Yesterday I attended a Bloomberg+Cornell Tech talk featuring Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist, early Facebook employee, owner of the Golden State Warriors. His investment organization, Social Capital, reaches across a wide range of industries including healthcare, education, financial services, and enterprise. Barely over 40, this dashing, pocket-square wielding Sri Lanka-born, Silicon Valley elite, obviously possesses some exceptional trait. Saying he was the poster boy of immigrant success would be an understatement of an understatement. For 45 minutes, he shared his views with Taking Stock host Pimm Fox on personal and societal progress (by 2045, the products he stands behind should touch a quarter of the world's population, employ 10 million people, and make a trillion; but "the African American man over there should also be making a trillion, so should this girl seated here, this gentleman behind her...") . That was the general sentiment that stewarded the course of the talk– the reallocation of power that was happening today, thanks to companies like Uber, Air BnB, and Facebook. Through these new forms of transactions, hierarchies are upended and the social landscape is becoming more fair. Nevertheless, he notes that the user-to-user model hasn’t yet touched structurally important parts of society like healthcare and education.
I liked hearing him talk about how we need to value people differently; value the guy from Chico state as highly as the Harvard grad. I too hope for a more diverse rubric of success to guide the next generation of kids growing up. I see the answer in interdisciplinary education systems where schools are not simply vehicles of economic and cultural reproduction, where students aren’t simply learning to fulfill what the market wants, but are instead growing up into a social hierarchy which values and accredits broad-ranging skills and traits.
Chamath spoke more about how technology advances society, taking it to a new symmetric order. I think I was too captivated by his even-toned, comfortably-paced charisma to notice that I wasn’t 100% satisfied with this matter-of-fact manifesto. And then Pimm pushed back with an interesting point. To get to it, he walked Chamath through a scenario– “after this event, I will get into a taxi driven by a Pakistani driver, greeted by the same complaints we’ve all been hearing– ‘this Uber is really killing my living, so much fewer customers now.’ What should I say to this taxi driver?” Chamath responded with his own scenario. I don’t quite remember the specifics but the example was about the decrease in farming in California. That had to happen. Because society has to evolve; lives are touched in new ways, opportunity is restructuring; in twenty years we will be using things to fulfill our needs that today we will not begin to understand. The momentum seemed to pick up again with this gusto of positive effervescence. Ultimately, he avowed, we cannot look at the minuscule, we must widen the “aperture of the problem”.
This was the interesting intersection of the talk. My thought is– what if this wide aperture setting fuzzes out the individuals that are suffering because of the changes? Why should the taxi drivers and the farmers be the ones giving up their ease of livelihood for the betterment of society? Yes, perhaps that’s life and we all contribute in some way or other for human progress. But we should not be talking about this without pointing out their sacrifice, their difficulties should not be dismissed as local or minuscule. Because to the individual suffering, the life he lives– his daughter he must feed, his paycheck he must stretch fibrously thin– is the “grand scheme of things”.
Chamath’s dismissal of the individual taxi driver’s hardships doesn’t discount his genuine passion for restructuring the labor pool, and his mission to make the world more democratic. One of the reasons I bring up his mindset is that it speaks to a question that has been on my mind lately. So if this guy wants to solve humanity’s hardest problems, can he really do it with that wide aperture? If those problems are rooted in inequality, or at least if solutions to many problems are obstructed by an apathy to inequality, or an apathy that lets us continue to feed and be fed by a zero sum game, is empathy a prerequisite? I guess every case is different and the options are not binary.
Pimm’s question and Chamath’s response just make me think about my dad and my own values. My dad is stubbornly not emotive when he hears of individual cases of social injustice. Nevertheless, he volunteers his talents in many areas of social development in Singapore. One way is by promoting design as a driver of new value creation in business and technological contexts. He got the government to fund scholarships for design students, design programs and prototyping capabilities, and promoted cluster collaboration between businesses, designers and end-users, all in the name of creating a design eco-system. Many people benefitted, people who could finally imagine making a living out of their passion. However, it wasn’t any of their individual narratives that pushed my dad to spend his free time working on creating these opportunities; his fervor was fueled by his love of the arts, and a belief in the potential for design to meet unidentified needs. Those needs didn’t have a face or story; I imagine that they appear to him as case studies.
My dad solved problems but the brainstorming would not be clouded by emotion. When I was little, he scoffed at me when I gave money to beggars on the way to a 3-star Michelin dinner, when I asked what would happen to alleged terrorists, and when I spent my Sunday afternoons teaching migrant workers how to use a computer, he’d say, “go get successful, get more resources than your Sunday afternoon and make a bigger change.” I wager though that if you stay perched too high up with your bird’s eye surveying the “grand scheme of things”, you lose sight of little pieces of the puzzle. And maybe to some people, those little pieces aren’t fitting in their puzzle. Maybe they get more done because they have an idea of what their whole picture looks like.
In Singapore’s quest to be a “City of the Arts”, any artist whose work doesn’t fit into the dominant neoliberal narrative will not benefit from arts funding and promotion. Does it come down to what you think each individual deserves, how much you support a Darwinian view of social hierarchy as not just the be all but the end all? So in this case, it’s whether a citizen has the right to public funds even if he self-actualizes on his own terms– the government would see this as a question of an individual freedom against society’s wellbeing, while the artist might see it as a plan that’s dysfunctional to begin with; he would argue that artistic development cannot be constrained by the market. In the case of Pimm’s taxi driver trying to keep abreast with Uber’s tailwinds, Chamath might see him as necessary collateral damage. How do you reconcile your drive to make society more equal when you don’t even have a problem with these very real cases of present day inequalities? The future will not stop at some stable symmetrically-powered society, and I don’t think he wants it to; in that period, there will also be those that fall behind of the advances. What then is the eventual goal?
After having written almost thus far, my friend told me to read up on the ethics of motivation. I will look into that and broach this issue again. Declaring now though, that I am gonna keep every post I write to a minimum of an hour of my time. Or it just keeps going...