It seems funny, until it isn’t. It was while reading a recent FT article about a bed, sorry, ‘sleep instrument’, costing $660,000 (yep), that I realised that the very rich don’t need a ticket on one of Elon Musk’s rockets to Mars – they are already living on a different planet. The feeling is swiftly confirmed by a glance at the same paper’s How To Spend It supplement, full of hideously expensive stuff that no one residing on planet earth would would give house room to, followed by a quick check on the internet of some of the other things that the seriously wealthy shell out for: at random, a £25,000-a-night hotel room, a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 2019 at £23,939, a Chanel handbag £3,000, or a ticket for a 2024 Taylor Swift concert costing an astonishing $58,195. WTF?
But addiction to bling in dubious taste is the least disturbing effect of extreme wealth. In a July New York Times piece headed ‘The Rich are Crazier than You and Me’, economist Paul Krugman noted the growing propensity of Silicon Valley’s billionaire tech bros to disappear down weird internet rabbit holes of their own making.
Take the sudden Valley enthusiasm for Robert Kennedy Jr as Democratic presidential candidate. Along with one or two vaguely progressive ideas (not all the suspects are far right, though many are), Kennedy harbours an impressive tally of public-health related conspiracy theories, including about Anthony Fauci and vaccines, HIV/Aids, the idea that gender dysphoria can be picked up from the water and that Prozac causes mass shootings. Jack Dorsey, founder of the app formerly known as Twitter, has endorsed him. Dorsey’s successor Musk has given him a platform on X, and others have hosted fund raisers in his name.
Another trend is what Krugman calls ‘recession and inflation trutherism’ – dogged assertion that even mildly positive news about the US economy is fake, invented to conceal the alternative reality of deepening recession. Dorsey (again) declared hyperinflationary disaster in 2021 and others, egged on by Musk, accuse the government of cooking jobs and other numbers and then quietly adjusting them downwards when no one is looking.
Where do these ideas come from? Anil Dash, himself a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and commentator, is in no doubt. ‘It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble’, he writes. ‘Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes’.
Extreme wealth plays an essential, justificatory part in this radicalisation – and, counterintuitively, renders them as manipulable as the ordinary dudes they think they no longer are. ‘Because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit,’ they push each other further and further into extreme contrarian ideas, says Dash.
In this perspective, otherwise off-the-wall ideas such as the quest for immortality, Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, Musk’s space colonisation ambitions, Peter Thiel’s Seasteading Institute, transhumanism and other manifestations of techno-utopianism take on a kind of mad logic – one of exceptionalism, impatience with restrictions on freedom to move fast and smash things, and desire for a separate world over which they can exert absolute control. It also makes sense of some apparent contradictions. Instead of preaching free markets and small government, Thiel, who passes for the billionaires’ intellectual, sees monopoly as the entrepreneur’s just reward (‘Competition is for losers’), while freedom paradoxically requires an authoritarian Trump-type state to banish liberal wokery and other tiresome hindrances to thinking the unthinkable (‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible’).
Dangerous in themselves, such beliefs have the side effect of rendering the holders liable to the ‘dictator’s dilemma’. Authoritarian regimes find it hard to generate reliable data. Like all targets-derived info, data that’s politically sensitive (ie livelihoods depend on it) will be reliably worthless (Goodhart’s Law). Censoring people, eg on social media, further obscures what’s really going on, leading to situations where accumulating discontents can erupt without warning (the Arab Spring or East Germany in 1989). As for an expression free-for-all, Musk’s X shitshow is proof that the last thing it produces is trustworthy information – and as we know from events at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, untrustworthy information in overexcitable hands is a potentially lethal weapon.
Jumpy authoritarians may be rubbing their hands at the prospect of using AI to sort the wheat from the chaff – and indeed, in combination with all-seeing surveillance, to concentrate information and power in one place in a way that dictators have always dreamed of. This is what AI pessimists like Yuval Harari believe the end of humanity looks like. Others argue strongly that that’s wrong – although their alternative outcome is not unequivocally a more positive one.
In a word, the issue is bias. AI’s ability to come up with roughly ‘right’ answers ultimately depends on having absorbed a foundation of ‘probably approximately correct knowledge’ – and that can only be produced by – yes – human beings working together in scientific or other trusted institutional endeavour. Unfortunately, rather than using curated data, large language models learn from information scraped from the entire internet, bots, trolls, fake news factories and all. Then, when people (dictators or not) start believing and acting on findings that are already unreliable, they inject a whole new level of uncertainty – ‘garbage in, garbage out’ becomes ‘garbage in, garbage out, garbage back in again’. Or, in the colourful words of activist author Cory Doctorow, ‘Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste’.
As the internet fills up with the resulting junk, approximately correct knowledge becomes an endangered species. In the torrents of manipulative fakery generated by the current surveillance capitalism regime, is it possible even to preserve the human capacity to create it? Political scientist Henry Farrell evokes a nightmare scenario in which, as software eats the world, it also consumes the structures that generate reliable human knowledge – excreting more toxic waste in its place.
If that turns out to be the case, don’t expect improvement in the terrible taste of the excessively rich any time soon. Or in their conspiracy theories and dangerous politics based on them. Or their plans for the rest of us, still living on planet earth.
Beautifully argued and written as ever Simon. As someone who hs followed the rich for the best part of three decades in compiling the Sunday Times rich list, I would concur with many of your observations. I note that your thesis is largely confined to the US billionaires – particularly the tech bros. But I would argue that in the short-term at least the British billionaires and simple multi-millionaires have had as profound a role on this side of the pond. Many of them were enthusiastic backers of Brexit and bankrolled the leave campaign despite the warnings (which sadly have become all too true) of the dreadful effect Brexit would have on the economy. Guy Hands, one of the leading City private equity players and to his eternal credit a strong critic of Brexit right from the start, put it nicely when he told one interviewer that the Brexit-backing tycoons wanted lower taxes for themselves and lower wages for everyone else. iIdon’t remember that being on the side of the Boris bus during the referendum campaign.
Vast wealth accumulation may always be with us but one can only hope that the Norwegian model prevails perhaps rather than the trans-Atlantic one. The Norwegian government publishes an annual list of the highest tax-payers which many of those at the top are quite happy to appear in. As one put it very nicely (and I paraphrase him here) he said he was quite happy to pay large amounts of tax to the government as society needed that money and had in turn given him the education and security in his day-to-day life which had enabled him to make his fortune. Would it not be great if more British and US super-rich took that line? Some do – like the London property man I know – who is rapdily spending his wealth on supporting a large number of crucial medical research programmes. On a personal note I discovered he was actually funding one of my own consultant’s research work which directly benefited my own health. More of that please.