Rebecca Solnit wrote: “I don’t know whether these #billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 & used their wealth to undermine its diversity & affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets & push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.
By producing such extremes of wealth, tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s #ElonMusk, the world’s richest person, who invited in misinformation, disinformation & hate, providing a platform for extreme right-wingers, racists & #conspiracy theorists, while also using his #Starlink#satellite technology first for & then against the Ukrainian military in their conflict with #Russia. ” #SanFrancisco#SiliconValley
2/ (snip) "Here’s Peter Thiel, founder of #PayPal, who put $10 million into the lawsuit that in 2016 bankrupted Gawker, which had outed him as #gay. This might make you think he cared about #privacy, but he also founded Palantir, which surveils #immigrants for the Department of Homeland Security, assisted in #CambridgeAnalytica’s weaponisation of #Facebook user data on #Trump’s behalf &, according to the Intercept, ‘has helped expand & accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world’. Big tech is ferociously protective of its own privacy while abusing ours. Frank Wilhoit’s claim that ‘conservatism consists of One Proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect’ applies precisely to the industry & its captains."
3/ (snip) "For a while, Thiel backed the libertarian wet dream known as seasteading, building artificial islands beyond government control. Thiel’s attempt to build a post-apocalyptic bunker in a remote part of #NewZealand’s South Island was rejected, but Bill Gates, now only the world’s 8th richest person, has his own island in #Belize. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the world’s 4th richest, owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, resort hotels & all, an inhospitable place for anyone who’s not enormously wealthy. Zuckerberg’s private compound covering 1400 acres of Kauai includes multiple mansions & luxury treehouses, plus an underground bunker. (Tech billionaires seem more interested in surviving apocalypse than preventing it.)
You can’t be in favor of both #democracy & #billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, & extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability."
4/ Ooof! (snip) "The choices tech titans make in their personal lives – gated communities, private schools, private jets, mega-yachts, private islands – show that a segregated, shrouded life is their ideal. But they profit off technologies which, while encouraging our own social withdrawal, are focused on capturing as much information about us as possible. That is, we are both more isolated & less private than we’ve ever been. I have never to my knowledge seen any of these billionaires, but by necessity I use their platforms & software & move among their employees. I live in a city & to some extent in a world that has been radically reshaped by their urges & ideals, which are not my urges and ideals."
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