The superhero we don't need (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Elizabeth Holmes dressed in the same style every day: black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and black low-slung shoes. This “uniform” underlined her deified status as a busy billionaire dedicated to changing the world, setting her apart from mere mortals with time to choose their clothes. “My mom had me in black turtlenecks when I was, like, eight,” she told one women’s magazine. “I probably have 150 of these. It makes it easy, because every day you put on the same thing and don’t have to think about it — one less thing in your life. All my focus is on the work. I take it so seriously; I’m sure that translates into how I dress.”
Yet this story of her image, like the blood-test technology that won her fame and fortune, was fake. One former colleague later revealed how a “frumpy” Holmes had adopted the look to mimic the signature style of Steve Jobs, even tracking down the exact Issey Miyake turtleneck favoured by the Apple founder. Her pose as a cool, black-clad genius worked for a while, fooling some of the best-known financiers and public figures in the United States. Then it had to be ditched in favour of dull suits to appear in court for fraud. And soon will switch to dowdy prison scrubs after her conviction and 11-year sentence.
Silicon Valley superstars love to embrace a simple style. Rich enough to buy anything in the world and puffed up with self-importance, they use clothing to send out the message that they are too important to waste their precious intellect and time on deciding what to wear every day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when quizzed about his uniform of grey T-shirts and blue jeans. (This is, lest we forget, the man who set up a website to rank attractive women at university that exploded into one of the planet’s most pernicious companies.)
Sam Bankman-Fried also tapped into this approach: he presented himself as a financial prodigy who disdained societal mores while set on saving the world. He went for the scruffy skateboarder look, a man-child with an unkempt bubble of hair who even wore his T-shirt, shorts and sneakers when sitting on stage next to a former US president and a former British prime minister.
It is no surprise that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair fell for such a phoney. Yet they weren’t the only ones suckered by this high priest of cryptocurrency, who preached of earning billions through his unique financial acumen, promised to pour the money into philanthropy, and then crashed to earth with his fortune evaporating. “SBF” championed a modish millennial approach to philanthropy, that claims to harness data, in tandem with supreme brainpower, moral leadership and relentless logic to improve the cost-efficiency of charity and tackle state failures. But his downfall has exposed the hollowness at the heart of this cult that has become as much part of Silicon Valley’s uniformity as their T-shirts and turtlenecks.
The astonishing rise and fall of the disgraced crypto king began over a meal with William MacAskill, a prominent young Oxford University philosopher. This Scottish professor, guru of the effective altruism movement, persuaded the vegan SBF, then a student, to forget about devoting his life to animal welfare and instead focus on making as much money as possible for donation to good causes. So SBF duly set out to become mega-rich, ostensibly on the basis that this would let him do as much good as possible in the world, and he seduced admirers and investors alike with his sense of mission while pouring money into MacAskill’s own projects.
Effective altruism draws its inspiration from Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher. He contends that the moral obligation to save children from hunger in a famine is no different from that of saving a child you saw drowning before you. Unfortunately, so radical and inhumane is his stance that he ends up as an eugenicist: the lives of those with disabilities are of less value, he argues, and so killing babies born with disabilities is ethically permissible. Singer is relentlessly utilitarian.
Yet his arguments lie at the root of this movement so beloved by Silicon Valley billionaires since it justifies their accumulation of great wealth on grounds that it can end up doing great good. Now, though, leading devotee Dustin Moskovitz, another of the Facebook founders, has acknowledged that effective altruism either encouraged or excused SBF’s unethical — and almost certainly criminal — behaviour. Even MacAskill, whose organisations received big donations from his shamed protege’s operations, admits he was wrong to dismiss fears that his philosophy might be “misused” to cause harm. Their church of benevolence became cover for a giant crypto-scam.
This cult of ultra-rationalism implies that it is morally better to get rich than to slave away in a badly-paid job that might be socially useful. Essentially, it tells people to work in the City rather than a care home, demeaning those who believe in public service or actually helping other human beings rather than piling up mountains of cash in tax-efficient havens to give away to their pet causes. Critics such as Timothy Noah have noted how it ignores issues such as economic inequality since its “most distinctive characteristic” was the “deftness with which it tiptoes past targets likely to offend billionaires”.
Some key adherents — including MacAskill — have since moved on to “long-termism”, an ideology aiming to save us from future threats such as artificial intelligence, rather than more prosaic ideas such as funding mosquito nets to save lives of existing human beings from malaria. Their argument is that if all lives have equal value wherever they are, that should extend to whenever they are around. “The things that matter most are the things that have long-term impact on what the world will look like,” said Bankman-Fried last year. “There are trillions of people who have not yet been born.”
It is, of course, impossible to apply data and accountability to the future. In reality, it seems that SBF used this pretence of doing good to provide cover for a giant pyramid scheme, pretending ends justified means while he hung out with his clique overseeing a crypto con at a $40m mansion in the tax haven of the Bahamas. “You were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers,” said a Vox reporter last week after his empire had fallen. “Ya, hehe… I feel bad for those who get fucked by it,” he responded, admitting “the ethics stuff” was mostly a front and talking of a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us”.
SBF was also the second-biggest donor to Joe Biden and the Democrats last year, handing over $37 million. Yet his veneer as a do-gooder slipped when the President’s party flirted with a wealth tax for the super-rich — who often end up paying proportionately far less to the state than fellow citizens due to armies of highly-paid accountants shifting their assets around the globe. He told the New York Times that “this could cause hugely negative collateral damage, significantly reducing the amount of innovation and taxable base in the first place”. Elon Musk, who might have been hit for £50 billion, chimed in with a warning that this might hamper his long-termist plan “to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness”.
The downfall of SBF should send a stark warning to be wary of self-appointed prophets who think their wealth has given them special gifts to solve the problems of humanity. These tycoons are often little better than the robber-barons of old who used charity to atone for their rapaciousness in business — but only after becoming immensely wealthy. Note how Jeff Bezos has joined the ranks of those billionaires such as Zuckerberg and SBF pledging to give away much of their fortunes. It is a welcome trend but it reeks of hypocrisy, given that it would be so much better if the ultra-rich simply played by the same rules as the rest of us, ensuring at least that their firms pay a fair share of tax. Even that secular saint Bill Gates is not immune to such criticism when Microsoft became a case study in tax avoidance for the Senate during his reign.
Ultimately, these prophets of elitist altruism proclaim a specious and self-serving creed: they create giant fortunes by running firms exploiting their digital revolution to dodge tax and evade national borders, then bask in the glow of adulation for their philanthropy having subverted democracies, slashed government revenues and thus weakened state services. Finally, they claim to be the best people to solve some of the most pressing societal issues — although only the ones they decide to tackle on their own terms, rather than more unfashionable ones such as filling roads, funding soldiers or fashioning support for the vulnerable.
Canada’s finance minister Chrystia Freeland provided a glimpse into such attitudes a decade ago before she abandoned journalism for politics, writing a superb book called Plutocrats that exposed how a smug elite dictate public discourse and demand a system tilted even more in their favour. One billionaire Republican donor she interviewed even argued for the abolition of most taxes, praising how the super-rich “self-taxed” themselves by supporting charities of their choice rather than funding government. He demanded the state should pay tech tycoons for their contributions to society. “It’s that top 1% that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99%,” he concluded, outrageously.
Many people yearn for superheroes, visionaries and wunderkinds to offer hope of salvation on a complex, messy planet. But altruism built on avarice is simply a comfort blanket for billionaires. Behind the stylised images, the sci-fi sheen of technology, the bold claims to have remodelled philanthropy, the arrogant insistence some people are so important they should be spared taxes, lies the same hubristic mentality that tarnished the aid industry. It is based on the cynical idea that a small, superior and wealthy elite knows best — and that they should not be thwarted in their drive to earn billions since they are indisputably the good guys. As two new age messiahs stumble and fall, we ought to be more sceptical over billionaire geeks posing as god-like saviours and show a bit more faith in our communal ability to resolve serious problems.
Ian Birrell is an award-winning foreign reporter and columnist. He is also the founder, with Damon Albarn, of Africa Express.
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Subscribe“Leading politicians from all parties seem to be terrified of them…”
They are, and I’d really like to know why. Every single poll shows that the majority of the public – which means most voters – are rationalists who understand that men can’t be women (or vice versa). So why not align with the majority on this issue?
Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?
I agree, but can a Prime Minister be “cancelled”?* It’s a huge shame that he doesn’t have the cojones to find out.
*other than by electoral means.
We’ve created this vast swamp of NGOs and activist orgs that have an outsized influence on politicians. I can only speculate that elected leaders simply don’t interact enough with everyday people – that even their social circles are dominated by people with divergent opinions.
“Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?”
It’s very simple. Leading politicians are ruled not by their voters, but by powerful financial interests. Wealthy NGOs and corporations have a vested interest in backing the trans lobby, making it disproportionately powerful compared to its constituent base. Despite being a supposedly oppressed minority trans rights activists are backed by some of the wealthiest and powerful organisations on Earth, such as Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Arcus Foundation etc. etc. Rishi Sunak fears them over you.
See https://archive.ph/9vaRd – the now deleted from Medium article ‘Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk Science’ from 2018 which gives a great overview of how fake all of this nonsense is.
Thanks for the link! Another aspect of this madness is that it provides an opportunity for intra-elite vetting and selection of “useful idiots” and a way for elites to compete and weed out people who may not be “loyal” to the cause of the .1%.
Conversion is changing one set of beliefs for another. The vast majority of people don’t care what others believe as long as the beliefs do not negatively impact on their lives. People generally tend to be live and let live. They have busy lives and don’t have time to stay up to date on current trends. It is the trans activists who have been infiltrating the government, the civil service, schools, not for profits, businesses, etc. to spread their doctrine and are using the power of the law to force their beliefs on the majority and silence objections by having all objections classified as hate speech. Using the power of the law to attempt to force beliefs upon the people should be illegal.
Yes, quite. The ‘infiltration’ has been cleverly orchestrated. Everyone has paid Stonewall to ‘train’ them (with our money, tbh) and to give them brownie points for being good, inclusive organisations. One way to comply was to bring in EDI experts (trans advocates – has anyone heard them advocating loudly for disabled employees?) Jobs for the boys – all those ‘gender’ graduates, with one world view, brought in at management level to devastate women’s rights in industry and government. There aren’t that many of them, but they punch above their weight, because they’re not brought in as office juniors.
Quite an effective tactic, it turns out, and massively difficult to undo.
Transgenderism is an occult movement with billions of dollars behind it. It’s a Trojan horse for those with nefarious intentions toward children and provides a convenient path through which the state can circumnavigate parental protections in order to indoctrinate children.
Politicians are not scared of trans activists but those financially backing them.
Do the Tories ever actually want to win again? Being 5% less radical than the radical left seems like a strategy for party annihilation. At what point do the actual conservatives and moderates in the party jump ship?
Who would they vote for? Increasingly moderate and conservative views are being literally banned. Rishi Sunak doesn’t care about women, doesn’t care about children, doesn’t care about the Conservative Party, and doesn’t care about the next election, because he knows he will lose anyway. He’s just focussed on his own employability after that happens.
Rishi Sunak just fancied being prime minister of a country. He had no loyalty to the U.K. as demonstrated by the US green card scandal. The position will have profited him greatly and enhanced his global profile.
In fact, that probably explains why Rishi Sunak has crumbled. He cares most about his position amongst the global elites, especially if he does not expect to win the next election, and they are mostly behind the the indoctrination of the masses with woke ideology.
How about Farage?
I don’t think they want to be elected and I don’t blame them. The next administration will only be issuing WEF directives to usher in Agenda 2030. This is why we are about to have a member of the Trilateral Commission installed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see several members of the next parliament assassinated as people finally wake up to what’s been done to them.
I think the current Tory ‘elite’ are not Conservatives and have no interest whatsoever in those who elected them.
I do wonder if some of the problem here is the tortuous language used by the radical trans lot.
Is conversion therapy what the GIDS at the Tavistock were doing or is conversion therapy talking to a worried teen about their feelings?
If the NHS gives clinical advice on child development, then why are these politicians contradicting medical experts?
They are all, without exception, sinister ideologues pursuing the same neoliberal transhuman creed.
Politics in the UK are getting increasingly surreal. For Mr. Sunak ‘it looks as though the Government intends to go ahead with a complete ban on “conversion therapy”. Presumably this is election jitters, not wanting to disturb the trans lobby wasps’ nest.
Meanwhile, here in Scotland, Mr Youseless plans to SCRAP the current conversion therapy ban, not because Mr Youseless thinks this is a good thing, but in order to save the SNP’s skin at the next election.
So both Mr Sunak and Mr Youseless are doing synchronised volte-faces, but in the opposite direction, both hoping to avoid political oblivion.
It’s crazy. The Tories might even win against the odds if they went full berserker against gender bullish*t – and in fact the whole DEI. They are not conservatives basically. Woke-LITE.
Have you considered running for leadership of the Tory party? I’m pretty sure “full beserker” is exactly what they are going for now!
Bonne chance, cherie!
People can never change sexes. But it seems politicians will always change positions, if it’s perceived to serve their interests.
It’s maddening that — at a time when popular sentiment (even in the United States!) seems to slowly be awakening to the delusion of gender ideology — spineless politicians still kow-tow to transactivism rather than standing for the real and pressing needs of women.
Keir Starmer has been having another of his moments about gender self-identification. But who cares what this creature thinks? It is a war crime to aid or abet a war crime, so that without ever having been a Minister, or even an MP for the governing party, Starmer is already a war criminal, thereby matching his foreign policies to his domestic policies. He is the Kid Starver of Gaza and Gospel Oak, and his White Phosphorus Party would privatise the hospitals at home having already bombed them abroad.
More broadly, with its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, Thatcherism has inevitably ended up as gender self-identification, which was unknown in 2010, and which has therefore arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Margaret Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and d**k Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.
Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, which were the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community, an authority that cannot be restored before the restoration of that basis. Thatcher created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour. Leo Abse, who had had the measure of the milk-snatcher, also had the measure of Tony Blair’s androgyny.
And if this is a culture war, then where is the culture on our side? At 46, I had always assumed that we would win this one in my lifetime. But I am less and less certain. The other side enjoys the full force of the State and of a cultural sector that the State very largely funds. That double force was what turned the England of 1530, an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries’ standing, into the England of 1560, a country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Again I say that that State is the Tory State, there having been no other for as long as the notion of gender self-identification has existed. There is no suggestion of a Government Bill or amendment to give statutory effect to the rhetoric of Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman, which is pointedly never quite echoed by Rishi Sunak, whose choice of words to the Conservative Party Conference was very careful indeed.
Does everyone get put into moderation, or is it just me? I pay for this. Do you?
I do. Every time. Sometimes it takes hours for my comments to appear. I have emailed numerous times and asked for an explanation but have never received one.
This comment took about ten minutes to appear.
My latest has now been waiting an hour.
You must be considered more threatening/ dangerous than I am.
It no longer even appears as “awaiting for approval”. Hey, ho. See here.
Happens way too often.
“Awaiting for approval.” Pidgin English.
We no longer have proper political representation we have a uni party interested only in promoting the globalist agenda. US is exactly the same.
“People pride themselves on “speaking truth to power” – leaders, big shots. In a democracy, this is easy to do. Usually, you get nothing but applause for it. What is hard is speaking truth to “the people” – for in a democracy, that’s where the power lies.”
Jay Nordlinger in the current issue of National Review, “Cooper’s Union”
“The constant appeals to public opinion in a democracy… induce private hypocrisy, causing men to conceal their own opinions when opposed to those of the mass… A want of national manliness is a vice to be guarded against, for the man who would dare to resist a monarch shrinks from opposing an entire community.”
James Fenimore Cooper in “The American Democrat” c. 1835