For the first ten years, we put their faces on magazine covers. For the next ten, we put them on protest signs.

With the midterms close, what you see on your phone depends on how you lean and how your friends lean. The algorithm learns both and builds each of us a different set of villains. In my feed, I get the oldest game there is, the powerful against everyone else, the billionaire class against the “mortal” people like us.

Nobody climbs to that altitude without growing attached to it. On the way up, most of them get full of themselves and never learn to stop wanting more.

We forget the beginning. When they were young, with an idea and no money, we called them visionaries. We cheer the little guy until he becomes the big guy, and the day he gets there, we don't want him anymore. We feed that monster for years and then act surprised by its size.

"But, as he mounts the ladder of success," Yogi Ramacharaka writes, "he is subjected to terrible temptations, and often allows the abnormal ambition to take possession of him."