I've grew up in a red state. It has always puzzled me what conservatives wanted as an "end game." Kansas had a famous period where there agenda was "starve the beast." Which was just another way to say they were going to cut taxes. They cut taxes so much that they couldn't work on roads, let alone spend on education or arts.
When Trump came along with his MAGA declaration, it felt similarly empty. It has a catchy vibe, but really, what specific policies and decisions do you want? And what is the vision? Is it some Ayn Rand capitalist freedom city?
I could disagree if a place like that is possible, but they won't even provide a vision to ague about.
And it makes me wonder, do we need a vision of a better future world - with specific support structures and spending decisions all fleshed out?
I think your point is a good one, that what should be centered are the real people who are here now. And those people are complicated and contradictory, so building a future has to promote individual freedom to create and exist in the most ways imaginable (to be healthy, safe, educated is a necessary foundation), but also to limit destructive and evil impulses of the powerful (billionaires), and of the majority (racists).
I think Trump's vision is much more about who he wants to harm than about who he wants to help; his promise is pretty much just "I'll hurt people you don't like." It's a promise of genocide, at bottom.
I think there's also an austerity vision for conservatives which involves hollowing out the social safety net and giving all the money to the rich. As in Kansas, it's not very popular when put in place. Part of the problem for progressives is convincing people that abundance is possible, and that everyone having more is more important than hurting people you consider undeserving.
That's the appeal of centering fetuses or future peopel who don't exist; you can claim they're innocent and pure and deserving, without the messiness of giving resources to (say) drug addicts, or the poor, or pregnant people who are all stigmatized in various ways, which means people kind of want them to suffer and think that's morality.
Well, I agree. I also can't help adding that money doesn't buy taste. Which isn't just a throwaway quip; taste indicates some kind of comprehensive viewpoint. Bezos doesn't seem to have one beyond amassing an unimaginable amount of money so he can control the future. Fortunately, that kind of plan isn't likely to work out in any meaningful way (because I don't want Jeff Bezos deciding what the future will look like on a massive scale). It's like an episode of Phineas and Ferb.
yeah Bezos is particularly hopeless even for an asshole billionaire and certainly taste has something to do with it. I think the threading got mixed up. my comment above this one (at least on my screen) was only intended to disagree with Noah's claim in a comment that Musk hasn't done much for climate change. Bezos has done nothing for climate change and shows no intention of wanting to do anything about climate change. And I'm not sure he's got an imagination (or taste) to do something if he tried. Musk really did do something: he more or less created a market for electric cars as a luxury good, popularizing them with exactly the kind of people who tend to have power and influence. in the corruption of our particular system, that's a really effective move. of course, he's also thrown billions at his own vanity space program and is repurposing twitter as a vile platform for right wing hate speech, so he's definitely a mixed bag.
Musk didn't develop the cars or the business model, though? He just took them from the original company. The business venture where he maybe did some enginering was paypal, but I think even that's kind of dubious. he's just a rich asshole who's parlayed that into sycophantic press coverage, pretty much.
I never claimed Musk was an engineer. If you think only engineers matter to bring technology to market succesfully, you're misinformed. And I think you're mostly wrong about the business model, the company he bought hadn't brought much of anything to market, let alone successfully and there were plenty of business innovations made by Musk as owner. Maybe the idea of luxury electric cars occurred to someone else, but probably it occurred to lots of someone else's, none of whom managed to implement it successfully. Steve Jobs also wasn't an engineer, but played a major role in bringing first personal computers and later smartphones to the broader market. The kind of innovation involved in developing usable computers, smartphones and electric cars involves a combination of many smaller engineering developments that need to be managed, directed and marketed by someone. To point to other conversations, its much more like Oppenheimer managing Los Alamos than like Einstien discovering relativity. (Though even on the later, much of special relativity was discovered earlier by Poincare, who mostly failed to recognize the importance of his ideas.) Musk and Jobs are both pretty clearly good at those management tasks within the confines of the system of modern American capitalism. Claiming they aren't engineers is just plain irrelevant. All of these technologies were available in some form long before they came to market successfully. You may not like the business of business, but it plays a key role in our society as it is currently constructed. (Oh and for the record, the claim that Musk did any engineering at Paypal also seems to be wrong. He apparently did try to write some code, but it was so bad that it was junked and not included in any actually implemented system.)
then why do you downrate Bezos? Amazon as business model seems more relevant/important than Musk's shitty electric cars, which literally kill people and are likely for that reason going to get swamped by competitors...?
it's also worth noting that Musk's main difference was again an incredibly sycophantic and boosterish press, which bought his great genius bullshit, thus making Tesla cool. self marketing is a kind of skill, I guess, but it seems pretty hard to untangle from what he's done at twitter. also tesla is in lots of ways more a stock boondoggle than a car company. Musk's literally engaging in climate denial now...idk. I don't think you really have to hand it to him.
and now I cringe to see myself refer to Musk as a mixed bag, since he makes me want to puke. but I really think he's done some good even if he makes me want to puke.
Could Bezos solve climate change? Like, hypothetically, could a person with that many squillions of dollars just…fix it? We can get to the rockets later.
probably not. climate change is a massive problem that requires policy adjustments by states. throwing money at green tech could help around the edges probably...but that's what Musk has done and I wouldn't say he's helped much. (he's a fuckhead, obviously, so...)
I mean, the US has made some real progress on climate goals, there have been major advances in green tech...it's a difficult global problem, but I think there are a number of developments more hopeful than Bezos!
I'll disagree with this one. Not that Musk is not a fuckhead, he obviously is one. But I think its still true that over half the electric vehicles on the road in the US are Teslas and they still account for more than half of all sales of such to private individuals. That has a really large climate impact just in and off itself, but he's also built the charging infrastructure that he's now making available to other manufacturers and helped develop and popularize electric vehicle technology. Sure maybe this could have been done better and by others if we'd had more government mandates sooner, but we didn't. (The Chinese did and so they don't need to Tesla or Musk to drive their charging infrastracture or electric car industry. Of course they did because of Xi Jinping's dictatorship, which is so so much worse than Musk.) But I think claiming Musk had no impact really strikes me as denying he's done some good just because he's a fuckhead. I'll even go so far as to say that I think there's a reasonable case to be made that electric vehicle mandates are only politically possible now in the US because Musk has done so much to popularize the technology. That case isn't unambiguous, but i think it can be argued.
Just catching up with a week's worth or reading. I really enjoyed the language you used in this one. When I think about the uber-billionaires that is exactly how I think about them.
What's the end game? Whoever dies with the most wins? Most of these folks have more than a couple generations of heirs could spend. I don't get it. Isn't it more admirable to leave a legacy of kindness?
I know he wasn’t perfect but damn, I love Einstein.
Cracking up at the Janelle Monae video. It’s so sexy it’s almost like a satire of sexy. Like how much more sexiness could you put into a music video. Every sexy thing and some extra sexy. I find her very funny --I know she is actually BEING sexy but somehow when she does that she is communicating a ‘oh, look this is sexiness, we are going meta here.’ It’s something certain slapstick comedians can do where they are both funny and make you aware of their pain but also make you see they are making you aware of their pain. Probably no one understands what I am talking about. Is there no word for this?
I'm afraid I don't find your view of history or progress a lot more nuanced than Bezos'. The device I'm writing you on runs on microprocessors that are direct application of quantum mechanics. One of the major pioneers of which, Werner Heisenberg, was a Nazi. And he wasn't the only one, just the most eminent one. A whole lot of the human progress that you highlight was brought to us by assholes and villains. Xi Jinpeng is a tyrant who has done more for the development of green technology than anyone else alive, there is a reason solar panels and electric car batteries are mostly produced in China. Bezos view of a sterile future is not benevolent, but not I'm not convinced of your vision that radical politics and progressive art are any better. A few years ago an old friend who grew up in the Soviet Union said to me "the leaders of the [Russian] revolution, Lenin, Stalin, they too were fighting for social justice" in reference to the rising American progressive left. At the time I was aghast. These days I begin to find it resonates. Certainly that resonance starts for me with the left's sometimes explict, sometimes implicit indulgence of October 7, backed always at some level by the claim that the the violence of the oppressed is always at least justified and maybe even righteous violence. E.g. Mao's cultural revolution framed itself as the violence of the oppressed as well. It isn't quite the same thing, but your art criticism lately seems to me to always have a hint that all art would be better if it was more openly about a certain "progressive realism" and was closer to your politics or espoused politcs you like more openly. At the moment, left doctrine begins to disturb me. Probably I should worry less, because violence in the US still seems much more likely to come from the right. But the last period of similar political instability, between the world wars, was marked by rising violence on the left and the right, and I suspect this one will be too. And apologies if this is at best obliquely connected to your theme that Jeff Bezos is an asshole, which is of course true. And we sure we should raise taxes on rich assholes.
I don't say, and don't think, that all good art is progressive, nor that all progress (however defined) is enabled by good people. I think that supporting artists alive now is good in itself, and that the mechanism whereby people claim moral authority through "speaking for" the dead, or for people who aren't there, is a reactionary and dangerous move that justifies moral panic, authoritarian violence, and the hoarding of wealth.
I will say that one thing that disturbs me for sure is the way that support for Israel seems to have led many to a sweeping rejection of progressive goals, and indeed to a feeling that any whiff of progressive politics is the real danger? Like, this piece is in no small part about abortion rights, and isn't at all about Gaza, but somehow you've tied yourself in knots to make it about Israel? I don't really see how that's productive.
Hi Noah. First, I admitted I was off topic. As to tying myself in knots, I'll admit to that in a broader context than this comment. Maybe I engaged here when I refuse to often these days because your post was safely not about Israel, Hamas and Gaza. If you want to delete my comment feel free. But really, being in favor of abortion rights is popular among the broader democratic coalition and is not in anyway something I'd mark as progressive politics. Heck, abortion rights are even popular enough with Republicans that red state referenda keep granting abortion rights in the same elections that elect Republican governments. With both abortion rights and Republican officials winning by broad enough margins to indicate a really substantial overlap of voters. Trying to deny that there is anything doctrinaire about modern progressive politics by pointing to abortion rights is as much a non-sequitir as my comment. And sure I support public funding of the arts. And the sciences and the humanities. And you can't fund dead artists, scientists or humanists. I don't reject all progressive goals, I just understand better than I used to the inherent distrust of the left that I meet often among immigrants from Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. There's a lot more I can say about any of this, but I remain very far off your topic of choice, so I'll stop. And you again, you can feel free to remove my off topic comments as such.
abortion rights are broadly popular, but thery're also definitely a progressive goal, and progressives are the ones you'll generally find staffing abortion funds and pushing for a broadening of abortion rights. (though of course there are also sexist progressives who insist abortion rights don't matter that much. they're wrong though.)
I don't think Heisenberg, for example, was looking backward in his pioneering, and I see that as a big problem with people like Bezos. Now, it's possible he just used the examples he chose because they'd be easily understandable to most of his audience; and it's possible he doesn't know (or care) much about music. (I'll give him a pass on Einstein.) And I really hope he accidentally does some lasting good. But I haven't seen anything that indicates the billionaire space race is about anything but ego, and the vision is so limited. If your big vision is to "create space colonies," that doesn't feel like a successful formula.
hey! miss you too! and if I implicitly defended Bezos or the billionaire space race, I didn't mean to. Among billionaires in the US, Bezos is perhaps oddly the most useful and the least useful. most useful just by the number of boxes Amazon drops at my house (and perhaps also yours?) least useful in terms of developing any technology that I can see as genuinely forward looking. Musk, Gates and Jobs all have him beat on that front and the best case is almost certainly for Musk and is not perfect. I think he's done some good but also some harm and don't know how it balances. I honestly suspect Bezos doesn't care much about science either, and Einstein is the paradigmatic scientist for those that don't care much about science. But honestly, I think Noah may make too much of the Mozart and Einstein allusions, Bezos was just reaching for names that he hoped had the broadest possible recognition. now using those two for that surely indicates something about Bezos culturual blinders. and now leaves me curious if one did a broad name recognition poll in the US of Mozart v. Taylor Swift v. Beyonce, who would win? I have no idea, I find it hard to imagine not knowing who all three are, but I suspect none of them have truly universal recognition. but any name recognition poll about scientists is going to be won by Einstein, hands down and no contest. don't really know why, Jonas Salk for instance should really beat him.
beyonce and taylor swift are both pretty controversial by virtue of not being white men and still being alive. Mozart is the standard blank space for high cultural achievement without content.
well then at least its interesting that the two living musicians who I suspect have the greatest name recognition are both women, one of whom is black. maybe there's a living white male musician with that degree of popular resonance, but I can't think of one. and certainly Einstein is usually used as the blank slate of "scientific genius" almost entirely by people who have no idea what he actually did, so maybe Bezos was using Mozart and Einstein the way you claim. And maybe claiming he was just reaching for what he thought were the most well known names doesn't manage to undermine what you're claiming, given the broad cultural context.
Bob Dylan's still alive, and I think is probably the musician with worldwide most cultural recognition right now...Paul McCartney's the other contender I'd guess. Madonna is still around too...
I've grew up in a red state. It has always puzzled me what conservatives wanted as an "end game." Kansas had a famous period where there agenda was "starve the beast." Which was just another way to say they were going to cut taxes. They cut taxes so much that they couldn't work on roads, let alone spend on education or arts.
When Trump came along with his MAGA declaration, it felt similarly empty. It has a catchy vibe, but really, what specific policies and decisions do you want? And what is the vision? Is it some Ayn Rand capitalist freedom city?
I could disagree if a place like that is possible, but they won't even provide a vision to ague about.
And it makes me wonder, do we need a vision of a better future world - with specific support structures and spending decisions all fleshed out?
I think your point is a good one, that what should be centered are the real people who are here now. And those people are complicated and contradictory, so building a future has to promote individual freedom to create and exist in the most ways imaginable (to be healthy, safe, educated is a necessary foundation), but also to limit destructive and evil impulses of the powerful (billionaires), and of the majority (racists).
I think Trump's vision is much more about who he wants to harm than about who he wants to help; his promise is pretty much just "I'll hurt people you don't like." It's a promise of genocide, at bottom.
I think there's also an austerity vision for conservatives which involves hollowing out the social safety net and giving all the money to the rich. As in Kansas, it's not very popular when put in place. Part of the problem for progressives is convincing people that abundance is possible, and that everyone having more is more important than hurting people you consider undeserving.
That's the appeal of centering fetuses or future peopel who don't exist; you can claim they're innocent and pure and deserving, without the messiness of giving resources to (say) drug addicts, or the poor, or pregnant people who are all stigmatized in various ways, which means people kind of want them to suffer and think that's morality.
Well, I agree. I also can't help adding that money doesn't buy taste. Which isn't just a throwaway quip; taste indicates some kind of comprehensive viewpoint. Bezos doesn't seem to have one beyond amassing an unimaginable amount of money so he can control the future. Fortunately, that kind of plan isn't likely to work out in any meaningful way (because I don't want Jeff Bezos deciding what the future will look like on a massive scale). It's like an episode of Phineas and Ferb.
yeah Bezos is particularly hopeless even for an asshole billionaire and certainly taste has something to do with it. I think the threading got mixed up. my comment above this one (at least on my screen) was only intended to disagree with Noah's claim in a comment that Musk hasn't done much for climate change. Bezos has done nothing for climate change and shows no intention of wanting to do anything about climate change. And I'm not sure he's got an imagination (or taste) to do something if he tried. Musk really did do something: he more or less created a market for electric cars as a luxury good, popularizing them with exactly the kind of people who tend to have power and influence. in the corruption of our particular system, that's a really effective move. of course, he's also thrown billions at his own vanity space program and is repurposing twitter as a vile platform for right wing hate speech, so he's definitely a mixed bag.
Musk didn't develop the cars or the business model, though? He just took them from the original company. The business venture where he maybe did some enginering was paypal, but I think even that's kind of dubious. he's just a rich asshole who's parlayed that into sycophantic press coverage, pretty much.
I never claimed Musk was an engineer. If you think only engineers matter to bring technology to market succesfully, you're misinformed. And I think you're mostly wrong about the business model, the company he bought hadn't brought much of anything to market, let alone successfully and there were plenty of business innovations made by Musk as owner. Maybe the idea of luxury electric cars occurred to someone else, but probably it occurred to lots of someone else's, none of whom managed to implement it successfully. Steve Jobs also wasn't an engineer, but played a major role in bringing first personal computers and later smartphones to the broader market. The kind of innovation involved in developing usable computers, smartphones and electric cars involves a combination of many smaller engineering developments that need to be managed, directed and marketed by someone. To point to other conversations, its much more like Oppenheimer managing Los Alamos than like Einstien discovering relativity. (Though even on the later, much of special relativity was discovered earlier by Poincare, who mostly failed to recognize the importance of his ideas.) Musk and Jobs are both pretty clearly good at those management tasks within the confines of the system of modern American capitalism. Claiming they aren't engineers is just plain irrelevant. All of these technologies were available in some form long before they came to market successfully. You may not like the business of business, but it plays a key role in our society as it is currently constructed. (Oh and for the record, the claim that Musk did any engineering at Paypal also seems to be wrong. He apparently did try to write some code, but it was so bad that it was junked and not included in any actually implemented system.)
then why do you downrate Bezos? Amazon as business model seems more relevant/important than Musk's shitty electric cars, which literally kill people and are likely for that reason going to get swamped by competitors...?
it's also worth noting that Musk's main difference was again an incredibly sycophantic and boosterish press, which bought his great genius bullshit, thus making Tesla cool. self marketing is a kind of skill, I guess, but it seems pretty hard to untangle from what he's done at twitter. also tesla is in lots of ways more a stock boondoggle than a car company. Musk's literally engaging in climate denial now...idk. I don't think you really have to hand it to him.
and now I cringe to see myself refer to Musk as a mixed bag, since he makes me want to puke. but I really think he's done some good even if he makes me want to puke.
Could Bezos solve climate change? Like, hypothetically, could a person with that many squillions of dollars just…fix it? We can get to the rockets later.
probably not. climate change is a massive problem that requires policy adjustments by states. throwing money at green tech could help around the edges probably...but that's what Musk has done and I wouldn't say he's helped much. (he's a fuckhead, obviously, so...)
It is depressing in the extreme that the most realistic plan is hoping the guy from the online bookstore builds humanity a space ark.
I mean, the US has made some real progress on climate goals, there have been major advances in green tech...it's a difficult global problem, but I think there are a number of developments more hopeful than Bezos!
I'll disagree with this one. Not that Musk is not a fuckhead, he obviously is one. But I think its still true that over half the electric vehicles on the road in the US are Teslas and they still account for more than half of all sales of such to private individuals. That has a really large climate impact just in and off itself, but he's also built the charging infrastructure that he's now making available to other manufacturers and helped develop and popularize electric vehicle technology. Sure maybe this could have been done better and by others if we'd had more government mandates sooner, but we didn't. (The Chinese did and so they don't need to Tesla or Musk to drive their charging infrastracture or electric car industry. Of course they did because of Xi Jinping's dictatorship, which is so so much worse than Musk.) But I think claiming Musk had no impact really strikes me as denying he's done some good just because he's a fuckhead. I'll even go so far as to say that I think there's a reasonable case to be made that electric vehicle mandates are only politically possible now in the US because Musk has done so much to popularize the technology. That case isn't unambiguous, but i think it can be argued.
Just catching up with a week's worth or reading. I really enjoyed the language you used in this one. When I think about the uber-billionaires that is exactly how I think about them.
What's the end game? Whoever dies with the most wins? Most of these folks have more than a couple generations of heirs could spend. I don't get it. Isn't it more admirable to leave a legacy of kindness?
they don't really want to be admirable; they want to be admired, which is not the same thing.
I guess that is what we get with a society that values status and money above all else. Has it always been that way in all societies?
Oh Lord this is great.
I know he wasn’t perfect but damn, I love Einstein.
Cracking up at the Janelle Monae video. It’s so sexy it’s almost like a satire of sexy. Like how much more sexiness could you put into a music video. Every sexy thing and some extra sexy. I find her very funny --I know she is actually BEING sexy but somehow when she does that she is communicating a ‘oh, look this is sexiness, we are going meta here.’ It’s something certain slapstick comedians can do where they are both funny and make you aware of their pain but also make you see they are making you aware of their pain. Probably no one understands what I am talking about. Is there no word for this?
I think it’s called “camp”!
I'm afraid I don't find your view of history or progress a lot more nuanced than Bezos'. The device I'm writing you on runs on microprocessors that are direct application of quantum mechanics. One of the major pioneers of which, Werner Heisenberg, was a Nazi. And he wasn't the only one, just the most eminent one. A whole lot of the human progress that you highlight was brought to us by assholes and villains. Xi Jinpeng is a tyrant who has done more for the development of green technology than anyone else alive, there is a reason solar panels and electric car batteries are mostly produced in China. Bezos view of a sterile future is not benevolent, but not I'm not convinced of your vision that radical politics and progressive art are any better. A few years ago an old friend who grew up in the Soviet Union said to me "the leaders of the [Russian] revolution, Lenin, Stalin, they too were fighting for social justice" in reference to the rising American progressive left. At the time I was aghast. These days I begin to find it resonates. Certainly that resonance starts for me with the left's sometimes explict, sometimes implicit indulgence of October 7, backed always at some level by the claim that the the violence of the oppressed is always at least justified and maybe even righteous violence. E.g. Mao's cultural revolution framed itself as the violence of the oppressed as well. It isn't quite the same thing, but your art criticism lately seems to me to always have a hint that all art would be better if it was more openly about a certain "progressive realism" and was closer to your politics or espoused politcs you like more openly. At the moment, left doctrine begins to disturb me. Probably I should worry less, because violence in the US still seems much more likely to come from the right. But the last period of similar political instability, between the world wars, was marked by rising violence on the left and the right, and I suspect this one will be too. And apologies if this is at best obliquely connected to your theme that Jeff Bezos is an asshole, which is of course true. And we sure we should raise taxes on rich assholes.
I don't say, and don't think, that all good art is progressive, nor that all progress (however defined) is enabled by good people. I think that supporting artists alive now is good in itself, and that the mechanism whereby people claim moral authority through "speaking for" the dead, or for people who aren't there, is a reactionary and dangerous move that justifies moral panic, authoritarian violence, and the hoarding of wealth.
I will say that one thing that disturbs me for sure is the way that support for Israel seems to have led many to a sweeping rejection of progressive goals, and indeed to a feeling that any whiff of progressive politics is the real danger? Like, this piece is in no small part about abortion rights, and isn't at all about Gaza, but somehow you've tied yourself in knots to make it about Israel? I don't really see how that's productive.
Hi Noah. First, I admitted I was off topic. As to tying myself in knots, I'll admit to that in a broader context than this comment. Maybe I engaged here when I refuse to often these days because your post was safely not about Israel, Hamas and Gaza. If you want to delete my comment feel free. But really, being in favor of abortion rights is popular among the broader democratic coalition and is not in anyway something I'd mark as progressive politics. Heck, abortion rights are even popular enough with Republicans that red state referenda keep granting abortion rights in the same elections that elect Republican governments. With both abortion rights and Republican officials winning by broad enough margins to indicate a really substantial overlap of voters. Trying to deny that there is anything doctrinaire about modern progressive politics by pointing to abortion rights is as much a non-sequitir as my comment. And sure I support public funding of the arts. And the sciences and the humanities. And you can't fund dead artists, scientists or humanists. I don't reject all progressive goals, I just understand better than I used to the inherent distrust of the left that I meet often among immigrants from Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. There's a lot more I can say about any of this, but I remain very far off your topic of choice, so I'll stop. And you again, you can feel free to remove my off topic comments as such.
no need to remove it!
abortion rights are broadly popular, but thery're also definitely a progressive goal, and progressives are the ones you'll generally find staffing abortion funds and pushing for a broadening of abortion rights. (though of course there are also sexist progressives who insist abortion rights don't matter that much. they're wrong though.)
Hey, David! Miss you!
I don't think Heisenberg, for example, was looking backward in his pioneering, and I see that as a big problem with people like Bezos. Now, it's possible he just used the examples he chose because they'd be easily understandable to most of his audience; and it's possible he doesn't know (or care) much about music. (I'll give him a pass on Einstein.) And I really hope he accidentally does some lasting good. But I haven't seen anything that indicates the billionaire space race is about anything but ego, and the vision is so limited. If your big vision is to "create space colonies," that doesn't feel like a successful formula.
hey! miss you too! and if I implicitly defended Bezos or the billionaire space race, I didn't mean to. Among billionaires in the US, Bezos is perhaps oddly the most useful and the least useful. most useful just by the number of boxes Amazon drops at my house (and perhaps also yours?) least useful in terms of developing any technology that I can see as genuinely forward looking. Musk, Gates and Jobs all have him beat on that front and the best case is almost certainly for Musk and is not perfect. I think he's done some good but also some harm and don't know how it balances. I honestly suspect Bezos doesn't care much about science either, and Einstein is the paradigmatic scientist for those that don't care much about science. But honestly, I think Noah may make too much of the Mozart and Einstein allusions, Bezos was just reaching for names that he hoped had the broadest possible recognition. now using those two for that surely indicates something about Bezos culturual blinders. and now leaves me curious if one did a broad name recognition poll in the US of Mozart v. Taylor Swift v. Beyonce, who would win? I have no idea, I find it hard to imagine not knowing who all three are, but I suspect none of them have truly universal recognition. but any name recognition poll about scientists is going to be won by Einstein, hands down and no contest. don't really know why, Jonas Salk for instance should really beat him.
beyonce and taylor swift are both pretty controversial by virtue of not being white men and still being alive. Mozart is the standard blank space for high cultural achievement without content.
well then at least its interesting that the two living musicians who I suspect have the greatest name recognition are both women, one of whom is black. maybe there's a living white male musician with that degree of popular resonance, but I can't think of one. and certainly Einstein is usually used as the blank slate of "scientific genius" almost entirely by people who have no idea what he actually did, so maybe Bezos was using Mozart and Einstein the way you claim. And maybe claiming he was just reaching for what he thought were the most well known names doesn't manage to undermine what you're claiming, given the broad cultural context.
Bob Dylan's still alive, and I think is probably the musician with worldwide most cultural recognition right now...Paul McCartney's the other contender I'd guess. Madonna is still around too...
Kanye would also rank highly for worldwide name recognition . . .