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A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite

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 member...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Brockmann, Hilke, Drews, Wiebke, Torpey, John
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7817031/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33471828
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244071
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author Brockmann, Hilke
Drews, Wiebke
Torpey, John
author_facet Brockmann, Hilke
Drews, Wiebke
Torpey, John
author_sort Brockmann, Hilke
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-78170312021-01-28 A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite Brockmann, Hilke Drews, Wiebke Torpey, John PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2021-01-20 /pmc/articles/PMC7817031/ /pubmed/33471828 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244071 Text en © 2021 Brockmann et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Brockmann, Hilke
Drews, Wiebke
Torpey, John
A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite
title A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite
title_full A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite
title_fullStr A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite
title_full_unstemmed A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite
title_short A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite
title_sort class for itself? on the worldviews of the new tech elite
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7817031/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33471828
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244071
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