American culture is experiencing an unprecedented backlash against Silicon Valley and the wired world that it has provided us. The tech giants are being slammed by criticism from all sides. On the Left, they are criticized for aiding the spread of anti-Hillary fake news and for fostering income inequality. On the Right, they are criticized for allegedly enforcing “political correctness” and preventing their workers from expressing non-liberal ideas. This has led even parties on the usually anti-regulatory conservative side of the American political spectrum, from relatively mainstream Fox News blowhards to racist alt-right extremists, to come out in favor regulating digital platforms like utilities.
It’s interesting to consider how we got here. For most of my adult life, the Internet has existed, changing the workplace, popular culture, and social life in profound ways. However, for most of that period there has been surprisingly little political commentary and social criticism about the Internet’s transformative effects. When television first emerged as a dominant medium, it received some scorn from cultural critics for being allegedly mindless and lowbrow. The rise of the Internet was an even more profound change than the rise of television – no one was doing financial transactions or finding love over their TV sets, after all – and yet its emergence did not seem to elicit the same amount of cultural angst.
There are some good reasons for this. Television was closed, centralized, and unilateral, with a few networks dominating its early years. The Internet was open, decentralized, and interactive. If someone accused the Internet of being a “vast wasteland” of lowbrow culture and poor-quality writing, you could respond by advising them to create and upload superior content. The Internet quickly became far too diverse and vast to be subject to any such generalizations. Any topics you might be interested in, and millions of others you had no interest in, were being discussed and documented somewhere online. Individual users’ experiences were totally self-customizable. Furthermore, they could participate in online discussions, which seemed to be a major improvement over television, which did not allow you to talk back to it (at least, it was far less responsive when you tried).
The political impact of the Internet seemed significant but neutral and non-revolutionary at first. Both liberals and conservatives soon had popular blogs promoting their own ideological arguments in what used to be called the political “blogosphere,” but with cable news simultaneously becoming highly partisan, this polarization did not seem a problem particular to online media. When the “netroots” movement emerged during the mid-2000s, it seemed that the web would become a tool for more effecient political organizing and fundraising. Indeed, some eventually credited the Obama campaign’s savvy use of Internet platforms with playing a substantial role in the Democratic presidential victory of 2008. The Internet seemed like a good tool for democratic discussion, even if those discussions could get ugly, and it seemed to be a great tool for parties and candidates to educate and organize potential voters. It was even credited with helping democratic movements to overthrow tyrannies during the Arab Spring, as Jason Willick noted in The American Interest.
There did not seem to be much political sentiment in favor of regulation of the tech industry. Conservatives had a ideologically-principled opposition to regulation, due to their general support of an unfettered free market. Liberals seemed to harbor an unusual degree of affinity for high-tech corporations compared with old-school corporations. West Coast tech companies seemed more innovative and less ecologically-damaging than oil companies and automakers, and they seemed more creative and less exploitative than the Wall Street financial industry. Many tech founders and tech employees were culturally liberal, and the industry seemed likely to remain a major source of Democratic funding if the party maintained its Clinton-era centrism (which critics would call “neoliberalism”) on matters of regulation, labor relations, and taxation.
It’s remarkable how quickly the political and economic climate has changed over the past decade. The once-decentralized Internet is increasingly dominated by a few giant corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. They have remarkable power over our personal data, our interpersonal communications, and our information consumption. The spread of smart phones made the Internet ubiquitous in American life, and made the tech companies even more powerful.
The financial crash of 2008 was clearly caused by the shenanigans of Wall Street, not Silicon Valley. However, the economic problems that the Great Recession caused probably exacerbated the disruption of weak and vulnerable industries that were facing online competition. I saw newspapers laying off my college journalism classmates, as some local papers struggled to monetize their online presence, and others went out of business entirely. Many brick-and-mortar businesses, particularly those dealing with creative media products like books and music, were driven out of existence by online competition (above all by Amazon, with its huge e-commerce market share). The rise of Instagram contributed to the death of the once-mighty Kodak corporation, in a classic case study of economic disruption documented in Andrew Keen’s delightfully grumpy book “The Internet is Not the Answer.”
Many other industries were less impacted by the rise of the Internet, of course. But the digital disruption occurred simultaneous with the final stages of the near-collapse of American manufacturing, which had already created economic displacement and insecurity for a different group of workers. The service sector had seemed like a safe haven from the outsourcing of industrial jobs. But then taxi drivers and hotel workers found themselves facing competition from the “sharing economy.” All of a sudden, the combined forces of globalization, automation, and digital competition made it seem as though most American jobs were potentially vulnerable.
This fact, combined with the stagnant middle-class wages and rising income inequality of the past few decades, can help account for the surprising popularity of Trump and Sanders in 2016. Those candidates, one a far-left socialist and the other a far-right nationalist, engaged in a degree of economic populism that would have been considered déclassé and bizarre 15 years ago. Their fiery rhetoric claimed that the economic and political system was fundamentally corrupt and “rigged.” Now, the electorate had been agitated to the point that these allegations seemed plausible to many voters.
Which brings us to our current dysfunctional politics. In recent years, social media platforms seemed to exacerbate political radicalism by enclosing people in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals, who were free to demonize the opposition and engage in conspiracy theories. It appears now that a foreign power observed this trend, and used targeted social media advertising to influence a U.S. presidential election. The fact that online disinformation helped a politically inexperienced and dispositionally crude reality television star get elected as commander-in-chief of the world’s greatest military power may be a key turning point. Now, politicians and activists around the world are waking up to the fact that the tech giants have tremendous unchecked power over our lives.
The current barrage of criticism directed at Silicon Valley may make reform efforts more popular than before, but it is by no means certain that this mood will be translated into actual legislative action. The current political chaos in the United States makes it seem unlikely that anything substantial will be accomplished anytime soon. The tech companies have tremendous financial resources and immense lobbying power. Given time, they may be able to defeat or co-opt any major efforts at regulatory reforms or antitrust actions. This window of opportunity may be narrow.
Still, even if it does not result in immediate legal and social reforms, this moment of tech skepticism can still facilitate widespread cultural reflection about how we use digital platforms. Honestly, this critical trend was one factor that inspired me to create this blog. In my own life, I’m trying to keep in mind that many things on the Internet are simply trying to get my attention or push my emotional buttons, that many things on the Internet are not true, that I should think twice about the amount of personal information that I share online, and that I should moderate my use of digital tools and engage in the occasional “digital detox.” These observations and goals are not profound or novel, but recent developments have given them new urgency. We are all reminded not to let our smart phones dominate and distort our lives, and not to let our laptops drive us crazy.