by Lucie Greene
During her tenure with the government, Smith led key initiatives to open up STEM careers to more diverse socioeconomic groups and regions in the U.S. She created fast-track training programs and introduced programs to promote STEM subjects to girls and women. She actively tried, through speeches and interviews, to write women back into the history of U.S. tech innovation, a field still largely attributed to lone-wolf male figures.
Strange that Smith herself has never ended up with a Bloomberg Businessweek cover feature akin to her male counterparts. But then she’s not digging a hole in a parking lot like Elon Musk. And she’s not a man. (Musk’s new venture, Boring Company, was formed after he got frustrated by L.A. traffic and decided to start digging in a SpaceX parking lot to develop a new tunnel system to solve it. Rather than being regarded as crazy, this wound up on the cover of the business rag—as seems to be the way with anything Musk does.) Though to be fair to Musk, this tunnel system now actually seems to be under way.
Much is made of the “revolving door” between the White House and Silicon Valley, and in some instances as a response to the power of Silicon Valley, it has been strategically driven by the U.S. government. It’s pragmatic—if you can’t beat them, join them. Or get them to join you, even temporarily.
Smith, who spent eleven years at Google, introduced “tours of service” at the White House, bringing in tech talent to work on digital platforms, strategy, and systems, a project framed almost like the Peace Corps. She led efforts to embrace Silicon Valley in new ways: getting the White House access to startups and innovation with a venture-capital-type fund, allowing the government to invest in new technologies quickly, without a lengthy procurement process. She also made sure technologists were more involved in the early stages of developing government platforms.
“She’s done more than anybody else I know, certainly in the last eight years, to encourage people who ordinarily spend their whole careers at Google or Apple or Tesla or Uber to take a year or two off and come into government and be a part of a team,” says Chris Kirchhoff, then partner at the Department of Defense’s Silicon Valley office DIUx (Defense Innovation Unit Experimental), who collaborated closely with Smith. We talk one afternoon in late 2016, amidst the transition into the Trump administration. His phone is pinging, doubtlessly with inquiries about what the future holds for the unit, but he’s calm and upbeat. “Her fundamental insight is the right one, which is that the commercial technology world is booming right now, and if we don’t have people from that world who do what she calls ‘term tours’ in government, as a part of our policy teams, we’re really going to be falling behind. So many public-policy challenges today involve technology either as an opportunity or, frankly, as a threat or a challenge.”
In May 2016, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced expansion of the DIUx Silicon Valley office. A White House statement explained: “In this new era of distributed innovation, many federal departments are working on the major challenge and opportunity to reinvent how they engage with the technology industry, so that many more technologies developed by commercial firms and startups are acquired and adopted by government.
“This is especially true in national security, which must adapt from a Cold War–era posture of having a near-monopoly on funding advanced technology, to a world in which the commercial technology market is now many times larger and making major innovations in commercial space, robotics, data science, and many other areas of relevance to national security.”
The office would “help recruit more Americans from the tech sector into government, so that more of our best and brightest innovators have a chance to join with talented colleagues in government to serve a tour of duty in government, collaborating to solve our toughest national-security challenges,” it said.
The office where Kirchhoff is partner is designed to explore this part of the tech sector. It has special acquisitions authority that allows it to interact in very rapid fashion with startup firms. The unit is looking at five areas: artificial intelligence; the commercial space; network technology and cybersecurity; autonomy; and life- and bio-sciences. At the end of the government fiscal year in 2016, the fund had made investments worth $36 million.
It’s difficult to tell the extent to which Silicon Valley has a genuinely different or superior approach to innovation than government does, or if it’s simply money and hubris. Kirchhoff thinks there is a fundamental difference. “Unquestionably, the tech economy is one of the few sectors of the economy where somebody will literally hand tens of millions of dollars to a group of young and eager people that are trying to do something new, and wish them luck. And really try and support them as they try to pull off something grand,” Kirchhoff says. “That’s just not true in most of the other industrial sectors of our economy and certainly not true in the public sector, where that kind of risk-taking is not part of the culture.”
Though Mariana Mazzucato, notably outspoken economist, has argued that it’s precisely because the government doesn’t rely on immediate profitability that high-profile experiments and breakthroughs have occurred during its time. And that to over-fetishize Big Tech’s ability will only result in less funding for these pursuits, which will be damaging.
But there are obvious conflicts with Silicon Valley’s role leading innovation: one is relying on Silicon Valley for its expertise in order to make judgments about policy. “Governments are using multi stakeholders,” observes Richard Hill. The narrative is that “problems are too complicated to be solved by government alone, so governments have to work with private companies,” he explains. “OK, fair enough. But then private companies get to participate in the decisions.”
CTOs, like chief digital officers (CDOs), are part of a new segment of hires at both federal and state levels, since Aneesh Chopra became the first U.S. CTO in 2009. They are cropping up everywhere. Most international governments have them, and so do most brands. Even beauty giant L’Oréal, which is trying to position itself as a tech brand, opened a “tech incubator” in San Francisco in 2016. In essence, it’s because tech is everywhere and has become everything. Entire sectors have to consider the User Experience (UX) and ease of navigating its websites. Meanwhile, technology is being employed by consumer packaged goods (CPG) and beauty companies to create new channels to consumers, new diagnostic and personalization tools. We now expect to interact with every brand and every sector with the same ease we do Silicon Valley’s platforms.
There are other projects establishing closer ties between government and Silicon Valley innovation. In 2016, the Obama administration invited Silicon Valley experts to Washington to brainstorm ways to fight the militant group Islamic State online. The State Department created the role of representative to Silicon Valley in 2016, appointing Zvika Krieger, who was also director of its Strategy Lab.
Code for America founder and executive director Jennifer Pahlka—who worked as U.S. deputy CTO under President Obama—has started working with President Trump to find new ways to enhance government’s use of technology. She’s advising the government on a range of issues, such as procurement reform, cloud computing, and user-centered design. Pahlka, like Smith, is a believer in technology’s ability to do good in civic life. She has spoken about California’s switch from an online food stamp application that took an hour, and was only accessible on desktop computers, to one that can be completed with a smartphone in seven minutes.
What’s clear is that in the hands of the right stakeholders, government can use technology to make itself more accessible and user-friendly but also more current in the eyes of young people. Two courses, “Hacking 4 Defense” and “Hacking 4 Diplomacy,” were introduced at Stanford University in 2016, also reinvigorating the university labs’ legacy of working with government to innovate. These are led by innovation guru and author Steve Blank, with Zvika Krieger teaching the courses.
It’s a strange moment as Donald Trump, perhaps one of the most analog and demonstrably anti-modernity presidents, co
ntinues to rule. (Anti-modern ideologically and in the sense that he still messengers documents and referred to cyber attacks as “the cyber,” which would indicate a lack of understanding of complex technology issues. His proficiency in tweeting, on the other hand, is well-known.) Whether this open spirit toward technological innovation continues remains to be seen. Elon Musk, Trump’s most controversial backer, has abandoned his position as an advisor, following the president’s decision to leave the Paris Climate Accord. Thiel’s role in the Trump administration, at least visibly, seems to have been diminished. Many of the programs spearheaded by Smith were publicly funded, and now government funding cuts seem to be the mandate. Trump’s 2017 budget sliced funding by $3.2 trillion in ten years, cutting all public programs, including many safety net and education programs, while increasing spending on infrastructure, home defense, and the military. Trump may not be a techie president, but he may need to work more closely with tech companies to ensure the future of government, and the future success of the U.S. economy.
Puneet Kaur Ahira has worked in both the public and private spheres as a former Googler, and more recently, as special advisor to Megan J. Smith, the former CTO for the United States. She is reflective about her tenure with Smith and President Obama. “I keep coming back to this notion of time. It actually takes a tremendous amount of time to undo everything that’s been done. If the next president has four years, how deep will the impact actually be?” she says. “But equally, I also think that in the eight years of President Obama’s administration, we only scratched the surface of augmenting government services and capabilities with tech and innovation. If you think about all of the areas where there was deep focus—for example, Data-Driven Justice, Computer Science for All, Net Neutrality—these efforts are all still fairly nascent. And increasingly, if you look at the shortlist of priorities, the focus is fixated on survival and security—all these other longer time horizon investments get left lower down on the list.”
Ahira was program director for Google’s Solve for X community at Google[x], the company’s moonshot laboratory focused on developing technologies that could “positively impact billions of people.” Before Google, she was a portfolio analyst at Goldman Sachs. She served on the board of directors for Colin Powell’s America’s Promise nonprofit and cofounded an NGO called Freedom’s Answer. She coauthored a book on civic activism under the same title. She was recruited from Silicon Valley to join President Obama’s elite tech team inside government.
Alternative training programs and a widened geographic focus for tech training remain crucial, Ahira says: “There’s a much larger candidate population who don’t look like your typical tech entrepreneur or have a conventional tech background. They don’t come from families with a long lineage of engineers; they didn’t do computer science as an undergrad. And they might not know anyone else who did.” Ahira believes STEM education should be fully integrated into all our education systems, rather than relying on advocacy organizations such as Girls Who Code, to take it to a wider cohort. “We need widespread literacy. We’ve seen computer science education successfully integrated across the curriculum in the UK. And the most promising spaces are those where the kids are being stretched to apply themselves creatively, critically, and technically,” she says. “I think that kind of technical skillset and technical mindset is going to become a prerequisite if we, as citizens, want to have a better handle on what’s happening and how it’s happening.” She adds, prophetically: “Because ultimately, most of this is going to become very political, very quickly.”
Indeed. Training people from all walks of life for technological revolution is arguably one of the most urgent huge challenges facing governments. And yet, restricted to government’s four-year terms, it’s a difficult issue to tackle decisively.
What does she think of Big Tech taking on a bigger civic role in the future? Already, with access to ample funds, it is making inroads in health and education, but also positioning itself as a civic force with Smart Cities and infrastructure. “Lack of diversity becomes an Achilles heel for any team. When you don’t have that diversity of background, diversity of thought, diversity of privilege, it leads to incomplete problem solving,” says Ahira. “I think the issue of diversity is something that on a surface level is being acknowledged, and there’s certainly a lot of painstaking effort given to sourcing the best talent from all over the world. But again, we’re just importing this talent into a very ideal scenario, busing them back and forth across an idyllic California landscape. I don’t know, it becomes difficult to retain a real empathy for what’s going on outside the bubble.”
This is shown in the kinds of problems Silicon Valley tackles, as well as its approach to civic projects. We discuss Airbnb’s new Samara project in Yoshino, Japan, a community center built in the blossom-laden hills in a small village to revitalize it. The house, a beautiful mixed-use property (you can stay in the attic and take part in tea rituals by day), is an example of Airbnb’s aspirational approach to marketing and social-good projects. It’s also part of its philanthropic program. “It’s more exotic to go to Japan and try to solve a problem outside of any real context you can relate to than it is to look in your own backyard and confront a complex history that has led to homeless veterans and aged-out foster kids camping out every two blocks,” says Ahira. “And yet there is such enormous opportunity to deploy our innovation communities and tech platforms on some of these stagnating systemic issues.”
Does Silicon Valley care about the whole world? It claims to. That’s the narrative it espouses and the one it’s using to obtain a greater and greater stake in the way we live. Not just as services but as architects of the future. And the narrative it is using to co-opt new nations on a global scale.
Narrative in all this therefore becomes incredibly important in Silicon Valley’s agenda. Despite its famed lack of diversity, Silicon Valley, as intermediaries of news and media, is rapidly becoming the lens on all things and the means to mobilize audiences against government. Its filter is already writ large on our newsfeeds, one that claims to be the voice of “everyone,” yet the “everyone” it defines is inherently skewed and narrowed by virtue of this group’s privileged makeup. It’s also shown, as Ahira observes, in its skewed approach to problems and its general perspective.
Silicon Valley’s expanded control of media is now another tool in its soft power arsenal reinforcing this group’s powerful cultural influence in avoiding questions and legislation. It has grown key in shifting the power balance with government—as Silicon Valley becomes the vendor, but also controls political dialogue. And in its rapid growth, supplanting media, Silicon Valley is controlling what used to be a check on power itself.
What happens when the lens on power, the media, is diminished and possibly replaced by one of the most powerful sectors that has ever existed?
3
The Fifth Estate
The World’s Most Powerful Editor.” It’s a grand title, and one that Mark Zuckerberg has curiously been running away from since it was awarded to him by Espen Egil Hansen, the editor in chief and CEO of Norway’s biggest newspaper, Aftenposten, in an open, front-page critique of the Facebook founder. Hansen had penned an outraged letter to Zuckerberg after Facebook took down a post by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland that featured historic images of war. Egeland’s offense was posting the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph “Napalm Girl” of Phan Thi Kim Phuc by Nick Ut, an iconic picture of an anguished and terrified young girl fleeing a napalm attack, widely considered emblematic of the horrors of the Vietnam War. It was removed from Facebook because the nudity in the image was considered indecent. (Less indecent, apparently, is the fact that the pictured women and children were in agony after liquid fire was dropped on them by the American military.) Zuckerberg was charged with censorship and cultural insensitivity. Hansen’s letter accused Zuckerberg of thoughtlessly abusing his power over the social media site, which had become a key distributor of news around th
e globe. “I am upset, disappointed—well, in fact even afraid—of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.”
In many ways the incident showed what we all know: Facebook, Twitter, and Google are more than social media platforms. The editors of Fleet Street and the news buildings in New York may have been the “Fourth Estate,” the check on power before, but today Silicon Valley is supplanting them. They are the new media magnates. (In the case of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, he now owns The Washington Post.) With Amazon Echo, we are verbally asking Alexa for the daily news, or scrolling through Apple News. Live events, award shows, and more are being streamed via platforms from Twitter to YouTube. Bloomberg has even launched a built-for-Twitter, twenty-four-hour news platform, TicToc, with a dedicated news team, demonstrating the importance of the platform to news consumption. Facebook is launching original entertainment. Will a news show be next? It’s already signed deals with news and entertainment companies Vox Media, BuzzFeed, ATTN, and Group Nine Media. What would a Facebook show look like? Would it be mediated by “likes”? Would global news correspondents and bureaus be replaced by virtual reality headset–wearing avatars, transported to natural disasters as cartoon characters (à la Mark’s virtual visit to the wreckage of Puerto Rico)? Would artificial intelligence be used to report basic news stories without the need for verification? And be brought to life by AI presenter bots? Maybe presenters will be done away with altogether. Or perhaps each viewer will be faced by their very own tailored AI-powered avatar presenter based on their likeness, delivering news and angles on coverage skewed to each person’s preferences. Will appropriate news content be restrained by the curious and often arbitrary moral dictums already present on Facebook platforms? (Which have become the stuff of comedy BuzzFeed “listicles.” During the 2017 Christmas period, a holiday card featuring a painted robin was banned for being too sexual in nature. A picture of a woman giving birth was also banned. Both might easily have appeared in news items on traditional media, in the right context.) It’s all possible.