“Billionaireism,” as defined by the writer and internet critic Cory Doctorow, describes “both the pathology that affects you when you are so wealthy that you’re effectively above consequences and above moral consideration for others, and the pathologies that having a society dominated by such people inflicts on the rest of us.” (One such pathology is the rapid decline in quality of digital platforms which Doctorow has termed “enshittification,” and which was the subject of a book he published last year.) A while ago, Doctorow joined us to talk about some books that illuminate different facets of living in a highly unequal society where the richest measure their wealth in billions. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
Careless People
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
This is an extraordinary book by a woman who served as a government-relations executive at Facebook, working directly under Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan, and Mark Zuckerberg—the company’s three big beasts. Wynn-Williams enters her role very enthusiastic about Facebook’s possibilities, but she soon becomes disenchanted. Many of those reasons are obvious, but there is also a lot in this book that has not previously been revealed. She describes instances of horrible sexual harassment and personal cruelty, like when, in a performance review, she was chastised for being “unresponsive” during a period when she was in a coma.
The ways in which the people Wynn-Williams worked with are shown to be “careless” evolve throughout the book. At the beginning, they seem more like people who unthinkingly flick cigarette butts out of the window when it’s been a dry summer. They’re careless in a reckless way. But, by the end, when Facebook has become structurally important to many governments—and much of the book is about how Kaplan sets out to accomplish this, in part through embedding with the Trump campaign—her co-workers become careless in the sense of just not giving a fuck about social duties or morality. It’s a Leona Helmsley, “Taxes are for the little people” variety of carelessness.
Little Bosses Everywhere
by Bridget Read
This is a book about the history of pyramid schemes, and specifically about a form of pyramid scheme known as “multi-level marketing,” or M.L.M. In the schemes, people are recruited to become salespeople for companies that sell their products directly to consumers, and then, when they fail to sell—because the products are not very good—the salespeople buy the inventory themselves to meet quotas. The M.L.M. world is also filled with people offering seminars on how to sell, preying on people who have already been scammed.
The connection between this stuff and billionaireism is that, first of all, the people at the top are very rich. They make a lot of money by basically lying about how they make money. And, second of all, the institutional support for policies that make billionaireism possible was in many ways created and financed by the M.L.M. industry. The Heritage Foundation, which laid the groundwork for so many laws that help make oligarchy possible, was bankrolled by Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos (Betsy DeVos’s father-in-law), the founders of Amway—a consumer packaged-goods M.L.M. company—when Amway was on the verge of being crushed by F.T.C. regulations. Read’s book is a great explanatory account of the industry, connecting big, nebulous ideas like neoliberalism to actual concrete things.
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