The Digital Disappointment!

Remember when all those young pups were changing the world? Sergei Brin and Larry Page were all about not doing evil. Mark Zuckerberg was going to make us all beffers. Spotify was Swedish, from the land of Abba and lovely people. Apple was Steve enabling us all to access our creative souls.

But.

Money wins again.

The United States is built on a culture of money. The people who risked their lives to emigrate there from past to the current day are interested in one thing, money. And once you get the culture infused into your lifestyle everything else goes to the wall.

It is almost impossible to imagine just how threatening Elvis was when Heartbreak Hotel took off and he appeared on national television. Young people doing their own thing! Within a couple of years he was neutered. His manager, Tom Parker put him in the movies, and made money.

The movie business in the ’20s and ’30s were innovative and challenging, but soon it was money. WOuld a movie make money? The Hayes code stopped all the adventures. When the McCarthy hearings started, the Hollywood moguls were quickly brought into line by the threat that people would not pay for tickets to see Communists. It wasn’t the Communism, it was the ticket sales that they worried about.

And so to the digital heroes. All good intentions disappear as soon as they go public and sell their freedom to Wall Street. Every decision is based on how much more money can be made. And it is always more money, not enough, or a little bit, it is huge amounts to make these still young men so wealthy that they literally have more money than it takes to fund small countries.

They get lost in share prices, in worrying about being able to trade in countries that have horrific human rights, but dollars to add to their revenues. They enable content that would never have seen the light of day pre-digital, political, sexual, criminal.

And when we see Neil Young and Joni Mitchell actually put their money where their songs are and refuse to let Spotify sell their music along side a dangerous anti-vax message, we see people sneering at them in favour of the money men.

So yet again we see the strength of the capitalist system, the power rooted in the hands of the wealthy, adding to their number and welcoming them into the cabal that has no resistance to the temptation that is greed.