Silicon Valley cultural cosplay at the Met Gala is a dangerous smokescreen

After many years of Silicon Valley forcing its way into Vogue’s Met Gala, this week’s edition marked the end of tech’s semi-hostile takeover of the fashion magazine’s annual party aimed at raising money for the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This year, the event’s co-chairs were Amazon founder and tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, who reportedly paid $10 million for the honor. Also present were executives from Meta, Snapchat, OpenAI and others, sparking outrage, especially among those who view the Met Gala not as a vulgar display of excess, but as the most exclusive and stylish event on the fashion calendar.

And then? Will the 2027 theme celebrate AI slop? Will Mark Zuckerberg fund a rebranding so that next year we’re not talking about the Met Gala, but the Meta Gala? Why, oh why, would Anna Wintour, global head of content at Vogue publisher Condé Nast, allow this?

There’s a huge gulf between the perceived coolness of the Met Gala and the tech bros who buy tickets for $100,000 each. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the Gala establishment embraces tech companies, despite behavior that many find morally reprehensible (data centers gobbling up land and natural resources, social media companies turning a blind eye to harm to children, etc.). Nor should we be surprised that the Met Gala is the stage on which Silicon Valley executives attempt to parade their newfound discovery of the concept of taste, as the New Yorker documented in March.

The event is nothing short of a spectacle, made all the greater by the fact that protests against Amazon not only provided a backdrop to the party, but threatened to eclipse its thin facade of glamor with a series of stunts designed to speak to the cold hard realities of the company’s working conditions, galvanizing collective action.

A group of activists left 300 bottles of urine inside the Met – a reference to Amazon workers who are expected to complete their jobs under such tight deadlines that they have no choice but to pee in bottles. Parked outside the event was a shopping cart filled with empty bottles, marked “Met Gala VIP toilet.” Videos containing protest messages were projected on Bezos’ New York penthouse.

Perhaps in light of the backlash, Bezos chose to forgo the opportunity to walk the red carpet with his wife. Meanwhile, the great and good of the celebrity world – Hollywood royalty, pop stars, Olympic athletes and models – posed for the cameras, seemingly oblivious to the clamor, perhaps choosing to avert their eyes from the protests and look past the tech bro interlopers, either so as not to offend Wintour and Vogue or in service of their own egos.

Money and art: always uncomfortable bedfellows

In many ways, it’s a story as old as time. The world’s great artists have long had to accept money and tolerate the company of wealthy patrons who, under the guise of good-hearted philanthropy, purchased proximity to their work.

People with boring jobs and lots of money are still there. Just look at how private clubs such as London’s Soho House, ostensibly designed as networking spaces for media and arts professionals, are inundated with financial bros and management consultants. Their corporate salaries allow them to escape their professional environment for a while and share a stylish space with people who lead much cooler and more interesting lives.

If you were cynical, you might assume the system is designed that way. After all, most people who work in media and the arts can no more afford membership in these spaces than they can afford to buy property in the metropolises where they live, just as most artists could never dream of receiving an invitation to the Met Gala.

Instead, these spaces — the members’ clubs, the Met Gala — serve a cultural elite whose good times are supported by the money of people they really hope don’t accidentally end up in conversation with at the bar. (I highly doubt Beyoncé has any burning desire to chat with Sergey Brin, but I could be wrong.)

Even worse, though, than rich people at boring jobs are rich people at bad jobs, tolerated and wooed for their money well beyond the point that makes no sense. It took a remarkably long time for the name Sackler, for example, to be erased from the cultural institutions that bore it, despite its well-documented association with the opioid epidemic.

The cultural void of Silicon Valley

If you have everything in the world, but lack cultural cachet, the quickest way to solve the problem is to invest money, in this case, by purchasing access to the most prestigious and exclusive cultural event in the world. And there’s almost nothing tech companies love more than speed.

This value reveals how deeply antithetical Silicon Valley culture is to how real culture is formed. Culture arises slowly from human communities united around shared ideals and experiences. Silicon Valley’s value system, with its emphasis on quick decisions, sharp reversals and immediate results, on profits over people, is diametrically opposed to the way culture develops and art flourishes.

The main obstacle Silicon Valley faces in trying to learn taste is that it simply doesn’t have the patience. You can’t trust AI with the years, or even decades, of deep learning, reading, and thinking that go into developing taste. True taste is formed through internal questions, real conversations and without fear of the friction of human experience. This is large, slow work that takes time – a concept that the tech world views strictly through the lens of economic productivity.

This need for speed has led to repeated missteps, as tech companies confuse trends with taste in their attempts to flaunt their new cultural enlightenment. The Palantir chore coat is a prime example: a wealthy tech company piggybacks on a trend initially inspired by working-class uniforms, in a misguided attempt to show that it understands fashion. This is classic Silicon Valley short-term thinking, and should not be confused with a desire to develop cultural relevance in a meaningful way.

Likewise, the presence of tech companies at the Met Gala, which today is essentially a forum for the casual cult of excess, is nothing more than a shortcut that ultimately reveals Silicon Valley’s superficial understanding of taste and culture.

The art of misdirection

This tastewashing and co-opting of culture ultimately serves as a smokescreen for the things tech companies would prefer us to ignore: layoffs, union busting, reports of employee mistreatment, contentious political relationships, and ethically questionable business deals.

Jeff Bezos would probably rather we discuss his wife’s Met Gala dress, even to criticize it, than talk about the fact that a man widely believed to be Amazon union leader Chris Smalls was arrested while protesting the event.

If tech companies present themselves as cool and relevant – for example by handing out baseball caps with the slogan “think” like Anthropic did – perhaps people will be less likely to focus on the environmental harms of AI? This is a soft power attempt to complement their hard power, but from what we’ve seen so far, they’re miles away from achieving that.

The tech barons want cosplay to be cool and cultured, and the cultural establishment will indulge them as long as they’re willing to reach into those extremely deep pockets while taking up minimal space on the red carpet. Meanwhile, the cultural center of gravity will shift away from the clad feet of Silicon Valley designers without them even realizing it. The really cool people will meet elsewhere, at a secret afterparty that no tech executives were informed about.

The real risk lies not in their invasion of parties, but in the fact that they exercise their hard power when their soft power strategy fails. The rumor that Jeff Bezos would like to buy Condé Nast is, for example, a real source of concern.

Condé Nast controls not only Vogue, but also publications such as Wired and Vanity Fair, which have a reputation for holding figures such as Bezos to account. From Bezos’ evisceration of the Washington Post, we can discern that he has no qualms about dismantling the reputations of respected historic titles.

Tech companies will quickly tire of their attempts to create cultural cachet, in which case they risk deploying their money to dry up the creative world, causing an exodus of the kind of talent they can never tame. Taste will continue to elude them as long as they wield their checkbooks like weapons, failing to understand that no matter how much they spend, they never seem to appropriate the cultural capital they most desire.