I keep seeing these articles..."Zuckerberg new justice reform"..."Mark Cuban new transparent drug company"..."IKEA saves 11,000 acres from development"
This really is neo-feudalism, isn't it? We've let this small group of people and businesses accumulate all the capital and power, and now we are beholden to their benevolence to see any meaningful progress or change.
Pick you fief. Do you rely on Elon Musk for protection and security, or do you go to the barony of Zuckerberg?
Some people like to do good. In fact, most people like to do good.
Ask any kid what they want to be when they grow up and no one will say "I want to become a scary ogre".
I want to do good, and most likely you want too. Zuckerberg and Musk and Cuban, apart from their money, are people like me and you. They don't wake up in the morning and think "how can I be a scary ogre today". They want to do good, and they happen to have the money to do it.
Because the idea of "good" is can be extremely subjective and might also include things like a tougher IP regime[1], invasion of foreign countries[2], or a drug war[3]. With enough money/influence you can get both major parties to agree with your priorities effectively removing the voters' control of their own country.
> "The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations."
I can't even tell if you're being sarcastic or what...
Yes, a lot of people like to do good.
On the other hand, we've seen from Zuckerberg specifically - not a generic random person - these power moves for as long as he's been on the radar. If you believe Zuckerberg is motivated by wanting to do good, you haven't been paying attention.
You are making an argument based on the personal attitudes of individual billionaires while OP is making a structural argument. So you are not really responding to them.
Further to the point, the personalities and temperaments of people is only weakly correlated with their moral quality, which is what you’re talking about when you talk about “doing good”. For example, many well meaning people who “like to do good” nonetheless participate in factory farming, which is a moral atrocity that subjects tens of billions of animals to suffering and death per year. If you don’t like the animal rights example, take the example of all the “like to do-gooders” who supported Jim Crow.
I think the problem here is that we moved away from Monarchies/Feudalism for a reason. If we let single people or families completely control the direction of legislation and justice systems, at some point it will go terribly wrong. Sure right now, Zuckerberg or Musk or Cuban, might be cool dudes with the right intentions and making great things, but what happens when they're gone? Who's going to take control of all that wealth and power?
Democratic states aren't perfect, but at least there are fail safes against the wrong people having power at the wrong time. The people supposedly all collectively own the wealth and direction of a state, so a single person can never be that powerful. Authoritarianism or dictatorships will always feel appealing in the face of dysfunctional governments, because there is always someone who is actually good at they do, and effects real change (if you disregard all the usual xenophobia/populism/oppression). In this case, you can see people saying "government is not doing anything about this, so why shouldn't these people fix it". Power eventually corrupts, if not the person then its descendants, at some point it goes terribly wrong and itends up tearing a society apart. This has happened pretty much everywhere.
Also the level of wealth some people are accumulating right now is absolutely unheard of in history. You can now "easily" have a business that reaches billions of people from your basement. If this exponential accumulation of wealth continues, government as we know it will become obsolete, and democracy will stop functioning because some people just have too much lobbying power.
Because Zuck's version of 'good' includes building a platform optimized exactly for fomenting discord and hatred in order to create ad revenue and bring in eye balls and clicks. It's a part of the survielence economy and has been weaponized in countless ways, Zuck may not be the one building it any more, he has many of you do that for him.
But it stands to reason that of those 3 you listed you have a very clear 'orge' in the bunch.
What good has he done for Society over all exactly?
Even with unfathomable wealth all he seems to be responsible for is creating a greater divide and discord amongst people and that help promote absurd conspiracies and crate time-wasting habits especially so in developing countries as his platform is what most associate with what the 'internet' as they cannot afford to browse anything else once they have access to it via FB enabled smart phones.
I'm glad SpaceX had his satellite blow up on the launch pad!
God only knows what horrible things would be possible had it actually made it into orbit.
As for Mark Cuban, I'm on the fence but his talk and backing of Andrew Yang makes me think he isn't an ogre, but Zuckerburg certainly is, willing or not at this point.
A CEO picks a cause for his philanthropy arm, a CEO starts a new company and a company invests in real estate. Whether you believe their intentions or not, its nothing really new, we just have made celebrities out of CEOs now. We have always had big corps with power and influence but now we just personify and drive the admiration/hatred to the one person heading it instead of the entire company. The more such headlines stimulate you, the more headlines you see like this because you are more likely to click on it.
The modern corporation appeared when the enlightenment occurred. Before then everyone was at the whim of kings. I don’t think arguing the pre-corporation world was somehow a better place has much merit.
That’s not really a good understanding of the European world pre-enlightenment. Kings were not Hobbesian all-powerful monarchs, nor were they the only source of power.
It is. And some people like to point out these exceptions as "see, billionaires CAN be good" and draw the conclusion that "it's ok to have billionaires".
But if you take a step back and look at a society-level structure, it's pretty obvious that wealth inequality is a NET NEGATIVE.
Smaller middle-class = unhealthy economy, and power concentration into the largest mega-corps that abuse anyone and everyone they can abuse to increase their quarterly results by another buck.
That's not good for the consumer nor employees. What we should strive for is having a ton of smaller companies provide a ton of competition among each other, low prices for consumers, and a large variety of employers in the job market. Large corps are a net negative in a society.
"But if Apple and Google make a ton of money, so will their employees!" Except we have PROOF that these companies made deals with each other to not compete for their own employees and keep salaries from increasing too much.
It's not just me saying this. Multiple studies have shown that a stronger middle-class equals a healthier and more resilient economy. And we have proof from a century of anti-trust cases that Big Corps abuse smaller competition, consumers, and employees.
I hear this argument a lot, and I'm confused. What's the alternative here? The billions these people have literally wouldn't exist if it weren't for them. iPhones and social networks and electric cars don't spontaneously materialize themselves.
So, if "neo feudalism" isn't your cup of tea, what would be? Actual feudalism?
Well all these 'neo-feudalists' don't seem to be waging lobbying campaigns to get the money out of politics, right? That would be paying to reduce their own power.
> Agreed, but sounds like the issue is the politicians and the government, not rich people.
Are we going to pretend that a nation-state's intelligence agency(ies) aren't some of FB's biggest clients? Are you not aware how the 5-Eyes program works at all?
FB gladly hand over the details of those Q-anon imbeciles on their platform with no resistance, they then proceeded to censor and de-platform anyone who didn't follow the narrative and even went after people who had nothing to do with politics in the last wave of bans.
And you don't think these 'rich people' aren't beholden to the State and its surveillance economy, of which they are just one part of the apparatus?
Corruption begets corruption: and many of these rich people (specifically CEOs of FAANG) are not without blood on their hands, playing 'whose worse' is like saying the one to actually kill Ceaser was the last to deliver the final blow on the Senate floor as he laid in a pool of his own blood. (Ceaser was a tyrant and deserved to die, just so its clear.)
I would argue the very Nation-State model is to blame, its a total cesspool; and this type of cronyism is prevalent in this model which rewarded a few (like, but limited, to Zuck) who acquiesced when they State showed up with bags of money for them to play along for these exact events.
Here's a quote from George Carlin that's perhaps applicable here -
“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.”
What about a stronger social and welfare state, like in some progressive European countries? But as soon as Americans hear "social" they think of communist Russia and North Korea, so you can't even have that conversation.
It’s unclear to me how having a welfare state makes wealth and political power less centralized. I think you’d just need massive decentralization of finance and political power, full stop.
That's just feudalism with extra steps, because that person on welfare is not given the same representation as a multi-billionaire with lobbying power.
Money needs to go back into the system from the bottom. The current system is as if you only allowed blood to circulate to the head and not back.
Those things probably could still exist if there was a cap on earnings, would there really be none of those things if you couldn't earn more than 100 million.
Obviously I am talking about net assets and money, not just "salary".
>The billions these people have literally wouldn't exist if it weren't for them.
Says who? To me it seems far more likely that if Zuckerberg's Facebook never struck it big, that Myspace Tom or some other social media company owner would be worth a similar amount instead.
> I hear this argument a lot, and I'm confused. What's the alternative here? The billions these people have literally wouldn't exist if it weren't for them. iPhones and social networks and electric cars don't spontaneously materialize themselves.
These things indeed don't spontaneously materialize themselves out of thin air. They materialize themselves because of the work of millions of people. The researchers and laborers that build the foundations (internet, roads) that made the innovation possible in the first place. The researchers and other companies that build the phones, social networks, electric cars, etc that these people iterated upon. The hundreds of thousands of people that work for these companies, that actually build the phones and the cars, etc.
These people created a good iteration on an existing idea and got lucky by doing it at the right place and at the right time. Surely they worked hard, and they had some positive contribution, but they did not fundamentally change the world or create billions by themselves. If Bezos hadn't build Amazon, we would have other online shops. If Zuckerberg hadn't build Facebook, we would have other social networks. If Apple hadn't made the iPhone, we would be using other smartphones.
None of these were particularly innovative - they were all iterations on existing technology that happened to capture the market mostly by luck. Society would likely not have been significantly different if any of these had not been created, we would just be using something slightly different but very similar. Why reward individuals with such tremendous power for (essentially) winning the lottery?
> The billions these people have literally wouldn't exist if it weren't for them. iPhones and social networks and electric cars don't spontaneously materialize themselves.
Why not? And more to the point: they also wouldn't have materialised without the workers who get paid less in 30 years than the CEO makes in a day. Why aren't they fairly compensated? And even more extensively: they wouldn't have materialised without the broader society, a simple word to hide "everyone that is alive or has lived before you". Amazon makes that money because it has roads to drive its deliveries on, a police to prevent theft, courts to settle disputes, and of course the power of the state is what lets them keep their private property, ultimately society provides them with relatively safe and well-fed people with money in their pockets to spend on their stuff. Without that they would have nothing.
In other words, no person is "self-made", and everyone who has achieved financial success owes a debt to society. This is not even getting into Georgist ideas that people also owe a debt to society for using "commons" such as land or natural resources or polluting.
Are there any well-known examples of billionaires being behind such initiatives while not seeking to publicise their involvement? This isn't a rhetorical question - I'm genuinely curious.
Not directly answering your question, but something I thought was relevant.
I recall some years ago, there was a movement to encourage large donors and philanthropists to make themselves more visible, rather than donating anonymously, in the believe that this would encourage other wealthy people to contribute as well, a kind of peer pressure or leading by example.
Steve Jobs was known to keep his philanthropy very private, although I'm not sure he would qualify for your bar of such initiatives, considering that (AFAIK) he didn't found or spearhead any massive progressive movements.
Part of me wonders if why these billionaires have their names on these projects is to try to buy goodwill? Rather than people just hating the rich in general, if they know that Bill Gates is donating all this money and attempting to help the less fortunate, he's slightly less of a greedy wealthy bastard? I don't see a Jeff Bezos foundation, for example.
Bill Gates has been on a PR campaign to reform his image since the late 90s. Most people today don’t seem to remember that he had an extremely negative reputation and was very unpopular.
John Rockefeller purchased an incredible amount of land for Grand Teton National Park, all under the guise of various shell companies. This is because if word got out he was trying to purchase the land, people would have raised the price.
Philips ( the former Dutch electronics giant ) actually built housing, schools and sports clubs for its employees. They were not the only ones during that era ( early last century ). These iniatives are not to be confused with company towns.
- $350m is enough to completely rewrite the policies across a large swathe of the US. The input of the public and other campaigning groups is swept away by this tsunami of money, and people are read their Zuck rights on arrest.
- $350m isn't enough to move the needle. In some ways this is a more frightening outcome, that that amount of effort - five SpaceX launches or one medium-sized company market cap - can't change a system that's entrenched against it.
- countervailing lobbying is spending another $350m in the other direction, so the needle remains unmoved.
None of these are particularly great. It's not really surprising that the average non-billionaire thinks that merely stating their case isn't enough to achieve positive change and it requires burning things down.
A billionaire using his money to make political change sounds is almost by definition anti-democratic. I don’t care if it’s for a “good cause,” which itself is a highly arguable thing.
60 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThis really is neo-feudalism, isn't it? We've let this small group of people and businesses accumulate all the capital and power, and now we are beholden to their benevolence to see any meaningful progress or change.
Pick you fief. Do you rely on Elon Musk for protection and security, or do you go to the barony of Zuckerberg?
This is miserable.
Ask any kid what they want to be when they grow up and no one will say "I want to become a scary ogre".
I want to do good, and most likely you want too. Zuckerberg and Musk and Cuban, apart from their money, are people like me and you. They don't wake up in the morning and think "how can I be a scary ogre today". They want to do good, and they happen to have the money to do it.
Why is this miserable?
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criti...
> "The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations."
[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/04/koch-senate-hawks/
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisroberts/2021/01/12/the-las...
Yes, a lot of people like to do good.
On the other hand, we've seen from Zuckerberg specifically - not a generic random person - these power moves for as long as he's been on the radar. If you believe Zuckerberg is motivated by wanting to do good, you haven't been paying attention.
If Zuckerberg cared about doing good instead of accumulating money and power he would have made a few different decision in the past.
Further to the point, the personalities and temperaments of people is only weakly correlated with their moral quality, which is what you’re talking about when you talk about “doing good”. For example, many well meaning people who “like to do good” nonetheless participate in factory farming, which is a moral atrocity that subjects tens of billions of animals to suffering and death per year. If you don’t like the animal rights example, take the example of all the “like to do-gooders” who supported Jim Crow.
Some like to be told they are doing good.
Subtle difference with big ramifications.
You arrange for a tire place to come and replace all the tires. But you leave an anonymous note. You have done good, and seek no reward.
Alternate.
You show up with a camera crew and surprise the person by giving them tires. Everyone glorifies you for your kindness.
End result is the same. Person in need has tires. Yeah.
One is a person helping others. One is helping others to help themselves to look good.
Both are accomplishing good. There maybe overlap in motive.
Both people giving have earned a reward. One of the earth, recognition and status.
The others reward is emotional and or spiritual.
Democratic states aren't perfect, but at least there are fail safes against the wrong people having power at the wrong time. The people supposedly all collectively own the wealth and direction of a state, so a single person can never be that powerful. Authoritarianism or dictatorships will always feel appealing in the face of dysfunctional governments, because there is always someone who is actually good at they do, and effects real change (if you disregard all the usual xenophobia/populism/oppression). In this case, you can see people saying "government is not doing anything about this, so why shouldn't these people fix it". Power eventually corrupts, if not the person then its descendants, at some point it goes terribly wrong and itends up tearing a society apart. This has happened pretty much everywhere.
Also the level of wealth some people are accumulating right now is absolutely unheard of in history. You can now "easily" have a business that reaches billions of people from your basement. If this exponential accumulation of wealth continues, government as we know it will become obsolete, and democracy will stop functioning because some people just have too much lobbying power.
Because Zuck's version of 'good' includes building a platform optimized exactly for fomenting discord and hatred in order to create ad revenue and bring in eye balls and clicks. It's a part of the survielence economy and has been weaponized in countless ways, Zuck may not be the one building it any more, he has many of you do that for him.
But it stands to reason that of those 3 you listed you have a very clear 'orge' in the bunch.
What good has he done for Society over all exactly?
Even with unfathomable wealth all he seems to be responsible for is creating a greater divide and discord amongst people and that help promote absurd conspiracies and crate time-wasting habits especially so in developing countries as his platform is what most associate with what the 'internet' as they cannot afford to browse anything else once they have access to it via FB enabled smart phones.
I'm glad SpaceX had his satellite blow up on the launch pad!
God only knows what horrible things would be possible had it actually made it into orbit.
As for Mark Cuban, I'm on the fence but his talk and backing of Andrew Yang makes me think he isn't an ogre, but Zuckerburg certainly is, willing or not at this point.
Trump and his supporters probably believed what he did was for the good, and many of us quite strongly disagrees.
But if you take a step back and look at a society-level structure, it's pretty obvious that wealth inequality is a NET NEGATIVE.
Smaller middle-class = unhealthy economy, and power concentration into the largest mega-corps that abuse anyone and everyone they can abuse to increase their quarterly results by another buck.
That's not good for the consumer nor employees. What we should strive for is having a ton of smaller companies provide a ton of competition among each other, low prices for consumers, and a large variety of employers in the job market. Large corps are a net negative in a society.
"But if Apple and Google make a ton of money, so will their employees!" Except we have PROOF that these companies made deals with each other to not compete for their own employees and keep salaries from increasing too much.
It's not just me saying this. Multiple studies have shown that a stronger middle-class equals a healthier and more resilient economy. And we have proof from a century of anti-trust cases that Big Corps abuse smaller competition, consumers, and employees.
So, if "neo feudalism" isn't your cup of tea, what would be? Actual feudalism?
Actual democracy would be a nice start.
Are we going to pretend that a nation-state's intelligence agency(ies) aren't some of FB's biggest clients? Are you not aware how the 5-Eyes program works at all?
FB gladly hand over the details of those Q-anon imbeciles on their platform with no resistance, they then proceeded to censor and de-platform anyone who didn't follow the narrative and even went after people who had nothing to do with politics in the last wave of bans.
And you don't think these 'rich people' aren't beholden to the State and its surveillance economy, of which they are just one part of the apparatus?
Corruption begets corruption: and many of these rich people (specifically CEOs of FAANG) are not without blood on their hands, playing 'whose worse' is like saying the one to actually kill Ceaser was the last to deliver the final blow on the Senate floor as he laid in a pool of his own blood. (Ceaser was a tyrant and deserved to die, just so its clear.)
I would argue the very Nation-State model is to blame, its a total cesspool; and this type of cronyism is prevalent in this model which rewarded a few (like, but limited, to Zuck) who acquiesced when they State showed up with bags of money for them to play along for these exact events.
“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.”
Those things probably could still exist if there was a cap on earnings, would there really be none of those things if you couldn't earn more than 100 million.
Obviously I am talking about net assets and money, not just "salary".
Says who? To me it seems far more likely that if Zuckerberg's Facebook never struck it big, that Myspace Tom or some other social media company owner would be worth a similar amount instead.
These things indeed don't spontaneously materialize themselves out of thin air. They materialize themselves because of the work of millions of people. The researchers and laborers that build the foundations (internet, roads) that made the innovation possible in the first place. The researchers and other companies that build the phones, social networks, electric cars, etc that these people iterated upon. The hundreds of thousands of people that work for these companies, that actually build the phones and the cars, etc.
These people created a good iteration on an existing idea and got lucky by doing it at the right place and at the right time. Surely they worked hard, and they had some positive contribution, but they did not fundamentally change the world or create billions by themselves. If Bezos hadn't build Amazon, we would have other online shops. If Zuckerberg hadn't build Facebook, we would have other social networks. If Apple hadn't made the iPhone, we would be using other smartphones.
None of these were particularly innovative - they were all iterations on existing technology that happened to capture the market mostly by luck. Society would likely not have been significantly different if any of these had not been created, we would just be using something slightly different but very similar. Why reward individuals with such tremendous power for (essentially) winning the lottery?
Why not? And more to the point: they also wouldn't have materialised without the workers who get paid less in 30 years than the CEO makes in a day. Why aren't they fairly compensated? And even more extensively: they wouldn't have materialised without the broader society, a simple word to hide "everyone that is alive or has lived before you". Amazon makes that money because it has roads to drive its deliveries on, a police to prevent theft, courts to settle disputes, and of course the power of the state is what lets them keep their private property, ultimately society provides them with relatively safe and well-fed people with money in their pockets to spend on their stuff. Without that they would have nothing.
In other words, no person is "self-made", and everyone who has achieved financial success owes a debt to society. This is not even getting into Georgist ideas that people also owe a debt to society for using "commons" such as land or natural resources or polluting.
I recall some years ago, there was a movement to encourage large donors and philanthropists to make themselves more visible, rather than donating anonymously, in the believe that this would encourage other wealthy people to contribute as well, a kind of peer pressure or leading by example.
Part of me wonders if why these billionaires have their names on these projects is to try to buy goodwill? Rather than people just hating the rich in general, if they know that Bill Gates is donating all this money and attempting to help the less fortunate, he's slightly less of a greedy wealthy bastard? I don't see a Jeff Bezos foundation, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Teton_National_Park#Esta...
The intent was to 'elevate the people'.
- $350m is enough to completely rewrite the policies across a large swathe of the US. The input of the public and other campaigning groups is swept away by this tsunami of money, and people are read their Zuck rights on arrest.
- $350m isn't enough to move the needle. In some ways this is a more frightening outcome, that that amount of effort - five SpaceX launches or one medium-sized company market cap - can't change a system that's entrenched against it.
- countervailing lobbying is spending another $350m in the other direction, so the needle remains unmoved.
None of these are particularly great. It's not really surprising that the average non-billionaire thinks that merely stating their case isn't enough to achieve positive change and it requires burning things down.
Edit : You can smell the sliminess in the article when it says "friendlier Joe Biden administration.."
Zuck is terrified of the democrats.