Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

This was a textbook case of the Marxist argument that capitalists instill the values of the property owner into their managerial classes, while still keeping most of the fruits of labor, in order to make common cause against the exploited proletariat, even though manager and worker have more in common than either does with the senior leadership. Even the most flag-waving Facebook (or Amazon or Google) middle manager, hired when the company was mature, realized he didn’t make beans compared with what the early employees and founders—the true owners of the company—were worth. And yet the managers sided with their overseers against the very people they worked alongside every day. Say what you like about Marxism in practice, but it describes our contemporary technobourgeois society exactly. As in companies, so in nations: the national conversation also ignored the socioeconomic rift, almost geologic in size, between how the affluent and the just-making-it lived. Facebook was merely the United States in microcosm.

What’s most amusing about this brouhaha, whether the bogeyman is the IRA or Cambridge Analytica, is that the people who seem to know least about ads are the most prepared to believe in the supernatural powers of advertising. While those who know most about ads, such as actual practitioners, are the most skeptical of the “magic bullet” claims by outfits like Cambridge Analytica. Ultimately, Trump won because more people were willing to share his message (for free!) on Facebook, ungoaded by any shifty Russians, and he was able to use the tried-and-true Facebook advertising tools to win. It was that simple.