One of the most grotesque features of late capitalism is the rise of wealthy influencers. This army of vapid no-talents, slathered in whatever overpriced bronzer is new, carrying a Hermes or Louis Vuitton’s sack of mediocrity, and usually wearing something Prada, Bulgari or Donna Karan vomited up, are the ones employed to simultaneously make the working class feel worthless while selling us something we do not need or even want.

From their vaunted McMansion in some lackluster suburb of Nowheresville or some overpriced condo in a concrete box where dreams go to die, they produce their “content” to the hapless, the defeated and the confused. These are the people that sad suck-ups praise as “rich people who rich right.” In other words, they take ostentatious obnoxiousness to the next level. They are not merely loud about their wealth, they have weaponized it.

As prices for groceries explode and rent becomes a penalty for living on this planet, the uberwealthy are living the high life. But their personalities are so bereft of actual substance that simply indulging in such materialism isn’t satisfying enough. They must flaunt it to any poor sap who scrolls by their glossy, screaming profiles between starving or dead children in Gaza and the daily Trumpian nightmare.

Wealthy influencers in this new Gilded Age are harbingers. Unable to grasp their Antoinettian place in history, they are both clueless and uninterested in the suffering of the masses. Their penchant for shiny things blinds them to increasing rage at the engineered inequities of our time. But neither their lack of curiosity or the chorus of sycophants defending them will spare them the coming wrath. It will also not spare them or any of us from the price for such avarice.

And how do we know this? We are living in a biosphere, incidentally the only one we have, that is under constant siege. Like all things, it is finite. It can only withstand so much extraction, infraction and excrement from the current arrangement of power and wealth. In short, its days are numbered so long as this machine of production and destruction for the material gain of a few parasitic worms in expensive Gucci sunglasses continues.

Kenn Orfanos, October 2025