They Weren’t Educated, But They Were Privileged

If one thing has been made abundantly clear, I am from Austin, Texas, the center of the tech world in my state. Sadly, I have repeatedly heard about how certain individuals were able to eschew education in favor of the entrepreneurial world, and there has been very little done to correct those narratives. My favorite lie stems around the belief that some working-class white men started businesses in garages that were somehow “worth it” enough to secure rampant investment and longevity. It is time to accept the truth: while those men may not have received a bachelor’s degree, they were far from “scrappy” young adults who happened to get lucky, and most people with their ideology will not be half as successful.

The best thing about the movie “Social Network” is the depiction of networking among the moneyed classes. Nowhere in the depiction did anyone see a janitor set up a meeting with a CEO and receive an opportunity to make dreams come true–that was “Good Will Hunting.” Meetings were set up among familial connections, and even when seeking investors, behavior among the privileged was abhorrent. For “elites,” there is a certain confidence in knowing that getting money will not be a problem, so they can behave as terribly as humanly possible. As a Yale graduate, this is how networking works, where a few individuals get more access than others to resource and the rest suffer the debilitating belief that we just need to “work more” and “try hard.”

All of the technoligarchs had access to resources before they bought the press and demanded we worship them as gods, and the myth of their “self-made” prowess has become a joke. College, after all, became more of a barrier to privilege rather than an expression of intelligence, and has now been exposed as such. Question: if some students are seen as “gifted” while others are seen as “undeserving” but all are at the same school, what value does the school actually have? The answer is that not being educated only matters if one has enough resources to function without additional access to “elite” networks.” Privilege without education is not genius, just the execution of the same barriers working the way they always have.