Why we created the Save Us Bill Gates computer game
By: Kevin Smith
Date: 22 January 2016
For most people January is a month of huddling up inside in too many jumpers and trying to recover from Christmas and New Years. But for some of the world’s richest and most powerful people it’s time to take the world’s centre stage and proclaim to the global media how they are going to solve the world’s problems, especially poverty.
Bill Gates always win at this game. In fact Bill Gates is in general winning so much that despite all the money he’s giving away, inequality is still skyrocketing and Bill plus his 61 richest mates now own more than the poorest half of the world.
What is going wrong? While many of the world’s richest people proudly give huge chunks of money to the world’s poor, they also use their big political influence to make sure they can avoid paying taxes, that they can continue earning money through unfair trade deals and earn piles of cash from exploiting resources and cheap labour with no or very few rights. For instance Bill Gates’ Microsoft is ‘saving’ more money from tax avoidance than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (where Bill Gates does most of his charitable work) is donating.
So while the mainstream media are happily lapping up Bill Gates’ story about the world’s richest people saving the world with all their charity, he and his friends are part of creating the problem of global inequality in the first place.
That’s why we created the game Save Us Bill Gates computer game. We wanted to dispel the myth that the richest people on the planet are the solution to eradicating poverty when the same people are very much part of creating the problem in the first place. We wanted to challenge the all too common ‘white saviour’ story presented by business leaders, politicians and NGOs that allows the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – often personified by Bill Gates – to present itself as a solution to poverty without facing scrutiny.
Challenging these myths of the philanthropic super-rich is a necessary first step to challenging the structures that are creating global inequality. Bringing an end to global poverty would take changing our economic system and dismantling the enormous political power of the world’s richest people.
So please enjoy the game and share it with your friends.
