I read an incredible piece by Kyle Fitzpatrick recently, and I have no one else to talk to about it. So you’re my victims. Hehe.
Recent paparazzi pics floating around the pop culture sphere look a little different to the usual pop icons paired with other artists, actors, or creative visionaries.
Instead, the ultimate contemporary status accessory for the cultural IT-girl seems to be a suit. Not the one she’s wearing though.
We recently saw Olivia Rodrigo publicly holding hands with an AI private equity executive, and it’s blown up to be this like, big cultural moment.
But she’s not the only one with an affinity for the tech-bro.
Fitzpatrick also notes Lady Gaga is also dating a tech entrepreneur, Este Haim has her cryptocurrency husband, and Karlie Kloss is deeply embedded in her Kushner love affair.
Even Nicole Kidman has found herself tangled in a similar high-finance fling.
The immediate temptation is to swipe past these headlines as harmless tabloid noise. But if you look closer, it reveals a shift in who holds absolute power in modern society.
As Fitzpatrick brilliantly analysed, this phenomenon is an arrow pointing directly at the new architects of our reality.
The visible death of traditional Hollywood and the creative power vacuum happening inside the entertainment industry means that proximity to raw capital is the new baseline for celebrity.
The finance bros and venture capitalists are no longer content to sit in the dark managing spreadsheets.
They have stepped straight into the frame to become the stars of the show.
This represents the realisation of what Fitzpatrick calls an everything-is-television future. We have built a world of total cultural workslop, where ordinary workers and job hunters are forced to audition like desperate extras just to enter corporate America. Meanwhile, the people holding the economic puppet strings are treated like red-carpet royalty.
By elevating an AI private equity bro to the exact same cultural level as a generational musical talent like Olivia Rodrigo, the machine is pulling off an invisible sleight of hand.
It creates a false equivalence that suggests what a tech investor does in a boardroom is somehow equal to the lifetime of devotion, raw talent, and human craftsmanship required to be a musician, actor or high-level creative.
It is the “Kardashian-ization of corporate finance”. Fawning over a generic man-in-finance archetype, turning corporate extraction into entertainment fodder for the masses.
When the public begins to romanticise the very venture capitalists who are actively funding the automation of our creative industries, the system has successfully automated our compliance.
We’re no longer demanding that our cultural icons rebel against the establishment; we are watching them date it. And screaming internally. Because what the fk.
It flattens the definition of human worth. Because it suggests that the ultimate peak of human achievement isn't creating beauty, innovation, or art. It's simply possessing the transactional power to buy it.
But the most disheartening layer of this shift is how completely it exposes the loss of our collective cultural imagination.
We’re allowing the sterile, unfeeling metrics of the balance sheet to colonise our dreams.
If our artists, musicians, and creative vanguards look are no longer looking for alignment with peer-to-peer artistic collaboration, and instead looking for economic shelter inside the corporate fortress, it signals a bleak, hyper-commercialised reality where capital doesn't just fund the culture; capital is the culture.
The boardroom has now consumed the studio.
The antidote to this corporate hypnosis begins when we stop treating net worth as a metric of human fascination.
We have to refuse to validate the corporate actors trying to buy their way into our cultural memory.
Money in the bank account can buy the catalogue, the distribution, and the whole damn PR campaign. But it will never possess a single drop of the soul required to create the art.
Is it time to gatekeep from the tech bros? Idk. Food for thought.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
