Western Daily Press (Saturday)
We’re the playthings of the new gods on Mount Olympus
IN two of his three seminal books on the past, present and future of the human race, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has warned there may be a danger of our species splitting, so that there could soon be a tiny elite group - and then there will be the rest of us.
The elite would have privileges beyond the dreams of even the great kings or emperors of the past. Harare, for example, talks about medical advances, available to the superrich, that could extend our lifespan by 100s of years.
The ultimate cost of such things will, of course, be borne by the rest of us - the subspecies that will continuously degenerate into an ever-poorer copy of the supermen and superwomen up at the top.
Scary. But not as far-fetched as it may seem. At least, not from where I’m writing these words... Don’t ask me how I got here, but I am sitting in a VIP lounge in Zurich Airport, surrounded by the sort of people who might make up Harari’s super-elite.
These people are sleek, smart, strutting and loud. With their MacBooks open, they bark instructions into phones, like so many well-
Martin Hesp gets a glimpse of how the other half – or one per cent – live, controlling our lives at the click of a button while we scurry about like ants
preened guillemots going through a mating ritual on a rock.
The besuited creature nearest me is saying: “We are haemorrhaging cash on this little deal. Losing £175,000 a day on it! It’s a f***ing car crash. Sort it!”
Within seconds of putting the phone down it rings and he is shouting: “Boris! Good to hear from you, mate. Listen, I’m about to get on a flight so I’ll call you. Soon. Promise.”
Boris? Really? I don’t want to get carried away, there are a great many men named Boris, but...
By the way, if you think I’m being nosy listening to these conversations, I have no choice. As I said, these people are loud.
There is an attractive woman who looks as though she’d be at home running a concentration camp, as opposed to sipping champagne in a Swiss airport. When I say attractive, she sort of is - but there is something unnaturally severe about her demeanour.
“Get them to go through the small print again,” she is saying in a phone. “I don’t care if it takes them all night. The contract is for £800 mill’ and we cannot afford any cock-ups. No wriggle room. Anywhere.”
She looks across and notices me observing her, and I am treated to a thin, subliminal, scowl.
I take another slurp of my free VIPlounge champers and mutter something to my pal from the Yorkshire Post who has been a newspaper hack for as long as me and who does a similar job for that paper. Chris Page shrugs, grins and says: “It’s how the Other Half lives, mate.”
Except it’s not the Other Half - it is the other one per cent. And as we fly across northern Europe at 38,000 feet in the hushed silence of business class, I realise that the folk around me working on their laptops and phones really are Harari’s super elite, busy running our lower level lives whether we like it or not.
For all I know, it could be my pen- sion fund that is haemorrhaging £175k a day. Or my bank that is taking a punt on a £800 million deal that should have no wriggle room.
Brexit might alter a few details for these people, but I imagine the dreaded no-deal scenario would offer them nothing but opportunity.
While we West Country folk go about our quiet and presumably innocent business - worrying vaguely about vast movements of political tectonic plates way beyond comprehension - these guys, soaring above the Earth’s surface in the ZurichLondon shuttle business cabin, are tweaking and altering millions of lives below their extendable seats with the prod of a smartphone screen.
To the Ancient Greeks, the idea of those gods up there looking down from Mount Olympus was powerful and superhuman enough. But 5,000 years later, here’s me on a brand new aeroplane flying so high it is lit by the evening sun - gazing out of a window down into a world that has already turned dark. Far below, countless millions of ant-sized people are struggling and hoping that tomorrow won’t be too bad - or that, with luck and a fair wind, something almost good might happen.
Within an hour I’ll be down there with them. Back down from the skybased pantheon of the business gods to the world of soil and sea where I belong. Ejected from my temporary visit to a place where the elite buy and sell newspaper and media groups (to take one example I overheard talk of ) in the same way kids swap sweets in a playground.
Harari warns that increasing artificial intelligence will hand this elite ever more power. Who needs middle management or number-crunchers when AI will do it all for you? Who needs 99 out of 100 employees?
“But the world will always need stories, Martin,” a member of this elite told me earlier. “Today, stories are more important than ever. The trick is to find the right story, and to tell it wisely.”
No change there then. It is what it’s always been: a few gods spinning tales.