Seriously, every last one.
There was a war of rhetoric today. Tech CEOs (a phrase used by a technologically illiterate populace, myself included) spent the morning and afternoon being grilled via Zoom call by politicians in the House Antitrust Committee.
And, as I might have mentioned, everyone sucked. A slew of write-ups can be found on the world wide web (tech!), but this one from the NYT is particularly useful, if occasionally galling. Now children, gather around for a story of the sort of utter, rampant, unyielding suckery that typically characterizes a congressional hearing.
I. Tech CEOs
I admit, I don’t think the CEOs sucked all that much. I mostly just wanted a snappy title and theme. Jeff Bezos, Chairman and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post had a particularly good introduction, which can be found here, along with the opening remarks of GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) brigade. In it, he waxed poetic about the glories of America, the trials of his youth, and the virtue of resilience. All excellent points, but the politicians in the room seemed distracted by his $100b+ net worth and rather unmoved by the touching stories and lessons he shared with them.
Perhaps it was naive of Jeff Bezos to try to assuage the guillotine brigade and their demagogic representatives in the House by telling the story of how he actually worked for his fortune. But could it have been naïveté? Perhaps you thought I was hyperbolizing or speaking metaphorically by referencing the guillotine, but an actual guillotine was erected outside Bezos’s home less than a month ago. Perhaps Bezos should have taken the symbol of bloody revolution against an imagined enemy as a clearer signal that he was not going to win them over.
Bezos did himself a disservice by trying to appeal to the mob’s sense of decency, and moreover did us a disservice by allowing the angry mob, motivated by jealousy and consumed by righteous indignation, to continue its assault on decency unchecked. When pressed by (mostly Democratic) politicians on supposed predatory behaviors (such as, for example, creating from scratch an international platform from which millions of third parties can derive meaningful income while billions of users get convenient and inexpensive goods), Bezos demurred, again and again, politely and sheepishly to the vultures who were hungry for soundbites.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Google’s umbrella corp.) all seemed to follow the same playbook, albeit with different players. While the Democrats occasionally hit Facebook for anti-competitive practices like the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, the Zuck was mostly targeted by Republicans who demanded an answer for Facebook’s purported war on conservatives. Alphabet’s Pichai faced a similar deluge, with one Republican asking him directly if Google would be aiding Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign. The claims of a war on conservatives are at best, greatly exaggerated and at worst, utterly invented (read a good, balanced breakdown of the claims here. Zuckerberg and Pichai mirrored Bezos’s temperament, meekly thanking the legally incompetent, technologically ignorant, and eternally useless swarm of politicians for the honor of being publicly harassed.
It is easy to understand why the CEOs would opt for cordial acceptance of the rhetorical beating over actually standing up to the delusional bullies we call our representatives. The idiots in that room who between them achieve maybe half the intelligence of a single one of the CEOs happen to control, in large measure, the fate of their companies (and thus, the national economy). Effective antitrust prosecutions can result in eviscerated companies, loss of competitive advantage through intellectual property or first mover advantage, and potentially even jail time. That’s an awful lot of power to be wielded by some goddamn clowns whose antitrust expertise begins and ends with the fickle opinions of their most uninformed but passionate constituents.
II. The Politicians
That brings us neatly to the rat-faced, sniveling bastards sitting in their committee room atop their high horses, lobbing attack after uninformed attack on the most exemplary drivers of American innovation. In a moderately sane society, with a moderately honorable political class, the most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders in the country would be treated, if not with reverence, at least with respect. Particularly, one would imagine, by a collection of politicians whose only contribution to the American economy is finding novel new ways to undermine it. Antitrust Committee Chairman David Cicilline, whose lifetime achievements can be boiled down to being the former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island and current member of the House, elected by all three Rhode Island residents, spoke with particular spite. Like a mosquito whose only apparent purpose is to annoy more capable beings for a brief period before disappearing into the dust as an anonymous and frankly pointless nuisance, Cicilline lashed out: ““Our founders would not bow before a king, nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.”
Dear readers, do not mistake this petty little man’s words for concern. Cicilline and his fellow professional empty suits do not mind that you bow to an emperor, they worry only that you might bow to the wrong one. They recognize, finally, what has been obvious for some time—power in American society is being reallocated from the political class to the entrepreneurial class. What you are witnessing is not a good-faith attempt by a rag-tag team of regulators who seek to return power to the people, it is a (somewhat desperate) attempt by our ruling class to wrestle back the last vestiges of power over us, their once-faithful subjects.
We should not be surprised that a collection of useless people who have made a career out of convincing people that they matter feels threatened when confronted by those who have earned their success, rather than be elected to it. While we can (and should) be amused by their slimy desperation to maintain power, we should use events like hearings as a reminder of who these people are. They are not our representatives in any meaningful way. To the extent their policy preferences overlap with ours, it is only in the interest of furthering their own power. They are not smarter than us, better than us, or more capable than us. They should be looked at with scorn and mocked endlessly. Our politicians are the worst among us, and if Mr. Cicilline insists that I bow to an emperor, I will gladly kiss the ring of the money-grubbing over that of the power-grubbing.