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Neo Symbolic Capitalism
“There’s a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency: we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors.”
When I read that, I said to myself, you gotta be kidding me. I mean, palace intrigue has been part of our world. From ancient Egyptians to Romans to the English monarchy, it is way older than the social media and modern internet media machine. Anyway, it got me thinking about Collison’s tweet. I have come to a conclusion. Sometimes a tweet is not just a tweet. Sometimes it is a subliminal confession of symbolic capitalism.
“Symbolic capital is nothing but economic or cultural capital as soon as they are known and recognized, when they are known according to the perception categories they impose, the symbolic strength relations tend to reproduce and reinforce the strength relations which constitute the structure of the social space.”
— French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, 1987
If you apply Bourdieu’s proposed idea to the 21st century, you are left with two kinds of capital. The financial capital is obvious. The second kind, the one that really matters, is symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is reputation, prestige, the accumulated weight of being someone worth listening to. That is even more important in our hyper-connected attention-first society. Symbolic capital is what converts better, faster. Whether it is fundraising, or attracting talent, or presenting yourself as the soothsayer sage of the future bedazzled with implied wisdom.
And there is a lot of symbolic capitalism to be earned these days, thanks to our social media infrastructure. And how easy it is to earn, given how much of our modern media infrastructure has changed, thanks to the hyperinflation of the “sources go direct” concept first proposed by tech inventor Dave Winer.
Financial capital has always been there, from monarchs to robber barons to billionaires, they are a constant. However, the ones who stand above and accumulate more and more of that are the ones that have symbolic capital. JP Morgan was a rich guy, but he made sure that most of the world knew he was the guy who saved the US Government. There is a reason why rich guys buy newspapers and media companies. There is a reason why Rupert Murdoch is richer than the dollars in his bank.
A hundred years later, we have Elon Musk, who was a rich guy, but became the richest guy after everyone believed he was Tony Stark, and he saw the future better than others. He didn’t need the media. He did it his way. And then bought his own machine to make sure he had infinite symbolic capital. Even more financial capital is just a cherry on top of an ever increasing cake.
Musk is the master. He executed a perfect plan for creating a perpetual machine for symbolic capital.
And the whole Valley took notes.
Everyone worth their opinion is now on social media, pontificating and offering wisdom. That is not an accident. Since Patrick’s tweet inspired this piece, let’s take the Collison brothers, arguably the greatest entrepreneurs out of Ireland, as a case study. Their creation Stripe is worth almost $159 billion. Is that enough?
Not really!
Given every startup and every company is in competition with each other now, you need to keep your company as the center of attention. Like everyone else, the Collisons need to keep the mythology of Stripe going. They need to keep earning that all important symbolic capital. If not, they will be lost in the fumes of the daily minutiae of OpenAI and Anthropic as “news.” Of course, the brothers are way too thoughtful to play the leaks-are-the-news game that is so openly played now.
I have seen the Stripe mythology come together literally and figuratively. The obsessive craft, the decade-long patient building of a financial behemoth. The establishing of Stripe Press to celebrate entrepreneurial pursuits. Aligning with the right kind of intelligentsia to earn the right kind of hype. And more lately, podcasts. This is symbolic capital earned and compounded over a decade. That capital is why hundreds of thousands of people follow Patrick. It is why this tweet got the response it did.
As I said, sometimes a tweet is not a tweet. Sometimes it is subliminal thinking about your own approach to doing things and how the world works.
How does the world work?
Today’s world of media and information is not about facts, or fiction. It is a blend of all that, whipped and thrown into the ether of the network at neck-snapping velocity, to overwhelm the moment, till the next moment arrives. The tweet describes the modern attention machine, the same pervasive dynamic that I have described in my previous essays about velocity as the new authority and how the modern internet media machine works. I am pretty sure everyone who matters around these parts is all too familiar with the modern media dynamic. And if they are not, their ultra-well paid media managers make sure they are.
The podcast ecosystem didn’t happen by accident either. Podcasts exist to provide clips and quips that get shared on social to get attention. Better the clip, the more the likelihood of attention. And the faster it is shared, the more you accumulate symbolic capital. It is like the coins you collected when pretending to be Luigi in Nintendo’s Super Mario. The network does not reward what is true or what is deep. It rewards what moves. Speed is the signal.
Since we in Silicon Valley architected this new dynamic, away from the pearl-clutching East Coast temples of orthodoxy, we know that platforms decide what spreads. This is the game, played at Formula One speeds.
There is a reason why “palace intrigue as role model for media” works, especially in our present. Every stumble, every pivot, every hire and firing gets compressed into a shareable unit of meaning and fired into the feed. The PR machine does not fight this. It feeds it. Carefully timed leaks. Coordinated podcast appearances. Engineered moments of apparent candor. The palace intrigue that reaches reporters is not the unfiltered reality. It is the selected version, packaged to keep the company au courant, in the story, in the feed. As I have said before, the meme is the metastory. It is the headline. And that is the point.
Which is why Twitter, now X, feels unbeatable despite everything. It is not because the product is superior. It is because the people with the most power and the most to gain have turned it into a gaming platform for symbolic capital. They are not users. They are players. And the game is very, very good to them.
We are all playing the same game. Patrick is smart enough to see and tweet about it.
March 13, 2025. San Francisco
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