Only twice in my life have I thought that Britain could succumb to the mob. One was after the death of Diana, when it became unwise and perhaps unhealthy to suggest that people were overdoing the grief. The other was in 2012, when, as a delayed response to the financial crash, bankers were so vilified that some I knew felt unsafe.
I should send them the latest Gallup World Poll. Across the 25 countries that were worst-hit by the crash, trust in financial institutions sank to a low of 37 per cent in, sure enough, 2012. It is now 63 per cent. For context, that is higher than it was pre-crash. Finance has overtaken national government and the judiciary in public esteem. It is even closing in on the military. The HBO/BBC show Industry, with its neutral-to-glamorising portrait of finance, would have been unthinkable a while back.
Tech is the black sheep now. Look at the court settlements. Look at the clamour for regulation. What might the sector learn from finance about how to pull off a redemption?
For one thing, get out of Palo Alto. I don’t just mean travel more, I mean relocate. Financial centres are in big cities, near to other professions and therefore other points of view. In London and New York the banks if not the funds back on to bohemian districts. The client-facing side of the business also forces people to be out and about. The result? Feedback from the outside world is constant. Public sentiment is unmistakable. Palo Alto, in contrast, is a disastrous place from which to view the world: too cloistered and monocultural. Hence the endless bewilderment of tech bosses that people don’t take their good intentions on faith.
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A certain mathsy naïveté might be inevitable in tech. But the sterile separateness of its home region – Nvidia’s headquarters could be a Gulf airport – reinforces it. The incomprehension goes both ways. The public’s unease, the sense of “what are they doing over there?”, might soften if the industry were not such a world unto itself.
Besides geography, finance could teach tech another lesson. Give more money away, or rather give it more conspicuously. One sponsor of the upcoming Renoir and Love show at the National Gallery is the hedge fund boss Kenneth Griffin. Another is Rothschild & Co. Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern? Bank of America. You might prefer an outing to the Barclays-emblazoned Lord’s Cricket Ground. You can get there on a red Santander bike.
Finance brands insinuate themselves into the fun or soft areas of national life. As a result, people are disarmed without quite knowing it. (In England, a laddish colloquialism for Premier League football is “Barclays”, as in “What a weekend of Barclays”.) In retrospect, societies let their anti-bank sentiment lapse after the crash in part because it was unaffordable. Much of cultural and sporting life would be at risk without the sector. No doubt, tech is also munificent, and perhaps more rigorously so, given its zeal for measuring inputs and outputs. But effective altruism has to be visible altruism to defang the public.
If relocation is impractical, and high-profile charity too crass, there is much simpler PR advice that finance could offer:
Shut up.
Finance bosses tend not to muse on the course of civilisation, on aesthetics, on what is to be done about this foreign nation or that foreign planet. With exceptions, such as Bill Ackman, their obiter dicta are confined to macroeconomics, and communicated with institutional dryness. This keep-quiet-and-take-the-money approach minimises offence.
For what it’s worth, I think the reputational switch-around of tech and finance is unfair. The former has received no public bailout, at least none of meaningful scale. Its products allow access to the sum of human knowledge for zero marginal cost. The range of social problems for which tech is blamed has become literally incredible. But one stray remark about birth rates on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast and I want to roll out the tumbril.
“Will AI break the world?” has no good answer. “Must we always hear from these people?” clearly does. Strategic silence: I can’t decide if the tech world will find it the easiest advice to implement, or by miles the hardest. – Copyright The Financial Times
