Repentance, the new mood?
Repentance is one of the noblest and most progressive properties of being a person. The inability to repent can lead to annihilation as with Don Juan and Smerdiakov. The ability to repent instead leads to redemption as it happens for Raskolnikov. Repentance, not always industrious, is becoming one of the prevailing moods among the technologists, the founders of start-ups and the inventors who populate Silicon Valley.
The most repentant of the repentant is Jaron Lanier whose name is always associated with the birth of virtual reality. He now he writes books. In two of these, You are not a gadget (Mondadori) and Dignity in the age of the Internet (Assayer), explained the treachery of technology and the need for a cyber-rebellion against the state of affairs. In the recent autobiography Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality reflects on his relationship with technology. An opportunity to really change the world if it hadn't been hijacked by Silicon Valley that doesn't care and doesn't understand the consequences of its actions.
Then there's Ev Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, who has publicly acknowledged the utterly nefarious role of the microblog in the global public conversation. To make up for it, he founded Medium, an online publishing platform where argumentative content is king; there is no advertising and it is funded through subscriptions. In fact Medium is one of the best things on the web and therefore it can be said that Williams' repentance was very industrious.
Chris Hughes: what next Facebook?
The story of Chris Hughes, 35, is more tortuous. Hughes shared a dormitory at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz and together with them started The Facebook, which Hughes left in 2007 to become involved in Barack Obama's electoral campaign.
Five years later, in 2012, Hughes bought a progressive press establishment like “The New Republic” of which he also became a director. Of absolutely democratic faith, married to Sean Eldridge (the union is one of the most powerful gay couples in America) and strengthened by Obama's electoral success, Hughes seemed the person sent by destiny to bring the historic liberal think-tank to safety economic.
The new owner intended to bring the magazine to profitability, which had lost 2012 million dollars in 3. Well, after less than two years of the Hughes cure, The New Republic's managing editor, managing director and a dozen journalists either walked out badly or were fired for irremediable disputes with the property. Franklin Foer, top editor of "New Republic" and another techno-skeptic, in his last important, debated and controversial book, World Without All: The existential Threat of Big Tech, painted a rather sharp portrait of the young Hughes with whom he worked for two years, before being abruptly fired.
In January 2016, Hughes announced to the newspaper's shocked staff that he was leaving the editorship of the newspaper and divesting his stake. The announced with these words:
After investing time, energy and over $20 million, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for new leadership and a new vision at The New Republic.
This bitter story, which began with so many expectations, has convinced many that the marriage between the vision of technologists and classic journalism is very problematic and can be destructive for the latter. To cheer up, however, there is the opposite example of the "Washington Post" which, after the acquisition by Jeff Bezos, is experiencing a new magnificent season.
Journey to paradise
Chris Hughes has just finished writing a book that is about to be published under the title Fair Shot: Rethinking inequality and How We Earn (St Martin's Press, $19.99, 224 pages). The book, according to the press releases and the short extracts published, can be roughly divided into two parts, the first tells the story that leads a young man from the American province to reach the heights of wealth through a series of fortunate circumstances. A story that could have been the plot of a story by Fitzgerald set in the golden twenties ... which, however, is followed by the greatest economic crisis in the contemporary world.
Hughes's is, in fact, a fairy tale that embodies the American dream. Raised in a Lutheran family of limited means in North Carolina, received in a prestigious boarding school like Andover and then entered Harvard on a scholarship, he was lucky enough to come across and sympathize with Zuckerberg and therefore, thanks to Facebook, to become billionaire overnight.
Then there is the engagement with Barack Obama to which his knowledge of the web and new media brings. Then follows the vain and painful attempt to secure a large newspaper like "The New Republic" to which he intends to bring the vision of the new economy. An experience that will mark him deeply and will act as a viaticum for subsequent choices.
Finally comes the awareness that there is something profoundly wrong in the social model that is emerging following the great transformation brought about by new technologies.
Journey to hell
The second part of the book recounts the awareness of the consequences and remedies of the betrayal of technology. The new technologies have ended up increasing inequality, they have attracted large economic resources without effectively redistributing them. The lost jobs have not been replaced, nor has a valid system of compensation for the lost wealth been found.
Rapid technological advances, globalization and financialization are knocking out the middle class,” Hughes writes.
This is a huge problem. For which a political program is needed. And this is probably the terrain on which the third episode of the young billionaire's life will develop.
From this awareness, his training as a political activist against inequality began. He travels to Kenya twice to study the different attempts to fight extreme poverty. The first trip he makes with Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist, to study the Millennium Villages Project, an experiment to ensure a dignified life for one of the poorest populations in the world. The second trip is made with another economist, Michael Faye, founder of the GiveDirectly project, which simply aims to transfer money to those who live on less than a dollar a day.
After comparing these two approaches Hughes comes to the conclusion that the simplest and most effective solution is to transfer money to people rather than trying to build the conditions for their development. His total adherence to the universal basic income project stems from this conviction. To promote it, Hughes founded the Economic Security Project, a non-profit organization that aims to distribute resources to the poor.
A basic income… or something else?
In reality, as Felix Salmon, a financial reporter, explains in the New York Times, Hughes's is a rather problematic variant of the basic income. In fact, Hughes's proposal is not universal but only supports citizens with a job of over 6 thousand dollars a year and with a dependent family member under the age of 6 or over 70.
Households with income exceeding $50 are not eligible for benefits. Those with an income of less than $6 are excluded as well. These "poor" will continue to be assisted by the traditional social security system. To the 42 million American households that appear to fit these parameters, the community will pay a check for $500 a month for each member who earns more than $6 a year. These payments will be made through the earned income tax credit scheme.
Salmon notes that as many as 80 million American households would be excluded from the program proposed by Hughes and comments
Supporters of universal basic income, especially those who see it as insurance against robot-induced unemployment, will resent the idea that the plan excludes the jobless and most needy.
How do you get the resources to finance this plan which would cost the exchequer 290 billion dollars, half of the defense budget? “Taxing people like me,” Hughes writes. Hughes also sets out rather specific proposals on the necessary tax measures and identifies the subjects to whom to address them. The wealthiest American families, about 5 million households, would foot the bill.
In short, the proposal of the repentant Crish Hughes is rather complicated and also has an elitist connotation, probably connected to the concern for its sustainability. However, he risks repeating the bitter story of the “New Republic”.
However, this concrete implication must not obscure the merits of this book which is also a testimony of our time and a signal that something is really changing. In this regard, John Thornhill writes in the "Financial Times":
Fair Shot is a dramatically personal, deeply felt, and persuasively argued plea by a personality from Silicon Valley's gilded youth to address the glaring inequality that mars the American Dream.
In any case, credit to Chris Hughes.
Thanks so much for the post. Really thank you! Keep writing.custom writing service