A common accusation labeled against the tech community is that they are detached from the real world. It’s an accusation made in part due to the gated nature of many tech company campuses, with star employees given everything by their employer such that many of the mundane challenges facing the rest of us are simply not a factor in their lives.
It’s a view that has some credence, at least according to a new study from Jacobs University Bremen, which finds that the tech elite have a common outlook that renders them distinct from the rest of society, and even among the more traditional global elite.
The researchers examine the worldview of the 100 richest people in the tech world, in large part via their public musings on Twitter. This canon was compared with a similar number of tweets from the general American population. They also looked at the mission statements of around 60 philanthropic organizations run by these individuals, plus statements made by the super-wealthy from outside of the tech world who had all signed up to the Giving Pledge run by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.
Specific focus
The analysis reveals that the tech elite are often tweeting about topics involving positivity, disruption, and temporality, with frequent usage of words such as “great” and “new”. They also appear to self-reference themselves and their tech peers extremely frequently.
The analysis also suggests that the tech elite believe that there is no real connection between money and democracy, which was a marked difference from the general sample assessed on Twitter.
When exploring the statements used by the tech elite when signing up to the Giving Pledge, they tended to be shorter and more likely to refer to meritocratic principles like hard work, education, and society. There was also a strong emphasis on progress, impact, and personal agency.
Making the world better
The researchers believe this indicates that the tech elite are strongly motivated by the desire to make the world a better place, but this was a view also held by other very rich people too so is not unique to the tech elite.
The authors admit that their analysis might not have given them explicit insight into the minds of the tech founders, as the Twitter accounts may be run by well-organized PR teams. It’s also quite possible that their views on money and democracy are strategic as much as they are heartfelt. Despite these uncertainties, the authors hope that their work might act as a starting point for further analyses of this new class of elite.
“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,” they conclude.
