Writer Anand Giridharadas on tech's billionaires: "Are they even on the same team as us?"

Because when you have discussions about stimulus relief around what kind of policy responses you could have to something like the 2008 financial crisis or the pandemic, there’s initially some discussion and clamor for universal basic income, or substantial monthly checks for people, or even the French approach of nationalizing people salaries… and those things usually die.

But I think there’s no question that it was not as difficult back then, as it is today, to summon some kind of sense of common purpose and even the need to sacrifice values like profit seeking for other values.

AG: Silicon Valley is the new Rome of our time, meaning a place in the world that ends up deciding how a lot of the rest of the world lives.

It’s the new Rome [in] that you can’t live on planet Earth and be unaffected, directly or indirectly, by the decisions made in this relatively small patch of [of the world]?

And my impression of having reported on that world is that it’s an incredibly homogeneous world of people at the top of this new Rome.

and it’s a lot of a certain kind of man who often is actually more obtuse about understanding human society and sociological dynamics and human beings than the average person.

But when you end up with a new Rome and it’s hyper dominated by people of one race and one gender, many of whom are disproportionately socially unintelligent, running the platforms through which most human sociality now occurs — democratic discourse, family community, so on and so forth — we all start to live in a world created by people who are just quite limited.

They are smart at the thing they’re smart at and they’ve become in charge of a lot of how the world works.

it’s so interesting, because it’s people who are clearly very smart in a certain area but  just honestly do not understand democratic theory.

And there’s a certain kind of personality type that I have found very dominant in Silicon Valley, where it’s these men who just don’t really have a lens for that.

It’s a certain kind of particular personality type where you care a lot about one thing and you go deep on that one thing, and it’s probably the same personality type that Beethoven had.

It’s a great thing, actually.

It’s just not great for governing us, and what these people are doing is privately governing us, and they have no humility about the limitations of their worldview.

AG: It’s absolutely essential that the tech industry be brought into the same kind of sensible regulatory regime.

The government is like ‘Why don’t we check out these car seats for you and create some rules around them and then you can just buy a car seat and not have to wonder whether it’s the kind that protects your child or crumbles?’ That’s what the government does for all kinds of things.