Bill Gates

In this course

Gates appears here as an exemplar of how 1960s counterculture ideals were absorbed and instrumentalized by emergent tech capital, a figure whose computational utopianism became the dominant technological ideology of late capitalism. The excerpt uses him to argue that the apparent outsider status of tech pioneers masks their role in consolidating power, suggesting that Gates represents the seamless conversion of radical aspiration into docile servitude within systems of control. This positioning asks the seminar to examine how the language of liberation through computing obscures the concentration of agency and wealth that figures like Gates embody.

Background

William Henry Gates III is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Following Microsoft's initial public offering in 1986 and the subsequent increase in its stock price, Gates became the world's then-youngest billionaire in 1987, at age 31. Forbes magazine ranked him as the world's wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. Gates became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed US$100 billion. According to Forbes, as of February 2026, his net worth stood at US$107.7 billion, making him the 18th-wealthiest individual in the world.

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