I've spent time with tech oligarchs – you have no idea just how weird they are

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

Last week, Jesse Armstrong, the British director behind Succession, released his first feature-length film – a thinly veiled satire about the tech oligarchs who dominate our lives and, increasingly, have a say over what constitutes free speech.
Though it would be easy to write Mountainhead off as pure fiction, to anyone who has spent time around these people, as I have, it was eerily accurate.
The four fictional billionaires are flush with obscene wealth accumulated in the technological miracle of the past two decades. Having all flown in on their respective private jets, they decamp to a remote mansion for a weekend of poker and bounce between 'friendly' shit talking, writing their net worth on their chests, planning a coup, and watching mass violence unfold around the world thanks to one of the character's apps (likely a nod to Facebook's amplification of content that ultimately contributed to genocide in Myanmar).
In writing the script, Armstrong borrowed from real life, using Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreesen and Sam Bankman-Fried as inspiration. Some of the most important and influential people of Silicon Valley, these men all share a belief in the saving grace of their own genius, even as one of them serves a 25-year sentence for duping people out of billions.
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Though the world mostly thinks of Silicon Valley as some kind of liberal bastion, at its core, it is libertarian (even the film's title is a nod to 'the godmother of American libertarianism', Ayn Rand). When I lived in San Francisco, where I was working for the Biden-Harris administration and the Democratic National Convention, I quickly realised that the prevailing attitude is that governments and regulations are pesky and burdensome – that they only serve to obstruct technological progress they're too small-minded to understand.
Working among and moving in the same social circles as senior tech executives and some of today's best known billionaires, you'd see just how weird they were. They would brag about sleeping in the office or demanding staff miss important family events. I once watched the son of a tech billionaire demand that a senior US government official record a video to ask a girl out for him.
In 2022, when autonomous-driving taxis started appearing on the streets of San Francisco, this confrontation between big-tech cockiness and government process showed up loud and clear. The businesses making the taxis failed to notify local officials before rolling out the vehicles, and only partially released their data to regulators.
When one tech company's fleet was taken off the roads due to safety concerns, other tech companies lobbied to get rid of human taxi drivers entirely. Sure, there's a lot less awkward chat in driverless taxis, but for technology with such a profound impact as vehicles driving around a city with no human behind the wheel, transparent oversight should be non-negotiable.