Best Served Cold: Luigi Mangione and The Age of Breach

Technofeudalism, accountability porn and the new counterculture

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A monkey screams, shaking the bars of her cage. She isn’t trying to escape. She’s enraged because she got a cucumber for performing a task, while the monkey beside her got a delicious grape. Primatologist Frans de Waal filmed this striking scene while studying animal empathy, revealing just how deeply fairness is ingrained in mammalian biology.

It’s why we feel a primal urge to scream when corporations aren’t held accountable for their actions, but regular people are. Elites avoiding accountability is nothing new, but in the last three decades corporate avoidance has reached new lows. Nobody in the military-industrial complex went to jail for lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nobody at BP went to jail for the Deepwater oil spill. No traders or bankers (outside of Iceland) were incarcerated for the 2008 financial crash. No one in the Sackler family was punished after Purdue Pharma peddled the death of half a million Americans.

Rage at the unaccountability of the corporate elite has been brewing for decades, and on December 4th, 2024, it found a new point of focus. 26-year-old Luigi Mangione walked up behind the CEO of the largest health insurer in the US, and shot him in the back as he walked to his company’s annual conference.

Mangione became a folk hero before anyone knew his name. The jacket he was wearing sold out at Macy’s. A spontaneous lookalike competition sprung up in Washington Square Park. People swooned at his good looks, and millions have shown a level of glee at the killing that has shocked the legacy media. Even ultra-conservative commentator Ben Shapiro had a rare moment of audience rebellion when he condemned the response to the murder. At the time of writing, a photo is going viral of chalk on a New York sidewalk asking ‘Was Luigi Justified?’ with 68 tallies for yes, and just 23 voting no.

This could also be a response to a particularly vicious round of Mario Kart.

The people have spoken, and the establishment is outraged. But what our legacy institutions have failed to understand is that this response is about more than a near-universal frustration at the US healthcare system. It’s an expression of something deeper, an example of what I call ‘The Age of Breach’.

I first wrote about Breach in 2020, and again in my book. It’s the idea that the internet has become our externalised collective unconscious, capturing and then amplifying a swirling ocean of our projections, hopes, fantasies, and violent urges. Some of these become archetypal, turning into myths and memes that evolve to take on a life of their own. The longer our unexpressed desires and rages swirl online, the more potent they become, influencing our hearts and minds, gaining power until they breach the physical world.

The eruption of rage after the murder of George Floyd was a breach event. So was the January 6th insurrection, fuelled by the online cult of QAnon. Ordinary people taking on Wall Street during the GameStop short squeeze was another. The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is one of the most important, tearing the seal off an overwhelming desire for revenge against elites who have been unaccountable for too long.

What makes it so important, and so terrifying to technocrats, is that it represents a re-embodiment of accountability. As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk puts it, ‘the body keeps the score’. But it also pays the bill. When accountability is displaced from individuals and dispersed into the labyrinthine realm of corporate law, PR campaigns and lobby groups, what’s actually happening is that it’s being intentionally disembodied. It is abstracted into a realm of imagined value and Kafkaesque rules where it can be continuously reframed and avoided.

However, psychological energy obeys the first law of thermodynamics just like everything else; it can’t be destroyed, only transformed. What goes around, comes around, and accountability will always return to the human body. There is nowhere else it can go, because that is where it originates. It is contained in flesh and sinew, muscles and neurons and guts, and we only forget this through mental sleights of hand.

When we suddenly remember, as many have after the assassination of Brian Thompson, we experience an eruption of potent psychic energy. All the unpaid accountability flows back to its source in a relentless torrent, and because it has been repressed, it is dark and vengeful. It can make us giddy with possibility, hungry for more violence. This is why people are putting up wanted posters for other healthcare CEOs in New York. It’s why this Breach won’t end with Mangione’s arrest.

But Breach is fragile, chaotic and unpredictable. A free-for-all murder fest of morally-bankrupt CEOs, while it might scratch our shadowy itch for accountability porn, is not going to sow the seeds of a healthy and conscious liberation from our broken power structures.

So what will? In this piece, I’m going to explore what revolution could look like in a new economic landscape controlled by huge corporations and big tech, and suggest how the energy of this moment can be harnessed to fuel a new kind of counterculture that moves beyond the zero-sum madness that enslaves us all.

The Counter-Elite Killer

After his arrest, legacy media refused to publish Mangione’s manifesto. However, journalist Ken Klippenstein released it in its entirety on his Substack. The manifesto, along with Mangione’s internet footprint (for example his review of Ted Kaczynski’s book Industrial Society and Its Future on Goodreads) paint a picture of a young man well-versed in revolutionary ideas. The manifesto also provides some insight into his motivations:

“I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart…. they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it… It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

What is striking about Mangione is that he is a member of the social elite. Though his precise motivations remain unclear at the time of writing, it appears that a surfing accident left him with a serious injury to his back, and a period of chronic pain which was relieved after he underwent surgery. It’s unclear whether he was denied insurance coverage at any stage, but if we take him at his word and focus on what he says in his manifesto, the killing was a protest against a broken system.

We’d all kill for those eyebrows.

Mangione is straight out of central casting to fill the role of what sociologist Peter Turchin calls a ‘counter-elite’ revolutionary (I reviewed Turchin’s book End Times earlier this year in my piece Pride of the Elites). In short, Turchin uses a big-data approach to history called Cliodynamics to argue that social strife happens when inequality spirals out of control, while at the same time there are too many ‘elite aspirants’ and not enough positions for them. Eventually, members of the elite defect (becoming counter-elites) and align with the angry masses to change the status quo. Usually this ends in revolution, and Turchin has long predicted that the 2020’s will be a time of significant social unrest.

As he points out, revolutionaries like Gandhi, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong were well educated members of the social elite. Guevara and Mao were also, like Mangione, charming and attractive. The idea of a sexy Mao might sound strange, but as historian Lee Feigon points out in Mao: A reinterpretation, Mao’s mentor considered him ‘exceptionally intelligent and handsome’.

What a hunk. Long before thirst traps, Mao was pioneering hunger traps.

Another factor needed for social unrest or revolution is what Turchin calls ‘popular immiseration’, a large class of people who are struggling economically and socially, creating an intolerable gap between the haves and the have-nots. Revolutionaries are often counter-elites who have the intelligence, confidence and means to appeal to the downtrodden; the perfect modern example is Trump.

However, Mangione and Trump are also examples, albeit very different kinds, of why revolutions so often lead us back to where we started. Trump is a counter-elite who cares only about himself, not about a higher ideal. He might ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington, but what seems more likely is that he’ll sell Washington to the highest bidder.

The controversial Democratic politician Rahm Emanuel recently made this point on The Ezra Klein Show, lamenting how Democrats focused their presidential campaign too much on ‘preventing the end of democracy’ when they should have focused on how Trump will turn the presidency into his own personal business, thereby associating him with the unaccountable elites who are the focus of so much popular rage today.

Conversely, Mangione is the archetypal young, idealistic revolutionary who charges into the fray only to realise he doesn’t know what comes next. Figures like this, however, often spark a larger movement. This is precisely what happens in breach events; when the imaginal meets the real, forces are unleashed that nobody can control.

However, what is so interesting about this assassination isn’t its similarity with what we’ve seen before, but what makes it different. The revolutionaries of old were fighting against an enemy they could see, whose lands and factories could be seized. That is no longer the case, and understanding why can point us toward new ways of liberating ourselves from the yoke of unaccountable elites.

Technofeudalism

The reason today’s revolutionaries can no longer rely on playbooks from the past is that we no longer live in a capitalist world. The notion that capitalism is over might seem counter-intuitive, but it's the theory at the heart of economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s 2023 book Technofeudalism.

He spends the opening chapters defining what exactly capitalism is, in order to show why our economic system today is so different. Capital is not money, but the means to produce goods and services. As Varoufakis points out, a sword is not capital. But a fishing rod is. So is a plough, a factory, or a field of grazing sheep. He also points to the related concept of ‘command capital’, which is the capacity to use your capital to get people to do what you want.

Capitalism was made possible in part when the common lands were enclosed and used as means of production, bringing the feudal era to an end. Instead of vassals being granted fiefs by a lord or king, and serfs working the land in exchange for wages, the means of production shifted to merchants as global trade exploded.

Varoufakis argues that we’re now in an age of Technofeudalism, where our digital commons have been enclosed in the same way our fields and forests were hundreds of years ago. Capital today (the means to produce things) has changed form, and now exists as what he calls ‘cloud capital’. The new elites are those who control and command authority in the enclosed fiefdoms of huge corporations like Amazon, Meta, Alibaba and United Healthcare.

Jeff Bezos is more like a feudal lord than an 1800’s robber baron. He allows vassals (merchants) to use his lands (Amazon.com), and extracts rent from them in the process. The same is true of Instagram or TikTok. Creators are allowed to make content in exchange for the attention they generate for advertisers. The data you generate on the platform is not yours to profit from, it belongs exclusively to the Technofeudal lords. This is the new reality we live in, and as Varoufakis argues, it’s vastly different from capitalism. His reasoning is as follows:

“Capital has hitherto been produced in some labour market – within the factory, the office, the warehouse. Aided by machines, it was waged workers who produced the stuff that was sold to generate profits, which in turn financed their wages and the production of more machines – that’s how capital accumulated and reproduced. Cloud capital, in contrast, can reproduce itself in ways that involve no waged labour.” (p.79)

Cloud capital works in part by harvesting our data and using that data to fuel its own growth. It requires your attention, but not necessarily your labour. To the technocratic elite, you are a barely significant point of data that can be used to sell you goods, sold to marketers or analysed for R&D. As Varoufakis puts it, it’s as if Don Draper were given control of the government: the marketers now control the market.

Peggy would make a great Minister of Defence, weeding out enemies from within and without with brutal efficiency.

At the same time, our banking system is ‘too big to fail’ because it owns the means of transferring money and controls our mortgages. Varoufakis gives an apt metaphor in the book: “Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.” (p.52) This is true of large health insurers in the US as well; they have the power not only to decide peoples’ fate, but to dictate the terms of the market.

Healthcare companies now use AI to determine whether people’s claims are accepted or not, because it’s cheaper and because it is based on the most valuable aspect of cloud capital: data. Probation courts and mortgage lenders also use AI algorithms to determine if you can own a house or walk freely. Today we are all serfs to algorithms controlled by competing fiefdoms.

Rage Against the Machine

It is an inhuman situation, and if we want to live free lives, we have to find a way to stop it. However, its roots go deeper than simply new technology. Algorithmic control of our lives is an expression of the rot at the heart of Western civilisation: quantitative values subsuming qualitative experience.

A parent loves their child, and their child desperately needs medical help. A corporation tells them they can’t have it because a machine has deemed it so. There is no recourse. No justice. The qualitative experience of love and care has been captured by the cold quantification of the machine.

This is inhuman, and the only reasonable response is revolution.

The question then becomes, what kind of revolution? Could an underground group of violent revolutionaries like Mangione change the system by assassinating healthcare and tech CEOs? It’s unlikely. In their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan compare over 300 violent and non-violent struggles in the 20th century to conclude that non-violent civil disobedience is about twice as effective as armed revolution.

This is because non-violent resistance has fewer barriers to entry; a lot of the population can join in and contribute, whereas violent resistance movements have much high barriers of entry and require superior military tactics to be effective. Non-violence also delegitimises the state’s use of force and garners international support.

However, the authors do point out that successful non-violence movements like South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement often combined a broad non-violent movement with a small group willing to enact violence as a last resort and bargaining chip. It’s hard to imagine a civil disobedience campaign that could have toppled Assad, for example. My reading of the book was that the ideal combination is a large, non-violent civil disobedience campaign coupled with a small, disciplined armed faction.

However, all the examples of successful movements they draw on took place in a world before AI algorithms and weren’t directed at vastly powerful corporations, but at governments. How do you fight back against the cloud? In the past, revolutionaries could seize the means of production and thereby gain power.

If I got my hands on this I would make so much goddamn yarn nobody would ever look down on me again. Unless they had more yarn than me.

Today, if Varoufakis is to be believed, we are up against powerful feudal lords of big tech companies and corporations who have decoupled power from capital; they control not only the factories and farms, but the means to transfer money, and they mediate your access to the rest of humanity. They can de-platform you. They can de-bank you. UnitedHealthcare can cut off your health insurance. Tesla can turn off your car any time it wants to. Amazon can de-list your product.

In a technofeudal reality, the fight isn’t primarily between rich and poor. It’s between the touchable and untouchable. Luigi Mangione comes from a wealthy family, went to an Ivy League college and was well read. However, even the wealthy are impacted by the Technofeudal machine. Mangione may be socially elite, but he isn’t untouchable in the way that our new feudal lords are.

This is one reason the killing of Brian Thompson has unified people across the political spectrum. Rich or poor, we’re all serfs now, aside from a few hundred Technofeudal lords. Faced with this, what does revolution look like? How can we fight an enemy that commands so much of the battlefield? What’s needed today is a new approach, and the breach event of Thompson’s murder shows us precisely what that could be.

The Body Politic

As Varoufakis points out in Technofeudalism, one of the paradoxes of capitalism is that when you as a worker are hired somewhere, there are two kinds of value being exchanged. There’s your ‘exchange value’, or how much money your time is worth in the free market. And then there’s your ‘experiential value’, the value of your qualities as a human being.

Because you are a body, you can’t separate these two aspects, so employers get access to your mind and soul for free as part of your exchange value. An employer can’t force you to care about your work, or give them your full creative potential, but they can capture your body for 8 hours and try to extract additional experiential value where they can.

As Varoufakis points out, the show Mad Men provides the perfect example. Don Draper is paid a huge wage to lounge around drinking and cavorting for most of the working day. Why? Because his experiential value; the quality of his thought, perspective and insight, is so high that it occasionally produces ideas which have huge exchange value for his employer.

Another way to see these two types of value is using a frame I’ve written about extensively in my book and on this Substack; the philosophical distinction between a metaphysics of quantity and quality. The metaphysical foundations of the secular Western world are based on the idea that quantity (matter) is the only thing that’s real, a philosophical position known as ‘physicalism’. The conscious experience of being alive (your experiential value) is seen as an epiphenomenon of matter, and as such less real and less valuable. Not only is this position philosophically and empirically untenable, but it creates an inhuman world and lies at the heart of the metacrisis.

So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”

They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity. That is, unless we want to make the claim that Thompson is more valuable as a CEO than as a father. It puts the whole of corporate America in an impossible double-bind.

If Mangione had destroyed the data centres that house United Healthcare’s patient records, it wouldn’t be a powerful breach event. But he killed a human being, a father and husband. He removed an experience from the world, as revenge against a machine that doesn’t care about experience. The assassination is a koan that brings to light the paradox at the heart of civilisation: what’s real is our experience of being alive, not how we can be quantified, but we pretend the opposite is true.

This truth also holds the seeds of a new kind of revolution. The first step in fighting back against our new Technofeudal reality is to create a counter-culture that links status to quality, not quantity. Just as GenX railed against ‘selling out’ and the corporate capture of culture, we need a new countercultural energy that rejects being quantified as data for Technofeudal lords. That rejection can come in many forms, from data-sovereignty to a push toward Web 3.0. However, it can also come in the form of resistance and subversion. My preferred approach to this is Edward Abbey’s technique of Monkey Wrenching: non-violent civil disobedience and sabotage that targets not people, but machines. For example, pouring sugar in the gas tank of a bulldozer to prevent it from killing a tree.

Machines are also embodied; they are physical and present in the world in a particular time and place. This can be hard to remember, because elites want it to be hard to remember. Complex financial tools like the AAA Mortgage-backed securities that bamboozled regulators and investors and led to the 2008 crash are disembodied and intentionally convoluted. The algorithms and machine learning that decides whether your child gets health insurance coverage are impossibly opaque and complex.

But they are still embodied, even if they appear not to be. They run on silicon and coltan and copper, housed in servers that can be destroyed, hacked, or damaged. Complex legal paperwork can’t stop a bullet piercing flesh, or a server farm being disconnected from a power source. No matter how abstract, cold and machinelike our power structures become, they cannot escape our essentially embodied, qualitative nature.

This may be the most significant lesson of the UnitedHealthcare assassination. The cloud isn’t real. Corporate messaging isn’t real. Human beings and the things we create are what’s real, and the source of true change comes from flesh and bone, breath and spirit.