The Absurd Ballet of Power: Wrestling, Blockchain, and the House of Saud
The Absurd Ballet of Power: Wrestling, Blockchain, and the House of Saud
The Muscles, The Money, and The Monarchs
One needn’t be a particularly astute observer of the human condition to notice that what passes for “trending” these days represents a perfect trifecta of American cultural and political decay. The choreographed violence of professional wrestling, the quasi-religious techno-utopianism of blockchain evangelists, and the obsequious genuflection before medieval barbarism dressed in Savile Row suits—all three demand our attention simultaneously, and not, I would argue, by mere coincidence.
Consider the spectacle of Oba Femi “showcasing his dominance” in the NXT ring. This is theater, of course, but theater that makes no pretense of subtlety. The entire enterprise exists to celebrate what Nietzsche might have called the “will to power” in its most cartoonish form. The audience—and I use that term with full knowledge of its implications—sits enraptured as manufactured conflicts reach their predetermined conclusions, all while believing themselves to be witnessing something authentic.
Meanwhile, in the supposedly revolutionary realm of blockchain technology, we have VSG forming a “strategic partnership” with something called GEM Digital Limited. The language is delightfully euphemistic—“securing up to $10 million” translates rather directly to “desperately trying to keep the lights on while the crypto winter turns into a crypto ice age.” The promised utopia of decentralization always seems to require rather centralized infusions of very conventional capital, does it not?
And then we arrive at the piece de resistance: the American president, that paragon of vulgarity and excess, touching down in Saudi Arabia to consummate a relationship built on the exchange of advanced weaponry for oil and influence. The “$142 billion arms deal” will ensure that the House of Saud can continue to behead dissidents and bomb Yemeni schoolchildren with state-of-the-art American efficiency. All this while plans to “lift sanctions on Syria” demonstrate once again that the moral posturing of the West is always negotiable when sufficient lucre is on offer.
The Digital Colosseum and Its Discontents
What ties these seemingly disparate threads together is not merely power but the performance of power—the need not simply to dominate but to be seen dominating. The wrestler must have his audience. The blockchain venture must have its press release announcing mysterious partnerships with entities bearing names like corporate lorem ipsum. The president must have his photo op with despots, preferably with something obscenely expensive in the background.
In WWE NXT, we learn that victory often comes not through superior skill but through “interference”—the strategic intervention of a third party to alter the outcome of what purports to be a fair contest. One Channing Lorenzo apparently provided such service to Wes Lee in his bout against the magnificently named Tony D’Angelo. How neatly this mirrors the blockchain space, where the invisible hand of the market is regularly supplemented by the very visible hands of venture capitalists and other financial interventionists who determine which technologies live and which die, regardless of technical merit.
And need we even draw the obvious parallels to the American president’s relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Here too we find “interference” on an international scale—the subversion of what Americans still quaintly refer to as “values-based foreign policy” by the naked pursuit of economic advantage and geopolitical convenience.
The Coming Financial Reckoning
What do these trends portend for global finance? Nothing particularly encouraging, I’m afraid. The $10 million secured by VSG pales in comparison to the $142 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, yet both reflect the same underlying reality: capital continues to flow toward spectacle, extraction, and domination rather than production, sustainability, or human flourishing.
The blockchain revolution, with its libertarian promises of freedom from centralized authority, finds itself increasingly entangled with precisely the financial institutions it once promised to obviate. “Enterprise solutions” and “flat fee models” are the language of accommodation, not disruption. Meanwhile, the American empire, unable or unwilling to compete economically with rising powers in Asia, doubles down on its last remaining competitive advantage: the capacity to deliver unprecedented destructive force anywhere on the planet within hours.
The WWE’s manufactured conflicts, with their predetermined outcomes and carefully scripted narratives, offer perhaps the most honest representation of our current financial system. The match appears competitive, but the winner has been chosen in advance. The crowd roars its approval or disapproval, believing their reactions matter, while behind the curtain, the same hands pull all the strings.
The Luxury of Ignorance
There’s something almost touching about Trump’s “affinity for luxury,” as if the gold-plated toilets and marble veneer of his various properties represented some kind of aesthetic achievement rather than the desperate compensation of a man who has never known the quiet confidence that comes with genuine taste. This vulgar conspicuous consumption finds its perfect mirror in the Saudi royal family, whose members purchase multi-million dollar artworks not to appreciate their beauty but to demonstrate that they can afford to do so.
In both cases, the ostentation serves a purpose beyond mere vanity. It is a statement of impunity—a declaration that normal constraints, whether financial, ethical, or legal, do not apply. The “Trump doctrine” that supposedly “prioritizes Gulf Arab states’ autonomy” is nothing more than a cynical abandonment of even the pretense of moral consideration in foreign affairs. It is the final dropping of the mask, the admission that American power exists primarily to serve American interests, however narrowly defined.
The Spectacle Continues
What these trends tell us, ultimately, is that the decoupling of financial success from social utility continues apace. The professional wrestling industry produces nothing of value beyond entertainment. The blockchain industry, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, has yet to deliver a single application that improves meaningfully on existing solutions. And the arms industry exists to produce instruments of death and destruction, tools whose optimal outcome is to never be used at all.
Yet capital flows inexorably toward all three, while schools crumble, infrastructure decays, and the natural world burns. The “strategic partnerships” celebrated in our trending topics represent not cooperation toward mutual benefit but the consolidation of advantage, the circling of wagons by those who already have against those who do not.
In this light, perhaps the most honest participant in our trifecta is Oba Femi, the WWE wrestler who “showcased his dominance” without pretending to serve some greater good. At least the spectacle of professional wrestling acknowledges itself as spectacle. The same cannot be said for the empty promises of blockchain revolutionaries or the cynical machinations of petrostates and their enablers.
The markets, like the WWE audience, may cheer these developments in the short term. But as with any performance built on deception and manipulation, the day of reckoning inevitably approaches. Whether that reckoning takes the form of market correction, political upheaval, or environmental catastrophe remains to be seen. But the trends before us suggest that those in positions of power have little interest in changing course. The show, as they say, must go on—at least until the lights go out.