Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

"This book’s inception occurred during this weird speaking gig at a billionaire’s retreat in a desert. Doug is a great writer, and a friend, I’ve followed his career for decades. He thought he was there to be a futurist and talk about futuristic stuff, and he goes to the session and it’s just five guys in a room. He says, “I have a speech.” They say, “We don’t want to hear the speech. We want to ask you what we should do to prepare for the end of the world. If we’re in a luxury bunker and we have mercenaries keeping us safe from the slobbering hordes outside, how do we keep the mercenaries from killing us to take the food in our bunker? We need your help with this stuff.” They’re all sitting there, larping Mad Max . Survival of the Richest addresses what has happened to rich weirdos and what is going on in their minds. Doug writes that the increasing trend of financialization over 40 years is to go meta. Rather than providing a service, you intermediate a service. Rather than intermediating a service, you sell intermediation tools for services. Rather than selling intermediation tools for services, you sell futures in intermediation tools for services. Rather than selling the futures, you sell derivatives of the futures. The productive economy exists as a chip in a casino where the people who participate in the productive economy aren’t welcome. To be a part of the ruling elite, you must distance yourself as far as possible from any productive activity or anything tangential to the productive activity. This describes the arts market, which keeps moving away from being the helpmeet and service provider to creative labor, to becoming a parasitic intermediator. In Chokepoint Capitalism , in the second half of the book where we present the solutions, we have a case study that relates to unionization. The Writers Guild of America in Hollywood had found that the number of agencies they dealt with had dwindled because four firms had acquired all their competitors. Two of these firms had been backed by private equity companies and saddled with huge amounts of debt that would tank the companies if they couldn’t figure out a way to get more profits. “I think that we underrate solidarity” These four agencies abandoned the traditional model, where the agent bargains for the best deal they can get for the writer and then takes a 10 per cent commission, and moved to a packaging model instead. They would approach the studio and say, “We’re going to get you a writer, a director, and a couple of stars from our talent pool. We’re not going to charge any commission to those creators because we’re such good-natured souls. Instead, we’re going to take a fee from you.” As productions have fixed budgets, every dollar that goes to an agent in fees is a dollar that doesn’t go to a writer in salary. The writers discovered that, very often, the 90/10 split had become a 10/90 split, and their agents were getting nine times as much as the writers were. The agents were intending to expand on this even more. The four agencies started building their own studios, and a couple of them did build studios. They then negotiated deals with their own studios on behalf of their own clients. The Writers Guild created a code of conduct and said, “No more packaging deals, no more studios. You sign it or we fire you.” The agencies said, “You’re never going to fire us.” On one day, all 7,000 members of the Writers Guild fired every agent in Hollywood. They ground out a 22-month strike until every single one of those agencies, including the ones that were indebted to their private equity owners and would not survive if they couldn’t go on exploiting writers in this way, caved. As it turns out, you can make a Hollywood movie without a Hollywood agent, but you can’t make a Hollywood movie without a Hollywood writer. The agencies are an example of going meta. This is survival-of-the-richest business. The fact that they were backed by private equity is not a coincidence. Private equity is about going meta. It’s about moving from a posture of delivering value and facilitating valuable production to extracting a rent from it. It was solidarity. We talked to David Goodman, who was our interlocutor for our LA launch at the Beverly Hills Public Library. He’s the showrunner for Family Guy and has done a lot of other great stuff, and he was running the Guild at that time. He told us there were writers who the agencies didn’t dare to exploit in this way. There were writers who got a great deal out of this. They walked out too, because they understood that their own personal fortunes were less important than the fortune of their field. And that, because they were not getting screwed over, they were better positioned to eschew their income for twenty-two months than these baby writers who were just coming up. It was solidarity, and it made all the difference in the world. It was quite remarkable. I think that we underrate solidarity. People are wise to the divide-and-conquer wheeze more often than we would think. If you go to a fun fair, and at 10 o’clock in the morning you see someone walking around with a giant teddy bear that you win by throwing five balls in a peach basket, that poor sod did not throw five balls in a peach basket. The carny working the basket said, “I’ll tell you what, mate. I’m going to charge you three dollars instead of five dollars. If you can get one ball in, I’ll give you a keychain. If you win two keychains, I’ll let you trade it for a teddy bear.” The reason isn’t that the carny wants to give away teddy bears. The carny wants someone to walk around all day with a giant teddy bear so that other people will line up to put down a fiver. There are writers out there who were getting giant teddy bears from the big four agencies. These writers knew it and they said, “I don’t owe you a shred of loyalty for this giant teddy bear. I cannot be bought for a giant teddy bear.” And they stayed out for 22 months."