Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money

Dash opens this piece with level setting about his position of wealth^[1] and balances that with his own background. He grounds it with the notion that rich people are willing to potentially forego a tight bond with their families in order to accumulate wealth. This is historically accurate^[2]. It's short but the closing point about the storage and accumulation of money versus the ability to direct a stream of money is something that stood out to me:

Put more cynically, you can't exert control over something if you've already stopped paying for it.

This can explain a number of things:

• Why tech CEOs are incapable of not aligning with right-wing stances on finance, labor and ethics: to do so will remove the control they have over people lives like the ability of them to support themselves. Elizabeth Anderson notes this in Private Government as a way to control a worker's autonomy (emphasis mine):

Exercising autonomy — directing oneself in tasks, no matter how exacting and relentless they are — is no ordinary good. It is a basic human need. No production process is inherently so constrained as to eliminate all exercise of autonomy. Elimination of room for autonomy is the product of social design, not nature. It is not merely "unpleasant" to be denied a rest break when one needs it. When some authority denies it (as opposed to when some natural constraint prevents it), the restriction demeans one's agency.

This is what folks like Bezos enabled at his warehouses or Kalanick (and the Doordash, Taskrabbit and Lyft executives) with their misclassified employees by denying them benefits and simple human dignity.

• Why we see more tech companies more willing to shoot down collective organizing: doing so forces workers (at worst, into a state of fear and apathy, and at best) into a place of defending executives who routinely will put the needs of the ultra-wealthy over them.

Dash's point on repositioning the perspective is a good starting point to begin challenging what and what the rich are aiming to do. However, there's more that we need to do: especially around becoming more horizontally aligned in what we need workplaces to model and who's even considered a worker. Things to address in another post.