Cory Doctorow on the high cost of living for the super-rich

“Billionaireism” as defined by writers and online commentators Cory Doctorowdescribes “the pathologies that affect you when you are so rich that you can actually transcend consequences and moral considerations for others, and the pathologies that a society ruled by such people inflicts on the rest of us.” (One of the pathologies is the rapid decline in the quality of digital platforms, which Doctorow calls “materialize,” this is the theme a book He published it last year. ) Not long ago, Doctorow joined us to talk about books that illuminate different aspects of living in a highly unequal society in which the richest measure their wealth in billions. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

careless person

Author: Sarah Wayne Williams

This is a remarkable book, written by a woman who was the head of government relations at Facebook, working directly for Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan, and Mark Zuckerberg (the company’s Big Three). Wynn-Williams came into office enthusiastic about the possibilities of Facebook, but she quickly became disillusioned. Many of these reasons are obvious, but there is also much in this book that has not been revealed before. She described horrific examples of sexual harassment and personal abuse, such as a performance review in which she was punished for being “unresponsive” while in a coma.

The way the people who worked with Wayne Williams were “careless” throughout the book. At first, they looked more like people mindlessly popping cigarette butts out of the window on a dry summer day. They are recklessly careless. But by the end, as Facebook became structurally important to many governments (much of the book is about how Kaplan went about achieving that goal, in part by embedding herself in the Trump campaign), her colleagues became careless and careless about social responsibility or ethics. This is the carelessness of Leona Helmsley’s claim that “taxes are for the little people.”

The ubiquitous little boss

by Bridget Reed

This is a book about the history of MLM, specifically about a form of MLM known as “multi-level marketing” or MLM. Recruited Become a salesperson for a company that sells products directly to consumers, then when they can’t sell because the product isn’t that good, the salesperson buys the inventory themselves to meet quotas. The MLM world is also filled with people offering how-to-sell seminars, targeting those who have already been scammed.

The connection between these things and billionaireism is that, first of all, the people at the top are extremely wealthy. They basically make a lot of money by lying about how they make their money. Second, the institutional support for the policies that make billionaireism possible was in many ways created and funded by the MLM industry. The Heritage Foundation, which laid the foundation for many of the laws that helped make the oligarchy possible, was funded by Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, the founders of Amway, a consumer products MLM company, at a time when Amway was on the verge of being suppressed by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations. Reed’s book is a great explanation of the industry, connecting big, vague ideas like neoliberalism to practical concrete things.