Even more than a flesh-and-blood bureaucracy, Wiener understood, an inscrutable bureaucracy-in-a-box, issuing decisions and edicts with superhuman speed and certainty, could all too easily be put to totalitarian ends. The box might seem autonomous, its outputs immaculate, but it would always serve its masters. It would always be an instrument of power. “The modern man, and especially the modern American, however much ‘know-how’ he may have, has very little ‘know-what,’” Wiener wrote. “He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind these.”

The pleasure of listening to music was not as great as he anticipated. He found more pleasure in manipulating music files. “Engaging with media in a traditional sense is often the last thing we do,” he observes. “In the digital ecosystem, the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself.” It was once assumed that digitization would liberate cultural artifacts from their physical containers. We’d be able to enjoy the wine without the bottles. What’s actually happened is different. We’ve come, as Goldsmith says, “to prefer the bottles to the wine.”

Moreover, billionaires’ extravagant wealth is by and large not spent, as Zuckerberg suggests, on cutting edge research and philanthropic efforts. After they’ve bought up enough yachts and private jets they mainly invest in making themselves richer through casino-style financial speculation and in luxury real estate in starkly unequal cities like San Francisco, Miami and New York, where mostly vacant homes act as safety deposit boxes to shield wealth from taxation. Their money might also end up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, where it can sit undisturbed by the long arm of the state. Very little of that ever trickles down to the 99%, where inequality has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.