The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen

  The Internet hasn’t really benefited most San Franciscans, either. Wave after wave of speculative tech booms have made San Francisco almost as exclusive a private club as Michael and Xochi Birch’s Battery, with the city ranking as one of America’s four most unequal cities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.48 It’s a view of the city that the snap-happy tourists on top of those red double-decker buses never get to see. In 2013, San Francisco’s median house price of $900,000 and monthly rent of $3,250 had made the city unaffordable to 86% of its residents.49 Evictions are up, too, an overall 38% increase between 2011 and 2013, in large part due to the 1985 Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict renters and leave the rental housing business. These evictions are up by 170% over the same period.50 The Internet’s so-called sharing economy has compounded the problem, with the increasing profitability of unregulated Airbnb rentals being one reason for the surge in Ellis Act evictions.51 One San Francisco tenant even sued his Russian Hill landlords for “unjust eviction” in 2014 because, rather than moving into the apartment themselves, they rented his $1,840-a-month apartment out on Airbnb for up to $145 a night.52

  “Warning: Two-Tier System.” Protesters in San Francisco’s Mission District waved such a construction-style sign outside the Google buses.53 “Public $$$$$$$$$ Private Gains,” another sign said.54 Others were less polite about these mysterious buses’ whisking their expensive cargo of privileged, mostly young white male workers down to Silicon Valley. “Fuck off Google,” came the message from West Oakland.55

  Rebecca Solnit’s drawing attention to the “Google Bus,” which rides on public infrastructure and stops at public bus stops but is a private service run by private companies, has become the most public symbol now of this economic division between Silicon Valley and everyone else.

  “I think of them as the spaceships,” is how Solnit describes this new feudal power structure in Silicon Valley, “on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.”

  Class Warfare

  These alien overlords certainly don’t have much sympathy for the city’s poor and homeless. “San Francisco has some of the craziest homeless people I have ever seen in my life. Stop giving them money, you know they just buy alcohol and drugs with it, right? Next time just hand them a handle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes,” one founder of an Internet startup wrote in a notorious post titled “10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition.”56 Another tech founder and CEO was even more blunt, calling San Francisco’s homeless “grotesque . . . degenerate . . . trash.”57

  Equally disturbing are the technorati’s solutions to the poverty and hunger afflicting many Bay Area residents. In May 2014, the Google engineer and libertarian activist Justine Tunney, who in 2013 tried to fund a private militia on Kickstarter,58 came up with the idea of replacing food stamps with Soylent, a “food product” that claims to “provide maximum nutrition with minimum effort.”

  “Give poor people @soylent so they can be healthy and productive. If you’re on food stamps, maybe you’re unhealthy and need to eat better,” Tunney tweeted, without bothering to check first with people on food stamps to see if they wanted to eat what the technology critic J. R. Hennessy calls “tasteless nutrition sludge.”59 No matter. In a month, Tunney had raised $1 million on Kickstarter for a repellent social experiment that brings to mind Soylent Green, the 1974 dystopian movie about a world in which the dominant food product was made of human remains.

  This libertarian elite doesn’t have much affection for labor unions and the industrial working class, either. When, in 2013, the city’s metro system union, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) workers, went on strike over the threats of automation to their jobs and their relatively low pay in one of America’s most expensive cities, the technology community erupted in a storm of moral outrage.

  “My solution would be to pay whatever the hell they want, get them back to work, and then go figure out how to automate their jobs,” the CEO of one tech startup wrote on Facebook.60 Indeed, much of the “work” being done by Google-acquired robotic companies like Nest, Boston Dynamics, and DeepMind is focused on figuring out how to automate the jobs of traditional workers such as BART drivers. “Coming to an office near you,” we’ve been warned about the automated technology of the future. And, just as Google is developing the self-driving car, there is no doubt some innovative Google engineer is working on an automated train that won’t employ either drivers, guards, or ticket takers.

  If poor people and unions are the problem for Silicon Valley’s tech elite, then technology, and the Internet in particular, is always the answer. And it’s this delusional “thinking” that has infected San Francisco, transforming one of the world’s most diverse cities—a place that has historically, as Solnit reminds us, been a “refuge for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists”61—into a laboratory for an outsourced, networked economy that wants to feed people Soylent and employ them to wait in lines.

  Technology companies, and technology in general, are beginning to replace government in San Francisco. The city is granting massive tax breaks to San Francisco–based Internet companies in exchange for charity and outreach work. And the result is a predictable set of self-interested “charity” projects such as private monthlong dance classes held for Yammer employees by a local ballet company. “Instead of job training, there are cocktail parties,” as one technology blog describes the consequences of this outsourcing of political responsibilities to multibillion-dollar private companies like Twitter. “Community engagements equal Yelp reviews written by and for techies. And some of the ‘giving back’ initiatives conveniently double as employee perks, stretching the definition of charity.”62

  The libertarian fantasy of private companies usurping government is, I’m afraid, becoming a reality. “It’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in L.A. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” boasted Chamath Palihapitiya, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose Social+Capital fund includes Peter Thiel as an investor. “Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter.”

  The Battery member and Uber investor Shervin Pishevar expressed this same techno-libertarian fantasy in under 140 characters. “Let’s just TaskRabbit and Uberize the Government,” Pishevar tweeted to his 57,000 followers.63

  He might as well have said: Let’s just TaskRabbit and Uberize the economy. Let’s just turn everything into the so-called sharing economy, a hyperefficient and frictionless platform for networked buyers and sellers. Let’s outsource labor so that everyone is paid by the day, by the hour, by the minute. Because that’s indeed what is happening to the Bay Area economy, with some Oakland residents even crowdfunding their own private police force64 and Facebook (of course) being the first US private company to pay for a full-time, privately paid “community safety police officer” on its campus.65

  Pishevar probably believes that unions should be Uberized and TaskRabbited, too. But, of course, with freelance Web service platforms like TaskRabbit—which provide such short-term “jobs” as waiting in line to buy a new iPhone on behalf of one of San Francisco’s lazy “meritocrats”—there is no role for unions, no place for anything protecting the rights of the laborer, no collective sense of identity, no dignity of work. TaskRabbit has even managed to offend traditional freelancers, with the executive director of the FreelanceUnion arguing that “the trend of stripping work down to discrete, short-term projects without benefits for workers is troubling.”66

  TaskRabbit calls its iPhone service #SkipTheLine. But actually, the economic system being rigged up is all about the Bay Area’s wealthy techies—who, surprise-surprise, tend to be as white, male, and young as those awesome dudes at FailCon—skipping a more fundamental line. It’s
a two-tier system of overlords and the unemployed, the underemployed and the occasionally employed. An economy in which menial tasks are handled by an outsourced underclass who will do anything for an hourly rate on labor networks like TaskRabbit—from cleaning houses to outsourcing romantic errands. Rather than revolutionizing the world’s labor force, TaskRabbit is commodifying life itself so that everything—from buying a rose to waiting in line—can be bought and sold.

  Secession

  In a May 2013 speech to his company’s Internet developers, Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and CEO, confessed his fantasy about the future. “We are at maybe 1% of what is possible. We should be focused on building the things that don’t exist,” he said.67 “Maybe we could set apart a piece of the world. I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things.” Thus did Page lay out what one critic identified as his “techno-libertarian utopia.”68

  Burning Man, the annual countercultural festival of what it calls “radical self-expression” and “self-reliance”69 in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, has already established itself as one of the most fashionable events on the Silicon Valley calendar, with tech entrepreneurs bringing their own celebrity chefs, hiring teams of “Sherpas” to treat them like “kings and queens,” and erecting air-conditioned yurts in the desert.70 But Page’s vision is to take Burning Man out of the desert. “I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society,” he explained to his developers. “What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.”

  But Page—or “Larry,” as everyone in Silicon Valley likes to call this member of America’s 0.0001% multibillionaire class—may already have the “safe place” for his vision of secession. That laboratory where technologists can experiment with new things on society actually exists. Burning Man has already been liberated from the Nevada desert. It is now called San Francisco.

  Today the San Francisco Bay Area has become the vehicle, both literally as a transportation network and otherwise, for a radical experiment in “self-reliance.” As the laboratory for the most important social experiment of our age, the Bay Area has come to represent a libertarian fantasy about how Internet companies can somehow detach themselves from their wider responsibilities in society and how networked technology can replace government. Never mind Larry Page’s hubristic claim about achieving “the 1% of what is possible”; the really relevant one percent are that minority of wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Page who are massively profiting from what New York magazine’s Kevin Roose calls a “regional declaration of independence.”71 It’s an experimental fantasy of outsourced labor, hostility to labor unions, a cult of efficiency and automated technology, a mad display of corporate arrogance, and an even crazier celebration of an ever-widening economic and cultural inequality in San Francisco.

  The fantasy of secession from the real world, the reinvention of the “New Frontier” myth, has become one of those fashionable memes, like the cult of failure, now sweeping through Silicon Valley. While PayPal cofounder and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is planning to establish an 80,000-person high-tech colony on Mars,72 others are focused on building their fantasy high-tech colonies within Northern California itself. The third-generation Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper is launching a 2014 “Six Californias” ballot measure to redraw California into six separate US states, including one called “Silicon Valley.”73 And the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who boasted at FailCon about his own failure, has already seceded. Having bought a $37.5 million, 89-acre property in Half Moon Bay, a coastal town just south of San Francisco, Khosla unilaterally declared independence and blocked all public access to a much-loved local beach beside his property.74

  Balaji Srinivasan, a Stanford University lecturer and startup entrepreneur, has taken the secession fantasy one crazy step further. At one of Paul Graham’s “Failure Central” Y Combinator startup events, Srinivasan pitched the concept of what he called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,” a complete withdrawal of Silicon Valley from the United States. “We need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology,” is how he described a ridiculous fantasy that would turn Silicon Valley into a kind of free-floating island that Wired’s Bill Wasik satirizes as the “offshore plutocracy of Libertaristan.”75 And one group of “Libertaristanians” at the Peter Thiel–funded, Silicon Valley–based Seasteading Institute, founded by Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and the grandson of the granddaddy of free-market economics, Milton Friedman, has even begun to plan floating utopias that would drift off the Pacific coast.76

  Behind all these secession fantasies is the very concrete reality of the secession of the rich from everyone else in Silicon Valley. Forget the floating utopias of Libertaristan. What we are seeing in the San Francisco Bay Area is the actual emergence of two separate and radically unequal worlds: one, a privileged, privatized place for the wealthy tech caste; the other, a shabbier, public one for everyone else. It represents what Joel Kotkin calls “a high-tech version of feudal society”—a type of society in which people may appear to live, travel, and work in the same physical space, but are actually residents of two quite foreign universes. These twin realms are separated by what the New York Times’ Timothy Egan describes as the “texture of inequality”77—a marked chasm in Bay Area quality of life affecting everything from real estate and transportation to work and corporate architecture.

  Google, the owner and operator of the world’s largest and most profitable data factory, dominates this reinvented feudal landscape. Take flying, for example. When I flew to Rochester from San Francisco via the joyless Chicago O’Hare Airport, I traveled, like 99% of regular travelers do, on scheduled aircraft that were both cramped and almost always delayed. But multibillionaires like Google’s cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and executive chairman Eric Schmidt not only fly on their own private jets, but even have their own private Bay Area airport, at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Page, Brin, and Schmidt have six luxury planes: Boeing 757 and 767 intercontinental aircraft, three Gulfstream 5 long-range jets, and a Dassault Alpha light attack jet capable of firing an impressive array of guns, rockets, missiles, and bombs. Best of all, at least from Page, Brin, and Schmidt’s point of view, Google has even been subsidized by NASA for cheap fuel, after what the agency’s inspector general described as a “misunderstanding” over pricing.78 So many of their jaunts around the world—from charity events in Africa to their presence at the World Economic Forum in Davos—are actually in part funded by public money.

  Google’s determination to reinvent reality can be seen in its plans to create a new Googleplex office, a medieval-style walled city called “Bay View”—featuring entirely self-enclosed offices, restaurants, gyms, laundries, crèches, even dormitories—that will, in good feudal fashion, cut off its privileged workers from everything around them. According to Vanity Fair, the 1.1-million-square-foot offices will be organized on strict algorithmic principles so that no Google worker will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk from any other Googler.79 Funded, of course, by all of our free labor, the creepy Bay View will be made up of nine identical four-story buildings designed to engineer serendipity by maximizing “casual collisions of the workforce.”

  While the proposed Bay View office might not quite have the breathtaking panoramas offered from the top of San Francisco’s tourist buses, it nonetheless should offer sufficiently good views to allow all the Google workers to see the new high-speed catamarans hired by their company to ferry them around the Bay.80 On a clear day, they might even catch sight of a four-story Google barge about the size of the Battery, which the company operates as a floating classroom to educate workers as they travel around the Bay.81

  Boat, barge, airplane, and bus travel are all being reinvented by Google so that its employees can commute to Bay View on fast, luxurious, and exclusively private vehicles that will run on publicly funde
d highways and seaways. Perhaps Google will even open its own Bay View airport so that it can house a squadron of Dassault jets to repel invaders from Mars or Washington, D.C.

  Google is far from alone among tech leviathans in turning contemporary reality into a feudal landscape replete with high-tech castles, moats, and towers. Silicon Valley is transforming itself into a medieval tableau—a jarring landscape of dreadfully impoverished and high-crime communities like East Palo Alto, littered with unemployed people on food stamps, interspersed with fantastically wealthy and entirely self-reliant tech-cities designed by world-famous architects such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry.

  Apple, a company that has been accused of cheating the US government out of $44 billion in tax revenue between 2009 and 2012,82 is building a Norman Foster–designed $5 billion Silicon Valley headquarters that will feature a 2.8-million-square-foot circular, four-story building containing a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 3,000-seat café, and office space for 13,000 employees.83 Before he died, Steve Jobs described Foster’s design for the new building as looking a “little like a spaceship.” Elon Musk should take note. After all, what’s the point of colonizing Mars when Martian architecture is already colonizing the Bay Area?