The bad new politics of big tech
The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.
That turn has accelerated in recent days: Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.” Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board. Rupert Murdoch, never shy to use his media power to advance his commercial interests, is hard at work.
“Anti-trust is back, baby,” Yelp’s policy chief, Luther Lowe, DM’d me after Fox News gave him several minutes to make the antitrust case against Yelp’s giant rival Google to its audience of millions.
The new spotlight on these companies doesn’t come out of nowhere. They sit, substantively, at the heart of the biggest and most pressing issues facing the United States, and often stand on the less popular side of those: automation and inequality, trust in public life, privacy and security. They make the case that growth and transformation are public goods — but the public may not agree.
The tech industry has also benefited for years from its enemies, who it cast — often accurately — as Luddites who genuinely didn’t understand the series of tubes they were ranting about, or protectionist industries that didn’t want the best for consumers. That, too, is over. Opportunists and ideologues have assembled the beginnings of a real coalition against these companies, with a policy core consisting of refugees from Google boss Eric Schmidt’s least favorite think tank unit. Nationalists, accurately, see a consolidation of power over speech and ideas by social liberals and globalists; the left, accurately, sees consolidated corporate power. Those are the ascendant wings of the Republican and Democratic parties, even before Donald Trump sends the occasional spray of bile Jeff Bezos’s way — and his spokeswoman declines, as she did in June, to defend Google against European regulators.
This has led to a kind of Murder on the Orient Express alliance against big tech: Everyone wants to kill them.
So Facebook should probably ease out of the business of bland background statements and awkward photo ops, and start worrying about congressional testimony. Amazon, whose market power doesn’t fall into the categories envisioned by pre-internet antitrust law, is developing a bipartisan lobby that wants to break it up. Google’s public affairs efforts are starting to look a bit like the oil industry’s. These are the existential collisions with political power that can shake and redefine industries and their leaders, not the nickel-and-dime regulatory games Silicon Valley has played to date.
The industry has had a remarkable run. The companies at its center — Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are the defining brands — are beloved by consumers, truly global, dominant in the markets. They have also been able to coast on their popularity and their amazing products while largely getting a pass on politics at its higher levels. They spend scads on lobbying — Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has risen to become a top lobbying spender in recent years — to keep the tax collectors and communications regulators at bay, but they’ve never had to fight for their identity against political tides that have defined other major American industries. It’s easy to forget that oil prospectors and junk-bond traders had their moments of glory too; now Wall Street and the oil industries are resigned to a defensive crouch.
This sort of political change happens slowly until it happens fast. Uber provided a new model for a transformative tech giant to crash through with a dark, negative brand. The company’s toxic internal culture and rogue business practices were pure extensions of Silicon Valley’s clichés, not particularly different from things Microsoft was once admired for, or Amazon’s more openly rapacious early years. But the narrative had changed — inequality and misogyny were central American concerns, not as easily brushed past.
Uber is the only one to go down so far. A pollster recently showed me numbers that put the favorable numbers of most of the giant tech brands in the ‘80s and ‘90s; only Uber is sub-50. But this process — call it Uberization — seems to be moving in the others’ direction, fast, and it has the potential to cast a shadow over the sunny brands of the other tech giants.
You can see the tracks laid for each of the tech giants, and there’s no clear way off this path — to downward poll numbers and normal, grubby politics — for any of them.
The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.
That turn has accelerated in recent days: Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.” Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board. Rupert Murdoch, never shy to use his media power to advance his commercial interests, is hard at work.
“Anti-trust is back, baby,” Yelp’s policy chief, Luther Lowe, DM’d me after Fox News gave him several minutes to make the antitrust case against Yelp’s giant rival Google to its audience of millions.The new spotlight on these companies doesn’t come out of nowhere. They sit, substantively, at the heart of the biggest and most pressing issues facing the United States, and often stand on the less popular side of those: automation and inequality, trust in public life, privacy and security. They make the case that growth and transformation are public goods — but the public may not agree.
The tech industry has also benefited for years from its enemies, who it cast — often accurately — as Luddites who genuinely didn’t understand the series of tubes they were ranting about, or protectionist industries that didn’t want the best for consumers. That, too, is over. Opportunists and ideologues have assembled the beginnings of a real coalition against these companies, with a policy core consisting of refugees from Google boss Eric Schmidt’s least favorite think tank unit. Nationalists, accurately, see a consolidation of power over speech and ideas by social liberals and globalists; the left, accurately, sees consolidated corporate power. Those are the ascendant wings of the Republican and Democratic parties, even before Donald Trump sends the occasional spray of bile Jeff Bezos’s way — and his spokeswoman declines, as she did in June, to defend Google against European regulators.
This has led to a kind of Murder on the Orient Express alliance against big tech: Everyone wants to kill them.
So Facebook should probably ease out of the business of bland background statements and awkward photo ops, and start worrying about congressional testimony. Amazon, whose market power doesn’t fall into the categories envisioned by pre-internet antitrust law, is developing a bipartisan lobby that wants to break it up. Google’s public affairs efforts are starting to look a bit like the oil industry’s. These are the existential collisions with political power that can shake and redefine industries and their leaders, not the nickel-and-dime regulatory games Silicon Valley has played to date.
The industry has had a remarkable run. The companies at its center — Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are the defining brands — are beloved by consumers, truly global, dominant in the markets. They have also been able to coast on their popularity and their amazing products while largely getting a pass on politics at its higher levels. They spend scads on lobbying — Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has risen to become a top lobbying spender in recent years — to keep the tax collectors and communications regulators at bay, but they’ve never had to fight for their identity against political tides that have defined other major American industries. It’s easy to forget that oil prospectors and junk-bond traders had their moments of glory too; now Wall Street and the oil industries are resigned to a defensive crouch.
This sort of political change happens slowly until it happens fast. Uber provided a new model for a transformative tech giant to crash through with a dark, negative brand. The company’s toxic internal culture and rogue business practices were pure extensions of Silicon Valley’s clichés, not particularly different from things Microsoft was once admired for, or Amazon’s more openly rapacious early years. But the narrative had changed — inequality and misogyny were central American concerns, not as easily brushed past.
Uber is the only one to go down so far. A pollster recently showed me numbers that put the favorable numbers of most of the giant tech brands in the ‘80s and ‘90s; only Uber is sub-50. But this process — call it Uberization — seems to be moving in the others’ direction, fast, and it has the potential to cast a shadow over the sunny brands of the other tech giants.
You can see the tracks laid for each of the tech giants, and there’s no clear way off this path — to downward poll numbers and normal, grubby politics — for any of them.
by Ben Smith, Buzzfeed | Read more:
Image: Buzzfeed/Getty
