“And for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
-William Gibson, Count Zero
My favorite author was on top of it forty years ago. He’s not the least bit wrong, either. If you look at the venture capitalists of Silly Con Valley over the last twenty years, the transformation is insane. I don’t think it’s an accident that at the core of the cohort are a bunch of white Africans who came through Stanford in the 1980s and 90s: the mental orientation is “entitled colonizer”: we are here to bring the light of our civilzation to you benighted abroginals, and your only appropriate response is subservient gratitude. From Peter Thel’s armada of Stanfurd undergrad blood boys, to Y Combinator as the new credential, to the “old dude hanging around the high school” vibe that Theo Baker’s outstanding book skewers in “How To Rule The World”, to the arrogance and inevitablity of “A.I.” and the demand that “it will” be treated as the equivalent of “it already can” – these are people who have enough money to foist their worldview on a world that has little opportunity to push back. There is an assumption that they are entitled to purchase their own government, coin their own money, carve out their own cities or states (Tim Draper will not be happy until California is in pieces and one of them is an autunomous 415/650) – that the world is obliged to conform to their demands.
And they can get away with it, because they have money. Lots and lots of money. Mostly through the circular dealing of passing it among themselves, investing in one another’s projects at grotesquely inflated valuations that then make their own holdings worth even more. Phony Stark himself made most of his money on government subsidies, used it to buy himself Twitter at an excessive price, and then have Twitter acquired by SpaceX to give himself another source of phony money with a government backstop. If it weren’t for Uncle Sucker, Elon Musk would be the most obnoxious has-been around the braai in Jo’Burg. As it is, he’s the bankroll of white supremacy around the world. It’s not a coincidence that white South Africans and Indian Brahmins are overrepresented in the VC class, because the superiority oozes out of them all.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. We were supposed to be working twenty-hour weeks by now. We certainly weren’t meant to be working twelve hour days six days a week, like the VC masters demand is necessary to stay ahead of “the Chinese menace”. Instead, the productivity gains of the last forty years have flowed uphill, and Ed Earl Brown is doing about like he did when he entered the workforce. Old-timers grouse that a homeless guy has a cellphone, when that phone’s service costs 20% of what a landline used to, or that their blue-haired grandkids have a 65” television when it costs a fraction in real dollars of what that wooden console set cost in 1984. Meanwhile, college tuition that once could be paid with minimum wage for 20 hours a week now means starting work with $100,000 in debt – but if you don’t take on the burden, you’re not allowed to have a job that offers you the carrot of eventually paying it off. Meanwhile, we’re being told that AI will replace everything except the most senior people – when the truth of the matter is, your garden-variety CxO could be replaced by AI much quicker than your typical junior developer. And the COVID-19 pandemic showed us who the essential workers really are – for the most part, they’re the people with their name on the front of their shirts. AI isn’t going to repair your toilet on Christmas Eve, or change the oil in your hypercar, or actually flip the burgers on the griddle. But the Eloi are convinced that they can abstract the Morlocks away, that the actual labor that makes things possible is fully fungible – as the word goes, unskilled.
The problem is, that kind of money buys you freedom from consequences. If your new company turns out to be shit, so what? Someone else will pick up the pieces, you just lost a bunch of funny money, you have plenty more. The investors who bankrolled you can spare the cash. Or maybe they can’t, but that’s their lookout. We have a class of people with wealth and power who have no fear of God, of the guillotine, of confiscatory top marginal rates, that someday the remaining 99% will realize that the 1% have all the stuff, and if they ever want any stuff, they have to take it from the 1%. And we owe it to that 1% to protect them from themselves. And the easiest way to do that will simply be to say that we’re taxing wealth, and as soon as you’re a billionaire, we’re going to take everything over a billion. Everything. If you don’t want to lose it, better start giving it away quick. In the golden age of the 1950s that the white supremacists want to return to, 1/3 of workers were in a union and the top marginal rate was 91%. Bet. If you want to bring back the old days, we aren’t starting with segregation or male chauvanism, we’re starting with that.
It’s past time to make being a billionaire a capital crime. If you want to live, you can’t take it with you.