Autophagy among the Rich

The meaning is not obvious, and perhaps we do not need, as of now, to know what it means. And yet, Joel Kotkin is right to bring it to our attention. That is,  he points out that today’s young billionaires, especially the Silicon Valley cohort, tend largely to support radical leftist causes. 

They are all-in in the war against the weather, in the pursuit of racial equity and the embrace of gender ideology. 

The annual clown show at Davos epitomises how today, the global elites have embraced an unholy trinity of ‘progressive’ doctrines: climate-change apocalypticism, a belief in systemic racism and racial ‘equity’, and radical gender ideology. The super-rich hope that by genuflecting to these causes, they can buy themselves political protection and fend off the activists lurking in the ranks of their own companies. Yet, in the long run, this could end up fuelling their demise.

Kotkin suggests that they are simply buying political protection. They feel threatened by the radical left, the revolutionary bands who are inclined to confiscate their wealth. So, they finance the pet causes of the left, hoping that these rebels will leave them alone.

Another possible explanation is this: these billionaires do not consider themselves to be predatory capitalists, exploiters of the poor working class. They aspire to become part of an intellectual elite, a guardian class of philosopher kings, running, not just their businesses, but the world entire.

Be that as it may, Kotkin points out that these tech companies are basically monopolies. They do not have real competition:

Once the vaunted centre of grassroots entrepreneurialism, a lack of antitrust measures from both Republicans and Democrats has allowed technology companies to morph into quasi-monopolies. Google controls over 90 per cent of the search-engine market; Microsoft owns over 74 per cent of computer-operating-system software; Amazon has nearly half of the US online retail market share and a significant proportion of cloud computing; Google and Apple together account for 90 per cent of smartphone operating systems.

And, they have taken over the media and non-profits:

Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple largely not only control the biggest platforms, but have also taken direct ownership of movie studios, newspapers and magazines. All these outlets, along with the AI models these firms produce, tend to reflect the worldview of the tech oligopoly.

In the US, non-profits’ assets have grown by a factor of 12 since 1980. In 2016, non-profits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting over 5.7 per cent of the US economy.

Such immense market power encourages executives not to take risks and innovate, but rather to consolidate their dominance by acquiring smaller competitors. Amazon, Meta and Google now account for two-thirds of all online-advertising revenues, which now represent the majority of all ad sales. These oligopolies also seem poised to dominate emerging technologies, from cloud services and underwater fibre-optic cables to AI.

But with the managerial revolution of the 1950s, the nature of executive elites changed. As sociologist Daniel Bell first identified half a century ago, business leaders were no longer upstarts and thus the natural opponents of state power. Instead, they reflected a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, a worldview which transformed the foundations of middle-class culture. The goal of this new executive class, as Bell saw it, was not so much building great companies, but gaining accolades from their peers, the press and the public – a trend also set out in Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book, The Third Wave.

Gaining accolades-- this suggests that these predators really want to be worshiped and adored. They do not want to innovate and to build. And they do not want to be respected for what they have accomplished. 

They want to maintain their position and their power by having monopoly control over information:

Of course, there’s nothing new about business magnates seeking control of information, but rarely in history have they shown such fealty to a common perspective. Today, outside of Rupert Murdoch’s news empire, upon which the sun will inevitably set, virtually all the leading oligarchs lean toward the Democratic Party (ironic, given that it was once the less receptive party to corporate power). Tech companies played a major role in the election of Joe Biden in 2020 and also helped finance the Democrats’ remarkably good showing in November’s Midterm elections. Though many of these donations are claimed to be earmarked for ‘non-partisan’ organisations – such as the $300million spent in 2020 by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife – post-election analysis has found that they were ‘distributed on a partisan basis that favoured Democrats’. In 2020, five of the top eight donors to Joe Biden came from tech firms.

The new oligarchs also exercise their power and influence by funding non-profits:

The primary means for oligarchic control is not campaign contributions, however. Instead, many gain influence from funding non-profits, which espouse selfless rhetoric even as they push their funders’ own personal agendas and interests. In the US, non-profits’ assets have grown by a factor of 12 since 1980. In 2016, non-profits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting over 5.7 per cent of the US economy.

Whether it’s the wives of the oligarchs or their heirs and heiresses, the people who are inheriting these fortunes do not know what it was like to produce them. They were not business people and did not work their way to the top. So, they do not know what it is like to work for a living. They are imbued with values that are more congenial to religions, that is, values like charity, and are happy to gain influence by giving money away. And yet, they must, above all else, want to hide the fact that they are useless parasites. They will go to great lengths to ensure that people do not discover their truth:

Born into the oligarchy rather than working their way to the top, these young trust-funders are not worried if their activities bother customers or even undermine the businesses that created their fortunes.

Many hope to fund a work-free world powered by technology and financed by the oligarchs’ lucre. This leftist dystopia will certainly not herald a bright future for the masses, but for the witless billionaires encouraging it, it does have a ring of historic justice.