by Lucie Greene
Partly, there’s a lack of understanding of what this means in Washington, says Krumholz: “There are going to be members of Congress who are hostile to Silicon Valley, perhaps because they don’t understand it, perhaps even more because its perceived to be allied with the Democratic Party, and Republicans [as of 2017] are in the majority now. And of course there are those in Silicon Valley who still feel superior to Washington and don’t really want to have to play this game because they think they can do a better job and wish that they could automate Washington—as opposed to leaving it to the legacy system that has grown up here.”
She adds: “But there’s still talk of revolutionizing politics and I think many of us are still waiting for technology to, if not revolutionize Washington, then to revolutionize the way Americans participate in politics.”
“Government” and “politics,” of course, mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And it varies by country. In the U.S., “government” is part civil, part military, part federal, part state, part local, and part law enforcement. It is also NASA and health care, Medicare. It’s national parks. It’s everything from your driver’s license to your taxes to assistance when your boat sinks out in the ocean. There are so many different interactions, and people feel differently about each one. But the overall concept of “government” seems to be coming up for scrutiny.
“Politics” has different but equally discouraging perception issues. If Brexit and the U.S. election were votes against state dominance, young people (who voted to remain in the EU and for Hillary Clinton) were “pro” state. Nevertheless, this same group is disengaged in politics and voting systems and is suspicious of politicians.
Voter turnout in 2016 dipped to nearly its lowest point in two decades, with approximately 55 percent of voting-age citizens casting ballots in the presidential election—the lowest turnout since 1996, when 53.5 percent of eligible citizens voted. “Most Americans are checked out,” Krumholz says. “Many of them are still enduring economic hardship from the economic crisis, and more importantly from forty years of wage stagnation. There is such a small percentage of Americans who are active in politics at any level.
“You would think there would be a price to pay for producing nothing but gridlock, but a do-nothing Congress and a diminishment of government power and authority is what some people want,” she observes. “There has not been a price to pay thus far. Maybe that is where we’re headed: rather than some kind of technological solution to wider participation and democracy, a withering of the democratic process. I don’t know. But at some point, it ceases to become a democracy, it begins to be a different form of government.”
“People are cynical, they don’t believe that the people in charge have their best interests [at heart],” agrees Macon Phillips, former coordinator at the U.S. Bureau of International Information Programs and former White House director of new media. Phillips, who in person is tall and preppy, is musing on this topic from a café in Dupont Circle. Phillips was also a digital strategist on the Obama election campaign, and has spent his career trying to transform legacy organizations for the digital era, but with a sense of conscience. “There is a widely held view that it’s inefficient and out of date . . . A generation has grown up having seen the record industry fall apart and die, be disrupted, the newspaper industry fall apart and die, be disrupted. I think that one of the big questions that we have to grapple with, as people who care about institutions, is what part of the government needs to fall apart and what part of the government is worth saving? And that’s a very difficult challenge.”
It helps that, as consumer brands, Silicon Valley companies seem more accountable to the populace than politicians, and elections are daily, not every four years. This change is coupled with a rising sense of citizen consumerism, one where consumers are more politicized and using their buying power to effect change—they can withdraw from a service or wage social media outrage when they dislike a brand’s behavior, prompting those brands to respond, which creates the perception of control.
Even in the wake of tumultuous political events, it is not the polling stations but these new media platforms—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook—that millennials are using to express their newly energized political views. So far with limited focus or effectiveness. Facebook live videos are being shared. Memes are being uploaded. Protests on a scale rarely seen are being held, and yet, in March 2017’s Los Angeles mayoral election, only 12 percent of voters cast a ballot. Less than two months earlier, 500,000 to 750,000 people, 20 percent of the city’s entire population, took part in the Women’s March, an event largely organized on social media.
These problems are not unique to the U.S., though. The breakdown of trust between governments and citizens is happening globally. Some blame social media for propelling divisive political discourse and say governments haven’t been quick enough to respond and have thereby made themselves irrelevant. Elsewhere, it’s argued that globalization itself has made it impossible for regional governments to retain power because they can’t guarantee security and jobs in the face of such a potent, ubiquitous force. There have been examples of increased nationalism and retrenchment, but are those the ultimate answer? As trans-border, consumer-centric entities, Silicon Valley companies are in a prime position to trump regional governance and are already mobilizing memberships and citizens to push forward their agenda.
And it’s an agenda that, in the U.S., is at odds with President Donald Trump’s. Silicon Valley favors scientific research, believes renewable energy is the future, and wants automation. Trump, during his 2016 campaign, promised to return jobs to the U.S. and appeared to believe that global-warming fears were overblown. (Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus told Fox News at the end of 2016 that Trump thought climate change was “a bunch of bunk,” but that he’d “have an open mind and listen to people.”) Where Silicon Valley sees the world as borderless and globalized, Trump wants to build a wall. Yet in some ways their missions are aligned, too. After all, few industries will benefit more than Silicon Valley if more aspects of government are privatized.
From Platforms to Politics
It’s fair to say that Silicon Valley has historically regarded government, and governance, with a degree of snobbery—as an interference and a slow-moving beast. But this view has evolved as tech companies have matured and grown, coming up against many different areas of regulation, requiring the hiring of policy heads to navigate political systems. Entrepreneurs have recognized the opportunity in government contracts and influence. As these companies’ success has grown, so too has their expanded mission and self-belief in rethinking all systems, including government.
“When I first arrived in Silicon Valley, there were zero political interests by Silicon Valley people,” comments Shervin Pishevar, the former executive chairman of Hyperloop One and managing director of Sherpa Capital. “There was also a snobby view of L.A. and media and Hollywood. And all of those forms of hubris were obviously wrong. There’s a codependence and a symbiosis between all three.”
The main interaction between the latest wave of Silicon Valley brands and government has been tracked back to 2011, when venture capitalist John Doerr hosted a now-storied dinner at his home attended by Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Jobs, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson, had to be persuaded to attend and came away frustrated, complaining: “The President is very smart [but] he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done. It infuriates me.” Could this be one of the patronizing CEO conversations Obama was referring to in his Pittsburgh address about Silicon Valley execs thinking they can run government?
Since then, the relationship between Silicon Valley and the government has grown with each company’s scope and complexity. Silicon Valley has an official body, FWD.us, a lobbying organization to advance key policies that serve its interests. It was cofounded in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg (among others) as an advocacy group for Silicon Valley, with a focus on immigra
tion reform. It raised $50 million in funding and was backed by Bill Gates.
On the lobbying front, Silicon Valley’s first spike of presence was linked to big-policy debates such as Obamacare and the financial crisis of 2008, along with important technology battles. Much of this is par for the course. In the life of any corporation, when it reaches a certain size it needs to fit with current policy and understand legislation.
The influx of tech has led to something of a cultural change in Washington, DC, though. “I really felt it more in the last five or six years,” Edward Alden said in 2016. Alden is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, specializing in U.S. economic competitiveness. “You see representatives of these companies at a lot more events. You really saw it with the effort in the second term of the Obama administration to get immigration reform. They enlisted the tech companies at a far deeper level than I’ve ever seen before.”
Yet it was through two acts of legislation that Silicon Valley’s approach started to change tack. Here Silicon Valley realized its power and switched from schmoozing to defiance, mobilizing its mass consumer reach to squash the proposed controls in new legislation. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) 2012 and the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA) 2011 focused on enforcing sanctions for cybersecurity and against copyright infringement and piracy; they saw the first coordinated action by Silicon Valley against the government.
In response to attempts to control these companies’ platforms and make them accountable for copyright infringement, Google and English Wikipedia, along with a few thousand smaller sites, coordinated an all-out internet blackout and elsewhere encouraged petitions to protest the bills. The legislation was positioned as censorship, anti–free speech, and against the freedom of the web. In response, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said: “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users and arm them with misinformation,” and “it’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform.” Both acts were subsequently abandoned.
It set a precedent for tapping the internet’s pervasive use among consumers (and therefore, the power of its overlords to effect change in its interests) that has since been repeated and has almost become de facto policy (without much challenge, in the U.S. at least). Uber now has an elaborate system of staging coups when it moves in to cities, using lobbying, grass-roots campaigning, sending email blasts to its membership, and undercutting traditional certified taxis with cheaper fares (economies of scale—and repeated rounds of funding—means it can afford not to be profitable, even now, which puts taxis on a back foot). Uber has mastered using its members as a mass pressure group against controls on its way of working: direct messaging campaigns to drivers, new platforms and microsites dedicated to championing its cause, and engaging members and intimidating government officials.
“They’re really trying to change the narrative,” says Alden. “You have stultifying government regulation on one side, and liberation, freedom, and consumer choice on the other. They’ve done a really good job of framing that. I think it has really restricted the willingness and ability of governments to constrain their activities to a great degree.”
The role of “Hero” vs. “Big Bad Government” is one that Silicon Valley continues to actively cultivate in its marketing and messaging. One case in point is that of Apple vs. the FBI following the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, in which Apple, in its defiance of the government, became the arbiter of privacy rights. And the government became the distrusted prying eyes. Following a mass shooting that left fourteen people dead and twenty-two seriously injured, the FBI in its investigation approached Apple to unlock an iPhone discovered at the home of one of the shooters to extract allegedly important information. Apple refused to create new software that could unlock the shooter’s personal password on the grounds that it would create a back door to abusing the privacy of all citizens.
“The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data,” wrote Apple CEO Tim Cook in a letter to Apple customers. “The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.” The Apple chief said the firm didn’t take lightly the decision to oppose the order, but “we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.”
The same rhetoric has been used to protect encrypted WhatsApp data in the UK. In April, Home Secretary Amber Rudd called on the company to allow messages to be intercepted, after it was discovered a terrorist had used the messaging platform before the 2017 attack on parliament. “We need to make sure that organizations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other,” Rudd commented on a BBC TV show.
The rise of technological civil disobedience grows every day, and is being propelled by the notion that government does not understand innovation and should not hold it back.
“Innovators and organizations are essentially bringing an end to the traditional regulatory process, and even traditional forms of democratic regulation,” says Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow with the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. They’re just doing their own thing, says Thierer, because the world we now live in is so highly decentralized, decontrolled with democratized innovation. “It confronts us with the hard choice about who makes the law for this new world that we’re living in. What is law? What is governance?”
Social Politics
Barack Obama was, in many ways, America’s first Facebook president, using the popular platform to connect to audiences. He was aided by Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, who played a key role in Obama’s election with Facebook as a mobilizing platform. By 2016, there was even an Obama chatbot, designed to let users contact the president via Messenger. The Clinton campaign continued in the same vein.
Social media has become integral to both political and government communications, and within that engine has made the state dependent on Silicon Valley as a vendor. It’s also decentralized the traditional, verified means of communication such as the press. (See Trump and his use of Twitter.) In essence, Silicon Valley platforms have become the government’s biggest intermediary to its audiences. And candidates’ biggest marketing tool.
As our media consumption becomes digital, and mobile, and government advertising efforts migrate to these platforms, Facebook and Google are the beneficiaries of government’s major advertising purchases through campaigns for the military, health, and other various services. Federal government spending on advertising totaled $996 million a year, according to a 2016 study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Coca-Cola spent nearly four times that the same year. Substantial portions of the government’s ad spending now go to Silicon Valley, though it’s hard to measure, as GAO commented: “The total scope of federal public relations activities is largely unknown. A number of factors make it difficult to quantify the resources the federal government devotes to public relations. These factors include the expanded use of web-based platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.” In 2014–2015 the Guardian reported that the British government spent £289 million on all marketing activity—with a significant increase in the digital and social media budget, a big chunk of which presumably went to Facebook and Google. (Though, the British government was one of a few organizations that withdrew advertising from Alphabet companies in 2017, after ads appeared next to extremist content on YouTube.)
Social media has transformed politics in a few ways. It is now a primary channel of promotion, because all of our media consumption is becoming digital. But it is also measurable and even predictable via algorithms, allowing for new insights and incredibly nuanced understanding of consumer sentiment and the messages people receive. Data analytics teams and programmatic adverts are now part and parcel of elections—putting Silicon Valley once again in the driver’s seat as experts. It also gives them a unique understanding of the electorate. Decentralizing what were once formal communication channels and processes has made a big impact on how we interact with politicians and government. It’s made them more accessible, modern, and human, but at the same time has undermined their stateliness.
Macon Phillips tracks the use of Facebook by the U.S. government back to 2008. “Facebook was a big part of the 2008 election campaign,” he says. “It was focused on organizing on college campuses . . . Early on, social media was seen as having an impact on politics and campaigns, but was not as much something people thought about in terms of governance. That changed with Obama and other leaders, but really with Obama.”
Today, that change is even more prevalent: “You’ve seen all the social media companies develop Washington, DC offices, trying to work with people in government on how to use their platforms and how to advertise on their platforms,” says Phillips. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and President Trump all have active social media accounts with millions of followers. Clinton, in a move of PR mastery, created a Twitter campaign during the 2016 presidential race that generated donations to the Clinton campaign from Donald Trump’s tweets. Having a social media presence has become part and parcel of being a modern candidate with millennial appeal.
These platforms and search engines are not just fully integrated into politics, but almost, like the press, seen as another “estate.” “In a debate, Hillary Clinton said, ‘Donald Trump said these things, just Google it.’ I think that’s really interesting . . .” relates Phillips. “It’s like ‘don’t trust me, trust a third party.’” Google, in other words, has become the ultimate fact-checker.