What Can’t Tech Money Buy?
Sunday Review / International New York Times | 27 May 2016
The robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries were kings of infrastructure. The people with towering wealth today are kings of information.
Palo
Alto, Calif. — IT did not take long for the tech industry to become the
new establishment, and to assign itself the rights and responsibilities
that come with such prosperity.
In 2010, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett unveiled the Giving Pledge,
a take on the old industrialist Gospel of Wealth for a new era of the
superrich. Since then, many of Silicon Valley’s most moneyed founders
and chief executives, including Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Pierre
Omidyar, Tim Cook, Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, have signed on
to give most of their wealth to a vague “philanthropy.”
Peter Thiel, the serial tech-firm founder, entrepreneur, investor, libertarian and presumptive Donald J. Trump delegate, is not a signatory, but apparently feels no less passionately about using his wealth to make his world a better place.
Last week Mr. Thiel revealed that he had funneled “in the ballpark” of $10 million to legal support for plaintiffs suing Gawker Media, most notably Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan, who recently won a $140 million judgment
against the company for defamation. Mr. Thiel made no secret of his
grudge against Gawker, since the company’s Valleywag blog revealed his
homosexuality in a 2007 post that lampooned the straight male culture of Silicon Valley more than Mr. Thiel himself. (Mr. Thiel is, notably, an investor in the tech site Pando, a media property that regularly insults him in more direct terms.)
But
as Mr. Thiel tells it, his action in the Gawker case was not about him,
or about quashing free speech, but about litigation finance in a case
with the potential to do a great deal of public good. In an interview
with The Times, he called it “one of the greater philanthropic things
that I’ve done. I think of it in those terms.”
Portraying
a $10 million investment in crushing one’s enemy as a charitable act of
justice that will make the world a better place is galling. But
students of history can hardly be shocked. Tech’s elite, lauded for
their originality, are influencing media, politics and society at large
with a kind of venture philanthropy, much as their industrial
predecessors did more than 100 years ago.
Cornelius
Vanderbilt and Leland Stanford each used significant portions of their
personal wealth to found idealistic universities, while John D. Rockefeller donated millions to education and scientific research amid criticism that good deeds couldn’t clean his dirty money.
Whether
their money came from oil, hotels, railroads or data, titans of
industry have long held enough power to both influence the American
political system directly and to hack it when necessary. Old money
maintains the status quo, while new money openly endeavors to change it.
The
robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries were kings of
infrastructure. The people with towering wealth today are kings of
information. The rise of Silicon Valley is best understood as a new
industrial revolution in this tradition. In many ways, it’s not at all
revolutionary in the strict definition of that term.
In recent years, many of the industry’s elite have pledged financial support
to schools, hospitals, police stations and homeless shelters, all while
many of the industry’s companies have avoided paying taxes that would
fund those same vital public institutions.
The “super-angel” investor Ron Conway has funneled his wealth into efforts to improve gun safety beyond legislation. Depending on whom you ask, Mark Zuckerberg’s investment of billions into his own charitable fund
for future giving was a grand statement in that Gospel of Wealth
tradition — or a public relations stunt and an enormous tax dodge.
Any
philanthropy seems legitimate when it aligns with your own goals. Even
Mr. Thiel’s support of free speech is apparently complicated: In
addition to the Gawker legal offense fund, he has also donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists and speaks passionately about preserving freedom for the kinds of journalists he presumably believes do not work at Gawker.
To
many of Gawker’s critics, Mr. Thiel is a hero on a charitable crusade
for justice. It would be safe to say that this is how his fellow Silicon
Valley philanthropists would also define their giving. They are under a
presumptive mandate to improve society according to their own values,
purely because they have made a lot of money while most everyone else
has not. The Gospel of Wealth dictates that this is not only their
ability, but their responsibility.
We
did indeed give them this mandate through our politics: loose campaign
finance laws and lower tax rates. Through policies that have reinforced
exceptional wealth disparities, we have allowed them not just to govern
themselves, but us as well. Instead of encouraging the superrich to
self-impose a Gospel of Wealth and celebrating — or criticizing — their
public gifts, the concerned public might take a different, simpler tack.
Mr. Thiel told an interviewer in 2012
that he feared the result of this precipitous wealth gap. “In the
history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through
Communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse,” he said.
“It’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen
today, or if there’s a fourth way out.”
If
we’re lucky, there may be, but Mr. Thiel isn’t going to like it. Wealth
gleaned by way of tax dodges and monopolistic business practices is
wealth stolen from the public, even when it is returned in the form of
supposed gifts. Philanthropy has the power to do a great deal of good,
but so do tax dollars allocated in an equitable democratic system.
Perhaps it’s time to adopt a Gospel of Government.
