by Andrew Keen
And then there’s “the largest open office space in the world,”84 which Mark Zuckerberg has hired Frank Gehry to build for Facebook’s 3,400 employees. Zuckerberg’s new office resembles Facebook itself: an intensely opaque, secretive company that has built its multibillion-dollar brand upon the lies of transparency and openness. This building might be internally “open,” but—like the new Google or Apple corporate city-states dotting the Silicon Valley landscape—it will be firmly shut off from the outside world. Indeed, Zuckerberg, the high priest of everybody else’s personal transparency, revealed his own personal commitment to “openness” and “collaboration” when, in October 2013, he spent more than $30 million buying the four houses surrounding his Palo Alto house to guarantee his absolute privacy from the outside world.85
As in the medieval world, Google, Apple, and Facebook have detached themselves from the physical reality of the increasingly impoverished communities around them. These companies provide so many free services to their employees—from gourmet meals, babysitting, and gyms, to dry cleaning, medical services, and even living spaces—that they are destroying businesses that have traditionally relied on the business patronage of local workers. The same is even happening in San Francisco. Twitter’s new downtown offices feature an in-house dining area called “The Commons,” where gourmet meals are always available. But, as the New York Times’ Allison Arieff notes, Twitter’s free food service, while uncommonly good for Twitter employees, has destroyed the business of local restaurants and cafés.86 So once again, the end result is more distance, literally and otherwise, in what the Weekly Standard’s Charlotte Allen called the new “Silicon chasm” in the Bay Area, between digital billionaires and analog beggars.87
“It’s the opposite of gentrification,”88 one local critic noted. Yes. And the opposite of gentrification is the impoverishment of communities that have the misfortune of being located next to buildings that resemble spaceships or artificial algorithms. Forget about regional declarations of independence. Internet companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter have actually declared independence—architecturally or otherwise—from everything around them. The digital overlords have seceded from the analog peasants. It’s the ultimate exit.
CONCLUSION
THE ANSWER
The Fancy-Dress Affair
I first met Michael Birch, the owner of the Battery social club, at a party in Marin County, the exclusive suburb over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge where Tom Perkins has one of his trophy mansions. It was one of those rather tiresome sixties nostalgia affairs at which everyone squeezes into the bell-bottomed trousers, Mary Quant miniskirts, and psychedelic shirts of the fifty-year-old counterculture. As a cultural event, it was about as historically authentic as the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. But the slightly built, bespectacled Birch, with his long blond flowing hair, already resembled a hippie, with or without the tight purple shirt and matching headband he was wearing for the party. There was a strangely ethereal quality to the Anglo-American entrepreneur. As if he’d just stepped out of an alien spaceship.
We talked beside the hot tub, which, in good Marin County tradition, was already full of revelers. “Hey brother,” I asked, trying, without much success, to capture the party’s vibe. “What’s goin’ on?”
What was going on with Michael Birch was the Battery. As we stood together in the warm California evening, he pitched me his vision for the unclub. He explained how he wanted to bring a diverse community together. “Different-thinking people” is how Birch, in the oddly detached language of a Web programmer, put it. He spoke dispassionately about his “social project,” which, he told me, would build community and understanding in San Francisco. With his half-British accent and eccentric air, he might have been Jeremy Bentham detailing, with mathematical precision, the social utility of his greatest happiness principle.
“How do you become a member?” I asked.
“We want diversity. Anyone original will be welcome,” he explained in a mid-Atlantic drawl. “Especially people who think outside their traditional silos.”
“Sounds like the Internet,” I said. “Or a village pub.”
“Exactly,” he said, without smiling.
“So could I join?”
The social engineer peered at me suspiciously, unconvinced, I suspect, by my ability to think outside any silo. “You have to be nominated by a member,” he mumbled.
He did, however, invite me to visit the Battery. “Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll come for lunch.”
“Cool,” he said.
But cool, once the aesthetic of genuine rebellion, is no longer cool. The rebellious, disruptive culture of “cool” has instead become the orthodoxy of our networked age. Thomas Friedman describes the social forces of global upheaval, the so-called new Davos Men, as the “Square People”1—but the real square people of our networked age are those who see themselves as uniquely disruptive. “If you need to inform the world that you are original,” notes the Financial Times’ Edward Luce dryly, “chances are you are not.”2 Beware “Silicon Valley’s cool capitalism,” warns the Observer’s Nick Cohen about alien overlords like Birch, Kevin Systrom, and Sean Parker, who’ve become the slickly marketed icons of what Cohen calls networked capitalism’s “borderless future.” This libertarian worship of the unregulated network and disdain for government destroys jobs “without creating new ones,” Cohen explains, and it compounds “the already dizzying chasm between the rich and the rest.”3
The origins of this infinitely disruptive libertarianism, of the only rule being the absence of rules, can be traced back to the 1960s. According to the Stanford University historian Fred Turner, the Internet’s borderless idealism, and its ahistorical disdain for hierarchy and authority, especially the traditional role of government, were inherited from the countercultural ideas of Internet pioneers like WELL founder Stewart Brand and the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” author John Perry Barlow.4 Silicon Valley, Turner says, has become an extension of the fancy-dress affair in Marin County where I met Michael Birch. It’s a sixties nostalgia fantasy hosted by space cadets like Birch who appear to have seceded from both time and space.
To borrow some of Apple’s most familiar marketing language, everybody now is supposed to “think different.” Unorthodoxy is the new orthodoxy in a world where the supposedly most different kind of thinkers—those who have escaped their traditional silo—are branded as the new rock stars. The only convention is to be unconventional and work for uncompanies, join unclubs, or attend unconferences. But today’s technology hipsters aren’t quite as cool as they imagine. Steve Jobs, the founding father of Silicon Valley’s “reality distortion field” and the original tech hipster, who idolized Bob Dylan and spent a summer in an ashram, also outsourced the manufacturing of Apple products in Foxconn’s notorious 430,000-person Shenzhen factory.5 And Jobs ran an astonishingly profitable company that, according to the US senator Carl Levin, has been cleverly avoiding paying the American government a million dollars of tax revenue per hour.6 Rather than “Think Different,” “Think Irresponsibly” might have been the mantra of the Apple accountants who organized this unethical and possibly even illegal scheme to avoid paying American tax.
So how can we really think differently about the crisis? What’s the most innovative strategy for disrupting the disruptors?
Disrupting the Disruptors
Just as there are many questions about today’s networked society, so everyone—from activists to writers to entrepreneurs to academics to governments—has their own answer to the Internet’s failure to realize most of its much-trumpeted promise. Some of these answers are more coherent and viable than others. But they all are understandable responses to the wrenching economic and social dislocation of networked society.
For the outraged, the knee-jerk answer is smashing the windows of Google buses and calling for the “dismantling of techno-industrial society.”7 For the more contemplative, the answer
is switching off the network through “digital detoxes,”8 technology Sabbaths, or joining the “slow Web” movement.9 For idealistic Web pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, the answer is an online “Magna Carta,” a digital Bill of Rights that protects the Web’s neutrality and openness against both governments and Internet corporations.10 For other publicly spirited technologists, the answer is developing anti-Google or anti-Facebook products like the “no tracking” search engine DuckDuckGo, the open-source and nonprofit social network Diaspora, and even an ambitiously decentralized project called Bitcloud that aims to create a new Internet.11 For curated websites like Popular Science, which have tired of the inanity of most user-generated content, the answer is banning anonymous comments.12 For Germany, the answer is in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2014 proposal to build a European network where data wouldn’t pass through the United States.13 The answer for the German government may even lie—irony of ironies—in reverting to the technology of the Stasi and using analog typewriters for secret communications, in an effort to protect itself from foreign snoops.14
For cultural theorists like Jaron Lanier, the answer is in reinventing the business model of online content to “multitudinous, diverse, tiny flows of royalties.”15 For political critics like the technology scholar Tim Wu and the Financial Times columnist John Gapper, the answer lies in Internet entrepreneurs growing out of their “obsessive adolescence” and taking adult responsibility for disruptions like Bitcoin.16 For humanists like Nicholas Carr, the answer lies in us shaping our networked tools before they shape us. For Internet skeptics like Talking Heads founder and lyricist David Byrne, the answer is that there isn’t an answer. “What will life be like after the Internet?” Byrne asks, with his characteristic dark humor. “I mean nothing lasts forever, right?”17
In the European Union, where there is a particular sensitivity about data privacy, one controversial answer lies in establishing a “right to be forgotten” law that bans inaccurate and accurate but unflattering online search engine links. While this law, at least in its mid-2014 form, is slightly impractical,18 it is nonetheless an important beginning to the legal debate about controlling online misinformation. “Discombobulated geniuses” like the hypertext inventor Ted Nelson might think that the network shouldn’t have a “concept of deletion,” but for the rest of us—especially those whose reputations have been compromised by vicious online smears—there is clearly a need for some sort of “right to be forgotten” legislation that enables us to delete links to these lies.
And yet if there is just one answer, a single solution, to the Internet’s epic failure, it is the opposite of forgetting. That answer is more memory—of the human rather than the computer kind. The answer is history.
It’s not just Michael Birch who has seceded from time and space. Fukuyama may have thought that history ended in 1989, but it’s that other world-historic 1989 event, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, that has unintentionally created another, more troubling version of the end of history.
“I recently took my 16-year-old daughter Adele to see a section of the Berlin Wall that has been preserved as part of a museum devoted to the division of the city, Germany and Europe. It was a bright Berlin morning,” writes the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen about revisiting the divided Berlin of Erich Mielke and the Stasi. “Adele, born in 1997, with just a toehold in the last century, wandered around. She examined these curious relics. Every now and again she checked her Facebook page on her device. ‘This just seems so ancient,’ she said, leaning back against the wall. ‘I mean, it feels like it comes from the 19th century.’”19
At least Adele Cohen has a sense of the past, even if she misidentifies it by a hundred years. But for many of her generation of Internet natives, the only time is the perpetual present. As the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland explains, today’s networked generation, in their preoccupation with “trading Instagrams and Vines,” has created an intimate, always-on culture that will—like a disappearing Snapchat photograph—vanish forever and leave nothing to posterity. “The point is that a fundamental aspect of human life—memory—is being altered by the digital revolution,” Freedland warns.20 The savage irony is that the more accurately the Internet remembers everything, the more our memories atrophy. The result is an amnesia about everything except the immediate, the instant, the now, and the me. It’s the end of history as a shared communal memory, the end of our collective engagement with the past and the future. “Once we had a nostalgia for the future,” warns Mark Lilla. “Today we have an amnesia for the present.”21
“The libertarian age,” Lilla argues, “is an illegible age.”22 But this isn’t quite right, either. It might be illegible for a traditional historian like Lilla, but not for a seasoned observer of networked society like the American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. “I had been looking forward to the 21st century,” Rushkoff writes at the beginning of his 2014 book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.23 But “looking forward,” Rushkoff confesses, has gone out of fashion in our networked age of real-time technology. Twentieth-century futurism, he says, has been replaced with a chaotic twenty-first-century “now-ist” culture that resembles Jonas Lindvist’s pointillist graphical image on the wall of the Ericsson’s Stockholm office. Rather than futurists, Rushkoff observes, we are all now “presentists” locked in to a mesmerizing loop of tweets, updates, emails, and instant messages. It’s this “narrative collapse,” he says, that makes sense of our hyperconnected world. It’s what makes networked society legible.
And so to rebel against this world, to think differently, to question Silicon Valley’s ahistorical confidence, means reviving the authority of our collective narrative. It’s particularly through the lens of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history that we can best make sense of the impact of the Internet on twenty-first-century society. The past makes the present legible. It’s the most effective antidote to the libertarian utopianism of Internet evangelists like John Perry Barlow, who imagines the Internet as something like a fancy-dress rave in exclusive Marin County, where, perhaps not uncoincidentally, Barlow also happens to live.
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind,” Barlow wrote in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. And this fantasy of imagining the Internet magically floating outside time and space, as an unplace, away from the authority of traditional laws, has become the standard justification for Silicon Valley disruption. No wonder the cult book among multibillionaire libertarian entrepreneurs like Sean Parker and Peter Thiel is Tolkien’s fantasy The Lord of the Rings. Thiel named Palantir, “the creepiest startup ever,” according to one British technology journalist,24 after the seeing stones in Tolkien’s trilogy. And Parker spent $10 million in June 2013 on a shamelessly meretricious Lord of the Rings–style wedding in the California forest featuring fake medieval stone castles, gates, bridges, and columns.
“For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say, or buy anything,” one of the young engineers I met at FailCon promised, articulating a faith in the Internet so magically redemptive that it resembles a Tolkienesque fantasy. He was, however, wrong. Not for the first (or last) time in history, believers are using dramatic language like for the first time in history to tout a revolution that isn’t really new. Yes, the decentralized network accidentally created by Cold War scientists like Paul Baran and Robert Kahn is original. Yes, today’s data factory economy is, in many ways, different from the factories of the industrial age. Yes, Internet technology is fundamentally changing how we communicate and do business with each other. But while all this technology might be novel, it hasn’t transformed the role of either power or wealth in the world. Indeed, when it comes to the importance of money and influence, Silicon Valley is about as traditional as those three thousand bottles of vintage wine in the Battery’s illustrious cellar.
History is, in many ways, repeating itself. Today’s digital upheaval repre
sents what MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call the “second industrial revolution.” “Badass” entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick and Peter Thiel have much in common with the capitalist robber barons of the first industrial revolution. Internet monopolists like Google and Amazon increasingly resemble the bloated multinationals of the industrial epoch. The struggle of eighteenth-century Yorkshire cloth workers is little different from today’s resistance of organized labor to Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb. Our growing concern with the pollution of “data exhaust” is becoming the equivalent of the environmental movement for the digital age. Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have reassembled the Bentham brothers’ eighteenth-century Panopticon as data factories. Bentham’s utilitarianism, that bizarre project to quantify every aspect of the human condition, has reappeared in the guise of the quantified-self movement. Even the nineteenth-century debate between Bentham’s utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill’s liberalism over individual rights has reappeared in what Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein calls “the politics of libertarian paternalism”—a struggle between “Millville” and “Benthamville” about the role of “nudge” in a world where the government, through partnerships with companies like Acxiom and Palantir, has more and more data on us all25 and Internet companies like Facebook and OkCupid run secretive experiments designed to control our mood.