We are all created equal in the virtual world, and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world. The network will not eliminate barriers of prejudice or inequality, but it will be a powerful force in that direction.
It is hard to overstate how influential this belief has become in MarketWorld, especially in Silicon Valley: The world may be cruel and unfair, but if you sprinkle seeds of technology on it, shoots of equality will sprout. If every girl in Afghanistan had a smartphone…If every classroom were linked to the Web…If every police officer wore a body camera…Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have vowed to connect the unconnected as part of their philanthropic work, because the Internet “provides education if you don’t live near a good school. It provides health information on how to avoid diseases or raise healthy children if you don’t live near a doctor. It provides financial services if you don’t live near a bank. It provides access to jobs and opportunities if you don’t live in a good economy.” Some in the Valley have become downright glib about the leveling bias of technology. “Thanks to Airbnb,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says, “now anyone with a house or apartment can offer a room for rent. Hence, income inequality reduced.” Investors like Andreessen, according to this view, are just like the Occupy movement, but with bigger houses and clearer results.
Networks are the basis for much of this new power—networks that simultaneously push power out to the edges and suck it into the core. This idea comes from an authority on networks, Joshua Cooper Ramo, a journalist turned protégé of Henry Kissinger, who some years ago became interested in how new varieties of power were upending the old laws of strategy and geopolitics. His study of networks and interviews with their owners became a book, The Seventh Sense, in which he says that this new
power is defined by both profound concentration and by massive distribution. It can’t be understood in simple either/or terms. Power and influence may yet become even more centralized than it was in feudal times and more distributed than it was in the most vibrant democracies.
Ramo is arguing that the Ubers and Airbnbs and Facebooks and Googles of the world are at once radically democratic and dangerously oligarchic. Facebook emancipates people in Algerian basements to write whatever they want, for all the world to see. Airbnb allows anyone to rent out their home. Uber allows anyone going through financial hardship to download the app and, without much hassle, get started making money. These platforms are pushing power out to the edges—power once controlled by media companies, hotel chains, and taxi unions. But networks tend toward extreme concentration as well. It is no fun if half of your high school friends are on the other social network, so Facebook becomes a de facto monopoly. A core tenet of network theory is that the bigger the network, the more juice it will be able to squeeze from every new connection. Networks, then, are those rare beasts that get healthier, tougher, and faster the fatter they become.
This simultaneous concentrating and diffusing of power has real consequences for the distribution of societal power. “Tech people like to picture their industry as a roiling sea of disruption, in which every winner is vulnerable to surprise attack from some novel, as-yet-unimagined foe,” writes Farhad Manjoo, who covers the sector for the New York Times. In fact, he notes, the industry is more concentrated than most, with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft controlling much of everything. By almost any measure, the Frightful Five, as Manjoo calls them, are “getting larger, more entrenched in their own sectors, more powerful in new sectors and better insulated against surprising competition from upstarts.” If technology keeps spawning Goliaths, it is because of the concentrating pressure of networks that Ramo described: Those players have built certain foundational networks, often called “platforms,” that upstarts have ever less of a choice but to build on the bigger those networks get. “These platforms,” Manjoo writes, “are inescapable; you may opt out of one or two of them, but together, they form a gilded mesh blanketing the entire economy.”
Facebook, despite calling itself a “community,” single-handedly redefined the word “friend” for much of humanity, based on what was best for its own business model. Another company, Google, can know everything you search for and buy, every off-color joke you have ever typed, every utterance you have spoken in your home in the presence of its kitchen helper, every move you’ve made in front of its home security camera. Airbnb boasted of 1.3 million people staying in one of its properties on a single New Year’s Eve. As technologies like these have eaten the world, a relatively small number of people have come to own much of the infrastructure on which ever more human discourse, motion, buying, selling, reading, writing, teaching, learning, healing, and trading are done or arranged—even as many of them make public pronouncements about fighting against the establishment.
David Heinemeier Hansson is the cofounder of a Colorado-based software company called Basecamp, a successful but modest business that stayed relatively small and avoided the lure of Silicon Valley and of trying to swallow the world. “Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe,” he has written. “No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.”
Maciej Ceglowski, the founder of a start-up called Pinboard, made waves in the Valley and beyond when he gave a talk comparing VCs first to the landed lords of feudal England, then to the central planners who once ran his native Poland:
There’s something very fishy about California capitalism.
Investing has become the genteel occupation of our gentry, like having a country estate used to be in England. It’s a class marker and a socially acceptable way for rich techies to pass their time. Gentlemen investors decide what ideas are worth pursuing, and the people pitching to them tailor their proposals accordingly.
The companies that come out of this are no longer pursuing profit, or even revenue. Instead, the measure of their success is valuation—how much money they’ve convinced people to tell them they’re worth.
There’s an element of fantasy to the whole enterprise that even the tech elite is starting to find unsettling.
We had people like this back in Poland, except instead of venture capitalists we called them central planners. They, too, were in charge of allocating vast amounts of money that didn’t belong to them.
They, too, honestly believed they were changing the world, and offered the same kinds of excuses about why our day-to-day life bore no relation to the shiny, beautiful world that was supposed to lie just around the corner.
Over a generation, America has grappled with one problem after another that could be said to have contributed to the decay of its politics and many people’s livelihoods. The American social contract has frayed, and workers’ lives have grown more precarious, and mobility has slowed. These are hard and important problems. The new winners of the age might well have participated in the writing of a new social contract for a new age, a new vision of economic security for ordinary people in a globalized and digitized world. But as we’ve seen, they actually made the situation worse by seeking to bust unions and whatever other worker protections still lingered and to remake more and more of the society as an always-on labor market in which workers were downbidding one another for millions of little fleeting gigs. “Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by start-ups,” the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham once tweeted.
As America’s level of inequality spread to ever more unmanageable levels, these MarketWorld winners might have helped out. Looking within their own communities would have told them what they needed to know. Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stands in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good. Diverting the public’s
attention from an issue like offshore banking worsens the big problems, even as these MarketWorlders shower attention on niche causes.
As life expectancy declined among large subpopulations of Americans, winners possessed of a sense of having arrived might have chipped in. They might have taken an interest in the details of a health care system that was allowing the unusual phenomenon of a developed country regressing in this way, or in the persistence of easily preventable deaths in the developing world. They might not have thought of themselves at all, given how long they were likely to live because of their tremendous advantages. “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” Bill Gates has said.
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Perhaps the most unlikely featured speaker at Summit at Sea was Edward Snowden, American whistleblower, scourge of the National Security Agency. He was in Russia, coming to the ship via video. His interviewer was Chris Sacca, a wildly successful VC (Instagram, Kickstarter, Twitter, Uber). One of the founders of Summit walked onstage and said, “We need truth-tellers and thought leaders like Chris Sacca.” Two truth-tellers for the price of one.
Sacca, taking the stage, praised Summit for becoming what he called “a platform for entrepreneurship, for justice.” He said it as if the two were the same. Then he interviewed Snowden for a time, eliciting what had become his whistleblower stump speech. At one point, the man in Moscow began to say what would quicken the heart of any chaser of Valley glory. The world’s most famous leaker spoke of the need to build new communication tools that went beyond encryption to be entirely untraceable so that even the fact of a conversation having occurred between two people would remain unknown. He talked about “tokenizing identity,” giving people ways of participating in the online communities of the age without becoming vulnerable to being followed from platform to platform and having people know every book they had read, every movement they had participated in, every friend they had made.
“When we think about the civil rights movement,” Snowden said, “when we think about every social progress that’s happened throughout history, going all the way back to the Renaissance, going back to people thinking about heretical ideas—‘Hey, maybe the world is not flat’—even making these arguments, challenging conventions, challenging the structures of law on any given day itself is a violation of law. And if the minute somebody starts engaging in heretical thinking, the minute somebody breaks a law, even if it’s a simple minor regulation, if that can be instantly detected, interdicted, and then remediated through some kind of penalty or sanction, not only would we never see start-ups like Uber get off the ground, but it will freeze human social progress in place. Because you’ll no longer have the chance to challenge orthodoxies without being immediately singled out, thrown off in the pen, having no possibility or capability to build a critical mass that could lead to change.”
Perhaps in an effort to be courteous to his entrepreneurial audience, Snowden had tucked a mention of a start-up into his much grander vision of heresy, thereby destroying whatever chance he had for his ideas to be heard as they were intended. He had ensured that Sacca, and presumably many others, would now hear his revolutionary words and think only of investment.
“So I invest in founders for a living,” Sacca said, staring up at the giant screen. “And I gotta tell you, as I listen to you, I smell a founder here. You’re talking about these things that need to be built. Are you going to build any of them? Because there’s probably investors waiting for you here.”
Snowden seemed taken aback. Here he was talking about heresy and truth and freedom, and now he was being asked about a start-up. Flummoxed, he tried to let Sacca down politely: “I do have a number of projects that are actively in motion. But I take a little bit of a different view from a lot of people who need venture capital, who are trying to get investors. I don’t like to promote things. I don’t like to say I’m working on this particular system to solve this particular problem. I would rather simply do it, at the minimum expenditure of resources, and then be judged on the basis of results. If it works, if it expands, that’s wonderful. But ultimately, for me, I don’t tend to think that I’m going to be working in a commercial space. So I would rather say, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ ”
It was a kindly delivered rebuke to MarketWorld’s way of life. Here was a man who didn’t like to promote himself, who didn’t crave money, who was actually fighting the system, and willing to lose for the greater good to win.
At Summit, Snowden called for “one spot, anywhere in the world, where we can experiment, where we can be safe.” For him, this was a serious vision perhaps involving life and death. Entrepreneurs, as if to mimic genuine renegades, tended to invoke the same idea, but in their case it was less about challenging power than about amassing and protecting it. The entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel called for floating “seasteading” communities far from the reach of law. Larry Page, the cofounder of Google, reportedly said, “As technologists, we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society.” The technology investor Balaji Srinivasan called for the winners of the digital revolution to secede from the ungrateful world of Luddites and complainers—“Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” as he put it—using tools, like those Snowden had imagined, to “build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology.”
What connects these various notions is a fantasy of living free of government. These rich and powerful men engage in what the writer Kevin Roose has called “anarchist cheerleading,” in keeping with their carefully crafted image as rebels against the authorities. To call for a terrain without rules in the way they do, to dabble in this anarchist cheerleading, may be to sound like you wished for a new world of freedom on behalf of humankind. But a long line of thinkers has told us that the powerful tend to be the big winners from the creation of blank-slate, rules-free worlds. A famous statement of that finding came from the feminist writer Jo Freeman, who in her 1972 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” observed that when groups operate on vague or anarchic terms, structurelessness “becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.”
Freeman’s idea could be traced back to the Enlightenment and Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes also believed that structurelessness wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, especially for the weak. The powerful Leviathan for which he advocated is often treated as shorthand for monarchy or authoritarianism. But in fact what Hobbes suggested was that the choice is not between authority and liberty, but between authority of one sort and authority of another. Someone always rules; the question is who. In a world without a Leviathan, which is to say a strong state capable of making and enforcing universal rules, people will be ruled by thousands of miniature Leviathans closer to home—by the feudal lords on whose soil they work and against whom they have few defenses; by powerful, whimsical, unaccountable princes.
Hobbes articulated a vision of an authority in which everyone had a formal legal investment, an authority that belonged to us in common and that trumped local authorities. He believed that there could be greater liberty under such an authority than in its absence: “Men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all.” In a world without rules, he wrote, “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.” The cardinal virtues in a such a world are “force and fraud.”
The self-styled entrepreneur-rebels were actually seeking to overturn a major project of the Enlightenment—the development of universal rules that applied evenly to all, freeing people from the particularisms of their villages, churches, and domains. The world that these elites seemed to envision, in which rules receded and entrepreneurs reigned
through the market, augured a return to private manors—allowing the Earl of Facebook and the Lord of Google to make major decisions about our shared fate outside of democracy. It would be a world that let them deny their power over the serfs around them by appropriating a language of community and love, movements and win-wins. They would keep on speaking of changing the world. But many, down in the world, would feel, not without reason, that what was bleak in the world somehow wasn’t changing.
It is not inevitable that what passes for progress in our age involves the concentration of power into a small number of hands and the issuance of stories about the powerful being fighters for the little guy. There are people thinking about other, more honest ways of making the world a better place, and thinking freely, without the burdensome MarketWorld requirement that progress must tend to the winners and obey their rules. But it is not easy to compete with MarketWorld for the resources and branding power it is able to throw at its works.
A few months after Summit, an event at the Goethe Institute in New York offered a very different vision for the digital age. It was a meeting of a budding movement called “platform cooperativism.” Here was a conversation about making the world better that eschewed the win-win commandment that the powerful should benefit from any change for that change to be worth doing. Platform cooperativism is a movement that seeks to make true what Silicon Valley claims is already occurring, proposing “a new kind of online economy,” as one of its digital pamphlets put it:
For all the wonders the Internet brings us, it is dominated by an economics of monopoly, extraction, and surveillance. Ordinary users retain little control over their personal data, and the digital workplace is creeping into every corner of workers’ lives. Online platforms often exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities in society, even while promising to be the great equalizers. Could the Internet be owned and governed differently?
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 9