One Saturday within the spring of 2021, somewhat achy after receiving our first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, my husband and I made a decision to remain in mattress and click on on the very first thing advised to us by our TV. It was WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, a documentary produced by Hulu in regards to the New York startup WeWork’s spectacular fall from grace. The movie principally chronicles the misdeeds of founder Adam Neumann, the surfer-dude dolt who turned a good suggestion – co-working areas that lease small workplaces to tech startups – right into a surreally overvalued conglomerate, earlier than he made a mortifying try to take the corporate public that ultimately led to his pressured resignation. As a comfort prize, Neumann infamously acquired a $1.7bn golden parachute.
The WeWork cautionary story is partly about slick advertising and marketing, which is what appears to have satisfied its traders that it was a tech startup. Neumann tried to place WeWork as one thing way more than an actual property firm: he borrowed the tech business’s idealistic language about altering the world however upped the ante, insisting that the corporate’s sole mission was “elevat[ing] the world’s consciousness”.
This can be a good thought when making an attempt to maintain billionaire traders’ cash spigots flowing. An actual property flipper has a finite value, based mostly on markets, earnings and bills, however an organization that “elevates the world’s consciousness”, nicely, who is aware of the place they could go along with it? There may be proof, although, that WeWork executives have been beginning to purchase into their very own advertising and marketing – to get excessive, so to talk, on their very own provide. As Gabriel Sherman writes in Self-importance Honest, Neumann was recognized to make insane pronouncements about “eager to be elected president of the world, dwell without end, and change into humanity’s first trillionaire”. When SoftBank CEO and future WeWork investor Masayoshi Son met Neumann, he requested him: “In a battle, who wins – the good man or the loopy man?” “Loopy man,” Neumann answered.
WeWork pushed its romantic origin story, which concerned Neumann and co-founder Miguel McKelvey’s idyllic childhoods hundreds of miles aside: Neumann on a kibbutz in Israel, McKelvey on a hippie commune in Oregon. From this formative expertise of communal dwelling, so the story went, they created WeWork – what Neumann described with the unimaginable idea of the “capitalist kibbutz”.
These canned origin tales are what passes for good storytelling in an age after we are desirous to swallow something tech jams down our throats. And tech is just the newest phenomenon that has made us simps for narratives about highly effective males and the way they bought that approach. This can be a tendency that appears rooted notably in American DNA, one which has been exploited for hundreds of years to rope folks into wars, cults and scams – with our unjust societal establishment being the best rip-off of all. Our obsession with brute energy has gotten us the place we at the moment are, a system the place practically 100% of American wealth is concentrated within the fingers of some males, considered one of whom has ascended to the very best political workplace (twice!) to change into our very personal authoritarian strongman.
Sympathy for the assgap
Neumann customary himself after the non secular tech-guy archetype, just like the shadow facet of Jack Dorsey from Twitter, whose Buddhist renunciation act contrasted dissonantly with the famously poisonous web site he based. However Neumann has his personal shadow in Billy McFarland, the con artist laughingstock who took entrepreneurial speculative fiction to Icarian heights along with his Fyre pageant. The 26-year-old McFarland and the rapper Ja Rule went all in on a pipe dream to carry a luxurious music pageant on what was as soon as Pablo Escobar’s non-public island within the Bahamas. Advertising the pageant on social media was their sole concern – they reportedly paid Kendall Jenner $250,000 for an Instagram put up – when it might have been meals, bogs and housing for his or her 5,000 ticket holders.
When their friends arrived, as an alternative of luxurious villas on a abandoned non-public island, they discovered hurricane tents and inflatable mattresses on a residential development website. The privileged would-be concertgoers spent a terrifying evening of Lord of the Flies-style chaos within the tents earlier than the pageant was canceled, prompting schadenfreude the likes of which Twitter had not often seen.
I’m not saying that McFarland, who was launched in 2022 after serving 4 years in jail for fraud, is similar as some other tech entrepreneur, but it surely’s simple to see how the tech market attracts con artists like roaches to grease. For one factor, McFarland was punished not for defrauding his clients – whom he put in critical hazard, along with stealing their cash – however his billionaire traders. As soon as once more, the flows and reversals of capital float above actual life, with all our ant-like obsession with trigger and impact and human struggling.
Certainly one of Silicon Valley’s most dearly held and deleterious myths is of its boy geniuses. McFarland reportedly idolized Fb’s Mark Zuckerberg, and I’d be prepared to guess that he styled himself not solely on the true Zuckerberg however on Zuckerberg as he was fictionalized by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in 2010’s The Social Community, one of the influential paperwork in shaping the narrative of Net 2.0. My husband and I additionally watched The Social Community whereas laid up from the vaccine. I had by no means seen it earlier than, and greater than 10 years after it was made amid a tech backlash with its goal squarely on Zuckerberg and Fb, I discovered the film’s tone unusual, because it portrayed Zuckerberg as a manipulative misogynist who’s however one of many visionary geniuses of our occasions. As Zadie Smith identified in her 2010 essay on the movie, Technology Why?, this doesn’t actually conform with what we all know of Zuckerberg, who’s so bland that his solely clarification for why he invented Fb, past a mystical fixation on the phrase “connection”, is that he appreciated “constructing issues”.
The unwitting assault on democracy, group and the human sense of self by a bunch of faculty sophomores who appreciated constructing issues just isn’t a foul story, but it surely’s clear why it isn’t the one which Sorkin selected. As Mark Harris wrote in New York journal in 2010, the movie’s central narrative query might be said as: “What precisely does it imply to be an asshole?” Girls within the movie’s first and final beats inform Zuckerberg that he both is or isn’t an asshole, and within the intervening two hours, he confidently fucks folks over like an oblivious poster within the Am I the Asshole? subreddit.
However this doesn’t make him a villain; it’s extra of his tragic flaw. One should think about that Elon Musk has executed a few of this similar rationalizing as he has gone from being hailed because the real-life Iron Man to his new position as Twitter’s head troll and eviscerator of the American federal authorities at Doge. Transferring quick and breaking issues means some folks will assume you’re an asshole. Or perhaps you must be an asshole to be efficient – assholes are the true good guys! Harris innocently stories in New York that Sorkin and the movie’s director, David Fincher, relate to Zuckerberg, having “been sooner or later of their skilled lives on the receiving finish of the phrase asshole”. The Social Community’s alternate title might be Sympathy for the Asshole, having been created by a group of males who’ve internalized the parable of their very own temperamental genius and are intoxicated by tales of others who’ve executed the identical.
This can be a favourite theme of Sorkin, who has change into the go-to screenwriter for modern “Nice Man” tales. His Steve Jobs, from the biopic Steve Jobs, is a complete dick, questioning his daughter’s paternity within the nationwide press and screwing over his collaborators and mentors. And nonetheless his genius is assured, if ineffable: in a single scene, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak blows up at Jobs, telling him: “How come 10 occasions in a day, I learn Steve Jobs is a genius? What do you do?” Jobs’s response is that his lack of ability to jot down code is irrelevant since he is sort of a conductor, “play[ing] the orchestra”, coordinating technicians underneath his sweeping enterprise imaginative and prescient.
Tech founders’ self-belief is broadcast by the geniuses they title their companies after: Tesla is a conspicuous instance, and Apple is, in fact, a nod to Isaac Newton. Steve Jobs and The Social Community are stuffed with mini-monologues about the way forward for computing and the lives of historic Nice Males like Alan Turing, creating little biopics inside biopics.
Intelligence is signified in Sorkin’s work by merely figuring out a number of details, and his nerd heroes are sometimes being requested tough trivia questions in order that they will reply them accurately, just like the sixth-grade brownnosers they as soon as have been. As Joan Didion stated of Woody Allen’s characters in 1979: “They mirror precisely the false and determined knowingness of the neatest child within the class,” however at the very least Allen’s characters are simply dilettante writers with teenage girlfriends, not the supposed incarnations of the spirit of American innovation. This juvenile intelligence and ruthlessness appear to go hand in hand. One of many leitmotifs of Sorkin’s tech biopics is, as I’m certain he learn on brainyquote.com: “Nice artists steal.” Zuckerberg and Jobs in his motion pictures are defiant about their apply of plundering different folks’s arduous work. This Sorkin doesn’t precisely share with them, since his biopics are ahistorical fantasies, telling tales which are principally Sorkin’s personal invention.
“I’m actually weak in relation to plot,” Sorkin instructed New York. “With nothing to cease me, I’ll write pages and pages of snappy dialogue that don’t add as much as something.” By seizing on poetic license, he can push these standard narratives even additional, plating up the Zuckerberg and Jobs of our desires, our very personal assholes to rival the assholes of historical past equivalent to Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. Sorkin’s attraction is to not inventive ingenuity however nationwide delight, creating company propaganda so satisfying that his traces from The Social Community have change into tech truisms – “we lived on farms, then we lived in cities, now we’re going to dwell on the web” – reshaping actuality round itself.
I can admit that this model of the Fb story is less complicated to face than the reality. As Smith writes in Technology Why?, Fb was a haphazard invention, with little thought given to its look or perform, decreasing all of us in the long run to the 19-year-old who invented it. There’s a unusual resonance with Smith’s unanswerable questions – “Why? Why Fb? … Why do it like that?” she asks. The granddaddy of all tech scams, Enron, the power supplier turned on-line buying and selling market whose unironic motto was: “Ask why.” Along with wreaking havoc on Texas and California power sectors (harm that, in our local weather change–addled current, we’re nonetheless affected by), Enron’s executives have been maestros of pretend accounting, hiding billions of {dollars} in debt to maintain the agency’s inventory value excessive earlier than its epic collapse in 2001. The definitive ebook on the Enron scandal, tailored right into a documentary with the identical title, is known as Enron: The Smartest Guys within the Room, and its executives cherished to congratulate themselves for his or her intelligence, casting it because the means to justify any sordid ends.
In a Sorkinist studying of historical past, American progress is safe-guarded as a result of the assholes we endow with nice energy are inoculated with visionary genius. However intelligence, popularly taken to imply devious cleverness or perhaps simply privilege, has by no means been synonymous with ethical goodness, and we must always not blindly have a good time folks for therefore low and ambiguous a bar as “altering the world”. Why? Why Fb? Why Enron? Why is our financial system an unregulated wasteland of self-dealing, the place theft just isn’t an aberration however the very basis of the world’s best fortunes? Musk has change into the archetypal tech founder not just for his ardour for self-beatification – he revived the dream of house journey! And he makes electrical automobiles! – however now additionally for his Dr Evil-style eccentricity and megalomania, primarily shopping for management of the federal authorities, which he spent 4 months haphazardly decimating.
Tech is just the most recent sector to take cowl within the American mania for founder myths, with the digital requirement that they be principally made up. (Elizabeth Holmes, the sociopathic founding father of the fraudulent medical startup Theranos and considered one of Silicon Valley’s few lady geniuses, courted traders with a falsified sob story about her uncle dying of pores and skin most cancers.) This narrative impulse comes from our personal epic origin story, our misplaced delight within the genius of the founding fathers that has change into one of many important stagnating forces of American authorities.
Our cussed American social construction, the place wealth and political energy are so ludicrously concentrated, was seemingly incarnated within the founders, a few of the smartest guys of the 18th century, whose inspiring opening salvo, a poetic ode to all males being created equal, was perhaps extra advertising and marketing than precise sport plan. With this, they bought the international coverage equipment of France to purchase into what could be essentially the most bold and visionary startup enterprise of all time: the US of America. The figures of the founders are narcotizing antidotes to the reformer spirit; depictions of them as revolutionaries foreclose any additional revolution as redundant. It’s no surprise they’re foisted on us by your entire spectrum of cultural gatekeepers, together with politicians, publishing, Disney, the Tonys, the Grammys and the Pulitzer prize.
Why else would we be so taken in by the romanticized story of our most corrupt and problematic founding father? Sure, you realize the one.
Who tells your story?
Lin-Manuel Miranda bought the thought for his musical Hamilton when he purchased a duplicate of Ron Chernow’s biography of the founding father on the airport. “Once I encountered Alexander Hamilton I used to be instantly captivated,” Miranda stated. “He’s an inspirational determine to me. And an aspirational one.” Miranda has popularized the fantasy that Hamilton’s was a New York immigrant story, like these of Miranda’s dad and mom, who moved to New York from Puerto Rico. However Hamilton was not an immigrant as we now consider them: he did transfer to New York from the Caribbean, however as an English citizen transferring between two of England’s colonies. (Regardless of having American citizenship, Puerto Ricans dwelling in the US are seen as extra “international” than Hamilton would have been.) And disregarding rumors kicked up by the musical’s reputation, he was white.
Miranda’s casting of the founding fathers with Black and Hispanic actors was a stroke of genius, because it clouded Hamilton’s politics in a confusion so profound that few folks felt like questioning them. One would possibly even neglect to note that the musical portrays no precise folks of shade. Because the historian Lyra D Monteiro wrote in The Public Historian, Hamilton repackages the identical myths of the founders that now we have acquired from time immemorial, notably the parable that white males have been the one folks of any significance dwelling in America throughout this time.
Regardless of his overtures to the subjectivity of historical past, with the ultimate music in Hamilton repeating the query: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Miranda misses the irony – that he has perpetuated a story by white males about white males, as a result of the founder biography is an primarily white style, particularly those you should buy on the airport.
Perhaps I’m loopy, however as I sat down to observe the dwell model made accessible on Disney+, I assumed {that a} hip-hop musical in regards to the founding fathers could be at the very least considerably tongue-in-cheek, poking holes in our pieties in regards to the founders. As an alternative, I watched a really lengthy and self-serious biography of Hamilton, with a sentimentality about its topic worthy of the Walt Disney Firm. This mix – a efficiency of range crossed with the acquainted sanding down of the sharper edges of American historical past – makes Hamilton “one of the sensible propaganda items in theatrical historical past”, as Matt Stoller writes, and one, if Disney has something to say about it, that will likely be proven to schoolchildren yearly for the remainder of without end.
Stoller’s essay The Hamilton Hustle from the Baffler is an exhaustive and illuminating rundown of all of Alexander Hamilton’s faults and misdeeds. Hamilton not solely was in favor of centralized authorities however was vehemently anti-democracy, calling the American folks “a terrific beast”. As an alternative, he envisioned a United States run by an elite coalition of rich financiers and navy officers, and far of his profession was devoted to fucking over the small farmers who shaped the vast majority of the American inhabitants. And whereas Chernow presents Hamilton as an abolitionist, he married right into a household of slaveholders and offered enslaved folks himself.
Hamilton’s authoritarianism had long-lasting results, eviscerating the financial energy of the center courses and creating stratification and inequality that we nonetheless acknowledge at this time. It’s baffling that educated, progressive folks so willingly accepted Miranda’s fairytale in regards to the father of contemporary finance so quickly after the 2008 monetary disaster, through which the craven stupidity of Wall Road bankers practically precipitated international financial collapse. However this can be precisely why Hamilton was such a phenomenon. As Stoller writes, Hamilton is so resilient a determine within the American standard consciousness that “the shifting standard picture of Hamilton is itself a gauge of the relative power of democratic establishments at any given second”– that’s, the extra standard Hamilton is, the much less wholesome American democracy is.
Hamilton the musical exemplifies a well-known leftist critique of up to date liberalism: that the looks of progress, notably involving narratives about “robust girls” and “breaking down historic boundaries”, stands in for the true factor. With this body, Hamilton is the quintessential Obama-era doc, with Obama’s secretary of the treasury, Timothy Geithner, calling Hamilton the “authentic Mr Bailout”. Geithner’s blanket bailout of the large banks, with the architects of the monetary disaster going completely unpunished, was a travesty we’re solely starting to reckon with, however one factor it did for sure is move the baton of bank-friendly financial insurance policies between the Bush and Obama administrations, with Obama’s innovation being an excellent nearer relationship with tech founders, the titans of our new Gilded Age.
Barack and Michelle Obama have stated of their best power: “A technique of taking a look at what we’ve each been doing for the final 20 years, perhaps most of our careers, was to inform tales.” That is true, and they’re perhaps somewhat too good at it. Perhaps because of this I’m a bit grumpy in regards to the Obamas’ selection to start out a movie and TV manufacturing firm with their post-White Home reputation, transferring decisively into the realm the place they’ve at all times most excelled: celeb. Their firm is known as Greater Floor Productions, which they declare is an ode to Stevie Surprise, however this phrase inevitably evokes Michelle Obama’s catchphrase on the 2016 marketing campaign path: “After they go low, we go excessive.” This coverage of tight-lipped civility was no match for the emergency of the Trump second – it’s embarrassing when one thinks of how low now we have sunk from there – but it surely was a savvy act of picture preservation, one which ensured that the Obamas would climate the Trump period unscathed, regardless of if the remainder of us will.
Simply as it’s for Silicon Valley founders, for the Obamas, “good storytelling” is synonymous with good branding. And, in fact, massive streaming firms equivalent to Netflix, whom the Obamas’ manufacturing firm signed an eight-figure take care of in 2018, don’t see their “content material” as separate from the calls for of promoting. To them, good tales are those folks wish to hear as a result of they’ve heard them earlier than, thus the knockoffs they produce of all their hottest reveals: iterating, iterating, iterating. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
Who wins?
Since I wrote the primary draft of this piece in 2021, there have been so many tech scandals and meltdowns that I’ve been in a position to shoehorn in only some of them right here, and it’s fascinating how we appear to have as wholesome an urge for food for tales of tech villains as these of tech founders. Sam Bankman-Fried makes a terrific story whether or not he’s the barefoot CEO giving all his cash away or the incompetent criminal playing along with his traders’ financial savings. We love Musk whether or not he’s exploring house or destroying Twitter (now X) and the American administrative state. It’s the final word postmodern nightmare, the place fact and style will not be solely contested however irrelevant.
One easy purpose that documentaries have abounded up to now 10 years – notably notable was the discharge of two competing Fyre pageant documentaries at the very same time – is due to the quantity of video footage that now exists of mainly everybody because the rise of actuality tv and the iPhone. Social media feeds exemplify the entire victory of spectacle over argument, a stream of limitless, barely distinguishable content material, narrativeless and authored by everybody. We have a look at the dominance of social media apps and begin in search of the Nice Males behind them, fully ignoring the billions of customers who’ve donated their time, confessions and creativity to make them compelling.
One sees this startlingly with HBO’s documentary collection Q: Into the Storm, which seeks out the boys behind the mega-conspiracy idea QAnon. The documentary film-maker Cullen Hoback had exceptional entry to Jim and Ron Watkins, the father-son duo within the Philippines who ran the nameless message board 8chan, the place Q, a supposed “deep-state” operative, posted warnings of a cabal of highly effective pedophiles who can solely be stopped by a heroic President Donald Trump. Hoback involves the identical conclusion that many different journalists have already got, that Ron Watkins had been writing Q’s posts since 2017, and that each Jim and Ron had heavy pursuits in selling QAnon.
However Q was by no means one particular person: Ron Watkins didn’t originate the persona, and the nameless message board that was QAnon’s birthplace was essential for its improvement, as a sort of collaborative fiction written by an internet of various authors. QAnon is a case research within the energy of emergence, although it’s all in service to maybe the least deserving and strongest Nice Man on the planet: Trump. When it comes to sheer folks energy, it acts like a microcosm of social media and even the US itself, this focus of human ingenuity misdirected to learn people who find themselves already wealthy and highly effective. That is one other approach of claiming, as my Marxist brother tells me, that employees create worth, at the same time as common folks have so little energy on this time of inequality, value will increase, stagnant wages, environmental injustice and battle.
The present billionaire class has extra energy than any human beings have ever had, and so they wield it with remarkably little duty. Billionaires should be minimize right down to measurement via each means potential, from breaking apart monopolies to tax reform to monetary regulation to union drives. However we additionally must cease swallowing these Nice Man tales entire and acknowledge them for what they’re: an ideology of dominance. I don’t exaggerate after I say that this ideology just isn’t solely impoverishing the narratives accessible to us however endangering human lives and the way forward for civilization.
However the wheel is starting to show. Tech billionaires’ public picture is in the bathroom, with these former “visionaries” seeming ever extra embarrassing, monomaniacal, shortsighted and pathetic. That is true of Trump, too, whose weird and ever-changing tariff insurance policies led to terrible approval rankings nearly as quickly as his second time period began. In fact, we might have stated this within the fall of 2024, too, when he was making rambling speeches about Hannibal Lecter and interrupting marketing campaign occasions to sway sleepily to Ave Maria – none of which was sufficient to price him the election.
The fickle winds of promoting might lastly be blowing towards these self-styled Nice Males, however they know extra keenly than anybody that every one publicity is nice publicity: McFarland was just lately again within the information, capitalizing on the eye garnered by his infamous failures, claiming he needed to host a Fyre pageant 2. It should take greater than our disapproval to cease all of them from failing up like Neumann, who was so incompetent that he bought paid greater than a billion {dollars} to give up his job.
Who wins, the good man or the loopy man? The loopy man, and he’s getting crazier on daily basis.
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Alice Bolin is the creator of Useless Ladies: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession and Tradition Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse, out this month. This essay was tailored from Tradition Creep courtesy of Mariner Books, HarperCollins Publishers
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