Why we love tech billionaires who rule our world

Some years ago — I think it was 2015 — I got a quick lesson in how easy it is to become a horrible person. I was a featured speaker at a conference in São Paulo, Brazil, and my arrival flight was badly delayed. The organizers, worried that I would miss my slot thanks to the city’s notorious traffic, arranged to have me met at the airport and flown directly to the hotel’s roof by helicopter.

Then, when the conference was over, there was a car waiting to take me back to the airport. And just for a minute I found myself thinking, “What? I have to take a car?”

By the way, in real life I mostly get around on the subway.

Anyway, the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.

That’s why I’m not shocked by the spectacle of Elon Musk’s reputational self-immolation. Fascinated, yes; who isn’t? But when an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.

The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch.

As The Times’s Kevin Roose recently pointed out, Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology the writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public.

But how is this possible?

It’s not really a surprise that technological progress and rising gross domestic product haven’t created a happy, equitable society; downbeat visions of the future have been staples of both serious analysis and popular culture for as long as I can remember. But both social critics like John Kenneth Galbraith and speculative writers like William Gibson generally imagined corporatist dystopias that suppressed individuality — not societies dominated by thin-skinned egomaniac plutocrats acting out their insecurities in public view.

Oh, and if this column gets me banned from Twitter — or if the site simply dies from mistreatment — you can follow some of what I’m thinking, along with the thoughts of a growing number of Twitter refugees, at Mastodon. – The New York Times