Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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the self-congratulation of digital elites 

From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 54-55:

Carnegie asserted that knights of capitalism like himself “ and the law of competition between these” were “not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.” No one would talk like that today, but our champions of capital do like to describe their work in strikingly moral terms. Google’s company motto is “Don’t be evil,” and at a recent company conference, Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and now its CEO, said earnestly that one of Google’s greatest accomplishments was to save lives— thanks to the search engine, for instance, people can type in their symptoms, learn immediately they are having a heart attack, and get life- saving help sooner than they would have otherwise. The self- driving car, one of Page’s pet projects, would eventually, he argued, save more lives than any political, social, or humanitarian effort. “ It’s not possible in tech to frame your ambitions aside from those who are making the world a better place,” Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, told me. “I think it has a lot to do with the way Silicon Valley was formed and the university culture. The egalitarian culture. The liberal culture there. People are often surprised by that. … And I always try to explain to people that people actually came to Google not to get wealthy, but to change the world. And I genuinely believe that.”

Getting rich and solving wicked problems. What more could you want in life?

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