Parler, Bezos, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, And The Rich And The Super-Rich

I've said here before that Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today is one of the most important literary works of the 20th century if considered in the same genre as Milton's prose or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. (It's available in pdf here.)

Lundberg's thesis was that US politics are dominated by an exclusive combine of wealthy families who manage centers of corporate and social power in the Fortune 500, the Ivy League, foundations, the federal govenment, and other institutions. I think he would have found no surprises in the saga of Parler, the social media upstart, over the past week. According to the Wall Street Journal,

In a complaint filed Monday in Seattle federal court, Parler alleged that Amazon Web Services kicked the company off its cloud servers for political and anti-competitive reasons. The conservative social network founded in 2018 exploded in popularity among supporters of President Trump after the November U.S. election.

“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter , ” according to the complaint, which also accused Amazon of breaching a contract between the parties.

Amazon said Saturday that it would cut off Parler because it wasn’t confident in its ability to sufficiently police content on its platform that incites violence. The company said while it would no longer provide web services to Parler after Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, it would preserve the platform’s data and help it migrate to different servers.

In related moves, Google and Apple removed the app from their stores. It was plain that the tech bilionaires regarded Parler as outside the bounds of received opinion and felt entitled to remove it. If it removed a potential competitor, so much the better.

But the recent crop of the super-rich, such as Bezos, Dorsey, and Zuckerberg, differ from the robber-barons and their descendants who were Lundberg's targets. The arrivistes, if they have descendants at all, won't be producing Rockefeller Jrs, Nelson Rockefellers, or Averell Harrimans. Those families, as well as their associates, struck me as magnanimous in the classical sense, endowing public institutions and undertaking public service.

The current crop strikes me as a group of petty, cowardly, small-minded men, not in the same league as Lundberg's rogues gallery, thuogh they may be just as influential, at least for now -- but this may be part of what's at the root of the social tensions behind the currnt global panic. These folks are terrified of Trump, it's plain, or they wouldn't be trying to engineer a bill of attainder against the guy.

The problem is that Trump was an opportunist who saw an opening. He didn't create the opening. Whatever becomes of Trump -- and I think 2024 is too far in the future for any sort of prediction -- the trend will still be there, and it will still be something that can be understood through Lundberg's insights.