My Kids Playact Billionaires And I Don't Mind
Theirs isn't exactly a flattering depiction of the ultra-wealthy.
I noticed the change to my kids’ voices before I noticed they were cosplaying the ultra-wealthy.
Coming up the stairs one evening last week, my nervous little dog in tow, I heard my children – nine-year-old daughter, twelve-year-old son – speaking to each other in an oddly dull and toneless way. Their voices sounded not just like adult voices, but like Serious Adult voices. They were talking about large sums of money, making some kind of deal, never breaking whatever character they had adopted.
They were playing Monopoly. It was some kind of Billionaire Edition made for zoomers with no attention span. My daughter wore her fanciest pink dress, a sparkly thing that sorta kinda marched her pink skirt. She wore her highest heels, my wife’s leopard design sunglasses – huge on her, but somehow fitting for the outfit – and pink lip gloss that matched her skirt. Atop it all, naturally, was a gold princess crown. Around her neck: Fake pearls, looped a few times around her neck.
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My son had put on the only suit that fits him anymore. He had buttoned his dress shirt to the very top and done his best to tie a tie. He had even put on dress socks and shoes and buttoned his suit jacket. Next to him sat a wine glass filled precariously to the top with cranberry juice. His sister, meanwhile, sipped apple juice from a glass I use on special occasions to make mixed drinks.
"We're billionaires," my son said, deadpan, before slipping on his too-big aviators and dolling the dice.
My kids sat across from each other and engaged in high stakes negotiations about railroads and taxes and properties and cash infusions. Their voices are what stopped me where I stood. They spoke flatly, without any extra words about what they wanted and when they wanted it. Everything they said was clipped, straight to the damn point. They were business people after all, and didn’t have time for everyday niceties. Time was money for these kids, and money was time, and hotels were begging to be built. They were cosplaying the rich. I found it altogether adorable and horrifying, endearing and nauseating.
Denny Carter
I’d like to think I’ve done an OK job talking to my children about the human degradation that comes with capitalism. I don’t use that language, exactly, but in kidspeak I try to tell my kids about the total lack of dignity that defines the lives of so many Americans. I’ve done what I can to dispel the myth that the poor are lazy. The poor, I tell them, work harder than I’ve ever worked, that’s for certain. They forgo sleep and food and any semblance of leisure time just to pay the bills, to get along, to not sleep on the street or in a shelter, to stay alive. It’s not hard for my children to understand this; their public elementary school receives government funding because a big chunk of the student population has no steady source of food at home. My kids have seen classmates come to school hungry and tired and agitated. They can’t relate, exactly – we have as much food as they could ever eat in our kitchen pantry – but they’ve seen others struggle and they have empathy for those kids because of it.
They are, I would say, fiercely empathetic. I'm not sure I've ever seen my son as worked up as when I told him about the incalculable suffering Elon Musk and his DOGE minions created with their criminal cuts to critical American aid programs. Injustice makes my children mad. Whatever my parental shortcomings, I'm proud of that.
We all point and laugh when we see Cybertrucks driving around the community. It’s become a game: From the backseat of our minivan, driving to dive practice or gymnastics or a friend's house, the kids call for my attention when they spot a Cybertruck. “God, it’s so ugly,” they’ll say, followed by a barb about Musk and what mainstream media outlets might call his “straight arm salute.” The other day my son asked me if Grok was still talking like Hitler. They know what’s up.
My wife and I have tried our best to serve as in-person counter-programming to the capitalist propaganda that will surround our kids for their entire lives, just as it surrounded us during childhood and adolescence. Everywhere they look, actually wealthy people or folks pretending to be rich for social media clout are selling them a way to live. You can be like me if you buy this product, or look this way, or eat and drink these things, or manipulate your body to achieve a look deemed worthy and lovable by those with oceans of money and the power that comes with it. We try – in ways both subtle and less-than-subtle – to tell our children that they are being sold a bill of goods by the people on TV and social media made perfect through AI programs that rid them of every blemish, of every imperfection – the stuff of poor folks. My daughter was aghast to find out that social media influencers rent kitchens to bake various desserts to avoid the messiness of their home kitchens (my kids don’t have any access to social media and probably won’t until they’re 18. I’d like to block the brain poison for as long as possible). She was speechless when we showed her a picture of an Instagram "beauty influencer" who showed her followers a real selfie compared to the massively airbrushed version she uses for social media posts.
This shit will fuck up your kids.
My kids and your kids are going to live through catastrophic economic times. There’s no way around it. Every underlying economic indicator says we're headed toward calamity. Whether that calamity is ninety days away or five years away, I don't know. No one seems to know until it happens, until the shit collides with the fan blades and we're all covered in feces. But it will come, and it will be destructive (my non-doomer take: Out of this destruction can come rebirth). For a decade and a half we’ve lived under zombie capitalism, a dead system kept alive by people unwilling to even acknowledge the necessary fundamental changes that have to happen if we are ever to have a sustainable economy that won’t succumb to every shock created by the vampires with their fangs sunk into us. Our economic system is dead. We pretend it isn't.
Perhaps people don't understand the intricate dynamics of capitalism like economists who are nose-deep in theory. Maybe they can't speak articulately about what troubles them about The System and all its inhumanity. But they know, as the late British journalist and activist Chris Harman wrote shortly after the 2008-2009 financial collapse, that it is "human labour that has produced new wealth," and that "under capitalism that wealth was turned into a monster dominating them, demanding to be fed by ever more labor." The monster can never be satiated. If it is not adequately fed, people will die: That's the monster's threat, the basis of the modern economy.
"The rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer, since in fact the commodities which become the means of domination over the worker are the products of the production process," said Karl Marx, who was Right About Everything.
American political normies – for whom Marx's name is something akin to a slur – might not grasp the Marxist critique of capitalism intellectually because they likely haven't been exposed to that style of economic analysis, or have been told it's faulty or maybe even evil. They feel Marxism in their bones though. They know something isn't right. This can't be the way we were meant to live. The stories about capitalism being the natural order of things doesn't feel right for those being ground to dust in an era of insidious capitalist enclosure in which the system absorbs parts of human existence that were once free and offers it back to us at a price. It's a thing you can feel more than you can think. For some, this feeling in their marrow – so persistent, so wearying – turns them toward fascism, which uses their confusion and anger and desire for revolution in bad faith. For others, it's a numbing balm. We'd rather keep scrolling and keep watching excellent TV shows than to grapple with what we feel in our bones.
We saw just how radicalized otherwise normal Americans had become in these late stages of capitalism when a healthcare CEO was gunned down last winter. The anger is real and the steam collecting under the surface of an exploited and exhausted populace is going to pour out one way or another; the ruling class will have its choice as to whether this steam releases all at once or slowly and controlled. The steam will manifest in unimaginable ways during my children’s lives, both in political movements and directionless violence that comes when people have been stripped of all recourse. The need for endless capitalist expansion is slowly destroying safeguards against child labor exploitation that have stood strong for nearly a century. Understanding economic fury and capitalist exploitation and alienation, I think, is going to be important for the younger zoomers and Gen Alpha. Today we are ruled by a radicalized political party that has converted our collective steam into a fascist movement that has devoured everything in its path and destroyed any pretense of systematic guardrails for American democracy. Our only other major political party has mostly resorted to ignoring the steam and praying it will go away on its own.
Thankfully, the parents of today's children are millennials, who came of age in the fire of worldwide economic collapse, and are better for it. We've had our noses pressed into the rot at the core of the system. We've seen the maggots up close.
Denny Carter
My son had a Shark Tank phase a while back. We’d watch jittery entrepreneurs come before the panel of surgically altered billionaire sharks and beg for their money and support. They’d smile through the pain of humiliation, as the sharks always wanted these folks to know who was in charge, who knew best, who had the Real Money here. The whole undignified display turned me off. These people – with far more money than any human should be allowed to have – demanding a chunk of someone’s company in exchange for a meager cash infusion – it was gross. My son thought so too. “Why are they treating them like that?” he’d ask as the sharks belittled contestants so consumed by anxiety I thought they might keel over on set.
After watching Mark Cuban and his ever-changing face and hairline on Shark Tank, I wasn’t surprised when I recently saw him urging American liberals to get on their knees before somewhat less fascist billionaires if they really want to break the country’s MAGA curse. These people believe they are gods sent to rule us all because they made one smart investment decades ago, maybe because they gave some cash to a nerd in his dad’s garage who created a fun little technology, got insanely rich, exercised until they had six-pack abs, then decided the entire human race needed to be subjugated and replaced by robots.
I have told my son that there are no good billionaires. This didn't sit well with him. He responded by asking if any billionaires gave money to Democrats. I said yes, they do. Does that mean Democrats are bad, he asked. Some of them are, I said. I tried to explain what it meant to be compromised; I’m not sure it resonated. Kids want good guys and bad guys, they want a world that can be easily understood. So do I, come to think of it.
That my kids were playacting rich people was viscerally horrifying in one way. I’d much rather them playact super heroes of aliens or robots or whatever kids do. I thought back to my childhood and a game – we called it “army” – in which my brother, our friends, and I would play as renegade soldiers saving the world one blood-soaked mission at a time. My name was Viper. I was half man, half cyborg after surviving an explosion somewhere in Russia (where else?). It was only the other day that I remembered Viper was independently wealthy, like Batman. How else was Viper going to afford to upkeep for his half-robot body and all his advanced weapons? I had to be rich. It opened up more scenarios, more possibilities, because money does that. Being a working class hero is no fun.
That my kids, playing one-on-one Monopoly during a lazy summer break evening, changed their voices and demeanor to be less expressive, duller, in their playacting of rich folks was, in hindsight, heartening. Their version of the rich was emotionless, less human than human. Their faces were set to a stern and joyless non-smile. They were dressed fancy and looked miserable, the way rich people do. I didn't mind that so much.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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