The New Robber Barons, A Recasting of an Old Play

“ Once upon a time not too long ago and not too far away, a few guys at Intel or Bell Labs or some damn place got the mind-boggling idea you could shrink down a computer's memory and put it onto a little sliver of silicon no bigger'n a horsefly's ass. Various outfits tinkered around with the concept and eventually it got commercialized. Lo and behold, Silicon Valley was born, where they start turning 'em out by the bucketful. By '78 we're talking a five-billion-dollar industry. Kids barely old enough to drink legal got so rich they just gave up counting the money. ”

“ Snell said, “He shared the dreams of many academics who feel blocked from great success and wealth, and he loved ‘get-rich-quick’ stories, such as a friend who struck gold in California real estate or the Silicon Valley’s overnight millionaires.”
Greed, however, isn’t the only motive. “People who like computers are games people,” John Lewis, the FBI agent, told me, “and they like challenges. It’s ‘me against the machine.’ You give them a computer and say you can do anything but that, and that’s the first thing they’re going to do. ”

“ Silicon Valley was supposed to be different. Growth and entrepreneurship—a failed company was just a stepping-stone to a successful one, can’t win them all, dust yourself off and get back to the garage and start inventing. There’s a whole world waiting out there!
Mother of three. Dad whose bright daughter’s university fund was raided to make ends meet during the “temporary” austerity measures. This one has a Down’s Syndrome kid and that one worked through three back surgeries to help meet production deadlines. ”

“ Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and the spectacle is still before us of the same selfishness, extravagance, and folly, which he rebuked so well and so vainly, but pushed to even greater excess, and more widely diffused, enervating the frames and ruining the fortunes of one great section of society, and helping to inspire another section, and that a dangerous one, with angry disgust at the hideous contrast between the opposite extremes of wretchedness and luxury which everywhere meets the eye in the great cities of the civilised world. ”

“ They are the raw materials of vulgar jokes and the targets of popular aggression. They are the Newly Rich. Perhaps they should be dealt with more appropriately within the academic discipline of psychology, but then economics in a branch of psychology. To many, they represent a psychopathology or a sociopathology.
The Newly Rich are not a new phenomenon. Every generation has them. They are the upstarts, those who seek to undermine the existing elite, to replace it and, ultimately to join it. ”

“ It is a term that has been applied much more broadly than its original concept, to the point where it is almost meaningless and rarely critically evaluated. Dvorak (2004) complains that it is essentially meaningless, stating that 'There is no such thing as a disruptive technology. There are inventions and new ideas, many of which fail while others succeed. That's it.' There remains however a disruption obsession inherent in the Silicon Valley narrative. ”

“ SECRETARY POMPEO: It’s Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley thought of in the biggest possible terms, in terms of the connectivity and relationships that are developed there and the intellectual capital that’s developed right here in this region. It is central to my mission.
When I travel around the world and talk to my counterparts, I know I always have at my back the fact that we’ve got a growing, thriving economy. It matters an awful lot. They know it, too. They are striving for it. It is difficult, frankly, for many of them to get to that same place. They know that, too. ”

“ Even if you fail, as many of us have, our system is geared to help you to get up and get after it again. And I know so many in this room, so many entrepreneurs, wear failure as a badge of honor, because you learned and you improved and you continued to compete. It’s how we all learn to execute our ideas and get them right the second time.
And this system, our idea of capitalism with free markets, has produced the greatest wealth and prosperity that the world has ever seen, and technology has played a huge role in that, and we all know it will continue to do so. ”

“ Don't cherish any illusions about it. Everyone that makes money must be guilty of a thousand cold-blooded things, a thousand sharp turns, a thousand cruelties; it's a game of cruelties. Fortunately, I'm not a brilliant success in that line, anyway; people merely think I am. The ideal money-maker always is and always will be a man without a temper, without a heart, and with an infusion, in our day, of hypocrisy. He takes refuge in hypocrisy because the public hates him and he is forced to do it to keep from hating himself. When public opinion gets too strong for him he plays to it. ”

“ They claim a power without control, exercised through forms which make it secret, anonymous, and perpetual. The possibilities of its gratification have been widening before them without interruption since they began, and even at a thousand millions they will feel no satiation and will see no place to stop. They are gluttons of luxury and power, rough, unsocialized, believing that mankind must be kept terrorized. Powers of pity die out of them, because they work through agents and die in their agents, because what they do is not for themselves. ”

“ Do not suppose them to entertain hidden but far-reaching designs. They are men of short views. Their aim is to pile up as much wealth as they can, as quickly as possible. In them we see the climax of that anti-social egoism which is the curse of our day. They are merely the most typical figures in an epoch enslaved to money. The intellectuals, the press, the politicians, the very members of the cabinets (preposterous puppets!) , have, whether they like it or not, become tools in the hands of the profiteers, and act as screens to hide them from the public eye. ”

“ At the best they make some sacrifice of innocence to function; at the worst they destroy themselves and debauch society.
Even vulgarity (by etymology the vice of the crowd) if we take it to mean undisciplined selfishness and pretension, flourishes at least as much among the prosperous as among the hand-working people. Wealth which is not dominated by noble tradition or by rare personal inspiration falls into vulgarity because it permits the inflation of those crude impulses which are much kept down in the poor by the discipline of hardship. ”

“ And thus the power of the riches of the patron (always imperfect and doubtful, as we shall see presently, even when most authoritative) depends first on the poverty of the artist, and then on the limitation of the number of equally wealthy persons, who also want seats at the concert. So that, as above stated, the art of becoming "rich," in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In accurate terms, it is "the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour." ”

“ It has seemed like successful accomplishment of what man must do to win and enjoy power over nature. Luxury, however, has brought vice and ill, and has wrought decay and ruin. It is the twin sister of sensuality, which is corruption. Is luxury a good or not? Men have lost faith in it, and have declared that the triumphs of the arts were delusions, "snares to the soul," corruption of the individual and society. They have turned back to the "old simple ways," and have renounced the enjoyments which were within their reach by the power of the arts. Such renunciation has always been popular. ”

“ You rich men have no ideals. You discredit the ideals of others. If I had your money, I would build such a temple to peace as would compel the world to come in. Oh! think what one might do, the name one might leave, the homes one might save. It is money that hides all this from you, money that hides even the purpose of life itself. You grub in the valleys when imagination should lead you to the hill-top. ”

“ They look forward to promotion and more interesting work. They and their social group fail to accord dignity to the work which they are doing at any time.
Another reason why the motive of social prestige has no effect in the more humble

positions is that in business we have practically abandoned the standard of the artist and adopted that of the capitalist. The artist's standard is diametrically opposed to the capitalistic standard. We honor the capitalist not for what he does, but for the money he gets for what he does. ”

“ Like many other fallacies that have become identified with motion picture characterization, rich people are invariably represented as being unkind, selfish, penurious, and immoral—oh, always immoral. And the poor are loving, kind, true, surfeited with virtue. ”

“ Finally, the "Truman Show" encapsulates the most virulent attack on capitalism in a long time. Greedy, thoughtless money machines in the form of billionaire tycoon-producers exploit Truman's life shamelessly and remorselessly in the ugliest display of human vices possible. The Director indulges in his control-mania. The producers indulge in their monetary obsession. The viewers (on both sides of the silver screen) indulge in voyeurism. The actors vie and compete in the compulsive activity of furthering their petty careers. It is a repulsive canvas of a disintegrating world. ”

“ The advertisers have already laid waste the countryside, achieved a censorship over the contents of magazines, and reduced the works of the great artists and savants to finely printed little blocks of text, which are used to wad out large pages on Campbell's Soup and Vacuum Cup Tires, and now, it appears, they are beginning to determine the character of theatrical entertainment. It is not inconceivable that the day will come when works of art of all kinds will be produced to promote the sale of motor-cars and canned salad dressing. ”

“ They had imagination enough to see cheap amusement for the masses in what most intelligent people, a dozen years ago, considered merely a mechanical curiosity. So they invested their small savings, these fur-cutters and petty tradesmen and barnstorming actors, in the venture that high finance scorned; and the boom, when it came, found them securely in the saddle. That's why the public gets so much perfunctory and stupid stuff thrown at it today. ”

“ The drama is not their fittest medium. And Mohler and his Broadway competitors have learned that lesson. They have learned that the large American audience wants emotion, not thought. They reduce emotion to its lowest terms of popularity, produce farces and melodramas, and grow rich; while the producer of intellectual plays, struggling under a burden of New York rent and Broadway salaries and the deadly cost of advertising, is slowly crushed down into bankruptcy, despite the good-will of the minority, the patronage of drama leagues, and even the endowments of the philanthropic. ”

“ It’s the turn of television factories like MCA to declare, in Lew Wasserman’s words: “We think the movie industry has made many mistakes in judgment. It has refused to face up to the need for progress in the entertainment industry.”
David Susskind, of Talent Associates, another TV production company, can arrive in Hollywood to make a movie, remarking pleasantly: “This town is dedicated to pap. Show business here is founded on quicksand. The people are quick to take offense at criticism because they have a guilt complex. They know they’re turning out commercialized junk. ”

“ Indeed, business people and creators should receive fair compensation, especially the creators; but in the zeal to protect major political contributors from the entertainment industry, bureaucrats and lawyers could imperil technology in the most lethal of 96ways. Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar, would prove it later with a stunningly oppressive proposal called the Green Paper, a technophobic lawyer’s wetdream, a techie’s nightmare. ”

“ Ask a venture capitalist how much money he is willing to invest in new technology that would touch content in a way that Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti don't sign off on. The answer is a simple one: Zero. Zero.
They've shut down an industry and innovation in the name of this terrorist war, and this is the cause. This is the harm. Five percent.
And what have you done about it? It's insane. It's extreme. It's controlled by political interests that has no justification in the traditional values that justify legal regulation. And we've done nothing about it. We're bigger than they are. ”

“ So, what I want, then, to say about the software layer is that it begins to have the power over the political economy of culture that it needs to have in order to make real changes. When Mr. Murdoch has to rush out and buy MySpace, in order to sustain the profitability of his media empire, you know that something very important has happened. MySpace is to media consumption the prosumer revolution made big, right? What we are watching is the world’s greatest believer in the producer/consumer distinction buying prosumer properties ’cause that’s where the profits is in the next 10 years. ”

“ Murdoch and whichever one of his children wants to inherit the business, because there’s less or no business to inherit, precisely because MySpace is the way of the future.
Nothing will save the recording industry now, and even the recording industry knows it. What won’t save them won’t save them because musicians have begun to desert, which was always the problem, it was never that the audience would steal, it was that the musicians would escape slavery, and the deenslavement of the musicians is now becoming a reality. ”

“ Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is for.
Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of. That's been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it's copyright that changes. ”

“ An artificial scarcity of concepts and ideas can then be established. Much money is to be made when creative flows of knowledge and ideas become scarce products or commodities that can be traded in the market place. And, increasingly, intellectual property law is providing profiteers with vast accumulations of wealth. ”

“ There can be little doubt, I think, that our capitalist economy does promote a monopoly of culture. Through their control of the market, the wealthy are able to bid up the prices of works of art until they are beyond the reach of the less prosperous. As a result, the best paintings and sculptures, with the exception of those that find their way into museums, are accumulated in inaccessible private collections, and opera and music are made needlessly expensive. One very evil consequence is the substitution of a purely pecuniary standard of valuation for aesthetic standards. ”

“ First, there may be motivations for creation that do not depend on the market mechanism. People sometimes create because they seek fame, or out of altruism, or because an inherent creative force will not let them do otherwise. Where those motivations operate, we may not need a financial incentive to create. Thus the "problem" of cheap copying in fact becomes a virtue. Second, the same technologies that make copying cheaper may also lower the costs of advertising and distribution, cutting down on the need to finance expensive distribution chains. ”