Gilded Age tycoon ideology rehearsed Silicon Valley’s survival-of-the-fittest rhetoric.

Evidence

Wiebe summarizes the worldview put forth by the millionaires as they coordinated to repulse the electoral threat to industrial capital, and it will sound familiar to anyone who has read the justifications of the Silicon Valley tycoons and their adulation of all things “destructive” and “entrepreneurial.” According to the nineteenth-century catechism, only the “highest types of their race discovered more effective ways to combine land, labor, and capital, and drew society upward as the rest reorganized behind their leaders.” The majority of “ordinary talent” was left to divide what remained after the requirements of capital, and “the weakest simply disappeared.” The result was to be “an ever improving race winnowed by competition.” Any violation of these “natural laws” would only benefit “the survival of the unfittest” and reverse the evolution of the race. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1916

Categorization

• XREF: Direct historical echo linking robber-baron social Darwinism to tech-tycoon justifications; ties Zuboff’s argument to Gilded Age capital history. — connects to: Gilded Age elites circumscribed democracy to protect their economic regime — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 343; Gilded Age social Darwinism and ‘network effects’ both excuse capitalist concentration as fate — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 340; Gilded Age industrialists invoked natural laws to justify opposing state regulation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 342
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘The Gilded Age Returns’ — how today’s tech lords reuse the exact racist-evolutionary language of the 1880s millionaires to justify concentration.
• BMF: The ‘highest types winnowed by competition / weakest simply disappear’ catechism evokes the meritocratic-survival rhetoric echoed across the Silicon Valley figures in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, though the resonance is thematic rather than a specific plot device.

Broader Connections

• Gilded Age social Darwinism and ‘network effects’ both excuse capitalist concentration as fate #corroborates (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 340
• Gilded Age industrialists invoked natural laws to justify opposing state regulation #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 342
• Gilded Age elites circumscribed democracy to protect their economic regime #corroborates (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 343