They’re building networks that don’t depend on billionaires’ servers.

You can buy the buildings, but not the minds. You can fund the demolition, but not erase the memory of what stood there.

The oligarchs think owning the algorithms means owning the outcomes. They think controlling information flow equals controlling dissent. They think etching their names into government architecture makes them permanent.

But ideas slip through firewalls the way water seeps through stone—slowly, invisibly, and with catastrophic persistence. And educated people with nothing left to lose don’t stay quiet. They use their capabilities for something.

This is what conquest looks like when oligarchs do it: not invasion but investment. Not coup but construction. Not revolution but renovation.

They destroyed democracy. Now they’re demolishing its architecture and rebuilding according to their specifications. They optimized citizens into algorithmic compliance. Now they’re optimizing government buildings for oligarchic performance.

The East Wing is being torn down as we speak. Heavy equipment chipping away at offices where public servants once worked. Spaces designed for democratic labor reduced to debris to make room for private spectacle.

And the men paying for it? The same men who made this moment inevitable by destroying our capacity to prevent it.

When the ribbon is cut, look not for the guest list—look for the plaque. A donor roster becomes the architecture of power.

Remember their names. Remember what they funded. Remember that when American democracy needed defending, they paid to demolish it and build something else in its place.

Something with their names on it.

The oligarchs are carving their names in stone, mistaking permanence for power.

But stone erodes. Empires rot. And the people they optimized out of existence are still here—still breathing, still watching, still waiting.

History will remember. They’ve made very sure of that. I’m not sure they’ll like how they’re remembered.

---

Go Deeper into the Circus

---