Years after Silicon Valley entered Vogue’s Met Gala, this week’s show marked the end of the low-tech take on the fashion magazine’s annual party to raise money for the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This year, the participants of the event were the founder of Amazon and the billionaire of technology, Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, who reportedly paid ten million dollars for the honor. There were also executives from Meta, Snapchat, OpenAI and others, which has sparked outrage — especially among those who consider the Met Gala not a scandalous show of extremism, but a special and stylish event in the fashion calendar.
What’s next? Will the 2027 theme celebrate AI slop? Will Mark Zuckerberg fund a rebrand so that next year we’ll be talking not about the Met Gala, but the Meta Gala? Why, oh why, would Anna Wintour, global content chief at Vogue publisher Condé Nast, allow this?
There’s a huge gulf between the perceived cool of the Met Gala and the tech bros who buy tickets for $100,000 a pop. But we should not be surprised that the Gala establishment welcomes technology companies, despite the behavior that many find morally objectionable (data centers that consume land and natural resources, social media companies ignore the harm of children, and so on). And we shouldn’t be surprised that the Met Gala is the stage where Silicon Valley executives try to show off their newfound sense of taste, as the New Yorker wrote in March.
This event is nothing if not a spectacle, made even more so by the anti-Amazon protests that not only formed the background of the party, but threatened to overshadow its small luxury space with a series of pranks designed to speak to the cold, hard truths of the company’s working conditions, stimulating collective action.
One group of activists left 300 bottles of urine inside the Met – a reference to Amazon workers who reportedly had to complete their work under such pressure in the past that they had no choice but to urinate in the bottles. A shopping cart filled with empty bottles was parked outside the event, labeled “Met Gala VIP toilet.” Videos containing protest messages were shown in Bezos’ New York penthouse.
Perhaps because of the backlash, Bezos chose to forgo the opportunity to walk the red carpet with his wife. Meanwhile, the best of the world’s celebrities — Hollywood royalty, pop stars, Olympians and models — put on cameras, seemingly oblivious to the noise, perhaps choosing to ignore the protests and look beyond the tech bro consultants, so as not to offend Wintour and Vogue, or work on their egos.
Money and art: Uneasy bedfellows
In many ways, this is a myth as old as time. The world’s greatest artists have long had to accept money and endure the company of wealthy patrons who, under the guise of benevolent charity, buy proximity to their work.
People with boring jobs and lots of money are still working. Just look at how private members’ clubs like London’s Soho House, designed ostensibly as meeting places for media and art professionals, are filled with finance bros and management consultants. Their corporate income allows them to escape for a while from their corporate environment and share a stylish environment with people who live a quieter, more enjoyable life.
If you were in doubt, you might think that the system is designed this way. After all, many people who work in the media and the arts can’t afford memberships to these spaces any more than they can buy a place in the big cities they call home, just as most artists wouldn’t dream of getting an invitation to the Met Gala.
Instead, these spaces — members’ clubs, the Met Gala — offer cultural elites their own good times funded by people they really hope they don’t accidentally catch up with at a bar. (I highly doubt Beyoncé has a burning desire to chat with Sergey Brin, but I could be wrong.)
Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri from Meta meet Olympic skier Alysa Liu.
Even worse, however, there are rich people with boring jobs and rich people with bad jobs, who were tolerated and loved their money long ago. It took a surprisingly long time for Sackler’s name, for example, to be absorbed into the cultural institutions it carried, despite its well-documented association with the opioid epidemic.
The cultural space of Silicon Valley
If you have everything in the world, but no cultural cachet, the quickest way to solve the problem is to throw money at it, in this case, by buying access to the most prestigious and exclusive cultural event in the world. And there’s almost nothing tech companies love more than speed.
This number reveals the important way in which the culture of Silicon Valley is very different from the way the real culture is formed. Culture is born gradually in communities of people who come together in shared ideas and experiences. The value system of Silicon Valley, with its emphasis on quick decisions, sharp U-turns and quick results, for human benefit, is diametrically opposed to the ways in which culture develops and art flourishes.
The biggest obstacle facing Silicon Valley in its attempt to learn taste is simply that it is impatient. You can’t send to AI the years, even decades, of deep learning, study and thinking required to develop a taste. True taste is formed through introspection, real conversations and not avoiding the contradictions of human experience. It’s incremental, slow-burning work that takes time — a concept the tech world views strictly through the lens of economic productivity.
The coat was originally designed for working class people and was resold by a tech company for $239.
This need for speed has led to repeated mishaps as technology companies mistake taste trends in their bids to reflect their new cultural enlightenment. The Palantir coat is a prime example of this: a wealthy technology company piggybacking off a trend, originally inspired by employee uniforms, in a misguided attempt to show that it understands fashion. Silicon Valley’s short-term thinking is primitive, and should not be confused with a determination to create meaningful cultural fit.
Likewise, the presence of tech companies at the Met Gala, which these days is mostly a place of self-absorbed worship, is nothing but a shortcut that ends up revealing Silicon Valley’s shallow understanding of taste and culture.
The art of deception
This taste-washing and cultural integration ultimately serves as a smokescreen for the things tech companies would like us to ignore: layoffs, union busting, reports of mistreatment of workers, controversial political deals and questionable business deals.
Jeff Bezos would probably prefer us to discuss his wife’s Met Gala dress, even criticize it, than to talk about the fact that the man who is reported to be the leader of the Amazon union Chris Smalls was arrested while protesting the event.
The Met Gala was the main target of the protests.
If tech companies make it cool and relevant — for example, offering baseball caps with the slogan “thinking” like Anthropic does — maybe people won’t be able to focus on the environmental damage of AI? It’s a soft power bid to complement their hard power, but from what we’ve seen so far, they’re miles away from catching up.
The tech barons want to make cosplay cool and sophisticated, and the cultural establishment will humor them as long as they’re willing to dip their hands into those deep pockets while taking up a little red carpet space. At that time, the cultural center of gravity will move from under the feet of the Silicon Valley designer without realizing it. The really cool people will meet somewhere else, at a secret party that none of the tech executives are even told about.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was also at the Met Gala, along with his girlfriend Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a health advocate affiliated with MAGA.
Where the real danger lies is not in their attacking groups, but in using their hard power when playing soft power fails. Rumors, for example, that Jeff Bezos wants to buy Condé Nast, are a real cause for concern.
Condé Nast not only controls Vogue, but publications like Wired and Vanity Fair, which have a reputation for holding figures like Bezos to account. From Bezos’ capture of the Washington Post, we can see that he has no qualms about tarnishing the reputation of prestigious legacy titles.
Tech bros will quickly tire of their efforts to build a cultural cache, at which point they risk pulling their money to feed the creative world dry, causing an exodus of the kind of talent they can never control. Taste will continue to elude them as long as they use their checkbooks as weapons, not realizing that, no matter how much they spend, they will never get ownership of the cultural capital they so desire.
