Gilded Age social Darwinism and ‘network effects’ both excuse capitalist concentration as fate

Evidence

Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons. In the same way that surveillance capitalists excuse their corporations’ unprecedented concentrations of information and wealth as the unavoidable result of “network effects” and “winner-take-all” markets, the Gilded Age industrialists cited Spencer’s specious, pseudoscientific “survival of the fittest” as proof of a divine plan intended to put society’s wealth in the hands of its most aggressively competitive individuals. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 340

Categorization

• XREF: The ideology-masking-concentration parallel connects to the library’s work on economic rhetoric and rationalization of inequality. — connects to: Gilded Age tycoon ideology rehearsed Silicon Valley’s survival-of-the-fittest rhetoric. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1916; Digital growth coincided with inequality levels unseen since the Gilded Age — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 133; Gilded Age elites circumscribed democracy to protect their economic regime — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 343 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Gilded Age elites circumscribed democracy to protect their economic regime #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 343
• Gilded Age industrialists invoked natural laws to justify opposing state regulation #epitomizes (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 342
• Postwar political psychology’s environmentalism was a reaction against social Darwinism and fascism #responds-to (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 331
• Post-war environmentalism was an antigenetic reaction to social Darwinism #responds-to (0.75)
• Gobineau predated Darwinism by reducing history to natural scientific law #qualifies (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 457