On the worldviews of the new tech elite: A social group that shares particular views of the world, which in this case means meritocratic, missionary, and inconsistent democratic ideology

Brockmann H, Drews W, Torpey J (2021) A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0244071. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244071

Abstract: The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises questions about the economic reach, political influence, and social importance of this group. How do these inordinately influential people think about the world and about our common future? In this paper, we test a) whether members of the tech elite share a common, meritocratic view of the world, b) whether they have a “mission” for the future, and c) how they view democracy as a political system. Our data set consists of information about the 100 richest people in the tech world, according to Forbes, and rests on their published pronouncements on Twitter, as well as on their statements on the websites of their philanthropic endeavors. Automated “bag-of-words” text and sentiment analyses reveal that the tech elite has a more meritocratic view of the world than the general US Twitter-using population. The tech elite also frequently promise to “make the world a better place,” but they do not differ from other extremely wealthy people in this respect. However, their relationship to democracy is contradictory. Based on these results, we conclude that the tech elite may be thought of as a “class for itself” in Marx’s sense—a social group that shares particular views of the world, which in this case means meritocratic, missionary, and inconsistent democratic ideology.

Discussion

The rapid dissemination of digital technologies catapulted the founders of large IT enterprises into the top ranks of wealth and power. Given their position of influence in contemporary and (probably) future societies, this paper explores the worldviews of the new tech elite. We focus on the richest 100 persons in tech identified by Forbes magazine. Elite research usually suffers from low to no response rates. Targeting a super-elite exacerbates the problem. In fact, we approached everyone from our list but got only one face-to-face interview. To circumnavigate this problematic access to data, we explored the digital traces of tech elite entrepreneurs to assess their distinctiveness relative to the general population and to other elites. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study tech elites with digitized text data. Social scientists have started to use social media data to scale ideologies of political elites, or citizens, but not of economic leaders [e.g., 84].

Specifically, we examine the worldviews of the IT tech elite with a simple “bag of words” approach. We hypothesized first that, as products of a society with strong meritocratic beliefs and frequently of elite institutions of higher education, the tech elite would see this world and future worlds in meritocratic terms. Our analysis of a large sample of their statements on Twitter (Tweets), relative to the general US Twitter-using population, indeed found that the tech elite tend to speak more frequently about merit-related topics and to more frequently use words that bespeak achievement-related concerns. They also speak more expansively and positively about the future than the general Twitter-using population. Our first hypothesis, proposing that the tech elite would see the world and the future in meritocratic, self-affirming, or even self-serving terms, was thus confirmed.

This paper provides a basis to directly test whether and how meritocratic beliefs translate into declining social mobility or even social closure in future research. A coherent, divisive and legitimizing social ideology is often seen as an important ingredient for class awareness and self-interested behavior [85]. “Career Funneling” at the most selective universities into tech jobs which are perceived as high status may provide a further explanation as to why tech clusters in Silicon Valley (re)produce a “class for itself” [e.g., 86].

Next, we hypothesized that the tech elite saw its endeavors in “entrepreneurial technoscience” as driven by a desire to “make the world a better place”—that is, that it is “mission-driven.” We tested this hypothesis by comparing the philanthropic statements of members of the tech elite vis-a-vis the Giving Pledge and websites of their own foundations. In addition to comparing across elites, we compared age cohorts within the tech elite to see whether their ideas about “making the world a better place” and about philanthropy varied.

On this basis we found that the members of the tech elite were more likely than the other Pledgers to have an expansive and positive vision of philanthropic endeavor. The tech elite does, indeed, appear to have strong, positive sentiments toward the idea of “making the world a better place.” Is this a “religious” inclination? Insofar as one can say based on these data, the answer to this question is “no.” The tech elite in particular tended toward a more secular outlook. In addition, we found that the different age cohorts within the tech elite tended to stress different secular missions in regard to their philanthropic activities: the oldest, “hardware” generation emphasized “research”; the middle, “software” generation most often cited “school”; and the youngest, “internet” generation most frequently used the word “can,” a reflection perhaps of their youthful enthusiasm. In any case, educational and cultural missions aim to shape the public interest.

This leads to hypothesis 3, which examines the relationship of the tech elite to politics. It proposes that members of the elite have a contradictory relationship with democracy because market success and financial wealth should tend to entail worldviews and arguably activities (including philanthropic activities) that sidestep democratic representation. We found no statistically significant differences in whether or not the tech elite saw a positive relationship between power and money, or between power and democracy, as compared to the members of the US Twitter-using population. Yet, the tech elite denied that there is a positive connection between democracy and money, something that is logically inconsistent with the previous correlations and that is not shared by ordinary US Twitter users, who see the existence of a nexus between democracy and money.

Finally, we aim to determine directly whether the tech elite constitutes a “class for itself” in the sense that we can predict statistically whether a person is a member of the tech elite or not. Machine learning models indicate that we can do so quite accurately (> 80%). Hence, the tech elite appears to be more than simply a part of the capitalist class in the broad sense of sharing “ownership of the means of production.” Rather, members of the tech elite communicate similar worldviews and clearly form a distinct fraction of the capitalist class.

This study constitutes a first exploratory step in the analysis of the tech elite. We highlight three limitations that may inspire future research. First, we haven’t been able in this research to trace everybody from our sample on Twitter and on foundation websites. Twitter is a competitor to other social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Google Techies or WeChat. It is also blocked in China. Also, there is a digital divide between younger and older tech entrepreneurs. The majority of our “hardware” cohort does not use Twitter. For these reasons, the results may be less robust for older members of the tech elite and for Chinese members. Still, we can account for this selectivity and reach higher “response rates” than conventional random samples in elite studies [e.g., 45].

Secondly, we cannot rule out that the Twitter accounts are managed by professional PR experts. Still, we have replicated the analysis with Tweets from non-tech members of the Giving Pledge and see systematic differences between both privileged groups, who can equally afford professional support. Thus, the tech elite communicates differently, and even if the tech elite employs professional support these people are presumably articulating the views of their wealthy clients.

Finally, our insights into the democratic worldviews of the tech elite remain limited. We do not know if the tech elite’s denial of a relationship between democracy and money is strategic communication or, in fact, their actual belief. Future research will have to explore this further. Social science research into social media use of political elites provides a promising roadmap for analyzing elite ideologies [e.g., 87, 88] and how they shape elite political behavior through donations and other exertions of financial power.

In conclusion, our research contributes to closing a research gap in societies with rising inequalities. We find that the 100 richest members of the tech world reveal distinctive attitudes that set them apart both from the general population and from other wealthy elites. As the companies they have created occupy a commanding position in the emerging tech-based economy, their views of our situation are likely to be of disproportionate significance. As a group, they are meritocratically inclined, concerned with the well-being of their fellow human beings, and relatively supportive of democratic society. Yet their position in a democratic system is contradictory: as a result of their enormous wealth, they have disproportionate influence over how discretionary income is spent. One need not be opposed to philanthropy to see that there is a problem here. Future research will have to address whether the attitudes of this unusual group change over time, and whether policies can be found to bring their opportunities to shape social outcomes in line with a democratic social order.