Credit: Getty Images / Gino Maccanti
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Anand_Giridharadas_-_PopTech_2011_-_Camden_Maine_USA-100x100.jpg)
MarketWorld is a power elite defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and think tanks. One recent November, they found themselves aboard a 145,655-register-ton Norwegian cruise ship bound for the Bahamas. Summit at Sea was a four-day-long maritime bacchanal honouring the credo of using business to change the world—and perhaps of using “changing the world” to prosper in business.
Summit, being one of the hotter MarketWorld tickets, had drawn to this cruise ship the founders or representatives of such venerable institutions as AOL, Apple, the Bitcoin Foundation, Change.org, Dropbox, Google, Modernist Cuisine, MTV, Paypal, SoulCycle, Toms Shoes, Uber, Vine, Virgin Galactic, Warby Parker, and Zappos. There were some billionaires and many millionaires on board, and lots of others who had paid a typical American’s monthly salary to attend.
And yet the stubborn facts of an age of stark inequality clouded this vision of the pocketbook-impacting approach to social justice and the use of business to unlock potential and birth transformational things. The more these entrepreneurs waxed about changing the world, the more those facts got in their way, mocking their grandiose and self-serving claims. And this was most acutely true for a subtribe hailing from Silicon Valley and the world of technology, with its audacious claims that what was good for business was great for mankind.
Yet there was no denying that as they chewed away, these technologists were also partly responsible for prying inequality as unsustainably wide as it had gotten. How did these new barons relieve the cognitive dissonance they might have felt from claiming to improve others’ lives while noticing that their own were perhaps the only ones getting better? One day a high priest of this technology world, a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Shervin Pishevar, had the crowd listening in rapt, reverent silence.
What they heard was a powerful man who seemed at pains to explain his power away and to cast himself as a man in pursuit of things nobler than money. “At the end of the day, it’s not about the money,” he said. “It’s about the love and those moments of character.” The Summit people clapped hard and whooped in recognition.
Pishevar turned to the topic of life-extending technology, which was a major focus of his work now. “Our life spans and the health of our lives are going to be longer, and it’s going to challenge the very basis of our current civilization,” Pishevar said. He was engaging in advocacy that disguised itself as prophecy, which was common among technology barons and one of the ways in which they masked the fact of their power in an age rattled by the growing anxieties of the powerless. VCs and entrepreneurs are considered by many to be thinkers these days. That people listened to their ideas gave them a chance to launder their self-interested hopes into more selfless-sounding predictions about the world.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe