One of the more bizarre cable-show-bro handoffs of late happened this week between Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity concerning the $13 billion one-day spike in the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos’ fortune.
Using a chyron calling the e-commerce mogul a “fat cat,” Mr. Carlson noted that the world’s wealthiest man had become “extremely rich from all of this, including a lot of the suffering,” referring to the pandemic, which has made Amazon’s delivery services a must-have for many people and has rocketed its stock to the stratosphere.
“I’m not against wealth accumulation. I’m not against free enterprise, but $13 billion in a day suggests something is skewed with the system, no?,” he asked a guest, who vehemently agreed with Mr. Carlson that something must be up, including floating an evidence-free idea that Amazon was somehow wanting to keep the pandemic going so it can continue to benefit.
Mr. Hannity came on next and quickly objected to the idea that the rich should be hindered from getting richer: “People can make money. They provide goods and services people want, need and desire? That’s America. It’s called freedom — capitalism — and as long as it’s honest, right? People decide.”
It was, how shall we say, awkward, with Mr. Carlson looking peeved to be tweaked by a colleague. And so Mr. Hannity soon did a semi-about-face on Twitter. “I apologize for any misunderstanding to Tucker and the Fox audience. I support freedom and capitalism,” he wrote. “Not people taking advantage of a pandemic. If I see such evidence, I will obviously condemn it.”
Obviously! But aside from the odd sight of a couple of rich guys sitting around judging a really rich guy, their joint fascination with the money — and so, so much money — was a shiny object we all need to stop looking at.
The wealth is extraordinarily distracting and, in fact, I wrote earlier this year that I thought the tech leaders would be richer than ever post-pandemic because their businesses had the heft and products to thrive in the crisis.
That has certainly turned out to be true. According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, No. 1-ranked Mr. Bezos has become close to $70 billion richer over the past year, for a total net worth of $184 billion, while the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has jumped $12 billion to $91.1 billion. In fact, all but two of the top 15 on the list are connected to American tech, including No. 13, Mr. Bezos’ former wife, Mackenzie Bezos, who is now $24.2 billion richer in 2020 with a $61.3 billion fortune.
And while there is something admirable about these moguls’ successes, against the backdrop of tens of millions of Americans out of work and seas of underpaid wage employees on the front lines of the crisis, the income inequality feels obscene. This is especially true given the tax breaks for the very wealthy in recent years and, really, for a long time.
But a focus on the wealth also obscures the unprecedented accumulation of power by tech giants and the lack of any significant regulation or incentives for real accountability. They are always going to be very rich, so get used to it, but they don’t necessarily have to be as powerful if we act now.
And this must be the main topic of a congressional hearing on Monday when the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee questions the four top tech leaders: Mr. Bezos, Mr. Zuckerberg, Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, owner of Google and YouTube.
The gathering of all four chief executives is a big deal, even if some think that appearing as a group will give each individual leader cover, resulting in less substantive questioning. And there are worries that the event will lack the usual drama, since it is likely to be largely remote, due to the coronavirus.
But it’s critical that lawmakers block out all the noise that has grown around the industry and aim at only discussing the repercussions of unfettered power. All the major problems related to tech stem directly from this, whether it be privacy violations or hate speech and misinformation or unfair market dominance or addiction or … fill in the blank.
We must think of it all as systemic, fueled by complete control over certain areas by tech companies, without adequate guardrails from publicly elected officials, which every other major industry has been subject to. Tech does not play by the rules only because there are no rules to speak of. So why shouldn’t they do as they please?
Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who more recently co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, put it perfectly in a podcast interview with me last year: “We need to move from this disconnected set of grievances and scandals, that these problems are seemingly separate: tech addiction, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, the rise in vanities, micro-celebrity culture, everyone has to be famous. These are not separate problems. They’re actually all coming from one thing, which is the race to capture human attention by tech giants.”
And it has become a completely fixed race. Because of their heft, these behemoths block every lane and there is no space for innovative small companies to pass them, especially those that are faster or with better ideas. The debate about breakup or levying fines or writing regulations should also be a debate about innovation. What about all of the useful inventions that do not happen when there is only one or maybe two real games in town in social media, in search, in online video, in apps and in e-commerce.
And in communications too, which is why the letter that Representative Jim Jordan, who is in the Republican minority, wrote Wednesday to ask Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler to invite Jack Dorsey of Twitter as a witness on Monday was an interesting idea.
“We believe there is a bipartisan interest to hear from Twitter about its power in the marketplace,” he wrote, before adding content moderation and hacking issues to the pile. This is the tiresome and inaccurate conservatives-being-silenced alleyway Mr. Jordan almost always goes down, frittering away time that would be better spent talking about power and the need to disperse it to many more.
In fact, having Mr. Dorsey there Monday to talk about that would be interesting, since it is a far smaller company than the other four, and it actually suffers due to its tiny size in the online advertising market. And while Mr. Dorsey may also be very wealthy from Twitter and his payments company called Square — with an $8.37 billion fortune, which is up $3.62 billon this year — he and his companies are also-rans by comparison.
So, take note Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hannity, you can follow the money, but what you should be following is the power that makes all that money.
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July 24, 2020 at 05:24AM
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Tech Is About Power. And These Four Moguls Have Too Much of It. - The New York Times
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