From the Lansing City Pulse, September 30, 2026

Don’t Worry, I’m Sure The Billionaires Have A Plan

(*wink wink*)

Well, I didn’t have “the world has a 10% chance of going from Orwellian society to straight-up dystopia within a decade” on my bingo card, but here we are.

And perhaps the part I understand the least is how casually the billionaire class seems to be carrying on as though nothing particularly unusual is happening. Just another day at the office. Another billion dollars here, another data center there. Nothing to see here, folks. Please continue shopping.

I mean, Hugging Face sounds cute and all. The irony almost writes itself.

At this point, it feels as though we’ve become hostages to a technological arms race we never agreed to participate in. The fight over data centers, their enormous appetite for electricity and water, and the consequences of allowing them to proliferate seems increasingly muted beneath the deafening roar of profit.

We are living in a time when altruism should be the shining star of human progress, yet somehow it keeps getting snuffed out by the sheer gravitational pull of greed.

And while ordinary people are being asked to accept the consequences—higher demands on our resources, environmental concerns, infrastructure strain, and an increasingly uncertain future—the people positioned to profit from all of it seem remarkably comfortable.

And then there is the president.

This is where the buck is supposed to stop.

Instead, we keep watching the administration cultivate increasingly cozy relationships with the very technology companies and billionaires who stand to make enormous fortunes from this transformation, while the public is left wondering where the guardrails are. Where is the urgency? Where is the demand that these companies prove they can build this future without making everyone else literally and figuratively pay the price for it?

A president does not have to be anti-technology to understand that technological progress without public protections is not automatically progress.

Our president has signed executive order, after executive order, after executive order. And executive orders mean very little if the underlying message to the most powerful corporations in the country is still: build first, ask questions later.

That is the part I find infuriating.

Because the federal government is not some helpless bystander watching this happen from the sidelines. It has enormous power to establish standards, protect communities, enforce environmental safeguards, demand transparency, and determine who ultimately bears the costs of this technological expansion. Unless you’re also enriching yourself too, because let’s be real, that’s all that matters to him and his ego.

If the administration chooses to prioritize access to capital, rapid development and the interests of technology giants over those protections, that is a political choice—not an inevitability.

And ordinary people have every right to question it.

Because apparently there is no problem so enormous that a billionaire cannot convince someone it is actually an opportunity.

And maybe that’s what bothers me most.

It isn’t simply that technology is advancing faster than our ability to understand its consequences. It’s that the people driving the bus seem to have decided that everyone else can worry about where it’s going.

At some point, you have to wonder whether we are still building a future for human beings—or merely building an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure for the people who already own everything.

Frankly, some days it feels like the endgame is for the rest of us to become collateral damage in somebody else’s investment portfolio.

When people feel powerless, ignored and increasingly disposable, history has a pretty ugly way of reminding us what happens when desperation replaces hope. Does anyone remember Luigi Mangioni?

Because if the people with the most money, power and influence are truly convinced that everything is going just fine, maybe they should step outside their penthouses once in a while and take a look around.

The rest of us can see the smoke

Ann Developer Siegle, Administrator

58 articals

• Previous Post