[atreestump]

The remainder, in Baudrillard’s sense, becomes the hidden and inescapable flaw in the vision of control espoused by the Silicon Valley elite and embodied in the rise of Trump. It is the excess, the chaos, the fragments of humanity that refuse to be assimilated into the perfect systems of optimisation and simulation. For Curtis Yarvin and his disciples, the dream is a world of clean hierarchies, where inefficiencies are eliminated and power is wielded with algorithmic precision. But the remainder is what resists this dream. It is the unpredictable, the wasteful, and the irrational forces that disrupt any attempt at total control.

Trump himself is a manifestation of the remainder. He is not the orderly CEO-leader of Yarvin’s technocratic vision, nor is he a coherent political actor. Instead, he is the leftover chaos of a system that has tried and failed to reconcile globalisation, mass media, and populist rage. He is a product of the very media systems the tech elite have built, but his existence exposes the limits of their mastery. Trump’s rise reveals the fundamental instability of the simulation—a reminder that no matter how perfect the system appears, there will always be something left over, something that cannot be absorbed.

For the tech giants, the remainder is the human element that their systems cannot predict or control. It is the anger of a populist movement that rejects the very institutions they support, the irrational conspiracy theories that flourish in their algorithms, and the chaos that undermines their faith in logic and data. The remainder is not a flaw in their systems—it is the inevitable by-product of their attempt to make everything measurable and manageable.

Baudrillard’s “remainder” also challenges the ideology of neo-reactionaries like Yarvin. They dream of a world purged of inefficiency, but the remainder is inefficiency itself—the excess and waste that power always seeks to eliminate but ends up generating in new forms. This is the paradox of control: the more it strives for perfection, the more it produces disorder. The remainder is what exposes the cracks in their simulation, reminding us that the world cannot be reduced to data, signs, or hierarchies.

In this way, the remainder becomes the ultimate challenge to the hyperreal world being constructed by Silicon Valley and exemplified in Trump’s presidency. It is the reminder that, no matter how much we try to simulate reality, something real will always escape—and that this escaped reality will disrupt even the most carefully constructed illusions. It is the waste, the chaos, and the irrational forces that refuse to disappear, undermining the vision of a world where everything fits neatly into a system.

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