Did the Digital Age Exacerbate "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire Syndrome?"

You have probably at some point heard the line that Americans who are not well-off often support right-wing economic policies not because they think they are good for the poor (indeed, often do so in spite of being persuaded that they are not) because they expect to personally benefit from a regime of effectively regressive taxation, few or no rights for workers, etc. when they someday join the ranks of the rich--sooner than later returning to a station that seems to them so natural and proper that one may speak of them in their present state as "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires." Just how widespread and deeply rooted this tendency actually is has long been a matter of argument (some go so far as to say that it is why "socialism never took off in America," some think it frankly irrelevant to the larger course of American political history), but few seem to go so far as to deny the existence of people who think in such terms altogether.

Accepting that one may well wonder about the implications of the age of the Internet for such thinking.

Considering that it seems relevant that the Internet, contrary to the (asinine) cyber-utopian propaganda, has proven itself much more useful to the right than the left--which is significant as it is the ideas of the right and not the left that are conducive to, indeed endlessly promote, the "syndrome." Central to it is the belief that, as Kurt Vonnegut had it, it is very easy to make money--indeed, to make really big money in no time at all--which the right certainly promotes with its stress on "opportunity," "entrepreneurship" and the "self-made man," seizing on "tech" in particular for a latterday basis for such images, most obviously through the cults those espousing and influenced by such ideas built up around figures like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and Silicon Valley more broadly. Meanwhile there is what those technologies made possible, what indeed can seem indicative of their real macroeconomic significance (manipulating information rather than things), like the supposed "democratization" of stock trading that gave rise to a day trading boom in the 1990s that is probably inextricable from the simultaneous dot-com hysteria that did so much to add the glitter to names like Gates' (Dow Jones 1 Million, Today!) and the subsequent rise of "crypto" that drives the belief that if not everyone can be a "tech billionaire" they can still make a fortune speculating on the ripples that the activity of tech billionaires sends through the market. For many seemingly even more accessible, there is the idea that in an age of "social media," "podcasting" and "influencers" anyone with an Internet connection and a camera with aspirations to being an artist, journalist, "thought-leader," etc. can achieve celebrity and all its rewards.

Amplifying all this the media, in line with its political and social biases even more than its stupid sensationalism, seizing on the "success stories," relentlessly promoted the illusion that slanted accounts of one-in-a-million and often totally random "successes" were somehow a rational life plan for everybody, as they totally ignored what really happened to the vast majority of persons walking this path. Those who were ruined by that "startup" or that speculative endeavor. Those who went out on the Internet and found that to be online is generally to be either ignored or abused--ignored so completely that they suspect there are no real human beings online or abused so brutally that they think that the only human beings online are of that species of human scum we call "trolls."

Confronted with the disappointment they are far more likely to meet with than the success the good conformist that Authority and Conventionality encourage everyone to be will take to heart the teaching that, whatever the facts, they "have no one to blame but themselves"--and so, returning to Vonnegut, "blame and blame and blame themselves," and hate themselves, with their only potential escape from such hatred of themselves their redeeming themselves their trying again and this time succeeding. Others, less thoroughly conformist, having invested themselves in an unfortunate enterprise, and not for the first time, may question the Conventional Wisdom--and often go only so far. Having seen how entrepreneurship and hard work does not pay off, they may simply decide that "life" is a "cheat and a snare." However, others may well take a harder look than that at what they have been made to believe, begin to understand that going through life thinking oneself a "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire" is insanity for an individual, and worse still for a society made up of them, and start to come to grips with those realities from which they have all their lives been told to look away. And that is the most interesting, and potentially meaningful, part of the story.