Are the Tech Lords Really Woke?
no, they just want a quiet life
If you are a confirmed racist sexist homophobe like me you view with alarm the woke tech lords, from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to retired Microsoft founder Bill Gates. And don’t get me started on the Google guys.
Joel Kotkin has a piece up at Spiked about woke capital: “The Coming Revolt Against Woke Capitalism.”
In the past, wealthy people overwhelmingly favoured the political right or the centre. Some billionaires still do, including oil and chemicals magnate Charles Koch, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and real-estate billionaire Donald Bren, all of whom are well into their seventies or eighties or beyond. Today, these folks are being supplanted by more youthful and supposedly more ‘enlightened’ oligarchs, who have consistently outraised and outspent their right-wing rivals by a margin of nearly two to one.
Of course, I find woke tech annoying, but I have come to believe that the tech lords are not so much lefties as taking care of bidness.
The case of Charles Koch is instructive. For decades he and his brother David financed a lot of libertarian causes. And got into endless trouble with the left that turned “Koch Brothers” into a pejorative.
And I remember in the 1990s that Microsoft, that up till then had kept its distance from Washington DC and K Street, suddenly found itself in court for monopolizing. And Bill Gates found himself in trouble because he hadn’t started a foundation to give money away. Okay, he said; I was going to start a foundation in due course when I was older, but if youse guys want me to start now, you got it.
I don’t think the tech lords — Google excepted, which started off with a grant from the intelligence community — are really lefties. But they know which side their bread is buttered, and they know that putting money into the left buys them protection.
So Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post. So Mark Zuckerberg puts $400 million “Zuckbucks” into the vital work of counting votes.
When you see the trouble that Elon Musk is getting into with his purchase of Twitter, you get the point. (Only, of course, the gubmint needs his reusable rockets. Darn.)
Joel Kotkin argues that the cognitive
elite activists reject the market traditions of liberal capitalism and instead promote a form of social control, often with themselves in charge.
You’d think that the business elite would hate this, because it harms their businesses and their freedom to innovate. Maybe they do, in their cups.
But they show in every way that their decision is to go with the flow. Wanna DEI? You got it. Is CO2 killing the planet? You betcha. Fund lefty NGOs? Yessiree.
Meanwhile they all know that they have to shovel money into the trough in Washington DC. Money buys everything, and if you don’t you’ll pretty soon find that the regulatory agencies are costing you billions.
I’m reading Open by Johan Norberg and he points out again and again that down the ages governments and rulers are forever wanting to censor and control. Everything. And over the last 1,000 years the rulers keep getting better at command and control and tapping society for more and more money. Of course, command and control leads to stagnation and running out of other peoples’ money. But in the pause between the fall of the old regime and the maturity of the new regime there is often opportunity for freedom and innovation. For a while.
What is notable is that there actually are people like the Koch Brothers and Elon Musk that push back against the system. Most people just go with the flow.
Is it possible to have a regime that doesn’t want to control everything and shut down the opposition?
Maybe. Problem is that whenever there’s a crisis, every government since the dawn of time thinks that the only solution is to give the government more money and power and shut down the heretics and naysayers.
And when it becomes clear that their actions made the crisis worse, they blame somebody else.