Advent and Money: An American Tale 🎄

Look at this : pic.twitter.com/A4lL2KyXgg

— Cristina Vos 🇧🇪🇮🇹 (@CristinaVos) December 16, 2022

(This is the "sensitive content" Twitter won't let me copy over from the original Tweet.  You figure out what's "sensitive" about it.) I have zero technical knowledge about computers, the internet, internet platforms, etc. It could be this tweet is full of technobabble and bafflegab and be utterly meaningless. With that caveat, what have we seen so far that counters it? The self-driving Tesla Musk keeps promising would almost require a separate blog to chronicle, so numerous have been the promises and so many the failures to deliver.  One just has to look at how he's running Twitter (into the ground) to understand he also knows nothing about management (which also explains why he's burning all his time there, while Tesla spirals down into the ground, too.

If you bought TSLA stock at its peak one year ago you're now coming up on having lost almost 2/3rds of your money.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 15, 2022

Brian Klaas calls it "The Myth of the Secret Genius." I call it American as apple pie, because I remember the first time I heard the great Americanism: "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" And young as I was when I heard it, it brought me up short, because of the screaming non sequitur. I grew up in the post-war era of the eggheads, men (always men, sorry) with great ideas and deep knowledge (a/k/a "The Best and the Brightest"; yeah, those guys)(usually about physics or economics, information highly prized but seldom well applied) who were basically famous college professors. And college professors then, as now, were not famous for being wealthy. So I knew "smart" was good, but I'd never connected "smart" to "making lots of money." That was a true Americanism, where we didn't have a "lucky sperm club" (to which Elmo is a member) or the adjacent idea that many wealthy people are actually kinda dumb, but with a low animal cunning about amassing money (a la Donald Trump, also a member of the Lucky Sperm Club). Which brings us around to: what do rich techbros do with all that money? And the answer is: convince people they are geniuses; because if they're so rich, they must be smart! Right?

The best part of all this is watching the investor class alphas spending their money to zap people who hurt their feelings or made fun of them. It's essentially militant snowflakeism.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 16, 2022

That's true for Musk, but it must be said Musk is individual in this. Bill Gates is not trying to piss people off; neither is Mark Zuckerberg nor Jeff Bezos. Of course, those gentlemen made their money themselves, and have enough regard for the market not to take a dump on the people who make that market make them rich.  In fact, of the three, I'd have to say Bill Gates is the only one to have at least some sense of societal obligation and social justice.  Jeff Bezo's ex-wife is actually doing a great deal along the lines of what Gates has done (tried to do; I'm not carrying water for Gates, just setting up a comparison with Bezos and Zuckerberg).  Bezos is pretty much out of the retail business; Gates left sometime back; only Zuckerberg is still trying to make another buck.  Which brings us to this picture:

 

That's from "Meta." Brian Klaas says Zuckerberg has sunk $30 billion into it (almost Musk/Twitter territory), only to turn out something that looks like a Playstation game from 2001. That screen shot is from this year!  I mean, it's so bad I figured I had to say something.  This is Tesla's self-driving car or Neuralink's "brain chip" or Bezo's clock in the mountain no one will ever be allowed to see which will only "strike" once every 10,000 years (and by then who will remember where it was to go see if it worked?).  'Man's reach must exceed his grasp,' as Browning said, but it must reach toward something worth attaining.  This?  You can see better CGI on "Mythic Quest" in the bumpers.  I think the recent storyline (on "MQ") where the famous game developer comes up with a toss-off set of tools for creating simple games (which turns out to be far more popular and fun than the elaborate game world she spent months creating) is actually more sophisticated than this whatever-it-is Zuckerberg has labeled "Meta," and it's meant to show up in the show as very crude graphics (in contrast to overly elaborate world-building).

This is what the richest men in America are doing with their money and their time.  Elmo is not an outlier.

Klaas wonders why we consider them geniuses.  Bezos built a bookstore on-line that turned into a river (Amazon) of commercial goods.  Most of that was simply hiring engineers to set up the platform and effectively leasing booth space to vendors.  It's a virtual mall, without the tedium of a "virtual mall" as it might appear in Meta (going by that picture).  A good idea that did spectacularly well, but...  Gene Roddenberry is said to have attended Star Trek conventions at the height of that craze and remarked sarcastically that it had all worked out as he had planned.  Of course his Star Trek only lasted three seasons, was running out of steam by the end of the second, and disappeared from view for decades.  Its revival, recovery, return as multiple shows and movies and....everything, couldn't have been foreseen by anyone.  Nor could the success of Amazon.  Bezos may be lauded in some circles, but most people have pretty much forgotten about him by now.

Gates and Zuckerberg have one thing in common with Elmo:  they all took an idea from somebody else and marketed the hell out of it.  Gates didn't invent DOS, he bought it.  Zuckerberg didn't create Facebook, he took it (stories vary there, but Zuckerberg was not Wozniak inventing the Mac.)  Elmo, of course, bought Tesla.  He didn't start it from scratch.  Give Gates and Zuckerberg that much credit; they built their companies far more from the ground up than Elmo ever did.  And they were far more successful than he's ever been.  In fact, without the success of Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, there is no expectation of tech wealth that powers the stock sale of Tesla to ridiculous and insupportable heights.

But geniuses?  Any of them?  Only in selling the world on the idea that they had a better mousetrap.

Let me make this more interesting by quoting Klaas at length.  The context here is a discussion of very rich people over-promising and under-delivering.  Klaas doesn't make the connection, but think of it as government, which must do what it says it's going to do with public money (except in the case of defense spending, but that's another matter), while "businessmen" (yes, men, stay with me) promise to "drain the swamp" and "run government like a business," and promise, oh, to build a big beautiful border wall and get Mexico to pay for it:

So much in the Trump era was going to be announced “in two weeks” that it became a joke to refer to something that would never see the light of day. Likewise, Elon Musk is his biggest hype man, promising brain implants that would revolutionize the ways we live, or saying that he’s building a tunnel that will transport people between Washington and New York in 29 minutes. (Instead, his tunnelling venture, the Boring Company, has mostly ghosted government, and its one viable project in Las Vegas is literally a tunnel lit up with futuristic lights in which cars drive slowly, making it less efficient than a tram).

That's the shot; here's the chaser:

The Gates Foundation, which rewards grant money to applicants, subjected its awards to scrutiny and found something fascinating. The grant applications that promised the moon were more likely to get funding than those that promised more modest, realistic results. But when the proposals actually got funded, those that over-promised frequently delivered similar results to those who accurately depicted their research.

The language used mattered a lot. If someone referred to their research as “innovative,” or “game-changing,” for example, they would be more likely to get funding than if someone accurately depicted it as an important, but incremental step toward better knowledge. And guess who tended to use over-confident language that promised the moon?

Men.

The study therefore showed that one reason for gender bias in grantmaking isn’t due exclusively to sexism, but also to the fact that men were more willing to sell a big idea with more expansive, over-confident promises.

Now, imagine that instead of the more sterile world of Gates Foundation grant applications, you’re sitting around a table in Silicon Valley with a bunch of super-rich tech bro investors who are looking for their Secret Genius. Who do you think gets the most money?

That's why I said "businessmen."  Oh, and we all know who gets the most money in that Silicon Valley scenario:  Elmo, the biggest Secret Genius of them all.

Here I diverge from Klaas entirely. He gives Elmo credit (though doesn't specify) for a few "good ideas."  I think Elmo, in Kissinger's famous dismissal of Nixon, has a meatball mind.  He's rich from birth, so failure has never been a serious danger for him (like Trump).  He thinks his money makes him smart (like Trump).  He's used his money to make himself rich on what is purely speculation (like Trump; although Elmo actually is worth billions,  It's publicly known, unlike Trump's true value, which is carefully hidden.).  Elmo's bubble is going to pop soon, and he's the one sticking pins in the bubble.  But it will leave a lot of people damaged and broke and losing a lot of money.  I suspect it won't injure Elmo much at all; by which I mean he won't be homeless or destitute.  He just will be among the wealthy, if not at the top of the heap of the uber-wealthy.

Why else do I diverge from Klaas on the subject of Elmo?

Now, given that this newsletter is called “The Garden of Forking Paths,” about all the possible worlds we choose in life, I close with a thought of a path not taken. Decades ago, when Elon Musk dropped out of academic life, he applied for a job at Netscape, which was one of the early corporate pioneers of the internet. Musk never heard back. The world would very likely be a different place if they’d offered him the job.

I suspect Netscape knew something the world has been much slower to pick up on.  Elmo's only strength is his narcissism.  All he really has to offer the world is his inherited wealth.  He could do a great deal of good in the world with that, or he could treat the world as his playpen and, in the phraseology of Silicon Valley, move fast and break things (like a child does).  He chose the path of least resistance.    The world would indeed be a different place if Netscape had offered Elmo that job (and if he'd stuck with it, which is even more unlikely).  Netscape would still have been crushed by Bill Gates (and that might have awakened Elmo to the possibilities of his wealth), but I think Elmo crashing about like a toddler in a candy store was inevitable.

Because money talks.  This is America, after all. 

And responding to NTodd, because I can't do it anywhere else (more's the pity):  I don't dislike Bezos (though I admire his ex-wife more, for her social consciousness).  I buy a lot from Amazon, so I've gone over to the dark side.  I don't think anyone calls Bezos a "genius" anymore because he set up Amazon and from that managed to buy WaPo.  "Genius" is a highly overused term, for which I blame the Romantics, who wanted it applied to them (and then it got away from them).  It struck me as an interesting difference that Bezos, Gates, and Zuckerberg are, or were, in the business of actually selling something to people, not just the government.  (Tesla is selling hype to people who want to believe they've bought a flying car.) In that difference lies an interesting tale, indeed.