Big Tech

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Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In 2015, academic and tech scholar Shoshana Zuboff posited a fourth fiction for the age of Big Tech—that reality itself was undergoing the same kind of metamorphosis. “Data about the behaviors of bodies, minds, and things take their place in a universal real-time dynamic index of smart objects within an infinite global domain of wired things. This new phenomenon produces the possibility of modifying the behaviors of persons and things for profit and control.”64 Today, we live in that world, governed by our Big Tech overlords. Feeding Our Addiction: The Cognitive Power of Big Tech One of the reasons that we haven’t yet figured out ways to curb the power of Big Tech—despite all the evidence of how it’s tearing at the fabric of our society—is simply that we are too busy being distracted by the bright and shiny products and services they make.

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The Valley has clearly moved away from its hippie, entrepreneurial roots. Big Tech chief executives are as rapaciously capitalist as any financier, but often with an added libertarian bent. Theirs is a worldview in which anything and everything—government, politics, civic society, and law—can and should be disrupted. As Big Tech critic Jonathan Taplin once put it to me, “Demos—society itself—is often viewed as being ‘in the way.’ ”15 So why haven’t our political leaders imposed any sensible regulations to hold such instincts in check? Follow the money. Not for nothing that Big Tech now vies with Wall Street and Big Pharma as one of the top spenders on political lobbying.

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And given that digital advertising surpassed TV ads in 2017, it’s clear that TV news will be the next to go.6 While cable news may have gotten a “Trump bump” in recent years, the longer term trend line is clear—TV will ultimately be disintermediated by Big Tech just the way print media has been. But the trouble with Big Tech isn’t just an economic and business issue; it has political and cognitive implications as well. Often, these trends are written about in isolation, but in fact they are deeply intertwined. In this book, my goal is to connect the dots—to tell the whole story, which is far bigger than the sum of its parts. Things Fall Apart: The Political Impact of Big Tech After it was revealed that the largest technology platforms in the world were exploited by Russian state actors and their private proxies to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it was Facebook, not Google, who took most of the heat.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Department of Commerce, https://www.slideshare.net/AllumBokhari/ntia-hate-crimes-report-january-2021/1 (April 11, 2021). 71 Ibid. 72 Emily Jacobs, “Democrats demand more censorship from Big Tech bosses,” New York Post, November 18, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/democrats-use-big-tech-hearings-to-demand-more-censorship/ (April 11, 2021). 73 “The War on Free Speech,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 26, 2021, https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2021/01/26/The-war-on-free-speech-Parler-Social-Media-technology/stories/202101140041 (April 11, 2021). 74 Krystal Hur, “Big tech employees rally behind Biden campaign,” Opensecrets.org, January 12, 2021, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/big-tech-employees-rally-biden/ (April 11, 2021). 75 Ari Levy, “Here’s the final tally of where tech billionaires donated for the 2020 election,” CNBC, November 2, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html (April 11, 2021). 76 Chuck Ross, “Biden Has Ties to 5 Major Tech Companies,” Daily Caller, January 10, 2021, https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/10/biden-big-tech-apple-facebook-trump-parler/ (April 11, 2021). 77 Ryan Lizza, Daniel Lippman, and Meridith McGraw, “AOC wants to cancel those who worked for Trump.

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Sun, September 18, 2020, https://www.the-sun.com/news/us-news/1495061/china-document-8-million-training-detention-camps/ (April 25, 2021). 53 “Church leaders seek Home Depot boycott on Georgia voting law,” Canadian Press, April 21, 2021, https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/church-leaders-seek-home-depot-boycott-on-georgia-voting-law/ar-BB1fRzT0 (April 25, 2021). 54 Evie Fordham, “Goya ‘buy-cott’ begins as customers load up on product after Trump backlash,” Fox Business, July 12, 2020, https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/goya-food-sales-trump-controversy (April 25, 2021). 55 Mann, “CEOs answer the call of the woke by pivoting to ‘stakeholder’ capitalism.” 56 John Binder, “Wall Street, Corporations Team Up with Soros-Funded Group to Pressure States Against Election Reforms,” Breitbart, April 13, 2021, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/04/13/wall-street-corporations-team-up-with-soros-funded-group-to-pressure-states-against-election-reforms/ (April 25, 2021). 57 David Aaro, “Ron DeSantis pushes bill aimed to take power away from Big Tech,” Fox News, February 16, 2021, https://www.foxnews.com/tech/desantis-pushes-bill-to-aimed-to-take-power-away-from-big-tech (April 25, 2021). 58 Rachel Bovard, “Section 230 protects Big Tech from lawsuits. But it was never supposed to be bulletproof,” USA Today, December 13, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/12/13/section-230-big-tech-free-speech-donald-trump-column/3883191001/ (April 25, 2021). 59 Ibid. 60 John Solomon, “Zuckerberg money used to pay election judges, grow vote in Democrat stronghold, memos reveal,” Just the News, October 20, 2020, https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/memos-show-zuckerberg-money-used-massively-grow-vote-democrat-stronghold (April 25, 2021); Libby Emmons, “BREAKING: Project Veritas exposes Google manager admitting to election interference,” Post Millennial, October 19, 2020, https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-project-veritas-exposes-google-manager-admitting-to-election-influence (April 25, 2021). 61 Unlike most of the corporations listed, the Fox news platforms, such as the Fox News Channel, for which I host a Sunday program, and the Fox Business Channel, were actually created, not acquired, by Fox. 62 Levin, Liberty and Tyranny, 114. 63 Ibid., 115. 64 Maydeen Merino, “ ‘Net Zero Is Not Enough’: John Kerry Says We Need to Remove Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere,” Daily Caller, April 22, 2021, https://dailycaller.com/2021/04/22/john-kerry-remove-carbon-atmosphere-leaders-summit-climate-change/ (April 25, 2021). 65 “The Government Is on My Property.

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Social media, like much of the news media, has become a wedge between Americans who are decamping to different platforms along ideological lines in the tens of thousands in the wake of the bans. That cannot be a good thing for the country.”73 Parler has fought its way back, but the collusive and monopolistic acts of Big Tech to destroy an independent platform were an extraordinary act of tyranny, and many in the media, unlike the Post-Gazette, were either silent or supportive of Big Tech’s action, constantly referring to Parler as a platform for right-wingers, white supremacists, violent conspirators, and the like, all of which was untrue. Big Tech’s ideological and political preferences can also be established by examining the political donations of their executives and employees, and which candidates and party they subsidize and invest in.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Many US politicians and regulators have accepted the argument that the big tech companies have earned their dominance—that it is a reflection of the high-quality services they provide and nothing more. Even President Obama maligned Vestager’s investigations into big tech as sour grapes. In an interview in 2015, he said, “their service providers who, you know, can’t compete with ours—are essentially trying to set up some roadblocks for our companies to operate effectively there.” But in recent years, the terrain has been changing fast. Both citizens and politicians are concerned about the untrammeled power and market domination of big tech. And there is increasing recognition that their power isn’t only a result of their high-quality products.

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Whether that was a necessary step to reduce the possibility of further violence after the election, a long-overdue decision by the platforms to take away a megaphone from a man whose history of lies far pre-dated the 2020 election, or the tech elite’s blatant censorship of the highest elected official in the United States, it cast an unmistakable light on the extraordinary power that technology and, more significantly, the people who develop it have over us. Big tech’s role in and reaction to the events that led to the storming of the US Capitol only highlight the concerns about technology that have been mounting for years. Seemingly endless reports of privacy breaches and stories of behavior manipulation resulting from vast troves of data mined by large companies have made it commonplace to view big tech through a dark lens. Some argue that the internet, smartphones, and computers have delivered to us a set of devices hell-bent on hijacking our attention and addicting us to the screen, while gathering ever more data of our online behavior.

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“These companies, because”: Tony Romm, “Tech Giants Led by Amazon, Facebook and Google Spent Nearly Half a Billion on Lobbying over the Past Decade, New Data Shows,” Washington Post, January 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/22/amazon-facebook-google-lobbying-2019/. “Washingtonization of Brussels”: Adam Satariano and Matina Stevis-Gridneff, “Big Tech Turns Its Lobbyists Loose on Europe, Alarming Regulators,” New York Times, December 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/big-tech-lobbying-europe.html. “As lawmakers, we will not”: Matthew De Silva and Alison Griswold, “The California Senate Has Voted to End the Gig Economy as We Know It,” Quartz, September 11, 2019, https://qz.com/1706754/california-senate-passes-ab5-to-turn-independent-contractors-into-employees/.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

It doesn’t have a personality and it doesn’t have ethics. Its sole imperative is to do whatever it can get away with to extract maximum economic value from humans and the planet. Left to its own devices, Big Tech will never do well by creative workers, not because Big Tech companies are staffed by robotic engineers who don’t value art, but because the more they pay artists, the less they can funnel to executives and shareholders. Big Tech treats its techies better than its artists because it has to: there are far more tech jobs than there are qualified technologists to fill them. The instant that changes, those engineers are toast.

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Carstensen, Competition Policy and the Control of Buyer Power, 58. 10. Packer, “Cheap Words.” 11. William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (New York: Henry Holt, 2020), 156. 12. Barry C. Lynn, “The Big Tech Extortion Racket,” Harper’s Magazine, Aug. 14, 2020, https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket. 13. Carstensen, Competition Policy and the Control of Buyer Power, 4. 14. Stone, The Everything Store, 234. 15. Article 11, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty, 1996, https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/295166; Article 18, WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, 1996, https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/treaties/textdetails/12743. 16.

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The combination of surveillance and vertical integration means that Amazon vastly outpowers both publishers and other retailers, cementing its dominance, and giving it more opportunities to spy on readers. This is the true heart of “surveillance capitalism”—not the idea that Big Tech uses data-mining and machine learning to create mind-control systems that bypass our critical faculties and trick us into buying whatever they want to sell us. Rather, Big Tech abuses monopoly power to deprive us of choice by limiting what we can buy, redirecting our searches to hide rivals’ products, and locking us into its ecosystem with technologies we can’t alter without risking a lengthy prison sentence.49 Amazon tracks the phrases we highlight, the words we look up, who else is reading from the same address.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

—RUSSELL BANKS Contents A Note to the Reader Introduction  1:   What Children Need and Why Corporations Can’t Provide It  2:   Who Wins the Games Tech Plays?  3:   And the Brand Plays On  4:   Browse! Click! Buy! Repeat!  5:   How Rewarding Are Rewards?  6:   The Nagging Problem of Pester Power  7:   Divisive Devices  8:   Bias for Sale  9:   Branded Learning 10:  Big Tech Goes to School 11:  Is That Hope? 12:  Resistance Parenting: Suggestions for Keeping Big Tech and Big Business at Bay 13:  Making a Difference for Everybody’s Kids Afterword Acknowledgments Appendix: Model Edtech Policy for School Districts Suggested Reading, Viewing, and Listening Resources Notes Index A Note to the Reader The facts are irrelevant.

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In 2006, in response to growing alarm about childhood obesity and calls to regulate food and beverage marketing to children, the food and beverage industry banded together with pledges to foreswear junk-food marketing to kids4 More than fourteen years later, not much has changed—children are still heavily targeted with ads for junk food.5 And Big Tech is no different. The roots of any particular social ill often lie in deeper systemic problems. Today’s commercial assault on children is tied to government policies that contribute to the escalation of corporate power and the decline of government regulation, diminished support for public schools, parks, and play areas, the rapid evolution of digital technologies, and the consolidation of media ownership. That’s why we need to address broader sociopolitical issues that leave children more vulnerable to exploitation by Big Tech and other industries that thrive on marketing to kids.

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They can be a potent and influential force in educating peers, parents, and younger kids. It’s encouraging that teens are speaking out and raising their own concerns about the influence Big Tech has on their lives.10 Some young people have formed their own support and advocacy groups, such as the Log Off movement.11 That young people are working to resist the more harmful business practices of major technology companies bodes well for a future generation of adults who recognize the importance of curbing the influence Big Tech has on the lives of children and want to do something about it. Of course, most people don’t have the time or resources to start an organization or to devote themselves full time to advocacy.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Marc Weiss, and Guang Yang, Global Urban Development, June 2004, http://www.globalurban.org/GUD%20Singapore%20MES%20Report.pdf. 29 “Singapore Faces Biggest Reskilling Challenge in Southeast Asia,” Justina Lee, Nikkei Asian Review, December 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Singapore-faces-biggest-reskilling-challenge-in-Southeast-Asia. 30 “PwC's Hopes and Fears Survey,” p. 4, PwC, September 2019, https://www.pwc.com/sg/en/publications/assets/new-world-new-skills-2020.pdf. 31 Interview with Tim Wu by Peter Vanham, New York, October 2019. 32 “The 100 Largest Companies by Market Capitalization in 2020,” Statista, consulted in October 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-capitalization. 33 Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, Lina M. Kahn, The Yale Law Journal, January 2017 34 “Big Tech Has Too Much Monopoly Power—It's Right to Take It On,” Kenneth Rogoff, The Guardian, April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/big-tech-monopoly-power-elizabeth-warren-technology; Quote: “Here are titles of some recent articles: Paul Krugman's “Monopoly Capitalism Is Killing US Economy,” Joseph Stiglitz's “America Has a Monopoly Problem—and It's Huge,” and Kenneth Rogoff's “Big Tech Is a Big Problem”; “The Rise of Corporate Monopoly Power,” Zia Qureshi, Brookings, May 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/05/21/the-rise-of-corporate-market-power/. 35 “Steve Wozniak Says Apple Should've Split Up a Long Time Ago, Big Tech Is Too Big,” Bloomberg, August 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-08-27/steve-wozniak-says-apple-should-ve-split-up-a-long-time-ago-big-tech-is-too-big-video. 36 Some scholars do dispute this notion.

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The result, he said, is that today the top five Big Tech companies more resemble monopolists like telecom provider AT&T in the 1980s than the upstarts they were not too long ago. They buy or copy competitors to protect their markets, he said, act as both a platform and seller, and favor their own products on their stores. And as with the monopolists of every previous industrial revolution, Wu argues, they stifle the economy and competition while doing so and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, rather than the many. For that reason, Wu claims, these “Big Tech” companies should face one of two tough measures: to be regulated like a natural monopoly or to be broken up.

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Wu's colleague at Columbia Law School Lina Khan in 2016 wrote a seminal paper (while at Yale), taking a similar stance: “Amazon's Antitrust Paradox.”33 Economists such as Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez, Kenneth Rogoff, and Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have also stated Big Tech has “too much power”34 or needs to be more strictly regulated. Leading journalists including Nicholas Thompson, the editor in chief of Wired, and Rana Foroohar, associate editor of the Financial Times, favor antitrust action against Big Tech too. And even some co-founders of the tech giants that have now come under regulatory scrutiny, including Apple's Steve Wozniak35 and Facebook's Chris Hughes, have said they favor more strict regulation. To Wu, it is the only right attitude.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Marc Weiss, and Guang Yang, Global Urban Development, June 2004, http://www.globalurban.org/GUD%20Singapore%20MES%20Report.pdf. 29 “Singapore Faces Biggest Reskilling Challenge in Southeast Asia,” Justina Lee, Nikkei Asian Review, December 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Singapore-faces-biggest-reskilling-challenge-in-Southeast-Asia. 30 “PwC's Hopes and Fears Survey,” p. 4, PwC, September 2019, https://www.pwc.com/sg/en/publications/assets/new-world-new-skills-2020.pdf. 31 Interview with Tim Wu by Peter Vanham, New York, October 2019. 32 “The 100 Largest Companies by Market Capitalization in 2020,” Statista, consulted in October 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-capitalization. 33 Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, Lina M. Kahn, The Yale Law Journal, January 2017 34 “Big Tech Has Too Much Monopoly Power—It's Right to Take It On,” Kenneth Rogoff, The Guardian, April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/big-tech-monopoly-power-elizabeth-warren-technology; Quote: “Here are titles of some recent articles: Paul Krugman's “Monopoly Capitalism Is Killing US Economy,” Joseph Stiglitz's “America Has a Monopoly Problem—and It's Huge,” and Kenneth Rogoff's “Big Tech Is a Big Problem”; “The Rise of Corporate Monopoly Power,” Zia Qureshi, Brookings, May 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/05/21/the-rise-of-corporate-market-power/. 35 “Steve Wozniak Says Apple Should've Split Up a Long Time Ago, Big Tech Is Too Big,” Bloomberg, August 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-08-27/steve-wozniak-says-apple-should-ve-split-up-a-long-time-ago-big-tech-is-too-big-video. 36 Some scholars do dispute this notion.

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The result, he said, is that today the top five Big Tech companies more resemble monopolists like telecom provider AT&T in the 1980s than the upstarts they were not too long ago. They buy or copy competitors to protect their markets, he said, act as both a platform and seller, and favor their own products on their stores. And as with the monopolists of every previous industrial revolution, Wu argues, they stifle the economy and competition while doing so and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, rather than the many. For that reason, Wu claims, these “Big Tech” companies should face one of two tough measures: to be regulated like a natural monopoly or to be broken up.

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Wu's colleague at Columbia Law School Lina Khan in 2016 wrote a seminal paper (while at Yale), taking a similar stance: “Amazon's Antitrust Paradox.”33 Economists such as Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez, Kenneth Rogoff, and Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have also stated Big Tech has “too much power”34 or needs to be more strictly regulated. Leading journalists including Nicholas Thompson, the editor in chief of Wired, and Rana Foroohar, associate editor of the Financial Times, favor antitrust action against Big Tech too. And even some co-founders of the tech giants that have now come under regulatory scrutiny, including Apple's Steve Wozniak35 and Facebook's Chris Hughes, have said they favor more strict regulation. To Wu, it is the only right attitude.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Some of these firms, no doubt, will be in breach of competition and antitrust laws, will become too economically dominant, and will have to be broken up accordingly. That said, in decades to come the most compelling case against Big Tech will not be this economic one. Rather, as technological progress continues, our concern will shift from the economic power that these companies wield—however mighty it may be—to their political power instead. THE POLITICAL CASE AGAINST BIG TECH Commentators today often like to draw a comparison between Big Tech and Standard Oil, the American giant founded by John Rockefeller in 1870. When that company was established, it owned the largest oil refinery in the world.31 By 1882, it controlled 90 percent of the country’s oil production.32 Its dominance continued until 1911, when the United States Supreme Court stepped in on antitrust grounds.

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The goal of the Political Power Oversight Authority should not be to strip Big Tech of any political power altogether. Just as competition authorities take into account both the merits and dangers of economic power, so, too, this new authority must perform a similar balancing act. These new technologies, after all, are responsible for improving our lives in countless ways as well. But aren’t people happy to use Big Tech’s offerings and services? And doesn’t that mean they have consented to all of the political consequences of those technologies as well? No. As Future Politics makes clear, the key question is whether Big Tech’s political power is legitimate—and the fact that people are happy to use Big Tech’s products and services is not enough to establish consent.

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There is a variety of different ways in which the Big State could deal with technological unemployment—and it must fall to citizens in each country, to their unique moral tastes and political preferences, to determine how exactly to strike the best balance between them. 11 Big Tech As we approach a world with less work, our economic lives will become increasingly dominated by large technology companies. And with that growing economic power the companies will acquire great political power, too. They will not only shape how we interact in the marketplace, what we buy and sell, but how we live together in broader society, our existence as political animals as well. Understanding the rise of Big Tech and the nature of their growing political power is as important as making sense of the decline of work—for in a world with less work, constraining these companies will demand more and more of our attention.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

In fact, it is something much closer to the opposite of a libertarian’s veneration of the heroic, solitary individual. The big tech companies believe we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole. By stitching the world together, they can cure its ills. Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality—to the empowerment of the “user”—but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling, a passive, bureaucratic description of us. The big tech companies—the Europeans have charmingly, and correctly, lumped them together as GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon)—are shredding the principles that protect individuality.

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Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Foer, Franklin, author. Title: World without mind: the existential threat of big tech / Franklin Foer. Description: New York: Penguin Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017008656 (print) | LCCN 2017020819 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101981139 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101981115 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Social aspects. | Information services industry—Social aspects.

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Thomas Jefferson, 1773 CONTENTS Also by Franklin Foer Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PROLOGUE SECTION I THE MONOPOLISTS OF MIND 1. THE VALLEY IS WHOLE, THE WORLD IS ONE 2. THE GOOGLE THEORY OF HISTORY 3. MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL 4. JEFF BEZOS DISRUPTS KNOWLEDGE 5. KEEPERS OF THE BIG GATE IN THE SKY 6. BIG TECH’S SMOKE-FILLED ROOM SECTION II WORLD WITHOUT MIND 7. THE VIRALITY VIRUS 8. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR SECTION III TAKE BACK THE MIND 9. IN SEARCH OF THE ANGEL OF DATA 10. THE ORGANIC MIND 11. THE PAPER REBELLION Acknowledgments Notes Index PROLOGUE UNTIL RECENTLY, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

The book traces the rise and fall of the first American grocery chain: Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011). aggressively titled article: Elizabeth Warren, “Here’s How We Can Break Up Big Tech,” Medium, March 8, 2019, https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c (January 25, 2021). “You can be the umpire in the baseball game… have a team in the game”: “This Is Why Warren Wants to Break Up Big Tech Companies,” CNN, April 23, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/04/23/elizabeth-warren-amazon-google-big-tech-break-up-town-hall-vpx.cnn (January 25, 2021). the benefactor of tax benefits… vast R&D budget: Richard Rubin, “Does Amazon Really Pay No Taxes?

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In early 2012, anonymous fliers taped around South Lake Union found a derogatory name: Nicole Brodeur, “Neighbors Talking About Amazon,” Seattle Times, January 12, 2012, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/neighbors-talking-about-amazon/ (January 17, 2021). “Today’s big tech companies”… Zappos and Whole Food Market and be stamped into smaller parts: Senator Elizabeth Warren, “Here’s How We Can Break Up Big Tech,” Medium, March 8, 2019, https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c (January 17, 2021). CHAPTER 1: THE ÜBER PRODUCT MANAGER the Ivona founders then had to renegotiate the actor’s contract: Katarzyna Niedurny, “Kariera Głosu Ivony.

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Europe Sees Reason to Worry,” New York Times, September 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/amazon-europe-margrethe-vestager.html (January 26, 2021). DOJ would examine Google and Apple… Facebook and Amazon: David McLaughlin, Naomi Nix, and Daniel Stoller, “Trump’s Trustbusters Bring Microsoft Lessons to Big Tech Fight,” Bloomberg, June 11, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/trump-s-trustbusters-bring-microsoft-lessons-to-big-tech-fight?sref=dJuchiL5 (January 26, 2021). “hold big tech companies accountable”: “Cicilline to Chair Antitrust Subcommittee,” January 23, 2019, https://cicilline.house.gov/press-release/cicilline-chair-antitrust-subcommittee (January 26, 2021). “We remain prepared… important issues”: Kim Lyons, “Nadler Calls Amazon Letter to Judiciary Committee ‘Unacceptable,’ ” The Verge, May 16, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/16/21260981/nadler-amazon-bezos-seller-judiciary (January 26, 2021).

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

ref=opinion&_r=0; Franklin Foer, “Amazon Must Be Stopped,” New Republic, October 10, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/119769/amazons-monopoly-must-be-broken-radical-plan-tech-giant; Andrew Clement and David Lyon, “Facebook: A mass media micro-surveillance monopoly,” Globe and Mail, April 23, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-facebook-a-mass-media-micro-surveillance-monopoly/; James Pethokoukis, “Conservatives turn on Silicon Valley—and the free market,” The Week, August 17, 2017, http://theweek.com/articles/718558/conservatives-turn-silicon-valley--free-market. 40 David Dayen, “Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism.” American Prospect, December 26, 2017, http://prospect.org/article/big-tech-new-predatory-capitalism; K. Sabeel Rahman, “Up Against Big Tech,” American Prospect, February 5, 2018, http://prospect.org/article/against-big-tech; Elizabeth Kolbert, “Who Owns the Internet?” New Yorker, August 21, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/who-owns-the-internet. 41 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 33. 42 Mike Elgan, “Why the Public’s Love Affair With Silicon Valley Might Be Over,” Fast Company, September 27, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/40472189/why-the-publics-love-affair-with-silicon-valley-might-be-over. 43 Stanley Bing, Immortal Life: A Soon to Be True Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

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New York Times, August 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/opinion/sunday/when-will-the-tech-bubble-burst.html. 8 Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003 (New York: Knopf, 2004), 271–75. 9 Scott Galloway, “Silicon Valley’s Tax-Avoiding, Job-Killing, Soul-Sucking Machine,” Esquire, February 8, 2018, http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/. 10 Shira Ovide, “Big Tech Has Dug a Moat That Rivals and Regulators Can’t Cross,” Yahoo, July 5, 2019, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-tech-dug 11 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2014), 174; “Richest people in the world,” CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/richest-people-in-world-forbes/12/. 12 Carter Coudriet, “13 Under 40: Here Are The Youngest Billionaires On The Forbes 400 2019,” Forbes, October 31, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2019/10/02/forbes-400-youngest-under-40-zuckerberg-spiegel/#7fd35f5a5a0e. 13 Sally French, “China has 9 of the world’s 20 biggest companies,” Market Watch, May 31, 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-has-9-of-the-worlds-20-biggest-tech-companies-2018-05-31. 14 Farhad Manjoo, “Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future,” New York Times, January 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/technology/techs-frightful-5-will-dominate-digital-life-for-foreseeable-future.html; Dana Mattioli, “Takeovers Roar to Life as Companies Hear Footsteps From Tech Giants,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/takeovers-roar-to-life-as-companies-hear-footsteps-from-tech-giants-1511200327. 15 “Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley,” Economist, August 30, 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/why-startups-are-leaving-silicon-valley; Rex Crum, “Let’s make a deal: SV150 firms spent $41 billion on acquisitions in 2016,” Mercury News, May 1, 2017, https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/01/lets-make-a-deal-acquisitions-were-all-over-the-sv150-in-2016/; “Too much of a good thing,” Economist, March 26, 2016, https://www.economist.com/brieing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-good-thing. 16 Christopher Mims, “Why Free Is Too High a Price for Facebook and Google,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-is-too-high-a-price-for-facebook-and-google-11559966411; Andy Kessler, “Antitrust Can’t Catch Big Tech,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/antitrust-cant-catch-big-tech-11568577387; David Dayen, “Trump’s Antitrust Cops Fail to Police Big Business—Again,” American Prospect, July 24, 2019, https://prospect.org/power/trump-s-antitrust-cops-fail-police-big-business-again/; Andrew Orlowski, “Google had Obama’s ear during antitrust probe,” Register, August 18, 2016, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/18/google_had_obamas_ear_on_antitrust_probe/. 17 Bryan Clark, “Facebook’s new ‘early bird’ spy tool is just tip of the iceberg,” Next Web, August 10, 2017, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/08/10/facebooks-new-early-bird-spy-tool-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/#; Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, “The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition from Startups,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-squashes-competition-from-startups-1502293444. 18 Crunchbase, Google Acquisitions, updated January 15, 2020, https://wwwcrunchbase.com/organization/google/acquisitions/acquisitions_list#section-acquisitions; Ben Popper, “Failure is a feature: how Google stays sharp gobbling up startups,” The Verge, September 17, 2012, https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/17/3322854/google-startup-mergers-acquisitions-failure-is-a-feature; Tim Wu and Stuart A.

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.: Belknap/Harvard, 2014), 174; “Richest people in the world,” CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/richest-people-in-world-forbes/12/. 12 Carter Coudriet, “13 Under 40: Here Are The Youngest Billionaires On The Forbes 400 2019,” Forbes, October 31, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2019/10/02/forbes-400-youngest-under-40-zuckerberg-spiegel/#7fd35f5a5a0e. 13 Sally French, “China has 9 of the world’s 20 biggest companies,” Market Watch, May 31, 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-has-9-of-the-worlds-20-biggest-tech-companies-2018-05-31. 14 Farhad Manjoo, “Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future,” New York Times, January 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/technology/techs-frightful-5-will-dominate-digital-life-for-foreseeable-future.html; Dana Mattioli, “Takeovers Roar to Life as Companies Hear Footsteps From Tech Giants,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/takeovers-roar-to-life-as-companies-hear-footsteps-from-tech-giants-1511200327. 15 “Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley,” Economist, August 30, 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/why-startups-are-leaving-silicon-valley; Rex Crum, “Let’s make a deal: SV150 firms spent $41 billion on acquisitions in 2016,” Mercury News, May 1, 2017, https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/01/lets-make-a-deal-acquisitions-were-all-over-the-sv150-in-2016/; “Too much of a good thing,” Economist, March 26, 2016, https://www.economist.com/brieing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-good-thing. 16 Christopher Mims, “Why Free Is Too High a Price for Facebook and Google,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-is-too-high-a-price-for-facebook-and-google-11559966411; Andy Kessler, “Antitrust Can’t Catch Big Tech,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/antitrust-cant-catch-big-tech-11568577387; David Dayen, “Trump’s Antitrust Cops Fail to Police Big Business—Again,” American Prospect, July 24, 2019, https://prospect.org/power/trump-s-antitrust-cops-fail-police-big-business-again/; Andrew Orlowski, “Google had Obama’s ear during antitrust probe,” Register, August 18, 2016, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/18/google_had_obamas_ear_on_antitrust_probe/. 17 Bryan Clark, “Facebook’s new ‘early bird’ spy tool is just tip of the iceberg,” Next Web, August 10, 2017, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/08/10/facebooks-new-early-bird-spy-tool-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/#; Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, “The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition from Startups,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-squashes-competition-from-startups-1502293444. 18 Crunchbase, Google Acquisitions, updated January 15, 2020, https://wwwcrunchbase.com/organization/google/acquisitions/acquisitions_list#section-acquisitions; Ben Popper, “Failure is a feature: how Google stays sharp gobbling up startups,” The Verge, September 17, 2012, https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/17/3322854/google-startup-mergers-acquisitions-failure-is-a-feature; Tim Wu and Stuart A.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The more I read, the more I realise that the tech companies are, at present, outmanoeuvring their social and fiscal responsibilities to the billions of people who are micro-dosing them with money 24/7. Accountability matters. In the Data Age, accountability is responsibility. That’s what Big Tech has to recognise. The usual definition of Big Tech is a reference to the top 5 tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft. In reality, Big Tech is about global reach, global control, and a business model that seeks global power without local responsibility. Uber and Airbnb are just the same. If that’s the model business favours, then the only option is legislation.

…

And before those men, there was Ada Lovelace, the early-19th century genius who inspired Alan Turing to devise the Turing Test – when we can no longer tell the difference between AI and bio-human. We aren’t there yet. Time is hard to gauge. * * * These 12 bytes are not a history of AI. They are not the story of Big Tech or Big Data, though we often meet on that ground. A bit is the smallest unit of data on a computer – it’s a binary digit, and it can have a value of 0 or 1. 8 bits make a byte. My aim is modest; I want readers who imagine they are not much interested in AI, or biotech, or Big Tech, or data-tech, to find that the stories are engaging, sometimes frightening, always connected. We all need to know what’s going on as humans advance, perhaps towards a transhuman – or even a post-human – future

…

Human beings are not revenue streams. We are not data packages. We are not here to be conditioned in operant chambers. It is easy for Big Tech to use its weapons of mass distraction to manipulate our behaviour for gain. And it is wrong. We sell our time, we sell our labour, sometimes we have to sell our bodies, sometimes we have to get money in ways we would rather not. But we accept that there is a distinction between making money, however you do it – and being money. Part of the problem, as ever, is the language we use. Big Tech hasn’t created, isn’t interested in creating, a ‘sharing’ economy. That’s just marketing. We don’t live in a sharing economy.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

There’s a tactic in warfare known as “feigned retreat,” in which one side leads another to a destination that’s actually a trap. That’s exactly what Big Tech is doing to lawmakers and the Justice Department’s antitrust division today. And it’s playing politicians on both sides by acting frightened of antitrust. Here’s why. Antitrust law was designed to protect consumers from monopolies and cartels that use market power to limit consumer choice and charge higher prices. But today’s Big Tech titans—companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon—provide consumers with a wider range of products than ever before and for strikingly low prices.

…

It did, at least for a hot second, in the form of Parler, a Twitter alternative popular with conservatives. Unlike Big Tech social media incumbents, Parler didn’t harvest user data and didn’t regulate political content. Instead, Parler set out to value, of all things, free speech and open dialogue. Parler was… earnest. Ultimately it paid a hefty price for its naivete. Following the Capitol riot, Parler was blocked from being downloaded from Google’s Play Store, was suspended from Apple’s App Store, and lost access to Amazon Web Services—all based on hackneyed allegations similar to those levied against President Trump. Big Tech may permanently put Parler out of business.

…

New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler added: “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them.”40 The threats have worked. In September 2019, the day before another congressional grilling was to begin, Facebook announced important new restrictions on “hate speech.” It was no coincidence that Big Tech took its most aggressive steps against Trump just as Democrats were poised to take control of the White House and Senate. Prominent Democrats promptly voiced approval of Big Tech’s actions, which Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal expressly attributed to “a change in the political winds.”41 Our courts have long held that governmental threats can turn private conduct into state action—and with good reason.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

These days, some of the biggest civic impacts come from the truly titanic, globe-spanning tech companies that sit in the midst of our social and economic life. “Big Tech,” as the journalist Franklin Foer dubs it. Indeed, there are now a surprisingly small handful of firms that dominate the public sphere. There are the ones that govern how we communicate (like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, and Netflix), ones that touch commerce (Amazon, Uber, Airbnb), and the information brokers and toolmakers of our work lives (Google, Microsoft). Big tech is a useful way to think about the particular challenges of software that dominates its area, because it highlights the near monopolies many of these firms enjoy.

…

But the business models have a propulsive force of their own. Eventually, after ten years at Google, Williams left; he wound up at the University of Oxford, where he wrote Stand Out of Our Light, a penetrating meditation on the civic and existential dangers of big tech. “I’ve gone from one of the newest institutions on the planet to one of the oldest,” he says wryly. Scale also makes algorithms reign supreme. Why? Because once a big-tech firm has millions of users—posting billions of comments a day, or listing endless goods for sale—there’s no easy way for humans to manage that volume. No human can sort through them, rank them, make sense of them.

…

Given how burned out and overstressed the workers are, it’s not surprising they’d get things wrong—accidentally banning material that isn’t prohibited or letting slip by material that’s genuinely threatening. But these are, again, the wicked problems of scale. The big tech firms wanted to grow massively, and they did. Billions of posts course through the feeds of the big tech firms every day, globally. Let’s say we assumed the absolute goodwill of every person running the services—that they were completely devoted to grappling with all the ways their tools can be used for ill, for abuse, for fakery. Let’s say they wanted to get rid of all these bad actors.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

But while the dynamics of production at zero marginal cost lead to lower prices, they also generate tendencies towards monopoly and rentierisation.12 This is because the business models of the big tech giants do not rest on the provision of free digital services – a strategy from which no profit could be generated. Instead, they collect an extremely valuable commodity produced by their users – data – and sell it on to advertisers, researchers and states.13 The extraction and commodification of this data by the big tech giants is a new method for the generation of economic rents.14 Business models based on the monopolisation of a particular online ‘space’ use network effects to establish near total market dominance.

…

Monopoly power is then exploited to acquire users’ data for free, often without sufficient privacy safeguards. Prices do not seem to exceed the costs of production, so neoclassical economists cannot detect the existence of a monopoly – yet workers, suppliers, taxpayers and even consumers still suffer as a result. The big tech companies have also engaged in other practices designed to consolidate their monopoly power. Some use anti-competitive practices designed to penalise their rivals, most use various accounting mechanisms to avoid taxation in order to boost their profits, and almost all have cosy relationships with local and national governments, which often allow them to access preferential treatment denied to their competitors.15 States stood by as these companies became ever more powerful, often providing them with subsidies, turning a blind eye to regulatory arbitrage and competing with one another to attract their investment.

…

Some use anti-competitive practices designed to penalise their rivals, most use various accounting mechanisms to avoid taxation in order to boost their profits, and almost all have cosy relationships with local and national governments, which often allow them to access preferential treatment denied to their competitors.15 States stood by as these companies became ever more powerful, often providing them with subsidies, turning a blind eye to regulatory arbitrage and competing with one another to attract their investment. As the coronavirus pandemic has deepened, the big tech companies have emerged as some of the greatest beneficiaries. Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook now make up a fifth of the entire value of the S&P 500 Index, and Jeff Bezos is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.16 Part of the reason these companies’ stocks are doing so well is that their business models, to varying extents, render them immune from the impact of the virus-induced lockdown.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

“Corporations had another stellar day producing things and keeping people employed” just isn’t a great news headline. These days, it is common for major media outlets, including centrist publications such as the Financial Times, to run articles about the sins of the major tech companies. Rana Foroohar, for instance, stresses the negative when she writes of “the power of the big tech titans.” In reality, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and others have provided Americans with some of their most amazing products, and sometimes for free or at very low prices. In terms of access to information, the world has been knit together far more tightly than almost anyone could have dreamed of two decades ago, and that may well be humankind’s single greatest achievement within our generation.

…

I am somewhat worried that market concentration ratios in many parts of the American economy are rising, but most of those markets seem pretty contestable and offer consumers lots of choice. The upshot is that the analysts who raise this issue usually are exaggerating the problem, harm to consumers is hard to find, and American competition remains alive and well. 6. ARE THE BIG TECH COMPANIES EVIL? Google’s original motto, which endeared it to many geeks, was “Don’t be evil.” And indeed, for a long time it seemed the company realized this aspiration. People under thirty may not know how hit-or-miss it was to search the web prior to Google. It has greatly enhanced our ability to find the right restaurant reviews, look up medical information, research dating or business partners, and track down old friends, not to mention that it provides the means for good, link-based blogging, among many other advances.

…

Whatever problems these developments may have brought in their wake, they are unparalleled achievements and arguably the greatest advances of the contemporary world. And, speaking on a purely personal basis, I find that the existence of a well-functioning, searchable, shareable, and mobile internet has given me public audiences far greater than anything I ever expected to have. The internet and the ease of use enabled by the big tech companies drove the single biggest revolution that ever has come to my career. So what’s not to love? Well, there are some drawbacks, and I’ll focus the second part of this chapter on where some future and present problems might lie—namely, our privacy. I don’t necessarily mind that tech companies store information about us, but the terms of that storage and its use are opaque, it is not always easy to opt out, and the companies do not always keep that information sufficiently private and secure, as evidenced by multiple hacking episodes, including a major information hack of Yahoo emails in 2013 and a hack of Equifax, a credit bureau (and not really a tech company), in 2017, not to mention various illegitimate drains of information from Facebook.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

“What is most interesting is that Silicon Valley remains in a cognitive bubble, reluctant to engage with legitimate public worries over monopoly, privacy and tech related job disruption, not to mention its own culture,” the Financial Times’ Rana Foroohar wrote in July 2017 in response to this latest round of Silicon Valley scandals.6 So, yes, it’s certainly not bad news that three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Facebook, Amazon, and Google—have joined a self-policing alliance of Big Tech companies committed to “ethics, fairness, and inclusivity” in the development of AI products. But how much self-imposed morality can we really expect from multi–hundred-billion-dollar companies that are currently accused of a raft of unethical behavior around the world, including monopolistic market practices, exploitation of their users’ data, and failure to pay their local taxes—not to mention the myriad other ethical scandals perpetually engulfing Big Tech? Although these companies are by no means intrinsically bad, they remain profit-driven businesses, answerable only to their shareholders or investors.

…

Time is many things, but it isn’t infinite, at least not for us humans. The digital clock, which seems to proceed at a more accelerated pace than its analog forebear, is already ticking furiously. Unless we act now, we increasingly risk becoming powerless appendages to the new products and platforms of Big Tech corporations. This book, then, is also a call to arms in a culture infected by a creeping (and creepy) technological determinism. And it’s a reminder that our own human agency—our timeless responsibility to shape our own societies—is essential if we are to build a habitable digital future. In contrast with smart cars, the future will never be able to drive itself.

…

The second method is through the work of such innovators as Betaworks’ hackers in residence or the entrepreneurs at BlueYard Capital’s “Encrypted and Decentralized” event, who invent new technologies and products to improve people’s lives. This doesn’t mean that every innovator or innovation is good. As we shall see in the next chapter, much of the digital innovation of Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook isn’t currently working. Yet, as I show in Chapter Seven, that isn’t an excuse to write off innovative entrepreneurs altogether in terms of creating products that realize the promise of the digital revolution. Utopians might dream up economic systems theoretically superior to free market capitalism, but none exist in the real world.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Stitch Fix built its online women’s clothing business around a smart algorithm that identifies which fashions its customers prefer. The impact that Bezonomics is having on society is just as profound. Some of the big tech companies are sowing discord with fake news, interfering with elections, and violating personal privacy. As Apple CEO Tim Cook put it: “If you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos.” The global wealth gap has become so out of kilter that politicians in America and Europe have singled out Amazon and other big tech companies for blame. These wealth-creation machines have become so efficient at creating riches for their top employees and shareholders that they’re likely to engender more public outrage and become easy targets for regulators—perhaps in some cases even be broken up.

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That’s a fair question but a complex one, and in the case of most complicated things no simple answer exists. My hope is that readers of this book will grow to understand this complexity and recognize the ways Amazon both helps or harms business and society so that they’ll be better equipped to survive in an age of Bezonomics and check the power of such big-tech platforms when warranted. How one thinks about Amazon depends to a large degree on where one stands. For Amazon’s Prime members around the globe, it’s hard to argue that Amazon is evil. It offers a vast selection of goods—Amazon will not confirm how many, but one source puts it at nearly 600 million.

…

In late 2018, a group of 450 Amazon employees, worried that the technology has the potential to violate one’s civil liberties, sent Bezos a letter protesting the company’s decision to sell its facial recognition software to police. Bezos didn’t respond publicly to the letter, but at a conference on the same day the letter was released, he made it clear where his priorities lay when it came to selling technology to the government: “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the U.S. Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble.” Bezos’s positive attitude toward the military industrial complex stood in stark contrast to Google, which announced in late 2018 that it wouldn’t sell general-purpose facial recognition software to governments before working through important technology and policy questions.

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Article 15 of the EU Copyright Directive426 (known as ‘Article 11’ during the legislative process) adopts the same approach as these failed experiments in trying to force platforms like Google to pay for using snippets. But Cory Doctorow points out in a blog post: ‘[The] problem isn’t Big Tech stealing publishers’ content; it’s that Big Tech is stealing publishers’ money.’427 Internet sites such as Google and Facebook dominate the mainstream online advertising market, a sector that used to be the mainstay of print newspaper revenues. Likewise, Amazon has become a major destination for advertising budgets that previously would have appeared in print newspapers and magazines.428 In 2021, Amazon gained $31 billion in revenue from advertising, which is as much as that gained by the entire global newspaper industry.429 The snippet tax is the wrong solution to a real problem; the right solution is reforming how the online advertising market works.

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Creators have no control over the percentage of advertising revenue that they receive, and are subject to arbitrary decisions about what can and cannot be posted. Accounts can be shut down without apparent cause, and with few rights to challenge such decisions, as Giblin has pointed out: “Creators shouldn’t have to choose between Big Content and Big Tech. Neither of them have their interests at heart. And similarly, society shouldn’t have to rely on the crumbs that Big Content and Big Tech are willing to give us. We do have alternatives. And in order to access them and to do a better job, we need to cut into that corporate power. We need to form new alliances that bring people together united over these common interests, which are, of course, to make sure that our amazing creators are recognised and rewarded for their work, and that that work can be made available so that all of us can benefit from it.”735 One way to cut out the intermediaries is to sell directly to fans.

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uri=CELEX%3A32019L0790 532 https://web.archive.org/web/20220619012633/https://torrentfreak.com/upload-filters-23-eu-member-states-face-legal-action-over-copyright-law-delays-210727/ 533 https://web.archive.org/web/20220619012648/https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/07/european-commission-betrays-internet-users-cravenly-introducing-huge-loophole-copyright-companies-upload-filter-guidance/ 534 https://web.archive.org/web/20220619012708/http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2020/11/11/cjeu-hearing-in-the-polish-challenge-to-article-17-not-even-the-supporters-of-the-provision-agree-on-how-it-should-work/ 535 https://web.archive.org/web/20220521202300/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2022-04/cp220065en.pdf 536 https://web.archive.org/web/20220521202300/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2022-04/cp220065en.pdf 537 https://web.archive.org/web/20220521202300/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2022-04/cp220065en.pdf 538 https://web.archive.org/web/20220619013517/https://walledculture.org/interview-marc-rees-a-la-francaise-de-lhadopi-par-la-copie-privee-jusquaux-algorithmes-de-larticle-17/ 539 https://web.archive.org/web/20220521202300/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2022-04/cp220065en.pdf 540 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701135921/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocate_general_%28European_Union%29 541 https://web.archive.org/web/20220705083329/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/rc4_170789/en/ 542 https://web.archive.org/web/20220619013536/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-07/cp210138en.pdf 543 https://web.archive.org/web/20220521202300/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2022-04/cp220065en.pdf 544 https://www.notion.so/DSM-Directive-Implementation-Tracker-361cfae48e814440b353b32692bba879 545 https://web.archive.org/web/20220619013615/https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2021/08/towards-national-transpositions-of-dsm.html 546 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617071526/https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/26/best-summary-australias-news-link-tax-bargaining-code/ 547 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617071548/https://www.cigionline.org/articles/bad-news-ottawas-proposed-online-news-act-misses-the-mark/ 548 https://web.archive.org/web/20220526132018/https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/435EB2FD-145A-4AD6-BF01-855C0A78CEFC 549 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701140259/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Goldman 550 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616135345/https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/03/wouldnt-it-be-great-if-internet-services-had-to-license-technologies-selected-by-hollywood-comments-on-the-very-dumb-smart-copyright-act.htm 551 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616135345/https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/03/wouldnt-it-be-great-if-internet-services-had-to-license-technologies-selected-by-hollywood-comments-on-the-very-dumb-smart-copyright-act.htm 552 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617075408/https://www.techdirt.com/2015/07/29/study-spains-google-tax-news-shows-how-much-damage-it-has-done/ 553 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617075436/https://walledculture.org/interview-cory-doctorow-part-1-newspapers-big-tech-link-tax-drm-and-right-to-repair/ 554 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617075502/https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-big-tech-companies-are-hard-to-deal-with-senator-bragg-20210602-p57xfw.html 555 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701140827/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Media_Alliance 556 https://web.archive.org/web/20170711223412/https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/release-digital-duopoly/ 557 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617075524/https://www.techdirt.com/2021/07/01/denmarks-media-companies-form-copyright-collective-to-force-google-facebook-to-pay-more-sending-them-traffic/ 558 https://web.archive.org/web/20220620130419/https://mathewingram.com/work/index.php/2017/07/10/newspaper-groups-hope-for-antitrust-exemption-is-a-hail-mary-pass/ 559 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701141146/https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/673 560 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084132/https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20949935/jcpa-letter-to-congress.pdf 561 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084149/https://publicknowledge.org/ 562 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084132/https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20949935/jcpa-letter-to-congress.pdf 563 https://web.archive.org/web/20220705065218/https://www.copyright.gov/policy/publishersprotections/ 564 https://web.archive.org/web/20130112213232/http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf 565 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701141304/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hargreaves 566 https://web.archive.org/web/20130112213232/http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf 567 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084203/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Hub 568 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084222/https://advanced-television.com/2015/07/31/uk-copyright-hub-launches/ 569 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084247/https://www.copyrightdoneright.org/ 570 https://web.archive.org/web/20190616012328/http://www.copyrighthub.org/digital-rights-holder-statement-published 571 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084308/https://www.ardito-project.eu/about-us 572 https://web.archive.org/web/20210921051650/http://cepic.org/app/uploads/2017/02/Rights-Data-Integration.pdf 573 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084358/http://www.linkedcontentcoalition.org/index.php/news-press/press-room 574 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084418/https://www.copyrightdoneright.org/want-to-get-involved/ 575 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617084450/https://www.copyrightdoneright.org/check-out-our-wonderful-supporters/ 576 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617085236/https://www.copyrightdoneright.org/how-it-works/ 577 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617085254/https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/copyright/855/wipo_pub_855.pdf 578 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701141536/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management 579 https://web.archive.org/web/20220617085320/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

And the targets for the deeper, more incendiary anger are big tech companies that are undermining standards of work. Big tech companies that clearly and openly embrace technologies that are shifting and degrading not just working conditions but how people work, period. Big tech companies whose leaders are openly hostile to their workers—crushing union drives, enacting oppressive, maddening workplace policies, and breaking labor laws, knowing they have the economic might to clean up their messes later. Big tech companies whose leaders are the richest men on the planet, or are aiming to get there. Big tech companies that have long operated under the general impression that they are unassailable, and that are finding out that, when faced with organized resistance—they are not.

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At the vanguard of what we might call this new Luddite movement is the popular podcast This Machine Kills, hosted by tech journalist Edward Ongweso Jr. and social scientist Jathan Sadowski, and produced by Jereme Brown. TMK embraces Luddism as a framework for exploring—and excoriating—the dominance of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. It quickly became a must-listen for tech critics and insiders alike, and for workers trying to navigate the world that Big Tech made. “I have been pleasantly surprised and shocked, to be honest,” Sadowski said, laughing, over a Zoom call with his cohost. “This crop of people, this crop of neo-Luddites coming up. I’ve seen a lot of resonance when we talk about Luddism, I see a lot of people in our mentions on Twitter saying, ‘If this is what Luddism is then yeah, call me a Luddite.’”

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“We may discover each other through our myriad of antagonistic practices in their incredible diversity.” So far, of the so-called Big Tech companies, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has probably attracted the most widespread ire, at least in the media, for its role in allowing misinformation to flourish on its platform, for allowing hateful content to spread, and, at its worst, for allowing both ordinary users and powerful regimes to target vulnerable groups for unthinkable violence, as in the case of Myanmar and its Rohingya minority. Mark Zuckerberg consistently polls as the least popular big tech CEO for a reason.1 But in the 2020s, there is plenty of ire to go around.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

,” gdrp.eu, accessed April 7, 2021, https://gdpr.eu/what-is-gdpr/. 63 “GDPR: Noyb.eu Filed Four Complaints over ‘Forced Consent’ against Google, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook,” noyb.eu, May 25, 2018, https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-noybeu-filed-four-complaints-over-forced-consent-against-google-instagram-whatsapp-and. 64 “Austrian Privacy Activist Schrems Files Complaint against Amazon,” Reuters, February 19, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-privacy-amazoncom/austrian-privacy-activist-schrems-files-complaint-against-amazon-idUSL8N2AJ4ZJ. 65 Kara Swisher, “She’s Bursting Big Tech’s Bubble,” New York Times, October 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-lina-khan.html. 66 Lina M. Khan, “The Separation of Platforms and Commerce,” Columbia Law Review 119, no. 4 (2019): 973–1098; Kari Paul, “ ‘This Is Big’: U.S. Lawmakers Take Aim at Once-Untouchable Big Tech,” The Guardian, December 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/18/google-facebook-antitrust-lawsuits-big-tech. 67 For instance, European regulators investigated Google for seven years, which resulted in a $2.7 billion fine because the web giant was found to favor its own shopping service in search results, stifling competition.

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In 2019, Germany cracked down on Facebook for abuse of its market power, prohibiting the company from sharing data about users, without their consent, across Facebook-owned platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp. See Michael A. Corrier, “Big Tech, Antitrust, and Breakup,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 2020. 68 Sheelah Kolhatkar, “How Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech,” The New Yorker, August 20, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-elizabeth-warren-came-up-with-a-plan-to-break-up-big-tech; Lina M. Khan, “Amazon’s Paradox,” The Yale Law Journal 126, no. 3 (2017): 710–805. 69 Rod McGuirk, “Australia Passes Law to Make Google, Facebook Pay for News,” AP News, February 25, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/australia-law-google-facebook-pay-news-959ffb44307da22cdeebdd85290c0cde. 70 Gabriel Gieger, “Court Rules Deliveroo Used ‘Discriminatory’ Algorithm,” Vice, January 5, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9e4e/court-rules-deliveroo-used-discriminatory-algorithm. 71 Shirin Ghaffary, “After 20,000 Workers Walked out, Google Said It Got the Message.

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Then, in the 1990s, some began using this information to generate revenue by targeting us with ads they knew we were likely to respond to. This business model soon spread, and the race for people’s attention was on. “Engagement” became the “currency of the attention economy,”35 while data became “the new oil.”36 Big tech companies didn’t stop at targeted ads, when they realized they could flat-out sell our data to interested parties. Their clients are insurance companies, banks, employers, political campaigns, anyone who is willing and ready to pay to know what we want. Their pitch to potential clients is simple: pay us and we can make people do what you want, buy your products, sign up for your services, even vote for you in the next election.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Since I started there in 2008 I’ve written pamphlets about how digital technology would breathe new life into our desperately tired political system. Over the years my optimism drifted into realism, then morphed into nervousness. Now it is approaching mild panic. I still believe that technology can be a force for good in our politics – and that many of the big tech companies hope it can be, too – but for the first time I am genuinely concerned about the long-term prospects of the system that Winston Churchill once famously referred to as ‘the worst kind of government, except for all the others that have been tried’. The great tech pioneers, of course, do not share this concern because they are firm believers in a sunny techno-utopia and in their ability to take us there.

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The internet doesn’t only create small tribes: it also gives easy access to enemy tribes. I see opposing views to mine online all the time; they rarely change my mind, and more often simply confirm my belief that I am the only sane person in a sea of internet idiots. * * * • • • It’s unfair to lay all this at the door of Big Tech, since much of this is a human, not technological, weakness. Tech has turbocharged these weaknesses, but we are also responsible. And let’s not romanticise life before the internet. People have always clustered, and politics has always been divisive. There have always been manipulation and liars in politics, too (Harry Truman once said of Richard Nixon that he was a ‘no-good lying bastard, who can lie out of both sides of his mouth, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in’).

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Facebook’s dream to connect the world also means connecting Russian bots with British voters and gullible news outlets, fake news purveyors with floating voters, and Theresa Hong with worried American mothers who have never voted before. Every election has become an arms race, and the problem with arms races is that they are very difficult to slow down. Big Tech has built the infrastructure for selling stuff – some of the most sophisticated and connected configurations man has ever dreamt up – and now these infrastructures have been repurposed to win elections. In the red corner: a multi-billion-dollar business of influence and control which gets more accurate and targeted every year.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Winners from the pandemic — Big tech’s covid-19 opportunity. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/04/big-techs-covid-19-opportunity?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/winnersfromthepandemicbigtechscovid19opportunityleaders; Compare with Crawford, S. (2018). Calling Facebook a utility would only make things worse. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/calling-facebook-a-utility-would-only-make-things-worse/ “These firms have done things that, say, a litany of mini-Googles could not have done”: Scott, M. (2020, March 25). Coronavirus crisis shows Big Tech for what it is — a 21st century public utility.

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Coronavirus crisis shows Big Tech for what it is — a 21st century public utility. Retrieved from https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-big-tech-utility-google-facebook/; The Economist. (2020, April 4). Winners from the pandemic - Big tech’s covid-19 opportunity. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/04/big-techs-covid-19-opportunity?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/winnersfromthepandemicbigtechscovid19opportunityleaders “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”: United States of America. U.S. Const. amend. II. Another recessed power might be “data portability” and “interoperability” requirements: Gasser, U. (2015, July 6).

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Retrieved from https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/greenpeace-finds-amazon-breaking-commitment-to-power-cloud-with-100-renewable-energy/ It’s a good bet that both Alibaba and Tencent: Pearce. Energy hogs. Many cloud computing companies are actually seeking out revenues from fossil fuel industries: Merchant, B. (2019, February 21). How Google, Microsoft, and big tech are automating the climate crisis. Retrieved from https://gizmodo.com/how-google-microsoft-and-big-tech-are-automating-the-1832790799 Chevron, ExxonMobile, Total, and Equinor have signed billion-dollar contracts with Google, Microsoft, and others: Matthews, C. M. (2018, July 24). Silicon Valley to big oil: We can manage your data better than you.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

And it also served as a handy stand-in for the sins of big tech that were more uncomfortable for Thiel to acknowledge. Like Facebook, it had collected enormous quantities of data, often from customers who may not have realized they were being surveilled; like Facebook it had, effectively, given advertisers access to that data; and like Facebook, it had been manipulated by Russian trolls (by way of YouTube). After Trump’s election, Thiel began telling anyone who would listen that while the public—especially liberals smarting from the 2016 election—were focusing their anger on Facebook, the truly evil big tech company wasn’t Facebook.

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And yet this is only half the story because Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it in when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet.

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From that point on, Thiel seemed to hang behind or above or somewhere in the middle of almost every story I reported about the tech industry, and increasingly, many stories beyond it. In 2011, years before progressives started talking about free college, Thiel was warning about rising tuition prices, calling the higher education industry a bubble more troubling than the one in real estate. He helped to jumpstart the backlash against big tech in 2014 when he called Google a monopoly—years before Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would. And then, of course, came his destruction of Gawker and the election of Trump. In 2018, I started interviewing former employees, business partners, and other associates—in Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere—to try to understand how this had happened.

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

“This is software that is writing itself,” Kittlaus said. Samsung, the consumer electronics and phone manufacturer, apparently agreed that Viv was onto something big. In October, Samsung acquired the start-up—for $214 million. Once the dust had settled from 2016’s announcements, it was clear that the big tech companies were envisioning two ways that people could have conversations with machines. The first, obviously, was by voice. But texting was an option, too, and Facebook, Microsoft, and Google all found this method intriguing. Their interest in text-based interactions stemmed from a belief that the app age (“there’s an app for that!”)

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The vagaries of pronunciation and prosody mean that a single word can be spoken in an almost infinite variety of subtly different ways, making speech synthesis tricky. When engineers don’t have the optimal snippets of sound to assemble into words—or the data to synthesize them—the results come out clunky, the audio equivalent of puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit. If it wasn’t already hard enough to get a computer to say things properly in English, the big tech companies are rushing to expand into new markets globally. Siri now speaks more than twenty languages, each presenting its own complexities of pronunciation and inflection. So you can probably guess at the more automated and improved technique for synthesizing voices that the tech world has recently rushed to embrace: deep learning.

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The technology “brings together all of our investments over the years in natural-language understanding, deep learning, [and] text-to-speech.” The Duplex demo was the most memorable moment of the whole conference. But there was one final element of conversational AI systems that Pichai didn’t mention. The people who have engineered all of the capabilities discussed in this chapter, whether at universities, big tech companies, or chatbot-making start-ups, are for the most part who you would expect—computer scientists. They wrangle numbers; they formulate algorithms. But it turns out that there is one critical component of creating voice AIs that requires people with creative skills rather analytical ones. To be effective and engaging, conversational computers need something that neural networks can’t easily provide.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

they succeeded in suffocating many of the country’s “legitimate” online services: Vlad Savov, “Russia’s Telegram Ban Is a Big, Convoluted Mess,” Verge, April 17, 2018. Chapter 12: Building a Better Hype Machine “Today’s big tech companies have too much power”: Elizabeth Warren, “Breaking Up Big Tech,” blog post, 2019, https://2020.elizabethwarren.com/​toolkit/​break-up-big-tech. “a sense of anger and responsibility”: Chris Hughes, “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” New York Times, May 9, 2019. “Imagine Facebook and Instagram trying”: Elizabeth Warren, tweet, October 1, 2019, https://twitter.com/​ewarren/​status/​1179118108633636865.

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similar arguments about Amazon and Google: Tim O’Reilly, “Antitrust Regulators Are Using the Wrong Tools to Break Up Big Tech,” Quartz, July 17, 2019, https://qz.com/​1666863/​why-big-tech-keeps-outsmarting-antitrust-regulators/. “Facebook and Twitter spread Trump’s lies”: Robert Reich, “Facebook and Twitter Spread Trump’s Lies, So We Must Break Them Up,” Guardian, November 3, 2019. Google and Facebook’s monopolization of advertising: Matt Stoller, “Tech Companies Are Destroying Democracy and the Free Press,” New York Times, October 17, 2019; Matt Stoller, “The Great Breakup of Big Tech Is Finally Beginning,” Guardian, September 9, 2019. the decline of newspapers, newspaper employment: “Employment Trends in Newspaper Publishing and Other Media, 1990–2016,” U.S.

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an executive order to have the Federal Communications Commission clarify: Adi Robertson, “Trump’s Anti-Bias Order Sounds Like a Nonsensical Warning Shot Against Facebook,” Verge, August 12, 2019. “reasonable efforts”: Honest Ads Act (S.1356), 116th Congress (2019–20), https://www.congress.gov/​bill/​116th-congress/​senate-bill/​1356/​text. others have proposed it for this very crisis: Jeff Berman, “Big Tech Needs Regulation, but DC Must Go to School Before It Goes to Work,” Recode, June 14, 2019, https://www.vox.com/​recode/​2019/​6/14/​18679675/​big-tech-regulation-national-commission-technology-democracy. Figure 1.1: Based on data from Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6380 (2018): 1146–51; redrawn by Joanna Kosmides Edwards.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

It was as if she had taken everybody’s cumulative tech terrors—about being tracked by our cell phones, monitored by our search engines, eavesdropped on by our smart speakers, spied on by our doorbells—bundled them all together, and projected them onto these relatively anodyne vaccine apps, which, to hear Wolf tell it, took every creepy surveillance abuse perpetrated by Big Government and Big Tech and programmed them into one QR code, on “the back end.” The words she was saying were essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to the many people now listening to her, they clearly felt true. And the reason they felt true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another.

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It bears remembering that many of the technologies that form the building blocks of modern tech giants were first developed in the public sector, with public dollars, whether by government agencies or public research universities. These technologies range from the internet itself to GPS and location tracking. In essence, Big Tech has appropriated commonly held tools for private gain, while adopting the discourse of the commons to describe their gated platforms. For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, he described it as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” He was right about that—why then should it be held hostage to the capricious whims of one man?

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Because Wolf, with her Black Mirror–inspired stories about vaccine apps that can “turn off your life,” not only validates those latent tech fears but also, along with her new partner Steve Bannon, has something progressives lack: a plan for what to do about it, or at least a facsimile of one. The plan is to push “Five Freedoms” and “no mask” laws wherever you live. The plan is to barge into your local school board meeting, accuse its members of being Nazis, and get elected to take their place. The plan is to stick it to Big Tech by subscribing to new right-wing platforms and “stay ahead of the censors,” as Bannon’s tagline declares. The plan is to get you to send them money, to join their wars. The result is a troubling dynamic—one that sits at the heart of our doppelganger culture. Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Critics warn of powerful tech titans buying off members of Congress, hoarding data that violates our privacy and gives them an unfair advantage over other companies, or making decisions about their platforms that can single-handedly shift an election. “Today’s big tech companies have too much power—too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,”82 Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading advocate for breaking up Big Tech, has charged. In October 2020, the Department of Justice sued Google, alleging that the company was “unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets.”83 About a month later, the Federal Trade Commission and nearly every state attorney general sued Facebook for anti-competitive practices.84 There are kernels of truth to these arguments.

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-China Economic and Security Review Commission, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2019-11/2019%20Recommendations%20to%20Congress.pdf. 73 O’Mara, The Code, 304. 74 “About Us,” TechCongress, https://www.techcongress.io/about-us. 75 “About,” Google, https://about.google/. 76 Guy Rosen, Katie Harbath, Nathaniel Gleicher, and Rob Leathern, “Helping to Protect the 2020 US Elections,” Facebook, October 21, 2019, https://about.fb.com/news/2019/10/update-on-election-integrity-efforts/; “New labels for government and state-affiliated media accounts,” Twitter Blog, August 6, 2020, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/new-labels-for-government-and-state-affiliated-media-accounts.html. 77 “How Google Fights Disinformation,” Google Blog, February 2019, https://www.blog.google/documents/37/How_Google_Fights_Disinformation.pdf. 78 Sara Perez, “Hands on with Telepath, the social network taking aim at abuse, fake news and, to some extent, ‘free speech,’ ” TechCrunch, October 11, 2020, https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/11/hands-on-with-telepath-the-social-network-taking-aim-at-abuse-fake-news-and-to-some-extent-free-speech/. 79 “Working Group on Infodemics,” Forum on Information & Democracy, November 2020, https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ForumID_Report-on-infodemics_101120.pdf. 80 Olivia Solon, “Qualcomm announces photo verification tool,” NBC News, October 15, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/qualcomm-announces-photo-verification-tool-n1243550. 81 Brundage, The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence. 82 Elizabeth Warren, “Here’s how we can break up Big Tech,” Medium, March 8, 2019, https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c. 83 “Justice Department Sues Monopolist Google for Violating Antitrust Laws,” U.S. Department of Justice, October 20, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monopolist-google-violating-antitrust-laws. 84 “FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization,” Federal Trade Commission, December 9, 2020, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-sues-facebook-illegal-monopolization. 85 Mark J.

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Other technologies are being developed that could determine if a video is being broadcast live or not.81 Big Is Not Necessarily Bad Clearly, the tech industry has a critical role to play in addressing the front-end conflict raging on its platforms. This may very well entail new regulation from Washington, in addition to whichever new policies companies voluntarily adopt. What will not necessarily help win the Gray War, however, is a wholesale breaking up of Big Tech. The decision to break up America’s most successful technology companies is enormously consequential for the U.S. economy and American national security. It is not a decision that should be political or decided based on vague accusations or the whims of public polling. A decision of this significance should be carefully considered against tangible evidence of consumer harm—evidence that a breakup would be the right remedy to address the harm, and that the benefits of a breakup wouldn’t outweigh the costs.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

She sees the online world with a very US-centric and US-inspired culture, which may have held regulators there in check. I meet Bell in her uptown Manhattan office, in the middle of Columbia’s journalism school, where she immediately opens by explaining why she believes regulation is so antithetical to big tech. ‘I’ve always said the problem with big tech was that you got the engineering model of Stanford University lashed to the economic model of Chicago University,’ she explains. ‘You basically got the free-market Friedmanites as an economic model, and then you have a theory of zero latency engineering.’ Bell is referring to the ultra-free-market reasoning that grew out of the Chicago School of Economics – a school of thought that came to dominate the world and influence the economic policies of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK.

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But there is a much more profound way in which network effects are deeply baked into the fabric of any production function that’s based on data.’ The result of these data oligopolies, Wenger explains, is that a large majority of us – in the developed world at least – carry around supercomputers capable of speaking to any other supercomputer on the planet, and then reduce them into dumb terminals for big tech. ‘An iPhone is a complete supercomputer,’ he says. ‘If you just go back like forty years, no amount of money in the world could have bought this much computer power – it just didn’t exist …Then the second you fire up an app icon, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, what have you, that supercomputer basically works only on behalf of that entity, and not really on behalf of you.

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Bell is referring to the ultra-free-market reasoning that grew out of the Chicago School of Economics – a school of thought that came to dominate the world and influence the economic policies of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. This economic theory reasoned that markets were the best source of information and of value, and so obstacles to them – regulation, competition policy and other barriers – were usually impediments to that. In big tech, Bell says, this economic orthodoxy – even if it is masked with a socially liberal culture – is fused with a technological mindset of zero latency, or moving as fast as you can and fixing things as you go along. The two for her are more dangerous together than they are individually. ‘The two of them are fused, essentially, by venture capital,’ she continues.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Two big-data experts, Victor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, argue: “Although data has long been valuable, it was either seen as ancillary to the core operations of running a business, or limited to relatively narrow categories such as intellectual property or personal information. In contrast, in the age of big data, all data will be regarded as valuable, in and of itself.”53 Levine likens it to “a new form of alchemy” in which Google and other big tech companies have transformed “useless scraps of data into mountains of gold.”54 Big tech companies and third-party data vendors are amassing, hoarding, trading, selling, and extracting data like gold. As mentioned earlier, Google and Facebook already scoop up all the data we generate on their platforms and much of the data we generate off them, appropriating our rich, dynamic digital lives.

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For the full text of Jeff Bezos’s letter see http://media.corporateir.net/media_files/irol/97/97664/reports/Shareholderletter97.pdf. 22. Solon and Siddiqui, “Forget Wall Street.” 23. Lee, “Google Is Losing Allies.” 24. Bill Galston and Bill Kristol, “Big Tech: Public Discourse and Policy,” New Center, https://cloudfront.newcenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/11/26062745/Big-Tech-Policy-Paper2.pdf. 25. Yang, “Apple Investigates Illegal Student Labour at Watch Assembly Plant.” 26. Kantor and Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon.” 27. See, for example, a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai by Google employees on December 5, 2018, https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/invisible-no-longer-googles-shadow-workforce-speaks-up-9ea04b7bcc41. 28.

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Goodman, “Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Headquarters.” 50. Mullins and Nicas, “Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign.” 51. Foroohar, “Release Big Tech’s Grip on Power.” 52. Taplin, “Google’s Disturbing Influence over Think Tanks.” 53. Marriage and Waters, “Alphabet Set to Face Down Shareholder Dissent.” 54. Dobson, “Inside the Verdura Resort in Sicily, Home to Google’s Top Secret Summer Camp.” 55. Rushe, “Scholar Says Google Criticism Cost Him Job.” 56. Foroohar, “Big Tech’s Grip.” 57. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 298. Chapter 3: New Frontier 1. Bennett, “Kim Kardashian Just Wants to Be Seen.” 2. Kardashian, Selfish. 3.

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

The First Amendment codifies a ‘negative liberty’; that is to say, it affords citizens the right to freedom from government interference. While this is essential, it means that it is ill-equipped to tackle many of the free speech battles of the digital age. Historically, censorship has been enacted by the state, but with the rise of social media as the de facto public square, big tech corporations now have dominion over the acceptable limits of popular discourse. We are rapidly moving into an age in which unelected plutocrats hold more collective power and influence than any national government, only without any of the democratic accountability. This is why the argument that private companies should be free to discriminate at will is no longer persuasive or viable.

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The law was crafted out of an understanding that, given the proliferation of comment sections on news websites, it was always unfeasible to expect media outlets to be able to ensure that illegal content would not be uploaded. Yet now, this same law is routinely exploited to enable tech giants to censor with impunity. Worse still, the increased polarisation of politics means that many social media users whose views happen to align with big tech are cheering on the deterioration of their own freedoms because, for now, the impact is only being felt by their opponents. Tribal allegiances are blinding people to the long-term effects of corporate hegemony. While it is true that social media companies have been subjected to governmental pressure to monitor ‘hate speech’ and ‘fake news’ on their platforms, there has also been a markedly paternalistic shift in the way in which their speech codes are formulated.

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Should, for example, Facebook have the right to discriminate against gay people, or certain ethnic groups? Political orientation may not be an immutable characteristic, yet few of us would justify the suppression of political dissidents by the despots of history on these grounds. Given the overwhelming left-leaning bias among employees in big tech, any efforts to police the tenor of conversation or ‘fact-check’ disputed news sources are bound to result in accusations of partisan censorship. These are not elected representatives invested with the authority to act on behalf of the demos, but multi-billion-dollar corporations who profit from selling our data to advertisers.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

Facebook learned about attempts by Russian military intelligence to hack the social network in 2015, but waited two years before coming clean publicly.28 American liberals accused Facebook of playing the handmaiden to Trump’s victory. But four years earlier, when Obama was inaugurated for a second time, few on the political left had seen any problem with the growing role of big tech and the almost wholly unregulated digital campaigning in politics. “Liberals were apparently extremely comfortable with the idea when their guy was doing it,” says tech writer Jamie Bartlett. “That was a mistake.” By then, Britain was already following America down the dark digital path. * In the early years of the 21st century, Conservative and Labour staffers looked enviously at the digital revolution flaming across the Atlantic.

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It was a Friday afternoon in late summer as I took the elevator to the ninth floor of a glass-fronted office block in central London. I had expected a cagey half-hour with a tight-lipped bureaucrat. Instead, we had a lively, wide-ranging chat that went on until the end of the working day. Our conversation often circled back to two issues: the weakness of British election laws and the role of big tech in our politics. The Electoral Commission has asked for more powers to trace digital campaigning. So far, little has been done. Whether the regulator could handle more power is debatable. Its budget was cut significantly during the long years of austerity. A former employee told me that during the 2017 general election, the electoral watchdog’s online monitoring team consisted of two young interns looking at social media, supplemented by a cardboard box for staff to deposit any suspicious-looking printed material.

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Britain’s attempts to rein in Facebook were largely confined to Westminster’s inquiry into fake news. Its chair Damian Collins told me that he regarded online political advertising and messaging “as a threat to our democracy”. Yet there is little sign of politicians mobilising to act. What changes have been introduced – like Facebook’s ad library – have come from big tech companies themselves, not government. Many politicians seem content to outsource the regulation of democracy to Silicon Valley companies that have a financial interest in maintaining the status quo. Even if Facebook has a change of heart about paid-for political adverts spreading misinformation ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, it will almost certainly be too little, too late.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

David Barboza, “The Rise of Baidu (That’s Chinese for Google),” New York Times, September 17, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/business/yourmoney/17baidu.html. 29. “Rise of China’s Big Tech in AI: What Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent Are Working On,” CBInsights.com, April 26, 2018, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/china-baidu-alibaba-tencent-artificial-intelligence-dominance/. 30. Louise Lucas, “The Chinese Communist Party Entangles Big Tech,” Financial Times, July 18, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/5d0af3c4-846c-11e8-a29d-73e3d454535d. 31. Javier C. Hernandez, “A Hong Kong Newspaper on a Mission to Promote China’s Soft Power,” New York Times, March 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/world/asia/south-china-morning-post-hong-kong-alibaba.html. 32.

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I firmly believe that the leaders of these nine companies are driven by a profound sense of altruism and a desire to serve the greater good: they clearly see the potential of AI to improve health care and longevity, to solve our impending climate issues, and to lift millions of people out of poverty. We are already seeing the positive and tangible benefits of their work across all industries and everyday life. The problem is that external forces pressuring the nine big tech giants—and by extension, those working inside the ecosystem—are conspiring against their best intentions for our futures. There’s a lot of blame to pass around. In the US, relentless market demands and unrealistic expectations for new products and services have made long-term planning impossible.

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Minsky, especially, was concerned that the meeting would miss two critical voices—Turing, who’d died two years earlier, and von Neumann, who was in the final stages of terminal cancer.18 Yet for their great efforts in curating a diverse group with the best possible mix of complementary skills, they had a glaring blind spot. Everyone on that list was white, even though there were many brilliant creative people of color working throughout the very fields McCarthy and Minsky wanted to bring together. Those who made the list hailed from the big tech giants at the time (IBM, Bell Labs) or from a small handful of universities. Even though there were plenty of brilliant women already making significant contributions in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and physics, they were excluded.19 The invitees were all men, save for Marvin Minsky’s wife, Gloria.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Chapter 2: Mergers and Acquisitions   25   Tech companies actively sought : Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (New York: HarperOne, 1994).   25   “new communalists” : Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).   26   Operation Sundevil : Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992).   26   “Governments of the Industrial World” : John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996, https:// www .eff .org /cyberspace -independence.   26   fungus and bacteria : Qi Hui Sam, Matthew Wook Chang, and Louis Yi Ann Chai, “The Fungal Mycobiome and Its Interaction with Gut Bacteria in the Host,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences , February 4, 2017, https:// www .ncbi .nlm .nih .gov /pmc /articles /PMC5343866 /.   28   extolled the virtues of the deal : Saul Hansell, “America Online Agrees to Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion; Media Deal is Richest Merger,” New York Times , January 11, 2000, https:// www .nytimes .com /2000 /01 /11 /business /media -megadeal -overview -america -online -agrees -buy -time -warner -for -165 -billion .html.   28   the piece I wrote placed in the Guardian : Douglas Rushkoff, “Why Time Is Up for Warner,” Guardian , January 20, 2000, https:// www .theguardian .com /technology /2000 /jan /20 /onlinesupplement10.   29   People blamed : Seth Stevenson, “The Believer,” New York Magazine , July 6, 2007, https:// nymag .com /news /features /34454 /.   30   hired investment bank Salomon Smith Barney : Tim Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times , January 10, 2010, https:// www .nytimes .com /2010 /01 /11 /business /media /11merger .html.   31   probably borrowed : Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020).   32   stocks quadruple : Lisa Pham, “This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394%,” Bloomberg , October 27, 2017, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2017 -10 -27 /what -s -in -a -name -u -k -stock -surges -394 -on -blockchain -rebrand.   33   “independent, host-led local organizations” : Dave Lee, “Airbnb Using ‘Independent’ Host Groups to Lobby Policymakers,” Financial Times , March 21, 2021, https:// www .ft .com /content /1afb3173 -444a -47fa -99ec -554779dde236.   33   Google was outspending : Shaban Hamza, “Google for the First Time Outspent Every Other Company to Influence Washington in 2017,” Washington Post , January 23, 2018, https:// www .washingtonpost .com /news /the -switch /wp /2018 /01 /23 /google -outspent -every -other -company -on -federal -lobbying -in -2017 /.   33   outspent by Facebook : Lauren Feiner, “Facebook Spent More on Lobbying than Any Other Big Tech Company in 2020,” CNBC , January 22, 2021, https:// www .cnbc .com /2021 /01 /22 /facebook -spent -more -on -lobbying -than -any -other -big -tech -company -in -2020 .html.   33   Numerous studies : Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81, https:// doi .org /10 .1017 /S1537592714001595; Chris Tausanovitch.

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(New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 251.   38   “we’re way closer … people’s brains” : Matthew Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change,” Wired , February 15, 2021, https:// www .wired .com /story /billionaires -use -vr -avoid -social -change /.   38   “It is not possible … you wanted” : Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change.”   39   “Yes, we are in a pandemic” : David Zweig, “$25,000 Pod Schools: How Well-to-Do Children Will Weather the Pandemic,” New York Times , July 30, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /30 /nyregion /pod -schools -hastings -on -hudson .html.   41   legions of Amazon workers : Joey Hadden, “Amazon Delivery Drivers Share What It’s Like to Be on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Including Not Having Time to Wash Their Hands and Uncleaned Vans,” Business Insider , April 2, 2020, https:// www .businessinsider .com /why -amazon -delivery -workers -feel -exposed -and -vulnerable -to -coronavirus -2020 -3.   41   Amazon avoids taxes : Matthew Gardner, “Amazon Has Record-Breaking Profits in 2020, Avoids $2.3 Billion in Federal Income Taxes,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, February 3, 2021, https:// itep .org /amazon -has -record -breaking -profits -in -2020 -avoids -2 -3 -billion -in -federal -income -taxes /.   41   anti-competitive practices : Mark Chandler, “Amazon Accused of Anti-Competitive Practices by US Subcommittee,” Bookseller , October 8, 2020, https:// www .thebookseller .com /news /amazon -accused -anti -competitive -practices -us -subcommittee -1222115.   41   abuses labor : Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford, “Power and Peril: 5 Takeaways on Amazon’s Employment Machine,” New York Times , June 15, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /06 /15 /us /politics /amazon -warehouse -workers .html; Casey Newton, “Amazon’s Poor Treatment of Workers Is Catching up to It during the Coronavirus Crisis,” Verge , April 1, 2020, https:// www .theverge .com /interface /2020 /4 /1 /21201162 /amazon -delivery -delays -coronavirus -worker -strikes.   42   more people opened online trading : Annie Massa, “Pandemic-Fueled Day Trading Is Overwhelming Online Brokers—and the Traders Are Fuming,” Fortune , December 9, 2020, https:// fortune .com /2020 /12 /08 /day -trading -online -brokers -tech -failure -crashes -outages /.   42   Shares of Zoom went up : Shanhong Liu, “Price of Zoom shares traded on Nasdaq Stock Market in 2020 and 2021,” Statista , August 9, 2021, https:// www .statista .com /statistics /1106104 /stock -price -zoom /.   42   Jeff Bezos’s fortune rose : Chase Peterson-Withorn, “How Much Money America’s Billionaires Have Made During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Forbes , April 30, 2021, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /chasewithorn /2021 /04 /30 /american -billionaires -have -gotten -12 -trillion -richer -during -the -pandemic.   42   five biggest U.S. tech companies : The staff of the Wall Street Journal , “How Big Tech Got Even Bigger,” Wall Street Journal , February 6, 2021, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /how -big -tech -got -even -bigger -11612587632.   42   Netflix’s share price : Jonathan Ponciano, “5 Big Numbers That Show Netflix’s Massive Growth Continues during the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Forbes , October 20, 2020, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /jonathanponciano /2020 /10 /19 /netflix -earnings -5 -numbers -growth -continues -during -the -coronavirus -pandemic /.   43   “Many creatives, startups, and techies” : Jen Murphy, “Remote Workers Flee to $70,000-a-Month Resorts While Awaiting Vaccines,” Bloomberg , February 15, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -02 -15 /remote -workers -flee -to -luxury -beach -resorts -while -awaiting -vaccines.   43   “It’s been great here” : Julie Satow, “Turning a Second Home into a Primary Home,” New York Times , July 24, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /24 /realestate /coronavirus -second -homes - .html.   43   Each 1 percent increase : Mary Van Beusekom, “Race, Income Inequality Fuel COVID Disparities in US Counties,” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota, January 20, 2021, https:// www .cidrap .umn .edu /news -perspective /2021 /01 /race -income -inequality -fuel -covid -disparities -us -counties; Tim F.

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But climate, poverty, disease, and famine don’t respect the safe play space defined by our user preferences. No matter what technology we’re using, none of us can climb back into the womb. 4 The Dumbwaiter Effect OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND W e can’t blame capitalism for all of technology’s ills, nor can we blame big tech for the devastating excesses and blind spots of business. But neither business nor digital technology could have wrought the havoc of this moment on their own. Rather, the two have formed a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that encourages entrepreneurs to envision a future ruled by private sector technologies that work to make our problems invisible, even if they fail to solve them.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Celina Ribeiro, Wired, August 30, 2020. 20 39 percent of Australians: Digital News Report: Australia 2020, University of Canberra News & Media Research Centre, 2020. 21 Much more had gone dark: “Facebook’s New Look in Australia: News and Hospitals Out, Aliens Still In,” Damien Cave, New York Times, February 18, 2021. 22 “calculated for impact”: Tweet by Evelyn Douek (@evelyndouek), February 17, 2021. twitter.com/evelyndouek/status/1362171044136710144 23 Human Rights Watch described: Tweet by Sophie McNeill (@sophiemcneill), February 17, 2021. twitter.com/Sophiemcneill/status/1362187114431975426 24 Australian lawmaker warned: Tweet by Anthony Albanese (@albomp), February 17, 2021. twitter.com/AlboMP/status/1362177819304812544 25 “likely be unable to offer”: “Meta Says It May Shut Down Facebook and Instagram in Europe over Data-Sharing Dispute,” Sam Shead, CNBC, February 7, 2022. 26 “life has been fantastic”: “We’re Fine without Facebook, German and French Ministers Say,” William Horobin and Zoe Schneeweiss, Bloomberg News, February 7, 2022. 27 40 percent of the big-tech workforce: “How Tech Workers Feel about China, AI and Big Tech’s Tremendous Power,” Emily Birnbaum and Issie Lapowsky, Protocol, March 15, 2021. 28 For months, she had been in touch: “Inside the Big Facebook Leak,” Ben Smith, New York Times, October 24, 2021. 29 “I just don’t want to agonize”: “The education of Frances Haugen: How the Facebook Whistleblower Learned to Use Data as a Weapon from Years in Tech”, Cat Zakrzewski and Reed Albergotti, Washington Post, October 11, 2021. 30 “Facebook has realized”: “Whistleblower: Facebook Is Misleading the Public on Progress against Hate Speech, Violence, Misinformation,” Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes, October 4, 2021. 31 “We can have social media we enjoy”: Frances Haugen Opening Statement, Senate Hearing on Children and Social Media, October 5, 2021. 32 “What we see in Myanmar”: Zakrzewski and Albergotti, October 2021.

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Rapidly bringing the country online would, they promised, modernize its economy and empower its 50 million citizens, effectively locking in the transition to democracy. A few months after Obama’s visit, Schmidt, acting as the Valley’s ambassador-at-large, landed in Yangon, Myanmar’s historic capital, to announce big tech’s arrival. Flanked by the American ambassador, he told the student audience, “The internet, once in place, guarantees that communication and empowerment become the law and the practice of your country.” Myanmar’s leaders believed in Silicon Valley’s vision as well. A state-run newspaper admonished its citizens that “a person without a Facebook identity is like a person without a home address.”

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And she stood out in another way: she was a high-ranking woman of color in an industry overwhelmingly, notoriously dominated by men. Both insider and outsider, she’d been a Silicon Valley believer since the 1990s, when she’d joined a company that made hardware for accessing the internet from TVs. But she’d also grown skeptical of big tech’s tilt toward young male geeks. Other than Yishan Wong, the site’s CEO, the twenty or so other employees at fledgling Reddit trended young. Most spoke in the in-jokes and cultural arcana of a platform that, despite its enormous userbase, felt insular. Pao was a little stiff; Wong urged her to use less “corporatey” language.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2010. Davenport, Thomas, and Laurence Prusak. Information Ecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Day, Ronald. Indexing It All. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Dayen, David. “Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism.” The American Prospect, December 26, 2017. http://prospect.org/article/big-tech-new-predatory-capitalism. Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009. Debatin, Bernhard, Jennette Lovejoy, Ann-Kathrin Horn, and Brittany Hughes. “Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors and Unintended Consequences.”

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In the face of this, we find, as already suggested, a surprising ally in a deeply compromised figure: the philosopher Hegel, who fascinated the critics of both capitalism and colonialism (Marx and Fanon). Hegel is known for his theory of “world-spirit,” or Geist, in terms of whose unfolding he interpreted the whole of history. One might therefore have expected Hegel to be an ally of Big Tech; it was, after all, Ray Kurzweil, now director of engineering at Google, who wrote that “the singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit.”35 But Hegel was a complex philosopher and also one of the most searching investigators into the nature of human freedom. In the words of his main interpreters, Hegel saw freedom as “possible . . . only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relation to others.”

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He argues that if the First Amendment protects not just freedom of speech but freedom of thought (for example, freedom of religious belief), then it must also protect the practices from which thinking freely emerges (for example, our rehearsals of ideas, as when reading a book).123 To be implemented, however, it would require a shift in US legal practice to make corporate actors fully accountable in relation to US constitutional rights.124 In any case, “intellectual” privacy does not capture data colonialism’s challenge to freedom of the intellect and to the self’s basic integrity in all its aspects (not just intellectual but also perceptual and affective). Given the current political turmoil in the United States at the federal level, the best hope would seem to be state legislation, such as California’s 2018 Consumer Privacy Act, which passed despite opposition from big tech.125 The European legal tradition offers a more fundamental challenge to data colonialism. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights already recognizes privacy (including privacy of what it quaintly calls “correspondence”), but the question is how this should be interpreted for an environment in which “correspondence” hardly captures the scale of data-gathering that is built into every transaction and action in connected space.126 German law provides a basis for going further.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Some journalists have suggested that big tech’s sudden interest in the nebulous idea of the Metaverse is actually an effort to avoid regulatory action.7 Should governments around the world become convinced that a disruptive platform shift is imminent, this theory supposes then even the largest and most entrenched companies in history need not be broken up—free markets and insurgent competitors will do the work. Others have argued that, on the contrary, the Metaverse is being used by said insurgents so that regulators will open antitrust investigations into today’s big tech leaders. One week before filing suit against Apple on antitrust grounds, Sweeney tweeted “Apple has outlawed the Metaverse,” with the company’s legal filings detailing how Apple’s policies would prevent its emergence.8 The federal judge presiding over the lawsuit seemed to buy into at least part of the “Metaverse as a regulatory strategy” theory, stating in court: “Let’s be clear.

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In October, members of the European Parliament began to voice concerns. One particularly important voice was that of Christel Schaldemose, who served as a chief negotiator for the European Union as it worked on its largest-ever overhaul of digital-era regulations (most of which were intended to curb the power of so-called big tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google). In October, she told the Danish paper Politiken that “plans for metaverse are deeply, deeply worrying” and that the union “has to take them into account.”6 It’s possible that the many Metaverse announcements, critiques, and warnings are just a real-world echo chamber about a virtual fantasy—or more about driving new narratives, product launches, and marketing than anything life-changing.

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Chapter 9 HARDWARE FOR MANY OF US, THE MOST EXCITING ASPECT OF the Metaverse is the development of new devices that we might use to access, render, and operate it. This usually leads to visions of super-powerful, yet lightweight, augmented reality and immersive virtual reality headsets. These devices are not required for the Metaverse, but are often assumed to be the best or most natural way to experience its many virtual worlds. Big-tech executives seem to agree, even though supposed consumer demand for these devices has yet to translate into sales. Microsoft began developing its HoloLens AR headset and platform in 2010, releasing the first device in 2016 and the second in 2019. After five years on the market, fewer than half a million units have shipped.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Obsolete products, firms, job categories, and services must fall by the wayside to make way for new ideas, new firms, jobs, and technologies. In this brave new world, big tech firms will remain very powerful. They will battle with governments to set the scope of regulation, but those battles will be offset by the need for governments and big tech to cooperate on national security agendas including cybersecurity. In renewed democracies restraints to big tech would allow a healthy modicum of privacy and individuals’ control of their data. China exploits technology for internal and external purposes with scant regard for privacy or human rights.

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China can attack crippling issues like wealth inequality and climate change by fiat. Xi Jinping says Chinese children waste too much time playing video games. By decree, he stops it. He decides there is too much investment in private tutoring that tilts scales toward those with wealth. He stops it, and for good measure he raises taxes to promote economic equality. If big tech firms have accumulated too much power, the government goes after them. To address climate change, it shuts coal mines. Yet repression imposes a cost that is hard to measure. An authoritarian state can slash red tape, but can it make space for the freedoms that sustain innovation and growth? While Chairman Hu Jintao led China from 2003 to 2013, each March I attended a development forum in Beijing, where we met senior officials over the course of three days.

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Whatever name they bestow, to the Chinese it beats dysfunctional democracy and self-serving global financial institutions by a country mile. Despite early promises to stay in its lane, China increasingly competes with the West. It has launched its own versions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It has kept American Big Tech firms out of the country, while nurturing homegrown giants. It has built new islands in the South China Sea and claimed territories that the West insists are in international waters. Yet Xi continues to proclaim that a rising power does not make aggression inevitable. Unlike the United States and its allies, China has not fought a war since 1979, apart from border skirmishes.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

., “US Authorities Investigate If Recently Published Emails Are Tied to Russian Disinformation Effort Targeting Biden,” CNN, October 16, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/politics/russian-disinformation-investigation/index.html. 9. Noah Manskar, “Twitter, Facebook Censor Post over Hunter Biden Expose,” New York Post, October 14, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/facebook-twitter-block-the-post-from-posting/. 10. “Fact: Big Media and Big Tech Stole the 2020 Election,” NewsBusters, November 9, 2020, https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nb-staff/2020/11/09/fact-big-media-and-big-tech-stole-2020-election. 11. Ibid. 12. Adam Entous, “Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?,” New Yorker, July 1, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign. 13.

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What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.

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The concern about universal mail-in balloting was that ballots would be sent to people and places they shouldn’t be, where anyone could return a ballot and where it was impossible to guarantee integrity. It was one of the dozens of fake news stories that the media ran to hamstring the Trump campaign and tilt the election in Biden’s favor. And with the assistance of Big Tech, the media could exert more influence on censoring conservative opinion than ever. CHAPTER SIX Stifling Debates It was a scene straight out of a movie. President Trump was walking to Air Force One, having just finished a ninety-minute rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, on September 18. His oft-repeated campaign event playlist was on the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

We are talking about individuals who rely—via their pension fund managers—on an industry they probably don’t understand very well to deliver the returns they will need to live off in old age. We are talking about tens of millions of workers—employees like teachers, firefighters, and other pensioners around the world. The rise of private equity has been hiding in plain sight. The industry doesn’t mint the kind of high-publicity executives you find in “big tech” companies like Amazon or Tesla or Apple. But its reach is staggering. Investors turn to private equity to deliver higher, more consistent returns that are hard to get elsewhere. And as private equity firms introduce other strategies, such as credit, real estate, and infrastructure, these investors allocate money to those strategies too.

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It’s time for people to learn what’s really going on with private equity, to get to know the traits and motivations of the key people pulling the strings. That’s where this book comes in. We are all well conditioned to think about, talk about, and obsess about the “big banks” of Wall Street that were deeply involved in the chaos of the financial crisis of 2007–8. We are fixated with the “big tech” of Silicon Valley and its drumbeat of IPOs, not only because of those companies’ insinuation into our daily lives but also due to the astronomical wealth that successful technology companies generate. Everyone with a 401(k) knows the alphabet soup of acronyms that cover names like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

…

That is also why the media spotlight that is increasingly focused on senior figures in private equity has some justification. Arguably, these investment folks are as important as other business and thought leaders we already think of in the conversation around the impact on our economy—and society—whether we are talking about the CEOs of the Big Tech companies or the Wall Street banks. What they stand for and what motivates them is part and parcel of the jobs they do. They are not only the “key employees” in fund documents between their investors and their firm—they are also key people in our economy. And for aspiring hires like David who want to reach the heights where the Founder and the senior partners sit, the demands of private equity form the crucible that will determine if they make it.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

.), Scientific Memoirs, selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, London: Richard and John Taylor, 1843. Lucian, A True History, trans. Francis Hickes, London: A. H. Bullen, 1902 [1894]. Hermann Lotze, Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland, Munich: G. J. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1869. Barry C. Lynn, “The Big Tech Extortion Racket: How Google, Amazon, and Facebook Control Our Lives,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 2020. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/ Stefano Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, New York: Atria Books, 2017. Robert McFarlane, “The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web,” The New Yorker, August 7, 2016.

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This, maintains Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Corporation, is his enterprise’s reason for being. Yet it would not take a particularly critical mind to notice that strengthening the social fabric and bringing the world closer together are not, in fact, what Facebook is doing. No, Facebook and the other big tech companies are, plainly, tearing the social fabric to threads, and pulling people apart. Just fire up your computer and marvel at the news of the day, at all the angry people behind the avatars, fighting with one another and with bots about the news, and about the meaning of the news. Witness how global and local politics have been corrupted into a form of unrelenting disinformation warfare.

…

See organized trolling campaigns fomenting violence against minority groups throughout the world. Observe the mobbing of political dissidents by mass campaigns from below, and the repression of the same dissidents by state surveillance from above. Revisit 2016 and watch the technologies of the new big tech companies mobilize to propel a disreputable internet troll into the highest office of the most powerful country in the world. Tremble before the online rage addicts who daily band together in search of new targets: someone caught on video in a moment of indiscretion, who is then summarily doxxed (that is, has their personal information revealed on the internet), shamed, fired, or ostracized; some young adult on the cusp of success who is brought low when shown to have used hateful language as a teenager in a chat forum; some clueless normie (slang for a normal, mainstream person, oblivious to the rhythms and insiderisms of online culture) ruthlessly ridiculed for not yet having adopted the terminology for a given identity group that was ratified by social-media vanguards only a short time before.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

After all, it had stolen my livelihood and left me with nothing but memes to eat. It had kidnapped my friends and sent me a daily ransom note called Facebook, where everyone insisted that everything was going great, that they were being treated well, that the food was always excellent—but I knew better. Big Tech trampled over every enjoyable experience in the world. It wouldn’t stop until everything felt like the same damn thing: staring at a screen. My entrepreneurial mission, meanwhile, required me to outwardly embrace what I privately abhorred. It was an impossible situation of my own design. Over time, the contradictions wore me down until I lay broken in a fetal ball on a sagging mattress in a decrepit Airbnb, surrounded by empty beer bottles and small, sad keepsakes of the life I’d left behind.

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He proceeded to describe the Factory’s twenty-five-thousand-square-foot mansion in San Francisco and to explain how the concept was inspired by Buddhist notions of “minimizing attachment.” He also mentioned a curious ritual called the Crucible. Long story short, the idea was to take these powerful people, break down their egos, and remold them. “This is the new disruption. Influence the influencers,” Chi said. “The populist phase of Big Tech is over.” * * * Foolishness or not, the Factory represented earthly desires that Silicon Valley elites were usually too embarrassed to admit, let alone discuss in a room full of strangers. Clearly, beneath all the claptrap about conscious capitalism—the latest buzzword for “mission-driven” corporations—and saving the world, blah blah blah, there lurked a tenebrous techie will to power.

…

These were ideas about racial purity and supremacy, recast as a humanitarian crusade for “biological innovation” and the scientific freedom to conduct unfettered genetic experimentation; about the social virtues of total surveillance, recast as openness and transparency; about the rightful primacy of technicians and capitalist tycoons; about the decadence of artists and intellectuals. If, as Google’s Tom Chi had said, “the populist phase of Big Tech is over,” I wondered, what nightmare comes next? * * * In March 2014, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1.  Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2.  

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

In a free market system, the solution would be to create alternatives. Parler attempted to do just that. Angered at the capricious nature of Twitter’s management, Parler began as an alternative. In 2020, as big tech began to unleash its power in the election, Parler steadily gained adherents: in late July, Parler saw over a million people join in one week. After the 2020 election, as big tech moved to stymie alternative media, conservatives jumped to Parler: Parler hit the top spot in Apple’s App Store, and jumped by more than 4.5 million members in one week. Parler’s chief selling point: it would not ban people based on political viewpoint.

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Immediately thereafter, left-wing authoritarians took full advantage of the situation to press forward revolutionary aggression, top-down censorship, and anti-conventionalism targeting not just the rioters, but conservatives and individual rights more broadly. This perspective was mirrored across nearly every powerful institution in American society. So, let us repeat the question. If there is a serious threat to free speech, does it come chiefly from right-wing authoritarians? Or does it come from the left-wing authoritarians in media, big tech, and government? If there is a threat to democratic institutions, does it come chiefly from right-wing authoritarians? Or does it come from the left-wing authoritarians in government, who broadly disdain the Constitution and believe in the implementation of their worldview from the top down? If there is a threat to our most basic liberties, whom should we most fear: the dumbasses in clown suits invading the Capitol on January 6?

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Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death.37 This is the America we currently occupy. As Axios reporter Jim VandeHei writes, “Blue America is ascendant in almost every area: It won control of all three branches of government; dominates traditional media; owns, controls and lives on the dominant social platforms; and has the employee-level power at big tech companies to force corporate decisions . . . our nation is rethinking politics, free speech, the definition of truth and the price of lies. This moment—and our decisions—will be studied by our kid’s grandkids.”38 There is no respite: your employer requires your fealty to woke principles; corporations require that you mirror their political priorities; the media treat you as a crude barbarian.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

This exchange in front of Congress, with a progressive Congresswoman grilling a former tech ingenue who is now one of the world’s most powerful men, made clear what students in my disasters course already knew: that we are in the midst of witnessing a disaster right now sharpened by so many of the problems with “Big Tech” that we have seen growing for at least a decade. What is transpiring with the giants of Silicon Valley and their impact on our national and international infrastructure deserves a full unit in my disasters course, because the call for change in high tech, and the need for solutions, has never been more urgent.

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Understanding the Cold War as an ideological battle between social freedoms and fairness, it is clearer in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s global surveillance and the Russian hacking of the 2016 US elections that the very technology thought to herald the end of that conflict and to usher in an age of information freedom—global computer networks—has actually left no clear victor among our multipolar world of networked citizens and migrants.41 Instead, the sure victors of the last half century of network history have been large organizations—telecommunication companies, surveillance states, big tech (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google), internet providers, cybersecurity organizations, data broker services (SAS and SalesForce), and other technologically powerful few that, fueled by data breaches and the fumes of modern privacy, sort, toll, and monitor our many network traffic bottlenecks. Networks do not resemble their designs so much as they take after the organizational collaborations and vices that tried to build them: the first civilian computer networks ever imagined tried to reproduce and manage the institutional collaboration among Soviet economic bureaucracy—and when Soviet bureaucrats proved noninteroperable, so did their computer networks.

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Naturally, not only is this data not publicly shared but very little is known about the user demographics: which accents are captured, who participates in the transcription, verification process, and so on. The entire process is shrouded in mystery; market competitiveness demands that it be so. Given the exclusive practices of big tech companies, we must look to independent developers—and free and open-source software (FOSS) initiatives that support independent developers—to make greater strides in disrupting the system. Ramsey Nasser,48 for example, comes to mind as an independent developer working on an Arabic coding language.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

As an alternative to pro-competition reforms, Klein proposes regulations of various kinds, modeled on those around airline safety and prescription drugs. A New Brandeisian might respond that corporate giants are adept at co-opting the regulatory process. Regulation can also reinforce existing concentrations of private power by introducing compliance costs that only large corporations can bear. Indeed, big tech firms have repeatedly called for more regulation in recent years—provided they get to decide how they’re regulated. Facing Reality Fortunately, rulemaking and anti-monopoly, or some combination of the two, aren’t the only choices available to us. There is another strategy: deprivatization. Making markets more regulated or more competitive won’t touch the deeper problem, which is the market itself.

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Travis Kalanick: Eliot Brown, “Uber Co-Founder Travis Kalanick Cuts Stake in Company by More Than 90%,” Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2019. 122, Just because Uber is … For data on the growing GDP share of the financial industry, see Thomas Philippon, “Has the U.S. Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation,” American Economic Review 105, no. 4 (2015): 1408–38. 123, These companies were so successful … Facebook acquisitions: Mark Glick and Catherine Ruetschlin, “Big Tech Acquisitions and the Potential Competition Doctrine: The Case of Facebook,” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series 104 (2019): 57–60. Google acquisitions: CB Insights, “The Google Acquisition Tracker,” available at cbinsights.com/. 124, Moreover, there aren’t … Decline in GDP and labor productivity growth rates: Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Verso, 2020), 31–32; Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (Verso: London, 2018 [2006]), 341.

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Gilens and Page’s research found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” 150, The second trend aims … My description of the New Brandeisians in this section draws from Lina Khan, “The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate,” Journal of European Competition Law and Practice 9, no. 3 (2018): 131–32; Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018); and Barry Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (New York: Wiley, 2009). See also Tim Wu, “The Utah Statement: Reviving Antimonopoly Traditions for the Era of Big Tech,” OneZero, November 18, 2019. 150, Toward this end … Proposal for forcing Facebook to spin off WhatsApp: Barry Lynn and Matt Stoller, “Facebook Must Be Restructured. The FTC Should Take These Nine Steps Now,” Guardian, March 22, 2018. The antitrust lawsuits filed by the FTC and forty-eight state attorneys general in December 2020—and dismissed by a federal judge in June 2021—also called for such a move. 150, Their advocacy is having … House Judiciary report: US House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, “Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets,” October 6, 2020.

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Andrew Perrin, “One-in-Five Americans Now Listen to Audiobooks,” Pew Research Center, May 30, 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/25/one-in-five-americans-now-listen-to-audiobooks. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Apjit Walia, “America’s Racial Gap & Big Tech’s Closing Window,” Deutsche Bank Research, Sept. 3, 2020,www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/America%27s_Racial_Gap_%26_Big_Tech%27s_Closing_Window/RPS_EN_DOC_VIEW.calias?rwnode=PROD0000000000464258&ProdCollection=PROD0000000000511664. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Sarah Berger, “How This 35-Year-Old Dad Made $1.5 Million off a Simple Fiverr Side Hustle,” CNBC, June 13, 2019, www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/how-this-dad-made-almost-1-million-on-fiverr.html.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Anneken Tappe, “Donald Trump’s Final Economic Report Card Could Be Very Underwhelming,” CNN, Jan. 27, 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/economy/us-gdp-fourth-quarter-preview/index.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Apjit Walia, “America’s Racial Gap & Big Tech’s Closing Window,” Deutsche Bank Research, Sept. 3, 2020, www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/America%27s_Racial_Gap_%26_Big_Tech%27s_Closing_Window/RPS_EN_DOC_VIEW.calias?rwnode=PROD0000000000464258&ProdCollection=PROD0000000000511664. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Index The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of the book. Each link will take you to the beginning of the corresponding print page.

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The answer is, we learned and relearned the lessons outlined in this book. As business owners and investors, we saw that the importance of thinking “digital first” was paramount as we watched old institutions struggle with embracing new ways of serving customers and eventually going bankrupt. At the same time, we watched big tech grow and new tech players enter the mainstream as the world was forced to do everything online. The year 2020 was the year many were forced to realize the future they’d heard of was at their doorstep, floating above them in a drone or maybe even in the cloud. Investors learned how incredibly unpredictable the stock market could be as we watched billions of dollars gained and lost like a seesaw.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Europe has leaned the most into regulating data collection, with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The U.S. government, by contrast, has taken a more laissez-faire approach to regulating technology, allowing the growth of “surveillance capitalism” in which big tech companies collect and store massive amounts of personal data. (Although political winds in Washington are starting to shift with a growing “techlash” against big tech firms.) China represents the starkest difference, with the Chinese Communist Party building an intrusive and expansive techno-authoritarian surveillance apparatus, which is imperfect and fragmented for now but will become increasingly capable over time.

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The Chinese government has also taken steps to increase privacy protections from corporate (although not government) surveillance, and the government may see advantages in reining in the independent power of tech companies. The Chinese Communist Party has begun cracking down on the power of Chinese big tech firms, reeling in once-powerful moguls like Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma. There are some areas in which Chinese firms will have major data advantages over U.S. companies, which are likely to translate into technical advantages in some AI applications. The most notable among these is facial recognition, which is being widely deployed in China while a grassroots backlash in the United States has slowed deployment.

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The CCP’s massive investment in intelligent surveillance and social control has boosted Chinese AI companies and tied them closely to the government. The fact that half of iFLYTEK’s revenue came from the government is indicative of the extent of the Chinese government’s ties to its AI national champions. This is not the case for American firms, for whom the government is a relatively small slice of their business. In the United States, big tech corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Google are independent centers of power, often at odds with the government on specific issues. Power is more fragmented in democracies, and it can be more difficult to get public and private sector actors to work together to establish rules for how to use technology.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

They’ll determine the future of democracy, causing it to flourish or decay. And their algorithms will decide vital questions of social justice, allocating social goods and sorting us into hierarchies of status and esteem. The upshot is that political authorities—generally states—will have more instruments of control at their disposal than ever before, and big tech firms will also come to enjoy power on a scale that dwarfs any other economic entity in modern times. To cope with these new challenges, we’ll need a radical upgrade of our political ideas. The great English philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiography of 1873 that, ‘no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.’1 It is time for the next great change.

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These three forms of power—force, scrutiny, and perception-control— are as old as politics itself.What’s new is that digital technology will OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Introduction 23 give them a potency that far exceeds any previous instruments of power known to humankind. The main consequence for politics, I suggest, will be that those who control these technologies of power will be increasingly able to control the rest of us.Two groups stand to benefit the most: political authorities and big tech firms. That’s the focus of chapter nine. This change in the nature of power will affect every aspect of political life. Part III looks at the implications for liberty. On the one hand, new inventions will allow us to act and think in entirely new ways, unleashing exciting new forms of creation, self-expression, and self-fulfilment.

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That’s why although the state doesn’t own the technologies that gather data about us, it’s already tried to establish control over them—sometimes with the blessing of tech firms, sometimes against their will, and sometimes without their knowledge.To take a couple of examples, law-enforcement authorities don’t need to scan the emails of Gmail users for evidence of child pornography because Google does it for them and reports suspicious activity.7 Similarly, the state doesn’t need to compile public and pri­ vate records of all the data collected about individuals (in the US the Constitution partly prevents it from doing so) but is perfectly able to purchase that information from data brokers who have undertaken the scrutiny themselves.8 Big Brother, it’s said, has been replaced by a swarm of corporate ‘Little Brothers’.9 In 2011 Google received more than 10,000 government requests for information and complied with 93 per cent of them.10 Tech firms comply with the government for various reasons: sometimes because they agree with the government’s aims, sometimes because they’re well-paid, sometimes because they want to collaborate on cutting-edge technologies, and sometimes because it makes business sense to stay on the state’s good side.11 In this context, Philip Howard, professor of Internet Studies at the University of Oxford, has identified what he calls a ‘pact’ between big tech firms and government: ‘a political, economic, and cultural arrangement’ of mutual benefit to both sides.12 As well as asking permission, the state will sometimes use the law to help it gain control over the means of scrutiny. Many European countries and the US have enacted laws requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to adapt their networks to make it possible for them to be wiretapped.13 Sometimes, however, tech companies push back, as when Apple refused to accommodate the FBI’s demands that it unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernadino terrorists.14 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 156 FUTURE POLITICS But where the state wants information that it can’t buy, legislate for, or demand—it still has the illicit option of hacking the databases of those who hold it.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

They all want to understand it, and they all want to be a part of it. And our students aren’t the only ones enthusiastic about AI. They’re joined in their exaltation by the world’s largest companies—from Amazon, Facebook, and Google in America to Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba in China. As you may have heard, these big tech firms are waging an expensive global arms race for AI talent, which they judge to be essential to their future. For years we’ve seen them court freshly minted PhDs with offers of $300,000+ salaries and much better coffee than we have in academia. Now we’re seeing many more companies jump into the AI recruiting fray—firms sitting on piles of data in, say, insurance or the oil business, who are coming along with whopping salary offers and fancy espresso machines of their own.

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Now we’re seeing many more companies jump into the AI recruiting fray—firms sitting on piles of data in, say, insurance or the oil business, who are coming along with whopping salary offers and fancy espresso machines of their own. Yet while this arms race is real, we think there’s a much more powerful trend at work in AI today—a trend of diffusion and dissemination, rather than concentration. Yes, every big tech company is trying to hoard math and coding talent. But at the same time, the underlying technologies and ideas behind AI are spreading with extraordinary speed: to smaller companies, to other parts of the economy, to hobbyists and coders and scientists and researchers everywhere in the world. That democratizing trend, more than anything else, is what has our students today so excited, as they contemplate a vast range of problems practically begging for good AI solutions.

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We’re data scientists—and we’re also academics, meaning that our instinct is to stay firmly in our lane, where we’re confident of our expertise. We can teach you about AI, but we can’t tell you for sure what the future will bring. We can tell you, however, that we’ve encountered a common set of narratives that people use to frame this subject, and we find them all incomplete. These narratives emphasize the wealth and power of the big tech firms, but they overlook the incredible democratization and diffusion of AI that’s already happening. They highlight the dangers of machines making important decisions using biased data, but they fail to acknowledge the biases or outright malice in human decision-making that we’ve been living with forever.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Sometimes they seem useless, advertising for months a sofa that we’ve already bought, but there are times when they seem terrifyingly on the money, suddenly displaying adverts for a product we mentioned to a friend five minutes ago. Was my phone listening to me? Was Alexa? The big tech companies insist they don’t listen in that way (and independent researchers believe that’s true),12 but they collect almost everything else – well beyond what you might realise they’re grabbing. Facebook, for example, sees almost all of your internet browsing, whether you had Facebook open at the time or not, and whether you have a Facebook account or not. Big Tech might not always best know how to monetise it, but their algorithms know us better, perhaps, than we know ourselves.

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In time Hildmann would come to describe himself as an ‘ultra-right-winger’ and say that the genocides of Adolf Hitler were a ‘blessing’ compared to those he believed Angela Merkel was planning.37 Patchily, and in fits and starts, QAnon was demonstrating that it could be just as virulent internationally as it had proven to be in the USA. Social media – inaction, then bad action With little more than the occasional exception, between 2017 and mid-2020, QAnon had free rein across all of the major social networks to spread its gospel, with very little in the way of pushback from either Big Tech or the mainstream media. With hindsight, this was a monumental mistake by the supposedly all-powerful and cabal-controlled media – but aside from a few dissenting voices, most people at the time thought this was the correct response. Without social media and mainstream outlets both failing to act, though, it’s possible QAnon could never have taken off in the way that it did.

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Mike’s mum had been estranged from her sister, who lives overseas, but they had been bonding again through a shared belief in QAnon through lockdown, sharing insights they had spotted or new mysteries on a daily basis. But the constant investigation of QAnon was coming to fill their days, aside from perhaps an hour or two watching television. For Mike, a turning point – for the worse – with his mum came when QAnon was kicked off mainstream social networks. ‘I think all of the efforts that have been done by big tech and by governments to try and tackle this basically poured more petrol on the fire,’ he says. ‘Mum’s completely disengaged, and I don’t think she will ever come back – the censorship’s completely backfired, well intentioned though it was.’ Mike’s mum had previously accessed QAnon mainly through Facebook and the open internet, until the ban.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Trump had banked more than $2 billion in “earned media,” that is, free attention—far surpassing that of any other candidate. Now, each tweet was a presidential proclamation. Where once the public and media had adored Big Tech—Facebook and Twitter gave people a voice, while Uber and Lyft gave anyone a ride—now the public devoured stories of state-sponsored hackers using vast databases of personal information to influence the election. Suddenly, nefarious forces in Silicon Valley had led the country off a cliff, and Big Tech was profiting from the strife. Travis Kalanick had spent the past two years steeling Uber for a Clinton presidency. He spun up teams of lobbyists in every market that mattered.

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From September 2007 and onward through the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank cut interest rates from a little over 5 percent to its lowest ever rate, 0.25 percent, by 2009. And that rock-bottom rate is where it would stay for the next seven years. Through these maneuvers the Treasury Department and the Fed arguably kept the global economy from spiraling further out of control. But during the panic, leaders focused mostly on Wall Street, and not Big Tech. Slashing interest rates to save the banks would have profound effects on technologists and entrepreneurs—particularly on a fifty-mile stretch of Route 101 in Northern California. In a way, the carnage of the dot-com bust had done the Valley more good than ill. The bust separated the dot-com poseurs from the actual valuable companies.

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He spun up teams of lobbyists in every market that mattered. He wanted them ready to deal with an incoming administration that was a friend to unions and an enemy to companies that relied on contract workers. Clinton hadn’t come after Big Tech quite yet; she was closely tied to major donors in the Valley, including Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce. But if there was a company a Clinton presidency might come after, it could be the most hated startup in the country: Uber. But Trump’s upset victory caught everyone at Uber off guard. Most of the rank and file, a largely Democratic- and Libertarian-leaning force, were tearing their hair out at the thought of a Trump presidency.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

By now, it’s clear they’ve broken quite a lot.’114 Leaving it to the platforms to self-regulate toxic content clearly hasn’t worked, as Mark Zuckerberg himself has now acknowledged.115 We need regulation with teeth to compel Big Tech to reform. The penalties handed out to date for failing to immediately remove unambiguously hateful content have been so low as to be meaningless in the context of Big Tech’s gargantuan, record-breaking profits. Major offenders need to be fined sums of money that really do impact their bottom line. Perhaps at last change is on the horizon. In the wake of the live streaming on Facebook of the 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which fifty-one people at two mosques were killed, Australia introduced the Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material Act, which levies fines of up to 10% of a company’s global turnover should it fail to remove ‘abhorrent violent’ material ‘expeditiously’ enough.116 Whilst this law covers the sharing of only the most extreme content (‘murder or attempted murder, a terrorist act, torture, rape or kidnapping’), it is a landmark piece of legislation with regards to the size of the penalty the offending platforms would have to pay.

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In doing so they must recognise that content moderating is a challenging job, both intellectually and emotionally, and that training moderators well, paying them decently and providing them with sufficient emotional support is a necessity. At present not enough is being done. If even 10% of the energy Big Tech devotes to corporate growth and expansion was dedicated to finding more ingenious solutions to content moderation, the world would be a lot further ahead in addressing online poison, polarisation, alienation and disconnection. It is not that they can’t afford to do more. With their tens of billions of dollars of revenue and mountains of cash reserves, social media companies have immense capability and power to bring about change.

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This is something a group of British MPs has recently argued for with specific reference to social media and children, suggesting in a 2019 report that along with mandating a ‘duty of care’, the government should also hold directors of tech companies personally liable for harms caused by their products, echoing the recent legislation in Australia.122 There clearly are steps our governments can and should take. We don’t have to accept that the digital train has left the station and there’s nothing we can do to change its destination. There’s much that can be done to protect ourselves and our communities in the face of Big Tech – if the political will and the political pressure is there. And whilst I welcome Facebook’s new-found cheerleading for regulation, we should have a healthy dose of scepticism about their proactive moves to shape the nature of this regulation. After all, calling for more regulation – in a form that works best for itself – was a long-standing strategy of Big Tobacco.123 Ensuring that social media companies do not enjoy excessive voice in the shaping of the new rules of the game is more critical now than ever, given their immense economic and media power.

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

Now many of those friends are millionaires (or at least half millionaires) after exercising their stock options following the massive growth in tech valuations. Yes, it’s easy to write my friends off as lucky, which is partially true, but I also know that’s just an excuse. Because I had many opportunities to board the big tech boat as it passed by, but I declined them all. And it’s not that I wanted to work in big tech specifically (I didn’t). It’s that I didn’t spend any significant time thinking about my career until I was 27 years old. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have shown that an individual’s income grows most rapidly in their first decade of work (ages 25–35).¹⁰⁵ Given this information, you can see why my focus at age 23 should’ve been on my career and not my investment portfolio.

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Though I could have traveled and dined out less often (experiences I thoroughly enjoyed), those purchases wouldn’t have moved the needle enough to make a difference. But you know what would have made a difference? Making better decisions earlier in my career. It wasn’t my money I should have optimized, but my time. While many of my friends went off to big tech firms (Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.) and got that sweet, sweet equity compensation, I worked at the same consulting firm for six years where I was paid generously, but had no such upside. I didn’t realize how much I was missing out until it was a bit too late. Now many of those friends are millionaires (or at least half millionaires) after exercising their stock options following the massive growth in tech valuations.

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Though you can always earn more money, nothing can buy you more time. As harsh as this sounds, I promise that I am not as hard on myself as it might seem. I know that I currently have a much better life than what I would’ve expected given my upbringing. In addition, I doubt I would have had the opportunity to write this book had I joined a big tech company. So there’s that. But more importantly, I know that even if I had reached my $500,000 goal, it likely wouldn’t have changed my life in any meaningful way. I know this because affluence increases in steps, roughly by factors of 10. This is why someone who increases their wealth from $10,000 to $100,000 will probably see a bigger life impact than someone going from $200,000 to $300,000.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

.* The most visible manifestations of the consolidation trend sit right in front of our faces: the centralization of the once open and competitive tech industries into just a handful of giants: Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. The power that these companies wield seems to capture the sense of concern we have that the problems we face transcend the narrowly economic. Big tech is ubiquitous, seems to know too much about us, and seems to have too much power over what we see, hear, do, and even feel. It has reignited debates over who really rules, when the decisions of just a few people have great influence over everyone. Their power feels like “a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government” in the words of Senator John Sherman, for whom the Sherman Act is named.

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But now it was all for the best: a law of nature, a chance for the monopolists to do good for the universe. The cheerer-in-chief for the monopoly form is Peter Thiel, author of Competition Is for Losers. Labeling the competitive economy a “relic of history” and a “trap,” he proclaimed that “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.” The big tech firms are a little more circumspect than Thiel. For Facebook, it is not trying to build a global empire of influence so much as “bringing the world closer together.” It is supposedly a “different kind of company that connects billions of people.” To do that right, however, requires a global monopoly.

…

But little could be closer to obeying Congressional intent than to use the Sherman Act against the trusts, or monopolies, of the era. It is here, among other places, that America can borrow from Europe, which has never given up on the big cases, and continues to enforce a law it borrowed from the United States in a manner more like America once did. Europe now leads in the scrutiny of “big tech,” including the case against Google’s practices, and in smaller, less public matters, like policing how Apple deals with competitors who also depend on the iPhone platform. European antitrust is far from perfect, but its leadership and willingness to bring big cases when competition is clearly under threat should serve as a model for American enforcers and for the rest of the world. 4.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

There is a petulant insistence that coded algorithms, rather than human expertise, are the ideal way to solve problems on the platform. This argument ignores the reality of continual algorithmic and manual adjustment of news feeds at firms like Facebook.28 Any enduring solution to the problem will require cooperation between journalists and coders. BIG TECH’S ABSENTEE OWNERSHIP PROBLEM After every major scandal, big tech firms apologize and promise to do better. Sometimes they even invest in more content moderation or ban the worst sources of misinformation and harassment. Yet every step toward safety and responsibility on platforms is in danger of being reversed thanks to a combination of concern fatigue, negligence, and the profit potential in arresting, graphic content.

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They optimize some combination of ad revenue and “engagement”—that is, the quantity and intensity of time spent on the site by users. As megafirms divert ad revenues from the legacy media, they have been richly rewarded, becoming some of the largest corporations in the world.2 Most advertisers want audiences, not necessarily any particular content. Big tech can deliver. The largest tech platforms are more than economic entities. They affect politics and culture—areas where metrics, no matter how complex, can only fitfully and partially capture reality. Communications scholars have documented many forms of bias on digital platforms, ranging from the gaming of search results to mass manipulation.3 These concerns rose in prominence during the 2016 US presidential election, as well as the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum—both of which featured deeply disturbing stories about misleading and inflammatory “dark ads,” which can only be seen by targeted demographics.

…

Tech behemoths can no longer credibly describe themselves as mere platforms for others’ content, especially when they are profiting from micro-targeted ads premised on bringing that content to the people it will affect most.26 They must take editorial responsibility, and that means bringing in far more journalists and fact checkers to confront the problems that algorithms have failed to address.27Apologists for big tech firms claim that this type of responsibility is impossible (or unwise) for only a few firms to take on. They argue that the volume of shared content is simply too high to be managed by any individual or team of individuals. There is a petulant insistence that coded algorithms, rather than human expertise, are the ideal way to solve problems on the platform.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

—Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford University, co-director of the Institute for Human-Centered AI “The Coming Wave makes an eye-opening and convincing case that advanced technologies are reshaping every aspect of society: power, wealth, warfare, work, and even human relations. Can we control these new technologies before they control us? A world leader in artificial intelligence and a longtime advocate for governments, big tech, and civil society to act for the common good, Mustafa Suleyman is the ideal guide to this crucial question.” —Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network “A sharp, compassionate, and uncompromising framing of the most consequential issue of our times, The Coming Wave is a must-read for technology practitioners, but more importantly it is a resolute call to action for all of us to participate in this most consequential discourse.”

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Similarly, a vast span of services, from very different sectors, across huge parts of the planet, have been collapsed into a single corporation, Google: mapping and location, reviews and business listings, advertising, video streaming, office tools, calendars, email, photo storage, videoconferencing, and so on. Big tech companies provide tools for everything from organizing a birthday to running multimillion-dollar businesses. The only equivalent organizations, touching so deeply into the lives of so many, are national governments. Call it “Googlization”: a range of services provided for free or at low cost leading to single entities functionally enabling massive sections of the economy and human experience.

…

You just expect antivirus and security software as a by-product of using Google or Apple. Products break, get obsolete. Services less so. They are seamless and easy to use. For their part, companies are eager for you to subscribe to their software ecosystems; regular payments are alluring. All the big tech platforms either are mainly service businesses or have very large service businesses. Apple has the App Store, despite primarily selling devices, and Amazon, while operating as the world’s biggest retailer of physical goods, also provides e-commerce services to merchants and TV streaming to individuals, and hosts a good chunk of the internet on its cloud offering, Amazon Web Services.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

Shear, “Trump Signs Executive Order Protecting Free Speech on College Campuses,” New York Times, May 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/trump-free-speech-executive-order.html. 147. Donald Trump Jr., “Free Speech Suppression Online Builds Case to Break Up Big Tech,” Hill, September 30, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/463631-free-speech-suppression-online-builds-case-to-break-up-big-tech. 148. Donald Trump, Twitter, May 16, 2020, 4:56 a.m., https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1261626674686447621, accessed May 27, 2020. 149. Nick Rigillo, “Convicted Racist Hits Danish Campaign Trail After Easter Riots,” Bloomberg, updated May 4, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-03/a-convicted-racist-joins-list-of-candidates-in-danish-election 150.

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No one voted for them, nor do we know exactly how they and their algorithms manage our speech. Yet they decide which of their billions of users will be heard and by whom, and which will not. That abuses occur countless times daily can be no surprise. They are built into the system. It comes down to money—what the technology writer Charlie Warzel calls the “original sin” of Big Tech’s prioritization of growth over the interests of users.58 When an aging senator asked Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 how the platform can be free to users, Zuckerberg replied (to snickers worldwide), “Senator, we run ads.” He might have also explained to the befuddled politician that the ads don’t work like those in paper publications: platforms curate and promote content for maximum “engagement,” that is, the intensity and frequency with which users interact with them.

…

While Donald Trump’s attacks on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, one of the pillars of speech protections on social media, lost momentum with his election loss, the issues exploded anew in January 2021, when Twitter banned him, along with seventy thousand QAnon accounts, following a pro-Trump attack on the US Capitol building. The immediate results were a drop in online misinformation, the migration of extremist content to the web’s darker reaches, and bitter criticism of “Big Tech” and Section 230 from almost all corners. But even if Section 230 survives intact in the short term, the push to substantially restrict online speech may well bear fruit. It is useless to guess how that will occur. Indeed, the entire course of online speech regulation has defied prediction. Who, after all, would have imagined even a decade ago that a private tribunal assembled and financed by a thirty-six-year-old billionaire’s company, Facebook, would have the power to pass judgment—on a transnational basis—on some of the day’s most important speech issues?

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

They’ve been backed into a corner by BUMMER and they’re incredibly vulnerable. News organizations—especially those supporting expensive investigative journalism—have been told for twenty years that it’s up to them to be nimble enough to come up with new business plans that will stand up to the “disruptions” of the big tech companies, but no one has ever come up with actual good advice. So the news has thinned, even as the news is ever more in the news. There is constant BUMMER obsession with the news, and yet there are almost no investigative local news organizations left in the United States. Our huge nation is only a few organizations away from having no independent newsrooms with resources and clout.

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Consumers are addicted, but so are the BUMMER empires. BUMMER makes tech companies brittle and weirdly stagnant. Of the big five tech companies, only two depend on the BUMMER model. Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft all indulge in a little BUMMER, but they all do just fine without depending on BUMMER. The non-BUMMER big tech companies have successfully diversified. There are plenty of reasons you might want to criticize and change those three companies, but the amount of BUMMER they foster is not an existential threat to civilization. The two tech giants that are hooked on BUMMER, Google and Facebook, are way hooked.

…

BUMMER HEAVEN One of the reasons that BUMMER works the way it does is that the engineers working at BUMMER companies often believe that their top priority among top priorities isn’t serving present-day humans, but building the artificial intelligences that will inherit the earth. The constant surveillance and testing of behavior modification in multitudes of humans is supposedly gathering data that will evolve into the intelligence of future AIs. (One might wonder if AI engineers believe that manipulating people will be AI’s purpose.) The big tech companies are publicly committed to an extravagant “AI race” that they often prioritize above all else.8 It’s completely normal to hear an executive from one of the biggest companies in the world talk about the possibility of a coming singularity, when the AIs will take over. The singularity is the BUMMER religion’s answer to the evangelical Christian Rapture.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

The funds had to demonstrate a repeatable process—and that made it hard to justify investing in speculative concept stocks. But an evolution was underway. Globally, technology stocks were taking off, and Australia didn’t have many. Hamish Douglass, a former investment banker turned fund manager, was dazzling financial planners around the country with his pitch about how Big Tech was changing the world, and why Australians simply had to own a piece of these profit machines. The ASX only had a handful of successful tech companies that were worth over $1 billion: accounting software firms Xero and MYOB, enterprise software maker Technology One and construction software company Aconex.

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Technology stocks had run hard both globally and in Australia. In the United States, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google—the so-called FAANG stocks—had run up spectacularly. But investors argued that their share price was only moving in step with their ever-rising revenues. There was no obvious bubble, at least when it came to big tech. But at the smaller end, there were signs that investors were getting carried away. Australia had its own acronym of tech darlings: the WAAAX stocks. Wisetech, Afterpay, Altium, Appen and Xero. While the FAANGs were global platforms whose reach transcended that of almost any corporation in history, the WAAAX stocks were masters of their niches, providing accounting and logistics software, electronics engineering and artificial intelligence.

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The rest of the market had to clamour for a small float of available shares. Unusually, the most expensive shares, measured by the highest price-to-earnings ratios, were the ones that were going up in price, while the cheapest stocks fell further. This was a value investor’s nightmare. L1 Capital, a Melbourne hedge fund, told its clients that the share prices of Big Tech stocks may be grounded in reality, but there were still two parallels with the tech bubble of 2000. The first was that 80 per cent of companies listed on the market were losing money. The second was that they were, on average, doubling within six months. Afterpay’s extraordinary growth was very real.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Classical AI scientists dismissed t­ hese as “shallow” or “empirical,” ­because statistical approaches using data ­d idn’t use knowledge and c­ ouldn’t h­ andle reasoning or planning very well (if at all). But with the web providing the much-­needed data, the approaches started showing promise. The deep learning “revolution” began around 2006, with early work by Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio. By 2010, Google, Microsoft, and other Big Tech companies w ­ ere using neural networks for major consumer applications such as voice recognition, and by 2012, Android smartphones featured neural network technology. From about this time up through 2020 (as I write this), deep learning has been the hammer causing all the prob­lems of AI to look like a nail—­ prob­lems that can be approached “from the ground up,” like playing games and recognizing voice and image data, now account for most of the research and commercial dollars in AI.

…

Ironically, as general intelligence is supposed to be emerging from AI and its applications to scientific research, it’s noticeably downplayed in the roles of scientists. Billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel remarked recently that innovations seem to be drying up, not accelerating.1 Tech startups once dreamed of the next big idea to woo investors in the Valley, but now have exit strategies that almost universally aim for acquisitions by big tech companies like Google and Facebook, who have a lock on innovation anyway, since Big Data AI always works better for whoever owns the most data. The fix is in. The question is ­whether, as Thiel puts it, ­there is now a “derangement of the culture,” or w ­ hether the good ideas have already been 2 snatched up.

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BETT I NG ON I DE A S Wiener pointed out that the economics of corporate profit make investment in a genuine culture of ideas difficult, since early bets on ideas are all in essence bad, as their full value becomes apparent only downstream. 272 T he ­F uture of the M yth To put it simply, new ideas ­can’t be predicted, and so represent an economic and intellectual commitment to a flourishing culture without guaranteed short-­term gain. We should expect, in other words, that the consolidation of the web into big tech ­w ill also tend to skew work on AI ­toward narrow applications on the profit curve, while inventions (still unknown) get short shrift. As proof of this claim, consider how ­little investment is given to exploring paths to artificial general intelligence, as opposed to applications of, for instance, deep learning to gameplay.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It is the most important subterranean force. Power is exercised through institutions—big Wall Street banks, global corporations, the executive and legislative branches of government, the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court, the military, elite universities, and the media (including social media as organized by Big Tech). But these institutions don’t wield power on their own. Particular people have outsized influence over them. They include CEOs like Jamie Dimon, large investors, hedge fund and private equity managers, media moguls, key lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable, and major donors to political candidates and universities.

…

“We think in terms of that moat and the ability to keep its width and its impossibility of being crossed,” Buffett explained in a Berkshire Hathaway meeting. “We tell our managers we want the moat widened every year.” That is why Buffett’s firm holds close to a 10 percent stake in all four remaining major American airlines. It’s also why Buffett loves Big Tech. At the end of 2018, his firm had $39.4 billion worth of Apple stock—its largest stock holding. He’s also big on Amazon. And he’s enamored with big Wall Street banks. Once, when asked to name his favorite bank, Buffett replied: “What’s your favorite child?” As of mid-2019, his firm held about $6 billion of JPMorgan shares, and Buffett’s top deputy, Todd Combs, sits on JPMorgan’s board.

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As I’ve explained, the sky-high profits at JPMorgan and the other banking behemoths on the Street are due to their being too big to fail, along with their political power to keep regulators at bay. Similarly, high profits at the four remaining major American airlines come from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions. High profits of Big Tech come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and a widening moat that’s discouraging innovation. In short, moats are good for profits and big investors but not good for most workers or consumers. If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he would be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power, for filling in the moats.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

There was a feeling that we were standing at one of history’s inflection points, not just because of Trump but because of the Internet. Digital technology had already transformed great swathes of the economy, but even bigger and more momentous changes lay ahead. Everyone was trying to figure out what those would look like, but nobody had any idea, not even the CEOs from the big tech companies who had unleashed the whirlwind. Throwing Trump into the mix added even more chaos and uncertainty. What if he started a trade war? Or a real war? It was difficult enough to be grappling with complex issues like growing income and wealth inequality, and the potential impact of robotics, artificial intelligence, and automation—but now we would have a man-child president whose obsessions included arming schoolteachers, banning Muslims, and building a wall at the Mexican border.

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How can it be that these “innovative” tech companies in Silicon Valley seem like some of the most backward organizations in the world? This is basically segregation, only instead of taking place at the University of Alabama in 1963, it’s happening in California in 2018. The consequences aren’t just moral failings—they’re financial. Freada Kapor has consulted with most big tech companies and produced voluminous research. Contrary to the prevailing opinion among bro-CEOs, Kapor argues that diversity produces better returns. A 2017 study by the Kapor Center estimated that employee turnover related to cultural issues was costing the tech industry $16 billion a year. Yet not much progress has been made, she concedes.

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If this were important at the CEO level, then you would see companies taking more dramatic action.” Also, these companies are making loads of money. “They’re doing swell. So it’s a case of, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” Kapor says. In recent years the Kapors started to dial back on trying to fix big tech companies. They believe they can have more impact by working with new start-ups. “We’re focusing on young companies,” Mitch says. “I think it’s more likely that a new generation of companies can do better. If you bake in a commitment to diversity and inclusion right from the start, it will still be part of the company when you get large.”

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

There were “some people who are very concerned about farming, those who are very interested in the environment, or labour standards, or privatisation of public services, or Third World debt.” The thing that connected the dots was large corporations: “These interests tie together and the place they all meet is this issue of corporate power,” wrote Monbiot. Multinationals, especially the big tech companies, may turn out to be the target of the globotics backlash if it does go global and does go to the street. Who Might the Backlash Target? Big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google were just starting to get roughed up in the “playground” of public opinion when this book went to press. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook was called to testify before the US Congress and EU Parliament about a scandal involving the misuse of users’ data.

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Of course, this sort of allegation is a long way from the job-displacing effects of globots, but as we saw in the antiglobalization movement, the targets of the backlash often find themselves in a crossfire from people with diverse grievences. Yet another source of what could become a mighty pushback takes an even deeper bite at the big tech companies by focusing directly on their goldmines—their data. RADICAL MARKETS AND WHO CONTROLS OUR DATA Two Chicago University scholars, Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, published a book in 2018 that points out that no one thought through the “data economy” before it happened. Their book, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, argues that the data-based economy unknowingly developed without any systematic thought as to the consequences.

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They get to use it as much as they like and however they like. It is like you have donated a book to a public library and the librarian gets to decide what to do with it. They suggest a radically different solution, what they call “data-as-labor.” Data in this view is generated by users and thus the data belongs to the users. If the big tech companies want to use it, they have to pay the users. Just imagine the radical implications of that simple switch in data ownership. Under the data-as-labor presumption, digitech firms would have to pay people for the data they create. Suppose the parliaments of all the advanced economies passed laws that forced Facebook (to take an example) to pay each of its users $100 per year for the right to use their data.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

This assertion can be made self-fulfilling through sheer dint of repetition, if one has sufficient control over the Narrative. But it is just here, in the realm of narrative tending, that the push for driverless cars has turned out to be ill timed, as it happens to coincide with a slow-motion collapse of the public’s trust in Big Tech to serve as steward of our interests, and shepherd of the Future. Futurism is a genre of mythmaking that seeks to generate a feeling of inevitability around some desired outcome, a picture that is offered as though it were a prediction. This is a good way to attract investment. And reciprocally, the flow of investment dollars is a good way to attract public speechifiers (journalists, “thought leaders,” etc.) who will lend their voices to the chorus of inevitability.

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If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion.”6 From the perspective of the imperial center, knowledge that is scattered and localized in the periphery is an obstacle to central control—unless it can be gathered and collated. All those lanes and alleys need to be mapped.7 THE UBERIZATION OF LONDON Though Seeing Like a State was written before Google and Uber existed, I think Scott’s framework allows us to see that Big Tech’s project of enhanced geographic legibility may be understood, yes, as making things more convenient for visitors and new arrivals to any locale, but also—in some sense we need to explore—as a program of political and economic dispossession affecting established residents. Some intuition of this must lay behind the allergic reaction that people around the world have had to the sight of Google’s camera cars prowling through their neighborhoods.

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One probably rooted in some rigid mental habit, a fear of change and hankering after the past? Or some merely aesthetic objection to technology, typical of privileged intellectuals? These are the stock phrases of forward thinkers on left and right alike who invoke inevitability to quarantine doubts that may arise about the progressive good will of Big Tech. To be free of nostalgia is the first point of pride for such intellectuals. This makes them useful to the tech firms in overcoming popular resistance when those firms launch fresh incursions into previously autonomous realms. To understand the resentments provoked by Street View in the UK, one has to select a Brexit hat and try it on for size.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

Let us go virtual A virtual currency made from digital cash denominated in a synthetic unit of account and determined by a basket of currencies does sound a little like Facebook’s Libra, which is an example of an ACU for commercial transactions. We will look at Libra in some detail later on, but at this point it is sufficient to note that while Facebook may have been the first Big Tech to try to establish a global digital currency, other similar proposals are sure to follow (Petralia et al. 2019). This is not a bad thing in many people’s eyes. The historian Niall Ferguson has stated plainly that ‘if America is smart, it will wake up and start competing for dominance in digital payments’ (Ferguson 2019).

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No more Dunkirk or Saving Private Ryan, no more The Dam Busters or Enemy at the Gates. Instead, movies will be about solitary individuals in dimly lit bedsits typing lines of Perl or Solidity while eating tuna out of a can. Chapter 7 Private digital currency Digital currencies issued by Big Tech firms would undoubtedly have some advantages relative to fiat currencies. — Gita Gopinath, IMF chief economist, Financial Times (7 January 2020) It is now a quarter of a century since a pamphlet I picked up at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) changed my view on the provision of currencies.

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Their analysis suggests that if platforms have any comparative advantage in issuing tradable tokens, it comes from other factors (You and Rogoff 2019). We will speculate on what these other factors might be later in the chapter.40 The issue of tradability is not the focus here, but a key advantage that Big Tech enjoys in such activities is the ability to ensure liquidity and value by guaranteeing its tokens can be redeemed for within-platform purchases, as de Bono imagined. However, You and Rogoff note that the theory of what they refer to as ‘redeemable platform currencies’ remains underdeveloped. I agree, especially because these platform currencies will be built from smart money that offers new functionality.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

In a world of intensifying geoeconomic competition, the countries with the most creative innovation hubs are likely to be the most prosperous and ultimately the most powerful. In a world of intensifying income inequality, the countries that can foster greater regional diversity in the locations of those hubs will be happier and more stable. Even as they seek to regulate Big Tech, governments must do everything possible to foster technology startups—a policy challenge to which we will return presently. For now, it is enough to say one thing about this challenge. Whatever the failings of venture capitalists, they are an essential ingredient of dynamic startup clusters.

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The VC industry is better at enriching itself than at developing socially useful businesses. The VC industry is dominated by a narrow club of white men. The VC industry encourages out-of-control disrupters with no regard for those who get disrupted. The least persuasive of these complaints is that venture-backed businesses are not socially useful. Of course, Big Tech has a dark side. Companies as huge as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have all kinds of social impacts, some good and some not, and governments are right to clamp down on the bad stuff. Violations of privacy, the propagation of fake news, and the sheer power of private actors to determine who gets to communicate when and to whom: these are legitimate targets for regulators.

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Similarly, the challenge to Facebook comes from the next generation of social-media platforms: the Sequoia-backed TikTok or the a16z protégé Clubhouse. Nor does the fact that Facebook has swallowed two prominent past challengers, Instagram and WhatsApp, undermine this point. For one thing, competition authorities, responding to the increasing skepticism of Big Tech, may block Facebook’s acquisition of future challengers. For another, the high prices that Facebook paid for Instagram and WhatsApp have created powerful incentives for VCs to fund the next round of contenders. Any clique that becomes as rich and powerful as the denizens of Sand Hill Road deserves critical scrutiny.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The lower interest rates also reduced consumption of those elderly dependent on interest from government bonds. 14.By the same token, changes in the structure of the labor market—the gig economy—may result in jobs that are insecure and without good benefits. 15.In many of these sectors, wages are low because the jobs were traditionally gendered, and there was systematic wage discrimination against women. 16.The defenders of Big Tech’s use of Big Data also argue that it allows them to steer individuals to products that better meet their needs. Putting aside the Big Brother aspects of this “steering,” it should be clear that the motive is not to make individuals happier but to increase Big Tech’s profits and that of the companies that advertise on their sites. Unfortunately, as the discussion below will illustrate, there are many uses of Big Data that disadvantage consumers as a whole, and especially informationally disadvantaged consumers.

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Trickle-down economics won’t work, just as it didn’t work for globalization. But government can make sure that everyone, or at least most people, are better off. There are at least four sets of policies that will be required: (1) Ensuring that the rules of the economic game are fairer, that the game is not stacked against workers—and most importantly, that the big tech companies don’t use the new technologies to increase corporate market power, in the manner described later in this chapter. Strengthening the bargaining power of workers and weakening the monopoly power of firms would create a more efficient economy with greater equality. (2) Intellectual property rights can be designed so that the fruits of the advances, most of which rest on foundations of basic research funded by the government, are shared more widely. (3) Progressive tax and expenditure policies can help redistribute income.

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We could require that data only be stored in an aggregate form, without individual identifiers (called anonymizing data), allowing researchers to glean information about behavioral patterns, but not to target individuals.31 And we could go even further, treating data as a public good, demanding that any data that is stored (in either processed or unprocessed form) be available to everyone, reducing the ability of the current tech giants to use their data advantage to further entrench their monopoly power. But here, the privacy issues raise a conundrum: The control of Big Data by a few big tech companies reinforces their market power. If we want to break this market power by making the data available to others, then we get a large, common pool of data. But a larger common pool means a greater loss of privacy and more opportunities for exploitation, with entrants competing on how to use the information to extract more value, which includes using that information to take advantage of consumers in the ways described above.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper