Employment in the software industry is by no means always lucrative. Left behind are workers in the vast service sector, many of whom work for contractors. Security guards earn around $25,000 annually.33 Many lower and even midlevel workers at firms such as Google live in mobile home parks, while others sleep in their cars. The Valley has some of the nation’s largest homeless encampments.34
Once a beacon of middle-class aspiration, Silicon Valley has become “fragmented and divided,” note Pastor and Brenner, “with the high-tech community largely isolated from the broader region and particularly those parts of the region that are less fortunate.”35
Feudalism with Better Marketing
In Wired magazine, Antonio García Martínez describes the contemporary Silicon Valley as “feudalism with better marketing.” He sees a clear elite of venture capitalists and company founders. Below them are the skilled professionals, well paid but living ordinary middle-class lives, given the high prices and heavy taxes. Below them lies the vast population of gig workers, whom García Martínez compares to sharecroppers in the South. At the bottom, there is an untouchable class of homeless, drug addicts, and criminals.36
García Martínez depicts a society that is “highly stratified, with little social mobility.” High prices make it all but impossible for most to own homes. Workers in the gig economy have little chance to improve their lot, as they struggle to pay their rent, or are forced to sleep in their cars or on friends’ couches, or commute great distances in to work.37 Roughly half of California’s gig workers struggle with poverty.38 For the “untouchables” below them, the prospects are even grimmer.
This regressive social evolution troubles many on both left and right. There are growing calls for regulation of the tech empire, for more antitrust action, or even for nationalization of the tech giants, not only in the United States but also in Canada and Europe.39 In recent years, some once favorable progressives have labeled the tech oligarchs as just the latest purveyors of “predatory capitalism” and a mounting threat to democracy.40
Ultimately, few stand to benefit from the rise of the tech oligarchy. Almost half a century ago, Daniel Bell predicted in his landmark work, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, that technology would enable those who control it to fulfill “a social alchemist’s dream: the dream of ordering mass society.”41 Allowing a small number of technologists and financiers to dominate a huge portion of the economy and the information pipelines, and to monetize every aspect of human behavior, seems incompatible with democratic self-determination.42
Stanley Bing’s novel Immortal Life portrays a society in the near future that is ruled by tech oligarchs. A chaotic government has essentially been replaced by a cabal of superannuated tech moguls who control 97 percent of sales in all market sectors—retail, entertainment, agriculture, and so on—through “one huge, interconnected skein of interests.”43 Democratic government hasn’t just been constrained; it has been made superfluous. The overlords implant devices into human brains, and plan to dominate the world by controlling the central cloud that all humanity is plugged into. The novel’s subtitle calls the story “soon to be true,” and it may not be awfully far from the mark.
What we must ask ourselves is whether we want the hierarchical, socially stagnant, centrally programmed future that the oligarchs have in mind for us. Given what their vision appears to be, and what we already see in California, resisting them represents the great imperative of our time.
PART III
The Clerisy
A thoroughly scientific dictatorship will never be overthrown.
—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
CHAPTER 7
The New Legitimizers
With populist movements and parties gaining influence not only in North America but in Europe and Latin America as well, many have been predicting a new era of authoritarianism, such as portrayed by George Orwell in 1984 or by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.1 But the more likely model for future tyranny is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the masters are not hoary Stalinoids or fanatical fundamentalists, but gentle, rational executives known as World Controllers.
The Controllers preside over a World State composed of five biologically engineered social castes, from Alphas at the top to Epsilons at the bottom. Alphas take for granted their preeminence and their right to the labor of lower castes. People no longer have children, since humans are developed in vats. Families have been abolished, except in a few distant “savage reservations.” Citizens of the World State live in amenity-rich dormitories and enjoy pleasurable pharmaceuticals and unconstrained sex without commitment or consequences. This family-free life is similar to how Mark Zuckerberg described his ideal Facebook employees: “We may not own a car. We may not have a family. Simplicity in life is what allows you to focus on what’s important.”2
Huxley’s scenario eerily resembles what today’s oligarchs favor: a society conditioned by technology and ruled by an elite with superior intelligence. The power of the Controllers in Brave New World resides mostly in their ability to mold cultural values: like those at the top of today’s clerisy they suppress unacceptable ideas not by brute force but by characterizing them as deplorable, risible, absurd, or even pornographic. Because their pronouncements are accepted as authoritative, they can run a thought-dictatorship far more subtle, and efficient, than that of Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin.3
In the Middle Ages, the teachings of the Catholic Church on social and cultural values were generally seen as having great moral authority. The medieval clergy preached a value system heavily influenced by St. Augustine, who had sought to replace the values of classical society—materialism, egotism, beauty, ambition—with chastity, self-sacrifice, and otherworldliness.4 As Pitirim Sorokin wrote, the clerical class turned the “sensate culture” of classical civilization into an “ideational” one centered on spiritual concerns.5
When the cultural role of the clergy diminished in the modern era, their part was gradually taken up by what Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed a “clerisy” of intellectuals. Religious clerics would remain part of this class, though on the whole it grew more secular over time. Today’s clerisy includes university professors, scientists, public intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations.6 Such people have more or less replaced the clergy as what the great German sociologist Max Weber called “the new legitimizers.”7
The Ideal of a Cognitive Elite
The concept of a governing class whose superior cognitive ability makes them rightful leaders goes back at least to ancient Greece, when Plato proposed a society run by the brightest and most talented—a vision that Marx described as “an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste system.” Later utopian literature, such as Thomas More’s Utopia in the sixteenth century, depicts enlightened people constructing a just and prosperous society, but with strict limits on freedom for the masses.8
At the beginning of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells envisioned an “emergent class of capable men” who could take upon themselves the responsibility of “controlling and