In the mid-19th century, European powers fought two wars against China’s Qing Dynasty to force it to continue accepting a particular vice: opium. The opium trade filled the coffers of a small group of European traders and governments while unleashing enormous social damage inside China. The Qing state, militarily overmatched, was physically incapable of stopping the flood of narcotics, which hollowed out families, degraded individual dignity, and rendered Chinese society vulnerable to political exploitation.

“Those who smoke opium waste time, neglect their duties, ruin their families, and shorten their lives,” warned Lin Zexu, a Qing imperial official who observed how the drug enervated the population. Zexu later wrote a pleading letter to Queen Victoria noting that Britain itself banned opium consumption for its own population, asking the Queen, “what has become of that conscience which heaven has implanted in the breasts of all men?”

The Opium Wars were a brazen illustration of a long-standing reality: unregulated vices can function as a form of aggression by the powerful against the weak.

Aristotle spent considerable time in his Nicomachean Ethics warning that a person overwhelmed by appetite was not merely unfree, but met his definition of being “enslaved.” More than a century later, the Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey issued a similar warning to Black Americans navigating a licentious modern society: “If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.”

Just as British colonialists flooded a helpless Qing Empire with opium to extract profit while destroying the population’s ability to resist, the American public now appears to be facing a deliberate assault by tech oligarchs—assisted by pliable government allies—aimed at putting a final nail in the coffin of American culture, and the ability by Americans to politically resist their agenda. Unlike opium, which was finite, costly, and difficult to transport, today’s elites possess a vastly more powerful weapon: unlimited digital vice, deployed to overwhelm the psychological defenses of an unprepared population, particularly the young and the poor.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when daily life was rapidly virtualized, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen articulated this worldview with remarkable candor. A small minority of humanity, he argued, enjoys “reality privilege”: access to rich physical environments, meaningful work, and full social lives. For everyone else, he suggested, virtual worlds constructed on the internet should replace what reality fails to provide.

“A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.”

Andreessen continued, with a note of barely concealed mockery towards those who preferred reforms in the real world to building everyone their own personal version of The Matrix:

“The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build — and we are building — online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”

What, then, does this “wonderful for everyone” virtual world look like? Increasingly, it resembles a 24/7 private digital casino and brothel, operating under constant surveillance, optimized for real-world profit, and accompanied by a corporate-controlled tabloid news outrage machine flickering in the corner.

Over the past decade, aided by broadband expansion and permissive regulatory shifts, the United States has experienced explosive growth in online gambling and pornography. Alongside these has come a subtler form of political manipulation enabled by ubiquitous short-form video platforms, which are rapidly eroding the culture of the written word and replacing it with flickering images projected on the wall of Plato’s cave.

Together, these form what might reasonably be called the three horsemen of virtual experience. All are aggressively capitalized, heavily promoted, and expanding at extraordinary speed.

The vices themselves are not new. Gambling and pornography are as old as recorded history. But changes in delivery can fundamentally alter their effects.

There is a clear difference between an evening poker game with friends and unlimited, anonymous, 24-hour gambling from a phone in one’s bedroom. The former places you in a social space, while the latter removes all friction, context, and restraint.

Moving vice into private accelerates atomization and alienation while insulating users from the social feedback that can prevent total degradation.

After the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, Americans wagered under $5 billion annually. Last year, they bet roughly $150 billion. Around 90 percent of those bets are now placed on phones. The explosive growth of prediction markets represents yet another turn of the same screw, converting the world itself into a gigantic casino. Monthly trading volume on these platforms surged from under $100 million in early 2024 to more than $13 billion by the end of 2025.

The "digital brothel" of the internet is perhaps even more destructive.

A recent Harper’s article described communities of young men whose lives have been slowly destroyed by compulsive online pornography—an addiction made possible only relatively recently by ubiquitous high-speed internet. “Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality,” the article notes, while observing the growth of cult-like communities of men who actually exited reality for a world of digital experience, as Andreesen proposed. The picture painted is not an idyllic one but a vision of social collapse and poersonal degradation.

Moral objections aside, a growing body of scientific literature documents the neurological harm caused by unlimited streamed pornography. Pascal Emanuel-Gobry writes:

“If our reward system interprets each new porn clip as the same thing as a new sexual partner, this means an unprecedented sort of stimulus for our brain… Even decadent Roman emperors, Turkish sultans, and 1970s rock stars never had 24/7, one-click-away access to infinitely many, infinitely novel sexual partners.”

“The combination of a pre-existing natural circuit for neurochemical reward linked to sexual stimulus and the possibility of immediate, infinite novelty—which was not a feature of porn until 2006—means that a user can now keep his dopamine levels much higher, and for much longer periods of time, than we can possibly hope our brains to handle without real and lasting damage.”

Its easy to look down on the people in the Harper’s article, whose ability to process real-world pleasure and experience meaningful social interactions has been utterly ruined by their online addictions.

But as the article notes in its conclusion, their mode of digital self-destruction is not even that different from others familiar to tech-centered modern life: hours lost to short-form video, chasing dopamine hits on social platforms, parasocial relationships, and the abandonment of complex relationships with others in exchange for the warm certainties of a solitary, glowing screen.

Over the past generation, the United States has undergone an extraordinary concentration of wealth, producing levels of inequality unmatched in modern history and giving rise to a powerful new oligarchy based in Silicon Valley. Whatever their differences, the wealthy share acute class consciousness. They understand their position very well—and they are nervous about it.

“It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money,” Peter Thiel said in a recorded interview later reported by the Washington Post. “An incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance and sanctions architecture has been constructed.” Wealth gives the “illusion of power and autonomy,” Thiel added, “but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment.”

Faced with a population for whom meaningful material improvement is neither planned nor expected, today’s oligarchs appear to be pursuing a different strategy: pacification through virtual experience. They aim to preserve their status through enforcing psychological compliance, encouraging the majority to live absorbed in screens, distracted and isolated, while real power and resources remain elsewhere.

Tech elites opportunistically cloak themselves in patriotic rhetoric, only to threaten to move to Dubai or Singapore whenever a U.S. politician suggests raising their taxes. In practice, they resemble a class waging a kind of colonial occupation against the American public. Their openly articulated vision is that the ordinary people whose opinions they consider irrelevant, and whose labor they hope to replace with AI and robotics, should disappear into a haze of digital pleasure —much as opium-addicted subjects of the Qing Empire did two centuries ago.

One lingering obstacle is that Americans still conceive of themselves as autonomous political actors. From the perspective of tech oligarchs, technology also offers a solution to that problem. Major social-media platforms are now being purchased and reengineered for explicitly political ends, with algorithms and video feeds used to alternate between pacification and periodic waves of mass hysteria, directed at targets their owners deem acceptable. These cycles often focus on internecine ethnic or racial antagonisms—sudden surges of fury aimed at Haitians, Somalis, or whoever else the algorithm happens to surface that week.

This form of tech-driven political warfare is our third horseman. Yet as destructive as this behavior is, it is also deeply insulting, because it reveals how thoroughly the society being targeted has already been neutralized. Americans are fragmented, dependent, and incapable of even negative collective action. Passions are deliberately inflamed, yet, for the most part, nothing ultimately happens. Beyond the fleeting physical satisfaction of hitting “send” on an angry post, there is rarely catharsis or translation into real-world action.

Hannah Arendt once observed that what prepares people for domination is not ideology alone, but loneliness. Once an exceptional condition, that state of atomization has become a mass experience. Isolation and loneliness, she noted, are not the same. Today, Americans increasingly suffer both, while being subjected to a limitless barrage of vices designed to keep them blinking their lives away at screens.

What, then, is to be done? It would be easy to tell people to unplug entirely—and to the extent that this is possible, they should—but full disengagement from platform capitalism really has become a form of “reality privilege,” one available primarily to the wealthy.

Regulation seems like one option. In China today, the state has explicitly labeled even video games an “opium of the soul” and banned online pornography rather than facilitating its spread. That posture reflects hard historical experience. After nearly a century of devastation caused by the opium trade, China did not escape mass addiction through cultural evolution alone. It took direct, sustained intervention.

Beginning in 1907, the Qing government negotiated a formal agreement with British India to phase out Indian opium exports over ten years; by roughly 1917, the foreign opium trade had largely ended. Domestic production and addiction persisted, however, until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after which the Communist government launched aggressive nationwide suppression campaigns that effectively eliminated opium smoking as a mass social phenomenon by the mid-20th century.

It is unlikely that any existing political movement in the United States will attempt anything remotely comparable. The left remains enamored with the idea that the only form of unfreedom is the restriction of personal choice. That worldview is survivable for the affluent, who can afford rehabilitation programs when things get out of hand and do not need to live their lives with a slim margin of error, but it is lethal for the poor. The right, meanwhile, actively accelerates the catastrophe in the name of short-term profit and oligarchic patronage.

A modest step we could all take is to revive a cultural habit that has largely been abandoned: acknowledging that vice exists, and that it is, in fact, harmful. That begins with recognizing the sheer scale of what is now being deliberately aimed at us through digital mediums. There is precedent for resistance. Past efforts to stigmatize destructive behavior like smoking successfully reshaped norms from the ground up and even challenged entrenched corporate power.

Unlike the opium traders of the nineteenth century, today’s tech oligarchs do not even bother supplying physical vice. Instead, they flood society with cheap, infinitely scalable virtual substitutes: simulations of risk, pleasure, intimacy, and meaning.

Whatever you want to do in the world, whatever fulfillment you seek, exists out there, in reality. It is not inside the digital cage being built to capture your attention, drain your agency, and pass itself off as freedom.

In the mid-19th century, European powers fought two wars against China’s Qing Dynasty to force it to continue accepting a particular vice: opium. The opium trade filled the coffers of a small group of European traders and governments while unleashing enormous social damage inside China. The Qing state, militarily overmatched, was physically incapable of stopping the flood of narcotics, which hollowed out families, degraded individual dignity, and rendered Chinese society vulnerable to political exploitation.

“Those who smoke opium waste time, neglect their duties, ruin their families, and shorten their lives,” warned Lin Zexu, a Qing imperial official who observed how the drug enervated the population. Zexu later wrote a pleading letter to Queen Victoria noting that Britain itself banned opium consumption for its own population, asking the Queen, “what has become of that conscience which heaven has implanted in the breasts of all men?”

The Opium Wars were a brazen illustration of a long-standing reality: unregulated vices can function as a form of aggression by the powerful against the weak.

Aristotle spent considerable time in his Nicomachean Ethics warning that a person overwhelmed by appetite was not merely unfree, but met his definition of being “enslaved.” More than a century later, the Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey issued a similar warning to Black Americans navigating a licentious modern society: “If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.”

Just as British colonialists flooded a helpless Qing Empire with opium to extract profit while destroying the population’s ability to resist, the American public now appears to be facing a deliberate assault by tech oligarchs—assisted by pliable government allies—aimed at putting a final nail in the coffin of American culture, and the ability by Americans to politically resist their agenda. Unlike opium, which was finite, costly, and difficult to transport, today’s elites possess a vastly more powerful weapon: unlimited digital vice, deployed to overwhelm the psychological defenses of an unprepared population, particularly the young and the poor.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when daily life was rapidly virtualized, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen articulated this worldview with remarkable candor. A small minority of humanity, he argued, enjoys “reality privilege”: access to rich physical environments, meaningful work, and full social lives. For everyone else, he suggested, virtual worlds constructed on the internet should replace what reality fails to provide.

“A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.”

Andreessen continued, with a note of barely concealed mockery towards those who preferred reforms in the real world to building everyone their own personal version of The Matrix:

“The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build — and we are building — online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”

What, then, does this “wonderful for everyone” virtual world look like? Increasingly, it resembles a 24/7 private digital casino and brothel, operating under constant surveillance, optimized for real-world profit, and accompanied by a corporate-controlled tabloid news outrage machine flickering in the corner.

Over the past decade, aided by broadband expansion and permissive regulatory shifts, the United States has experienced explosive growth in online gambling and pornography. Alongside these has come a subtler form of political manipulation enabled by ubiquitous short-form video platforms, which are rapidly eroding the culture of the written word and replacing it with flickering images projected on the wall of Plato’s cave.

Together, these form what might reasonably be called the three horsemen of virtual experience. All are aggressively capitalized, heavily promoted, and expanding at extraordinary speed.

The vices themselves are not new. Gambling and pornography are as old as recorded history. But changes in delivery can fundamentally alter their effects.

There is a clear difference between an evening poker game with friends and unlimited, anonymous, 24-hour gambling from a phone in one’s bedroom. The former places you in a social space, while the latter removes all friction, context, and restraint.

Moving vice into private accelerates atomization and alienation while insulating users from the social feedback that can prevent total degradation.

After the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, Americans wagered under $5 billion annually. Last year, they bet roughly $150 billion. Around 90 percent of those bets are now placed on phones. The explosive growth of prediction markets represents yet another turn of the same screw, converting the world itself into a gigantic casino. Monthly trading volume on these platforms surged from under $100 million in early 2024 to more than $13 billion by the end of 2025.

The "digital brothel" of the internet is perhaps even more destructive.

A recent Harper’s article described communities of young men whose lives have been slowly destroyed by compulsive online pornography—an addiction made possible only relatively recently by ubiquitous high-speed internet. “Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality,” the article notes, while observing the growth of cult-like communities of men who actually exited reality for a world of digital experience, as Andreesen proposed. The picture painted is not an idyllic one but a vision of social collapse and poersonal degradation.

Moral objections aside, a growing body of scientific literature documents the neurological harm caused by unlimited streamed pornography. Pascal Emanuel-Gobry writes:

“If our reward system interprets each new porn clip as the same thing as a new sexual partner, this means an unprecedented sort of stimulus for our brain… Even decadent Roman emperors, Turkish sultans, and 1970s rock stars never had 24/7, one-click-away access to infinitely many, infinitely novel sexual partners.”

“The combination of a pre-existing natural circuit for neurochemical reward linked to sexual stimulus and the possibility of immediate, infinite novelty—which was not a feature of porn until 2006—means that a user can now keep his dopamine levels much higher, and for much longer periods of time, than we can possibly hope our brains to handle without real and lasting damage.”

Its easy to look down on the people in the Harper’s article, whose ability to process real-world pleasure and experience meaningful social interactions has been utterly ruined by their online addictions.

But as the article notes in its conclusion, their mode of digital self-destruction is not even that different from others familiar to tech-centered modern life: hours lost to short-form video, chasing dopamine hits on social platforms, parasocial relationships, and the abandonment of complex relationships with others in exchange for the warm certainties of a solitary, glowing screen.

Over the past generation, the United States has undergone an extraordinary concentration of wealth, producing levels of inequality unmatched in modern history and giving rise to a powerful new oligarchy based in Silicon Valley. Whatever their differences, the wealthy share acute class consciousness. They understand their position very well—and they are nervous about it.

“It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money,” Peter Thiel said in a recorded interview later reported by the Washington Post. “An incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance and sanctions architecture has been constructed.” Wealth gives the “illusion of power and autonomy,” Thiel added, “but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment.”

Faced with a population for whom meaningful material improvement is neither planned nor expected, today’s oligarchs appear to be pursuing a different strategy: pacification through virtual experience. They aim to preserve their status through enforcing psychological compliance, encouraging the majority to live absorbed in screens, distracted and isolated, while real power and resources remain elsewhere.

Tech elites opportunistically cloak themselves in patriotic rhetoric, only to threaten to move to Dubai or Singapore whenever a U.S. politician suggests raising their taxes. In practice, they resemble a class waging a kind of colonial occupation against the American public. Their openly articulated vision is that the ordinary people whose opinions they consider irrelevant, and whose labor they hope to replace with AI and robotics, should disappear into a haze of digital pleasure —much as opium-addicted subjects of the Qing Empire did two centuries ago.

One lingering obstacle is that Americans still conceive of themselves as autonomous political actors. From the perspective of tech oligarchs, technology also offers a solution to that problem. Major social-media platforms are now being purchased and reengineered for explicitly political ends, with algorithms and video feeds used to alternate between pacification and periodic waves of mass hysteria, directed at targets their owners deem acceptable. These cycles often focus on internecine ethnic or racial antagonisms—sudden surges of fury aimed at Haitians, Somalis, or whoever else the algorithm happens to surface that week.

This form of tech-driven political warfare is our third horseman. Yet as destructive as this behavior is, it is also deeply insulting, because it reveals how thoroughly the society being targeted has already been neutralized. Americans are fragmented, dependent, and incapable of even negative collective action. Passions are deliberately inflamed, yet, for the most part, nothing ultimately happens. Beyond the fleeting physical satisfaction of hitting “send” on an angry post, there is rarely catharsis or translation into real-world action.

Hannah Arendt once observed that what prepares people for domination is not ideology alone, but loneliness. Once an exceptional condition, that state of atomization has become a mass experience. Isolation and loneliness, she noted, are not the same. Today, Americans increasingly suffer both, while being subjected to a limitless barrage of vices designed to keep them blinking their lives away at screens.

What, then, is to be done? It would be easy to tell people to unplug entirely—and to the extent that this is possible, they should—but full disengagement from platform capitalism really has become a form of “reality privilege,” one available primarily to the wealthy.

Regulation seems like one option. In China today, the state has explicitly labeled even video games an “opium of the soul” and banned online pornography rather than facilitating its spread. That posture reflects hard historical experience. After nearly a century of devastation caused by the opium trade, China did not escape mass addiction through cultural evolution alone. It took direct, sustained intervention.

Beginning in 1907, the Qing government negotiated a formal agreement with British India to phase out Indian opium exports over ten years; by roughly 1917, the foreign opium trade had largely ended. Domestic production and addiction persisted, however, until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after which the Communist government launched aggressive nationwide suppression campaigns that effectively eliminated opium smoking as a mass social phenomenon by the mid-20th century.

It is unlikely that any existing political movement in the United States will attempt anything remotely comparable. The left remains enamored with the idea that the only form of unfreedom is the restriction of personal choice. That worldview is survivable for the affluent, who can afford rehabilitation programs when things get out of hand and do not need to live their lives with a slim margin of error, but it is lethal for the poor. The right, meanwhile, actively accelerates the catastrophe in the name of short-term profit and oligarchic patronage.

A modest step we could all take is to revive a cultural habit that has largely been abandoned: acknowledging that vice exists, and that it is, in fact, harmful. That begins with recognizing the sheer scale of what is now being deliberately aimed at us through digital mediums. There is precedent for resistance. Past efforts to stigmatize destructive behavior like smoking successfully reshaped norms from the ground up and even challenged entrenched corporate power.

Unlike the opium traders of the nineteenth century, today’s tech oligarchs do not even bother supplying physical vice. Instead, they flood society with cheap, infinitely scalable virtual substitutes: simulations of risk, pleasure, intimacy, and meaning.

Whatever you want to do in the world, whatever fulfillment you seek, exists out there, in reality. It is not inside the digital cage being built to capture your attention, drain your agency, and pass itself off as freedom.