Gates-washing the future
A new Netflix series continues the effort to launder Bill Gates’ reputation
Bill Gates is no stranger to media adoration. He’s been feted as our pandemic sage, climate champion, and the savior of Africa — often in publications and other venues that aren’t interested in anything other than the narrative disseminated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Some of them even receive funding from the Foundation for their thinly veiled propaganda. But occasionally one of those outputs is so egregious it needs to be called out.
In September, Netflix released a five-part series called What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates providing the billionaire yet another opportunity to present himself as our great sage. The positive publicity was necessary after the anger directed at Gates during the pandemic and the scandals that came to the public’s attention during his divorce from Melinda French Gates. Don’t worry, you won’t hear anything about all the time he spent with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in this series.
Each episode tackles a different issue, going through artificial intelligence (AI), misinformation, climate change, inequality, and infectious diseases. But each one does so in a way that places Gates and the Foundation at the center of the issue, while weaving a tale that ensures audiences are left with the notion Gates and his wealth are key to any real solution — the only possible exception being the episode on inequality.
Take AI, for example. To kick the series off, Gates and the makers of the series jump into the deep end of generative AI hype. The episode is filled with terrible AI-generated visuals that will look even worse if anyone bothers to watch this puff piece in a few years time, alongside the usual claims of boosters about how powerful AI has now become and how close it is to thinking for itself — a claim that’s little more than a sci-fi dream than a tangible reality. The episode goes so far as to present Gates as central to the story of OpenAI, guiding its path from behind the scenes.
Paris Marx
The choice of how the episodes are arranged is a curious one. I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue that the creators’ indulgence in AI hype leads the first episode to being something akin to misinformation about what the technology actually is and does, yet they follow that with an episode on the harms misinformation poses to society. But their focus is not on the misinformation that benefits some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world; it’s on the aspects of it that target them, once again placing Gates and the conspiracies about him during the pandemic at the center of the narrative. The episode provides a good illustration of the wider blind spots of the series because they rely so heavily on the Gates narrative.
There are two places where this stands out most during the episode. Early on, Gates talks about some hate he faced earlier in his career. Throughout the series, he mentions getting into philanthropy a little over twenty years ago, but the full story is never given to the audience. The truth for why Gates faced that hate was because he was a ruthless monopolist at the head of Microsoft, and when the company was brought to court on antitrust charges by the Department of Justice, Gates gave a defiant and arrogant deposition that turned the public against him and helped ensure the company lost the case.
Gates got into philanthropy after he tore his own reputation to shreds and decided to use the vast wealth he’d accumulated at Microsoft to rehabilitate it by reframing himself as a caring rich guy giving away his billions instead of the ruthless capitalist people despised. But that also gets to the ire directed at him during the pandemic.
There’s no denying Gates was subject to conspiracies, including that he was putting microchips in Covid vaccines and might be a lizard person. But there was also righteous anger aimed at him for opposing an effort to waive intellectual property (IP) rights on the vaccines so more companies could manufacture them and sell them at much lower cost to increase access in the Global South. Gates pushed the COVAX initiative, claiming it would get vaccines to low-income countries despite the IP rules, that largely failed and actively spread misinformation in the media about the ability of other facilities around the world to manufacture Covid vaccines. He was accused of enabling vaccine apartheid. That was no conspiracy theory, but you won’t hear anything about that in the series. According to its narrative, all the anger he faced was based on misinformation.
Those blind spots are only exacerbated by the creators’ decisions on who to interview during the series. Room is made for critics of Gates and his approach — US Senator Bernie Sanders makes an appearance, along with climate activists who want to go much further than Gates. But while they’re usually able to make a few points, space is given to Gates, people at his organizations, and other experts who back him to rebut the criticism. Tim Schwab, the author of The Bill Gates Problem, refused a request to appear in the series and said the pitch he received was wildly different than what ultimately appeared on Netflix.
In the episode about the climate crisis, there’s an extended focus on the work of Gates and Breakthrough Energy Ventures — a company he established nine years ago — are doing to fund companies working on climate tech initiatives. Those investments are used to further Gates’ narrative that a techno-fix to climate change is within reach, even though we’re far behind on emissions reduction because the very capitalist system all his solutions must run through is holding us back. One of the youth activists is allowed to say that, in her view, a certain level of blind optimism is a level of climate denial. It’s not a criticism Gates — or the creators — take on board.
Paris Marx
That continues in an episode exploring whether Gates is too rich and the growing inequality that is tearing the United States apart. When asked the question directly at the beginning of the episode, Gates can’t answer directly and instead chooses to intellectualize his wealth. Later in the episode, he declares that “inequality’s very difficult.” But the guests the creators decide to have on to defend Gates’ immense wealth are telling. Alongside Sanders saying he’d get rid of billionaires are Noah Smith and Mark Cuban defend the position of billionaires in US society, followed by Mitt Romney and Thomas Friedman to throw out the usual tropes against socialism or communism while praising the capitalist system that produced people like Gates.
There’s no question that capitalism has been able to deliver tangible improvements in many parts of the world, but what people like Gates cannot fathom is that capitalism has now become an impediment to a better world and that they’re the clearest examples of its failure, rather than its success. Capitalism creates the incentive for tech CEOs to downplay the threat of climate change so they can chase their AI fantasies. It has presented innumerable roadblocks to addressing the climate crisis because short-term profits have primacy over long-term sustainability and even species survival.
The problems the Gates Foundation was founded to help address are the product of the unequal world order capitalism requires — where billions need to be impoverished so the wealth of their nations can be captured by multinational corporations, billionaire CEOs, and the highly developed countries where they’re headquartered. Around the world, people have been pushing back against Gates’ efforts to force commercial solutions on them, whether it’s his advocacy of privatized education in the United States or agri-business in Africa. But none of that is presented to audiences of Netflix’s newest docu-series.
What’s Next? is little more than the latest Gates PR vehicle. It’s designed to ensure the public continues to see a rapacious monopolist who actively works to push commercialized solutions to problems poorly suited to market responses as a altruistic grandpa whose hoarded wealth can solve the world’s problems. Key people involved in the series have a history in the Gates orbit, so it’s no surprise it can’t even fathom the notion that relying on billionaires might not be the best way to address our collective challenges.
Near the end of the series, none other than Bono turns up to call Gates “a bit punk rock.” It provides a great illustration of how wealth and proximity to it can warp people’s minds and their understanding of the world. What we need is a future without Bill Gates, not one where he continues to shape our world.
