Sex scandals, rows over terrorism, fears for its impact on social policy: the backlash against Big Tech has begun. Where will it end?
Evgeny Morozov in The Guardian
Just a decade ago, Silicon Valley pitched itself as a savvy ambassador of a newer, cooler, more humane kind of capitalism. It quickly became the darling of the elite, of the international media, and of that mythical, omniscient tribe: the “digital natives”. While an occasional critic – always easy to dismiss as a neo-Luddite – did voice concerns about their disregard for privacy or their geeky, almost autistic aloofness, public opinion was firmly on the side of technology firms.
Silicon Valley was the best that America had to offer; tech companies frequently occupied – and still do – top spots on lists of the world’s most admired brands. And there was much to admire: a highly dynamic, innovative industry, Silicon Valley has found a way to convert scrolls, likes and clicks into lofty political ideals, helping to export freedom, democracy and human rights to the Middle East and north Africa. Who knew that the only thing thwarting the global democratic revolution was capitalism’s inability to capture and monetise the eyeballs of strangers?
How things have changed. An industry once hailed for fuelling the Arab spring is today repeatedly accused of abetting Islamic State. An industry that prides itself on diversity and tolerance is now regularly in the news for cases of sexual harassment as well as the controversial views of its employees on matters such as gender equality. An industry that built its reputation on offering us free things and services is now regularly assailed for making other things – housing, above all– more expensive.
The Silicon Valley backlash is on. These days, one can hardly open a major newspaper – including such communist rags as the Financial Times and the Economist – without stumbling on passionate calls that demand curbs on the power of what is now frequently called “Big Tech”, from reclassifying digital platforms as utility companies to even nationalising them.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s big secret – that the data produced by users of digital platforms often has economic value exceeding the value of the services rendered – is now also out in the open. Free social networking sounds like a good idea – but do you really want to surrender your privacy so that Mark Zuckerberg can run a foundation to rid the world of the problems that his company helps to perpetuate? Not everyone is so sure any longer. The Teflon industry is Teflon no more: the dirt thrown at it finally sticks – and this fact is lost on nobody.
Much of the brouhaha has caught Silicon Valley by surprise. Its ideas – disruption as a service, radical transparency as a way of being, an entire economy of gigs and shares – still dominate our culture. However, its global intellectual hegemony is built on shaky foundations: it stands on the post-political can-do allure of TED talks much more than in wonky thinktank reports and lobbying memorandums.
This is not to say that technology firms do not dabble in lobbying – here Alphabet is on a par with Goldman Sachs – nor to imply that they don’t steer academic research. In fact, on many tech policy issues it’s now difficult to find unbiased academics who have not received some Big Tech funding. Those who go against the grain find themselves in a rather precarious situation, as was recently shown by the fate of the Open Markets project at New America, an influential thinktank in Washington: its strong anti-monopoly stance appears to have angered New America’s chairman and major donor, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet. As a result, it was spun off from the thinktank.
Nonetheless, Big Tech’s political influence is not at the level of Wall Street or Big Oil. It’s hard to argue that Alphabet wields as much power over global technology policy as the likes of Goldman Sachs do over global financial and economic policy. For now, influential politicians – such as José Manuel Barroso, the former president of the European Commission – prefer to continue their careers at Goldman Sachs, not at Alphabet; it is also the former, not the latter, that fills vacant senior posts in Washington.
This will surely change. It’s obvious that the cheerful and utopian chatterboxes who make up TED talks no longer contribute much to boosting the legitimacy of the tech sector; fortunately, there’s a finite supply of bullshit on this planet. Big digital platforms will thus seek to acquire more policy leverage, following the playbook honed by the tobacco, oil and financial firms.
There are, however, two additional factors worth considering in order to understand where the current backlash against Big Tech might lead. First of all, short of a major privacy disaster, digital platforms will continue to be the world’s most admired and trusted brands – not least because they contrast so favourably with your average telecoms company or your average airline (say what you will of their rapaciousness, but tech firms don’t generally drag their customers off their flights).
And it is technology firms – American companies but also Chinese – that create the false impression that the global economy has recovered and everything is back to normal. Since January, the valuations of just four firms – Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – have grown by an amount greater than the entire GDP of oil-rich Norway. Who would want to see this bubble burst? Nobody; in fact, those in power would rather see it grow some more.
The culture power of Silicon Valley can be gleaned from the simple fact that no sensible politician dares to go to Wall Street for photo ops; everyone goes to Palo Alto to unveil their latest pro-innovation policy. Emmanuel Macron wants to turn France into a startup, not a hedge fund. There’s no other narrative in town that makes centrist, neoliberal policies look palatable and inevitable at the same time; politicians, however angry they might sound about Silicon Valley’s monopoly power, do not really have an alternative project. It’s not just Macron: from Italy’s Matteo Renzi to Canada’s Justin Trudeau, all mainstream politicians who have claimed to offer a clever break with the past also offer an implicit pact with Big Tech – or, at least, its ideas – in the future.
Second, Silicon Valley, being the home of venture capital, is good at spotting global trends early on. Its cleverest minds had sensed the backlash brewing before the rest of us. They also made the right call in deciding that wonky memos and thinktank reports won’t quell our discontent, and that many other problems – from growing inequality to the general unease about globalisation – will eventually be blamed on an industry that did little to cause them.
Silicon Valley’s brightest minds realised they needed bold proposals – a guaranteed basic income, a tax on robots, experiments with fully privatised cities to be run by technology companies outside of government jurisdiction – that will sow doubt in the minds of those who might have otherwise opted for conventional anti-monopoly legislation. If technology firms can play a constructive role in funding our basic income, if Alphabet or Amazon can run Detroit or New York with the same efficiency that they run their platforms, if Microsoft can infer signs of cancer from our search queries: should we really be putting obstacles in their way?
In the boldness and vagueness of its plans to save capitalism, Silicon Valley might out-TED the TED talks. There are many reasons why such attempts won’t succeed in their grand mission even if they would make these firms a lot of money in the short term and help delay public anger by another decade. The main reason is simple: how could one possibly expect a bunch of rent-extracting enterprises with business models that are reminiscent of feudalism to resuscitate global capitalism and to establish a new New Deal that would constrain the greed of capitalists, many of whom also happen to be the investors behind these firms?
Data might seem infinite but there’s no reason to believe that the enormous profits made from it would simply smooth over the many contradictions of the current economic system. A self-proclaimed caretaker of global capitalism, Silicon Valley is much more likely to end up as its undertaker.
Showing posts with label Silicon Valley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silicon Valley. Show all posts
Sunday, 3 September 2017
Sunday, 16 October 2016
Who will save us from Silicon Valley?
Evgeny Morozov in The Guardian
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have given $3bn to help cure all disease. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
A world where billionaires were blunt and forthright, where they preferred pillaging the world to saving it, was far less confusing. The robber barons of the industrial era – from Carnegie to Ford to Rockefeller – did eventually commit some of their riches to charity but there was no mistaking one for the other. Oil and steel brought in the cash; education and arts helped to spend it.
Of course, the eponymous foundations were neither neutral nor apolitical. They pursued projects that were rarely at odds with US foreign policy and often shared many of its key ideological biases and presuppositions. From modernisation theory to democracy promotion, the civilising imperative behind them was not so hard to discern. Some of these foundations have eventually come to regret many of their dubious advocacy campaigns; the Rockefeller Foundation’s imprudent support for population control in India is just one example.
Today, when five of the world’s most valuable companies are technology firms, it’s very hard to see where their businesses end and their charity efforts begin. As digital platforms, they power diverse industries and sectors from education to health to transport and thus have an option that was not available to the oil and steel magnates of yesteryear: they can simply continue selling their core product – mostly hope, albeit wrapped up in infinite layers of data, screens and sensors – without having to divert their funds into any nonproductive activities.
The Chan Zuckerberg initiative, a limited liability company (a somewhat unusual format for a charity), was set up by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, in December 2015, ostensibly to share their wealth with the rest of us. It has recently been in the news thanks to its founders’ ambitious commitment – to the tune of $3bn – to cure all disease.
Zuckerberg can surely afford this, given how little tax his company is paying: in the UK, its tax filings for 2015 show revenues of £210.7m, on which the company paid just £4.17m of taxes – an effective rate of 2% (itself a 1,000-fold increase on what it paid in 2014). Facebook, however, also managed to generate a tax credit of £11m, which it can use to reduce its future tax burden. The disease of tax avoidance is unlikely to be cured by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative.
Henry Ford in his first car, built in 1896. Photograph: Library of Congress/Getty Images
To speak of “philanthrocapitalism” here – as many have done, either to praise or bury it – seems misguided, if only because such projects bear so little resemblance to philanthropy proper. One doesn’t have to admire Ford or Rockefeller to notice that their philanthropic endeavours, whatever their real political goals, were not supposed to make extra cash. But is it really so with our new tech barons?
While Zuckerberg’s commitments in the health sector are still too recent and ambiguous to judge, he has a more extensive history in education. Following Zuckerberg’s personal commitment of $100m dollars to schools in New Jersey – an investment that is yet to bring the desired results – the Chan Zuckerberg initiative has invested in companies that supposedly help expand educational opportunities in the developing world.
Thus, it has poured money into Andela, a Lagos-based startup that trains coders, joining the likes of Google (via GV, its venture fund) and Omidyar Network, a similar philanthropic investment firm belonging to another tech billionaire. A few weeks later, one of Andela’s co-founders left to found a payments startup: apparently, there are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in saving the world.
That one can never fully understand what drives these investments, a profit motive or a genuine desire to help out, is a feature, not a bug. If the logic driving the Fords and the Carnegies was to atone for the sins of rapacious capitalism, the logic of the Zuckerbergs and the Omidyars is to convince us that rapacious capitalism, fully unleashed on society, will do lots of good.
The Chan Zuckerberg initiative also invested in BYJU, an Indian company that has developed an app that teaches students science and maths. A noble endeavour, but what attracted Zuckerberg to the firm was, by his own admission, its heavy reliance on personalised learning, which, of course, is only possible when large troves of user data are recorded and analysed. Does that remind you of any giant tech company?
This celebration of personalisation is also present in another educational project supported by Zuckerberg – a learning software made by a company called Summit Basecamp. The company has the luxury of having 20 Facebook staffers, from engineers to product managers, helping it with growth and expansion – the result of Zuckerberg touring one of its schools in 2013. And expand it did: according to the Washington Post, its software is now used by 20,000 students in more than 100 schools.
The Chan Zuckerberg initiative has poured money into Andela, a Lagos-based startup that trains coders. Photograph: Mohini Ufeli/Andela
Parents of these students can hope that Summit Basecamp will keep its word and that no personal data will ever leave the company. Such promises won’t be any more reassuring than those of the founders of WhatsApp, who, on being acquired by Facebook, promised to defend their users’ personal data, only to announce, a few months ago, that it will be shared with Facebook.
Zuckerberg also joined the rest of the Silicon Valley elite, from Bill Gates to Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, in investing in AltSchool, a startup founded by a former Google executive, which takes personalised learning to a whole new level. In a good Taylorist fashion, its classrooms feature cameras and microphones so that any glitches inherent in the learning process can be analysed and engineered away. AltSchool now wants to expand by selling licences to its software to other schools.
What passes for philanthropy these days is often just a sophisticated effort to make money on engineering the kinds of rational, entrepreneurial and quantitative souls that would delight at other types of personalisation. Such learning is, of course, well suited to the needs of consulting firms and technology giants. A recent profile of AltSchool in the New Yorker mentioned that its students read the Iliad armed with a spreadsheet where they mark how many times the theme of “rage” occurs in the text. Such schools can produce excellent auditors; poets, however, might need an alternative, to, well, the AltSchool.
The very same technology elites are also backing the charter school movement – a longrunning effort to bring more competition to the educational sector by supporting privately run but publicly funded educational initiatives. From Gates to Zuckerberg, technology billionaires are vocal defenders of this movement. It won’t be surprising if they deploy their big data weapons to advance the argument that the traditional educational system must be completely overhauled.
We should be careful not to fall victim to a perverse form of Stockholm syndrome, coming to sympathise with the corporate kidnappers of our democracy. On the one hand, given that the new tech billionaires pay very little tax, it’s not surprising that the public sector would fail to innovate as quickly. On the other, by constantly giving the private sector a head start through technologies that they own and develop, the new tech elites all but ensure that the public would rather choose slick but privatised technological solutions over quaint, but public, political ones.
That we can no longer differentiate between philanthropy and speculation is an occasion to worry, not celebrate. With Silicon Valley elites so keen on saving the world, shouldn’t we also ask who will eventually save us from Silicon Valley?
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have given $3bn to help cure all disease. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
A world where billionaires were blunt and forthright, where they preferred pillaging the world to saving it, was far less confusing. The robber barons of the industrial era – from Carnegie to Ford to Rockefeller – did eventually commit some of their riches to charity but there was no mistaking one for the other. Oil and steel brought in the cash; education and arts helped to spend it.
Of course, the eponymous foundations were neither neutral nor apolitical. They pursued projects that were rarely at odds with US foreign policy and often shared many of its key ideological biases and presuppositions. From modernisation theory to democracy promotion, the civilising imperative behind them was not so hard to discern. Some of these foundations have eventually come to regret many of their dubious advocacy campaigns; the Rockefeller Foundation’s imprudent support for population control in India is just one example.
Today, when five of the world’s most valuable companies are technology firms, it’s very hard to see where their businesses end and their charity efforts begin. As digital platforms, they power diverse industries and sectors from education to health to transport and thus have an option that was not available to the oil and steel magnates of yesteryear: they can simply continue selling their core product – mostly hope, albeit wrapped up in infinite layers of data, screens and sensors – without having to divert their funds into any nonproductive activities.
The Chan Zuckerberg initiative, a limited liability company (a somewhat unusual format for a charity), was set up by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, in December 2015, ostensibly to share their wealth with the rest of us. It has recently been in the news thanks to its founders’ ambitious commitment – to the tune of $3bn – to cure all disease.
Zuckerberg can surely afford this, given how little tax his company is paying: in the UK, its tax filings for 2015 show revenues of £210.7m, on which the company paid just £4.17m of taxes – an effective rate of 2% (itself a 1,000-fold increase on what it paid in 2014). Facebook, however, also managed to generate a tax credit of £11m, which it can use to reduce its future tax burden. The disease of tax avoidance is unlikely to be cured by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative.
Henry Ford in his first car, built in 1896. Photograph: Library of Congress/Getty Images
To speak of “philanthrocapitalism” here – as many have done, either to praise or bury it – seems misguided, if only because such projects bear so little resemblance to philanthropy proper. One doesn’t have to admire Ford or Rockefeller to notice that their philanthropic endeavours, whatever their real political goals, were not supposed to make extra cash. But is it really so with our new tech barons?
While Zuckerberg’s commitments in the health sector are still too recent and ambiguous to judge, he has a more extensive history in education. Following Zuckerberg’s personal commitment of $100m dollars to schools in New Jersey – an investment that is yet to bring the desired results – the Chan Zuckerberg initiative has invested in companies that supposedly help expand educational opportunities in the developing world.
Thus, it has poured money into Andela, a Lagos-based startup that trains coders, joining the likes of Google (via GV, its venture fund) and Omidyar Network, a similar philanthropic investment firm belonging to another tech billionaire. A few weeks later, one of Andela’s co-founders left to found a payments startup: apparently, there are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in saving the world.
That one can never fully understand what drives these investments, a profit motive or a genuine desire to help out, is a feature, not a bug. If the logic driving the Fords and the Carnegies was to atone for the sins of rapacious capitalism, the logic of the Zuckerbergs and the Omidyars is to convince us that rapacious capitalism, fully unleashed on society, will do lots of good.
The Chan Zuckerberg initiative also invested in BYJU, an Indian company that has developed an app that teaches students science and maths. A noble endeavour, but what attracted Zuckerberg to the firm was, by his own admission, its heavy reliance on personalised learning, which, of course, is only possible when large troves of user data are recorded and analysed. Does that remind you of any giant tech company?
This celebration of personalisation is also present in another educational project supported by Zuckerberg – a learning software made by a company called Summit Basecamp. The company has the luxury of having 20 Facebook staffers, from engineers to product managers, helping it with growth and expansion – the result of Zuckerberg touring one of its schools in 2013. And expand it did: according to the Washington Post, its software is now used by 20,000 students in more than 100 schools.
The Chan Zuckerberg initiative has poured money into Andela, a Lagos-based startup that trains coders. Photograph: Mohini Ufeli/Andela
Parents of these students can hope that Summit Basecamp will keep its word and that no personal data will ever leave the company. Such promises won’t be any more reassuring than those of the founders of WhatsApp, who, on being acquired by Facebook, promised to defend their users’ personal data, only to announce, a few months ago, that it will be shared with Facebook.
Zuckerberg also joined the rest of the Silicon Valley elite, from Bill Gates to Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, in investing in AltSchool, a startup founded by a former Google executive, which takes personalised learning to a whole new level. In a good Taylorist fashion, its classrooms feature cameras and microphones so that any glitches inherent in the learning process can be analysed and engineered away. AltSchool now wants to expand by selling licences to its software to other schools.
What passes for philanthropy these days is often just a sophisticated effort to make money on engineering the kinds of rational, entrepreneurial and quantitative souls that would delight at other types of personalisation. Such learning is, of course, well suited to the needs of consulting firms and technology giants. A recent profile of AltSchool in the New Yorker mentioned that its students read the Iliad armed with a spreadsheet where they mark how many times the theme of “rage” occurs in the text. Such schools can produce excellent auditors; poets, however, might need an alternative, to, well, the AltSchool.
The very same technology elites are also backing the charter school movement – a longrunning effort to bring more competition to the educational sector by supporting privately run but publicly funded educational initiatives. From Gates to Zuckerberg, technology billionaires are vocal defenders of this movement. It won’t be surprising if they deploy their big data weapons to advance the argument that the traditional educational system must be completely overhauled.
We should be careful not to fall victim to a perverse form of Stockholm syndrome, coming to sympathise with the corporate kidnappers of our democracy. On the one hand, given that the new tech billionaires pay very little tax, it’s not surprising that the public sector would fail to innovate as quickly. On the other, by constantly giving the private sector a head start through technologies that they own and develop, the new tech elites all but ensure that the public would rather choose slick but privatised technological solutions over quaint, but public, political ones.
That we can no longer differentiate between philanthropy and speculation is an occasion to worry, not celebrate. With Silicon Valley elites so keen on saving the world, shouldn’t we also ask who will eventually save us from Silicon Valley?
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