13. Servants of Capitalism*

‘Angel investors’ are wealthy individuals who provide funding and advice for small growing companies. It is understandable why advocates of entrepreneurship revere angel investors, but are they ‘angelic’? Investing early means getting a piece of a potentially prosperous pie, and providing resources for projects that align with a specific vision of the future means exercising material power that very few people have. Such benefits make early-stage investing rather self-serving, and a sober renaming could reflect that reality. But if the opportunity to rename presents itself, we can do more than simply knock investors off potentially unearned pedestals. The power of the ‘angel’ metaphor provides a smokescreen for the system that investors both prop up and are propped up by: in reality, angel investors only exist because the status quo capitalist process of creating high-growth companies requires them. If we are to believe there are other better ways of bringing new technologies into the world, we must reckon with, and directly address, our lack of disenchantment with growth-at-all-costs market capitalism. To do this, we can point directly to the role of the angel as depicted in religious texts: a servant of a higher power. Instead of ‘angel investor’, why not servant of capitalism?