Among the Ash Heaps and Billionaires

Undoubtedly, we now live in the Age of AI. On January 20th, 2025, when Donald Trump is sworn in as President of the US for a second time, he will officially inaugurate the Age of Avarice. He will swear an oath, not to the Constitution, but to power, malice, greed, and cruelty — four words that will define our new era.

I can focus narrowly on writing about the Age of AI, but AI is poised to play itself out against the backdrop of avarice. For me, the only way to understand this is through literature and the humanities.

In the closing pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, has a final revealing encounter with Tom Buchanan.

“What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”

”Yes. You know what I think of you.”

They discuss an earlier event that defines the story’s central tragedy. Nick then reflects in what is now a famous passage:

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ..”

One of Fitzgerald’s early titles for the Great Gatsby was Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires. The “ash heaps” refers to the valley of ashes — a desolate wasteland between West Egg and New York City, inhabited by the working class. Millionaires refers to Tom Buchanan and by extension the modern oligarchs: tech bros and the Wall Street power brokers.