Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  In the Valley, prediction has become a popular way of fighting for a particular future while claiming merely to be describing what has yet to occur. Prediction has a useful air of selflessness to it. Predictors aren’t caught in the here and now of their own appetites and interests. It seems like they aren’t choosing how things will be in the future any more than they chose the color of their eyes. Yet selecting one scenario among many possible scenarios and persuading everybody of its inevitability—and of the futility of a society’s exercising its collective choice among these futures—is a deft way to shape the future.

  As he predicted the elongation of life and other such “things that are coming down the pipe,” Pishevar was in fact pushing those things down the pipe. He was part of a group of elites who had been very smart and very lucky with start-up investments, and who now got to make decisions of enormous social consequence about what to do about the human life span. This power gave them great responsibility and exposed them to the possibility of resentment—unless they convinced people that the future they were fighting for would unfold automatically, would be the fruit of forces rather than their choices, of providence rather than power. Hence the cleverness of Pishevar’s passive framing of his own goals: “The way things are structured today are not going to be relevant to what the reality is going to be.” Longer lives for rich people were just something that happened to be coming down the pipe. Not so much a better health care system for all.

  “What are the characteristics of people who are able to do world-changing ideas?” someone in the crowd asked during the Q-and-A portion.

  This question set Pishevar up well to present himself—and his fellow elites—as rebels up against the powerful, and not as power itself. The characteristic that world-changers have in common, Pishevar said, is a willingness to fight for the truth. It had nothing to do with their being more luckily born than you, unburdened by racial and gender discrimination and with greater access to seed capital from family and friends. It was that they were braver, bolder than you—some might say ruthless—willing to take on power, no matter the cost. Citing Travis Kalanick of Uber and Elon Musk of Tesla, he said, “They are most comfortable in the uncomfortable places. What that means is, they’re very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. And most of us want to just be kumbaya, everything’s great, I’m happy, you’re happy, we’re good, besties, BFFs—and it’s like, ‘No. Fuck that. Let’s challenge each other. What’s going on here? What is the truth?’ When things get uncomfortable, the reason it’s getting uncomfortable is because there’s a conflict between something that’s true and something that’s not true. And the only way to suss that out, figure it out, is to poke at it. And people like that who make big ideas happen don’t run away from those conflicts. They actually embrace it.”

  This idea of the start-up pursuing its singular truth in this fashion was part of Pishevar’s rebellious self-conception. A king presides over a multitude of truths. But a rebel, who takes no responsibility for the whole, is free to pursue his singular truth. That is the whole point of being a rebel. It is not in the rebel’s job description to worry about others who might have needs that are different from his. By Pishevar’s lights, when a company like Uber challenged regulators and unions, there were not rival interests at play so much as a singular truth vying with opposition, and insurgent rebels going up against a corrupt establishment. This became even clearer with his answer to the following question:

  “How do you find the balance between morality and ambition and having to compete?”

  Because Pishevar did not think himself powerful, because he refused to see the companies he invested in as powerful, he seemed not to understand the question. It takes a certain acceptance of one’s own power to see oneself as facing moral choices. If instead what you see in the mirror is a rebel outgunned by the Man, besieged, fighting for your life, you might be tempted to misinterpret the question in the way that Pishevar now did. He interpreted it as being about how he, a moral man, representing a moral company—again, he chose the example of Uber—stood up against immoral forces.

  “My biggest thing is existing structures and monopolies—one example is the taxi cartels—that is a very real thing,” he said. “I’ve been in meetings where I’ve been threatened by those types of characters from that world. I’ve seen them beating drivers in Italy. You see the riots in France, and flipping over cars and throwing stones. I took my daughter to Disney. We were in the middle of that. We had to drive our Uber away from basically the war zone that was happening.

  “So from a moral perspective, anything that’s fighting against morally corrupt, ingrained systems that are based on decades and decades of graft within cities, within city councils, with mayors, etcetera—all those things, they are real, actual things that are threatened by new technologies and innovations like Uber and other companies in that space. So from that perspective, bring it on. That is something we should be fighting. And from a moral perspective, we have a responsibility to fight those types of pockets of control. And they exist at all levels—in the city level to the state, and even at the national and global.”

  Pishevar was not only casting venture capitalists and billionaire company founders as rebels against the establishment, fighting the powers that be on behalf of ordinary people. He was also maligning the very institutions that are meant to care for ordinary people and promote equality. He referred to unions as “cartels.” He cast protests, which were a fairly standard feature of labor movements, as a “war zone.” He spoke of taxi drivers and their representatives in the language of the corrupt, mafioso Other: “those types of characters from that world.” Here was a leading investor in a company, Uber, that had sought to shatter democratically enacted regulations and evade the unions that have a record of actually, and not just rhetorically, fighting for the little guy, and he was proudly portraying himself as the one who was truly fighting for the people against the corrupt power structure. “In the era when political power corrupts, social and crowdsourced power cleanses,” Pishevar once wrote. “We must stir the hornet’s nest to build immunity to the sting of corruption.”

  Speaking of the regulations he didn’t like and unions he didn’t like, Pishevar said, “Finding companies that can disrupt those is one way of having some kind of ethical philosophy of saying, ‘We are going to use our capacity and our knowledge to improve our world by getting rid of some of those points of control.’ ” In short, technological disruption was the venture capitalist’s way of making the world a better place for everyone’s benefit.

  Applause and whoops.

  Pishevar spoke as an insurgent, with none of the grace and sense of obligation of the man who accepts his own arrival. Nor did his bearing suggest any awareness that Uber and Airbnb, of which he loved to speak, now faced serious charges of exploitative and illegal behavior toward people who genuinely lacked power. In Pishevar’s mind, he and those companies were the weak ones. There he was driving in Paris, with protesting drivers creating a “war zone” and threatening him and his child. There he was trying to cleanse corruption by defying local city regulations. There he was clinging to his unpopular truth like Martin Luther reincarnated as a VC, nailing theses to the doors of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. VCs are among the most powerful people in the world today, but in his mind he was the little guy. When your leader still wears the beret from his days in the rebel army, you should be afraid.

  As the Q-and-A ended, Pishevar praised the Summit conference as “a movement of value creation,” seamlessly merging the language of Selma and Harvard Business School.

  To take the edge off of “value creation,” a phrase that risked reminding people that he was a powerful gazillionaire, he once again invoked mushy language. Value creation, he said, was brought into one’s life by value creators—people who put you “in an environment of love, faith, support.” Here he was appropriating a language of movement
s and love, solidarity and selflessness, and even the therapeutic language of sharing being caring, and using it to dress up the naked truth of his oligarchic visions. He had the audacity to board an expensive, exclusive, invitation-only cruise-ship conference full of entrepreneurs, and yet claim it was taxi drivers who constituted the unjust cartel. He could profit from and defend a company doing everything in its power to smash the idea of a labor movement, while unabashedly speaking of this conference in the language of movements. He could, as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, be the very picture of what was making the country less equal, while claiming to be fighting on behalf of the common man.

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  Shervin Pishevar’s refusal to own up to his power was not an isolated occurrence. Such modesty is a defining feature of Silicon Valley, an epicenter of new power. “They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings,” writes Danah Boyd, a technology scholar. She came of age among hackers and renegades and then grew frustrated with their failure to accept victory. They now owned the tools of modern power. But the group’s self-image as “outsiders,” a hangover from the sector’s countercultural origins, left it “ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful,” Boyd argues. And powerful people who “see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility.” As it happens, the two companies that had made Pishevar a legend got into legal trouble for engaging in that very sort of denialism.

  Airbnb’s troubles began some months before Summit at Sea, when an African American woman named Quirtina Crittenden took to Twitter to complain of being racially profiled when trying to book accommodations. Posting screenshots of rejections by hosts whose rentals had been listed as available for a given date range, Crittenden added the tag #AirbnbWhileBlack. Over time, others began to add their testimonies to Crittenden’s, especially after she was profiled by National Public Radio the following year. The stories began to fly: “One bachelor’s degree, one master’s degree, and one doctorate’s degree later, and I still can’t rent your apartment. SMH #AirbnbWhileBlack.” Then a black user named Gregory Seldon shared a story of how he had “made a fake profile as a white guy and was accepted immediately.” Seldon’s tweet went viral, and a social media firestorm was born.

  Because of how Airbnb and other Silicon Valley platforms work, the company faced a choice of how to respond. Airbnb could claim that the platform itself has little power, that it cannot be held responsible for what occurs between two autonomous people on its site. But it surprised many by putting out a report some months later in which it committed to make “powerful systemic changes to greatly reduce the opportunity for hosts and guests to engage in conscious or unconscious discriminatory conduct.” These steps were admirable—and also voluntary.

  Two months after the viral explosion of #AirbnbWhileBlack, however, when the company received complaints from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleging that it “may have failed to prevent discrimination against African American guests” and “may have engaged in acts of discrimination” itself, Airbnb retreated. “While Airbnb simply operates a platform and is not well positioned to make determinations regarding the booking decisions Hosts make in each case,” the company said in a legal response, “Airbnb has recognized on its own based on available data that some third-party hosts on its site are likely violating Airbnb’s policy against racial discrimination, and that its policies and processes have, to date, been insufficient fully to address the problem.” Yet despite a Harvard Business School study that backed up users’ claims of discrimination, the company said it was merely engaged in the “publication of rental listings,” a humble role that it said “immunizes” it against liability. Airbnb, it argued, “cannot be held legally liable for the conduct of its third-party users.” The law, the company said, “does not impose a duty to prevent discrimination by others.”

  At the time #AirbnbWhileBlack launched, Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance.

  Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age.

  It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote:

  Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.

  The judges believed Uber and Lyft to be more powerful than they were willing to admit, but they also conceded that the companies did not have the same power over employees as an old-economy employer like Walmart. “The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes,” Judge Chhabria wrote. Judge Chen, meanwhile, wondered whether Uber, despite a claim of impotence at the center of the network, exerted a kind of invisible power over drivers that might give them a case. In order to define this new power, he decided to turn where few judges do: the late French philosopher Michel Foucault.

  In a remarkable passage, Judge Chen compared Uber’s power to that of the guards at the center of the Panopticon, which Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon was a design for a circular prison building dreamed up in the eighteenth century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The idea was to empower a solitary guard in the center of the building to watch over a large number of inmates, not because he was actually able to see them all at once, but because the design kept any prisoner from knowing who was being observed at any given moment. Foucault analyzed the nature and working of power in the Panopticon, and the judge found it analogous to Uber’s. He quoted a line about the “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power.”

  The judge was suggesting that the various ways in which Uber monitored, tracked, controlled, and gave feedback on the service of its drivers amounted to the “functioning of power,” even if the familiar trappings of power—ownership of assets, control over an employee’s time—were missing. The drivers weren’t like factory workers employed and regimented by a plant, yet they weren’t independent contractors who could do whatever they pleased. They could be fired for small infractions. That is power.

  It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. Its posture is not entirely cynical, though. The technology world has long maintained that the tools it creates are inherently leveling and will serve to collapse power divides rather than widen them. In the mid-1990s, as the Internet began reaching into people’s lives, Bill Gates predicted that technology would help to equalize a stubbornly unequal world: