“I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins…Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.”
Dear Mush-for-Brains Bezos, and frenemy bozo;
The problem isn’t quantity, but quality. How many math and music geniuses do we waste every year because they never have the opportunity to train and express those talents, or simply die of starvation/war?
Here’s a modest proposal: Let’s toss all the billionaires into a wood-chipper, and use their hoarded wealth to raise up the standard of living for the bottom third of the planet, including an education system with resources to pick out these geniuses and encourage them.
Yeah, this. There are quite a lot of kids who could be their generation’s [enter name/field1)] - but the only way they’re ever going to see a university from the inside is as a cleaner on a zero hour contract.
What am I saying. There are millions out there who won’t even get to look at a primary school from the outside.
Apart from everything else that’s wrong with this it’s such a diabolical waste.
1) While thinking about names/fields maybe look past the usual suspects and take a couple of minutes to look for those usually omitted. You know, “wrong” gender, complexion, ancestry, and so on. Very interesting. Also, quite enraging.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Stephen Jay Gould
Not necessarily distinct from this point, but their wealth and power also depend on the creation of ever more consumers, to prop up the impossibility of endless growth for as long as possible.
Their interchangeable workers and their interchangeable consumers are, of course, the same people.
Their wealth comes from setting it up so that everything those people do at the same time reinforces and feeds a system that the billionaires have arranged that they get a cut from at chokepoints. It’s a closed system which the billionaires sit above (in shadow, one might say), feeding off the energy it produces.
I wonder if it’s why they’re so horrified by the idea of a Tobin Tax or the like. (A true Tobin Tax is just a tax on international currency transactions, but the wider sense is a tax on any stock market trades/speculations at a certain level: a friction on high speed trading.) It’s not that they don’t appreciate the idea, it’s that they know perfectly well what it is, and they’ve long been using it to extract wealth from us: all those charges and fees and payments and subscriptions and whatnot, they’re a Tobin Tax imposed by the billionaires on the rest of humanity, extracting a cut from every little exchange and interaction. (And advertising is a way of extracting a cut from the act of merely looking at things, which is why they hate adblockers so very much. They’ve monetised the act of sight, and the logical next step is mandating what you aren’t allowed to not look at.)
And what they can’t allow is the idea that it might be turned around and applied to them.
I think that the existence of billionaires is definitive proof that we don’t live in a meritocracy. There is no way in hell anyone has that much merit.
If nothing else, they need to go back and re-read those books less superficially. They might call themselves Accelerationists after Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, but the tech bro billionaires more closely resemble the controlling gods of the story than Great Souled Sam.
I’m oft reminded of this quote from Keith Johnstone’s Impro, where he posits that the Western education system crushes the creativity out of people.
Intelligence is proportional to population, but talent appears not to be related to
population numbers. I’m living in a city at the edge of the Rocky Mountains; the
population is much greater than it was in Shakespearian London, and almost everyone here is literate, and has had many thousands of dollars spent on his education. Where are the poets, and playwrights, and painters, and composers? Remember that there are hundreds of thousands of ‘literate’ people here, while in Shakespeare’s London very few people could read.
Maybe it’s the economy that makes eating while being an artist very difficult, or the new ways that people are creating, such as tic tok, or the idea that there were proportionally more creators in Elizabethan London (one of the largest and most important cities in the world at the time) than might be found in a random city in America as indicative as a failure of the educational system, or forgetting that we know about those creators because their work has survived (at least in part) and many more are lost in history.
I was hoping this would also address their flooding markets with immature technology, flawed startup failures, or forward fixes that endanger consumers and poison the well for innovations developed in a more responsible and thoughtful manner. They want their flying cars now, or some way to extend their lifespans so they can have flying cars in the future. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just hoping they’ll all take a flying leap and stop wrecking things while they pursue their goals.
“… when I discount the immense amount of entertainment and creativity being produced today, because I hate the modern world and it all sucks, there is a mysterious lack of entertainment and creativity being produced today”
He was quite curmudgeonly, but he goes on to talk about people who claim “they can’t draw” or “can’t dance” when children and pre-industrial peoples had no such limitations. Because the education and economic system hadn’t made art a commodity that you had to be “good” at rather than something that people just do.
Keith’s point is we don’t need to simply have more people to find exceptional creators, but rather have environment, education and economics that encourage people to create.
Nice piece. Hamilton Nolan’s writing often makes me think he’s a good writer and thinker. In that piece, he explains well the folly of philanthropy:
A millimeter below every billionaire’s charitable spirit lies an endless well of self-preservation. This sort of desperate planning for the End Times gives the lie to everything that Zuckerberg and his moneyed peers say about the rising tide that lifts all boats. When the tides rise high enough, your rickety boats will sink, while they will float away on their yachts. Every charitable check can be seen as a tranquilizer dart, designed to pacify the public just enough that they won’t start wondering why the nice plutocrat who came to their island and bought all the land built such a big wall around it all.
The most fervent quasi-religious hope of every billionaire is that he can have it all; that he can both bask in opulent wealth and be a good person, beloved by one and all. Unfortunately for the rich, this hope will always be revealed as an impossible dream.
Moral philosophers have long pointed out that the mere act of giving away some money does not absolve you from the responsibility of doing something ethical with all the rest of your money. To feed one hungry child and then let a thousand more starve as you build your mansion is not an act that balances the scales of right and wrong.
In a resource-constrained world, there is no escaping the moral imperative for the wealthy to use their stupendous resources to help the needy as much as possible. There is no buying your way out of that situation. The “indulgences” that the Catholic church used to sell to escape the effects of sin were, we all now recognize, a scam. The charitable foundations of modern billionaires can be understood the same way.
They want their flying cars now, or some way to extend their lifespans so they can have flying cars in the future. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just hoping they’ll all take a flying leap and stop wrecking things while they pursue their goals.
