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Stories Chosen For You
Why tech billionaires are actually dumber than you think
October 02, 2022
It turns out that many of today’s billionaires are selfish, lonely men fantasizing about how they will survive the end times they have played a part in creating.
In mid-September, for just a few days, Indian industrialist Gautam Adani entered the ranks of the top three richest people on earth as per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. It was the first time an Indian, or, for that matter, an Asian, had enjoyed such a distinction. South Asians in my circle of family and friends felt excited at the prospect that a man who looked like us had entered such rarefied ranks.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Adani was deemed the second richest person, even richer than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos! A Times of India profile fawningly quoted him relaying his thought process in the early days of his rags-to-riches story. “‘Dreams were infinite but finances finite,’ he says with engaging frankness,” according to the profile. There was no mention of the serious accusations he faces of corruption and diverting money into offshore tax havens, or of the entire website, AdaniWatch, devoted to investigating his dirty deeds.
Adani made his money, in part, by investing in digital services, leading one economist to say, “Wherever there is a futuristic business in India, I think… [Adani] has a stronghold.”
The moment of pride that Indians felt in such an achievement by one of their own was short-lived. Quickly Adani slipped from second richest to third richest, and, as of this writing, is in the number four slot on a list dominated by people who have made money from the digital technology revolution.
In fact, ranking multibillionaires is a meaningless exercise that obscures the absurdity of their wealth. This year alone, a number of tech billionaires on Bloomberg’s list lost hundreds of billions of dollars as the gains they made during the early years of the pandemic were wiped out because of a volatile stock market. But, as Whizy Kim of Vox points out, whether or not they’re losing money or giving it away—as Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has been doing—their wealth remains insanely high, and most are worth more today than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
What are they doing with all this wealth?
It turns out that many are quietly plotting their own survival against our demise. Douglas Rushkoff, podcaster, founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism, and fellow at the Institute for the Future, has written a book about this bizarre phenomenon, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
In an interview, Rushkoff explains that billionaires worry about the end of humanity just like the rest of us. They fear catastrophic climate change or the next pandemic. And, they know their money will likely be of little value when civilizations decline. “How do I maintain control over my Navy Seal security guards once my money is worthless?” is a question that Rushkoff says many of the world’s wealthiest people want to know the answer to.
He knows they ask such questions because he was invited to give private lectures by those who think his expertise in digital technology gives him unique insight into the future. But Rushkoff was quietly studying them instead and has few flattering things to say about these wielders of economic power.
“How is it that the wealthiest and most powerful people I’d ever been in the same room with see themselves as utterly powerless to affect the future?” he asks. It seems as though “the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable calamity and then just, you know, hang on for dear life.”
Rushkoff explores this tech billionaire “mindset” that he says has resulted in a generation of people who are “almost comedic monsters, who really mean to leave us all behind.” Adani is a perfect example of this, having invested in the very fossil fuels that are destroying our planet. He has large holdings in Australia’s coal mining industry and has sparked a massive grassroots movement intent on stopping him.
The admiration that some Indians feel for Adani’s ascension on Bloomberg’s list of billionaires is based on an assumption of cleverness. Surely, he must be one of the smartest people in the world in order to be one of the richest? Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man by far (with twice as much wealth as Bezos), has enjoyed such a reputation for years.
Those who are invested in the idea of merit-based capitalism can justify the unimaginable wealth of the world’s richest people only by assuming they are intelligent enough to deserve it.
This is a façade. Rather than smarts, the wealthiest people on the planet appear to be rather small-minded idiot savants who share a common disdain for the rest of us.
After being around tech billionaires in private, Rushkoff concludes that they are invested in “this notion that they really can, like puppeteers, kind of control society from one level above,” and that this approach is “different than the era of Alexander the Great, or Caesar.” If the question that vexes them most of all is how, in a disastrous future, will they control the guards they hire to protect their hoardings, then our economic system is a farce.
“Even if we call them genius technologists, most of them were plucked from college when they were freshmen,” says Rushkoff. “They came up with some idea in their dorm room before they’d taken history, or economics, or ethics, or philosophy” classes, and so they lack the wisdom needed to oversee their own perverse amounts of wealth.
Having spent time with many tech billionaires, Rushkoff worries that “their education about the future comes from zombie movies and science fiction shows.”
Billionaires are not simply drawing their wealth from a vacuum. According to data from the World Economic Forum, “the world’s richest have captured a disproportionate share of global wealth over recent decades.” This means that, if you were rich to begin with a decade or two ago, you are likely to have seen your wealth multiply by a greater amount than middle-class or lower-income people.
Not only are tech billionaires undeserving of their wealth, but they also are fleecing the rest of us—and fantasizing about hoarding that wealth in the worst-case scenarios while the rest of humanity struggles to survive.
The danger is that if society valorizes such (mostly) men, we are in danger of internalizing their childish, selfish mindset and giving up on solving the climate crisis or building resiliency on a mass scale.
Instead of relating to them, we ought to feel sorry for a group of people so cut off from humanity that their vision of the future is a very lonely one.
“Let’s look at these tech-bro billionaire lunatics. Let’s laugh at what they’re doing… so they look small rather than big,” says Rushkoff. He thinks it is critical to adopt the perspective that “the disaster they’re so afraid of looks entirely manageable by more reasonable people who are willing just to help each other out.”
Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.
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Black voters in Herschel Walker's Georgia hometown want nothing to do with his Senate run
October 02, 2022
In a New York Times deep dive into the life of Herschel Walker growing up in Wrightsville, Georgia, Black locals who sat down with the Times' John Branch shrugged off his run for a seat in the U.S. Senate and stated they have no desire to see the hometown hero win in November.
With Walker earning the Republican Party nod to take on incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), the report notes that polling since June have shown that the former University of Georgia football star and Heisman Trophy winner has made little inroads with Black voters with the report noting Walker is "attracting less than 10 percent of Black voters."
That apathy towards Walker's Senate run also extends to his hometown.
"The race for a critical Senate seat was in full motion by midsummer, but there were just a few Herschel Walker campaign signs sprinkled around his hometown," Branch wrote with Walker's former football coach Curtis Dixon explaining, "All those campaign materials were in the white community. The only other house that has a Herschel Walker poster is his family.”
RELATED: Republican Herschel Walker invokes Jesus to dismiss holding a gun to his wife’s head
For his report, Branch explained he sat down with nine Black voters -- none of whom plan to vote for the Republican candidate.
"In a predominantly Black neighborhood of small homes about a block from where Mr. Walker went to high school, nine people, including a man who said he was Mr. Walker’s cousin, gathered on a steamy Saturday in July to eat and talk in the shade. No one planned to vote for Mr. Walker. Most scoffed at the thought," he reported.
Retired teacher Alice Pierce claimed she knows Walker's mother and liked the family before admitting, "But I’m not going to vote for him, I’ll be honest with you."
"Fearful of repercussions in a small town, and out of respect for members of the Walker family who still live in the area, many Black residents in Wrightsville spoke only under the condition of anonymity," the Times report states. "One woman, taking a break from mowing her lawn, said Mr. Walker would be in over his head as mayor of Wrightsville. 'He’s famous to some people, because of football,' she said. 'But he’s just Herschel Walker to me.'"
“Herschel’s not getting the Black vote because Herschel forgot where he came from,” former Walker coach Dixon explained. “He’s not part of the Black community.”
Branch added, "Such feelings toward Mr. Walker have been present for decades. They are flowering ahead of November’s elections."
You can read more here.
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After a week of market turmoil, dismal headlines and disastrous polls, British Prime Minister Liz Truss faces a TV grilling Sunday at the start of her restive Conservative party's annual conference.
Less than a month into the job, the new Tory leader will sit down with the BBC in Birmingham, where the party is kicking off its four-day gathering, and is expected to again defend her controversial economic plans.
Opposition parties, much of the public and even Conservative MPs -- notably backers of her defeated leadership rival Rishi Sunak -- are aghast at the debt-fueled proposals to cut taxes unveiled by Truss and finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng.
Markets tanked in response to the package, and the Bank of England staged an emergency intervention to bail out embattled pension funds, setting the stage for a difficult few days in Birmingham.
Breaking nearly a week of silence, Truss held a round of broadcast interviews with regional BBC stations on Thursday -- when her awkward pauses generated almost as many headlines as her defense of the plan.
She then followed up with further interviews and a newspaper article Friday in which she vowed to press on with the policies but get "an iron grip" on public finances.
"I am going to do things differently. It involves difficult decisions and does involve disruption in the short term," she wrote in The Sun tabloid.
"Not everyone will like what we are doing, but I want to reassure the public that the government has a clear plan that I believe is right for the country."
Sunday's live TV appearance is her first before a national UK audience since Kwarteng unveiled the contentious proposals on September 23, and comes after a raft of polls showed a dramatic slump for her party.
One poll Friday by YouGov found that 51 percent of Britons think that Truss should resign -- and 54 percent want Kwarteng to go.
Existential threat?
Several other polls in recent days showed the opposition Labour party with mammoth leads of up to 33 points over the Conservatives -- its biggest since the heyday of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair in the late 1990s.
Echoing Blair, Labour leader Keir Starmer says that his party now represents mainstream UK voters, and has demanded Truss recall parliament rather than press ahead with her conference.
As it is, both Sunak and former prime minister Boris Johnson are reportedly staying away from Birmingham.
But Truss will have plenty of critics lying in wait at what the Tories bill as Europe's largest annual political event.
Protesters angry at rising energy bills and the government's handling of the worsening cost-of-living crisis massed in London and Birmingham Saturday, with more demonstrations planned for the start of the Tory conference Sunday.
Kwarteng is due to address the party's grassroots on Monday, before Truss closes the gathering with the leader's keynote speech on Wednesday.
Although both have ruled out a U-turn on their economic package, they conceded ground Friday by allowing the Office for Budget Responsibility to send Kwarteng an initial independent costing score-card of it later next week.
The conference program has already been pared back to eliminate some of its fringe partying following the September 8 death of Queen Elizabeth II -– who appointed Truss only two days before she died.
Not that there is much to celebrate for the Tories, given their poll ratings, which have fueled speculation that Truss could face her own leadership challenge, or that she may sacrifice Kwarteng.
Many commentators are urging contrition from the duo in Birmingham, to avoid the kind of doomsday scenario laid out by senior Tory MP Charles Walker.
A general election is not due until January 2025 at the latest. But if one were held tomorrow, Walker said, "we would cease to exist as a functioning political party".
© 2022 AFP
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