Succession reminded me that, starting from the premise that the powerful aren’t a unified block, some of the biggest battle lines in the western world are between new vs old media empires. Murdoch vs Zuckerberg, old vs new money, entrenched monopolies vs emerging monopolies, big finance vs big tech. Neither really care all that much about the political issues that their empires trumpet or echo to their bases, as long as people are kept busy and divided. Corporate wokeness is largely a new money, west coat invention, which doesn’t give a damn about addressing structural inequality so much as it provides leverage for boardroom coups.What is succession if not peak old media (HBO, cable) worshiping itself whilst also acknowledging it doesn’t know what to do next(against Netflix & YouTube)?
The peasants are getting restless, understandably. Who will get to provide them with bread and circuses whilst making a few trillions of them in the meantime?The peasants hate big finance too, understandably. The tech bros, cannily sensing a power vacuum, created crypto as tech snake oil. It fosters an even worse inequality prospect, but the sugar coating the bitter pill is just another re-packaged version of the American Dream: maybe you can strike it rich too sticking it to those incumbent silverback robber barons.
No one knows the future. But I prefer to bet on big structural shifts rather than the dreams of billionaires. I try not to let Silicon Valley’s vested interests paint how the future should be. Silicon Valley, just like Old media, wants one thing: growth at the expense of everyone else. It maintains loss-making growth only by hype as it eats into Old Media’s market share. Whether that results in more ads or more Teslas or more green-washed Netflix fictions being sold is immaterial. I would argue that disruptive innovation is happening faster everywhere besides tech. And it’s happening in unsexy labs on obscure topics driven by visions that take decades to materialise, yet both Silicon Valley and Old media have no patience for thinking beyond the next quarter, no long-term vision for the future. This is unsurprising, could I really expect anything else from sociopaths?
Once again, Bichler and Nitzan, and by extension Thorstein Veblen, provide the most relevant political economy theory within which to view this conflict. Differential accumulation and business sabotage.
Lockdown has been brutal, and work never stops, so I’m pressed for time here. Below are some fascinating articles I find related to this vast topic. More to come soon.
Is “Succession” the Best Sitcom on Television?
What Was California? From Josiah Royce to the Silicon Valley “Thought Leaders”
““This should all be obvious, of course, yet it needs to be said again and again: the “thoughts” that come out of Silicon Valley are not really thoughts, but ad hoc rationalisations of power. What is interesting about Facebook mindfulness, or Berkeley Bayesianism, or Stanford Girardianism, is not the content of the claims, but the illustration these provide of the longue durée dynamics of California history: a history of vapid curiosity, always skimming just over the surface of a process of immeasurable destruction.”
“Silicon Valley ran dry on large breakthroughs in software, so we decided to invent the “blockchain”, a simulacrum of innovation that organically fermented from the anti-institutional themes in the Western zeitgeist to spawn an absurdly large asset bubble with absolutely nothing at the center. There is no there there, and crypto morphed into a pure speculative mania which attracted a fanatic quasi-religious movement fueled by gambling addiction and the pseudo-intellectual narrative economics of the scheme. All conversation around crypto is now simply the sound and fury of post-hoc myth making to rationalize away the collective incoherence of the bubble in a near perfect exemplar of the motivated reasoning of economic determinism.”