The Anthropology of Appropriation

I. The High Performer

At the beginning stands a type we have measured elsewhere: the Leistungsträger, the high performer. The word lies by telling the truth. It sounds like burden and responsibility, like the one who bears what others cannot. Taken literally, it says something else: a high performer is not the one who renders achievement, but the one who carries it — from the person who created it to the person who wants to have it. At the end of the route he stands and says: I made this. The full anatomy of this type is set out in a separate essay, "The Self-Appointed High Performers"; here what interests us is his origin.

For he does not fall from the sky; he is made. In youth one acquires a kit of thought and craft that, for most, is marked by its extreme standard equipment; tools outside the canon promise no foreseeable return and demand one's own effort — they drop through the selection criterion. With this kit one tries to gain a foothold in some area of society, usually by chance, rarely following one's own inclinations. There one learns the rules of the game, which are sacrosanct to the newcomer: whoever questions them is sorted out. And once one has sufficiently internalized the conditions and begins to recognize the structures of power, one notices, at some point, the phenomenon of the high performer — and the choice of whether to become one oneself.

The decisive thing is: he is no exception and no failure of character. He is what the rules carry upward. And with that he is the first, most clearly visible figure of a larger process.

II. Two Substrates

When the advancement of the Megamachine is spoken of, one thinks of the mechanical side: engines that become reusable, algorithms that order what no human can survey, models that generate language. That is the visible half. The invisible half is that the machine builds on a second substrate — the human one. It develops not only its apparatus but also the type that operates it, owns it, and reaches its levers.

The high performer is, in this, not the whole human being but one of his functions. To see how the machine forms the type, one must first consider which functions a human being performs in it at all — and how they interlock.

III. The Functions

The established human being in the Megamachine is not one thing but several at once, and the functions reinforce one another. In his work he is a high performer: he carries the achievement of others upward and appropriates it. With the proceeds he is a consumer: he converts them back into the machine's products, and each purchase confirms its worth. The surplus he invests — and here enters the function that demands the most attention, because it is the least unambiguous: that of the investor.

The investor is not a uniform type. At one pole stands the one who places his money, broadly diversified, into a fund and earns a moderate return; he appropriates no particular foreign idea but bears the average risk of the economy as a whole — that is Oppenheimer's economic means, nearer to it than it looks. At the other pole stands the risk speculator, who buys himself access to the creativity of others through investment, because direct access is denied him. As a high performer he stood physically between inventor and market; as an investor he lets his capital take that place. And here, too, the function divides once more: the early-stage investor, whose money first makes the idea possible, bears real risk; the secondary-market speculator gives the company not a cent, but only buys a claim on the achievement of others. The investor is thus not a point but a spectrum, reaching from enabling to skimming. Precisely for that reason he does not stand alone: he rests on the appropriation that the high performer performs, and he points ahead to a final function.

For what a human being does with his proceeds is not yet what he does with his position. With it he becomes a multiplier: he hires and sorts out, he passes the sacrosanct rules on to the next newcomers, he raises the next generation in the same standard kit and the same carrier's path, he sits on committees, endows, votes — in such a way that the order is confirmed and not called into question. That is the most Megamachine-conforming function of all, because it does not merely operate the machine but propagates it.

Every success in any of these functions reinforces the outlook. In his world this human being behaves not only correctly but decently: he works, he provides, he invests responsibly, he passes things on. Therein lies the real stability of the machine — it runs not on cynics, but on people who, with a clear conscience, do what their world holds to be right.

IV. What Falls Through

The same selection that decides over the functions also runs through the structures that surround them: the state, with its funding programs, favors capital over the inventor; the prevailing rules of the startup dilute the creator round after round; and at the top sits whoever rose by precisely these rules. Everywhere the same thing is rewarded — mediating, appropriating, presenting — and the same thing sorted out.

What is remarkable is not what rises, but what falls through. The selection systematically sorts out a particular set of qualities: creating for the sake of the thing itself, bearing another's burden without a counter-reckoning, enduring uncertainty without a hedge, generosity toward the one who can give nothing back. One might be tempted to call that, straightaway, the better part of the human. But the point is not that the bad sit at the top and the good at the bottom — that would be the same cheap morality we deny ourselves. The point is more sober: the machine filters not by worth but by rule. What it sorts out has no advantage under its rules — nothing more is said, for now.

What it produces thereby is nonetheless an anthropology of its own, and a peculiar foreignness dwells within it. To the one who rose by passing off others' achievement as his own, creating for the sake of the thing itself is not merely unfamiliar but unintelligible — an activity without discernible purpose. To the one who rose by passing uncertainty on, enduring it appears as foolishness. To the one who has mastered the language of contracts, the equal footing that a fair contract presupposes is not a value but a missed opportunity. The machine filters not despite its rules, but through them. At its top it breeds an anthropology of appropriation.

V. Arendt, Inverted

Here lies a danger sharper than the sentence that the rich have too much power. An earlier Megamachine could have a cruel apparatus operated by comparatively ordinary people — that was Hannah Arendt's finding about the banality with which the monstrous is administered. The present one does something else. It lifts the anthropology of appropriation itself to the levers and gives it the means to form the next variant of the machine in its own image.

The empirical test is sobering. Whoever holds the political levers at the top has, for the most part, invented little or nothing technically. The inventors of the core technologies — of payment cryptography, of rocket engines, of battery chemistry, of language models — sit at the base and remain mostly anonymous. At the top sits whoever controls capital, connections, and narrative. The purest case is that investor who has created nothing technically and openly rejects democracy as a form of rule: the human side of the metamorphosis in person. He is not the exception at which the pattern fails; he is the pattern thought through to its end. With that, the question of whether the next Megamachine takes a democratic or an autocratic shape becomes, in truth, an anthropological one: which type of human being sits at the levers when the machine sheds its skin?

VI. The Honest Counterweight

At this point the thought must be protected against itself, or it tips into a condemnation — and a condemnation would be the same tool, the hammer, against which this whole inquiry is directed.

First: the type is an effect of selection, not a fate and not a verdict on the essence of individual human beings. The structure carries these qualities upward. That does not mean that everyone who sits at the top is by nature bad, and it does not mean that the same people would not act differently under other rules. Structure before character — otherwise one turns a position into an essence.

Second, and this is the more uncomfortable point: what falls through is not holy either. Creating can become an obsession that consumes people. Generosity can be vanity. The inventor who bears his burden alone can do so out of a stubbornness that permits no equal footing — and then he fails not only at the machine but at himself. What is sorted out is not the good as such. It is merely what has no advantage under these rules. Whoever transfigures it into virtue builds himself the same straw man as the one who declares the top to be evil.

VII. Material That Cannot Be Magnetized

Precisely here lies the reason why one answers the machine only with architecture and not with appeal. If what is sorted out is not holy, and the rise of the appropriator is no accident, then one cannot count on the better people winning in the end. The appeal — be more generous, create for the sake of the thing, respect equal footing — is ineffective, because it speaks against a selection stronger than any exhortation. Whoever hopes that the better will prevail has not understood how the machine works: it is built so that it does not.

The only answer that holds is a structure in which the appropriating qualities find no lever — because the construction does not contain that lever. An inventors' cooperative that develops to proof of concept and then licenses, that issues no shares, knows no exit, has no cap table, is not an association of better people. That would be appeal again. It is a construction on which the anthropology of appropriation finds nothing to grip: no share market on which majorities are bought; no dilution round in which the creator is expropriated; no mediator's position that wedges itself between inventor and market and takes its percentage.

One does not build better people. One builds material that cannot be magnetized.

The machine selects the anthropology of appropriation and gives it the means to perpetuate itself. We cannot set against it the hope that the better human prevails — for the machine is built so that he does not. We can set against it only an architecture in which the appropriating has no lever. The better is not rewarded there. It is merely no longer punished.