Silicon Valley’s Cultural Cosplay at the Met Gala Is a Dangerous Smokescreen

After many years of Silicon Valley nudging its way into Vogue’s Met Gala, this week’s edition marked the completion of tech’s semihostile takeover of the fashion magazine’s annual party to raise 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 had reportedly paid $10 million for the honor. Also in attendance were executives from Meta, Snapchat, OpenAI and others, which has ignited outrage — especially among those who consider the Met Gala not a vulgar display of excess, but the most exclusive and stylish event on fashion’s calendar.

What 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 chief content officer at Vogue publisher Condé Nast, allow this?

There’s a vast chasm between the perceived coolness of the Met Gala and the tech bros who buy tickets for a reported $100,000 a pop. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the Gala establishment is embracing tech companies, in spite of behavior that many find morally objectionable (data centers gobbling up land and natural resources, social media companies turning a blind eye to harms to children, and so on). And neither should we be surprised that the Met Gala is the stage upon which Silicon Valley executives are attempting to parade their newfound discovery of the concept of taste, as documented by The New Yorker in March.

The event is nothing if not a spectacle, made even more so by the protests against Amazon that didn’t just form a backdrop to the party, but threatened to eclipse its thin facade of glamour with a series of stunts designed to speak to the cold, hard realities of the company’s working conditions, galvanizing collective action.

One activist group left 300 bottles of urine inside the Met — a reference to the Amazon workers who reportedly have to complete their duties under such extreme time pressure that they have no choice but to pee in bottles. Outside the event was parked a shopping trolley full of empty bottles, marked “Met Gala VIP toilet.” Videos containing protest messages were projected onto 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 the good of the celebrity world — Hollywood royalty, pop stars, Olympians and models — posed for the cameras, seemingly oblivious to the clamor, perhaps choosing to look away from the protests and look past the tech bro interlopers, either so as not to offend Wintour and Vogue, or in service to their own egos.

Money and art: Forever uncomfortable bedfellows

In many ways, this is a tale as old as time. Great artists of the world have long had to accept the 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 at it. Just look at how private members’ clubs such as London’s Soho House, designed ostensibly as spaces for media and arts professionals to network, are flooded with finance bros and management consultants. Their corporate salaries allow them to escape their corporate environments for a while and share a stylish space with people who lead much cooler, more interesting lives.

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

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

Worse, though, than the wealthy people with boring jobs are the wealthy people with evil jobs, tolerated and courted for their money long past the point that makes any sense. It took a remarkably long time for the Sackler name, for example, to be struck from the cultural institutions that bore it, in spite of its well-documented association with the opioid epidemic.

Silicon Valley’s cultural vacuum

If you have everything in the world, but lack 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 that tech companies love more than speed.

This value reveals the key way in which the culture of Silicon Valley is deeply antithetical to how actual culture forms. Culture is born slowly out of communities of humans coalescing around shared ideals and experiences. Silicon Valley’s value system, with its emphasis on snap decisions, sharp U-turns and immediate outcomes, on profits over people, is diametrically opposed to the ways in which culture develops and art flourishes.

The main obstacle Silicon Valley faces in its bid to learn taste is that it simply doesn’t have the patience. You cannot outsource to AI the years, even decades, of deep learning, reading and thinking it takes to develop taste. True taste is formed through internal interrogation, real-life conversations and not shying away from the friction of the human experience. It’s expansive, slow-burn work that takes time — a concept the tech world views strictly through the lens of economic productivity.

This need for speed has brought repeated missteps as tech companies mistake trends for taste in their bids to display their newfound cultural enlightenment. The Palantir chore coat is a prime example of this: a wealthy tech company piggybacking off a trend, which was initially inspired by working-class uniforms, in a misguided attempt to show that it understands fashion. It’s classic Silicon Valley short-term thinking, and shouldn’t be confused for a willingness to build cultural relevance in a meaningful way. 

Similarly, the presence of the tech companies at the Met Gala, which these days is mostly a forum for the unselfconscious worship of excess, is nothing but a shortcut that ultimately reveals Silicon Valley’s shallow understanding of taste and culture.

The art of misdirection

This tastewashing and coopting of culture ultimately serves as a smokescreen for the things tech companies would rather we ignore: the layoffs, the union-busting, the reports of employee mistreatment, the controversial political dealings and the ethically dubious business deals.

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

If tech companies pose as cool and relevant — for example, handing out baseball caps with the slogan “thinking” as Anthropic has done — maybe people will be less likely to focus on the environmental damage of AI? It’s a bid for soft power to complement their hard power, but from what we’ve seen so far, they are miles away from grasping it.

The tech barons want to cosplay being cool and cultured, and the cultural establishment will humor them for as long as they’re willing to put their hands in those exceedingly deep pockets while occupying minimal red-carpet space. Meanwhile, the cultural center of gravity will shift from under Silicon Valley’s designer-clad feet without them even realizing it. The genuinely cool people will reconvene elsewhere, at a secret afterparty no tech executives were even told about.

Where the real risk lies is not in their invasion of parties, but in them exercising their hard power when their play for soft power fails. The rumor, for example, that Jeff Bezos wants to buy Condé Nast, is a genuine cause for concern. 

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

Tech bros will tire quickly of their attempts to build cultural cachet, at which point there’s a risk they’ll deploy their money to suck the creative world dry, causing an exodus of the kind of talent they’ll never be able to tame. Taste will continue to elude them as long as they wield their checkbooks like weapons, not understanding that, no matter how much they spend, they never seem to gain ownership of the cultural capital they most desire.