To talk like this was to flirt with the actual, and not rhetorical, changing of the world. One did not regularly encounter ideas like this in MarketWorld, even though the suppositions behind them were obvious: that sometimes the builders of technology serve only themselves; that sometimes humanitarianism and entrepreneurship are actually distinct things. The subversive premise of platform co-op, as the cause was casually known, ought not to have been as subversive as it was: that ordinary people, and not just the winners of MarketWorld, should have some say in how technology develops; that it could develop in more than one direction; that some of those directions would be better than others at turning innovation into progress for most people.
One heard from speakers ways of thinking that were all but barred from MarketWorld: the idea that there were such things as power and privilege; that some people had them in every era and some people didn’t; that this power and privilege demanded wariness; that progress was not inevitable, and that history was not a line but a wheel; that sometimes astonishing new tools were used in ways that worsened the world; that places of darkness often persisted even under new light; that people had a long habit of exploiting one another, no matter how selfless they and their ideas seem; that the powerful are your equals as citizens, not your representatives.
The attendees didn’t confine their speech to win-wins. They spoke of exploitation and abuse and solidarity. They spoke of problems. They were not bound by the genteel MarketWorld consensus. The audience was cynical rather than utopian, critical rather than boosting. They knew what wasn’t new. The speakers, for their part, had none of MarketWorld’s customary slickness. Presentations weren’t smooth. No lavalier microphones were on offer. No one roamed the stage like a lion on the savanna. There were few, if any, jokes in the talks. People just spoke to the problems they wished to solve. The event was a thrillingly democratic contrast with Summit at Sea and other MarketWorld forums.
Trebor Scholz stepped up to the podium and explained why, a few years earlier, he had written a short essay on an idea that he coined as platform cooperativism. As he surveyed the world being remade by Silicon Valley, and especially what was once called the sharing economy, he began to see through the fantasy-speak. Here were a handful of companies thriving by serving as middlemen between people who wanted rides and people who offered them, people who wanted their Ikea furniture assembled and people who came over to install it, people who defrayed their costs by renting out a room and people who stayed there. It was no accident, Scholz believed, that these services had taken off at the historical moment that they had. An epic meltdown of the world financial system had cost millions of people their homes, jobs, and health insurance. And as the fallout from the crash spread, many of those cut loose had been drafted into joining a new American servant class. The precariousness at the bottom, which had shown few signs of improving several years after the meltdown, had become the fodder for a bounty of services for the affluent—and, Scholz noted, for the “channeling of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.” Somehow, the technologies celebrated by the Valley as leveling playing fields and emancipating people had fostered a slick new digitally enabled upstairs-downstairs line in American social life.
It didn’t have to be this way, said Scholz. Technology was neither inherently feudal nor inherently democratic. It had, as Ramo wrote, both tendencies. Which tendency would win out depended on the values of the age and what people chose to fight for. We live in an era in which it is remarkably easy, by historical standards, to build a platform like Uber or Airbnb. Yet for all this ease, the big platforms tend to be owned by small cliques of investors like Shervin Pishevar and Chris Sacca, run for their benefit, and given to extracting as much value from workers as they can, at very low prices. If it is so easy to build platforms these days, Scholz wondered, why couldn’t workers and customers create their own platforms?
Scholz had embarked on a global adventure to locate and study various attempts to do just this. The idea lived already, in many little embryos. There was Fairmondo and Loconomics and Members Media and various others. But it wasn’t just about these companies, Scholz said: “I’m not really talking about an app. I’m not really talking about technology per se, but it is really about the change of a mind-set, a mind-set that is now based on this kind of extractive economy but is working towards one that is really based on mutualism and cooperativism.” Here was a rarity: a no-strings-attached idea for actually changing the world.
When Scholz spoke at events, he was asked over and over how democratically owned tools could ever compete with powerful corporate platforms. “How can we achieve scale?” people would ask. “How can we reach out to the masses?”
“We are the masses,” Scholz reminded them.
He ceded the floor to people working on various aspects of platform co-op. Brendan Martin was the founder of the Working World, a cooperative financial institution active in Argentina, Nicaragua, and the United States. He was seeking to build what he called “nonextractive finance.” He told the audience that the challenge represented by platform co-op was part of a very old human story:
The fight over platforms, whether they are cooperative or owned by just a few—you can look and you can distill history down to essentially being that fight. Class warfare can really be about who gets to own it, a couple of us or all of us. It is things that have public benefit that are owned by a couple of people, and they get to extract what they will from those who have to use it—or they are shared for the collective benefit. What is new about technology here, it’s just a new space to have that battle in.
Who owns what no one has any choice but to use? It is an ancient question that has become central to a new age. Martin looked at the new platforms and saw links to earlier platforms—the platforms of granaries, of gold, of land. Revolution after revolution over the ages had called for the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of land. “We might change that now to cancel the debts and redistribute the platform,” Martin said.
Then there was Emma Yorra, who codirected the Cooperative Development Program at the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn. She was running a social service program that had little apparent connection to technology. The center had some years earlier begun to organize worker cooperatives to help poor immigrants locate work in housecleaning, child care, pet care, and the like, and to keep as much of the pay as possible, rather than forking it over to a middleman.
One day Yorra was taking the subway, and she saw an ad that angered her. It was for one of the slick new digital platforms offering super-easy housecleaning. As she recalled it:
It’s an ad that’s really promoting itself for its technological ease of use. I think it’s like, “Get a clean apartment with one click.” And it’s just got this hand that is a yellow-gloved hand. It’s kind of disembodied, and it’s got a sponge and you’re going to get this clean apartment cleaned by someone you don’t see, some magical elf who has a yellow hand. And it’s not really a person, right? It’s all about the technology.
This was what had bothered Yorra. The technology, which had made the service easier to procure, had also changed the nature of the interaction. The one-click app obscured the messy human reality of the working people behind it, who now had less bargaining power.
Yorra had begun to build what she imagined as a cooperative answer to the one-click cleaning service. Because MarketWorld is so hard to escape even when you are rejecting it, she had taken funding from the Robin Hood Foundation, financed by the titans of Wall Street, to build her service. The effort was still in progress that night at the Goethe Institute. (Eventually, her organization would release a new app called Up & Go, which allowed consumers to book housecleaning services, and which channeled 95 percent of the money directly to the workers, who also owned the businesses.) That evening, with the app more than a year away from release, Yorra had a long way to go to make progress against a statistic that appalled her: the news, put o
ut by the charity Oxfam, that just sixty-two billionaires possessed as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity (3.6 billion people), down from three hundred billionaires a few years ago. In fact, it was nine billionaires, not sixty-two, as Oxfam would later say when better data came in. And the following year, the number of billionaires it took to account for half the world’s resources dropped from nine to eight.
Six of those eight made their money in the supposedly equalizing field of technology: Gates, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Carlos Slim of Telmex and other Mexican businesses, and Michael Bloomberg, the purveyor of computer terminals. Another, Amancio Ortega, who built the retailer Zara, was famous for applying advanced technology to manufacturing and for automating his factories. The final member of the gang of eight, Warren Buffett, was a major shareholder in Apple and IBM.
CHAPTER 4
THE CRITIC AND THE THOUGHT LEADER
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
—UPTON SINCLAIR
In October 2011, in the sleepy village of Camden, Maine, Amy Cuddy prepared to give her first proper talk outside academia. Cuddy was a social psychologist at Harvard Business School who had spent more than a decade publishing papers on the workings of prejudice, discrimination, and systems of power. She had written of how the sexism that women face is a strange amalgam of the envy men feel toward career women and the pity they feel for women who don’t work. She had written of how “socialized obedience” and “conformity” played into the decisions of both the 9/11 hijackers and the American guards at Abu Ghraib who tortured their prisoners. She had written of how white people taking computerized implicit-bias tests became more prejudiced when informed that the tests’ purpose was to measure racism. She had written of how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people more easily perceived “anguish, mourning, remorse,” and other “uniquely human” emotions in people of the same race as them than in people of other hues. She had written of the “model minority” stereotype that shadows so many Asian Americans.
That autumn, she was continuing to work with a team on a long-term project to study how men’s hegemony, that most global of phenomena, adapts to local conditions so as to enroot itself. In America, where being independent and self-oriented are the leading “cultural ideals,” she and her colleagues wrote, the society tends to cast men as independent and self-oriented. In South Korea, where being interdependent and others-oriented are more prized, the society tends to cast men as interdependent and others-oriented. As a working paper put it, “Men in general are seen as possessing more of whatever characteristic is most culturally valued.” Like much of her work, the paper didn’t offer solutions. It was part of a noble intellectual tradition of plumbing the depths of a problem. Which was perhaps why none of Cuddy’s work had led to giving a talk beyond the walls of academia—until now.
She had been invited to speak at a conference called PopTech. It was, like Summit at Sea, an important stop on the MarketWorld circuit. It had been founded by a group of people who wanted to bring big ideas to Maine—including the inventor of Ethernet and a former chief executive of Pepsi and Apple. At PopTech, the ideas went down easy amid the lobster rolls and twilight deck parties overlooking West Penobscot Bay and nightcaps at Natalie’s at the Camden Harbour Inn. Like many MarketWorld conferences, PopTech charged a sizable attendance fee, and it relied on corporate sponsors. When MarketWorld organized such events, it could be difficult to keep its tastes and ways of seeing from shaping what ideas were offered and how. It was not clear what these MarketWorld types would make of Cuddy, since she tended to speak of problems rather than easy solutions, and of challenging power and systems, and appeared little interested in the milquetoast change of win-wins.
Fortunately, Cuddy had a guide to this new world in the form of Andrew Zolli, who, as PopTech’s curator, was her host at the conference. Zolli was a kind of MarketWorld producer, standing at the profitable intersection of companies wanting to associate themselves with big ideas, networkers looking for their next conference, and writers and thinkers who wanted to reach a broader audience and perhaps court the influential elites of the circuit. Zolli, who called his conference “a machine to change the world,” was a consultant and strategic adviser to companies like General Electric, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Nike, and Facebook, as well as NGOs, start-ups, and civil society groups; he was on the boards of various MarketWorld organizations; and he was a fixture on the paid lecture circuit, where he spoke on topics like resilience. His book on the subject would praise such things as smart electrical grids and marine conservation as win-wins.
Zolli was, in other words, an expert in and perpetuator of MarketWorld culture and its way of seeing. He understood what ideas would be useful to MarketWorlders, helping them to anticipate the future and make their killings, and he understood what ideas made winners feel socially conscious and globally aware but not guilty or blamed.
An essay he wrote to promote his book on resilience argued that the world should focus less on rooting out its biggest problems, including poverty and climate change, and more on living with them. The message had reassuring implications for those who were perfectly content with the status quo and preferred the kinds of changes that essentially preserved it. Zolli believed that the desire to solve underlying problems is “an alluring and moral vision,” but ultimately wrong. The problems were perhaps here to stay, and it was more important, he argued, to teach people to cope.
Zolli promoted various projects that devote resources to helping people weather bad situations rather than to improving those situations. For example, he praised research at Emory University that illustrates how “contemplative practice” can “bolster the psychological and physiological resilience of children in foster care,” which was a lot easier than fixing foster care. He spoke of inflatable bridges and electrical micro-grids that could help communities survive exploding transformers as sea levels continue to rise. He was quick to admit that none of these kinds of fixes “is a permanent solution, and none roots out the underlying problems they address.” He knew he had critics: “If we adapt to unwanted change, the reasoning goes, we give a pass to those responsible for putting us in this mess in the first place, and we lose the moral authority to pressure them to stop.” But this was the kind of thinking mostly heard from people who didn’t make a living as corporate consultants and MarketWorld idea generators, and Zolli didn’t buy it. He made clear that he wasn’t saying “there aren’t genuine bad guys and bad ideas at work, or that there aren’t things we should do to mitigate our risks. But we also have to acknowledge that the holy war against boogeymen hasn’t worked and isn’t likely to anytime soon. In its place, we need approaches that are both more pragmatic and more politically inclusive—rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop the ocean.” You can talk about our common problems, but don’t be political, don’t focus on root causes, don’t go after bogeymen, don’t try to change fundamental things. Give hope. Roll with the waves. That is the MarketWorld way.
Cuddy was nervous about speaking, for the first time, to hundreds of strangers who weren’t in her field, who weren’t enthusiastic students who had signed up for her class, who didn’t know any of the basic concepts of social psychology. Although her work on images of men in individualist and collectivist societies was on her mind, it may not have exhilarated PopTech. Another paper she had published, in Psychological Science, “Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance,” would become the basis for her talk.
The stage lights came up from darkness. Cuddy stood center stage with her hands on her hips, her feet planted shoulder-width apart, tucked into a pair of brown cowboy boots that only added to what would come to be called her signature “power pose.” On the giant screen behind her was an image of Wonder Woman, whose hands and feet were in the same powerful posture, engaged in the same willf
ul taking of space. What she and her colleagues had found was that standing in a forceful position like this could stir confidence in people—and perhaps blunt some effects of the sexism that she had long studied. For twenty seconds that felt like eternity, Cuddy stood there, looking powerful and remaining silent, as the Wonder Woman theme song played. She pivoted from side to side, holding her position. Then she broke character and smiled.
“I’m going to talk to you today about body language,” she began. The title of her talk, revealed on the second slide, was “Power Posing: Gain Power Through Body Language.” She began to explain her and her colleagues’ research showing that without changing any of the larger dynamics of power and sexism and prejudice, there were poses people could strike in private that would help them gain confidence. Without necessarily intending to, she was giving MarketWorld what it craved in a thinker: a way of framing a problem that made it about giving bits of power to those who lack it without taking power away from those who hold it. She was, to use a metaphor she would later employ, giving people a ladder up across a forbidding wall—without proposing to tear down the wall. Or as Zolli might have put it, she was giving people a way of “rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop the ocean.”
* * *
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“It is the best of times for thought leaders. It is the worst of times for public intellectuals,” declares Daniel Drezner, a foreign policy scholar, in his recent treatise The Ideas Industry, a part-academic, part-first-person account of how an age of inequality, among other things, has distorted the work of thinking.
Drezner starts out by defining two distinct kinds of thinkers, who share in common a desire to develop important ideas and at the same time reach a broad audience. One of these types, the dying one, is the public intellectual, whom Drezner describes as a wide-ranging “critic” and a foe of power; she perhaps stays “aloof from the market, society, or the state,” and she proudly bears a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes.” The ascendant type is the thought leader, who is more congenial to the plutocrats who sponsor so much intellectual production today. Thought leaders tend, Drezner says, to “know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change the world”; they are not skeptics but “true believers”; they are optimists, telling uplifting stories; they reason inductively from their own experiences more than deductively from authority. They go easy on the powerful. Susan Sontag, William F. Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal were public intellectuals; Thomas L. Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and Parag Khanna are thought leaders. Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines; thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change. Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners; thought leaders promote the winners’ values, talking up “disruption, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurial ability.”
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 10
