Jeff Bezos Likes Mozart Because Mozart Is Dead

In space, no one can tell you that billionaires are a fucking blight.

This week Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos elaborated on his dream of colonizing the solar system. He argued that he wants to push humanity to the stars because “if we don’t, we will eventually end up with a civilization of stasis, which I find very demoralizing.” He added that in space, population can boom. Humanity will reach a trillion people, which will mean we will have “a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.”

Bezos claims to want to move humanity and progress forward. But when he imagines what that might mean, he is only able to think in terms of cultural achievements decades or hundreds of years old. Einstein died in 1955; Mozart died in 1791. If space is supposed to transform the human species and prevent the stagnation of culture, why are we framing that transformation in terms of retro worship of a couple of long dead white guys?

This contradiction isn’t a coincidence or an accident. Bezos chose Einstein and Mozart precisely because they are long dead. They are no longer controversial or relevant, and are therefore easily conscripted in a program of bland, nonpartisan uplift. Einstein’s socialism and radical politics have largely been forgotten in the image of him as white haired guru and saint; would Bezos really welcome a thousand Einstein’s lambasting him as a capitalist oligarch?

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

That sure sounds like the beginning of an argument to nationalize Amazon. Or at least to tax Bezos till he cries quietly in the back of his stupid spaceship.

As for Mozart, he’s long since been canonized as a kind of pure distillation of Quality music, divorced from style or history. There’s a whole mini-industry devoted to convincing parents that making their infants listen to Mozart will stimulate their brains and make them smarter, despite the complete lack of evidence.  

Everyone remembers that Mozart was a prodigy, whose greatness was supposedly innate and unaffected by class or education. Less remembered is that Mozart’s father, Leopold, was himself a composer and musical theorist. If you want more Mozarts, it seems like you should probably invest more in music education so more kids have parents who are musicians. If you just spend on space and continue to gut music programs in schools, you’ll end up with a lot of billionaires on asteroids chortling unmusically, if smugly.

Bezos doesn’t want to put billions into arts education though. That’s in part because actual artists are alive, and living artists can’t be safely trusted to lie in the grave and emanate quality quietly. The advent of music software and DIY traditions have made it easier for more musicians to make more music than ever before. Most of it doesn’t sound much like Mozart, because two hundred and fifty years have happened.

And a lot of the music from the last few decades has content that Bezos doesn’t want to be associated with for a range of reasons.

Why doesn’t Bezos promise us a thousand Janell Monaes in his space future, or a thousand Chanda Prescod-Weinstein? Why when he thinks of a dynamic society does he look way, way back at what came before, rather than what is here right now?

The answer is fairly obvious; Bezos prefers dead musicians and thinkers because they share a key attribute with his future trillions—they aren’t around to speak for themselves. Bezos can speak for past and future Mozarts because those Mozarts aren’t in the room with him.

It’s the same logic whereby conservatives are very, very concerned with fetuses, but are notably unenthusiastic about providing resources to living children. Notional humans have no desires or demands; you can safely claim that they support you without fear of contradiction or critique.

Living humans in contrast, are inconveniently self-conscious and self-motivated. They might, conceivably, say that they don’t care about exploring space, and would rather you just pay your fucking taxes and support a massive expansion of the social safety net. They might ask you to help struggling musicians now, rather than pretending your big phallic rockets will somehow squirt out magic Mozart babies in the future.

Bezos and other wealthy assholes who claim to speak for a more populated future insist that they are working for the good of humanity. But the humanity whose good they pursue is oddly stripped of actual humans. Bezos’ evocation of Einstein and Mozart is a tell. He doesn’t really want to go forward; he wants to reproduce the past by drawing over himself the mantle of Great Men past. His future isn’t new and dynamic; it’s not more equal or just; it’s not even flourishing with a new era of creativity. Instead, his future looks like the past, except that some billionaire dipshit has been added to the roll of Great Names. All those trillions will sing in glory to Jeff Bezos, raising their voices which are his voice.

Oligarchs love to cosplay as populist and/or charitable benefactors, waving vaguely as vast gulfs of time and space, over which they claim to hold dominion on our behalf. But, despite the best efforts of the worst people, there is still no future, and no present, and no past, without us. Someone will write new songs; someone will uncover the rules of the cosmos; someone will make this world, and perhaps others, a better place. When that happens it won’t be because of Jeff Bezos. It will be despite his best efforts to silence them.