The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism

Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power

Ben Little, Alison Winch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367260118
• eBook ISBN: 9781000397635
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism.

Interrogating not only the founders' political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism's mode of command. The 'New Patriarchs' examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Peter Thiel. We also include Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these (mostly) men legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but 'visionary' masculinity to exotic forms of shareholding. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity, and postfeminism, locating the power of the founders as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of oppression tied to imaginaries of the American frontier, the patriarchal household, and settler colonialism.

This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, and Gender and Cultural Studies.

1
Theorising the patriarchal network

Elon Musk makes cameo appearances in many popular films and TV programmes. In the comedy film Why Him? he plays himself at a party – his appearance authenticating the film’s Silicon Valley setting. The film’s plot is driven by the father v. fiancé conceit: two men from different generations engage in a struggle for authority over a woman and thus over generational supremacy. The father, Ned (Bryan Cranston), owns a print company in Michigan, and the fiancé boy genius Laird (James Franco) is a billionaire CEO of a video games company in California. The men compete and eventually bond over Stephanie (Zoey Deutch), whose intention to drop out of Stanford in order to run Laird’s philanthropic foundation is a disappointment to her father. The film is a partial satire of Silicon Valley cultures playing on stereotypes of gender roles in tech: the boy genius founder, the female partner running the philanthropic foundation, female-voiced AI, as well as the pretentious food, the billionaires.

Significantly for our purposes, Laird’s home is also a mocking portrait of the American frontier homestead, replete with farm animals which he tends in a haphazard fashion; he is even subject to unexpected ambushes – from his best friend, butler, and household manager Gustav (played by biracial actor Keegan-Michael Key), who is training him in martial arts. Although there are restaurant-style chefs in the household, the rest of the domestic staff are eclipsed by the husky-voiced AI (played by Kaley Cuoco, the ‘sexy blonde’ Penny in the geek sitcom The Big Bang Theory – a role referenced in the film). And Laird’s home is also his business. His homestead is a corporate household, accommodating his workforce, the programmers and gamers producing and testing his products. The only components this head of the household lacks are the wife and children, and the film is driven by his need to overcome this lack.

The film’s patriarchal plot, which is undergirded by the rivalry and collaborations between men, reveals the conservatism of the cultures it is mocking in a number of ways. One of the points of contestation between the two men is Stephanie’s body. Stephanie is framed as belonging to her father; a tattoo of Laird’s name on her hip – indicating a loss of possession – is a source of paternal rage. Another point of contestation is the shift from print to digital; Ned is on the verge of bankruptcy and Laird buys his business in an attempt to save it. Another is the depiction of the home. It is in Laird’s home that Ned learns of the engagement, and of Stephanie’s decision to work for Laird. The film ends with Stephanie’s father, brother, and fiancé turning the printing company into a toilet factory, and Stephanie using this company – and staying true to the female caring (and American imperialist) role – to help improve sanitation in developing countries (this is a nod to Bill Gates’ philanthropic work on sewage projects). Although she remains unmarried at the end of the film, Stephanie is economically tied to Laird, and he achieves what he has always wanted – a corporate household remade in the image of a white, middle-class, heterosexual family. And Stephanie’s body has facilitated a form of homosocial bonding between Laird and Ned, bringing together their economic and generational differences – the movement from one form of patriarchy to another.

Although the film was badly reviewed (a 39% aggregate score on RottenTomatoes.com), it is worth dwelling on because of what it reveals about the patriarchal network that we are looking at. This film offers a useful introduction to some of the contexts within which the contemporary American tech industry is located. Although Silicon Valley likes to project itself as progressive, future-oriented, and innovative, we have been struck by how the ideologies of the founders are embedded in histories of white American settler colonialism. In particular, these ideologies are animated by the frontier spirit and its paradigm of the heteronormative white homestead. In this chapter we examine the myth of the frontier and ‘patriarchal architectures’ of the homestead or household (Perry 2018). That these myths are part of the stories that American West Coast Tech tells about itself is key in identifying and making sense of contemporary raced and gendered hierarchies. That contemporary tech has a colonial impulse has been identified by Zuboff (2019) as well as Couldry and Mejias (2019). Skeggs and Yuill (2019) note how Facebook is embedded in colonial paradigms of personhood and property. We develop these scholars’ work to look at the specificity of the colonial and patriarchal histories that inform the corporations’ ‘data relations’ (Couldry and Meijas 2019).

Why patriarchy?

Anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner gives a useful – if limited – description of a patriarchal system. She argues that it is organised around ‘three dyads and their many kinds of interaction’:

1. The relationship between a patriarchal figure of some sort and other men;
2. The many homosocial but heterosexual relationships among the men themselves; and
3. The relationships between men and women (Ortner 2014, 532).

This definition is productive because it clarifies that patriarchal systems are not simply about the repression of women, but also relationships between men, and that these are constantly being negotiated. That is, men compete and collaborate with other men, and men hold power over other men. This seems to usefully describe the kind of network we are describing in this book. The focus on patriarchy as a set of relations rather than a static system is also key. However, it is important to note that patriarchy is always contextual; it is not a theoretical framework that can be applied without taking into account contemporary political structures, histories, specific colonial projects. Indeed, historically the term patriarchy has been highly contested on multiple fronts (e.g. Rowbotham 1981, Acker 1989), and it is still a concept that is not easily assimilated in many feminists’ critical work (see McRobbie 2015). Our intention in using the term as a key part of our argument is to hold on to the clarity of the idea, while also being attentive to arguments criticising the often universalising, essentialist and unhistorical ways in which it has sometimes been deployed (Josephs 1981, Patil 2013, Miller 2017). We understand that patriarchy is fluid, moving, shapeshifting – in relation not only to what form it takes, but also to the identity of the recipient of its socioeconomic benefits. As Cynthia Enloe states, ‘Patriarchy is not old-fashioned: it is as hip as football millionaires and Silicon Valley start-ups’ (Enloe 2017, 15). As she goes on to argue, patriarchy is a ‘system – a dynamic web – of particular ideas and relationships’; it is ‘stunningly adaptable’ and ‘can be updated and modernized.’ This is what makes it sustainable (Enloe 2017, 16). Our priority here is to show the specificity of one such system.

Ortner’s definition above is limited for our purposes here because it does not directly take into account race, migration status, and class – structures of oppression that are crucial to understanding how patriarchy functions in US West Coast Tech. Because of this, we also focus on a conception of patriarchy that is articulated with histories of personhood in America. What is at stake in this is a concept of who counts, who gets to be a ‘proper person’ – in other words, who gets to own property rather than be property. Here we turn to Imani Perry’s discussion of patriarchy and seventeenth-century theorisations of personhood as delineated by the logics of the American frontier household (Perry 2018). As Perry points out, John Locke gives us a very clear statement of how the ideal household is constructed. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke has us consider ‘a master of a family with all these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves, united under the domestic rule of a family’ (Locke 1689, 86). He compares ‘the master of a family’ to a monarch, arguing that the master ‘has a very distinct and differently limited power.’ Locke grants that the master does not have ‘legislative power of life and death’ over the members of the family – with the exception of the slave. Nevertheless, the master is the patriarch of the household, and the other components are differentially striated beneath him. Our argument in this chapter (and this book) is that this racialised, gendered, classed shaping of personhood persists in the patriarchal network we have identified, as well as its workforces and exported products.

Rather than examining the categories of male and female as key to what she calls ‘patriarchal architectures,’ Perry examines the history of personhood, of what it means to be a full person. This is understood not in binary gendered or sexed terms but in hierarchical terms which also take into account race and class: what it means to be a full or proper person through legislation. Examining Lockean ideas of personhood, Perry notes that there is ‘an embedded deception’ and ‘violence’ in how categories of sex, race, and class are constructed, and then presented as natural. It is a form of coercion: ‘They are philosophical fictions matching legal ones’ which then ‘instruct how the person would be treated’ (Perry 2018, 55). Essentialising sex or gender, for example, reproduces categories as being grounded in truths rather than ideologies, policies, legislation. A focus on the metaphor of the household rather than the binaries of male and female is therefore productive inasmuch as it does not reify and repeat sex difference but at the same time is aware that particular patriarchal structures work to replicate sex and gender binaries. Indeed, our argument in this book is that gendered hierarchies are reinforced and legitimated by the patriarchal network.

Thinking in terms of the household also exposes the racialised structures of the celebrity assemblages we are looking at, as expressed in the claims to personhood made in relation to race, class, and social reproduction, among other factors. We follow the work of Patricia Hill Collins (1989), who argues for the centrality of the imaginary of the white middle-class family as reinforcing raced, gendered, and classed systems of oppression, as well as how the constitutive limits of personhood are prescribed therein. We also draw on the work of Lisa Nakamura by understanding race as ‘a code that evokes a specific type of regulating response from the state that serves to make race “real”’ (Nakamura 2008, 74); as well as Ruha Benjamin: ‘if we consider race as itself a technology, as a means to sort, organize, and design a social structure as well as to understand the durability of race, its consistency and adaptability, we can understand more clearly the literal architecture of power.’ (Benjamin 2019, 91). It is precisely this designation of a social structure that we see in Locke’s philosophising above.

But why hold on to seventeenth-century philosophy and American history when discussing the apparently innovative and future-focused men of West Coast Tech? Understanding patriarchal architectures as articulated by Perry – as a hierarchical set of raced, classed, gendered re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The new patriarchs
• 1 Theorising the patriarchal network
• 2 Elon Musk: Geek masculinity and marketing the celebrity founder
• 3 Jeff Bezos: Beyond the American frontier
• 4 Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate household
• 5 Peter Thiel’s technological frontiers
• 6 Endorsed by Sandberg: Resilience not resistance
• 7 The limits of liberalism: Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• Conclusion
• Appendix: A concordance of popular books on digital capitalism
• Index