Yet this isn’t just a story for the business pages. In fact, Big Tech is at the center of nearly every story in the news today, ranking second only to stories about Donald Trump in the press. Yet while the president will leave us eventually, Big Tech is forever, transforming our existence a little more every day, as the technology itself spreads more deeply into our economy, politics, and culture. It’s an alchemy that is just beginning. As amazing as the changes of the past twenty years have been, they are only the first stages of a multi-decade transition to a digital economy that will rival the industrial revolution in terms of transformative power. And by the time it is complete, the consequences are likely to be even more sweeping, changing the nature of liberal democracy, of capitalism, and even of humanity itself.
What Big Tech is doing is, in a word, big. And while I’ve been critical of many aspects of this digital transformation, there is no denying the tremendous upside as well. Silicon Valley has been the single greatest creator of corporate wealth in history. It has connected the world, helped spark revolutions against oppressive governments (even as it has also facilitated repression), and created entirely new paradigms for invention and innovation. Platform technologies allow many of us to work remotely, maintain distant relationships, develop new talents, market our businesses, and share our views, our creative expression, and/or our products with a global audience. Big Tech has given us the tools to call up a variety of goods and services—from transportation to food to medical treatment—on demand, and generally live in a way that is more convenient and efficient than ever before.
In these and many other senses, the digital revolution is a miraculous and welcome development. But in order to ultimately reap the benefits of technology in a broad way, we need a level playing field, so that the next generation of innovators is allowed to thrive. We don’t yet live in that world. Big Tech has reshaped labor markets, exacerbated income inequality, and pushed us into filter bubbles in which we get only the information that confirms the opinions we already have. But it hasn’t provided solutions for these problems. Instead of enlightening us, it is narrowing our view; instead of bringing us together, it is tearing us apart.
With each buzz and beep of our phones, each automatically downloaded video, each new contact popping up in our digital networks, we get just a glimmer of a vast new world that is, frankly, beyond most people’s understanding, a bizarre land of information and misinformation, of trends and tweets, and of high-speed surveillance technology that has become the new normal. Just think: Russian election-hacking; hate-mongering Twitter feeds; identity theft; big data; fake news; online scams; digital addiction; self-driving car crashes; the rise of the robots; creepy facial recognition technology; Alexa eavesdropping on our every conversation; algorithms that watch us work, play, and sleep; and companies and governments that control them. The list of technology-driven social disruption is endless—and all of it has appeared in just the past few years. Individually, each item is just a speck in the eye, but collectively it makes for a sleet storm, a freezing whiteout that yields a foggy numbness, the anxious haze of the modern age.
The issue is that periods of great technological change are also characterized by great disruption, which needs to be managed for the sake of society as a whole. Otherwise, you end up with events like the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, as historian Niall Ferguson has outlined in his book The Square and the Tower, might not have happened without the advent of major new technologies like the printing press, which eventually brought with it the Age of Enlightenment, but not before it upset old orders in the same way that the Internet and social media have upended society today.20
No one can hold back technology—nor should they. But disruption can and should be better managed than it has been in the past. We have the tools to do so. The challenge for us today is figuring out how to put boundaries around a technology industry that has become more powerful than many individual countries. If we can create a framework for fostering innovation and sharing the prosperity in a much broader way, while also protecting people from the dark side of digital technologies, then the next few decades could be a golden era of global growth.
This book is an attempt to shine a light on the things about Big Tech that should worry us, and what we can do to fix them. I hope that it will serve as a wake-up call, not just for executives and policy makers but for anyone who believes in a future in which the benefits of innovation and progress outweigh the costs to individuals and to society. It’s in everyone’s interest to believe that we can create that kind of future. Because as we’ve come to understand all too clearly over the past few years, once people stop believing that a system is good for them, the system falls apart.
CHAPTER 1
A Summary of the Case
“Don’t be evil” is the famous first line of Google’s original Code of Conduct, what seems today like a quaint relic of the company’s early days, when the crayon colors of the Google logo still conveyed the cheerful, idealistic spirit of the enterprise. How long ago that feels. Of course, it would be unfair to accuse Google of being actively evil. But evil is as evil does, and some of the things that Google and other Big Tech firms have done in recent years have not been very nice.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin first dreamed up the idea for Google as Stanford graduate students, they probably didn’t imagine that the shiny apple of knowledge that was their search engine would ever get anyone expelled from paradise (as many Google executives have been over a variety of scandals in recent years). Nor could they have predicted the many embarrassments that would emanate from the Googleplex: Google doctoring its algorithms in ways that would deep-six rivals off the crucial first page of its search results. Google’s YouTube hosting instructional videos on how to build a bomb. Google selling ads to Russian agents, granting them use of the platform to spread misinformation and manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Google working on a potential search engine for China—one that would be compliant with the regime’s efforts to censor unwelcome results. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt leaving his position as executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, a few months after The New York Times revealed he’d been unduly influencing antitrust policy work at a think tank that both his family foundation and Google itself supported, going so far as to push for the firing of a policy analyst who dared to speculate about whether Google might be engaging in anticompetitive practices (something that Schmidt has denied). In May 2019, Schmidt announced he would be stepping down from the Alphabet board as well.1
All of this may not exactly be evil, but it certainly is worrisome.
Google’s true sin, like that of many Silicon Valley behemoths, may simply be hubris. The company’s top brass always wanted it to be big enough to set its own rules, and that has been its downfall, just as it has been for so many Big Tech firms. But this is not a book about Google alone. It is a book about how today’s most powerful companies are bifurcating our economy, corrupting our political process, and fogging our minds. While Google will often stand as the poster child for the industry more generally, this book will also cover the other four FAANGs—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix—as well as a number of additional platform giants, like Uber, that have come to dominate their respective spaces in the technology industry. I’ll also touch on the ways that a variety of older companies, from IBM to GM, are evolving in response to these new challengers. And I will look at the rise of a new generation of Chinese tech giants that is going where even the FAANGs don’t dare.
While there are plenty of companies both in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that illustrate the upsides and the downsides of digital transformation, the big technology platform firms have been the chief beneficiaries of the epic digital transformation we’re undergoing. They have replaced the industrialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the information-based economy that has come to define the twenty-first.<
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The implications are myriad, and I will track many of them, often via the Google narrative, which has been the marker for larger industry-wide shifts. Google has, after all, been the pioneer of big data, targeted advertising, and the type of surveillance capitalism that this book will cover. It was following the “move fast and break things” ethos long before Facebook.2
I’ve been following the company for over twenty years, and I first encountered the celebrated Google founders, Page and Brin, not in the Valley, but in Davos, the Swiss gathering spot of the global power elite, where they’d taken over a small chalet to meet with a select group of media.3 The year was 2007. The company had just purchased YouTube a few months back, and it seemed eager to convince skeptical journalists that this acquisition wasn’t yet another death blow to copyright, paid content creation, and the viability of the news publications for which we worked.
Unlike the buttoned-up consulting types from McKinsey and BCG, or the suited executives from the old guard multinational corporations that roamed the promenades of Davos, their tasseled loafers slipping on the icy paths, the Googlers were the cool bunch. They wore fashionable sneakers, and their chalet was sleek, white, and stark, with giant cubes masquerading as chairs in a space that looked as though it had been repurposed that morning by designers flown in from the Valley. In fact, it may have been, and if so, Google wouldn’t have been alone in such excess. I remember attending a party once in Davos, hosted by Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, that featured giant taxidermy bears and a musical performance by John Legend.
Back in the Google chalet, Brin and Page projected a youthful earnestness as they explained the company’s involvement in authoritarian China, and insisted they’d never be like Microsoft, which was considered the corporate bully and monopolist of the time. What about the future of news, we wanted to know. After admitting that Page read only free news online whereas Brin often bought the Sunday New York Times in print (“It’s nice!” he said, cheerfully), the duo affirmed exactly what we journalists wanted to hear: Google, they assured us, would never threaten our livelihoods. Yes, advertisers were indeed migrating en masse from our publications to the Web, where they could target consumers with a level of precision that the print world could barely imagine. But not to worry. Google would generously retool our business model so we, too, could thrive in the new digital world.
I was much younger then, and not yet the (admittedly) cynical business journalist that I have become, and yet I still listened to that happy “future of news” lecture with some skepticism. Whether Google actually intended to develop some brilliant new revenue model or not, what alarmed me was that none of us were asking a far more important question. Sitting toward the back of the room, somewhat conscious of my relatively junior status, I hesitated, waiting until the final moments of the meeting before raising my hand.
“Excuse me,” I said. “We’re talking about all this like journalism is the only thing that matters, but isn’t this really about…democracy?” If newspapers and magazines are all driven out of business by Google or companies like it, I asked, how are people going to find out what’s going on?
Larry Page looked at me with an odd expression, as if he was surprised that someone should be asking such a naïve question. “Oh, yes. We’ve got a lot of people thinking about that.”
Not to worry, his tone seemed to say. Google had the engineers working on that “democracy” problem. Next question?
Well, it turns out that we did have to worry about democracy, and since November 2016, we have had to worry about it a lot more. And it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: As tech firms have become inexorably more powerful, our democracy has become more precarious. Newspapers and magazines have been hollowed out by Google and Facebook, which in 2018 together took 60 percent of the Internet advertising market.4 This is a key reason for the shuttering of some 1,800 newspapers between 2004 and 2018, a process that has left 200 counties with no paper at all,5 restricting the supply of reliable information that is the oxygen of democracy. And given that digital advertising surpassed TV ads in 2017, it’s clear that TV news will be the next to go.6 While cable news may have gotten a “Trump bump” in recent years, the longer term trend line is clear—TV will ultimately be disintermediated by Big Tech just the way print media has been.
But the trouble with Big Tech isn’t just an economic and business issue; it has political and cognitive implications as well. Often, these trends are written about in isolation, but in fact they are deeply intertwined. In this book, my goal is to connect the dots—to tell the whole story, which is far bigger than the sum of its parts.
Things Fall Apart: The Political Impact of Big Tech
After it was revealed that the largest technology platforms in the world were exploited by Russian state actors and their private proxies to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it was Facebook, not Google, who took most of the heat. CEO Mark Zuckerberg insistently denied the possibility that nefarious foreign actors could have hacked the platform, which, of course, is exactly what was revealed to have happened. As The New York Times later reported, both he and COO Sheryl Sandberg had enlisted a shadowy right-wing PR firm that used underhanded techniques to discredit the Big Tech critic and financier George Soros.
But Google was only marginally more responsive to those first signs of election manipulation in the wake of 2016, and it turned out to have played a major role as well. Its subsidiary YouTube was a host to much of the pre-election hate that was stirred up by actors both abroad (including the same Russian agents that were active on Facebook) and at home.7
The 2016 election, Brexit, and the continued role that Russia plays in online disinformation underscore the fact that the very cohesion of society is at stake in this new digital revolution. We are experiencing a crisis of trust in this country; we’ve lost faith in our institutions, our leaders, and the very systems by which society is governed. As tempting as it might be to point a finger straight at the White House, this is not all about the current administration. For one, research shows that the declining trust in liberal democracy has coincided with the rise of social media.8 Part of this has to do with the fake news problem—which academic studies have found is 70 percent more likely to be shared than real news.9 But the fall in trust also has to do with a sense that the game is rigged, and that there is now an even wider social and economic chasm dividing the haves and have-nots, a divide created not just by Wall Street, but by Silicon Valley, too.10 In 2008, Washington bailed out the largest and most powerful banks and left ordinary homeowners to take losses. We can argue about the economic rationale for this, but the political result was the emergence of a narrative that the system had been captured by a small group of rich and powerful people. It drove voters on both ends of the spectrum away from the Republican and Democratic centers as a result.
Now, just as the public fury at Wall Street after the 2008 crisis contributed to the populist backlash that led to Donald Trump, the sense that Silicon Valley is building robots instead of factories, and creating paper billionaires instead of jobs, is now fueling extremism on both ends of the political spectrum: from the rise of fascism among white men in red states, to socialism among angry young millennials in the blue states (feelings that are, of course, aired and fanned on the very technology platforms that have helped to fuel them). When you stop to think about it, it’s not so surprising that a growing number of experts believe that it was tech-based disruption as much as trade that pushed the American Rust Belt toward Donald Trump.11
There is no question that the tech sector has spawned incredible economic bifurcation. A 2016 report by the Economic Innovation Group revealed that a mere 75 of America’s 3,000-plus counties make up 50 percent of all new job growth. These are the places where Big Tech looms large: San Francisco, Austin, Palo Alto, and so on. The cities where the large tech firms locate create wealth, but often become walled gard
ens.12 Witness the protests over housing bubbles in San Francisco that have left even the middle class unable to afford homes.
Then there’s the fact that election manipulation via platform technology continues to be a huge problem around the world, with Google and Facebook being used to oppress entire populations or even support genocide and murder in countries from Myanmar to Cameroon.13 There are some who believe technology is making us more vulnerable to fascism.14 This is one of the reasons that financier George Soros, founder of the Open Society, has now made the study of Big Tech a key area of his philanthropic work.
Born in Hungary, Soros is acutely sensitive to the political implications of this technical revolution, seeing in it the potential for an authoritarian state to harvest our private data and put the knowledge to nefarious uses of the sort predicted in George Orwell’s 1984. In a speech at Davos in January 2018, he noted that Big Tech was divesting people of their autonomy, explaining that “it takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind.’ There is a possibility,” Soros said, “that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it.” He feared the risk of “alliances between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich IT monopolies that would bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance.”15
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