He was constantly on guard against lazy language. I suspect Hayek would not have shared in their aura of self-satisfaction. What would classical liberals such as Hayek make of today’s philanthrocapitalists – those who append the word ‘social’ to an endless list of activity (social innovation, social enterprise, social impact bonds) as if that terminological canonization inevitably made their business pursuits more socially responsible? Silicon Valley investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel. Whether Hayek would have agreed with the award is debatable.
#Gawker definition free#
He is revered by many conservatives for his condemnation of government regulation and his defence of free enterprise in 2015, he received a Hayek Lifetime Achievement award. Mandeville and Smith also hailed the need for government regulation to ensure that private rewards are distributed in a just manner, an important caveat that today’s philanthrocapitalists often ignore even as they appeal to scholars in the classical liberal tradition (from Mandeville and Smith to thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek) to justify their own economic standpoint. In reality, the assumption that private enterprise inevitably contributes to humankind is rooted in 18th-century political economics – made fashionable by thinkers such as Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, who each praised the capacity of private profit-seeking to improve living standards. The tradition of philanthrocapitalism – where private profit = public good What is wrong is to assume that such rhetoric is limited to Silicon Valley. This rhetoric is visible in countless examples, including Google CEO Larry Page’s proclamation that he’d rather gift his fortune to Elon Musk’s SpaceX than a traditional charity because Musk’s space exploration would do more for humanity. Timberg is right to point out that Silicon Valley tech moguls are spearheading a new philanthropic paradigm which assumes that all ‘wealth creation’ is naturally beneficial for humankind. Timberg, a reporter for Salon, is one of the few observers to realize this, pointing out that, if ‘we look at what philanthropy means to today’s Silicon Valley’, then Thiel’s use of the term ‘may make sense as a dead-sincere statement’. He’s at the forefront of a fast-growing trend: the tendency to subsume all sorts of lobbying, legislative and commercial activity under the umbrella of philanthropy.’ ‘Thiel is something of a poster-child for the new philanthrocapitalism. He’s at the forefront of a fast-growing trend: the tendency to subsume all sorts of lobbying, legislative and commercial activity under the umbrella of philanthropy.
Far from being an outlier, Thiel is something of a poster-child for the new philanthrocapitalism. The problem with much of this commentary is that it presumed Thiel was an outlier among wealthy philanthropists, that he was single-handedly responsible for debasing the meaning of philanthropy, that he was somehow unique for having the gall to suggest that his self-serving actions were obviously useful for all humankind. Silicon Valley’s appropriation and debasing of philanthropy
Scores of news articles used scare quotes around the word ‘philanthropic’ in order to emphasize their own scepticism over the appropriateness of the term. In Salon Scott Timberg suggested that Thiel’s appropriation of the word ‘philanthropic’ to describe his actions was ‘the strangest use ever’ of the term. Thiel later professed to the New York Times that he considered his secretive legal battle to be ‘one of the greater philanthropic things that I’ve done’. It turned out that Thiel had nursed a decade-long grudge against Gawker and had actively canvassed for legal cases to support as a third-party funder in order to force the newspaper to close. The jurors in the case were unaware that Bollea’s lawsuit had been secretly funded by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley investor. The story emerged in the weeks after Terry Bollea, otherwise known as Hulk Hogan, had been awarded a major cash settlement in a lawsuit against Gawker, an online news tabloid.
In May, the worldwide media gleefully reported an unexpected twist in a story that had scooped headlines for months.
0 kommentar(er)
