It’s obvious, if you start to look under the hood, how the tech industry (I’ll generalize now) believes itself to be an elite, swaying people to believe them, follow them, be like them. Become a tech entrepreneur! Improve people’s lives! Save the planet!
Bill Gates funds geoengineering research to combat climate change. Jeff Bezos travels into orbit. Peter Thiel funds conservatives in the US, just like Robert Mercer.
They all want to solve problems, for themselves, for society. But mostly for themselves. One example given is The Boomer Remover, mentioned by Kevin Roose in an interview with NPR. The creators wish to rid employers of the Baby boomers, born approximaly between 1945-1965, and voilá: an app for that! Problem solved!
This problem-solving approach to issues (or non-issues) pervades much of the discourse. “Tech entrepreneurs” are gladly expressing their willingness to solve issues created by humans, be it climate, environment, jobs, health, national defence or gender. The approach perceives an issue to be solved very much like an algorithm: problem + solution = problem solved. The tech sort of way (of which I’ll write more later).
If you’ve happened to deal with humans, you might disapprove of this method of solving problems. Humans are often irrational and do not always follow logic procedures, like symbols in a mathematical formulae. A world filled with individual humans and groups of humans is seldom predictable in all ways.
Anand Giridharadas discusses power in the hands of the public versus tech entrepreneurs (or rich people in general): there’s a very tangible difference if a city, through politics, decides to do something (usually called democracy), and some rich people deciding what happens in the city (usually called plutocracy).
I’d rather the city council makes decisions on childcare than Elon Musk, Daniel Ek or Notch. Most likely the members of the city council know my city, what childcare is, the economics behind childcare and the city in total, many of them are aware of the diverse lives of parents, public transports, working hours and so on. Most likely the rich kids are no longer aware of life as an ordinary citizen. Furthermore, decisions by the city council are more transparent and can be appealed. Neither of those apply to the rich kids’ decisions.
And you might have noticed that the absolute majority of the tech names (the aforementioned, and Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook, the cadre of Steves, Bills and Pauls, Sam Altman, to name but a few) are all men. White men. So, when they wish to solve problem they themselves see, their solutions are usually tech-y.
Molly Smith follows blockchain and crypto on her website Web3 is Going Just Great. She summarises (some of) the amounts lost in events related to the so called Web 3.0: scams, fraud, hacks, bankruptcies and the like. Plenty of the people (men) behind these cryptocurrencies are facing jail for various reasons. First, they claim to help people getting rich. Second, they (try to) run away with amassed sums of money from rather unsuspecting, gullible or desperate people. Dan Olson created a video on YouTube on cryptocurrency, and discussed parts of it with Ezra Klein (you can also listen to Molly here). One very thoughtful and valid point Dan makes is how regular people are watching a decline in income versus the lives and opportunities of rich people. They can’t perceive themselves as rich, unless they risk their money (and a big portion of luck) on the stock market, the real estate market or… cryptocurrency! They might have one chance in 50.000, but some people will take the chance/risk, since it’s their only way out of poverty or a poor pension. In the tech community, some people are thus willing to satisfy this demand.
NFT, that’s another side of the coin. When it first appeared in the media I got flashbacks from the years around 2000, when tech entrepreneurs could pitch virtually any idea and receive money, and 2006-2007, when the financial world seemed on fire with a savings rate on almost 5 %, Icelandic banks (with no money) being hailed as financial vikings. And later it all burned. When the hype is too intense, it tends to border on fantasies on what’s pausible, removing the boundaries on what’s possible. And then things crash. In May 2021 I read this often-cited article about the §2 billion deli. Matt Levine, working in the financial sector, couldn’t grasp how a simple deli in New Jersey was worth several billion dollars. Too many threads like these, ordinary people buying virtual receipts on things they can’t own for several § 100.000, and companies being hailed for doing things that aren’t even contributing to production, in the weave and you know things are spiralling out of control.
The space contest. I cannot remember who said it or where I heard it (Kate Crawford on a podcast with Taylor Owen, revised 2023-08-11), but the perspective is highly relevant (perhaps not so much today, after the tech business has suffered post-covid, as one year ago). Markets can saturated, demand dropping, so where to next? Space. Direct resources and time to point out space as the next reliable frontier. Humans must go further, exploring the Solar system for real. Why? Because money can be made out of false narratives and hopes of… what? A better future? Because demand is dropping and markets are saturated, (some people in) the tech business needs a new “frontier” in order to scam people even more. Why not invest in something that could potentially be worth x trillion dollars? You could be much richer, if you strike the motherloard, than cryptocurrency, real estate or the stock market. Not to mention work. That’s never going go pay off. This is why Jeff Bezos squeezes himself into a little rocket.
Seen in this light, Bill Gates seems different, the way he actually accepts taxation, donates money for good causes globally, and publically debate. Personally, I believe geoengineering is extremely dangerous, but research is research and necessarily not applied. I also believe rich people should be able to debate societal issues, instead of hiding or pretending they are contributing to solving issues simply because they create an app. The Boomer Remover, the cryptocurrency, the NFT market, the space contest – they’re all scams and shams without true purposes beside making the owners rich and us poor.