Silicon States

by Lucie Greene

  “Nobody thinks the big telecoms are ‘good guys’ and I think people are neutral about big hardware manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Cisco,” observes Richard Hill. “But when it comes to the internet companies [Apple was not, of course, an internet company], somehow all these guys are just doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, for the benefit of humanity. And I think it’s only now beginning to sink in that maybe it’s not that simple.”

  These are for-profit companies, after all. They don’t have moral codes, they have business interests. “The sooner we get away from the notion that they are sentient beings who have their own moral frameworks separate from the financial interests of their shareholders, the better off we’ll all be,” says Joe McNamee, executive director of the European Digital Rights (EDRi) international advocacy group. The problem, he says, is that collectively “everyone seems to think that those companies should magically work out what each individual thinks the correct level of censorship or content is, but that’s not the case. They work out, at any given moment, what is most profitable for them to do or not do, and then do it.”

  It’s revealing in the dialogue surrounding Bitcoin and blockchain technology in general for example. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, is framed as the ultimate symbol of libertarianism, an escape from government and decentralized engines of democracy to enthusiasts, rather than simply another form of digital currency whose stock market value still only exists, ironically, in relation to traditional currencies (i.e., it does not exist in a silo—its valuation exists from being compared with U.S. dollar values, not as an independent thing). Blockchain, the real-time, constantly updating program that measures digital assets, is also being framed with the ideology of seizing power back from meddling banks and governments, allowing for trading and exchange free from interference. But in many ways, it’s simply a more advanced accounting system.

  It’s another example of how Silicon Valley, tech, and the internet paint themselves as something more special than what they are, and that the tech insiders are more special then all of us other laypeople.

  David Golumbia discusses this in The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. Golumbia, an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, looking at the media language specifically, argues that the rhetoric surrounding Bitcoin and blockchain technology places it on an ideological pedestal—any criticism is simply people not understanding the technology. “The implication is that this lack of technical expertise disqualifies the critics from speaking on the topic at all,” he says.

  Now many techies are starting to talk about blockchain elections being the most accurate way to achieve democracy. “The world is not going to turn upside down because you can suddenly cast a vote on your computer instead of going down to the voting place. Similarly, I think blockchain does have legitimate potential uses, but they’re all like improved record-keeping and things that are mild improvements on technology that already exists or functions.”

  In other words: it may make the stock exchange or election faster or more efficient, but it will not upturn what voting is, or what currency is. Yet visit a tech conference, or a Bitcoin event, and the die-hard fans have a cult-like belief in its transformative powers. Bitcoin’s founders are famed for their deep libertarian beliefs, championing this decentralized, unregulated currency as the ultimate escape from government interference. Since then, it’s been watered down, but the broad belief in blockchain’s democratizing influence is still strongly embedded in rhetoric. Maybe this will evolve as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies start to be used wholesale by innovative countries. (Several nations, including Estonia, are experimenting with uses for cryptocurrencies.)

  But all this rhetoric has become part of a powerful force in tech’s favor. A way to, at once, make its powers and tools seem more special. A way to sidestep criticism and steamroll opposition.

  Fake News and the Future

  The issue of real and fake news will become more important as Silicon Valley platforms like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter become central to the news cycle, placing generated fake news alongside fact-checked, legitimate content. And it gets harder to differentiate between real and artificially generated posts. Video coverage, particularly live video, was viewed at one point as a way to cut through this, appreciated for its unfettered, instant, visceral, and immersive properties. As we have seen, it has proven to be particularly effective in citizen journalism.

  But even live video and images will soon have the potential to be doctored. In the past two years, researchers have made massive advances in manipulating pictures, images, and sound with machine-learning, artificial-intelligence programs. These can continually refine their output. Initial success suggests that within the next decade, highly sophisticated moving and still visual output might be possible, making it difficult to believe our eyes, as well as what we read.

  The issue of fake news is already a pressure point for Silicon Valley tech giants, as brands and big media companies withdraw advertising following the discovery of those ads being placed next to extremist or fake content. But this has only been discussed in the most overt and controversial cases. What about the grey space in between? Branded features and partisan “news” content. Or inaccuracies in AI-generated written news reports. Or, even more gravely, the content that affects public opinion in elections using online propaganda, as has been done by Russia in the run-up to both the American and French elections, as revealed by intelligence reports. The British government has also asked Mark Zuckerberg for evidence of whether Russia-backed accounts affected the EU referendum and its general election.

  Fake news is becoming a key political issue. French advertising giant Havas, as well as the UK government, in partnership with the Guardian, BBC, and Transport for London, all withdrew ads from Google in 2017, following Google’s lack of guarantees when it comes to ad placement. Havas attributed the withdrawal to Google’s inability to “provide specific reassurances, policy, and guarantees that their video or display content is classified either quickly enough or with the correct filters.”

  France has taken action a step further. In January 2018, President Emmanuel Macron announced a new law to combat fake news. During elections, social media would face tougher rules over the content that they allow online. And deliberate attempts to blur the lines between truth and lies were undermining people’s faith in democracy. Macron’s new rules include tougher regulation about showing the sources of apparent “news” content, and limits on how much could be spent on sponsored news material.

  In his announcement, Macron talked about the lowered cost of such activity; he said it was now possible to propagate fake news on social media for just a few thousand euros. (Which rather puts the scale of Russia’s $1.25 million per month during the lead-up to the U.S. election, and its potential impact, in perspective.) “Thousands of propaganda accounts on social networks are spreading all over the world, in all languages, lies invented to tarnish political officials, personalities, public figures, journalists,” he said.

  But there’s a question of how to resolve these tensions.

  In the wake of revelations about Facebook staff curating its newsfeed in 2016 with more liberal stories, what was more concerning to Microsoft’s Danah Boyd was not that the feed was curated, but the widely held misconception by consumers that an algorithm’s sorting and listing information would be less biased than humans doing the same thing. That a code was somehow more neutral than a human in curating a newsfeed of stories. In a May 2016 piece on Data & Society’s platform dubbed “Facebook Must Be Accountable to the Public,” also published by the Huffington Post, she wrote: “What is of concern right now is not that human beings are playing a role in shaping the news—they always have—it is the veneer of objectivity provided by Facebook’s interface, the claims of neutrality enabled by the integration of algorithmic processes, and the assumption that what is prioritized reflects only the interests and actions
of the users (the ‘public sphere’) and not those of Facebook, advertisers, or other powerful entities.”

  She added: “There was never neutrality, and never will be . . . I have tremendous respect for Mark Zuckerberg, but I think his stance that Facebook will be neutral as long as he’s in charge is a dangerous statement. This is what it means to be a benevolent dictator, and there are plenty of people around the world who disagree with his values, commitments, and logic. As a progressive American, I have a lot more in common with Mark than not, but I am painfully aware of the neoliberal American value systems that are baked into the very architecture of Facebook and our society as a whole.”

  The Facebook and napalm photo incident, while well-intended, revealed the cultural blindness in Silicon Valley’s perspective.

  Which comes down to a paradox as Silicon Valley captures more and more control of the news cycle and online speech. If we expect them to take more control of content online, protect us from fake news, from abuse, what guidelines do we set? Is it better if an algorithm does it, or if a Facebook-selected group, with their own personal biases, does it? Then there’s the question of what, really, is Facebook. A media company? A social network? Because that has implications for the responsibility it holds.

  “The German justice minister has said Facebook should deal more with hate speech. It’s illegal—why don’t they do more? Well, because they’re not a law enforcement authority,” says Richard Hill. “They can delete content, but unless you’re happy for there to be absolute impunity, then they can’t do all you want them to do. The problem that we have in this society is that, as long as you have politicians saying, ‘Why doesn’t Facebook take more power and be more efficient in regulating our free speech?’ you can’t simultaneously say that they should also have less power.”

  In many ways, Google and Facebook are caught between a rock and a hard place. “Google can be trained to be racist as hell,” Boyd tells me. “Does Google have responsibilities once it’s been identified? Yes. But that responsibility is actually very easy to be done in terms of public shaming . . . Take what’s gone on with Facebook and how they should be modifying the News Feed. Is the answer for them to make it such that it’s whatever is in your feed, that’s populism, or is it to curate, which has been the history of democracy and republicism? If so, which values are going to be structured? . . . No matter what, they’re damned for any choice they make, so it’s one thing to talk about regulating them, but what values do we actually want? We can’t agree as a public on what those should be, so the question to me is, is the right answer for them to be regulated through legal structures that are themselves pretty corrupted? To be regulated by public shaming, which is what is really working right now for some of them?”

  Maybe it comes back to that original conflict—that these companies have intentionally and strategically placed themselves within a broader symbolic framework in our lives. As such, we attach more expectation to them than simply being businesses. They benefit from this, but this stance also creates new pressures that other commerce might not carry. Silicon Valley companies have fostered ideological and moral personas which may begin to work against them as issues of fake news, trolling, and the filter bubble become more prevalent in popular discourse. Do we want them to take responsibility or not? They, of course, do not.

  There’s a growing dichotomy between Silicon Valley’s outsized, world-dominating ambition and the way it tries to present itself. The world’s biggest media companies—a global taxi company, a global hotelier, planting anchors in harbors around the world—are masquerading as “technology companies,” “platform solutions,” and “community driven hospitality companies,” attempting to absolve themselves from any of the messy checks and balances that have slowed their predecessors. It fooled everyone in its stronghold markets, until it didn’t. Armed with a slew of cheerful, ukelele-soundtracked intro videos and tropes about empowering communities, Silicon Valley is now trying to sneak in—and conquer—new territories far and wide. Will these new territories also be fooled?

  4

  Connecting the World

  It could almost be a Benetton ad. That, or a Unicef campaign. Or both. Visit the website of Internet.org, Facebook’s pseudo-philanthropic organization dedicated to bringing low-cost internet to underdeveloped countries, and there are pictures of hijab-wearing girls laughing, children smiling in national costumes from various corners of the earth, cycling in villages, and more—except instead of holding buckets of water or baskets, they’re clasping mobile phones. Optimism and worthiness are laid on with a trowel. There are case studies about the positive impact of Free Basics, Facebook’s limited, free version of the internet that gives users access to a selection of websites and content without data charges. Children have been able to study. Fathers have been educated about how to be better parents. Facebook partners with six internet and mobile companies including Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, and Qualcomm, as well as regional operators, to offer Free Basics. There are other more ambitious Internet.org projects, too, such as the Internet.org Connectivity Lab, exploring lasers and lightweight aircraft to bring internet to remote areas.

  “Through our connectivity efforts we’ve brought more than 25 million people online who otherwise would not be and introduced them to the incredible value of the internet,” it says. “They’re doing better in school, building new businesses, and learning how to stay healthy.”

  After conquering the U.S. and other mature markets, Silicon Valley has its sights on colonizing the remaining corners of the world, and in many instances is raising the banners of altruism to do it.

  Africa and its 1.2 billion population has been one major target. In 2017, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced plans to train ten million Africans in digital skills and increase funding to African startups. It’s hired a CMO for Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s also launching YouTubeGo, a version of YouTube designed to stream with weaker internet. In the same year, Facebook announced plans to lay 500 miles of fiber-optic cables in Uganda. Both giants are launching tech hubs and various initiatives to expand their reach in developing African markets.

  The internet here, like Christianity before it, is presented as the great civilizer, unlocking economies and empowering (that word again) people to achieve their potential. Free internet infrastructure is being built as a gift in exchange for ownership of the consumer population’s digital universe, which of course is infinitely more valuable.

  As it enters these markets, and other dynamic emerging economies from Southeast Asia to South America, Silicon Valley is discovering new challenges. For one, it’s going head-to-head with Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Huawei. In 2017, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma announced a $10 million African fund. In fact, Chinese tech companies are doing battle with Silicon Valley in a number of lucrative markets, including India and Brazil. Alibaba has made large investments in Paytm and Snapdeal. Didi Chuxing, the equivalent of Uber in China, has invested in Ola. Smartphone maker Xiaomi led a $25 million funding round in content provider Hungama Digital Media Entertainment in April of 2017. Web services company Baidu is also exploring India.

  Who will win?

  The axis of influence is starting to tilt. Silicon Valley may have owned innovation culturally, on a global scale, for the past two decades, but new vibrant tech hubs are emerging and challenging its dominance. They’re also creating new competitors. Opponents are emerging from vibrant new tech scenes in Israel, India, and Bali. Emerging leaders are “building apps and services that respond to local needs, and in doing so, they’re building products for the future of the internet,” Caesar Sengupta, Google’s vice president of product management, told the Wall Street Journal. “The next generation of global tech companies is just as likely to come out of a local coffee shop in Bangalore or Ho Chi Minh City as they are from Silicon Valley.” His sentiment was echoed by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Commenting at a Beijing tech conference, he said: “In the next five years, there will be more inno
vation, more invention, more entrepreneurship happening in China, happening in Beijing, than in Silicon Valley.”

  Still it persists. Like Hilton, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola before, Silicon Valley is attempting to roll its American brands out globally, hoping their primary colored–pizzaz will win over nations and deflect comparisons to the more cynical corporate behemoths and imperialists that came before them. But in this enlightened and transparent digital age, that’s getting harder and harder to do.

  Silicon Valley’s famed tone-deafness is being further exposed as it enters new markets. The nineteenth-century Imperialists may have been able to freely and brutally invade island after island, but Silicon Valley’s missteps as it moves into new markets are, ironically because of the internet, reported on and critiqued live. Silicon Valley giants no longer enjoy the consumer innocence of their early years, where childlike music and startup rhetoric let them swoop into any market they chose and appear smaller than they are. Their role as famous, bold-faced, global corporations is inescapable. And the trajectory from excitement to cynicism about them as a result has also been exponentially accelerated.