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by
Joel Kotkin
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September 6 - September 10, 2020
the middle class would likely foot much of the bill
a serflike future of rented apartments and frozen prospects.14 Unable to grow into property-owning adults, they will depend on subsidies to meet their basic needs.
the new tech aristocracy also regard themselves as intrinsically more deserving of their wealth and power than the old managerial elites or the grubby corporate speculators.16 They believe that they are not just creating value, but building a better world.
very few companies control the information pipelines.
Even as they devastate the old media, the oligarchs also have the means to purchase some of its most venerable survivors.
Amazon has achieved enormous influence over the book industry;
The entertainment industry is also being swallowed up by the tech giants.
the tech oligarchs have been moving to shape content as well. Controllers like those at Facebook and Twitter seek to “curate” content on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative views, according to former employees.
With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era.39 It recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but with more advanced technology.
exploitation of personal data as the “electricity of the 21st century.”
Perhaps the best way to picture the future contours of hightech feudalism is to examine the present conditions in its fountainhead, California.
Rather than a model of upward mobility, California is a place now dominated by a small class of exceedingly wealthy and well-connected people, resembling the nobility of the Middle Ages or the elites of the Gilded Age.
Social stratification rather than upward mobility now characterizes the social order of California. The state has one of the nation’s highest Gini ratios—which
California’s level of inequality is greater than that of Mexico, and closer to that of Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras than to what is common in developed counties like Canada and Norway.9 With adjustment for cost of living, California now has the highest overall poverty rate in the United States,
Fully one-third of welfare recipients in the nation live in California, which is home to barely 12 percent of the total population.
Across the state, almost two-thirds of job growth in 2015–16 was in minimum-wage or near-minimum-wage jobs,
Among the nation’s large cities, inequality grew most rapidly over the last decade in San Francisco,
Nearly 30 percent of Silicon Valley’s residents rely on public or private financial assistance.
employ large numbers of noncitizens on temporary visas,
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today’s clerisy includes university professors, scientists, public intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations.6 Such people have more or less replaced the clergy
The concept of a governing class whose superior cognitive ability makes them rightful leaders goes back at least to ancient Greece,
The New Deal era brought considerable support for placing more decision-making power in the hands of university professors and other specialists,
Daniel Bell
“knowledge class,”
Theoretically it represented a meritocracy, but this class has become mostly hereditary, as well-educated people, particularly from elite colleges, marry each other and aim to perpetuate their status.
What I designate as the clerisy is a group far larger and broader than the oligarchy. It spans a growing section of the workforce that is mostly employed outside of material production—as teachers, consultants, lawyers, government workers, and medical providers.21 These professions are largely insulated from the risks of the marketplace. They also make up an increasing proportion of the workforce in the high-income countries:
Many of the people in these growing sectors are well positioned to exert a disproportionate influence on public attitudes, and on policy as well—that is, to act as cultural “legitimizers.”
Writers and other creative people are often portrayed as being resistant to authority and tolerant of differing viewpoints, but history often reveals them to be no more willing to oppose orthodoxy than anyone else.
Today the news media are increasingly inclined to promote a single orthodoxy.30 One reason for this is a change in the composition of the journalistic profession: working-class reporters, many with ties to local communities, have been replaced by a more cosmopolitan breed with college degrees, typically in journalism. These reporters tilt overwhelmingly to the progressive side of politics;
journalism is steadily moving away from a fact-based model to one dominated by opinion.
Entertainment media are also turning into bastions of left-wing orthodoxy.
the history of unaccountable rule by “experts,” or those claiming intellectual superiority, is less than encouraging for liberal democracy.
The most powerful clerisy on earth today is in China.
Members of the contemporary clerisy who hold positions of power like to be seen as disinterested actors, making rational choices for the good of society. But they are people with their own prejudices and self-interest.
James Burnham
As the managerial class grows in power, it becomes more self-referential. Its members are responsible not to the citizenry, but only to other managers and to those regarded as part of a qualified peer group.
Rule by the most educated and highly credentialed people is profoundly illiberal, observes Yascha Mounk,
A survey commissioned by the Atlantic notes that the highly educated are now arguably the least politically tolerant group in America.
In coming decades, the clerisy could employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “‘ordering’ the mass society,” as Daniel Bell predicted.
Universities have long served as gatekeepers for the upper classes, but they are doing less well at what was arguably their greatest twentieth-century triumph: expanding opportunities for the many.
Perhaps nothing has so defined or enhanced the role of the clerisy in American society as the expansion of universities.
Cutting against this democratizing trend in the United States, however, is the soaring cost of a university education: it more than tripled as a proportion of the national median salary between 1963 and 2013.10 This has made the top universities more socially exclusive, even as they have become more important for success. The elite universities have grown richer both in their endowments and in the academic qualifications of the students they admit, relative to less well-positioned institutions.
Today’s leading universities are filling the role envisioned by Charles Eliot, who became Harvard’s president in 1869: taking the lead in creating an enlightened national ruling class—the Alphas, if you will.
Top universities have considerable power over access to the best jobs in the private sector.
Once seen as champions of free thought and inquiry, universities have been reverting to something more like a medieval model in which heretical ideas come under assault. Today the attack is likely to come from inside, rather than from an external oversight body like the Catholic Church.
The current mission in universities, and even in lower schools, is “to promote” a particular set of beliefs rather than “to teach,”
