The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they divert attention away from the actual conspiracies playing out in plain sight, albeit obscured by the labyrinthine mechanisms of capital. While people are worrying about pedophilic sex cults, tracking chips hidden in vaccines, or musicians using human sacrifice to accumulate fame, there are less arcane and far worse things taking place.
There is also an interesting dynamic wherein certain figures are situated at one of two extreme poles in popular discourse: as maniacal supervillains or selfless philanthropists. Usually, neither is an accurate characterization, and the truth lies somewhere along the spectrum, though seldom in the “middle”. This polarization also overlooks the ways in which these figures might sit at both poles simultaneously, to accumulate both capital and power. It is probably obvious by now, if the title didn’t already give it away, that I am talking about Bill Gates.
What I want to propose is that the actual Gates agenda, far from facilitating the rise of the lizardmen, depopulating the world, or tracking everyone with microchips, is more… basic. Pretty much everything he does can be be viewed through the lens of accumulating profit and control, and his primary means is by situating himself as a gatekeeper.
It is easy to get carried away, finding connections between things that aren’t really correlated, all to support a narrative you already believe. So in the spirit of transparency, and to open my analysis to critique, I will admit that I have an intense animosity toward Bill Gates, and that this animosity informs the context of my interpretations. I almost reflexively assume the worst of him, and “the worst” almost always bears out, in spite of paltry evidence to the contrary. My hostility toward Gates is founded upon his status as an ultra-wealthy person, because I understand that such wealth is always based on the exploitation of people and the natural world. There is literally no wealthy person on Earth who earned their wealth through a strict conversion of their own intellectual or physical labor into material assets. At multiple (countless) junctures along the trajectory of their ascension to great wealth, both temporally and spatially, someone was exploited, or something was extracted, under threat or actualization of violence.
From that foundation, I also take issue with Gates frequently injecting himself into spaces where he does not belong and where he is not welcome, both because he has no real knowledge or expertise in these areas, and because there is always some ulterior motive, again toward profit or control. Such is the case with his relentless attempts to influence education reform or alleviate poverty in Africa.
More than his generosity, what Gates’s “philanthropy” reveals is his cynicism and his arrogance. These traits are mutually reinforcing, because on the one hand, Gates does not trust in the capabilities of other people, and on the other he thinks himself to be uniquely capable. In my hometown of Philadelphia, Gates is best known — besides his status as one of the world’s wealthiest men — as a driving force behind education “reform”, physically manifest in the “School of the Future”, a public high school which was supposed to model Gates’s theory that technology could solve all problems.
Like most schools, Future is both a product and a reproducer of the broader society. The experiment, to outfit a school with enough technology to meet the vaunted goal of 1:1, hoping that would somehow reconcile deep historical and systemic inequities for the mostly-Black student population, was an epic failure. Today, the school is the same many others in Philly, doing next to nothing to change the material conditions of young people, nor much at all to alter their prospects. This in spite of the noble efforts of individual teachers, who in their relative isolation can only hope to reduce harm. “School of the Future”, in retrospect, was a rather ironic name, because rather than some gleaming exemplar of “reform”, it represents another reproduction of the relations of domination within the city and country at large.
His cynicism and arrogance, blended in equal parts with white liberal racism, create a cocktail of paternalism by which he sees himself as the savior of the “darker nations”, be they Black children in Philadelphia, Africans dying from malaria, or farmers in the two-thirds world dispossessed by a changing climate.
