Tech backlash: ‘Maybe Silicon Valley needs to be taken down to size’
Tech backlash: ‘Maybe Silicon Valley needs to be taken
down to size’
By ETHAN BARON PUBLISHED: March 19, 2018 at 5:00 am
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful land filled with
bright minds and gleaming prospects. People called it Silicon Valley, and out
of it flowed knowledge, ideas and innovations that gave us almost-unthinkable
powers to learn, to communicate, to transform our lives into exactly what we
wanted them to be. The region’s denizens toiled happily at the cutting edge,
and day by day, they were Making the World a Better Place.
But today, this beautiful land is under attack from
within and without. The products and
services it sends out into the world are being called addictive, divisive and
even damaging, raising the cry that instead of making the world better, they
are making it worse.
As technology plays a deeper and more pervasive role in
nearly every aspect of our lives, the industry that has upended everything from
shopping and travel to education and human relationships is facing a backlash
the likes of which Silicon Valley has never seen.
Polarizing online content and Russian manipulation of
social media platforms have fueled calls from the right and the left for
greater regulation of firms like Google, Facebook and Twitter. World wide web
inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Republican U.S. Senator John McCain, leftist billionaire
George Soros, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and conservative Fox News host Tucker
Carlson have all joined the chorus demanding the government take action.
Critics argue that the big tech firms have become too
economically dominant, intruded too far into our lives and have too much
control over what gets seen and shared online. At the same time, critics
contend, those same companies have failed to take responsibility for the misuse
of their services by malevolent actors, for the spread of fake news and for the
way their platforms and algorithms can be gamed.
Stanford computer science students are protesting Apple,
demanding it make less addictive devices.
The #MeToo movement has amplified a debate over sexual
harassment and diversity in Silicon Valley. And conservatives have attacked the
whole region as a liberal echo chamber that stifles precisely the open debate
it claims to embrace.
Thus the backlash.
“What makes it categorically different now is that this
is the first time I have seen that people are saying, ‘Hmmm, maybe Silicon
Valley needs to be taken down to size,’ said Leslie Berlin, project historian
for Stanford University’s Silicon Valley
Archives. “This notion that what Silicon Valley represents actually threatens
rather than embodies what makes the country great, that is new.”
Berners-Lee in an open letter this month called the tech
giants “a new set of gatekeepers” whose platforms can be “weaponised” to widen
social rifts and interfere in elections. Benioff told CNBC in January that
social media was “addictive” and should be regulated like cigarettes. Carlson
wants Google treated like a public utility because it “shuts down free speech
for political reasons.” Former president
Barack Obama, at a February conference at MIT, said social media was
Balkanizing public discourse, creating “entirely different realities” that
contribute to “gridlock and venom and polarization in politics.” Even Facebook
has jumped in with an unusual mea culpa, issuing a news release in February
admitting it was “far too slow to recognize how bad actors were abusing our
platform.”
Despite its critics, Silicon Valley remains hugely
successful and influential, with 21 percent of employed people working in tech,
according to a 2017 Federal Reserve Bank report. Though the region’s economy
has shown some signs of slowing, job growth in Silicon Valley has been more
than double the national rate since the beginning of the economic recovery in
2010. And the region remains home to the two most valuable public companies in
the world, Apple and Google’s parent firm Alphabet, as well as world-class
universities. Every day, people around the world benefit from Silicon
Valley-built tools that have transformed communication, opened access to
information, and made life easier.
The notion that Silicon Valley’s best days are over is
far from new — people have been predicting its demise ever since the advent of
the microprocessor, said Leslie Berlin, project historian for Stanford’s
Silicon Valley Archives.
“It was going to be the oil shocks of the ’70s that were
going to take it down, and Japanese competition was going to take it down,
India and China, the Dot Com bust, Y2K – it’s just been one thing after
another, the ’08 crash,” Berlin said. “Time and again, Silicon Valley has
bounced back from these perceived threats. Silicon Valley has always been sort
of the golden child of the Golden State.”
But this time, Berlin and others see something shifting.
“It is unprecedented,” UC Berkeley Haas School of
Business professor Abhishek Nagaraj, said of the backlash. “I think this is
because of how deeply penetrated tech is in people’s lives.”
Nagaraj, who studies the tech industry, compared the
demonization of Silicon Valley to the outcry against Wall Street after
deceptive investment banking practices knocked the U.S. into the Great
Recession.
“It appears as if, basically, tech is the new finance,”
Nagaraj said.
Increasingly, the public views the tech industry as a
force against which they are powerless, said San Jose State University
anthropology professor Jan English-Lueck, who researches Silicon Valley’s
culture.
“It’s now on people’s radar screen to be a place of the
elite, where they’re changing the world in a way that ordinary people don’t
have an influence on that change,” English-Lueck said.
While the devices and social media platforms created by
hugely successful Silicon Valley tech firms have given us new ways to connect,
they’ve also thrown the worst of human nature into our faces, said
English-Lueck.
“You don’t have to look in somebody’s eyes when you’re
telling someone something ugly,” English-Lueck said. “That’s really exaggerated
people’s ability to hate.”
She believes the optimistic view of technology as the
great liberator and connector helped keep major tech firms from building more
safeguards into their platforms to prevent vicious online attacks,
dissemination of fake news and nation-state intrusions.
“Do we want free speech and free action that’s amplified
by the internet?” she said. “Sometimes we don’t want that.”
Stephen Milligan, CEO of pioneering San Jose data-storage
firm Western Digital, doesn’t think technology can solve everything.
But Milligan doesn’t buy the notion that Silicon Valley
has lost its bloom. The region’s companies are still trying to solve “real
problems” in the world and having a positive impact on people’s lives.
“It’s still cool,” Milligan said. “I actually think it’s
more cool.”
Silicon Valley boosters such as Peggy Burke, CEO of Palo
Alto branding agency 1185, will tell you the technology industry can fix the
problems it creates.
“You have to weigh the good and the bad, and if the bad
gets so bad that it outweighs the good, someone will solve for that,” Burke
said. “If there’s a problem — traffic, transportation, housing, stopping
Russians, fake news — someone in the Valley right now is working on solving for
that problem. I’ve been in the Valley for 30 years and I’ve seen it happen over
and over.”
A reckoning for the region is likely, but it won’t be a
fatal one, Berkeley’s Nagaraj said. The problems arising from technology will
exacerbate the ongoing decentralization of innovation, as boot camps bring
entrepreneurial skills to new regions, and clusters of expertise — in “deep
learning” artificial intelligence in Toronto, for example — lead to cooperative
projects linking the Valley to other areas, he said.
“It’s going to be a much more collaborative process than
one of replacement,” he said. “We are moving to a world where not all the big
hits come from Silicon Valley.”
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