Silicon Valley’s cultural cosplay at the Met Gala is a dangerous smokescreen

After many years of Silicon Valley making its way towards it Vogue Met Galathis week’s issue saw the completion of the technology’s almost hostile takeover of the fashion magazine’s annual gala to raise money for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This year, the event’s co-chairs were Amazon founder and tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, who reportedly paid $10 million for the honor. Executives from Meta, Snapchat, OpenAI and others were also in attendance, sparking outrage — especially among those who consider the Met Gala not a vulgar display of excess, but the most distinguished and elegant event on the fashion calendar.

What’s next? Will the 2027 theme be celebrated? AI slope? Will Mark Zuckerberg fund a rebranding so that next year we’re not talking about the Met Gala, but about the Meta Gala? Why, oh, why would Anna Wintour, chief global content officer at Vogue publisher Condé Nast, allow this?

There’s a wide gulf between the extravaganza of the Met Gala and their tech brethren who buy tickets for $100,000. But we should not be surprised that the Gala Foundation embraces technology companies, despite behavior that many find morally unacceptable (data centers – Seizing land and natural resourcesSocial media companies Turning a blind eye to the harm caused to childrenetc.). We shouldn’t be surprised that the Met Gala is the stage where Silicon Valley executives try to showcase their new discovery of taste. Verified by The New Yorker In March.

The event is nothing if not a spectacle, heightened in significance by the anti-Amazon protests that not only formed the backdrop to the party, but threatened to obscure its thin façade of glamor with a series of stunts designed to speak to the cold, hard realities of the company’s working conditions, and spur collective action.

One activist group left 300 bottles of urine inside the metro — referring to Amazon workers who are said to be forced to complete their duties under such intense time pressure that they have no choice but to urinate in bottles. Outside the event, there was a parked shopping cart filled with empty bottles, labeled “Met Gala VIP Toilet.” Videos containing protest messages were shown at Bezos’ apartment in New York.

Perhaps in light of the backlash, Bezos chose to forego the opportunity to walk the red carpet with his wife. Meanwhile, the great and good of the celebrity world—Hollywood royalty, pop stars, Olympians, and models—stood in front of the cameras, seemingly oblivious to the noise, perhaps choosing to look away from the protests and look past the prying eyes of their tech brethren, either so as not to offend Wintour and Vogue, or to serve their own egos.

Money and art: eternally uncomfortable bedfellows

In many ways, this is a tale as old as time. The world’s great artists have long been forced to accept money and tolerate the company of wealthy patrons who bought proximity to their works, under the guise of good philanthropy.

People with boring jobs and lots of money still do it. One need only look at how private members’ clubs, such as the Soho House Club in London, ostensibly designed as networking spaces for media and arts professionals, are teeming with finance bros and management consultants. Their corporate salaries allow them to escape their corporate environments for a while and share an elegant space with people who live more wonderful and interesting lives.

If you’re a cynic, you might assume the system is designed that way. After all, most people who work in media and the arts can no more afford membership in these spaces than they can afford property in the capitals they call home, just as most artists could never dream of being invited to the Met Gala.

Instead, these spaces—members’ clubs, the Met Gala—serve a cultural elite whose good times are subsidized by the money of people they really hope they won’t accidentally find themselves in conversation with at the bar. (I highly doubt Beyoncé has much desire to chat with her.) Sergey Brinbut I could be wrong.)

But what’s worse is that the rich people who work boring jobs are the rich people who work evil jobs, who are tolerated and fawned over for their money long after the point where it makes any sense. It took a remarkably long time for the Sackler name, for example, to be removed from the cultural institutions that carried it, despite its well-documented presence. Association with the opioid epidemic.

The cultural vacuum in Silicon Valley

If you have everything in the world, but lack cultural cachet, the quickest way to solve the problem is to spend money on it, in this case, by buying access to the most famous and exclusive cultural event in the world. And there’s almost nothing technology companies love more than speed.

This value reveals a key way in which Silicon Valley culture is profoundly at odds with how actual culture is shaped. Culture is born slowly from communities of people gathered around shared ideals and experiences. Silicon Valley’s value system, with its emphasis on snap decisions, sharp turns and instant results, and its preference for profits over people, is completely at odds with the ways in which culture develops and art flourishes.

The main obstacle Silicon Valley faces in its quest to learn to taste is that it simply does not have the patience. You can’t outsource to AI the years, or even decades, of the deep learning, reading, and thinking it takes to develop taste. True taste is formed through internal questioning, real conversations, and not shying away from the contact of human experience. It’s expansive, slow work that takes time — a concept that the tech world views strictly through the lens of economic productivity.

This need for speed has led to frequent errors as technology companies misread trends for taste in their offerings to showcase their newfound cultural enlightenment. the Palantir chore coat A prime example of this: a wealthy technology company exploits the trend, initially inspired by working-class uniforms, in a misguided attempt to show that it understands fashion. It’s classic Silicon Valley short-term thinking, and not to be confused with the desire to build cultural relevance in a meaningful way.

Likewise, the presence of tech companies at the Met Gala, which these days has mostly become a forum for the cult of excess and excess, is nothing more than a shorthand that ultimately reveals Silicon Valley’s shallow understanding of taste and culture.

The art of deception

This laundering of taste and exploitation of culture ultimately acts as a smokescreen for the things that tech companies would rather us ignore: layoffs, union-busting, reports of employee mistreatment, controversial political dealings, and ethically questionable business deals.

Jeff Bezos would probably prefer us to discuss his wife’s Met Gala dress, even if only to criticize it, rather than talk about the fact that the man is widely… He is said to be Amazon union leader Chris Smalls He was arrested while protesting the event.

If tech companies pretend to be cool and relevant – for example, handing out “thinking” baseball caps as Anthropic did – perhaps people will be less inclined to focus on the environmental damage caused by AI? It’s an attempt to use soft power to complement their hard power, but from what we’ve seen so far, they’re miles away from absorbing it.

Tech moguls want to appear cool and cultured, and the cultural establishment will continue to mock them as long as they are willing to stick their hands into those very deep pockets while taking up minimal red carpet space. On the other hand, the cultural center of gravity will shift from under the feet of Silicon Valley designers without them realizing it. The really cool people will meet somewhere else, at a secret party that no tech executives have been told about.

The real danger lies not in them invading parties, but in exercising their hard power when their soft power play fails. the commonFor example, Jeff Bezos’ desire to buy Condé Nast is a real cause for concern.

Condé Nast controls not only Vogue but also newspapers like Wired and Vanity Fair, which have an excellent reputation for holding figures like Bezos to account. from Bezos destroys the Washington PostWe can tell he has no qualms about dismantling the reputation of esteemed heritage titles.

The tech bros will quickly tire of their attempts to build cultural cachet, at which point there’s a danger that they’ll use their money to suck up the creative world, causing a mass exodus of the kind of talent they’ll never be able to tame. And taste will continue to elude them as long as they use their checkbooks like weapons, without understanding that, no matter how much they spend, they never seem to get ownership of the cultural capital they so desire.