“If you can access a service for free, or for a remarkably low price, you yourself might be the product.” That line, in an article called “Should the Tech Giants Reprogram Capitalism?” by Nicholas Barrett of The Economist, sent a chill down my spine.
Our physical bodies are not products, of course (thankfully). Our online activities are the product. Tech companies sell information about us to advertisers. By enabling those advertisers to pitch their products to us on sites that they know we frequent, tech companies sell our attention spans.
Barrett’s article focuses on how the digital revolution, which was once hailed by tech-utopians as a source of expanded democratic discourse, creative expression, and economic opportunity has not panned out as expected for average people. Barrett discusses some of Douglas Rushkoff’s ideas, including those presented in Rushkoff’s 2016 book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. Rushkoff is a professor at one of the City University of New York branch campuses, and his thinking focuses on the relationship between the digital revolution and capitalism.
I’m fairly certain that Rushkoff is a somewhat doctrinaire leftist who makes me look like a squirrelly moderate reformer by comparison. I reject as impractical the idea that there is some realistic alternative to “extractive capitalism.” I think there is no good alternative to a market economy, which is, to paraphrase Churchill, the worst economic system except for all those others that have been tried. However, I am open to more regulation, taxation, and antitrust legislation against tech companies in order to protect the public interest.
Barrett’s article makes no such specific proposals; it literally provides more questions than answers regarding the downsides of the digital revolution. The key question posed by Barrett is “could it be possible to redirect the efforts of the largest tech companies in a way that would make them responsible to the needs of the wider economy?” He observes that “without defining an endgame that goes beyond perpetual growth for the sake of growth, the tech giants could be the next global elite to find themselves standing in the crosshairs of widespread public resentment. And yet, I’m still not exactly sure what an economically and socially sustainable Silicon Valley would look like or how it would work.”
Is it realistic to expect tech companies to change? After all, there is the economic reality that corporations are focused on pleasing shareholders, increasing market share, and at the very least preserving their institutional powers and prerogatives. Corporations are not people, no matter what the Supreme Court might say, but they are made up of human beings shaped by evolution to have self-preservation as their most fundamental instinct. I don’t think corporations are evil, in part because their self-interested actions can do good by providing jobs to workers and providing good products and services to consumers, but the nature of capitalism is that companies will rarely do things that are completely altruistic.
That means that tech companies may only alter their behavior based upon outside pressures from various concerned parties: government regulators, crusading politicians, boycotting consumers, rebellious employees, investigative journalists, or economic competitors.
After the populist backlash expressed in elections across the Western world in recent years, tech companies may be beginning to understand that failure to mitigate their disruption in the structure of our economy could create further social and political instability. Such instability could be bad for the American business community and, as Barrett noted, could make Silicon Valley a political target.
One hopes that such developments will cause Big Tech leaders to think more about the consequences of their business models upon people who aren’t shareholders. The old tech-utopian gospel of “our new technology will liberate everybody and make everything better” needs to be questioned and doubted. A viewpoint involving less blind faith and more harsh realism would understand that every disruptive technology that leads to a Silicon Valley success story also creates some losers who are displaced by the disruptive change.
Silicon Valley needs to think more about those they might hurt. They need to think about hiring more people, if their initiatives would otherwise cause a net loss in the number of employed Americans. They also need to improve their public image by reassuring people that they will be good stewards of individuals’ private information.
I’m not expecting corporations to act like saints or do things that will dramatically reduce their profits – once again, they can’t be trusted to do so, nor can they be expected to do so, given the self-interested incentives of a market economy. We definitely can’t expect soul-searching from struggling start-ups, of course, they can only afford to try to stay afloat.
But giant companies with tremendous resources like Oracle and Microsoft and Apple and Yahoo and Facebook and Uber and Google have the power to facilitate socially responsible initiatives without any significant harm to their economically dominant positions. It would be smart for the leaders of these tech giants to take a break from the next disruptive initiative and the next quarterly report to think about their relationships with the society that they are doing so much to shape and transform.
Silicon Valley should consider “how can we be more economically responsible and environmentally sustainable?” and “what are the long-term implications of our current initiatives on labor economics?” and “how can we protect privacy and free speech?” and “how can we shore up the economic stability and political stability and rule of law that any health capitalist society relies upon and that corporations like ourselves benefit from?” and “how can we give back to our communities?” and even “how can we do more good and less evil?” (After all, Google’s original motto was “Don’t Be Evil.”)
A recent Los Angeles Times article by none other than aforementioned tech-cynic Douglas Rushkoff may provide some cause for optimism about this issue. He reports that many Silicon Valley leaders have come to favor a “Universal Basic Income,” which would involve a transfer of money (one assumes from the government) to every American. This is a solution to poverty, and of course there are already massive entitlement programs in the U.S. government’s budget that serve the purpose of keeping the elderly, the disabled, and the unemployed financially afloat. “UBI” would transfer money on a larger scale, to every American below a certain income threshold.
Rushkoff writes that “many of the workers and leaders at Silicon Valley’s biggest firms have jumped aboard the UBI bandwagon, and with equally self-serving ambitions. By which I mean, they understand the basic math undermining their long-term business plans: If they automate all the jobs, who will be left to buy their services? Even the data that companies such as Google mine from our otherwise free online activities would be worthless if we had no money to spend. The penniless have no consumer behavior to exploit.”
Rushkoff argues that UBI is not an optimal solution to the problems creates by the digital revolution, and I agree that we would all be better off if tech companies thought more about creating jobs than about compensating for the economic wreckage left in automation’s wake through after-the-fact income transfers to the underemployed.
However, I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that some Silicon Valley leaders are advocating a Universal Basic Income. It may not be the right solution to the economic disruption caused by the digital revolution, but at least it is a sign that industry leaders are finally thinking about how they might address the problem.