by Lucie Greene
SILICON
STATES
Silicon States
Copyright © 2018 by Lucie Greene
First hardcover edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Greene, Lucie, author.
Title: Silicon states : the power and politics of big tech and what it means for our future / Lucie Greene.
Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010153 | ISBN 9781640090712 | eISBN 9781640090729
Subjects: LCSH: High technology industries—Social aspects—United States. | Technology—Political aspects. | Social responsibility of business.
Classification: LCC HC79.H53 G74 2018 | DDC 338.4/760973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010153
Jacket designed by Darren Haggar
Book designed by Jordan Koluch
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to my friends and family, my constant supporters
With special thanks to J. Walter Thompson
CONTENTS
Introduction A Changing Landscape
1 The New Power Map
2 Government and Silicon Valley
3 The Fifth Estate
4 Connecting the World
5 Moonshots
6 The Future of Health
7 “Fixing” Education
8 Airbnb Land
9 Women and Silicon Valley
10 Hacking Philanthropy
Conclusion The Future, Maybe
Acknowledgments
SILICON
STATES
Introduction
A Changing Landscape
The year is 2014. Crowds have gathered for one of the final talks of the day at the Web Summit, the annual tech hurrah. Every year since 2009, European startups, marketers, social media managers, and hangers-on convene for this affair, flocking to Dublin during perhaps the city’s soggiest, purple-skied month. At the conference, attendees walk through the acres of stands collecting flyers, watching motivational talks, and gawking at the great and the good of Silicon Valley who are flown in to spout their entrepreneurial wisdom onstage. At night, everyone swigs pints of Guinness. (It’s since migrated to Lisbon, but the format remains the same.)
Each year I attend about twenty of these conferences, with their interchangeable executives in lapel microphones reciting carefully crafted soundbites and bombastic statements about what’s to come in technology, retail, marketing, and beyond. “Data is the new oil!” “Content is king!” “Disrupt yourself to survive!” I and a migratory pack of journalists and tech executives attend them in hotspots around the world to gain access to these self-proclaimed visionaries and speak on behalf of our companies about what we believe the future holds. The schedule has become ever more crowded over the past few years, each new gathering competing for a share of corporate travel budgets and Buzzfeed column inches. They have become well-oiled, navel-gazing marketing events, albeit with a lot of shouting. I’ve been to so many that they have started to blend into one long, undifferentiated TED talk.
This one, though, was different.
Caroline Daniel, then editor at FT Weekend, was gleefully ribbing billionaire Peter Thiel about Silicon Valley’s hubristic “Change the World” sloganeering (that and his recent statement that Europeans have no work ethic). She was also teasing him about what he had next on the agenda, alluding to his obsession with longevity research. Thiel is famed for his efforts to become immortal, in wilder reports even exploring having transfusions of young people’s blood to stay youthful—an act so quintessentially far-out Silicon Valley that it had been parodied on the HBO TV series of the same name. With one eyebrow arched and a flicker of a smile, she asked: “So, do you really think you can live forever?”
I stopped scribbling notes and looked up. There had been rumblings of Thiel and other Silicon Valley luminaries’ interest in immortality, but until this moment it had seemed a slightly crackpot endeavor, an idle pursuit for billionaire playboys, not a tangible business pursuit and potential reality. But Thiel’s unabashed certainty was disarming. He was serious, and, I’d soon discover, there were others working in this vein. All of this was a long way from restaurant recommendations or online marketplaces. Silicon Valley’s ambitions, it seemed, had spiraled to new levels in breathtaking if unnerving ways.
People today, Thiel said, have been trained not to be enthusiastic about the future and about the promises of technology. We’d come to see space travel and scientific progress in dystopian lights. Who’d want to leave the planet after watching a movie like Gravity, he asked, when space exploration was shown in such a way? (This has since become a refrain for Thiel.) We should be more ambitious about solving world problems, he continued. Where had our ambition gone?
Technologists, he argued, were a “counterculture” in today’s society simply for championing the future. Sitting before a crowd of 22,000 prosperous tech nerds, gawking in admiration, this seemed like a stretch to me. But Thiel doubled down on his vision of Valley techies as twenty-first-century punk rockers. Not only were they underrepresented in government, he argued, the government was actually trying to curtail progress, regulating technologies it doesn’t understand. Politics, and the ignorance of politicians, was holding us back.
Then Daniel asked, “Do you really have the right as the technologist to determine and say we’re going to change the world?”
“These questions of rights are always very tricky,” Thiel answered, head tilted to one side in thought. “You can always flip it around and say what gives the people in [Washington] DC the right to stop medical inventions that could save many people’s lives? What gives people the right to stop technology in one form or another?”
I squirmed. Daniel seemed to squirm, too. Thiel continued: “It’s not as though we’re living in a perfect world. We’re living in a world in which there are enormous problems, where there are many things that are incredibly screwed up. And so I think it is imperative on us to try to fix these problems as quickly as possible. And sometimes that means not asking for permission—but really asking for forgiveness later.”
As I considered Thiel’s statement in the frenetic years since, it has come to epitomize a distinct attitude developing in the Valley about its role in the world, one characterized by an increasingly nonchalant regard for effecting seismic, irreversible change with an air of distant sociopathic paternalism, especially for those left behind by this relentless drive for progress.
Amid the high-flying urban millennials using on-demand driverless flying cars, after all, countless workers will lose jobs from automation. Fast-food workers will be replaced by machines. Airlines have already replaced ticket stewards and suitcase labelers with machines. In singular, distinct entities, these are all logical efficiencies. But taken together, they represent enormous, painful change for a huge swath of the population; and that change is casually being rationalized by Silicon Valley billionaires as “progress.”
But is this the progress we want? And do we even realize how fast it is happening? And how irreversibly? Are we comfortable with Silicon Valley defining the future?
&nb
sp; I should be clear that when I refer to Silicon Valley, I’m talking specifically about the group of businesses that have come to embody the culture and industry of digital technology. In other words, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Google, Apple, Snapchat, and Tesla—the most ambitious and powerful tech companies the world has seen that are attempting to shape our future. Some of them have even been given their own acronym, GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). Not all of them are from Silicon Valley geographically, but collectively, this group of businesses has come to embody similar power, influence, and values. Since the resurgence of Apple, tech companies have not only become mass market, they have become globally monumental, region-transcending brands in sync with a powerful new generation of millennial consumers who have incorporated digital socializing, mobile use, and the internet into every facet of their lives.
In the past twenty years, the power and influence of Silicon Valley’s giants has increased rapidly, supplanting many traditional industries like automobiles and energy, not to mention retail, entertainment, communication, and tourism. Walmart launched in 1962. Unilever launched in 1929. Nestlé launched in 1905. My employer, J. Walter Thompson, a multinational advertising agency, launched in 1864 and took decades to become global. These traditional companies are now grappling with Amazon (1994) and other tech companies launched long after—but which are already bigger, or taking away significant market share.
Similarly, in an incredibly short timespan there has been a fundamental power shift in society from the middle class to the uber-wealthy and a fundamental intellectual shift in our ideological culture from revering astronauts and Hollywood actors to putting the CEOs of tech corporations up on pedestals. This has coincided with a fundamental economic shift from manufacturers and traditional businesses to algorithms and data—and these tectonic shifts stem from these technologists’ work and ideas.
Now, as they mature and start to take themselves more seriously, these companies and leaders are moving into key civic areas and co-opting new power centers. Their cultural influence surpasses government, academic institutions, and even Hollywood. Having taken over our lifestyles, they are vying for our health care, infrastructure, energy, space travel, education, and postal systems. And they are applying the tools that won them success—platforms, AI, big data, and consumer-centric on-demand models—to disrupt them. How these approaches fare when it comes to these stickier, more complex sectors will be interesting to watch. But it’s telling that alongside this, Silicon Valley leaders are starting to think bigger, growing beyond scaling to considering new societal models, systems, town planning, and visions of future worlds. With characteristic hubris, they’re also looking at the world around them—they’ve changed our social life, our commercial life, why not our political and biological life as well?
They’re already memorializing themselves with vast, lavish headquarters in every city, each serving as de facto Silicon neighborhoods. What happens when we all live inside the Silicon State?
Some would say we already do.
There have been signs of cultural pushback, at least in 2018. Early in the year, consumer packaged goods (CPG) giants like Unilever, and its CMO Keith Weed, started referring to the digital “swamp” when referencing Google’s and Facebook’s lack of transparency when it comes to selling digital advertising. Many brands have publicly withdrawn ads on YouTube, among other similar sites, when their logos have appeared next to extremist content or fake news. Reports have emerged questioning audience size estimations of Facebook in the UK and Australia.
Then there was the explosive scandal in March surrounding Facebook’s data breach of 87 million accounts (harvested by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica for commercial use in attempting to shape political campaigns in the U.S., UK, and other countries). The scandal, exposed by Britain’s Guardian, Observer, and Channel 4 news on TV, and by The New York Times in the U.S., hit Facebook’s stock price by 13 percent and knocked off as much as $75 billion in market cap from the social media giant in the week that followed. Authorities in both countries launched investigations and demanded appearances from Zuckerberg and Facebook (and in the UK, the associated whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie). The immediate aftermath of the scandal was outrage and furious media debate, along with widely shared social media hashtag #DeleteFacebook. Pundits quickly went to town critiquing Facebook’s slow response, the leadership skills of its executives Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, and their tone-deaf TV interviews in the aftermath. Rival tech baron Elon Musk famously deleted his company’s Facebook pages (ooh, burn!!). Apple CEO Tim Cook used the occasion to trumpet Apple’s strict privacy policies and said he thought it was too late for the social network giant because they did not proactively self-regulate (double burn!). The scandal also prompted a wave of other investigations and allegations on both sides of the pond, not least Zuckerberg’s sensational appearance before Congress to answer questions about Facebook’s behavior. It brought to the surface Cambridge Analytica’s reported association with other tech companies and figures including Peter Thiel–backed Palantir, the data analysis company that is contracted by the Pentagon and police services in the U.S. to aid in work such as surveillance, which was also alleged to have used Facebook data. (It did not look good that Thiel is also a Facebook board member.)
Taken together, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal marked a collective loss of innocence for the public about tech’s role in the way we live. And yet, it’s difficult to tell what real impact it has made. Facebook’s audience, and its neighboring services WhatsApp and Instagram, seem undented. Zuckerberg refused to appear personally for the British authorities’ investigation in a stunning display of Big Tech bravado (or more frightening, Zuckerberg’s untouchability). Despite European Union fines and the beginnings of a crackdown in the UK, from banning Uber in London (temporarily) to promising more gig economy worker rights, tech companies are still thriving in these regions. In the U.S. Amazon continues to evade antitrust investigations as it becomes grocer, clothing retailer, shipping company, and more.
The toughest check on this group seems to be the stock market, where even the hint of withering popularity is directly hitting share prices for Silicon Valley brands. Added to Facebook’s dive, Snapchat, after its wildly misjudged post making light of Rihanna’s experience of domestic violence by singer Chris Brown, saw its stock price tumble, and was also hit recently by a $1 billion loss when Kylie Jenner declared it unhip. Facebook’s stock rebounded after Zuckerberg’s Congress appearance. It’s an example of the massive volatility of these companies’ value. But it usually seems to be fleeting. Rightly or wrongly, there’s still a tension between privacy fears and popular discourse, and how deeply embedded these companies are in consumer behaviors and habits. Their success continues to be driven by frequent, daily, minute-to-minute consumer buy-in and de facto apathy. Opt outs en masse, at an unprecedented scale, might be the only thing that stops them. But will that happen anytime soon? It’s unlikely. Because we don’t click as we preach.
Silicon Temples
From the back of a taxi on a clear day, it’s possible to see the skeletal, withered New York Pavilion Towers, once a glittering, illuminated centerpiece of the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It is strange to look at these decaying monuments of the future, decades after they were imagined and erected, especially sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, crawling on pot-holed roads toward Manhattan from JFK Airport.
The ’64 World’s Fair was one of a series of expositions celebrating science, culture, national achievements, and the future. New York’s was an unbridled festival of midcentury consumerism in jet-set architecture with grand domed pavilions. Ford, Pepsi, IBM, and General Motors all took part. On London’s Southbank, there are remnants of the 1951 Festival of Britain, designed to showcase the “genius of British scientists and technologists.” It featured the largest dome ever constructed and a floating tower dubbed the “Skylon.” Some aspects, such as the co
ncrete blackened by pollution, are viewed less affectionately. Only etchings and a ruined foundation remain of the Crystal Palace, centerpiece of the 1851 Great Exhibition—the first of such fairs celebrating the feats of the Industrial Revolution. These eras were times of unbridled enthusiasm for the future and the power of private industry to build things for our collective benefit.
The old headquarters of mighty industries past can be revealing, particularly those built from scratch in company heydays. These often served as the ultimate expression not only of that company at its peak, but also that company’s industry at its peak. Today they are cultural landmarks. The Express newspaper building, built on London’s Fleet Street in 1932, is a glittering memorial of a time when two-thirds of the British newspaper-buying population read the paper every day. Everything about the sleek black façade communicates power, opulence, and futurism, with art deco lines, rounded corners, and gilded details. IBM’s 1950s Minnesota headquarters even had a brochure tagline, “Where today meets tomorrow,” and was lavish in its countryside stateliness and minimalism. The Victorian industrialists in the UK even built model villages around their factories, bringing the world-tour aesthetic to buildings in eclectic combinations, with soaring ceilings and elaborate columns. They hoped to inspire workers with refined designs in rural settings, while adding modern techniques to improve welfare through ventilation and heating. (Trips to the pub were often banned by the owners, and churchgoing was encouraged in these paternalistic idylls.) Today many of these buildings remain, but in altered forms. The pubs of Fleet Street, once crowded with reporters sipping ale and trading stories, are now largely empty.
It’s emblematic that pretty much every significant Silicon Valley company has recently completed, or is in the throes of constructing, its own original headquarters. All are designed by superstar international architects with superhuman efficiencies, new features, and capabilities. And obsequious architectural magazine articles to venerate them.