“The worst about the Irish is that they become corruptible as soon as they stop being peasants and turn bourgeois.” — Frederick Engels
More than the common man will ever realise, writing about contemporaneous matters in Ireland is a gnarly business, not least when dealing with the personal minefield of the Web Summit story.
History is a leading genre in Ireland over political commentary for a reason, where a stray sentence or a piece of legally dubious prose can be enough to land an author in a world of judicial hurt.
Running this gauntlet and capturing, not so much the story of one man and his company, but the very zeitgeist of post-Crash Irish capitalism, Catherine Sanz's (of the Business Post) 313-page study ‘Drama Drives Interest: The Web Summit Story’ made it onto bookshelves shortly before Christmas.
Born from downturn-era TCD student politics, before catching lightening in a bottle as Ireland Inc. sought to rebuild itself from the ashes of the banking crash, “The Web Summit Story” gathers accounts within the Paddy Cosgrave axis pertaining to what went right and wrong in the Silicon Valley fellowship that sought to remake Ireland.
From its germination in the Georgian Houses around the Irish tech scene as a spirited spinoff of the digital democracy initiatives of the early 2010s, the story chronicles the transformation of the Summit into becoming the leading interface between Dublin and Big Tech
Very much a middle-class product of the comprador class he now rails against, Cosgrave built his initial social network during his TCD years, ironically earning a reputation for stances against PC culture through his involvement with the irreverent Piranha magazine.
Set at a time when the two-tier contrast between foreign multinationals and a charred-out national economy was cemented, an era wherein our brand of capitalism transitioned from mohair-wearing kingpins to Silicon Valley apparatchiks, the Web Summit perfectly embodied this changing of the guard.
Indeed, I first encountered Cosgrave at a speaking engagement at Trinity, when the tech founder decried the preferential treatment of U.S. firms by Irish developmental authorities, decrying the imbalanced economy which an FDI-reliant economic approach was pre-disposed to engender.
In many respects, the book documents Cosgrave’s failed ideological development from his irreverent libertarian days at Trinity to his gradual embrace of a self-obsessed brand of millennial leftism, culminating in his resignation from the Web Summit for his imprudent tweets during the October 7th attacks.
Until his endorsement of Mary Lou circa 2020, Cosgrave was something of an ideologically opaque figure, earning fire for a backtracked decision to invite Marine Le Pen to the conference in 2018.
Absent the cultural hegemony of the 2010s, one wonders whether his political odyssey would have differed. Would a more ideologically coherent Cosgrave, or one that was formally associated with the political right, have dropped the ball so greatly?
The book delves into (so far as it can be legally documented) the breakdown of Cosgrave’s working relationship with Summit co-founders Daire Hickey and David Kelly, as well as the abject failure of the man himself to manage a pivot to Qatar following the controversial relocation to Lisbon.
This spiral culminates with threats from Cosgrave to expose “Kompromat” on one of his rivals, with the book hammering home the fundamental immaturity and borderline narcissism of the tech bro in managing his corporate house.
At a time when tech bros are posing certain challenges to the populist and nationalist right, the Cosgrave biography hits home the lack of moral formation many in that scene have undergone relative to the fortunes and influences they possess.
Mock George Soros all you want, but the Hungarian financier was able to frame the post-Soviet era in his image through his subterranean civil society networks and will continue to do so long after his heart stops beating.
Can the same be said of Elon Musk's Edglelord conservatism or Cosgrave's puerile online leftism that lasted a total of ten hours when confronted with a coherent lobby following his commentary on October 7th?
Would Andrew Carnegie or Ford have wasted their days on Twitter if alive today instead of forming the foundations that have directed the Western World below the surface?
Indeed, the replacement of Cosgrave by the American Katherine Maher, who was parachuted in to run the conferencing company, shows the limited extent to which Irish tech bros can ever truly manage projects at scale.
Web Summit grew too feisty and lucrative for Ireland’s white-collar class, eventually ending up on the radar of the American ruling elite, which was more than able to cast Cosgrave aside in the space of a few hours when required.
At the time of commencing this review, I happened upon a
Fintan O'Toole mini-documentary on the life and times of the late media mogul and philanthropist Joe O'Reilly — it is illuminating to contrasts his life with Cosgrave’s foray.
A creature of the semi-state era and its gradual liberalisation, O'Reilly, for all his faults, had all the benefits of earning his money slowly through meticulous graft and wooing of domestic political elites via his hold over the Irish media ecosystem.
Cosgrave, by comparison, comes across as a more transient pump-and-dump figure, unable to play politics at home or abroad, and one terminally prone to be a slave of his Twitter narcissism.
Akin to Chuck Feeney and Michael Smurfit, O’Reilly sought a fundamental change in Ireland through philanthropic work. Cosgrave’s social impact has been so limited to his funding of the muckraking ‘On The Ditch’.
One gets the strong impression that the full story of Catherine Sanz's 313-page study about the rise and fall of former Silicon Valley golden boy, Paddy Cosgrave, will forever remain legally embargoed courtesy of Irish defamation law — we are all the poorer for it.
However, one thing is for certain: Ireland in the 21st century is going to need a better class of upstart activist entrepreneurs to manage our relationship with Silicon Valley and one that spends a lot less time checking their notifications.
