Has Big Tech got too big for its boots? | Dan Gillmor
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Silicon Valley is an economic powerhouse – we all benefit from its innovation. But its dark side is an ugly hubris it may regret
In the middle of the government shutdown crisis, Chamath Palihapitiya, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, dismissed the impact:
If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter.
The falsehood in that much-replayed podcast was obvious: all kinds of bad things – including what NPR called a “squeeze on science and health” – were happening. The economic toll of the 16-day shutdown was estimated at $ 24bn, meanwhile; and had Congress not lifted the debt ceiling, a genuine economic meltdown might well have occurred.
Palihapitiya’s silly assertion did have a useful impact. It confirmed to many outsiders a fundamental disconnect the technology industry has with the rest of the world. Silicon Valley, enjoying its latest boom, is beset with hubris. And that is leading to public disdain, which won’t be as easy to solve as putting more transistors in a microprocessor or finding clever new ways to share photos.
I’m a huge fan of what Silicon Valley does right. The qualities that have made it so vital and prosperous include a risk-taking culture overloaded with capital and smart, single-minded people, where so many try that even the relatively rare successes have outsized impact, creating outsized wealth and growth. I admire what they do in so many ways, and their innovation has created enormous value – not just financial – for our world.
But the the darker side to those qualities is more real than they like to admit. And it’s clearest in a visible disrespect, from some of the tech people, for those who aren’t part of the scene – and what looks like indifference to others’ lives from the majority.
Never have the wealth and income gaps been greater, but never have the problems of the people at the bottom been less visible in my two decades here. This is partly due to the shriveling of the local media organizations that once might have put the problems more loudly on the public agenda. Whatever the cause, the gaps are growing and the tech industry, for one, hasn’t demonstrated much concern.
The Bay Area’s latest economic boom is amazing to see. It’s especially notable in San Francisco, where many companies are locating or establishing major beachheads. Fleets of sleek private buses roam the streets to pick up workers whose jobs are still down the peninsula in the “old” Silicon Valley, and the city’s soaring rent prices are causing all kinds of problems for longtime residents, many of whom are leaving.
This is unsustainable, just as the 1990s boom was bound to bust. We’re hearing the standard refrain of “this time it’s different” from folks who either ignore the lessons of history or never studied it in the first place. But that’s a longstanding characteristic of a place that lives in a perpetual boom-bust cycle.
Some of the worst elements of tech hubris have emerged in the attitudes of the industry powerhouses. Companies like Google and Facebook have built giant businesses based on the concept that users of the products are, in fact, the products. What users do on their services, and all the data they generate, much of it highly personal, is owned by the companies and will be put up for rent or sale to others.
Facebook, never content to push the boundaries, just gave teenagers a way to post publicly, not just within constrained groups of their choosing. The company’s public justification: teens deserve public platforms, too. Yeah, right. The move had nothing to do with Facebook’s overriding motives these days: to get its users to create more data, then to monetize all that information.
Collecting all that information – much of which, we have to acknowledge, we give them willingly – has made the tech powers, at best, cooperators in the most invasive surveillance system ever devised as they hand over our data to government snoops. Some, like Microsoft, seem to be active collaborators. And the telecom companies – increasingly, core players in the tech-communications sphere – are outright partners with governmental abusers of our privacy and security.
Dave Eggers’ new novel, The Circle, is getting a lot of attention in this context, because he’s describing a dystopian world where the companies (and governments) take increasing control over the lives of their workers and society as a whole. I don’t share his ultimate worry, because I believe the public is waking up to what corporations and governments are taking away from us. But he’s onto something important, and the tech crowd’s tone-deafness to its own hubris fuels ever more skepticism and outright rebuke.
Hubris takes many forms, including physical. Apple just won permission from the city of Cupertino, California, to build its massive new corporate headquarters – a structure that some have likened to a giant spaceship but which bears a startling resemblance to the UK’s electronic surveillance mother ship, the GCHQ. Cupertino’s assent to the mega-project was a foregone conclusion, despite the serious local disruption the project is likely to cause.
More than most places, Silicon Valley subscribes to Henry Ford’s famous belief that “history is more or less bunk”. Nevertheless, here’s some recent history. In the 1990s, several prominent tech companies built palatial new headquarters. That was, it turned out, the high point of their corporate lives, and they’ve pretty much disappeared.
The self-satisfied tech industry – like so many high-flying industries of the past – is practically begging for a comeuppance these days. Markets, fueled in part by public attitudes, do tend to solve the hubris problem. It’s too bad that self-reflection isn’t more prominent in the industry’s ethos.
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