The Rich Are Not Like You and Me

That's a problem for social science. And more importantly for us

I was on the Paul Krugman show yesterday and it was good (for “talking about how the world is swirling down the pipeline” values of good). Paul’s tastes and mine in science fiction shaped the conversation - on a different timeline I could imagine a ‘here’s how this SF writer’s ideas explain the headlines’ continuing feature. But on the timeline we’re on, I was struck immediately by something different.

One of the guiding themes of the conversation is that today’s political economy is hard to grasp for social scientists who think about markets and mass politics. People like Paul and I come from fields that make a lot of simplifying assumptions. Those assumptions seemed to work well for a very long time. Now, they may be less well suited than they used to be.

In particular, social scientists are trained to think of markets and government as fundamentally distinct. We also usually assume that people’s individual idiosyncrasies tend to wash out in the aggregate. This or that individual’s weird belief is countered by that other person’s, or is smoothed down by the individual’s need to work with other people.

Such assumptions may be increasingly badly fitted for the world we are moving into. Paul asked me what had changed since Abe and I wrote our article and popular book on what we called ‘weaponized interdependence,’ a concept describing how global networks have been turned into tools of economic coercion. My reply:

it used to be that you could think about the problem of weaponized interdependence in terms of ‘is the United States overusing its power?’ Is it … paying attention to its long-term interests in the right ways? Does it have the right understanding of what kinds of trade-offs it faces?

And now I think we're in a world where it really becomes increasingly difficult to tell … where the business interests of powerful and connected companies end, and where the national interest of the United States begins. The two are really beginning to blend into each other, and that's something that I think that neither economists nor political scientists, nor really anybody who I know has really begun to get a handle on … if we're in a world where the platforms … are increasingly merging together with the U.S. government, what kinds of consequences does that have for the U.S.? What kinds of consequences does that have for other countries?

Furthermore:

one of the professional defects of social scientists … is that we do tend to be much more comfortable with trying to figure out what happens in the aggregate with masses than we are with the idiosyncrasies of particular elites. … Great Man Theory has a bad name in the academy and for some quite deserved reasons.

And so this means, I think, that we are probably less equipped to understand … a world where, as you described it in your newsletter yesterday, … we have this relatively small number of people who have absolutely outsized power, who have accumulated not just economic wealth, but the power to control platforms, to shape a lot of the actual day-to-day existence of our lives.

A couple of days after our conversation was recorded, Reuters broke a story about what Elon Musk had done with Starlink during Ukraine’s campaign in 2022. It’s the Lex Luthor ‘let the rift grow!’ moment from the new Superman movie, but played completely straight.

During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive … According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim. … As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military advisor said, troops failed to surround a Russian position in the town of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the region of the same name. … The decision shocked some Starlink employees and effectively reshaped the front line of the fighting, enabling Musk to take “the outcome of a war into his own hands,” another one of the three people said.

Musk did this because of his own idiosyncratic beliefs about war:

The three people familiar with the order said they believed it stemmed from concerns Musk expressed later that Ukrainian advances could provoke nuclear retaliation from Russia.

And that in turn prefigures the world of unrestrained billionaires with platform power, and deep connections into government that is coming into shape around us.

Musk’s order was an early glimpse of the power the magnate now wields in geopolitics and global security because of Starlink, a fast-growing satellite internet service that barely existed early this decade and now provides connectivity even in remote areas of the world.

The piece that Abe and I wrote for WIRED on “hegemonic enshittification” describes how the platform power of billionaires like Musk is increasingly entwined with the more traditional political power of impulsive and chaotic leaders like Donald Trump. The Trump administration is defending the US based tech economy and looking to extend it as a tool of power and influence. The tech owner class is increasingly willing to return the favor, and the idiosyncrasies of all involved are reshaping world politics.

For decades social scientists assumed that such figures’ weirdness and irrational urges would be restrained by each other’s clashing impulses and ambitions, by the mass public, or by markets. None of those have gone away. But you wouldn’t want to be relying too heavily on them either. It’s visibly true that crazy ideas can sweep like wildfire through the billionaire class and their political allies, via private group chats. Large scale public opposition doesn’t stop them, while markets have turned out to be surprisingly complaisant, so long as there are short term returns to be made.

The result is a world that is much more unpredictable than it was. The individual whims and collective paranoias of very powerful men (they are nearly all men) play a more important role, and are far less constrained than they used to be. The differences between the extremely rich and ordinary people are greater and much more politically salient than they used to be. As the rich become more isolated from mortal concerns, their weirdness effloresces.

That brings us back, through a circuitous route, to science fiction. There is a famous quote from William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Gibson’s books describe a future in which the super-rich have won, but have retreated into self-made worlds of strangeness in high orbit. In Neuromancer, the book that made Gibson’s name and set the cultural template of cyberpunk, the future of the planet plays out through a family feud between 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, a member of one of the clans that have shaped the world, and her father.

This resembles the world of vicious rivalries intertwined with intimate connections - think Musk and Stephen Miller - that we’re in right now. But more immediately, a story in today’s Financial Times reveals to my astonishment that there is a 3Jane Torment Nexus:

Divine offers loans of less than $1,000 worth of Circle’s stablecoin USDC — a crypto asset that matches the value of the US dollar — to cash-strapped consumers, mostly overseas. It describes its borrowers as underserved by “traditional institutions”. It uses Altman’s iris-scanning system to make sure borrowers who default on their loans cannot create a new account. The loans mostly come with fixed interest rates of between 20 and 30 per cent. Among Divine’s peers is crypto group 3Jane, which in June received $5.2mn in seed funding from venture group Paradigm — which previously invested in FTX. … Defaulted loans on the 3Jane protocol are sold to US collections agencies.

We live amidst the increasingly deranged technological dreams of the Tessier-Ashpool class. I suspect these dreams are not sustainable. Even so, the crash is going to be very ugly when it happens.