Big Tech

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

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
Published 12 Jul 2021

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: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

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 and Cory Doctorow
Published 26 Sep 2022

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
Published 12 Sep 2022

—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
Published 7 Jan 2021

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 and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

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.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

Times (Apr. 30, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/technology/global-tipping-point-tech.html. 23.Sam Schechner, Big Tech Braces for a Wave of Regulation, Wall St. J. (Jan. 16, 2022), https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-braces-for-wave-of-regulation-11642131732. 24.Silvia Amaro, How Europe Became the World’s Top Tech Regulator, CNBC (Mar. 25, 2021), https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/25/big-tech-how-europe-became-the-worlds-top-regulator.html. 25.Edward White & Mark Wembridge, Xi Jinping Defends Crackdowns in ‘Common Prosperity’ Drive at Davos, Fin. Times (Jan. 17, 2022), https://www.ft.com/content/8963b1ee-9ffb-4f2e-8648-472e641716ba. 26.Cecilia Kang, Lawmakers, Taking Aim at Big Tech, Push Sweeping Overhaul of Antitrust, N.Y.

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, Al Jazeera (Aug. 12, 2016), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/8/12/internet-or-splinternet. 75.Ian Bremmer, The Technopolar Moment: How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order, Foreign Aff. (Oct. 19, 2021), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-10-19/ian-bremmer-big-tech-global-order; Stephen M. Walt, Big Tech Won’t Remake the Global Order, Foreign Pol’y (Nov. 8, 2021), https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/08/big-tech-wont-remake-the-global-order/. 76.See generally Mark Leonard, The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict (2021). 77.See generally Michael Kwet, Digital Colonialism Is Threatening the Global South, Al Jazeera (Mar. 13, 2019), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/13/digital-colonialism-is-threatening-the-global-south; Bill Wasik, Welcome to the Age of Digital Imperialism, N.Y.

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Rubinstein et al., SEC Posts Sample Letter to China-Based Companies, Amid a Stalled Process for SEC Clearance of Their Offerings, White & Case (Jan. 7, 2022), https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/sec-posts-sample-letter-china-based-companies-amid-stalled-process-sec-clearance. 184.Matt Haldane, What China’s New Data Laws Are and Their Impact on Big Tech, S. South China Morning Post (Sep. 1, 2021), https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3147040/what-chinas-new-data-laws-are-and-their-impact-big-tech. 185.Iris Deng, Beijing Tightens Grip on China Tech With Proposal for Cybersecurity Reviews on All Foreign Public Listings, S. China Morning Post (July 10, 2021), https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3140611/beijing-tightens-grip-china-tech-proposal-cybersecurity-reviews-all?module=inline&pgtype=article; Noriyuki Doi and Naoki Matusda, China to Require Review of Overseas IPOs by Companies with Data on 1m Users, Nikkei Asia (July 10, 2021), https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-to-require-review-of-overseas-IPOs-by-companies-with-data-on-1m-users. 186.Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Geren Xinxi Baohufa (中华人民共和国个人信息保护法) (Personal Information Protection Law) (2021), http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c30834/202108/a8c4e3672c74491a80b53a172bb753fe.shtml. 187.Data Security Law of the People’s Republic of China (2021), http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/c23934/202112/1abd8829788946ecab270e469b13c39c.shtml. 188.Haldane, supra note 184. 189.Ryan D.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

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
Published 31 Aug 2017

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
Published 10 May 2021

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
Published 11 May 2020

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
Published 15 Mar 2021

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.

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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

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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.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Raiding the Raiders Conclusion Acknowledgements Notes Index About the Author Also by Brett Scott Copyright About the Publisher Introduction This book is about a merger and an acquisition. The merger is between the forces of Big Finance and those of Big Tech. The acquisition is of power: once the merger is complete, Big Finance and Big Tech will have power over us on a scale never before seen in human history. The argument I will make is a contrarian one. Every day the media buzzes with excitable stories about how this or that start-up company offers convenient benefits to people through this or that exciting new fintech app.

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Bitcoin tokens remain largely perceived as a collectible investment to be bought and sold like any other, while the underlying technology has been co-opted into co-ordinating oligopolistic cartels, which is hardly novel in the grand scheme of capitalist history. Stablecoins and CBDC certainly do cause waves in the monetary system but, despite their differences, all these digital options have one feature in common: they can be integrated into the operations of Big Tech, and can even be issued and directed via Big Tech platforms. The most contrarian form of money in the world, then, may be the simplest and most unfashionable. Cash. It remains a bug in the system, standing in the way of the fusion between finance and tech, and this is precisely why it is one of our last hopes. Conclusion In South Africa I experienced years of ‘rolling blackouts’ when the electricity infrastructure failed.

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The digitisation of payments enables the digitisation of finance more broadly – a task currently outsourced to the financial technology, or ‘fintech’, industry – which in turn is enabling the full automation of corporate capitalism. We can already see this at work in the operations of corporations like Amazon, Uber and Google (or, in China, Tencent and Alibaba). Almost every big tech firm is entering into partnerships with financial institutions. Such companies cannot have global digital empires without fusing with global digital payment systems. Major oligopolies (conglomerations of mega-firms) are forming out of this process, but they are concealed behind a proliferation of apps that give the superficial appearance of diversity.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

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.

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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.

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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
Published 26 Mar 2019

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.

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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.

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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
Published 14 Oct 2020

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.

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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.

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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
Published 8 Apr 2019

“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.

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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.

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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
Published 1 Mar 2018

“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.

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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.

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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
Published 11 May 2020

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.

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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
Published 26 Sep 2022

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
Published 25 Sep 2023

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 and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

,” 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
Published 4 Apr 2018

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
Published 14 Aug 2020

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
Published 14 Sep 2021

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.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
by Madhumita Murgia
Published 20 Mar 2024

Many of the women complained that they rarely got to see the products built with the data they supplied. Often, they never heard from the companies again. ‘It’s not just a question of data, it’s also about the dependence of the state on Big Tech actors,’ Aneja said. The reliance on American companies was too high, she felt. ‘Most government [health] systems run on Amazon Web Services. A lot of infrastructure and expertise that shapes how the government thinks about AI is coming from Big Tech. They are filling a gap in state capacity.’ Ashita, too, has a measured outlook. She likes the Qure.ai product and believes it has huge potential, but to improve real-world access the technology has to move from private hospitals like hers into free government-run healthcare centres and mobile vans.

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It revealed the murky world of ‘data brokers’ – shadowy companies that collect data about our online lives and turn them into saleable profiles of who we are today, and who we will one day become. And eventually, it took me beyond the brokers, deep into the business models of the world’s most valuable companies, grouped loosely together as Big Tech, who made their money in the same way: by converting our lives into swarming clouds of data for sale. But before I followed that trail, I wasn’t convinced I wanted to spend several months writing about a bunch of statistics. I needed to make the story feel tangible to me. What did all that data actually look like?

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The root of the issue is that profit-driven corporations and marginalized communities, like the ones her patients are from, often exist at cross-purposes. I spoke to Paola Ricaurte, a Mexican academic and civil rights activist who works on understanding this tension. Her research helps clarify what Aneja called ‘data colonialism’ – the extractive act of profiteering off the data of marginalized and vulnerable people to build AI systems. ‘Big Tech companies concentrate money, they concentrate value generated through data collection, but they also concentrate knowledge, and for me that is most important,’ Ricaurte told me. During the pandemic in 2020 for instance, it became clear that the Mexican government needed Google’s help to craft its own internal health policy, she said.

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think
by James Vlahos
Published 1 Mar 2019

“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
Published 14 Sep 2020

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
Published 11 Sep 2023

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.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

Zia Qureshi, “The Rise of Corporate Market Power,” Brookings Institute, May 21, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-rise-of-corporate-market-power/. 126. Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: The Case against Big Tech (London: Penguin UK, 2019). 127. Kenneth Rogoff, “Big Tech Is a Big Problem,” Project Syndicate, July 2, 2018, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/regulating-big-tech-companies-by-kenneth-rogoff-2018-07. 128. Qureshi, “The Rise of Corporate Market Power.” 129. Michał Kalecki, Collected Works, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 130. Galbraith, The New Industrial State. 131.

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Thodoris Chondrogiannos and Nikolas Leontopoulos, “How a Global Call Centre Giant (Mis)managed the Pandemic,” Investigate Europe, May 7, 2020, https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2020/how-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-call-centre-companies-mismanaged-the-pandemic-crisis/. 134. Olivia Solon, “Big Tech Call Center Workers Face Pressure to Accept Home Surveillance,” NBC News, August 8, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-workers-face-pressure-accept-home-surveillance-n1276227. 135. Frank W. Elwell, “Harry Braverman and the Working Class,” Rogers State University, accessed July 9, 2023, http://faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Braverman/Presentation/Braverman.pdf. 136.

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Many libertarians argue that the pandemic has shown that state spending needs to be pared back to create more space for the democratic interactions that take place within “the market.” But, as we have seen throughout this chapter, states rarely work alone. Whether the British and American governments working with McKinsey or the Chinese government working with its big-tech giants, states almost always rely on some support from the private sector during moments of crisis. In turn, through their cooperation with states, businesses have gained power over our lives that would be the envy of some of the most authoritarian governments in history. Cutting public services doesn’t create more space for free markets, it simply encourages states to rely more on unaccountable organizations like McKinsey to do their dirty work for them.111 These consultancies then gain immense influence over the exercise of state power—from the high-level advice they provide to lawmakers, to the pedestrian support they provide to the civil servants implementing these policies.112 The close links between the public and private sectors seen during the pandemic demonstrate the futility of attempting to draw a stark line between state and corporate power in capitalist societies, especially during crises.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

BT, for example, planned to spend £12 billion to get broadband to 20 million homes and premises by 2028. The UK government promised to chip in £5 billion towards broadband connectivity.46 The problem is so widespread that even the US’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has said that big tech should pay more in Europe as well as in the US. Its chief, Brendan Carr, said: ‘It’s a ripe issue and it’s at a pivot point… The time where big tech was untouchable has passed.’47 There is an additional and critical cost to which US multinationals are not contributing their share. That is the cost of running the British state. Their businesses rely on a stable government, law and order, the protection of their property and IP rights, sound money, viable national defence and a social security system – to all of which they are making only a small contribution.

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, Reuters [website] (8 October 2021), https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/what-is-global-minimum-tax-deal-what-will-it-mean-2021-10-08/. 43 ‘Global minimum tax will put the squeeze on investors’ returns’, Financial Times (12 January 2024), https://www.ft.com/content/53d7140a-88e4-4c70-8a55-1649d3d629c3. 44 George Turner, ‘G7 tax deal represents a tax cut for big tech in the UK – new analysis’, TaxWatch [website] (27 September 2021), https://www.taxwatchuk.org/g7_tax_deal/. 45 ‘Exposed: Amazon’s enormous and rapidly growing plastic pollution problem’, Oceana [website] (December 2021), https://oceana.org/reports/amazon-report-2021/. 46 ‘The road to full fibre’, BT [website], https://www.bt.com/about/bt/policy-and-regulation/keeping-the-uk-connected/fibre-for-all. 47 Quoted in Anna Gross, ‘Campaign to make big tech pay for telecoms networks gathers pace’, Financial Times (10 October 2022), https://www.ft.com/content/cb8d8dfa-5e8c-4dd7-b9c7-7535a52be5a0. 48 Matthew Keep, ‘Tax statistics: an overview’ [PDF], Parliament.uk [website] (5 June 2023), https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8513/CBP-8513.pdf. 8.

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Mr Buffett’s success is a stark illustration of US capital at work – taking calculated risks, buying businesses in profitable sectors and determinedly growing wealth. His approach has not changed in more than half a century, but the US economy has. In the past 15 years, it has been impossible to ignore how three great American commercial forces have become truly massive in their scale and riches: big tech, private equity and US-based multinational corporations. And a basic, obvious question has continued to press on my mind: how much of the UK’s economy is now US-owned? Originally, I believed such a simple question would be well understood by the British government, and so – because I am nosy – I filed a volley of Freedom of Information requests asking about US corporate muscle here.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

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 Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

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.corporate-ir.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/wp-content/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.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

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.

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

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
Published 2 Jan 2020

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
Published 5 Mar 2019

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
Published 7 Sep 2022

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
Published 5 Sep 2022

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 and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

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
Published 18 Jul 2022

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
Published 17 Oct 2022

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
Published 11 Oct 2021

Morris and Fonrouge, “Smoking-Gun Emails”; Marshall Cohen et al., “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
Published 13 Jun 2022

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.

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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
Published 22 Mar 2022

Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage,” in Richard Taylor (ed.), 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.

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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.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

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.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

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.

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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.  

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

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
Published 13 Jun 2022

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 and Kiersten Saunders
Published 13 Jun 2022

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
Published 18 Jan 2023

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
Published 3 Sep 2018

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.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

People are losing faith in old, top-down systems, and decentralized models of organization are being embraced by activists and entrepreneurs alike. In this ecosystem, more and more energy is moving from the margins toward the center, from the grassroots upward, from start-ups, protesters, and outsiders—a kind of countermovement to Big Tech’s monopolistic consolidation of power and the efforts of authoritarian leaders to centralize power in their own hands. The historian Melvin Kranzberg once observed that “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral,” and the same might well be said of the growing influence of outsiders.

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Meanwhile, they vacuumed up our data, pelted us with advertisements based on that data, and erased our privacy—which, out of habit or convenience, we’ve allowed. The web, Berners-Lee wrote in a blog post, “has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.” To restore the original spirit of the web and sidestep the tentacles of government and Big Tech, Berners-Lee has proposed a new platform called Solid that would allow individuals to retain ownership and control of their personal information by placing it in secure PODS (personal online data stores); companies would have to request (or be granted) access to that information but could not data mine that information or sell it.

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Other proponents of a decentralized web or Web3 are proposing a model based on the sort of peer-to-peer technology employed by blockchain (which powers bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies). In theory, such a decentralized architecture would allow users to bypass the control of tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, which currently act as intermediaries, and would also make it more difficult for Big Tech and governments to collect our data and control what we see. Blockchain is a kind of digital ledger where transaction data is stored not in one central location but on servers and hard drives around the world, making that data difficult to alter or hack and circumventing centralized authorities like governments and banks.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

He thought about it for a moment, and said: “Probably about what our society is doing.” I found strong evidence that our collapsing ability to pay attention is not primarily a personal failing on my part, or your part, or your kid’s part. This is being done to us all. It is being done by very powerful forces. Those forces include Big Tech, but they also go way beyond them. This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns. I realized, when I learned all this, that there is a hole in all the existing books I had read about how to improve your focus.

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Tristan’s co-workers were decent people, struggling with their own tech distractions—but the incentives seemed to lead only one way: you should always design products that “engage” the maximum number of people, because engagement equals more dollars, and disengagement equals fewer dollars. With each month that passed, Tristan became more startled by the casualness with which the attention of a billion people was being corroded at Google and the other Big Tech companies. One day he would hear an engineer excitedly saying: “Why don’t we make it buzz your phone every time we get an email?” Everyone would be thrilled—and a few weeks later, all over the world, phones began to buzz in pockets, and more people found themselves looking at Gmail more times a day.

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One was a thought experiment, and the other was hard evidence from inside Facebook itself. Let’s imagine Nir is wrong, and we all follow his advice anyway—we allow surveillance capitalism to continue getting us “fiendishly hooked,” with only light regulation. Then let’s imagine Tristan is wrong, and we all follow his advice anyway—we regulate the Big Tech companies to stop their invasive practices. If Tristan is wrong and we still follow his advice, you would have been tricked into creating a world where you get targeted with a lot less advertising, you spend less, you get spied on less, and in return, you have to pay a small sum each month to subscribe to a few social-media companies, or those companies have in some way been taken over as public utilities run in our collective interests, like the sewers or the highways.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott
Published 14 May 2018

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
Published 19 Jul 2023

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
Published 2 Sep 2019

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
Published 13 May 2020

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
Published 15 May 2022

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
Published 14 Jun 2018

.* 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.

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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.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

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.

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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?

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

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.

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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
Published 4 Sep 2023

—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.

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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.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

Classical AI scientists dismissed these as “shallow” or “empirical,” because statistical approaches using data didn’t use knowledge and couldn’t handle 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 were 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.

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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 whether the good ideas have already been snatched up.2 MEGABUCK SCIENCE The polymathic MIT computer scientist and founder of cybernetics Norbert Wiener warned about what he called “megabuck” science in an unpublished manuscript, “Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas,” found among his papers after his death in 1964.3 In the early 1950s, Turing had completed his fundamental (and it turned out, final) turn toward the future of invention as human-level AI; Wiener during the same period had begun serious contemplation about a future bereft of ideas necessary for AI, and other fields.

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BETTING ON IDEAS 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. 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 will 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.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

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.

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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 and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

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 System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 24 Mar 2020

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.

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“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
Published 22 Oct 2018

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
Published 10 Jan 2019

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
Published 8 Jun 2020

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.

Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV
by Peter Biskind
Published 6 Nov 2023

When Hastings, myopically gazing at his own navel, once declared his only competition was sleep, he repeated the mistake made by Bewkes when he myopically declared that Netflix posed no more of a threat than the Albanian army. Sleep may have seemed to Hastings like his company’s only threat, but solely because potential competitors had not yet awakened to the fact that streaming could grow their bottom line, even be a business of its own. Amazon was the first Big Tech company to take him on. Amazon executive Roy Price was Hollywood royalty. One of his grandfathers, Roy Huggins, created TV hits like Maverick and The Fugitive, and hired David Chase to write for The Rockford Files. His father, Frank, headed up Columbia Pictures and then Universal Studios. Price the Younger had a gilt-edged pedigree that included Phillips Andover Academy, Harvard, and USC law school, as well as a stint at McKinsey & Company and Disney Animation, impressing Princeton-educated Jeff Bezos so much that he hired him to create a new streaming division for Amazon—from scratch.

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For its part, Disney has joined Netflix, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Apple, Amazon, and the SAG-AFTRA union in defraying costs for those of their employees who need to travel out of states like Georgia and Texas for abortions. Meanwhile, the tension between Iger and Chapek escalated. Chapek seemed to endorse the idea that Disney should be a data-driven company. At a June 2021 retreat in Hawaii, Iger gave a talk rejecting the reliance on data as a driver of production decisions, popularized by Big Tech companies like Netflix. Data, he said, “should not be used to determine what stories are told.” He likes to say that had Henry Ford been able to run the data on what people wanted in 1903, they would have said “a faster horse”; instead he gave them the Model A. He added, “If we had tried to mine all the data that we had at the time to determine whether we should make a superhero movie that was essentially about an Afrofuturistic world with a Black cast, the data probably would have said, ‘Don’t do that.’

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Succession was the anti-Vinyl, a throwback to the kind of shows HBO was known for in the old days, where the talent served the show, not the other way around. Nor did it come encumbered with massive, bestseller IP. Said Bloys, immodestly, “At HBO, we make our own stars.”39 The contemporary context is the entrance of Big Tech into the media space. “There’s another . . . succession going on,” explains Armstrong.40 He is referring to “the big news companies [that are] under massive strain [when] Netflix and Apple [come] knocking at their door.” He continues, “We can see these media consolidations in response to that. [It’s] hopefully in the DNA of the show.”41 Succession was marinated in the brine of the Trump era.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT canonical Village institution: Megan Brenan, “Media Confidence in U.S. Matches 2016 Record Low,” Gallup, October 19, 2023, news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-record-low.aspx. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT trust in Big Tech: Megan Brenan, “Views of Big Tech Worsen; Public Wants More Regulation,” Gallup, February 18, 2021, news.gallup.com/poll/329666/views-big-tech-worsen-public-wants-regulation.aspx. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT in a simulation: Rounak Jain, “Are We Living in a Multiverse or a Simulation? Depends on Who You Ask, Says Peter Thiel,” Benzinga, October 5, 2023, benzinga.com/news/23/10/35111877/are-we-living-in-a-multiverse-or-a-simulation-depends-on-who-you-ask-says-peter-thiel.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT bigger swings in: Jed Kolko and Toni Monkovic, “The Places That Had the Biggest Swings Toward and Against Trump,” The New York Times, December 7, 2020, sec. The Upshot, nytimes.com/2020/12/07/upshot/trump-election-vote-shift.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT contributions are disproportionately: Krystal Hur, “Big Tech Employees Rally Behind Biden Campaign,” OpenSecrets, January 12, 2021, opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/big-tech-employees-rally-biden. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT extremely conservative views: Max Chafkin’s biography of Thiel, The Contrarian—although it takes a Villagey perspective by putting Thiel’s politics at the front and center of the story—is nevertheless convincing that Thiel is quite conservative along a number of dimensions, more so than he is libertarian.

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I asked Gurley, who isn’t usually considered to be a bomb thrower, whether he worried about further antagonizing Washington. He told me he knew he was being provocative. And he basically didn’t care because the conflict was already out in the open after Biden had appointed Lina Khan, an outspoken critic of big tech, as head of the Federal Trade Commission. Why was Gurley so concerned about this? Well, even though Khan has gone after the biggest names in tech—bringing lawsuits against Amazon, Meta, and Google—Gurley isn’t crazy to worry about regulatory capture helping incumbents. (His thesis is well regarded in academic literature.)

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony
by David G. W. Birch
Published 14 Apr 2020

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
Published 1 Feb 2022

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
Published 22 Apr 2019

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
Published 20 Nov 2018

After decades when most economists dismissed antitrust actions as superfluous so long as consumers were not the victims of price-gouging, we are slowly waking up to the reality that monopoly capitalism is back — and it can be harmful even if its core products (as in the case of Google and Facebook) are free. But it’s not just Big Tech that’s killing competition. As Tepper shows in this engagingly written polemic, there’s also excessive concentration in air travel, banking, beef, beer, health insurance, Internet access, and even the funeral industry. If you want to understand the real cause of rising inequality, discard Piketty and read Tepper instead.

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The Ho Chi Minh Trail itself was in the triple-canopy jungle, which made it almost impossible for helicopters and planes to see through the trees and support US troops below.59 The response of the Department of Defense was to dump 19 million gallons of herbicide that poisoned the land.60 Between Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, they have collectively bought over 436 companies and startups in the past 10 years, and regulators have not challenged any of them. In 2017 alone, they spent over $31.6 billion on acquisitions. Most small companies now do not expect to succeed on their own and their only goal is the “exit” to one of the big tech companies before they are crushed. The threat of unlimited losses against a big player is reason enough for startups to sell to the incumbents. The retailer Diapers.com initially rejected Amazon's efforts to acquire it. In response, Amazon responded by slashing its own diaper prices in a clear effort at predatory pricing.

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The ones that do not accept an offer they can't refuse face brutal competition: their innovations are copied, they face patent lawsuits, and their top talent is poached. The tech giants love startups, but in the same way that lions love feasting on lifeless carcasses of gazelles. Either they provide innovations the giants can't come up with in-house, or they pay a toll to the big tech companies for the pleasure of using their infrastructure. There is perhaps no better example of this dynamic than what has happened to Snap, the company that makes the disappearing messaging app Snapchat. Although it is one of the most innovative consumer-focused internet companies, it has been battered by the giants.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

Now Jacob and I needed to go into the field and get to work. CHAPTER 5 SXSW, THE CIA, AND THE $1.5 TRILLION THAT WASN’T THERE There’s a country song in here somewhere, but my journey from pretend journalist to pretend author started as it should have, at the beginning. In early 2022, South by Southwest (SXSW), a big tech and music conference in my hometown of Austin, Texas, invited me to organize a panel of crypto skeptics. I was pretty fired up. SXSW would mark our first venture into the real world; everything Jacob and I had done thus far was online or remote. We recruited Edward Ongweso Jr., a razor-sharp journalist for Motherboard, Vice’s technology site, to join us on stage.

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We were eventually deposited in a private cabana where more people came and went, idly discussing their startup ideas or asking questions about season 3 of The O.C. Charles continued making crude—and legally actionable—passes at the publicist, who insisted in a whisper she could handle herself. Strangers pontificated about stablecoins and big tech and the next cool party they would attend. Eventually, I realized that I was maybe a decade too old to be doing what I was subjecting myself to and announced my exit. We all decided to use the opportunity to escape Charles. Jacob, who handled a lot of our communications, told our intelligence friends that we would surely talk to them soon.

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Crypto companies formed lobbying groups and political action committees, and executives donated lavishly to political candidates, with little apparent criteria for their donations except “could be friendly to crypto.” According to Bloomberg, “donations from people working in digital assets reached $26.3 million” in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, more than donations from execs in big pharma, big tech, or even the defense industry. While many of crypto’s true believers were conservative, it was an equal opportunity industry when it came to influence-peddling. Sam Bankman-Fried largesse toward the Democrats was quickly becoming legendary, but lest you think this was a partisan issue, his colleague at FTX, Ryan Salame, as mentioned earlier, donated $23 million to the Republicans.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

The second is when the rules of the system are changed to support more cooperative practices—especially through governments that see the value of cooperative enterprise enough to encourage and fund it. For platform cooperativism to flourish, I suspect we need both of these. We can begin by identifying the competitive advantages of cooperation. Cooperative practices, for instance, are poised to thicken the notoriously loose ties that online connectedness normally offers. And as big tech companies continue having difficulty treating workers and users as—well, people—co-ops can offer positive, ethical alternatives that workers and users can turn to. Hybrid models—combining aspects of a conventional company with aspects of cooperative ownership and governance—seem promising in the short term.

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A common rationale used in defense of the platform economy is that it will generate a huge wealth for the platform owners, and they will reinvest these profits into the real economy, thus serving the public good. Unfortunately, this is not the case. On the contrary, the latest wave of digital innovation has resulted in excessive returns to capital, with massive amounts of cash going to the balance sheets and the offshore accounts of big tech companies, while very little gets invested in welfare, social infrastructures, education, health, and clean energy to fight climate change. This situation is exacerbated by the apparent inability of governments to tax profits made by high-tech and financial giants, as seen recently in the very generous tax settlement between Google and the UK government and the tax dispute between the Italian government and Apple.

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The new government is also promoting new policies to foster a collaborative economy that generates social benefits locally. Besides these types of initiatives, Ada Colau has also promised a shift toward re-municipalization of infrastructure and public services. This is grounded in a very critical understanding of the neoliberal, surveillance-driven “smart city” model being promoted by big tech corporations. The ambition, instead, is for a shift to a democratic, green, and commons-based digital city built from bottom up. This vision of re-municipalization of critical public services and network infrastructures is of growing global appeal, leading to a new alliance between public utilities and cooperative online platforms.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

The episode ends with Terry’s hiring manager taking out the trash as the company peacefully moves on. The worry fantasy of a handful of AI-powered firms dominating the competition and controlling the economy is not that far-fetched. “The dystopia is now,” Barry Lynn, director of the Open Markets Institute, told me. “The dystopia is not in the future.” To Lynn and the growing number of big-tech critics, the tech giants have already grown too big and powerful, and are causing real harm. While making this case in 2017, Lynn got himself, and his institute, ousted from the New America Foundation, which counts Google among its donors. Lynn expressed particular concern about Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and began our conversation teeing off on the first two.

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“They do a lot of work to create new things, new processes, new technologies,” Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and colleague of Lynn’s, told me. “But they largely withhold those from the market unless they can deploy them in a way that’s favorable to their own business.” The big tech companies, for instance, tend to kill products—both acquired and built internally—that would’ve been fine businesses on their own, but don’t reach the scale necessary to survive inside corporations with market caps in the trillion-dollar range. Take aQuantive, for example: $6.2 billion of value flushed away because Microsoft couldn’t get its act together.

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As the tech giants succeed and workplace technology improves, productivity growth—which helps us produce more goods for the same amount of the work—is still slowing in the US. “Despite all of that technological richness around us, we haven’t had a great two decades,” the MIT economist Daron Acemoglu told me. “Growth has not been amazing. Growth has been pretty anemic.” The US federal government has taken note of big tech’s power and practices, and it’s now looking into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. A meek US regulatory body is unlikely to break these companies up, and will probably only levy manageable fines. But I don’t think a breakup would be a bad thing. Breaking up the tech giants could open a wider door for smaller companies trying to compete with them.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

“Tech buses” that take workers from residential parts of the city to Silicon Valley office parks have become flashpoints for social conflict; homelessness is rising amid the thriving regional economy; and conflicts around gentrification have become endemic. Some of this can and should be solved by simply building more homes and more transportation infrastructure. But what’s particularly maddening about the Bay Area’s conflicts over big tech’s relentless expansion is that so many American cities would benefit enormously from the arrival of thousands of well-paid office workers. In America’s underpopulated cities, the expansion of the tax base alone would be a game changer. The new residents would create secondary jobs by demanding local services and construction work, ensuring that incomes would rise broadly and social problems like homelessness would go down.

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And as with media and publishing, if you could get several different large technology companies to move jobs in tandem, the benefits of a technology cluster could be retained. While the government can’t actually make a bunch of big technology companies move a bunch of jobs to midwestern cities, it’s clear to everyone that the tech world’s moment as the golden boy of American politics has passed. Every month now some politician or other has new complaints about Big Tech and its influence on our society and economy. The tech world, meanwhile, is increasingly angry about its treatment at the hands of politicians. A relocation scheme doesn’t resolve all of these tensions, but it should ameliorate them. Being home to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, among others, is a huge achievement for the American economy.

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But an extremely large number of Americans don’t directly experience any benefits from these companies. And that’s largely because their geographical base is so narrow, and the places where they are based are suffering from such acute housing shortages that they are experienced locally as a decidedly mixed blessing. Shifting big tech out of the Bay Area could be particularly valuable because one of the region’s biggest economic assets, its unique culture of venture capital firms, is basically useless to large established players. Shifting big players out would give start-ups and smaller firms more room to expand while simultaneously seeding new cities with the stockpiles of skilled workers and rich technology executives who could launch future start-up clusters.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

For more on these movements see these websites: https://equitablegrowth.org/, and https://newconsensus.com/, both accessed August 30, 2021. 27.On Warren’s policies, see 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, accessed September 24, 2021; Sheelah Kolhatkar, “How Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech,” New Yorker, August 20, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-elizabeth-warren-came-up-with-a-plan-to-break-up-big-tech, accessed September 24, 2021. Sanders’s reform agenda included promoting government programs to make university education free to all Americans, to offer health care to every American (“Medicare for All”), to cancel trillions of dollars in student debt, and to establish a federal minimum wage of $15/hour.

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Bush is an easily overlooked feature of his presidency, an oversight that is understandable given his (Trump’s) fascination with the military and with violence. 25.Regulating or breaking up the social media companies was increasingly the battle cry of portions of the Republican Party that saw themselves as being in vanguard of a populist GOP. See, for example, Josh Hawley, The Tyranny of Big Tech (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2021). For more on the erosion of the open, global character of the internet and the rise of “cyber sovereignty,” see James Griffiths, The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Elizabeth C. Economy, “The Great Firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s Internet Shutdown,” The Guardian, June 29, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/29/the-great-firewall-of-china-xi-jinpings-internet-shutdown, accessed September 27, 2021; “China Internet: Xi Jinping Calls for ‘Cyber Sovereignty,’ ” BBC News, December 16, 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-35109453, accessed September 27, 2021; Justin Sherman, “Russia and Iran Plan to Fundamentally Isolate the Internet,” Wired, June 6, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/russia-and-iran-plan-to-fundamentally-isolate-the-internet/, accessed September 27, 2021; Matt Burgess, “Iran’s Total Internet Shutdown Is a Blueprint for Breaking the Web,” Wired, October 7, 2020, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iran-news-internet-shutdown, accessed September 27, 2021; Paul Bischoff, “Internet Censorship 2021: A Global Map of Internet Restrictions,” Comparitech.com, August 3, 2021, https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/internet-censorship-map/, accessed September 27, 2021. 26.On Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, see Andrew Marantz, “Are We Entering a New Political Era?

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

Laura Portwood-Stacer, “Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of the Facebook abstention,” New Media & Society 15, no. 7 (December 2012): 1054. 62. Grafton Tanner, “Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August, 9. 2018: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-detox-big-techs-phony-crisis-of-conscience/#!. 63. Navia, 141. 64. Ibid., 125. Navia notes that the language for “sea of illusion” also translates to “wine-colored sea of fog,” yet another image of typhos. 65. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso Books, 2013), 17. 66.

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Most important, the decision to leave Facebook involves its own kind of “margin”: It may be that refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already possess a great deal of social capital, people whose social standing will endure without Facebook and people whose livelihoods don’t require them to be constantly plugged in and reachable…These are people who have what [Kathleen] Noonan (2011) calls “the power to switch off.”61 Grafton Tanner makes a similar point in “Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience,” a short piece on the repentant tech entrepreneurs who have realized just how addictive their technology is. Working via initiatives like Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that aims to curb the design of addictive technology, former Facebook president Sean Parker and ex-Google employees Tristan Harris and James Williams have become fervent opponents of the attention economy.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 3 May 2021

Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, January 15, 2019. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/01/15/2019-proxy-letter-aligning-corporate-culture-with-long-term-strategy/. Tasfaye, Mekebeb. “IMF Head Christine Lagarde Warns of the Dangers of Big Tech’s Push into Finance.” Business Insider, June 11, 2019. www.businessinsider.com/imf-head-christine-lagarde-warns-big-tech-in-finance-2019-6. Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. “About the Task Force.” www.fsb-tcfd.org/about/#. Tax Policies for Inclusive Growth in a Changing World. Paris: OECD, 2018. www.oecd.org/g20/Tax-policies-for-inclusive-growth-in-a-changing-world-OECD.pdf.

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Most companies, after all, do not operate on the extreme ends of this scale. The board of a monopoly can decide to delegate technology responsibilities if technology is seen as incidental to its core business. In contrast, a monopoly business that sees technology as a differentiator will want to have technology expertise on the board; many big tech companies are themselves examples of this kind of approach. In a similar vein, a company that operates in a competitive market but largely relies on technology just to stay in the game—for example, a mining or oil-and-gas business—can confidently delegate this responsibility. However, a business in a competitive market that draws appreciable value from technology—such as a financial services business—is best served by bringing independent technology expertise into the boardroom.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

“It’s very likely that this year the global economy will experience its worst recession since the Great Depression, surpassing that seen during the global financial crisis a decade ago,” Gita Gopinath, the IMF’s chief economist, reports. The market is showing a big disconnect. Equities are up 25% from their lows, but rates are still at record lows and crude is back at $20. The credit markets have all popped since the Fed started buying. And big is better, a microcosm of our winner-takes-all world. When you exclude the Big Tech market leaders, you realize that the other 80% of the market is still down 20% or more from the highs, even with all the gobs of support from the Fed and Congress. Four out of every five stocks are still in a bear market. But the markets as a whole are on fire, led by names such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft.

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The virus is subsiding in the USA, like a wave rolling back to the sea. We are now entering a slow recovery stage, where the markets will continue to diverge from the economy and from the jobless. Over thirty million Americans have now filed jobless claims. That’s more than 18% of the workforce. But a basket of the Big Tech names has already set new all-time highs. This is not just a big month for us; this is now one of our biggest months ever. We are getting a payoff for our long-risk profile. Our QE bet is paying huge dividends. The headlines in the US papers scream “The Worst Is Over.” But we know that’s not really the case.

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Where it has changed most is the feeling of being a caged animal, not being able to go exactly where you want when you want. We don’t have real problems—you know, stuff like making your next rent payment, or being crammed in a tiny place, or feeling scared you’ll get sick, or that profound sense of alienation I’ve read about. The markets have stabilized and the VIX is back to thirty. The Big Tech stocks are making new highs. The focus is now on restarting a more normal life. It will take time and is going to come with more strings attached such as temperature checks, capacity limits, working from home, and surgical masks. Here in the USA, it took trillions of dollars to stabilize the markets.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

In Renaissance Florence, they oversaw a flourishing of artistic genius that has never been rivaled. More recently, they have ushered in the era of Big Tech, with smartphones and the internet transforming the way we interact with the world. The role of corporations in these developments, of course, has not always been positive. Roman publicans became renowned for their greed and corruption, leading to their eternal association with sinners in the Bible. The Medici Bank in Florence was denounced for engaging in usury, and the Dominican friar Savonarola led bonfires of the vanities to campaign against their vices. Big Tech is under assault on any number of fronts, from its privacy practices to its monopoly positions to its handling of free speech.

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The move-fast-and-break-things culture of Silicon Valley tends to exaggerate tendencies already present in corporations, from excessive risk-taking, to consumer manipulation, to short-termism. Start-ups have often ignored, tolerated, or even encouraged problematic behavior on their platforms. Society, long aslumber, has begun to awaken to these problems. It is starting to fashion responses. Governments are asking hard questions about data and privacy and cybersecurity, about Big Tech and artificial intelligence and social media. Consumers, shareholders, employees, and even some CEOs are pressing for change. Facebook itself has decided to stop breaking things—although it still wants to move fast. If history is any guide, this is not the end of the story. The corporation will survive—perhaps in a different form, but still, in its spirit, the same thing.

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They can cut corners in complying with environmental, waste-disposal, or cybersecurity regulations and protections. Where this occurs, governments must step in to level the playing field. They can draft, enact, and enforce rules to reward good behavior. They can fine polluters. They can tax carbon emissions. They can set consumer-protection rules governing Big Tech. Much of the past century has been spent trying to craft these rules. But more work must be done to ensure that the invisible hand cultivates the garden of Earth. VII. DON’T TAKE ALL THE PIE FOR YOURSELF Corporations exist to promote the common good. They do so by channeling our work into productive avenues, from growing crops to building houses to inventing new technologies.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

I fear that the media’s delayed—and often misplaced—concerns about technology has fostered an endless ping-pong of surface changes and tactics, rather than focus on structural changes like decommodification and decentralization to enact a better internet. Worse still, Silicon Valley—handed this truncated timeline of its ills—is already working to co-opt and neutralize the “techlash,” similar to how it weakly responded to the matter of diversity just a few years before. Calls for “ethics” are coming from inside the big tech houses, and with an agenda that favors optics over solutions. When tech executives appoint themselves as the stewards of the industry cleanup, they carry on with the same spirit of contempt for outsiders—and users—that unleashed the problems in the first place. Yet failure to anticipate the consequences of the internet is not the same as accepting, loving, or yielding to the internet in its current state.

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Amazon’s foul treatment of its factory workers is iniquitous, but it is not extraordinary rendition. Infrastructure is power, but it is not the law, which means there is still an opportunity for users—as individuals and collectives, and working with government bodies—to hold platforms accountable. Some well-intentioned leftists have suggested nationalizing big tech. While admitting it is an unrealistic demand, Sarah Jaffe has argued in favor of nationalizing Amazon for its infrastructure and logistics. Its efficiency is valuable. In a piece she wrote for The Outline, she explains that a call to “nationalize Amazon is to challenge the idea that Amazon should have more power than the democratically-elected governments of states or countries.”

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The BBC reported that Yishan Wong, in a private post to Reddit moderators, said that anything legal should remain on the platform even if “we find it odious or if we personally condemn it” (“Reddit Will Not Ban ‘Distasteful’ Content, Chief Executive Says,” October 17, 2012). Reporting on Alex Jones is widely available online (Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon, “Does the Banning of Alex Jones Signal a New Era of Big Tech Responsibility?,” The Guardian, August 10, 2018; John Paczkowski and Charlie Warzel, “Apple Kicked Alex Jones Off Its Platform, Then YouTube and Facebook Rushed to Do The Same,” BuzzFeed, August 7, 2018; Avie Schneider, “Twitter Bans Alex Jones and InfoWars; Cites Abusive Behavior,” NPR, September 6, 2018).

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

We know this, because the text above is not about Facebook today, but was written in 2007 and was about the completely dominant network MySpace.27 Given how impossible it is considered for new competitors to enter the market, it is a miracle that this happens so often. Just look at how novel today’s big tech companies – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft (GAFAM) – actually are. When I wrote the Swedish version of In Defence of Global Capitalism in 2001, Google was a three-year-old newcomer who had three years left to go to IPO and was doing battle with search engine giants such as Yahoo!, AltaVista and MSN Search.

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According to The Economist’s calculations, the share of GAFAM’s revenues that overlap with their competitors has increased from 22 to 38 per cent since 2015.35 In a more existential way, Apple has started to make life miserable for its ad-dependent competitors by offering iPhone users the opportunity to avoid being tracked online by a particular company. Furthermore, Big Tech’s impressive growth took place during a period of low interest rates and booming markets. These companies will face more difficult times ahead. Just as I wrapped this chapter up, I received the latest results from these supposedly invincible companies: in November 2022, amid slowing sales and collapsing share prices, Amazon announced that it would have to let around 10,000 workers go and there were reports that Google was preparing to do the same.

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If you’re afraid that a company’s control over search services will give them control of what you see, think and buy, it’s worth recalling that they have another eight billion competitors. The most common way to find out something, get a second opinion or recommendation on what to think, do or buy is actually not to ask Google or Facebook but to send a message to a friend or contact and ask. Big Tech’s greatest achievement is to have made that form of advice easier than ever before. 6 PICKING LOSERS ‘The market will always reach the most efficient economic outcome, but sometimes the most efficient outcome is at odds with the common good and the national interest.’ REPUBLICAN SENATOR MARCO RUBIO1 If it’s so crucial to have successful companies, innovation and growth, are they not a little too important to leave to the market?

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

Kyle Wiggers, “Intel debuts Pohoiki Springs, a powerful neuromorphic research system for AI workloads,” VentureBeat, March 18, 2020, venturebeat.com/2020/03/18/intel-debuts-pohoiki-springs-a-powerful-neuromorphic-research-system-for-ai-workloads/. 14. Jeremy Kahn, “Inside big tech’s quest for human-level A.I.,” Fortune, January 20, 2020, fortune.com/longform/ai-artificial-intelligence-big-tech-microsoft-alphabet-openai/. 15. Martin Ford, Interview with Fei-Fei Li, in Architects of Intelligence: The Truth about AI from the People Building It, Packt Publishing, 2018, p. 150. 16. “Deep Learning on AWS,” Amazon Web Services, accessed May 4, 2020, aws.amazon.com/deep-learning/. 17.

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Stuart Russell, “How to stop superhuman A.I. before it stops us,” New York Times, October 8, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/opinion/artificial-intelligence.html. 35. Ford, Interview with Rodney Brooks, in Architects of Intelligence, pp. 440–441. CONCLUSION: TWO AI FUTURES 1. Rebecca Heilweil, “Big tech companies back away from selling facial recognition to police,” Recode, June 11, 2020, www.vox.com/recode/2020/6/10/21287194/amazon-microsoft-ibm-facial-recognition-moratorium-police. 2. Joseph Zeballos-Roig, “Kamala Harris supports $2,000 monthly stimulus checks to help Americans claw out of pandemic ruin—and she’s long backed plans for Democrats to give people more money,” Business Insider, August 15, 2020, www.businessinsider.com/kamala-harris-biden-monthly-stimulus-checks-economic-policy-support-vice-2020-8. 3.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

In the same way that cities can play a distinct policy role in climate policy, the large technology companies—Facebook, Google, and Tencent, for example—are vital parts of the policy process in the domain of the internet. Their centrality to the concept of the levelling, as strategic assets for large states and regions, will condition the way governments and regulators address them. Europe has few, if any, technology giants, and therefore Europe regulates Big Tech. In the United States, the technology companies make up 25 percent of the stock market and an equally large proportion of corporate earnings, and they have garnered the key innovation clusters in the technology space. They are cultural and strategic tentacles of the United States overseas. In many cases, their innovations (such as the screens on iPhones) stem from collaborations with the US military.

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A growing number of academics and policy makers now call for the large tech giants to be regulated or even broken up, given the power they hold over consumers and consumers’ data. In a strict economic and moral sense, such calls are well placed, but they ignore the reality of the multipolar world, where one of the ways in which the large poles are becoming both distinctive and powerful is through the internet and data. In my view, it is far more likely that the big tech companies will not be broken up but will be co-opted as strategic partners of large states. If this occurs, Europe—which, as noted earlier, has no internet and social media giants of its own—may suffer, and it may respond with tougher regulation of non-European internet, IT, and social media platforms.

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W., 138 business cycle, 138–140, 142 Cadbury, Adrian, 205 Callaghan, Jim, 249 Cantor, Eric, 51 capital, and wealth inequality, 43–44 Carrington, Lord, 127–128 Carville, James, 181 Case, Anne, 44 Case, Steve, 129 Castaneda, Jorge, 221 central banks and bubbles, 173 and crises, 172, 173 and debt, 16–18, 174, 176–177, 189–190 and financial crisis of 2008, 173–174, 175, 179 forecasts, 68, 170 future actions, 183–185 history, 171–173 in multipolar world, 266–267 power and influence, 5, 168, 169–170, 171, 172–173, 179, 266–267 as problem, 16 and QE, 16–18, 174–179, 183, 190 role and intervention, 170–171 understanding of, 167–168, 170–171 See also Federal Reserve System Charles I (King), 3, 81, 82, 91 Chernow, Ron, 277 Chidley, Katherine and change, 134 and economic growth, 155–156 learning of new role, 134–135, 164–165 potential solutions, 149–151, 165 reality of situation, 135–137, 148–149 Chile, 118 China central bank and house prices, 174 Communist Party, 230–232 consumer culture, 289, 290 debt problem, 16, 186, 188, 192, 193–194, 198–199 debt restructuring, 197–202 domestic security, 232–233 economy, 216, 227, 228–229, 232, 288, 289–290, 301 financial services and system, 197, 291–292 genetics and gene editing, 298 and globalization, 216 Hart and respect in relations, 256–257 international influence, 294 Levellers-type group, 232–233 manufacturing, 34, 35 military and navy, 292–293 next recession, 76, 185–186, 198, 291 as pole in multipolar world, 18–19, 222, 223–224, 279, 288–295 power and influence, 6, 223–224, 229–230 regional economics, 201 rule of law, 294–295 social stability and infrastructure, 290–292 technology and Big Tech, 224, 231, 272–273 as threat, 288–289 trade and dispute with US, 33, 34–35, 216, 232 transformation, 228–229 wealth inequality, 42 and Western business, 216–217 Churchill, Winston, 7 cities, 151, 270–272 Citizens’ Assembly (Ireland), 110 civic virtue and civic ethic, 152 civil service, 133–134 Clarke, George, 84 Clarke, William, 84 The Clash of Ideas (book), 73 Clausewitz, Claus von, 267 climate change, 9–10, 48–49, 268–272 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, and Colbertism, 227 Commonwealth countries, 256–257 communications, 49, 107 Congressional Budget Office, 187 constitutional democracy.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

By the end of 2018, the company had collected a billion faces from the internet, meaning it could identify a significant number of people on the planet, some of whom would have several photos of themselves come up in a search. Clearview now had a more robust product with which to court investors and potential customers. And it had first-mover advantage. Facebook, Google, and other big tech companies had vaster databases of people’s photos and names, but they hadn’t released a tool like Clearview’s. Ton-That believed he could beat them to the punch and reap the rewards. But the reason the Silicon Valley giants hadn’t released their own version of a facial recognition tool to identify strangers wasn’t that they couldn’t build it; it was that they were afraid to.

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Spock’s face, and the software would reveal all the other points in the episode where the character appeared. That was an extraordinary achievement in 2008, and it had obvious security applications. If you had surveillance video of a crime, you could use PittPatt’s software to go through endless amounts of tape, pinpointing the moment the perpetrator appeared.[*1] Big tech companies started calling, expressing an interest in acquiring PittPatt. They told Schneiderman that they wanted to be able to steer the technology’s development to make sure it would work on a smartphone. Despite some tempting offers, Schneiderman did not sell; he wanted to stay in control of his product.

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* * * — IN MAY 2019, Josh Findley, an agent in the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, received a trove of unsettling images, flagged by Yahoo!, that seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. Findley, who was based in Fairfax, Virginia, at the time, had sixteen years of experience working child exploitation cases. It was traumatic to do the work, he said, but necessary. Most big tech companies that host email, photos, and videos actively work to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Many use a technology invented by Microsoft in 2009 called PhotoDNA, which can flag the presence of known abusive material previously catalogued by investigators, even if it’s been slightly altered.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

Apple, for example, has begun using a good chunk of its spare cash to buy corporate bonds the same way financial institutions do, prompting a 2015 Bloomberg headline to declare, “Apple Is the New Pimco, and Tim Cook Is the New King of Bonds.”6 Apple and other tech companies now anchor new corporate bond offerings just as investment banks do, which is not surprising considering how much cash they hold (it seems only a matter of time before Apple launches its own credit card). They are, in essence, acting like banks, but they aren’t regulated like banks. If Big Tech decided at any point to dump those bonds, it could become a market-moving event, an issue that is already raising concern among experts at the Office of Financial Research, the Treasury Department body founded after the 2008 financial crisis to monitor stability in financial markets.7 Big Tech isn’t alone in emulating finance. Airlines often make more money from hedging on oil prices than on selling seats—while bad bets can leave them with millions of dollars in losses.

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Bottom line: when you have a lot of cash and can move much of it abroad easily, as the biggest tech companies do, everyone will start watching you more closely. As Steve Jobs once said, “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” But when you are the world’s most valuable company, it’s harder to play the rebel. The truth is that Big Tech is as corporate as it comes, and since Big Tech is also where most of the new growth and income creation in the United States lies right now, there’s little doubt that it will draw more and more attention from regulators, tax collectors, and social activists. The investigation into Apple’s finances was clearly a warning shot to other US multinationals.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

Kantrowitz and S. Burch, “How Parler Crackdown Could Make ‘Life Miserable’ for Amazon, Google,” The Wrap, January 12, 2021, www.thewrap.com/tech-talk-parler-crackdown-amazon-google-antitrust. Cf. S. Frier, “Bans on Parler and Trump Show Big Tech’s Power over Web Conversation,” Bloomberg, January 10, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/parler-trump-bans-show-big-tech-s-power-over-web-conversation. 29. Diversity statements: Brian Leiter, “The Legal Problem with Diversity Statements,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 2020, www.chronicle.com/articlethe-legal-problem-with-diversity-statements; Colleen Flaherty, “Diversity Statements as ‘Litmus Tests,’” Inside Higher Ed, November 19, 2019, www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician-comes-out-against-mandatory-diversity-statements-while-others-say-they. 30.

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Certainly, as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, I have learned that I cannot talk or write freely and dispassionately about certain topics—illegal immigration, global warming, identity politics, abortion, affirmative action, Donald Trump, or policies concerning COVID-19 quarantine—without campus or student and faculty efforts to restrict my free expression or threaten me with career reprisals. In general, over the last three years, anywhere from 62 to 71 percent of Americans have expressed new fears of personal and career repercussions for speaking candidly.27 A new phrase, “freedom of speech, not of reach,” is used mostly by the media, publishing, and especially Big Tech to suggest that while the government protects free speech in the public sphere, courts have clearly decided that private companies have the right—and sometimes the responsibility—to apply codes of conduct and censorship in their own domains. They have done so partly on the assumption that those denied or cancelled have freedom of choice and can go elsewhere.

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But what if there are no other Twitter, Facebook, or Google competitors with comparable reach in an industry where the leading companies enjoy near-cartel status and are virtual monopolies, increasingly involving the chief ways in which Americans communicate with one another? In monopolistic fashion, Big Tech has the ability to choke off and shut down upstart rivals. Consider the case of Twitter’s small, new rival Parler. It exercised no comparable restrictions on the free expression of its users. Yet its internet and smart phone access were virtually shut down by the collusive efforts of Amazon, Apple, and Google—at the very moment millions of former Twitter followers of the now cancelled Trump were moving over to the new company.28 One of the most bizarre paradoxes of contemporary liberal support for restrictions of free speech has been the return of versions of 1950s-era “loyalty oaths” that in many states once required each faculty member, as a condition of employment, to swear “that I am not a member of, nor do I support, any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means, [and] that I am not a member of the Communist Party.”

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

Method to the Whale’s Madness The trade by the mysterious Nasdaq Whale, while executed by professionals, had some similar elements to what was in favor with retail traders that year. He was buying call-option contracts that had the most bang for their buck—relatively short-dated, out-of-the-money ones—and he got the direction of the market right. From June through August, the Nasdaq Composite had a strong rally, rising by 24 percent, and the big tech stocks that led the charge did even better than that. That wasn’t mere good luck, though, because the whale’s gamble was even bigger than believed. By early September it emerged that the buyer was Japan’s SoftBank Corp., led by the risk-loving billionaire Masayoshi Son. Reporters also learned that his $100 billion Vision Fund had simultaneously purchased billions of dollars of many of the underlying tech stocks.

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“We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.”[7] Minutes later, conservative Texas senator Ted Cruz retweeted her post, adding: “Fully agree.” “On the face of it, it seems to favor a handful of rich, influential players at the expense of ordinary citizens and ordinary traders,” he later said to reporters.[8] Donald Trump Jr. weighed in as well: “It took less than a day for big tech, big government and the corporate media to spring into action and begin colluding to protect their hedge fund buddies on Wall Street. This is what a rigged system looks like, folks!”[9] Back on the left, Bernie Sanders told an ABC morning talk show that weekend that the incident confirmed his dim view of high finance: “I have long believed that the business model of Wall Street is fraud.

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Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri was one of the few not to accuse Robinhood of restricting trading to save hedge funds, though he got many facts wrong in an impassioned essay, “Calling Wall Street’s Bluff,” in which he lumped together conservative ire at coastal elites and social media platforms accused of being unfair to those on the right with Robinhood. “And the elites are happy to help. Enter Robinhood—as in, steal from the rich. Robinhood was the trading platform for the little guy. No fees, no hassle. It was Big Tech, once again, allegedly democratizing another sphere of American life captured by elite control. But like the tech platforms, Robinhood wasn’t really about its users. Its bread was buttered by selling the data on users’ trades to the big players—the elite guys, like Citadel—to give them inside tips on where retail investors were sending their money.”[11] Misunderstandings aside, what he and almost every other critic initially failed to grasp was how dangerous Robinhood’s funding crisis had been.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

“Our problems are fast becoming your problems.”28 The events of 2018 reinforced for me that as much as I’ve learned my craft and wielded some power, there was much more that was beyond my control. The rule of law can be an illusion and can vanish in an instant—a lesson I had first learned in Indonesia as a young journalist. That night in the ballroom, I appealed to my fellow journalists to stay the course in holding governments and Big Tech accountable for eroding democracy in their quest for more money and power. I ended with what has now become our global rallying cry: “We are Rappler, and we will hold the line.” That was the genesis of #HoldTheLine: the line in our country’s Constitution that defined our rights. Using fear and violence, the holders of power were trying to force us to step back and give up our rights.

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With globalized information flows, this would give a blank check to those governments and non-state actors who produce industrial scale disinformation to harm democracies and polarize societies everywhere. 9.Challenge the extraordinary lobbying machinery, the astroturfing campaigns and recruitment revolving door between big tech companies and European government institutions. We call on the UN to: 10.Create a special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General focused on the Safety of Journalists (SESJ) who would challenge the current status quo and finally raise the cost of crimes against journalists. Acknowledgments The kindness of strangers.

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The Answer to the Capitol Riot Is Regulating Social Media,” Time, January 28, 2021, https://time.com/5933989/facebook-oversight-regulating-social-media/. 8.Rob Pegoraro, “Facebook’s ‘Real Oversight Board’: Just Fix These Three Things Before the Election,” Forbes, September 30, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/robpegoraro/2020/09/30/facebooks-real-oversight-board-just-fix-these-three-things-before-the-election/?sh=2cb2cb3c1e6c. 9.“Is Big Tech the New Empire?,” Studio B: Unscripted, Al Jazeera, March 27, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OLUfA6QJlE. 10.Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America (New York: Random House, 2019). 11.“EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Cambridge Analytica Whistle-Blower Christopher Wylie,” Rappler, September 12, 2019, https://www.rappler.com/technology/social-media/239972-cambridge-analytica-interview-christopher-wylie/. 12.Ibid. 13.Raissa Robles, “Cambridge Analytica Boss Alexander Nix Dined with Two of Rodrigo Duterte’s Campaign Advisers in 2015,” South China Morning Post, April 8, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2140782/cambridge-analytica-boss-alexander-nix-dined-two-rodrigo. 14.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

Large corporations in general are notorious for tax dodging, of course, but even among that crowd the tech companies stand out. According to an estimate from the UK organization Fair Tax Mark, six Silicon Valley favorites—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft—managed to avoid paying more than $100 billion in taxes between 2010 and 2019.34 In 2019, in a major PR blitz, big tech launched a series of its own housing initiatives. That January, Microsoft announced it would invest $500 million on projects for low- and middle-income housing in the Seattle metro region. In June, Google made a billion-dollar commitment to help address the chronic Bay Area housing crisis; this was followed, in October, by a billion-dollar pledge from Facebook.

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In Seattle’s case, the revenue was aimed at assisting populations most vulnerable to eviction from rising rents. The countercharge that a head tax is a “job killer” is standard Chamber of Commerce fare, cynically masking the self-interest of its corporate members.36 Not all the blame for the housing crisis can be laid directly at the door of the big tech companies. However, they are an easy public target because it is widely believed that their high-wage employees contribute to gentrification, displacement, and rising rents in areas within commuting range of their workplaces. But what about large service industry employers like Disney? Their employees are much closer to the poverty line and experience homelessness on a routine basis.

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INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. abuse See also violence Actors’ Equity union addictions adequate housing affordable housing big tech initiatives budget motels used as building market-protected combined with land-use regulations conversion of debt-financed investing developers disincentivizing for Disney World employees extended-stay service apartments financing of global crisis indoor micro-home village for homeless for minimum-wage working people moteliers as providers of Orange County Housing Trust programs Reedy Creek Improvement District rents and inventory of shortage of subsidizing the building of Airbnb Alabama Alcantara-Anderson, Gabby ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, employed) All-Star Resorts Alvarez, Jose Amazon Ambassador Inn American Homes 4 Rent American Hotel and Lodging Association Anaheim, California Anderson, Valerie Anderson, Wes Animal Kingdom Apple Arizona Arlington County, Northern Virginia Asia Athena Group Atlanta, Georgia Atlantic Coast/Atlantic Coastal Ridge Austin, Texas Australia “automated landlords” See also landlords Backlot Apartments Baker, Sean Baltimore, Maryland Bay Area, California Beastie Boys Beaver, Mike Becker, Clancy Bezos, Jeff Biden, Joe BK Ranch Blackstone Group Blaine, Latoya Blasi, Gary Bond, Brianna Booking.com Boston, Massachusetts Boyer, Karin and Lance Brevard County, Florida Brockovich, Erin Bronx, New York City Brookes, Ralf Brooklyn, New York City Broward County, Florida Brown, Denise Scott Buchheit, David Buenaventura Lakes Buffett, Jimmy Burger King Burrow, Kareem Bush, George Buxton, Debbie California Cameron Preserve CanAm Highway Capone’s Dinner and Show Capri Inn Caribbean Carlyle Caswell, Susan CDC.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
by Duncan Mavin
Published 20 Jul 2022

Lex had taken to calling Greensill a fintech too. In reality, it was nothing like that, culturally or in a business sense. In contrast to the uber-casual tech scene, Greensill’s senior executives were buttoned-up and formally dressed. And while the company shared much of the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos of big tech companies, it had little in the way of actual new or proprietary technology. But that didn’t really matter. If Lex said the business was a fintech enough times, others would repeat it, and the money flowed in. There was another term frequently applied to Greensill: ‘shadow bank’. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, tougher regulations had forced traditional banks to set aside large amounts of capital to cover for another calamity.

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He once told the magazine Gentleman’s Journal that the key traits to being a successful entrepreneur are to be ruthless, to have a vision, be good at reading other people, hustle constantly, respect others, and to be good with money – for this last one, he wrote, ‘read really very, very mean with money . . . You wouldn’t think so watching the “burn” of big tech companies or the staggering losses of others but remember the stats – only a tiny percentage of new companies survive. If you can’t balance your monthly budget, it’s going to be a problem. Every penny spent has to be thought about before you spend it.’ The other NoFi Bank owners were an eclectic bunch too.

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The companies that provide this service often portray themselves as a better, fairer alternative to payday lenders, which have been heavily criticized by poverty action groups and government inquiries for charging exorbitant rates to desperate customers. But the fees that these alternative payroll companies charge can still be costly. FreeUp’s small group of founders came from big tech and consulting backgrounds and had also worked in quasi-governmental and non-profit organizations. They were backed by the venture capital investor Public, which is run by a former Number 10 policy adviser. As well as being a fintech, FreeUp was one of a new breed of so-called ‘GovTech’ firms that were pushing new technologies into the public sector around the world.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

As town meetings and civic groups disappear, we’ve tried to practice self-government on the Internet. In its early days there were utopian hopes for the electronic town hall. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, wrote a book about how digital technology would make government more efficient and inclusive, restoring its connection to the governed. But the masters of big tech knew that the best way to keep us online was to feed our appetites, our tribal identities, our vanity, our rage. It’s a lot easier to flame or dunk on someone whose face isn’t right in front of you. And the pandemic has made us profoundly unreal to one another. It’s driven many Americans into varieties of digital insanity.

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Carbado and Donald Weise (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and for his biography, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, by John D’Emilio (Cleis Press, 2015). In “Make America Again” I learned a lot about monopoly, technology, and class in contemporary America from Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, by David Dayen (New Press, 2020); World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, by Franklin Foer (Penguin, 2018); The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, by Michael Lind (Portfolio/Penguin, 2020); Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People, by Barry C. Lynn (St. Martin’s Press, 2020); Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, by Alec MacGillis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, by Matt Stoller (Simon and Schuster, 2020); and “What Happened to Social Mobility in America?

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

Typically, monopolies are either state-owned or state-regulated, otherwise their market power is open to abuse to the detriment of the consumer. For example, we appreciate that we can only have one railway line, but that we can’t allow a private firm operating it to charge whatever fare it wants – so we regulate it. Big tech has similar features. MARK: Talk me through how a data dividend might work. ERIC: Well, one idea you and I are working on, is that the government could license data. Because the dominant tech firms – Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google – are using our collective data as the basic fuel for their profit engines, there is a deal to be struck.

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It’s worth thinking about this in the context of our three requirements of good ideas: make a difference, keep it simple, cut across political lines. We are suggesting that property rights be established and that monopoly data licences be auctioned. We are then paying the dividends to the people who volunteer the data. That’s an ownership-based, fair solution. But there’s another twist. The behaviour of the big tech companies is very poorly understood. As we discussed in Dialogue 4, some of them, like Amazon and Facebook, are aggressively competing with other companies, and in doing so they are providing consumers with services for free, as in the case of Facebook, or at ever-lower prices, as in Amazon’s case.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

From the first journalist carving on stone tablets, media bias and bias of human beings has been a fact of life. But today we face an altogether different threat. The power of big tech is something that William Randolph Hearst at the height of yellow journalism could not have imagined. “Polling shows roughly 70 percent of Americans receive their political news from social media,” he said. “Over and over again I’ve heard from Americans concerned about a consistent pattern of political bias and censorship on the part of big tech.” After several flowery minutes Cruz got around to admitting that he had zero evidence conservatives were being systematically censored.

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“The only folks who are gonna give Tom the benefit of the doubt are those who have less to lose,” Jones told me. “There’s no way you can side with a Black man accused of this act, when you can show how much a part of the system you really are by saying, ‘Hang him.’ ” 25 A week after my interview with Alex Jones, Big Tech pulled the plug on Infowars. Beginning the first week in August 2018, the biggest social media companies dropped Jones and Infowars from their platforms.[1] Apple deleted all but one of Infowars’ six podcasts from iTunes. Google nuked Jones’s YouTube channel, which had amassed more than 2.4 million subscribers; its 36,000 videos had racked up more than 1.6 billion views since 2008.

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True to his word, he proved a terrible lobbyist for internet regulation. Jones capered in the hallways, saying “beep-beep-beep” in an imitation of a Russian bot.[12] He stalked in and out of the hearing room with his cell phone held aloft. He performed for his film crew outside the Capitol, lobbing verbal broadsides at Big Tech and Democrats, and got into a minor dustup with police. He was going for a repeat of his 2016 Republican convention tour de force, but this time he wasn’t a rising, far-right provocateur. He was a hate-mongering tormenter of the families of murdered children, cut off from his social media supply.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

In India, for example, in an environment of ‘underutilised and unutilised generating capacities’, a growing trend for DISCOMs to offer shorter PPA terms was reported as early as 2016.36 The following year, in the US, it was likewise reported that utility off-takers that had previously offered solar developers ‘generous long-term contracts’ were now offering ‘shorter-term fixed prices with a higher subsequent exposure to variable wholesale prices’.37 Today, globally, utility PPAs are usually characterized by shorter contract periods than corporate PPAs.38 Of course, all of this is highly contingent on the local industry and regulatory context. Are corporate PPAs even allowed? Do Amazon, Google and the other big tech companies, which represent the main buy-side participants in the corporate PPA market, operate server farms in the countries in question? (In Europe, most such farms are located in colder, northern climes, fuelling the Scandinavian corporate PPA market while doing nothing to help the market in, say, Iberia.)

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One of the big problems, surely, with market-coordinated processes is that people cannot ask markets why they are doing things in a certain way. Nor can people ask markets why they messed up when things go awry. Market mechanisms preclude accountability. But arguably, relying on a small coterie of big-tech companies, and their idiosyncratic energy-purchasing habits, to drive the transition away from fossil fuels seems, in political terms, even more problematic. One can quite imagine that, for many environmental and anti-monopoly activists, perhaps the only thing worse than nobody being responsible for driving and shepherding the energy transition would be Amazon, of all firms, being so responsible.

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So why are PPAs being sold at such a low price? It feels like buyers are getting a really good deal, and owners are getting poor terms. The obvious explanation’, this individual concluded, ‘is mismatch between demand and supply.’62 The companies benefiting most from the corporate PPA market being a buyers’ market are, of course, the big tech companies mentioned above. As two industry experts explained to the Financial Times, the Amazons and Googles of the world are effectively able to bend the corporate PPA market to their own demands. ‘The tech companies really do dominate the whole market from a size perspective,’ one said. ‘Their influence is huge.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

The price tag for such a measure was potentially staggering, but Gingrich wanted to make it clear: he had arrived to carry the nation into the Internet Age.7 GINGRICH REVOLUTION The second annual PFF conference that summer of 1995 showed how high the scrappy little think tank’s standing had vaulted in Gingrich’s Washington. The conference had left muggy Atlanta for the mountain air of Aspen, summertime playground of the powerful and rich. The halls overflowed with corporate lobbyists hoping to gauge what the Speaker might be thinking about the next big tech issue on the docket: The Telecom Revolution—An American Opportunity. So ran the title of that year’s conference and its accompanying white paper, taking advantage of the fact that the telecom bill that the White House had brought to the Hill at the start of 1994 hadn’t gone anywhere, shelved by recalcitrant Democrats who didn’t like the idea of letting broadband Internet companies operate on a more open playing field.

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Instead of the traditional research and procurement process, the Pentagon sponsored hackathons and design charrettes to get government bureaucracies to behave more like start-ups. The swelling number of defense contracts were hard to see at first—just as in the Valley’s early years, the top secret nature of so much of this activity kept observers from fully understanding its size and scope—but it soon became impossible to ignore the growing amount of work Big Tech had started to do for the military. What also became clear was a continuing irony: that some of those most enriched by the new-style military-industrial complex were also some of the tech industry’s most outspoken critics of big government, and champions of the free market. In the space-age Valley, the person embodying this contradiction was Dave Packard.

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The program she had started in 1996 had become wildly successful, a pathbreaking model that had inspired others to build similar schools for underrepresented kids. What had begun as a modest prep program for teenagers had grown to serve kindergarten through high school, bringing science and engineering education to more than 5,000 Seattle students and counting. But the faces inside those big tech companies looked much the same as they had when she started at Microsoft all those years ago. “Why are people of color not part of this movement, and why isn’t anyone doing anything about it? Why is everyone continuing to give more to people that already have more?” she wondered. “There is no incentive for leaders in tech to do anything, no incentive for them to explore other communities for brainpower.”27 Nonetheless, the mid-2010s conversation about tech diversity was unlike anything the Valley had seen before.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

Instead, I think their founders and engineers were idealists who thought that having good intentions mattered more than producing good outcomes. Today, in part because of these blind spots—and the billions of dollars their companies have had to spend fixing their mistakes—the demand for people who can spot the flaws in technological systems before they cause catastrophic problems has grown. Big tech companies are hiring people with backgrounds in fields like law enforcement, cybersecurity, and public policy, who have both the real-world experience and the consequentialist imaginations to analyze new products and imagine all the possible harms they could enable. There will be a much bigger need for these people in the future, and not all of them will be engineers.

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I routinely get emails and DMs from today’s Sarah Bagleys—rank-and-file workers at Facebook, Amazon, Google, and other tech giants who tell me that they’re horrified by some of the tools their companies are building, their workplace practices, and their failures to contain the harms resulting from the use of their products. These people believe that they can be most effective as ethical advocates from the inside, but they’re grateful for the efforts of journalists, researchers, and activists who are pushing from the outside, adding more voices to the chorus calling for change. And outside the big tech companies, there are plenty of righteous machine-makers we can support and learn from. These are people like Jazmyn Latimer, a product designer who works with the nonprofit group Code for America. Several years ago, Latimer got an idea for an app called “Clear My Record,” which would use automated software to help eligible people convicted of past criminal offenses to apply to have their convictions expunged from their records.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

“If we’re in Silicon Valley, we’ll go out and screw around, but in Austin there’s nothing else to do except go out and drink . . . The company was oriented towards drinking and working very hard. Everything was very intense.” Hired at age twenty-four, Lilly would have been just another cog in the wheel at a big tech firm, but his first job as a Trilogian was as a director on Liemandt’s staff. New hires immediately spent twelve weeks bonding and training at a company boot camp called Trilogy University. The idea was to “push new recruits to their limits” with an unrelenting series of technical and emotional challenges while simultaneously indoctrinating them with Trilogy’s core vision and values.

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A woman who worked at the company told me that Slide felt like a frat house, with an undercurrent of sexism and rumored hookups. Given that many Silicon Valley start-ups are founded and staffed by young men straight out of college, drinking at the office is common. There’s beer on tap at most big tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and you’ll often find beer in the refrigerator at small start-ups, to juice those late nights of coding with your buddies. Rubenstein calls Slide’s alcohol problem and “ambient sexism” symptoms of “a culture of immature individuals.” In these kinds of environments, Rubenstein says, “there are all sorts of comments like ‘Gee, that’s gay,’ or ‘Gee, do you have a vagina?’

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One former engineer at Facebook collected data showing that female engineers received 35 percent more rejections of their code than men. Facebook’s head of infrastructure told the Wall Street Journal that the discrepancy was based more on an engineer’s rank than gender, revealing another problem: the lack of women in senior engineering roles. One engineer said that working at a big tech company is “kind of like Russian roulette,” meaning that a great manager can really make women feel valued, while getting a bad manager means you’re screwed. The women in my living room told me that men who had positive things to say about their contributions too often expressed them in a patronizing way, saying, “Wow, that’s actually a really good idea.”

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Schneider, accessed November 28, 2021, https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/nyc-taxi-ridehailing-uber-lyft-data; “Edinburgh,” Inside Airbnb, accessed November 28, 2021, http://insideairbnb.com/edinburgh; Ken Symon, “Investment Leads to Surge in Scottish Hotel Room Numbers,” insider.co.uk, updated October 3, 2019, www.insider.co.uk/news/investment-leads-surge-scottish-hotel-20389723. 104. Chris Isidore and Jon Sarlin, “Big Tech Is Way Too Big,” CNN Business, updated December 17, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/17/tech/big-tech-too-big-tim-wu/index.html. 105. Matt Stoller, “What a Cheerleading Monopoly Says About the American Economy,” BIG by Matt Stoller, published January 17, 2020, https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/what-a-cheerleading-monopoly-says. 106. “Ship It on Steam,” STEAM, Valve Corporation, accessed November 28, 2021, https://store.steampowered.com/app/511700/Ship_It. 107.

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A blog post by Help Scout, one of Zendesk’s leading competitors, makes the same arguments to defend the company’s decision to exclude gamification—that it might reward the wrong kinds of behaviour and result in poor customer service.90 The problem is, companies want gamification in their support systems, and so Zendesk now promotes its integration with Kaizo, a gamification app.91 Another Zendesk competitor, Freshdesk, proudly touts its Arcade system, complete with fully customisable points, levels, quests, and achievements that “break the monotony” and “make support exciting by turning your helpdesk into a game.”92 It sounds sophisticated, but if you’ve already made a solid API-driven support platform, it’s not difficult for programmers to build a gamification layer on top. Those same programmers, the princes of the information economy, aren’t immune from gamification. Big tech companies have always competed to hire the best programmers, but since there are only so many computer science graduates from MIT and Stanford to go around, they’re looking further afield than ever to find those diamonds in the rough, the self-taught geniuses who can’t be found in the usual places.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

House of Lords Select Committee on Communications, Regulating in a Digital World, p. 38. 45. J. Ramsay, ‘Competition among Exchanges Has Reached a New Low, and It’s Dangerous for the Stock Market’, 23 May 2018, at businessinsider.com. 46. M. Sandbu, ‘The Market Failures of Big Tech’, Financial Times, 19 February 2018. 47. Furman et al., ‘Unlocking Digital Competition’, p. 35. 48. Ibid., p. 32. 49. Sandbu, ‘Market Failures of Big Tech’. 50. M. Warner, ‘Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms’, August 2018, pp. 4–5 – pdf available at ftc.gov. 51. Competition & Markets Authority, ‘Online platforms and digital advertising: Market study interim report’, December 2019, p. 15 – pdf available at assets. publishing.service.gov.uk.

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‘Labour’s Ideological Clampdown on Uber Is a Harbinger of What Prime Minister Corbyn Would Do’, Telegraph, 26 November 2019. 31. A. Ram and S. Bond, ‘Uber Wins 15-Month London Licence in Court Fight’, Financial Times, 26 June 2018. 32. H. Boland, ‘Tech Giants Double Their Army of UK Lobbyists’, Telegraph, 21 October 2018. 33. I. Lapowsky, ‘Facing UK Regulation, Big Tech Sends a Lobbyist to London’, 13 November 2018, at wired.com. 34. C. Cadwalladr and D. Campbell, ‘Revealed: Facebook’s Global Lobbying Against Data Privacy Laws’, Guardian, 2 March 2019. 35. ‘The Best Place …’ is from the title of Chapter 3 of the UK government’s March 2017 policy paper, ‘UK Digital Strategy 2017’, available at gov.uk. 36.

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The anticompetitive aspects of platform operators integrating across business lines – with the result that customers or suppliers in one business are commonly rivals in another – represent the main basis of Lina Khan’s influential article on Amazon and antitrust. See L. Khan, ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’, Yale Law Journal 126 (2016– 17), pp. 710–805. 53. Sandbu, ‘Market Failures of Big Tech’. 54. Furman et al., ‘Unlocking Digital Competition’, p. 32. 55. Competition & Markets Authority, ‘Online platforms and digital advertising’, p. 13. 56. Furman et al., ‘Unlocking Digital Competition’. 57. Kenney and Zysman, ‘Rise of the Platform Economy’. 58. Cited in Furman et al., ‘Unlocking Digital Competition’, p. 45. 59.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

It just needs a change of mindset. Above all, we need to develop a new way of thinking about monopoly. In the Exponential Age, Bork’s theory is in tatters: we won’t necessarily be able to spot over-large companies from their negative effects on consumers. But fortunately, the market dominance of big tech companies has given the once-fusty field of antitrust scholarship a new lease of life – and has led to some exciting new ideas. For example, one surprisingly popular paper by the legal scholar Lina Khan argues for an alternative antitrust framework – one that accounts for the implications of Amazon’s dominance of infrastructure and logistics.53 Instead of focusing on Amazon’s implications for consumers, we might look to the conflicts of interest that arise from massive scale and infrastructure power.

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This firm, Openreach, would need to invest in the network and sell services to BT and any other phone company who wanted access on equal terms. This eliminated the need to build a second national network into people’s homes (although it didn’t stop some firms from doing so).56 Again, the European Commission is leading the way in regulating big tech companies. Under the proposed Digital Services Act, when a platform gets very big – defined as reaching more than 10 per cent of Europeans – new obligations come into play. These involve greater reporting and auditing requirements, and a commitment to share data with researchers and the authorities.

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Whether it is ignoring cyber threats, or failing to update employment legislation, or being slow to rethink the nature of monopoly, our systems have been lackadaisical in their response to the changing technological order. Many of the suggestions in this book have been about trying to help institutions adapt more quickly. When we hand down power to the local level, we create political units that are small enough to be agile. When we increase the transparency of big tech, we become more likely to spot incipient problems and respond rapidly – before anything gets out of control. These are just a few examples. In the Exponential Age, all institutions need to be serious about flexibility. If they are too rigid, they will be outpaced by our changing world. Provided you are reading this book at some point before 2040, chances are you have lived more of your life before the Exponential Age than during it.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

The examples of technology failures are numerous. From screening job candidates to deciding whom to release on bail, automated decisions have too often caused harm, making decisions that mirror long-standing societal prejudices. Robotics design frequently reflects culture-specific values and gendered norms. Big Tech controls data and uses it in ways that are opaque yet impactful on our behaviors. And Silicon Valley, the epicenter of innovation, is notoriously dominated by homogeneous leaders who do not reflect our global community. These problems are real and immense. The reality is that the train has left the station.

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The company recognized that algorithms and data sets can reinforce bias and stated that it will “seek to avoid unjust impacts on people, particularly those related to sensitive characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, income, sexual orientation, ability, and political or religious belief.”4 How can we ensure that AI ethics departments in Big Tech are not simply rubber stamps? Frankly, we can never be certain that corporate statements around ethical AI practices are more than mere ethics washing. And there’s always a risk that by celebrating corporate efforts, we are legitimizing a limited and sticky path, and co-opting efforts from the outside.

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Gebru’s binary characterization that positive change solely happens from the outside through marginalized communities while others are cast as co-opting those same goals is also too restrictive. This tale of two insiders-turned-outsiders (a category that, as my research on whistleblowing has shown, disproportionately includes women) can have several readings. The problems exposed about Big Tech are of course our principal concern. They underscore the need for more systematic oversight from outside regulators. Corporate failures underscore the continuous need for government, academia, and non-profits to take an active role. We need more public monitoring and auditing along with independent, non-profit research on ethical AI.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

What we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.” But the antiregulatory religion pushed by libertarian think tanks since the Reagan era has gutted antitrust enforcement efforts in both Republican and Democratic administrations. As former secretary of labor Robert Reich wrote in 2015, “Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.” Even the investment bank Goldman Sachs finds itself perplexed by the extraordinary margins these monopolies are generating.

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And I don’t think that when President Clinton signed the law that led to safe harbor, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that there was any intention for the tech companies to hide behind it the way that they currently do. None of us in the music business have enough resources to fight the legal battles against these big tech companies. The best thing would be to change laws. The DMCA “safe harbor” provisions that Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook hide behind need to be changed, as Azoff suggests. Every artist who has tried to have his work removed from an infringing website knows the problem. The rightful owner of the work files a takedown notice, the infringing site deletes the file temporarily, then the user reposts the same work using a different URL.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

Next door was a woman who was one of the few top-tier female computer business consultants of the day, but it turned out she suffered from multiple personality disorder and you never knew who she’d be. There might be an acid-tongued punk rocker harassing me, or a silver-tongued power broker enlisting me to help out with a thrust into one of the big tech companies. It turned out the refrigerator had failed and was not just colonized by ants, but had been completely filled by them, as if Archimedes had been performing an experiment with ants instead of water. I had to walk the rusty Space Age relic out back by the creek to empty it on its side. It looked like a flattened rocket that might have flown on the cover of one of Hugo Gernsback’s 1950s pulp science fiction mags, the ones in which Ellery wrote his popular science pieces.

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Won’t they become easy marks for charlatans who convince them science isn’t a friend to them? Isn’t the whole point of engineering that we’re supposed to serve nontechnical people?” Please keep the following in mind when you read “think pieces” about how robots deserve empathy: Tech writers have a bad habit of articulating “big ideas” that happen to serve the interests of the big tech companies at a given moment. There were a lot of pieces about the evils of copyright when Google was making an unprecedented instant fortune by plowing over copyright. Similarly, a flood of “radical” think pieces praising the end of privacy and the value of collectivity appeared when Facebook was first commoditizing and cornering the market on digital personal identity.14 “If, well, when giant robots or superintelligent swarms of nanoparticles decide you’re not worth keeping around, it won’t matter what you think.

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There was a path to making VPL into one of the big companies, and it had to do with the rise of networking. I could possibly fight the various ridiculous battles with an ineffectual board, the alleged Japanese mob, alleged French spies, and confirmed Hollywood divorce attorneys and come out on the other side leading a big tech company. But I had fresh doubts about whether it was what I wanted. If I was to make an uncharitable assessment of myself at the time, I would say that my problem was that I wanted to be loved. I was still that little boy who had lost his mother, and I couldn’t bear the jealousy and pestering that came with success in Silicon Valley.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

The code is open-source, so anyone can evaluate it. But everyone thought that someone else would evaluate it, so no one took the effort to actually do it. The result was that the vulnerability remained undetected for over two years. In response to Heartbleed, industry created something called the Core Infrastructure Initiative. Basically, the big tech companies all got together and established a testing program for open-source software that we all rely on. It’s a good idea that should have been done a decade earlier, but it’s not enough. In Chapter 1, I explained that the Internet was never designed with security in mind. That was okay when the Internet was primarily at research institutions and used primarily for academic communication.

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Someone else might suggest exempting pure software systems because they don’t have physical agency, but they can still have real-world effects: think of software that decides who gets released on bail or parole. Regulations should probably cover these systems as well. The third problem with regulating the Internet+ is efficacy. Large corporations are very effective at evading regulation. The big tech companies are spending record amounts of money lobbying in Washington, to the point that they’re now spending twice what the banking industry does, and many times more than oil companies, defense contractors, and everyone else. Google alone spent $6 million on lobbying in just three months of 2017.

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Hinz (1 Nov 2012), “A distinctionless distinction: Why the RCS/ECS distinction in the Stored Communications Act does not work,” Notre Dame Law Review 88, no. 1, https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1115&context=ndlr. 153The logic behind that old law: David Kravets (21 Oct 2011), “Aging ‘privacy’ law leaves cloud email open to cops,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ecpa-turns-twenty-five. 154The big tech companies are spending: Olivia Solon and Sabrina Siddiqui (3 Sep 2017), “Forget Wall Street: Silicon Valley is the new political power in Washington,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/03/silicon-valley-politics-lobbying-washington. 154Google alone spent $6 million: Jonathan Taplin (30 Jul 2017), “Why is Google spending record sums on lobbying Washington?”

Hedgehogging
by Barton Biggs
Published 3 Jan 2005

In early 1998, the young tech guy quit the big firm and used his record to raise $45 million for his own hedge fund, which, in reality, was just a leveraged long tech fund.That first year he was up 40%, and in 1999, he was up a dazzling 65%. I figure he must have taken home $30 million. In 2000, the money gushed in, and he began with $600 million. That November, he came to the big tech conference in Santa Monica in a G-5 with his wife, two children, a nanny, his wife’s parents, and a cousin who was his personal trainer. He had been nicked by the price declines of that summer, but he still believed he was invulnerable, touched by stardust, anointed by the gods. Just as friendly and talkative as ever. 

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ccc_biggs_ch12_162-177.qxd 174 11/29/05 7:03 AM Page 174 HEDGEHOGGING As business organizations, investment management firms and hedge funds are particularly vulnerable to solothink, because a run of poor performance quickly affects assets and revenues and can bring to the surface all the detritus of human interpersonal relationships. As long as the investment messiah can keep walking on water, everything is fine, but if the messiah loses his touch, performance is so measurable that he can lose his halo very quickly. Recently, a young analyst I know was telling me what happened at Circuits, a big tech hedge fund that was created and built by Sid. Sid is very bright, opinionated, confident, and hardworking. In the 1990s he put up big numbers in the glory years, and in 2001 he reacted quickly, went short tech, and avoided the worst of the carnage. However, he has stayed bearish, arguing that tech is still expensive and that there is no new product cycle.

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Huge market capitalizations like Cisco and Intel doubled.We bears began to despair of it ever ending.Then, fitfully, the bubble began to lose gas. In the early spring of 2000 the Internet stocks collapsed.The IIX fell from 690 to 400 in two months.This sharp drop was shrugged off as an aberration in an already inflated specialty market. That summer, the big tech names began to drift sideways, but inexplicably the IIX rallied back to 560. Once again, all seemed right with the tech and Internet worlds. “The pause that refreshes,” said one market letter writer. In July 2000 The High Tech Strategist published a table that shows the average price/earnings ratio for the 40 largest Nasdaq stocks was 230 times earnings.Then, in late summer, there began to be rumblings that the overall economy was beginning to falter.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

The related bill(s) have not yet dropped but are something to look out for, given that Jim and the Californians for Consumer Privacy were instrumental in translating GDPR into the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPR), the most comprehensive data legislation in the United States. California governor Gavin Newsom’s Data Dividend Law, which has been introduced and is being debated, recognizes that people from whom personal data has been collected should be compensated for its use. Senator Mark Warner’s DETOUR Act and associated bills that aim to regulate big tech by providing transparency into the value of consumers’ data, and to block manipulative “dark patterns” in the use of algorithms. The state of Wyoming’s Digital Asset Legislation, which includes thirteen new laws already passed, and has many more in consideration during the upcoming legislative cycle.

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As Albert Einstein said, “I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people refuse to go to war.” We must fight to fix our democracy before it breaks beyond repair. We can only do this together. Remember: you have agency! It is not only up to big tech and our governments to protect us. We have to stand up for ourselves as well. You do not need that viral Facebook app, or to answer that quiz, or to give away the value of your facial-recognition data to see what you look like when you are older. San Francisco was the first city in the United States to ban facial recognition altogether, and that city knows its dangers better than any other.

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With special recognition to Caitlin Long, Representative Tyler Lindholm, Senator Ogden-Driskill, Rob Jennings, Steven Lupien, and the rest of the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force, the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, and the forward-thinking legislators that have voted to pass all thirteen of these new laws that protect your citizens and residents. I am proud to call this beautiful place my new home! The U.S. Congress and its top thought leaders, for pushing forward with the regulation of big tech and the protection of the digital assets of the citizens and residents of the United States. With special thanks to Senator Mark Warner, Senator Ed Markey, and Senator Elizabeth Warren. You are a guiding light for others to see how important this is to the future of our country. Matt McKibbin, for being an incredible friend, partner, and thought leader.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

You can take the journalist out of a tabloid, but you can’t take the tabloid out of a journalist. FRIDAY, 6 JUNE Richard Waters, our west coast editor, has written an eye-opening column on the anniversary of the Snowden revelations about mass surveillance. He says the debate has extended to the role of Big Tech companies and their collection of limitless amounts of data. Until Snowden, conventional wisdom included a free pass to Big Tech operating alongside a borderless internet free of regulation. This argument now sounds complacent, he writes. ‘In reality the ground had already been shifting, as politicians and regulators took a keener interest in the expanding digital realm.

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OMG.’ 2019 Succession From my front-row seat, I had watched the world change dramatically during my years as editor. These were turbulent times, starting with the global financial crisis and ending with a crisis of liberal democracy. I had witnessed the rise of China and a concentration of power among the Big Tech companies whose presence in our daily lives was ubiquitous. And I had placed my chips on a few select areas: the Weekend FT, original, long-form journalism adaptable for print and online, and digital transformation which would drive us past the milestone of 1 million paying readers in 2019. The timetable for my departure as editor at the end of the year was in place.

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Feb 2015

This is the stuff that keeps the internet going: rules that route your request for traffic, servers that host that web page you’re after, systems that certify for your computer that the site you’re trying to access isn’t bogus. Because it all happens at the speed of light, it doesn’t feel cluttered up, of course. But all these little stages and protocols create invisible centres of power, explains Nick – be they governments, big tech companies or invisible US-based regulators – and they are all exercising control over what happens on the net. That’s bad for security, and bad for privacy. MaidSafe strips all this out. The end result, says Nick, will be a network that is very difficult to censor and offers more privacy. ‘Even if we wanted to censor users’ content, we couldn’t – because with this system we don’t know or have access to anything the users do.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

Perhaps it was the Hawaiian shirt and cowboy boots, but there was something about Watters that made James and Endler think he might be open to a different line of thinking. Endler made the pitch: There are vulnerabilities all over the place, he told Watters. Programmers at Microsoft, Oracle, and the big tech companies were inadvertently writing bugs into their code every single day. By the time one bug was found and patched, developers had already baked new code, with new bugs, into software being used by iDefense’s customers all over the globe. The security industry did little to protect their customers from the next attack.

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It wasn’t until the fall of 2015—after two years of trying and failing to convince someone to talk—that one of the market’s first brokers agreed, against his better judgment, to sit down with me face-to-face. That October I flew to Dulles to meet with a man I’ll have to call Jimmy Sabien. Twelve years earlier, Sabien had been the first man bold enough to call up Watters to try to convince him to sell zero-days to him on the sly, instead of handing them over to iDefense’s customers and the big tech companies. Sabien and I arranged to meet at a Mexican restaurant in Ballston—just a few miles from several of his former customers—and over enchiladas, he relayed what many hackers and government agencies have long known, but kept quiet. Sabien had been out of the market for years, but in the late 1990s he was recruited to one of three boutique government contractors that first started buying zero-day bugs on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies.

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In the post 9/11 decade, implants once, under Gosler’s tenure, reserved for a few hundred terrorists and foreign officials in China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan now numbered in the tens of thousands and eventually grew into the millions. As iDefense was drawing up its modest price lists for bugs in Chantilly—and getting pilloried for it by the big tech companies—TAO hackers, fifty miles east, were mining for bugs on BugTraq, scouring obscure hacker magazines, and ripping apart any new hardware and software that hit the market in search of bugs to add to the agency’s zero-day arsenal. Those backdoors I’d first glimpsed in the closet of Snowden’s leaked classified secrets?

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

The successes of MU we have mentioned are among the most productive applications of digital technologies and have paved the way to myriad other innovations. Nevertheless, they are, overall, marginal to the current direction of AI. For 2016, McKinsey Global Institute estimated that $20‒$30 billion out of the total global AI spending of $26‒$39 billion comes from a handful of big tech companies in the United States and China. Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, most of this spending appears to go toward massive data collection that is targeted at automation and surveillance. So why are tech companies not developing tools that help humans and at the same time boost productivity?

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Just taxing the clear examples of automation technologies, such as industrial robots, would not be optimal either, for such a policy would leave out the much more pervasive algorithmic automation technologies. Nevertheless, if subsidies and other policies cannot succeed in redirecting technological efforts, automation taxes may need to be considered in the future. Breaking Up Big Tech. Big businesses have become too powerful, and that is a problem in and of itself. Google dominates search, Facebook has few rivals in social networking, and Amazon is developing a lock on e-commerce. These overwhelming market shares remind us of Standard Oil, which had a 90 percent market share of oil and oil products when it was broken up in 1911, and AT&T, which had a near monopoly on telephone service when it was broken up in 1982.

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Data on renewable costs and evolution over time are from www.irena.org/publications/2021/Jun/Renewable-Power-Costs-in-2020, assessing the “levelized cost of electricity” generated from various sources. “In 50 years…” is from McKibben (2013). Remaking Countervailing Powers. On the economic and broader implications of growing concentration of power in the hands of Big Tech, see Foer (2017). For blue-collar production workers as a share of the US labor force, see https://bluecollarjobs.us/2017/04/10/highest-to-lowest-share-of-blue-collar-jobs-by-state. Starbucks unionization is discussed in Eavis (2022). On Hong Kong protests, see Cantoni, Yang, Yuchtman, and Zhang (2019).

Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
by Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm
Published 18 May 2022

So, for the time being, it is legal for insurance companies in New York to snoop on social media to collect information used for risk discrimination, at least if they can explain to regulators why they are doing it. Artificial Intelligence All the data that are being collected must be stored and analyzed, and Big Tech is committing huge resources to the advancement of a new databased health industry, using a variety of related strategies. Alphabet has recently created a new research unit, called Verily Life Sciences, to develop AI-based approaches to data analysis, and Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT is focused on collecting massive amounts of individual data from a variety of sources and transferring it to cloud-based systems, including a virtual assistant that takes notes at patient-doctor meetings using speech recognition technologies (Singer 2017).

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Measurement of information is a wide-open field, and we hope that our efforts will stimulate interest, foster debate, and spark innovation. Second, our theoretical framework assumes that the information asymmetries are such that individuals know more than (insurance) companies or the state. This is a standard assumption, and it strikes us as very reasonable in many instances. However, as (Big Tech) companies guzzle up more and more information about more and more individuals, linking them across many domains and mining them for patterns, the information asymmetries may not just grow smaller and disappear – as we assume – but eventually reverse. Our intuition is that this would increase the https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009151405.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press 202 Conclusion “cream skimming” of insurance companies: Their risk classification would be excellent; they could identify bad risks with high accuracy; and they would not need to worry as much about adverse selection.

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Burton, Kathryn M. McDonald, and Lee Goldman. 2003. “Changes in Rates of Autopsy-Detected Diagnostic Errors over Time: A Systematic Review.” JAMA 289(21): 2849–56. Siddeley, Leslie. 1992. “The Rise and Fall of Fraternal Insurance Organizations.” Humane Studies Review 7(2): 13–16. Singer, Natasha. 2017. “How Big Tech Is Going After Your Health Care.” The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/technology/big-techhealth-care.html (December 27, 2017). Song, Jae et al. 2019. “Firming Up Inequality.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(1): 1–50. Soskice, David, Robert H. Bates, and David Epstein. 1992. “Ambition and Constraint: The Stabilizing Role of Institutions.”

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

Even Google and Uber keep postponing [the roll-out of these vehicles]’, says Mathieu Saujot, a researcher at IDDRI, a sustainable-development think tank.49 But if driverless cars do one day go mainstream, they will produce, on account of their lidars and ultra-high-definition cameras, up to one gigabyte of data per second.50 In the words of the head of a big tech company, ‘A million autonomous cars represent as much data as the entire world population connected to the web.’51 And what will these vehicles use to communicate with? Road signs, smart roads, and other driverless cars connected to ‘edge data centres’ that offer the lowest possible latency. Paradoxically, the more ‘autonomous’ the car, the more it will depend on the surrounding infrastructure … There is nothing less autonomous than an autonomous vehicle.

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Consider that for videos, high-definition will soon be overtaken by 4K (number of pixels) video resolution, even 8K video resolution, which ‘uses 32 times more data than high-definition’, according to one report.73 Another staggering statistic is put forward by a researcher for the magazine The Conversation: ‘A 10% increase in 4K video in 2030 alone would produce a 10% increase in the overall volume of electricity used by digital technology.’74 The CEO of Digital For The Planet says that the intellectual and social pollution generated by captology techniques causes environmental pollution: ‘These three forms of pollution are interdependent, and so we cannot tackle one without addressing the others.’75 How do we resist such strategies? First, we must call out, as did the former engineer at Google, Tristan Harris, the manipulation techniques developed by the big tech companies. The next step is to act. There are a number of solutions aimed at giving users back control of their existence: deactivating notifications, deleting the most addictive applications (Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram), distancing ourselves from social media whose algorithms provoke user indignation (and create traffic on the application), banishing smartphones from the bedroom, or switching off one day a week.76 There are associations that list bars and restaurants where using a smartphone is forbidden.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
by Nancy Jo Sales
Published 17 May 2021

This was a few years before “techlash” had set in, with people finally questioning the notion that tech was an unmitigated good. It was before the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 showed how a social media platform, Facebook, could sway an election and threaten democracy; before Google faced worldwide protests from its employees, in 2018, over its handling of sexual harassment cases; before some of the heads of Big Tech appeared before Congress via videoconference in 2020 and were grilled about everything from antitrust issues to hate speech on their sites. “Americans have become much less positive about tech companies’ impact on the U.S.,” said a 2019 survey by Pew, reporting that only 50 percent of Americans now viewed the tech industry favorably, a drop from 71 percent in 2015.

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My friends came over to watch it in my living room with me, toasting my crossing the finish line of this four-year-long race. I was interviewed about it in a number of places, including the Washington Post, on NPR’s All Things Considered, and on Kara Swisher’s Recode Decode podcast, which was a thrill for me since I think she’s hands down the best writer on Big Tech, never failing to take the CEOs to task. I was happy to see all the tweets from people who saw the film and liked it. One of my favorites was from a woman who said: “The HBO docu Swiped confirms what women have felt all along: #dating apps were built by #bros to perpetuate #broculture by training men and women under the patriarchy to learn dehumanizing and expendable dating behavior.

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—Marisa Meltzer, author of This Is Big “Groundbreaking…I love Nancy Jo’s honesty and her connection with her own brain, heart, and soul. It’s so unbelievably refreshing to read the words of a woman that are so based in truth, her truth. I love this book so much. I didn’t want to put it down.” —Peri Gilpin “Nancy Jo Sales has written an unflinching confession and thoroughly researched exposé of how big tech has affected the way we relate now. Amid so much hot sex, I found myself chilled to the bone.” —Iris Smyles, author of Dating Tips for the Unemployed “An adrenaline-fueled romp through the world of online dating. At once hilarious and disturbing, Sales recounts not only how this technology shapes our experiences of love and dating, but also how it transformed her.”

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

” * * * • • • ON JANUARY 11, while he was still staving off increasingly peevish queries from the ConnectU team, and giving vague descriptions to Greenspan, Zuckerberg registered the website thefacebook.com. Facebook.com was already taken. It’s not clear how much work Zuckerberg had done on the project by then. During the winter break, in the early part of January 2004, he visited some friends in the Bay Area and was blown away by visiting the home of the big tech companies. But it is indisputable that, later that January, Zuckerberg spent one or two weeks—his own accounts vary—coding what would be known as thefacebook.com. Certainly the project was his priority that month. He viewed this new site as the culmination of all the projects he’d been working on previously.

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While still at Harvard, he had seemed to welcome the idea of selling off his project, even joking that if the Winklevoss twins won a lawsuit against Thefacebook for stealing their idea, paying damages would be the problem of whoever bought the site. But now he was totally committed to his creation. He felt it could make a difference in the world. But not if someone else owned it. After word leaked about Facebook’s metrics, a conga line of suitors came calling. For other social networks, buying Facebook would neutralize a threat. To big tech companies with little presence in social networking, it was an opportunity to enter that arena. For media companies, it represented a pipeline to young customers. Zuckerberg spent an extraordinary amount of time taking meetings with those suitors, often accompanied by Owen Van Natta, who was an experienced dealmaker.

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* * * • • • BY THEN WYLIE had a new digital pen pal, a reporter for The Guardian/Observer named Carole Cadwalladr. A feature writer and investigative journalist known for deep dives into her topics, often with a participatory twist (like working in an Amazon warehouse), Cadwalladr had become fascinated with what she perceived as the pernicious influence of big tech companies. In 2016, she began investigating Cambridge Analytica. She wrote a series of articles about the company—its involvement in Brexit, its methods, its ties to Robert Mercer and the ultraconservative movement that had backed Trump. And the Facebook data that Kogan had been called out for in December 2015.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

“What are your chances of getting elected to Congress, if you try?” 80,000 Hours. July 2, 2015. https://80000hours.org/2015/07/what-are-your-odds-of-getting-into-congress-if-you-try. 10. Dennin, James. “Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and other big tech companies top list of tax-avoiders.” Mic. October 4, 2016. https://mic.com/articles/155791/apple-google-microsoft-cisco-ibm-and-other-big-tech-companies-top-list-of-tax-avoiders#.Hx5lomyBl. 11. Bologna, Michael J. “Amazon Close to Breaking Wal-Mart Record for Subsidies.” Bloomberg BNA. March 20, 2017. https://www.bna.com/amazon-close-breaking-n57982085432. 12. https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings/page+2 Chapter 9: The Fifth Horseman?

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

Writers could give game characters names and origin stories, for example. “Angry Birds was fantastic, but really it’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s the beginning of what is going to really happen,” Yanover said. Last year, in an effort to capitalize on the new moneymaking opportunities of convergence, big tech investor Silver Lake Capital bought a third of WME for an undisclosed sum. TPG, meanwhile, bought a chunk of CAA. “It used to be the only things the agent did—back when I started—was TV, movies, books, and theater,” said Ari Emanuel, the CEO of WME, during an onstage interview last year. “Now there are a wide variety of distribution points and places where artists can start creating content.

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In early 2012 the entertainment industry thought it could use its lobbying clout in Washington to quietly push two bills through Congress that would have given it new powers to control the content of websites violating their copyrights. But the bills read as if they were as much motivated by a nefarious Hollywood power play as by a desire to stop illegal activity. Big tech companies such as Google blacked out their website names in protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills. Some, such as Wikipedia and Reddit, went dark. And the bills were quickly defeated. But what happened after the SOPA/PIPA fiasco was as interesting as the event itself. Instead of hardening their positions as they had in the past, executives from Hollywood and Silicon Valley figured out a way to make headway.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth had, to borrow another fashionable Valley word, “pivoted” into the conference business. “Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,”1 the event instructed its audience. And to help us overcome the fear, to make it feel good to fail, FailCon invited some of Big Tech’s greatest innovators to outfail each other with tales of their losses. At FailCon, the F-word was ubiquitous among illustrious Silicon Valley speakers like Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, the billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and Eric Ries, the author of a bestselling handbook for Internet success called The Lean Startup.

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But unlike “your garden-variety Silicon Valley billionaire,” Sennett explains, “the progressives of a century ago believed that once in power, the plutocrat would inevitably stifle talent which threatened his or her domain.”29 And that’s why, according to Sennett, “it’s time to break up Google.” The “problem is simple,” he says. “The company is just too powerful, as are Apple and many other big tech groups.” “Were he alive today,” Sennett writes about President Theodore Roosevelt, the American president who trust-busted Standard Oil, “I believe Roosevelt would concentrate his firepower on Google, Microsoft and Apple. We need modern politicians who will be similarly bold.”30 “Imagine that it’s 1913 and the post office, the phone company, the public library, printing houses, the U.S.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

Sounds like a monopoly? ‘It certainly doesn’t feel like that,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Lindsey Graham during his 2018 US Senate hearing.8 His response raised much laughter, although it wasn’t entirely wrong: there is indeed a growing niche audience that is exploring alternative solutions. As the big tech firms come increasingly under fire – whether in the US Senate, the EU, the British Home Office or the German Ministry for Justice – non-state actors ranging from radical libertarians to extremist users spot a unique chance to woo away unhappy clients. The Cambridge Analytica scandal sent Facebook’s shares tumbling9 and caused thousands of users to participate in a #Deletefacebook campaign, which was strongly encouraged on competing platforms that welcomed dissatisfied users with open arms.

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Due to the network effect, every new user significantly enhances the value of a network, and every lost user exponentially decreases its value. This means that platform migration dynamics set in motion by take-down policies could significantly change the social media landscape in years to come. At this point, it may be worth asking whether we will see a decline of the big tech platforms to the benefit of their ultra-libertarian rivals. Have we perhaps reached peak Silicon Valley? The creation of this parallel alt-tech universe is a dynamic that might challenge the hegemony of the big social media firms. In the long run, it may also change existing power relations on the internet and revolutionise the way our societies connect and network.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

That, in turn, means fewer economic resources to address the economic problems from which the left behind suffer disproportionately. There are two misconceptions to avoid here. This is not just a problem in the digital economy. Several European countries have recently moved to impose special taxes on the big internet tech companies, arguing that Big Tech is a particular offender in avoiding profit taxes through profit shifting. France, for example, has introduced its taxe GAFA (named for Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple), a levy on the national turnover of big IT multinationals. But the techniques used to engineer away tax liabilities are just as available for entirely “physical” activities.

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Even these treaties do not limit national governments’ ability to tax capital as much as is often thought. In addition to not making matters worse by allowing unnecessary exemptions from taxability, governments can employ other taxes when income taxes are constrained by tax treaties. The European strategy to tax Big Tech provides an illustration: it eschews profits taxes (which could fall afoul of treaty obligations), opting instead for turnover taxes designed to mimic a profit tax. 24. Tørsløv, Wier, and Zucman, “Missing Profits of Nations.” 25. William Nordhaus, “Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics” (2018 Nobel Prize Lecture, Stockholm University, 8 December 2018), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2018/nordhaus/lecture/; Martin Sandbu, “Nobel Economics Lessons on Climate Change,” Financial Times, 12 December 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/30c93916-fd3d-11e8-ac00-57a2a826423e. 26.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

According to the historian of ideas Philip Mirowski, one of the main causes of the problem is that science is becoming commodified.51 As it becomes an outsourced research engine for corporations, quality control collapses. A ‘parallel universe of think tanks and shadowy “experts”’ emerges outside of academia, while inside, the state demands policy-oriented research but is increasingly indifferent to quality controls. Corporations – especially big tech – have little interest in research that doesn’t pay off quickly with monetizable innovations and gizmos. Google has backed a proposal to incentivize scientists to think about the bottom line, wherein they place research ideas on something like a scientific stock market and the most promising ideas are snapped up by venture capitalists.

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Like the algorithmic protocols of the digital platforms, they hit below the intellect, working underneath the surface of persuasion, building realities into our everyday experience. It doesn’t negotiate with our wants, it shapes what we are capable of wanting. And, as the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta once put it, ‘everything depends on what the people are capable of wanting.’19 The underground persuasion of reality-shaping is what big tech does really well. It is quite different from what used to be called hegemony. Hegemony is a strategy of obtaining leadership of a broad civil society coalition to achieve political goals. It means building alliances with other groups by taking their interests and desires seriously, rather than just coercing them.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

The public was alarmed, but it never realized how effective the Chinese campaign really was, because no one had an incentive to admit it. According to Mudge, the Chinese had broken into repositories for the source code of many big companies and written in what looked like programming mistakes. In reality, they were back doors that would allow Chinese spies to break into the customers of those big tech companies whenever they wanted. In a fight like that, Google and many others understandably considered the NSA to be the good guys. But it was not that simple. In a few years, with the public debut of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Google and many other American tech companies, to say nothing of the rest of the world, would see the agency as an archenemy

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Only after the anonymous website went live the next day did Steele acknowledge, on Saturday, that concrete sexual assault allegations and an investigation were behind Jake’s departure. At various times over the next year and a half, some victims identified themselves, including Komlo and Leigh Honeywell, a Canadian security engineer for big tech companies. Honeywell said that during an on-and-off consensual relationship a decade earlier, Jake had ignored a safe word and become violent. “Being involved with him was a steady stream of humiliations small and large,” Honeywell wrote on her own site. “He mistreated me in front of others and over-shared about our intimate interactions with friends who were often also professional colleagues.”

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

Every several months, leadership would evaluate their progress, granting more funding to the teams whose work was proving their hypotheses about what customers needed from GE in their digital future. Some teams would get cut, or pivot to new hypotheses. Jeff also notes that the talent he hired was probably inappropriate for the transformation. “I hired big tech pedigree leaders—from Cisco, SAP, IBM, and Oracle—but not true entrepreneurs. They thought about scale, not experimentation. I would have done that differently.” It’s counterintuitive for big company leaders, but sometimes overcommitting is the issue. When you fund an initiative with hundreds of millions of dollars and big fanfare, the pressure for a big outcome in an unrealistically short time hangs over the team.

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Ali Niknam, CEO of Bunq, the mobile bank based in Amsterdam, says his startup has been recruiting great developers in the Netherlands, even though there is a huge shortage of developer talent there. What’s more, Bunq even manages to lure developers out of bigger tech companies like Uber, Google, and Microsoft—even though Bunq pays less than those big tech giants. “They are all taking pay cuts,” he says. How has he done that? One reason is the mission. “We’re changing the course of the financial industry. You can be a part of 130 people who are shifting an entire industry on its end,” Ali says. When computer scientist Tom Bilske moved from his native Australia to Amsterdam, he leapt at the chance to join Bunq.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

Similarly, flags of convenience subvert the intent of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. These are all examples of the hacks made possible by an organization that is larger than the body that is regulating it. Corporations generally do business both in and out of Delaware. Maritime shipping companies are global—much larger than Panama. We’re seeing this now with the big tech companies. No public institutions possess a regulatory footprint that can match them. Companies like Facebook are global, yet regulations affecting them are national. Regulatory structures suitable for the information age just don’t exist yet, and that enables companies to profit from jurisdictional arbitrage. 32 Administrative Burdens Sometimes a hack is the product of necessity, born of adversity and the need to adapt.

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What has changed over the past half-century is the extent to which computers and computer interfaces provide greater opportunities to manipulate the perceptions of others. Combined with computer algorithms and behavioral science, they change the speed and sophistication of mind-meddling, and those differences in degree lead to differences in kind. Not always, though. Writer and activist Cory Doctorow cautions us from blindly believing “the thesis that Big Tech used Big Data to create a mind-control ray to sell us fidget spinners.” At best, what I’ll be talking about in the next few chapters are cognitive nudges that push us one way or the other to varying degrees. But I think we need to be equally reluctant to ignore these techniques. Paired with AI, they’re going to get more effective.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022

The PJ Media post caught the attention of programmers at Fox News, who ran a segment on the censorship conspiracy theory starring Diamond and Silk, a pair of pro-Trump sycophants who began their broadcast careers as YouTube personalities, and who would lose their Fox News gigs two years later after falsely claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax. In their segment, Diamond and Silk claimed that big tech censorship of conservatives was real, because Facebook had deleted some of their posts without warning. (In fact, internal emails revealed that Facebook repeatedly contacted the duo about posts that violated site rules.) Trump, a fan of Diamond and Silk, completed the cycle of fact-free outrage with his tweets, which prompted his economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, to suggest government action against Google.

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When the video-sharing app TikTok blocked hashtags associated with QAnon in July 2020, it removed one of the most straightforward means for Q supporters to discover and network with their peers. But while Silicon Valley giants like YouTube can curb the spread of conspiracy theories by taking away their artificial algorithmic boost, big tech firms are unlikely to deliver us, as a species, from the meaning-making thought processes that misfire when we craft conspiracy theories. TikTok can ban a hashtag, but it has less control over the feelings of fear and uncertainty that send us searching for alternative explanations. And if we accept that the Facebooks of the world will never be perfect at moderation, it’s worth adopting one more paranoia to ask whether we’re giving them too much power in the hopes that they will flawlessly execute an impossible task.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

Scott’s case studies describe intangibles-rich methods of production, grounded on detailed, time-honoured know-how and relationships—that is to say, intangibles—being replaced unwittingly by lower-quality ideas and practices (again, intangibles) that are more congenial to powerful, high-status people. These inadequate definitions of intangible investment help cast light on what intangible investment actually is. If you want to think about how intangible-intensive economies differ from less intangible-intensive economies, don’t think about knowledge work, small manufacturing sectors, or big tech companies. Think instead of an economy where what people do is more heavily and intimately connected in economic relationships; where activities of all sorts, from factory production to supermarket shopping, are more information rich; and where economic activity is more freighted with meaning, with association, and with emotional significance.

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Because intangibles have synergies, a marginal dollar spent on R&D or product design is more valuable to an intangibles-rich firm such as Facebook than to a laggard. In addition, it seems that large firms benefit particularly from the spillovers of intangible assets, to the extent that they are adept at exploiting these spillovers, copying or adapting their smaller competitors’ ideas (what the tech industry has come to call the kill zone around big tech firms—a periphery in which competitors are routinely crushed). Perhaps, then, the years 2000–2009 marked the turning point when the synergies of intangible capital in the leading firms were sufficient to dissuade followers from investing, and the result was an overall slowdown in investment and/or lowered overall productivity growth despite ongoing investment.

Meantime: The Brilliant 'Unputdownable Crime Novel' From Frankie Boyle
by Frankie Boyle
Published 20 Jul 2022

He laughed, then stopped himself, maybe remembering that this was what I’d done. ‘Fuck knows what she was doing at the Go-Go – she didn’t really need the money. Marina went to Princeton – you know that, right?’ I’d always assumed that was some joke of hers that I didn’t quite get, so I nodded in agreement. ‘She left to start working at that big tech start-up down on India Street. You know the thing, they’re always in the news putting implants in mice’s brains and trying to make them feel guilty or whatever … Beloved Intelligence. Aye, she was pretty senior down there. Fuck knows why she still had her bar job – maybe researching what kind of upgrades humanity needs, or something.’

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You’re not really a PA, are you?’ ‘What makes you think that?’ ‘I don’t know. The way the driver spoke to you, I think.’ She laughed politely. ‘Yes, you’re right. Tom and I are equal partners: we do a lot of our best work together. But we do a little role play because all our modelling suggests that people in big tech and investment are incredibly racist.’ ‘And not ableist?’ ‘Modelling suggests they’re actually slightly pro-disability. We think because of Stephen Hawking.’ ‘How did you get my number? I guess all my data’s online if you know how to get it.’ ‘No, we employ a resident private eye; it’s a kind of hipster thing, I suppose.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

We are far past Daniel J. Boorstin’s concept of the pseudo-event—press releases, awards shows, press conferences, and other trumped-up events whose sole purpose for being is so that they can be reported on. (Consider the media fervor that erupts around the unveiling of a new product or feature by a big tech company.) Save the much-fetishized long-form genre—two-thousand-plus-word, thoroughly reported stories that have ascended to hallowed status in an industry in which only the most privileged are allowed to do such work—much of journalism is now pseudo. We have other names for it: clickbait, linkbait, trolling.

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Microsoft, which like Twitter publishes transparency reports about what it shares with the U.S. government, based a high-profile ad campaign around the concept of being “Scroogled”—a portmanteau meant to highlight what it sees as Google’s privacy lapses, such as “Google’s policy of supplying the name, e-mail address, and neighborhood of users who purchase apps on Google Play.” This ad campaign has come under some criticism. Microsoft has long been cast as a stodgy old man, if not an outright villain, of the tech scene. The company certainly engages in some data collection practices comparable to Google’s—like most big tech companies, it’s deeply reliant on the Web’s surveillance infrastructure—and the subsequent revelations of its participation in the NSA’s PRISM program have done nothing to burnish Redmond’s image as a privacy defender. The ad campaign also has the unfortunate consequence of presenting privacy as a commodity, on the same commercial plane as, say, how much storage space the company’s cloud storage service offers.

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By that he doesn’t mean that all forms of encryption are uncrackable, or that some entity might not find another way to obtain your personal information, but encryption works well enough that it raises the cost of doing business for those who would otherwise indiscriminately vacuum up your data. It also offers support to the idea that privacy and security are worth upholding for everyone, not just for those people with technical know-how. One reason why it’s so important for big tech companies to start encrypting all of their data links—something that most of them only began doing after the Snowden revelations—is that it provides this kind of social benefit for a huge number of people. And as large actors such as Yahoo and Google increasingly get behind encryption, that boosts public awareness and creates more of a market for the kinds of privacy enhancing technologies that many people could benefit from.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
by David Golumbia
Published 25 Sep 2016

Reflecting on some surprising alliances between today’s technology giants and the lobbying groups and of the world’s major extractive resource companies, Ames (2015) writes that even if we still give Google and Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and allow that their investments in the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute weren’t directly motivated by killing Obamacare and throwing millions of struggling Americans back into the ranks of the uninsured and prematurely dying—nevertheless, they are accessories, and very consciously so. Big Tech’s larger political goals are in alignment with the old extraction industry’s: undermining the countervailing power of government and public politics to weaken its ability to impede their growing dominance over their portions of the economy, and to tax their obscene stores of cash. Google—like Facebook, like Koch Industries—wants a government that’s strong enough to enforce its dominant private power over the economy and citizens and protect its wealth, but too broken and too alienated from the public to adequately represent the public interest against their domineering monopolistic power.

Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Published 5 Nov 2013

Yet after the first thespian session he was hooked, and he signed up for another acting class the second semester. Before he knew it, he started ignoring his computer science assignments and instead spent his evenings on a small stage near campus performing stand-up comedy. Although he graduated with a number of job offers from big tech companies, Dick instead chose to pursue his new and improved dream of becoming a world-famous actor, comedian, or both. He packed his bags and set out to Chicago to join the Second City sketch-comedy and improv troupe in hopes of eventually making it on Saturday Night Live or getting his own TV show.

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“We’ve been friends for a couple years, and I think he’d be a great complement to myself and the team,” Ev told the board in an e-mail. “I have a high degree of trust with Dick that I wouldn’t have bringing in an outsider, no matter what their experience.” For Dick the prospect of being Twitter’s COO was a redux of the opportunities he had missed by pursuing his improv career instead of taking a job at a big tech firm after college. Twitter was changing the world, and Dick wanted to be a part of it. Here was his chance to be back on the stage, a global stage. After he underwent extensive interviews with Biz, Goldman, Bijan, Fred, and Fenton, the Twitter board agreed to hire him, although Ev didn’t leave them much of a choice.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

Maybe bringing a teddy bear to meetings is the big new thing and everybody is going to do it. Maybe the world has changed, and I’ve been left behind, back in that outdated, old-fashioned era where people don’t bring stuffed animals to meetings. I check with my friend Chuck, a guy who once worked in marketing at a really big tech company. I send him a link to the teddy bear article, asking him if this is really what life is like in the corporate world. “Are all companies like this?” I ask. Chuck assures me they are not. “Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings,” he writes, “is a step away from Jonestown.”

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A few weeks later Jordan announces that Fearless Friday was such a huge success that we’re going to be doing it again. “Welcome to the world of start-ups,” my friend Harvey says when I tell him about Fearless Friday. Harvey is about my age, maybe a little older. He lives in San Francisco. He spent years working at big tech companies, but a few years ago he left a very cushy gig and took a job as a vice president at a start-up, a tiny place that had less than one hundred employees. Eleven months after he joined, the company was acquired for more than $1 billion. Harvey won’t tell me how much he made, but I’m guessing it’s more than $10 million.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

I believe the whys and hows of the successes and failures apply broadly to all growth stocks . . . or to stocks that are presented as growth stocks. QED. HERE COME THE REGULATORS Another thing happened while I was writing this book. Big Tech (principally Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) came under intense criticism. Five bipartisan bills were introduced into the House with the goal of “reining in Big Tech.” A new head of the Federal Trade Commission was appointed, in part based on her groundbreaking published article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which was highly critical of the company. And a federal judge threw out an antitrust case that was filed against Facebook by 48 state attorneys general.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now
by Sergey Young
Published 23 Aug 2021

Google’s claim to be a “business partner” of health-care services provider Ascension, for instance, entitles it full access to patient health records.30 Even where data are anonymized, patients sometimes can still be reidentified accurately.31 Worrying as this might seem, the flip side of big tech companies’ obsession with health data is that they are much better positioned in mind-set and skill set than conventional health-care institutions to bring the benefits of precision medicine to fruition. Big tech has the best AI, the deepest pockets, and the strongest commercial will to move mountains. Meanwhile, a campaign is underway to regard control of personal health data as a kind of human right.

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind
by Cate Sevilla
Published 14 Jan 2021

A journalist I know bravely wrote a beautiful personal essay about her own depression and suicidal thoughts for the publication she worked for – and while her editor’s initial response was to tell her the piece was ‘brave’, they then showed astounding insensitivity by suggesting that she illustrate the article by returning to the scene where her near-suicide took place, and having a photo taken. (I mean, fucking hell!) While some of us are being told to bring our whole selves to work by big tech companies, it turns out that being disciplined or punished for mental health problems or illnesses is something of a trend, not only amongst the women I interviewed for this book but also amongst the wider working population. The Mental Health at Work 2018 summary report ‘Seizing the Momentum’, compiled by Business in the Community, found that 11 per cent of employees who disclosed a mental health issue faced ‘disciplinary action, demotion or dismissal’;2 even more worrying, this figure has actually increased since 2016, when the figure was only at 9 per cent.3 Marianne, the former teacher we met in Chapters 1 and 2, told me that in the last year of her teaching career she was involved in a serious car accident that left her suffering from symptoms of PTSD as well as a brain injury.

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I was so, so excited and then so, so worried. I couldn’t imagine why he wasn’t responding. Weren’t they pleased to have me on board? I waited a week, followed up, and then he was like, ‘Oh, sorry I totally missed your reply!’ Spoiler alert: this company was equally chaotic and it folded a year and a half later. On my first day at another big tech company, the team forgot I was due to start that day and I had to wait for two hours in a nearby Starbucks while they sorted out my starter kit. The first thing they did when they brought me back up to the office was to walk me into a meeting of the team senior leads and introduce me with a fancy job title I had no idea I had.

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream
by Michael Sayman
Published 20 Sep 2021

In Miami, you rarely saw people living on the street. It was just too hot. I’d heard that California had more unsheltered people than any other state. San Francisco and all of Silicon Valley had a particularly large homeless population, thanks to a housing shortage and the wealth bubble created by the rise of big tech over the last two decades. The average tech engineer here spent 40 to 50 percent of their salary on rent, not leaving much for savings, buying a house of their own, or eating out off campus. Some Silicon Valley CEOs, like Marc Benioff of Salesforce, had begun stepping up with their billions to fund hospitals and shelters, but obviously, it wasn’t enough.

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Maybe if we looked at our fears and doubts as building blocks instead of stumbling blocks, we’d have a much easier time in life. * * * — Since giving my speech, I’ve been trying to follow my own advice. I’m getting closer to defining success on my own terms, which turn out to be not about making the next big tech product but about working and learning and living a comfortable, happy life. I’m also learning not to beat myself up for still feeling like a scared, confused, doubtful ten-year-old half the time. That insecure ten-year-old got me where I am today. Oh, I’ve also been trying to embrace getting older.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

May 27, 1999. www.britannica.com/biography/Gustavus-Swift. Guthrie, Douglas. “The Influence of the Leyden School upon Scottish Medicine.” Medical History 3, no. 2 (1959): 108–22. https://doi:10.1017/S002572730002439X [inactive]. Haag, Matthew. “Manhattan Emptied Out During the Pandemic. But Big Tech Is Moving In.” The New York Times, October 13, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/nyregion/big-tech-nyc-office-space.html. Hadley, C. J. “Mr. Spud.” Range, 1998. http://www.rangemagazine.com/archives/stories/summer98/jr_simplot.htm. Haines, Michael R. “The Urban Mortality Transition in the United States, 1800–1940.” Annales de démographie historique 1, no. 1 (2001): 33–64. https://doi.org/10.3917/adh.101.0033.

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Most people want more: Anders and Pallais, “Why Can’t We Be Friends?: Theory and Evidence on Friendship Formation.” price growth outpaced income growth: Himmelberg, Mayer, and Sinai, Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals, and Misperceptions. Some technology companies: Haag, “Manhattan Emptied Out During the Pandemic. But Big Tech Is Moving In.” grew by more than seven million: Data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All Employees, Total Nonfarm.” In about one fourth: Ryan, “United States Office Outlook—Q3 2020.” Thomas Menino launched: ECPA Urban Planning, “Case Study: The Boston Waterfront Innovation District.”

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success
by Scott Davis , Carter Copeland and Rob Wertheimer
Published 13 Jul 2020

Most of them are engineering- and product-centric, and as their markets mature with slower growth and normal profitability, they’ll have to confront the same challenge of ensuring profitability without jeopardizing safety and customer value. Additionally, while Big Tech doesn’t grapple directly with safety risks and the loss of human life, issues of customer privacy and social influence are similarly meaningful and only growing in significance. Drawing the lines on customer data use and weighing them against the pursuit of profit and higher share prices is a similar evaluation. It’s inevitable that the influence of nonfinancial and nonemployee stakeholders will only continue to rise in the future. And the industry is not immune from its own megacrisis. In fact, cybersecurity threats for Big Tech could prove to be the equivalent of a global pandemic for industrial firms and travel-focused companies.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

Just as public key cryptography lets Bitcoin users “sign” a bitcoin address (essentially, their public key) with their private key to prove that they control it, an institution certifying a person’s attributes can give authority to that certification with this same digital signatures model. This pairing can create an irrefutable record that, say, your university has confirmed you have a degree, your utility company has attested that you’ve paid your power bills, or a birth registrar has authenticated your birth certificate. Various blockchain developers, including at big tech firms like Microsoft, are trying to augment this digital signatures system by incorporating those institutionally signed attestations into blockchain transactions. The idea is to give an added layer of security since the certifying institution would be unable to revoke an attestation after it has been written into an append-only immutable ledger—much as a bitcoin transaction cannot be reversed.

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CHAPTER EIGHT It’s made more difficult by the fact that 2.4 billion people: Mariana Dahan and Alan Gelb, “The Identity Target in the Post-2015 Development Agenda,” World Bank, September 17, 2015, http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/ict/brief/the-identity-target-in-the-post-2015-development-agenda-connections-note-19. According to … UNESCO: “Trafficking and HIV/AIDS Project,” UNESCO, July 4, 2017, http://bangkok.unesco.org/content/trafficking-and-hivaids-project. including at big tech firms like Microsoft: Joon Ian Wong, “Microsoft Thinks Blockchain Tech Could Solve One of the Internet’s Toughest Problems: Digital Identities,” Quartz, June 1, 2017, https://qz.com/989761/microsoft-msft-thinks-blockchain-tech-could-solve-one-of-the-internets-toughest-problems-digital-identities/.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018

In spite of this third failure to successfully pitch people on the idea, Evan remained undaunted. And as he hoped to keep Reggie and Bobby engaged and driving on the project, he told them that everyone really liked their idea. Most of their peers were pursuing internships—or, in Bobby’s case, full-time jobs—at prestigious banks and big tech companies. But Evan and Bobby were used to ignoring the norms to chase their startup ideas. And Reggie was committed to it. Most importantly, they really liked the app. While primitive, it was fun to use. And they really believed that people would want to send pictures that deleted themselves, whether for sexting or otherwise.

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Evan and I spoke about the technical difficulties behind the Android development and how users had sent over a billion images through Snapchat since it had launched. But most interesting were his comments when I brought up the possibility of selling the company: “There’s no way I’m going to work for anybody else,” Evan said. “I don’t think you’re going to see us selling any time soon.” Evan wasn’t interested in a quick payday or a steady job at a big tech company. And Mark Zuckerberg would soon give him good reason to rule out working at Facebook. But most of all, Evan wanted to be a founder and a CEO—the captain of his own company that he could grow to be the next Apple. Evan’s attitude and Snapchat’s traction made the company’s next fundraising, a Series A round, the hottest deal on Sand Hill Road.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

Within a year, a small company started by Hinton was acquired by Google, and Hinton and his students Krizhevsky and Sutskever became Google employees. This acqui-hire instantly put Google at the forefront of deep learning. Soon after, Yann LeCun was lured away from his full-time New York University professorship by Facebook to head up its newly formed AI lab. It didn’t take long before all the big tech companies (as well as many smaller ones) were snapping up deep-learning experts and their graduate students as fast as possible. Seemingly overnight, deep learning became the hottest part of AI, and expertise in deep learning guaranteed computer scientists a large salary in Silicon Valley or, better yet, venture capital funding for their proliferating deep-learning start-up companies.

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Have you ever uploaded an image to Flickr? If so, it’s possible your image is part of the ImageNet training set. Have you ever identified a picture in order to prove to a website that you’re not a robot? Your identification might have helped Google tag an image for use in training its image search system. Big tech companies offer many services for free on your computer and smartphone: web search, video calling, email, social networking, automated personal assistants—the list goes on. What’s in it for these companies? The answer you might have heard is that their true product is their users (like you and me); their customers are the advertisers who grab our attention and information about us while we use these “free” services.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

In 2016, Hughes had founded a progressive think tank and advocacy group, Economic Security Project, which proposed federal and local tax reforms to give guaranteed monthly income to the poorest Americans. He was part of a growing movement among left-leaning academics and politicians against the concentration of power held by Big Tech; the movement pointed to Facebook, Amazon, and Google as the winner-take-all titans of a new gilded age. The chorus was growing: advocates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were joined in their protest of Big Tech’s monopolization by the progressive former labor secretary Robert Reich, George Soros, and others. But Hughes acknowledged that the seeds of Facebook’s problems were there from the beginning: the urgent-growth mind-set, the advertising business model, and Zuckerberg’s centralized power.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

Would it have helped if I raised my hand—know-it-all—and said that Guam, according to numerous reputable sources (on my phone) was already home to roughly 170,000 U.S. citizens? That Tierra del Fuego was an archipelago split between Argentina and Chile? No. Fake news. Americans in Guam? That was as believable as Joe Biden winning California. So it went. Hillary, we learned, had secretly already been executed. What, you’ve seen her since? Green screens. Big Tech trickery, the name we give witchcraft in the twenty-first century. And there are, in fact, two United States, the one that “lives in our hearts” and the wicked one, which is actually a corporation. “Two governments exist side by side,” observed Straight. Trump was not only still president of the real one, he was the nineteenth president, because most of the others since Lincoln, including Honest Abe, were illegal.

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Hank, though, is a book lover. Mixed in with calls for holy rage—“I know I’m making you mad!” he boasts—directed at the usual suspects—mask-mandators and vaccine genociders and all the many pedophiles—is a special venom for those who would read Scripture on Kindle, or some other wicked app, subject to Big Tech revision. “ ‘Well, I got my phone,’ ” Pastor Hank says in a dummy voice—he is a great performer of voices. Then, in his angry own: “When’s the last time you opened the book, cracked the book, read the book?” The Book. The Bible. He may love only one book, but he loves it a whole lot, paper, ink, and stitching.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

Try to put your most complex thought into an email and then go meet someone and try to explain it in person, and think about the banter and the smiles, and gauge the effectiveness of seeing someone be excited when you’re onto something, and the polite head shakes when you’re not, and then ask yourself which of those two methods is a better way to communicate a half-formed idea. Density gave us cars in turn-of-the-century Detroit and would give us computers in the information age. Urban cores started recovering in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the early 2000s, cities—in particular, cities with big tech and finance industries—were back in roaring form. Companies were moving downtown, Sex and the City was in its heyday, and yuppies were engaging in strange new trends like going to goofily hidden cocktail bars and the next day soothing their hangovers with $4 pour-over coffee that takes about thirty-five minutes to produce.

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The timing was no coincidence and telegraphed to the broader political world that Silicon Valley was starting to more forcefully insert itself into housing fights. The donation also hardened the perception that California YIMBY—whose views on housing aligned with the views of major tech companies and their associated philanthropic arms like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative—was now a wholly owned subsidiary of big tech. And these suspicions were generally fair. The YIMBY movement had proven that it was possible for a determined group of people to force a change in the political priorities, but no constituency could deny the unbreakable rules about politics requiring money. * * * — BY SUMMER THE campaign season was officially underway.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

Many other long-standing and recent policy ambitions—strengthening progressive taxation of corporations and people, labor law changes to enable stronger unions, nationalized health care, supply chain due diligence legislation, strengthening of regulatory scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, antitrust legislation and regulation of Big Tech, robust and legally enforceable standards for ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing—also merit support. That these topics are not the subjects of chapters reflects constraints of space and time, availability of sources, or the fact that they are already covered well by other authors.

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The NCMC, the second arm, would act more like a venture capital or private equity firm, pooling money from private investors to fund companies developing important technology and infrastructure related to major issues like climate change, pandemic preparedness, or supply chain security. This would both create high-quality jobs and divert private capital away from speculative activities that fuel asset bubbles and away from businesses with large social and environmental externalities, from Big Tech to the oil and gas industry. By gaining an equity stake in companies, the NCMC could also improve working conditions and wages for employees, reversing the standard private equity playbook of stripping assets and cutting jobs. As some of these companies succeeded, the NCMC would provide its investors with reasonable returns and fund a new round of investments in other companies.

Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek
Published 22 Dec 2016

As we saw in Chapter 1, tech companies have taken up a disproportionately large amount of this cash glut. The leaders of tax evasion have also been tech companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Uber. The second use of this cash was in high levels of mergers and acquisitions – a process that centralises existing capacity rather than building new capacity. Among the big tech companies, Google has made the most acquisitions over the past five years (on average, it purchases a new company every week),30 while Facebook has some of the biggest acquisitions (e.g. it bought WhatsApp for $22 billion).31 Google’s creation of the Alphabet Holding Company in 2015 is part and parcel of this process; this was an effort designed to enable Google to purchase firms in other industries while giving them a clear delineation from its core business.

San Francisco Like a Local: By the People Who Call It Home
by Dk Eyewitness
Published 5 Apr 2023

And little wonder; pioneering is in the blood. SF (only tourists say “San Fran”) was built on the Gold Rush, and has blazed many a trail – LGBTQ+ rights, sharing economies, and revolutionary politics, to name a few. It’s a small city with big ideas; a place where anything seems possible. Some say the big tech invasion has tamed SF’s subversive side. But scratch below the surface and you’ll find free-thinking, flamboyant ’Frisco alive and kicking. And that’s exactly where this book will take you. We know the places that San Franciscans adore, from experimental galleries housed in laundromat basements to the best live drag spaces.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

Four hundred and fifty thousand men in this country drive vans for a living. I’d love driverless cars to become standard. I’m excited for them and I would love to find them something better and more fulfilling to do. But I am not excited about the economic tragedy that will happen unless all this happens under the control of an enlightened state not capitalist big tech. The promise of internet is lower prices, complete symmetry of information. But the internet is trapped by the social relations it’s been born in. We need to free it for us all.’ It sounds like a case for nationalising the internet. Every time I utter this phrase, I’m aware it sounds like something only the most doctrinaire Mao-book-carrying, blue-serge-suit-wearing communist would say.

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Elizabeth Warren, who as I write is the Democrat’s favourite contender to unseat Trump, may well be the next president of the United States. Mark Zuckerberg will probably do everything in his murky, data-harvesting, email-leaking, algorithmic power to stop her though. As Paul Mason says, she has the tech giants in her sights. ‘Today’s big tech companies have too much power – too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.’ Their enormous, head-swimming wealth puts them on a par with nation states.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

Several others lined the room, including various Defense Department staffers and executives from Google’s cloud computing group. Most of the DoD staffers wore suits and ties. Most of the Googlers wore suits and no ties. Sergey Brin wore a white T-shirt. Mattis was on a West Coast tour, visiting several big tech companies in both Silicon Valley and Seattle as the Pentagon explored its options for Project Maven. Launched by the Defense Department four months earlier, Project Maven was an effort to accelerate the DoD’s use of “big data and machine learning.” It was also called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team.

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As the company developed this technology, further funding was required, so Abbeel decided he would ask the biggest names in AI. Yann LeCun visited the lab in Berkeley and agreed to invest after pouring a few dozen empty plastic bottles into a bin and watching the arm pick them without a hitch. Yoshua Bengio declined to invest. Though he had taken only part-time gigs with the big tech companies, he said that he had more money than he could ever spend and that he preferred to focus on his own research. But Geoff Hinton invested. He believed in Abbeel. “He is good,” Hinton says. “And that’s very surprising. After all, he’s Belgian.” That fall, a German electronics retailer moved Abbeel’s technology into a warehouse on the outskirts of Berlin, where it started picking and sorting switches, sockets, and other electrical parts from blue crates as they moved down a conveyor belt.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

It was a bold and imaginative idea. Time will tell whether the tortoise eventually wins. AGGREGATORS One of the great dilemmas facing publishers since the birth of social media has been whether they should sit back and expect readers to come to their own platforms, or go to where the audiences actually were. The big tech companies smelled this weakness and created news aggregators. Join them, or dare ignore them? Facebook, a huge driver of traffic to news sites, decided it was better to keep readers within its own proprietary ecosystem. Apple News was launched in 2015 and by 2019 had ‘roughly 90 million’ regular users.

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In those far-off days he evidently could not imagine a time – barely a decade later – when the great tabloid cash cow of the family company, the Sun, would declare a £68 million loss amid falling print sales and the enormous cost of phone hacking claims against its parent company. Since Murdoch made his pronouncement, however, newspaper companies around the world have begged the big tech companies to effectively subsidise the cost of their news-gathering. The 2019 UK Cairncross Review into a sustainable future for journalism came up with a number of recommendations that involved some form of subsidy. They included new tax reliefs aimed at encouraging a) payments for online news content and b) the provision of local and investigative journalism, as well as c) an extension of the LDRS, which subsidises the reporting of local councils.

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications
by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt
Published 31 Dec 2023

By creating a series of physical paintings for a particular search string, Andrew employs search engine optimization skills to ensure that her paintings are the top image results for searches such as ‘Contemporary Art Auction Record’ or ‘Cover of Artforum’. The artist comments: I believe AI is creationary, not just predictive. It creates our future as much as it anticipates it. By injecting my Vision Boards, which represent my visual hopes for the future, into the developing brain of big tech’s AI, I am teaching our computers to dream wider than our current world. I am educating AI based on the world that I want and not just the one I’ve lived so far.13 Meanwhile, ImageNet Roulette (2019) by Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford highlights the biases in AI systems by presenting a web experiment in which users can upload pictures for classification.14 Some of these classifications are needlessly negative such as ‘clown’ and ‘buffoon’, based on existing labels assigned to images in the original ImageNet database.

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Others focus on the content itself, which is more difficult when it is not text, but instead images or video (Vosoughi/Roy/Aral 2018). Some models focus on trying to detect whether one particular content propagates already known fake news, while others focus on the structure of the text or image itself. Researchers, big tech firms, and start-ups are developing such models. To name a few examples, Meta has developed a model called SimSearchNet++ to detect variations of an image with a very high degree of precision.5 It uses OCR to detect texts in images. The start-up Sensity has developed a solution to detect deepfakes or images of faces generated with GANs.6 Research tends to show that—as is often the case with AI—methods employing a mix of human annotators and AI tools are more capable of detecting fake news.

The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World
by Anu Bradford
Published 14 Sep 2020

Kogan, Exporting Precaution: How Europe’s Risk- Free Regulatory Agenda Threatens American Free Enterprise 101–02 (2005), http://www.wlf.org/upload/110405MONOKogan.pdf [https://perma.cc/3TUJ- 46KH]. 24.Editorial, Tax Affairs of American Tech Groups Come Under Fire, Fin. Times (Oct. 3, 2017), https://www.ft.com/content/8cdba452-a779-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97. (on file with author). 25.Why Big Tech Should Fear Europe: To Understand the Future of Silicon Valley, Cross the Atlantic, Economist (Mar. 23, 2019), https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/03/23/why-big-tech-should-fear-europe [https://perma.cc/47Y3-3VZU]. 26.Philip Stephens, Opinion, Europe Rewrites the Rules for Silicon Valley, Fin. Times (Nov. 3, 2016), https://www.ft.com/content/5596e92c-a04d-11e6-86d5-4e36b35c3550.

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The Commission engaged Mazars LLP as Monitoring Trustee. Trustee Details, Case No., M.7881 (ABInBev/SABMiller) (June 24, 2016), http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/additional_data/m7881_2794_3.pdf [https://perma.cc/8WFM-9H7D]. 182.See supra note 62 and accompanying text. 183.Richard Waters, Department of Justice opens review into Big Tech’s market power, Fin. Times, July 24, 2019, available at https://www.ft.com/content/4f008ab0-ad8c-11e9-8030-530adfa879c2 (on file with author). Chapter 5 1.Regulation 2016/679, of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Protection of Natural Persons with regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data, and Repealing Directive 95/46/EC, 2016 O.J.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Talent,” New York Times, October 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/technology/artificial-intelligence-experts-salaries.html; “Artificial Intelligence Is the New Black,” Paysa Blog, April 18, 2017, https://www.paysa.com/blog/2017/04/17/artificial-intelligence-is-the-new-black. 32. Ian Sample, “Big Tech Firms’ AI Hiring Frenzy Leads to Brain Drain at UK Universities,” Guardian, November 2, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/02/big-tech-firms-google-ai-hiring-frenzy-brain-drain-uk-universities. 33. Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic, 2015), 12–13; Cade Metz, “Why A.I.

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priv=Google+Inc; Yasha Levine, “The Revolving Door Between Google and the Department of Defense,” PandoDaily (blog), April 23, 2014, http://pando.com/2014/04/23/the-revolving-door-between-google-and-the-department-of-defense; Cecilia Kang and Juliet Eilperin, “Why Silicon Valley Is the New Revolving Door for Obama Staffers,” Washington Post, February 27, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-obama-nears-close-of-his-tenure-commitment-to-silicon-valley-is-clear/2015/02/27/3bee8088-bc8e-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html. 107. Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (New York: Grand Central, 2014), 255. 108. Deborah D’Souza, “Big Tech Spent Record Amounts on Lobbying Under Trump,” Investopedia, July 11, 2017, https://www.investopedia.com/tech/what-are-tech-giants-lobbying-trump-era; Brodkin, “Google and Facebook Lobbyists”; Natasha Lomas, “Google Among Top Lobbyists of Senior EC Officials,” TechCrunch (blog), June 24, 2015, http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/google-among-top-lobbyists-of-senior-ec-officials; “Google’s European Revolving Door,” Google Transparency Project, September 25, 2017, http://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-european-revolving-door. 109.

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See also certainty; totality knowledge, asymmetries in, 11, 19, 80–81, 484, 498; and affective computing/emotion analytics, 286–290; and Aware Home project, 6, 7, 234–235, 247; and elemental rights, 54; and information warfare, 281; as pathology of the division of learning, 185–186; and telemedicine, 247–251 Kogan, Alexander, 280 Kosinski, Michal, 273–274, 274–275, 275–276, 280, 615n64 Kramer, Adam, 303 Kreiss, Daniel, 122–123 La Diega, Guido Noto, 237 language, philosophy of: and declarations, 177 Lapsley, Daniel, 453, 456 Law and Economics Center, George Mason University, 125 lawlessness: of cyberspace, 103–105; essential to advance of surveillance capitalism, 101; Facebook’s interest in, 251–252; and facial recognition, 251–252; intelligence agencies covet private sector’s, 118–120; and the internet of things, 209–210; and ISPs/internet companies, 171–172; and rise of industrial capitalism, 105–107 laws of motion, 66–67 laws of social behavior (Pentland), 430–431 Lefort, Claude, 355, 359 Leibowitz, Jon, 50, 160 Lemov, Rebecca, 322 lending companies, 172–173, 507–508 Lenin, Vladimir, 406 Levi Strauss, 246 Levy, Steven, 47, 72–73 Libert, Timothy, 136 libertarianism, 109, 138, 323 life expectancies, improved: and rise of second modernity, 35–36 life pattern marketing, 243 “Like” button (Facebook), 159–161, 274, 275, 457–458, 491 LinkedIn, 165 ListenTree, 207–208 Livestream, 157 lobbying (political): Big Tech, 105, 114, 122, 342, 487; Facebook, 252–253; Google, 122, 124–126; ISPs, 171 location data, tracking of, 137, 154, 174, 242–245; and Pokémon Go, 317, 318; resistance to, 140 Loewenstein, George, 460 London, August 2011 riots in, 27, 41–42, 44 London Times, 143 Look magazine, 356–357 Loveluck, Benjamin, 442 Luca, Michael, 132 luxuries, 257 Lynn, Barry, 127 Lyon, David, 112, 115 M (Facebook digital assistant), 259 MAC address, 249–250 Machado, Antonio, 34 machine hive, 413–414, 492 machine intelligence: acquisition of, 102; capabilities of, 95; definition of, 65; and emotion analytics, 282–290, 291–292; Facebook’s FBLearner Flow, 279; Google’s investment in, 188–189; IBM’s, 211, 276–277; as means of production, 95–96, 97f; recruitment/dispersal of scientists in, 189–190; revenues from, 189.

San Francisco Like a Local
by DK Eyewitness
Published 4 Oct 2021

And little wonder; pioneering is in the blood. SF (only tourists say “San Fran”) was built on the Gold Rush, and has blazed many a trail: LGBTQ+ rights, sharing economies, and revolutionary politics, to name a few. It’s a small city with big ideas; a place where anything seems possible. Some say the big tech invasion has tamed SF’s subversive side. But scratch below the surface and you’ll find free- thinking, flamboyant ’Frisco alive and kicking. And that’s exactly where this book will take you. We know the places that San Franciscans adore, from experi­mental galleries housed in laundromat basements to the best live drag spaces.

Austin Like a Local
by DK

Glinting skyscrapers over-look historic bungalows, and swanky cocktail bars sit kitty-corner to no-frills food trucks. And though rising rents have pushed out some of the music venues and honky-tonks that earned this city the title of “Live Music Capital of the World,” Austin still moves to a unique beat. “Keep Austin weird,” locals cry. And beneath the facade of strip malls, chain restaurants, and big tech companies, Austin’s quirky soul is alive and kicking in indie boutiques, offbeat graffiti, and downright wacky attractions. And that’s exactly where this book will take you. We know the places that Austinites adore, from the BBQ joints they’ll camp outside for to the swimming spots they’ll linger in ’til late.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

Most of these are cobots—meaning the robot assists the surgeon rather than replacing the surgeon. Yet it’s autonomous robots like STAR that hold the most promise. With the ability to perfectly execute routine procedures at a fraction of today’s cost, robo-surgeons bring demonetization into the operating room. Unwilling to let entrepreneurs have all the fun, big tech companies are also rushing into that room. Exhibit A: Verb Surgical, a partnership between Alphabet and Johnson & Johnson. With their fleet of cheap and much-improved surgical robots hitting the market in 2020, Verb’s stated, unassuming goal is the “democratization of surgery.” What does that mean in plain English?

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“it will be about health”: Lizzy Gurdus, “Tim Cook: Apple’s Greatest Contribution Will Be ‘About Health,’ ” CNBC, January 8, 2019. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/tim-cook-teases-new-apple-services-tied-to-health-care.html. Racing Apple are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, Baidu, Tencent, and others: CB Insights does an excellent job summarizing the big-tech healthcare ecosystem in these two reports: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/top-tech-companies-healthcare-investments-acquisitions/ and https://www.cbinsights.com/research/google-amazon-apple-health-insurance/. DIY Diagnostics Oura ring: See: https://ouraring.com. (Author note: Peter’s VC firm is an investor.)

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
by David E. Sanger
Published 18 Jun 2018

Obama read the tea leaves and created an independent panel to advise him on what kind of new restrictions—if any—to put on the NSA after the Snowden revelations and to guide him on balancing privacy and security. The panel included Mike Morell, who had retired from the CIA not long after I dealt with him on Olympic Games, and a range of other former counterterrorism officials, academics, and constitutional lawyers. To the shock of the NSA and the FBI, Morell and his colleagues sided with Big Tech. The panel made a unanimous recommendation that the government should “not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software.” Instead, it should “increase the use of encryption and urge US companies to do so.” No sooner had the ink dried on the panelists’ signatures than the NSA urged Obama to ignore its advice.

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the agency developed the “Clipper chip”: Steven Levy, “Battle of the Clipper Chip,” New York Times, June 12, 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipper-chip.html. the Clinton administration retreated: Susan Landau, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 84. Morell and his colleagues sided with Big Tech: Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass Sunstein, Peter Swire, Report and Recommendations of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, December 12, 2013, lawfare.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/staging/s3fs-public/uploads/2013/12/Final-Report-RG.pdf.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

The first is that contrary to Head being reined in by the crisis, the Head experts—whether highly educated medics or vaccine scientists or epidemiologists—have proved their vital importance and therefore dispatched the populist disdain for expertise. The second points out that the institutions that have become even more central to our existence during the crisis—the big-tech digital platforms—are the epitome of the disembodied world of data manipulation that tend to reinforce a Head worldview. Both points have validity but I don’t think they carry enough weight to dislodge my Covid-19 rebalancing thesis. Moreover, the first claim misunderstands the complaint against experts.

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It is true that some of the richest and most powerful modern businesspeople, such as Bill Gates, dropped out of higher education, but the ethos of these “cognitive entrepreneurs” is certainly not hostile to the increased status of “nerdy” cognitive aptitudes—in fact, quite the opposite. Digital giants such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon recruit their senior people overwhelmingly from elite universities. Indeed universities are increasingly complaining that they are losing their best researchers, especially in AI, to Big Tech. Postindustrial Disenchantment This cognitive shift is a surprisingly recent thing in developed societies. It is hard to speak with any confidence about the mentalities or levels of contentment of people in earlier eras. But it may be that industrial society, especially in its most recent phase in the second half of the twentieth century—including democratic equality and welfare states—was better at distributing self-respect and status than today’s cognitively stratified postindustrial society, especially for men.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix
by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
Published 18 Apr 2022

Now, with the coronavirus established as a long-term challenge, they would have to remain committed to disrupting themselves despite the devastating loss of revenue from movie box offices, TV advertising, sports, and theme parks. Would streaming be their route to redemption or just a mirage given the high bar set by Netflix and Amazon? One way to respond would be to deviate from business practices that had guided them for nearly a century, loosening the shackles that made it tougher to compete with Big Tech. NBCUniversal made the first move in that direction. Citing the closure of most U.S. movie theaters, it announced that a handful of its 2020 film releases would be made available at home (including streaming) simultaneously with their abbreviated theatrical runs. The longtime agreement between studios and exhibitors was to honor a roughly ninety-day exclusive period for a film’s theatrical run—which industry insiders refer to as the “window” of initial release.

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JOHN STANKEY MAY HAVE BEEN A Bell Head, but he wasn’t so ensconced in the clubby confines of telecom that he didn’t see tech giants as his direct competitors. The hypothetical scenario of his being in charge when deals for Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix crossed the transom is worth pondering. His sense of urgency about Big Tech did not express itself in a very congenial way after the Time Warner deal closed, however. Stankey was in rare form during a town hall for employees in the summer of 2018, seated across from HBO boss Richard Plepler. In a postmerger get-together with all of the comity of a block party populated by Jets and Sharks, Stankey repeatedly took the air out of the room with his blunt-force comments.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

Before the Internet, hackerspaces were necessary to share information and skills; after the Internet, they became places in which members are, Siravo wrote, “questioning radically the ways in which we currently live, work and learn,” taking a William Morris–like interest in challenging the divisions in capitalist production. But that freedom is something different in a space that people have designed for themselves in which to explore and create; in trying to replicate those spaces in a for-profit company, the big tech corporations have co-opted this exuberance. 23 The boundaries between work and leisure thus blurred even more in the new tech companies, bringing more of the things workers might have done in their spare time into the workplace. The growth of the Internet helped blur these lines even for workers outside of the tech industry, who were now expected to check email at home, or who might play a game or write a personal blog on company time—and, particularly with the growth of social media, sometimes face workplace consequences for things they did in their free time and documented online. 24 The lines blurred in another way, too: users’ online behavior, from the items they searched for on Google to their interactions during online multiplayer video games, created value for the tech companies.

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The wannabe Zuckerbergs are their own kind of gig worker, scrambling individually to make a buck, just on a grander scale. 41 Rather than leave to become startup founders, some tech employees have instead taken a page from the Tesla factory workers, or indeed, from the workers who serve them those catered lunches: they’re organizing. The Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) began with an engineer and a cafeteria worker turned organizer who challenged a few of the shibboleths of Big Tech—namely, the idea that different kinds of workers have no interests in common, and the assumption that the programmers have more in common with the Zuckerbergs of the world than they do with the working class. It built slowly for a while, and then, after Trump’s election in 2016, a burst of action drew many new recruits, both to the TWC and to Tech Solidarity, a group begun to help tech workers find ways to act on their anger.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century
by Torben Iversen and David Soskice
Published 5 Feb 2019

Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmons, Beth and Zachary Elkins. 2004. “The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy.” American Political Science Review 98 (February): 171–89. Singer, Natasha. 2017. “How Big Tech is Going After your Health Care.” New York Times, December 26, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/technology/big-tech-health-care.html. Slomp, Hans. 1990. Labor Relations in Europe: A History of Issues and Developments. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Solt, Frederick. 2016. “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database.” Social Science Quarterly 97 (5): 1267–81.

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne
Published 9 Sep 2019

I quickly added, “Not surprisingly, I’m not going to be the foremost advocate of sending myself or my colleagues in other companies to prison. I think that might have a chilling effect on international travel, that actually helps us understand what the world’s people need from our products.” Paul Smith, “Microsoft President Says Big Tech Regulation Must Learn from History,” The Australian Financial Review, April 2, 2019, https://www.afr.com/technology/technology-companies/microsoft-president-says-big-tech-regulation-must-learn-from-history-20190329-p518v2. Back to note reference 30. Warner, 9. Back to note reference 31. HM Government, Online Harms White Paper, April 2019, 7, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/793360/Online_Harms_White_Paper.pdf.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

So dead that when you ask Congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads, like it’s all a bad dream they’re trying hard to forget. So dead, that it’s hard to believe this story. 8. “We Killed the Bill Dead” Casey Rae-Hunter (co-founder of The Future of Music coalition) In the post-SOPA spin cycle, some in the media were keen to paint this as a pitched battle between big content and big tech. The corporate entertainment industry was happy to play along, painting a conspiratorial picture of the protests. This was far from the case. First, the entertainment industry had quite a head start in terms of lobbying, having already poured millions of dollars into Washington before most of the tech companies even showed up.

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Addressing this would not only aid enforcement, but also help more artists get paid more often. Now is the time for all stakeholders to come together to discuss how we can create a rising tide to lift all boats. Which brings me to another point. In the post-SOPA spin cycle, some in the media were keen to paint this as a pitched battle between big content and big tech. The corporate entertainment industry was happy to play along, painting a conspiratorial picture of the protests. This was far from the case. First, the entertainment industry had quite a head start in terms of lobbying, having already poured millions of dollars into Washington before most of the tech companies even showed up.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

Marcus, “Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again,” New Yorker, December 31, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/01/the-new-york-times-artificial-intelligence-hype-machine.html. 59. D. Basulto, “Artificial Intelligence Is the Next Big Tech Trend. Here’s Why,” Washington Post, March 25, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/03/25/artificial-intelligence-is-the-next-big-tech-trend-heres-why//?print=1. 60. L. Dormehl, “Facial Recognition: Is the Technology Taking Away Your Identity?,” The Guardian, May 4, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/04/facial-recognition-technology-identity-tesco-ethical-issues/print. 61.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

As one historian put it, the area was encountering its “Big Bang” moment, the fateful turn of events that gave rise to the personal computer and video gaming industries. Venture capital started percolating from the gold mines that those industries became, and that started to lay the very foundations that would cause the explosion of Big Tech. The types of people who were finding success in Silicon Valley were by definition optimistic and thought outside the box. As it turned out, the boy riding around the streets just north of the Valley was unwittingly learning on his paper route that he already had the DNA for the type of success the headlines wrote about.

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The Zappos culture—fun, weird, and referred to by Barbara Walters as Tony’s “social experiment”—was also off-putting for some, especially for buttoned-up corporate America. But in a post-recession world in which tech companies seemed to have all the answers to society’s problems, a new generation of young workers without technical coding skills looked away from big tech firms in Silicon Valley and instead to Zappos, with its lack of formality and an emphasis on hiring around culture, not resumes. Its core business was selling shoes online, but that seemed to be the last thing that came to mind when people thought of Zappos and Tony Hsieh. The news segments and talk show interviews—from Tony explaining Zappos’s core values of staying humble and embracing weirdness to B-roll of pranks being pulled in the office—mythologized Tony and his stated purpose of creating happiness for customers and employees.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
by Cory Doctorow , Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman
Published 18 Nov 2014

But as we debate the future of communications and free speech, let’s not discount as worthless the personal, homely, handcrafted messages that speak straight to our hearts just because they lack artifice. Hollywood versus Google The future of the Internet should not be a fight over whether Google (or Apple or Microsoft) gets to be in charge or whether Hollywood gets to be in charge. Left to their own devices, Big Tech and Big Content are perfectly capable of coming up with a position that keeps both “sides” happy at the expense of everyone else. Take YouTube, for example: now that it’s impossible to start an effective competitor to YouTube—because you’d need an army of copyright lawyers and a database of all the copyrighted video ever made in order to run your own Content ID system—YouTube and the major labels have cut deals to run a music-streaming service that perfectly suits the labels’ needs.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet
by Pamela Paul
Published 14 Oct 2021

Much of the work is done in shared Google Docs, and many kids do their work while on their phones with one another, trading answers back and forth via text. The theory is that these networked products and services help children learn valuable skills for the workplace: teamwork and collaboration. At the same time they deemphasize skills that might dampen the future bottom line of Big Tech companies like Google, such as authorship (darned copyright and royalties). And let’s not kid ourselves: Collaboration has a rosy feel, but what it frequently means, as most students know, is cheating. The real group project? Covering up the fact that the popular kid in your group did zilch.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down
by Tom Standage
Published 27 Nov 2018

How machines learned to process human language Gadgets that can understand and respond to spoken commands are growing in popularity. Amazon’s Echo devices, featuring a digital assistant called Alexa, can be found in millions of homes. Ask Alexa to play music, set a timer, order a taxi, tell you about your commute or tell a corny joke, and she will comply. Voice-driven digital assistants from other big tech firms (Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri) have also vastly improved. How did computers learn to process human language? The original approach to getting computers to understand human language was to use sets of precise rules – for example, in translation, a set of grammar rules for breaking down the meaning of the source language, and another set for reproducing the meaning in the target language.

Designing Web APIs: Building APIs That Developers Love
by Brenda Jin , Saurabh Sahni and Amir Shevat
Published 28 Aug 2018

Beta Program As you develop your API, you need your top developers to adopt your new functionality, give you feedback on it, and launch with you when you release your new API functionality to the general devel‐ oper audience, as mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5. 188 | Chapter 10: Developer Programs Pro Tip Launching new features with top developers who are already using them is a common best practice. It shows the entire developer popula‐ tion that these top developers trust and find your new API useful. If you ever see a keynote address at Google I/O, Facebook F8, or any other big tech event, you will notice that every developer launch is accompanied by a slide or a clip that shows developers already implementing great innovations using the API. This is the result of an early access and partner program. Here’s the way Slack has run this program in the past: 1. Ideation. About two months before releasing new API func‐ tionality, engineering, product management, marketing, devel‐ oper relations, and business development gather and think about who their top developers could be.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

William Alden, “Palantir Has a Well Placed Friend in Trumpland,” BuzzFeed News, November 17, 2016; Jacqueline Klimas and Bryan Bender, “Palantir Goes from Pentagon Outsider to Mattis’ Inner Circle,” Politico, June 11, 2017. 70. William Alden, “Trump’s Election Boosted Demand for Palantir Shares, Investor Says,” BuzzFeed News, December 15, 2016. 71. “Digital Destroyers: How Big Tech Sells War on Our Communities,” Big Tech Sells War, https://bigtechsellswar.com; Jack Poulson, “Reports of a Silicon Valley/Military Divide Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Tech Inquiry, July 7, 2020. 72. Richard Waters, “Palantir Goes Public but Founders Will Have Control for Life,” Financial Times, September 29, 2020. 73.

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The answer isn’t more regulation, it’s less.”19 Emanuel came around, and Chicago added itself to what was then a short list of cities deregulating airport transit. Six years later, the Chicago Tribune editorial board rent its garments in lamentation at the results: “We collectively abandoned cabs, once a reliable form of public transportation offering a ride for a consistent and predictable price, for a world where big tech controls a crucial part of the city’s infrastructure.” Unable to compete, the supermajority of Chicago cab medallions had gone off the street, so “that cramped Uber ride to O’Hare might well set you back $100 or more on a busy Friday afternoon, double or triple the price of the cab that no longer cruises your neighborhood.”20 The board took a desperately apologetic tone, but it can’t get the cabs back on the street or the crabs back in the barrel.

Demystifying Smart Cities
by Anders Lisdorf

Just configuring the connection to the fleet would in the best case take 5000 hours using the approach by major cloud platforms today. That would mean two developers for more than a year. Although New York is bigger than most cities, clearly some different mechanism has to be employed in order to scale smart city implementations involving devices. The big tech vendors who sell IoT platforms do not at the time of writing have any great solutions out of the box for doing this at scale, which is an important limitation when considering using their platforms as the basis for smart city initiatives. This is part of the reason that IoT solutions are often procured end to end from specialized vendors.

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

Yiming and Wang Xing were kindred spirits, two computer geeks far away from home, hustling their way through the wild, topsy turvy world of Chinese internet startups. Wang Xing persuaded Yiming to join his latest venture, Fanfou, a clone of Twitter built for the China market. Yiming was like a fish in water, back in his entrepreneurial element after time away at big tech Microsoft. He served as a technical partner responsible for Fanfou’s search features, trending topics, and social analytics. The site developed fast and, at the time, was considered one of the brightest stars of the Chinese internet. Yiming later reflected on his time working at Fanfou, saying one of the big realizations for him was how social networking and obtaining information were two separate things.

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb
by Dorie Clark
Published 14 Oct 2021

No matter how brilliant or qualified you are, life may get in the way, or you may not be chosen. Maybe you desperately wanted a job at Apple, and it didn’t work out. If you let that rejection stymie you permanently, then yes—it is “failure.” But maybe that experience can become a lever to consider other opportunities. Maybe you can land a job with one of the company’s big tech competitors—or even a brilliant, design-forward startup that could become the next Apple. Maybe you start a research project to better understand Apple’s methodology, which could become an article or a book or a graduate thesis. When you measure yourself entirely based on factors outside your control, like a random person’s decision to hire you or not, it can be devastating to fall short.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Published 9 Oct 2017

About a mile southwest, at Uber’s headquarters, another scandal is brewing: a tool called “Greyball,” used to systematically mislead authorities in markets where the service was banned or under investigation, has just been reported in the New York Times.4 Across the street, at Twitter, stock prices fell more than 10 percent in a single month, and the company is scrambling.5 And thirty miles south, in Menlo Park, Facebook has just started rolling out its solution to fake news: stories shared on Facebook that have been debunked by third-party, nonpartisan fact-checking organizations have begun being marked with a red caution icon and the word “Disputed”—a label that’s already being disputed itself, with some calling it censorship and others calling it too milquetoast for news that’s demonstrably false.6 Unrest is brewing at the big tech companies. I don’t feel bad for them. Tech has spent too long being treated as a marvel—getting a free pass on ethics by promising us convenience wrapped in a slickly designed package. It’s time to turn on the pressure, and keep it on until things change. Send customer service complaints. Tell the media.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

Me, an ordinary person from a farm in rural Virginia, made a ripple in the world. It showed me that things were way more fragile than I was taught to believe. Once I started seeing the world this way, I couldn’t unsee it. * * * ■ ■ ■ ■ In 2015 I was invited to give a speech at a big tech conference in Dublin, Ireland, called Web Summit. Tens of thousands of people would be there. I wanted to make it count. In this talk I shared the first seeds of this idea. That a small segment of our society was using our movies, our music, our neighborhoods, our everything, as an investment portfolio.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang
Published 12 Oct 2020

They continue, “We treat other people not as merely ‘rational beings’ but as ‘responsible beings.’ An essential part of being human is the ability to enter into commitments and to be responsible for the courses of action that they anticipate. A computer can never enter into a commitment.”6 The version of life under AI being sold by big tech companies presents a reassuring, controlled world, where unfettered optimization and automation are inevitable. Those in control, those who built the closed systems of control, unsurprisingly purport to predict the future. As ASF and the number of emerging pathogens climb, it becomes obvious that it is impossible to predict the future because we live in an open system.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT vowed to ban: For instance, Mark Zuckerberg testified in Congress that Facebook has made “fighting misinformation and providing people with authoritative information a priority for the company.” Danielle Abril, “What Big Tech CEOs Will Tell an Angry Congress about Policing Misinformation and Extremism,” Fortune, March 24, 2021, https://fortune.com/2021/03/24/facebook-alphabet-twitter-ceos-congressional-hearing-testimony-misinformation-extrimism-online-big-tech-congress/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT they consider “misinformation”: For a statement of some of the problems with the concept of “misinformation,” which ultimately argued that the concept could be made useful if it were to be applied more rigorously, see Conor Friedersdorf, “How ‘Big Disinformation’ Can Overcome Its Skeptics,” Atlantic, April 21 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/anti-disinformation-laws-social-media/629612/.

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
by Vikram Chandra
Published 7 Nov 2013

Subbanna, Sridhar, and Srinivasa Varakhedi. “Computational Structure of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and Conflict Resolution Techniques.” In Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, 56–65. Springer, 2009. Swain, F. “Glowing Trees Could Light up City Streets.” New Scientist 208, no. 2788 (2010): 21. Swan, Rachel. “Outside the Gates: Unions Versus Big Tech.” SF Weekly, July 3, 2013. http://www.sfweekly.com/2013-07-03/news/apple-google-seiu-sis-manny-cardenas/full/. “Team: Heidelberg LSL.” Igem.org. Accessed February 3, 2013. http://2012hs.igem.org/Team:Heidelberg_LSL. Tedd, Eugene. “Hours of Hell and Anguish.” Prairie Schooner (1955): 95–108. Tharu, Susie, and K.

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World
by Rahm Emanuel
Published 25 Feb 2020

One of the prime drivers behind the homelessness problem in San Francisco, and many other cities for that matter, is the rise in the cost of rent and the lack of affordable housing. These factors have not only created more homeless people. They have begun pushing out the middle class, which is choosing to live elsewhere (this is one of the reasons that Google and Salesforce and other big tech companies have been opening new campuses in Chicago and other cities). If we’re not careful, what we are left with in these cities with unaffordable rent and housing problems is a very rich upper class and a very poor lower class, with no one in between and no bridge on which to traverse that gap.

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food
by Chase Purdy
Published 15 Jun 2020

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: Purdy, Chase, author. Title: Billion dollar burger: inside big tech’s race for the future of food / Chase Purdy. Description: [New York] : Portfolio/Penguin, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019056850 (print) | LCCN 2019056851 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525536949 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525536956 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Meat—Moral and ethical aspects. | Meat industry and trade—Environmental aspects. | Cultured meat.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway
Published 8 Sep 2019

It dawned on me that, up to this point, the people we were most comfortable with occupied the lower rungs of the upper middle-class lifestyle in our area. The Taylors, Fosters, and Sullivans were by and large like we used to be: just barely financially stable. With our windfall, we’d been transformed. On paper we were now more like the Pattners, Vices, and the Shiners—the upper crust of our area, with trust funds or big tech money and the cars to prove it. We used to be close to some of these people years earlier. But as they graduated to fancier bottles of wine, more expensive jeans, and vacations to all of the right places, we’d drifted away. To be honest, we resented them. We didn’t feel as comfortable in their company, and the fault was mostly ours.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none.” Consolidation was rife, as Oracle swallowed up struggling companies in order to maintain market share through sheer inertia. After laughing off the iPhone in 2007, Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft was stuck firmly in the midst of a ten-year rut. While the big tech dinosaurs were limping through this extinction event, a nimbler breed of SaaS companies was coming onto the scene, but there were a lot of doubts about them. They only worked for small businesses. Their “dial-up software” couldn’t be configured or integrated into larger systems. They were a fad that appealed only to cash-strapped companies in decline.

Bulletproof Problem Solving
by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
Published 6 Mar 2019

CSIRO's defense of its patent for wifi provides an example of how strategy plays out over time, in a series of moves designed to learn more about competitor intentions, and to position their own moves for the highest level of success. CSIRO's strategy for how to compete went from an unsuccessful passive approach of letter writing to ask for voluntary licensing of its technologies, to suing the big tech giants. Even more dramatic was their strategy about where to compete. CSIRO had to decide which players it should target initially (Exhibit 6.11). It chose to sue a small to medium networking company called Buffalo Technology for patent infringement in what has been described as a test case. Buffalo was a Japanese company rather than a US giant, with less experience in US patent cases, and at that time it had an almost complete reliance on networking technology that was transitioning rapidly to wifi.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

“We went from the mainframe to mobile cloud computing, and the next tech phase will be decentralized blockchain computing.” While it’s easy to imagine the future of finance as a showdown between the likes of Coinbase and JP Morgan, they’re not the only contenders. Tapscott, the Blockchain Revolution author, says big tech giants—not just Facebook but Amazon and Apple too—could just as easily dominate crypto. Then there are national governments. Authoritarian regimes like China or Venezuela, Tapscott points out, are developing cryptocurrencies. Their strategic goals involve not only undermining the US dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency but using crypto to surveil and control their citizens.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber
by Susan Fowler
Published 18 Feb 2020

The interviewers all volunteered the information at the beginning of each interview, each of them saying the same thing: “Twenty-five percent of our engineers are women.” I kept hearing this magical number repeated. One of my interviewers took it a step further. “We have more women,” he said, “than Google, than Amazon—than all of the big tech companies, really.” I loved the idea of working someplace where I wouldn’t be the only woman, where I would—hopefully—be paid and treated equitably. I was sold. The interviews zoomed by, and I soon found myself standing in front of the whiteboard for my final interview, a dry-erase marker in my hand.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

In some advanced countries, including the United States, regulation has tended to protect incumbents and limit competition in various parts of the economy. Network effects and outdated antitrust regulations enabled the ascendancy of the Big Tech firms—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google—that dominate their respective spaces and gobble up any competitors they cannot squash. The US financial sector does not suffer from such extreme concentration, although the United States certainly has a handful of major banks and payment providers. They do not exert the same degree of dominance as the Big Tech firms; still, stringent regulatory requirements have created barriers to entry in financial markets and kept competition in check.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

Nevertheless, Gates Sr.’s advocacy around the estate tax, as a form of gratitude for friendly government policies, shows how much berth there is for reforms against the growing appearance of oligarchy, in which the wealthiest industry captains pay the least in taxes and have the loudest voices in our democracy. 4 Fail Fast “Failing fast” is en vogue as a mantra in corporate management, which means it has also become a way of life at the Gates Foundation, which pulls the best and brightest employees from Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Consulting, and MBA programs. “One of the great personal virtues of Bill and Melinda—and one of the key reasons I have devoted the bulk of my career to the Gates Foundation—is their willingness to change their minds,” CEO Mark Suzman noted in the foundation’s 2022 public-facing annual letter.

…

And we have to consider the idea that if we really care about equity and want the world to be a more equitable place, we should reorganize our economy and society in a way that doesn’t allow the accumulation of such extreme wealth by a very small group of people. There are many ways to do this, but the most obvious corrective is a new era of taxation. This means putting an end to the tax avoidance strategies of multibillionaires and multibillionaire corporations, making Bill Gates (and Big Pharma and Big Tech and everyone else) pay their fair share. My own view is that with the richest people on earth, like Bill Gates, the currently proposed wealth tax—even Bernie Sanders’s proposal to take eight percent a year from the very richest people—doesn’t go far enough. A wealth tax would limit Bill Gates’s ability to become richer, but it would not change the fact that he is obscenely rich.

Time Management for System Administrators
by Thomas A.Limoncelli
Published 1 Jan 2005

A second common trait I've noticed in myself and in my colleagues is a genuine desire to help people, to support them in the use of an unfriendly or unforgiving technology, and to make things work so other people can get things done. This trait is definitely commendable, but if it gets noticed that you can and are able to help, others will ask you for it more and more. The universe gravitates toward clue, so the end result is a life I usually describe as "one big tech support call." When my grandmother was still alive, I would visit her in Florida periodically. Every time I would go, she and all of her friends would bring me their digital watches to set. And you know what? I loved it. Still, one's life doesn't always run as planned when pleas for help can come at any time.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Twitter has a particularly poor record, with women holding only 10 percent of the technical roles at the company. Twitter’s senior executives were so (un)concerned about the image this conveyed that in the middle of a high-profile gender bias case in July 2015 they hosted a staff “frat party.” To their credit, the big tech firms have made genuine efforts to bring more minorities and women into their ranks. Their limited success, they claim, has more to do with “the pipeline”—the available pool of applicants with reasonable qualifications for the job—than any lack of initiative on their part. But to hear many of the women and minority coders who have broken into the business tell it, an unconscious bias about what a “techie should look like” is a more likely obstacle.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you, to your accountant, to a federal judge, and even the president, if I had a personal email [address].’ The PRISM revelations provoked a howling response from the hi-tech denizens of San Francisco’s Bay Area. First there was bafflement, then denial, followed by anger. The Santa Clara valley, where most of the big tech firms are situated, likes to see itself as anti-government. The philosophical currents that waft through Cupertino and Palo Alto are libertarian and anti-establishment, a legacy of Silicon Valley’s roots in the hacker community. At the same time, these firms vie for government contracts, hire ex-Washington staff for the inside track and spend millions lobbying for legislation in their favour.

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work
by Scott Berkun
Published 9 Sep 2013

Notes 1 Mayer's policy on remote work is discussed here: http://gigaom.com/2013/02/25/why-marissa-mayers-ban-on-remote-working-at-yahoo-could-backfire-badly/. 2 “Coralling the Yahoos,” March 2, 2013, Economist, references a study conducted by Ipsos, a polling firm: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21572804-technology-allows-millions-people-work-home-big-tech-firm-trying-stop. 3 I have complied this list of fully distributed companies: http://scottberkun.com/2013/how-many-companies-are-100-distributed/. 4 From an interview with Tom Preston Warner at GitHub headquarters, October 2012. 5 Scott Berkun, “Would You Work from Home?” October 17, 2012. http://scottberkun.com/2012/poll-results-would-you-work-from-home/.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

In 2018, a maintainer of Lerna, a tool for managing JavaScript projects, decided to add a clause to its MIT license “banning ICE collaborators”—that is, companies known to work with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. In the pull request, the maintainer explained, “I’ve been really disturbed to see what ICE has done to American immigrants . . . . a lot of big tech companies are supporting ICE by providing them with infrastructure and in some cases doing significant development work for them.”130 While the decision had been discussed with two other stakeholders before the pull request was opened, it was not unanimously supported by Lerna’s other maintainers, and the support it did receive was not very strong.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson
Published 27 Mar 2017

“We can always get any number of speakers to come out here to speak, and give the board any amount of literature. But nothing beats going to the markets in which we operate, visiting the shops and talking to customers, or traveling to tech innovation hubs like Israel, Silicon Valley, or Boston to see what big tech companies and small startups are doing.” In parallel, Singtel’s human resources team regularly brings in fresh thinking. Rita McGrath of Columbia University, Vijay Govindarajan of the Amos Tuck School of Business, and Linda Hill of Harvard Business School ran interactive sessions attended by hundreds of Singtel employees.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs
by John Doerr
Published 23 Apr 2018

Unless we changed the environment, it couldn’t possibly succeed. Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. The executive team had brought in OKRs to help integrate two clashing internal cultures. Essence, the health insurance company formed by the St. Louis doctors’ group, was risk averse, per Hippocrates; Lumeris pushed to the edge to find the next big tech and data insights. Essence nurtured a proprietary model within a hypercompetitive industry; Lumeris took those learnings and shared them with the world. As demand for our services began surging, this culture gap was slowing us down. In May 2015, eleven weeks after I arrived, we announced a total reorganization under the Lumeris umbrella.

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

Google and Facebook may well have their own money one day, or at least their own money-like equivalent that can serve as a store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange – it is a far more realistic prospect than either ever acquiring its own army. But it is probably at least twenty years away. It is power over the sword and power over money that has enabled the state to defeat overmighty corporations in the past. But if this new contest is network v. network, then the big tech companies have other advantages. Facebook can claim nearly two billion members, bigger than any state or any empire. It can infiltrate itself into people’s lives in a way that no state can. By providing the space in which they share their experiences, it has the capacity to shape how they live. States do that by making rules which they can back up with force if necessary.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

Chapter Six 1. Zak Doffman, “Chinese Media Claims NYPD Is Using Beijing-Controlled Facial Recognition—Is It True?” Forbes, January 13, 2019; forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/01/13/chinese-media-claims-nypd-is-using-beijing-controlled-facial-recognition-is-it-true/#129e6ca592a6. 2. “Rise of China’s Big Tech in AI: What Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent Are Working On,” CB Insights, April 26, 2018; cbinsights.com/research/china-baidu-alibaba-tencent-artificial-intelligence-dominance/. 3. “Sizing the Prize: PwC’s Global Artificial Intelligence Study: Exploiting the AI Revolution,” PwC; pwc.com/gx/en/issues/data-and-analytics/publications/artificial-intelligence-study.html. 4.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 14 Jun 2018

The Roads to rivalry 1Ellen Sheng, ‘The Five Biggest Chinese Investments in the US in 2016’, Forbes, 21 December 2016. 2Tom Kington, ‘Mosque-Building Bin Ladens Buy Marble Once Used for Churches’, Daily Beast, 4 August 2014. 3Michele Nash-Hoff, ‘Should We Allow the Chinese to Buy Any Company They Want?’, Industry Week, 9 January 2018. 4Dylan Byers, ‘Pacific Exclusive: Warner talks tough on big tech’, CNN Tech, Pacific Newsletter, 27 April 2018. 5Michael LaForgia and Gabriel J. X. Dance, ‘Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by US Intelligence’, New York Times, 5 June 2018. 6House of Representatives, Energy and Commerce Committee, Press Release, ‘Walden and Pallone on Facebook’s Data-Sharing Partnerships with Chinese Companies’, 6 June 2018. 7Ali Breland, ‘Facebook reveals data-sharing partnerships, ties to Chinese firms in 700-page document dump’, The Hill, 30 June 2018. 8Casey Newton, ‘Google’s ambitions for China could trigger a crisis inside the company’, The Verge, 18 August 2018. 9Kate Conger, ‘Google Removes “Don’t Be Evil” Clause from Its Code of Conduct’, Gizmodo, 18 May 2018. 10Good Morning America, Interview, ABC, 3 November 2015. 11Trump, Staten Island speech, ‘Trump: I’m So Happy China Is Upset; “They Have Waged Economic War Against Us” ’, Transcript on Real Clear Politics, 17 April 2016. 12The Economist, ‘The Economist interviews Donald Trump’, 3 September 2015. 13B.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

But increasingly it seems that flexible options are going to be on the table in the coming years—responding to needs that existed long before the pandemic. For some, that flexibility was seen as providing an improvement in workforce opportunity. Now, you could work from anywhere. You didn’t have to be in Silicon Valley to join a big tech company, or in Manhattan to go into high finance. But CEOs also worried that increased remote work would cause a dangerous fraying of corporate culture. Workday CEO and cofounder Aneel Bhusri told me he was eager to get his employees back to the physical office. Workday makes cloud-based software used by other companies’ human resources and accounting departments.

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It
by Erica Thompson
Published 6 Dec 2022

The makers of these models have decided that the right amount is quite a lot, so that’s what we get, and the results are used to argue that emissions can continue to rise because our children will be able to take the carbon out of the atmosphere later. Equally, if you could set a price for inducing behavioural change that reduced the demand for high-carbon consumer goods – maybe the Big Tech companies are working on this now as their next big product! – then that price could be set in the models and included as a carbon reduction strategy. If it were a sufficiently low price, it would be used by these models in addition to the usual suite of technological options. The point is that the entire outcome of these models hinges on a judgement that has been made that carbon dioxide removal at scale has a reasonable price and behaviour change of the wealthiest consumers at scale does not.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

cntn_id=100660. 14 See https://medium.com/transit-app/welcome-to-scootopia-we-now-aggregate-all-electric-scooters-c31c7337d5e6. 15 I came across this suggestion in an interview with Aza Raskin, who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, in issue 20 of Offscreen. 16 See, for example, “The Making of a YouTube Radical” by Kevin Roose for the New York Times, published June 8, 2019 at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html. 17 See “Barcelona is Leading the Fightback Against Smart City Surveillance” by Thomas Graham for WIRED, published May 18, 2018 at https://www.wired.co.uk/article/barcelona-decidim-ada-colau-francesca-bria-decode. 18 Senator Warren published details of the plan via Medium on March 8, 2019, at https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c. 19 Although the underlying protocols are open, and although web browsers typically rely on open source technology, most browser usage falls under the purview of private corporations who are able to build moats through integrations with their other products. Google’s Chrome browser alone commands more than half of all browser usage; Apple’s Safari is the nearest competitor.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

Even back then, Sacks was an outspoken libertarian and free speech advocate. His disdain for wokeness pushed him toward the right, though with a populist-nationalist edge that made him a skeptic of American interventionism. At a fiftieth birthday dinner for internet entrepreneur and fellow libertarian Sky Dayton in Tuscany in 2021, Sacks and Musk discussed how big tech companies were colluding to restrict free speech online. Sacks had a populist take, arguing that a “speech cartel” of corporate elites was weaponizing censorship to keep down outsiders. Grimes pushed back, but Musk generally sided with Sacks. He had not focused much on speech and censorship until then, but the issue resonated with his growing anti-woke sentiments.

…

Depending on your outlook, there were three ways to view this: (1) as a laudable effort to prevent the spread of false information that was medically dangerous, undermined democracy, provoked violence, stirred up hate, or perpetrated scams; (2) as an effort that was originally well-intentioned but had now gone too far in repressing opinions that dissented from the medical and political orthodoxy or offended the hair-trigger sensitivities of Twitter’s progressive and woke staff; or (3) as a dark collusion between Deep State actors conspiring with Big Tech and legacy media to preserve their power. Musk was generally in the middle category, but he came to harbor darker suspicions that pushed him toward the third category. “There seems to be a lot of stuff swept under the rug,” he said one day to his fellow anti-woke warrior David Sacks. “A lot of shady stuff.”

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

This evolutionary process, called encephalization, may have occurred as an early Homo species learned improved ways to hunt game and cook meat, giving a boost of concentrated energy that could support larger brains with greatly increased cognitive power. Hominin brains are voracious users of energy, not too different from the energy-intensive data centers of the big-tech companies. The brains of anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens, are around 2 percent of our body mass, but consume around 20 percent of our metabolic energy. The best evidence suggests that Homo sapiens emerged first on the African savannah around two hundred thousand years ago, the start of a period known as the Middle Paleolithic, though we must emphasize that genetic and fossil discoveries continue to alter the estimated chronology.1 According to the evolutionary biologist E.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

The financialisation fix has attempted to avoid this problem by reducing the share of national income accruing to workers and extracting profits from the future through debt, but this model no longer seems sustainable. Partly as a result of these problems, competitive capitalism is rapidly being transformed into the kind of monopoly capitalism envisaged by Lenin over a century ago. Rather than investing themselves, today’s big tech monopolies are growing by merging with or acquiring other firms, increasing their power. They are using this monopoly control to acquire rents, overcharging for some services and failing to pay workers in line with their productivity. Rent extraction and wage suppression amongst some of the largest firms in the global economy accelerate the problems associated with finance-led growth that have been outlined in this book.

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
by Mo Gawdat
Published 29 Sep 2021

They simply could not run their businesses otherwise. This kind of transaction took place literally billions of times every single day. We were building a marketplace analogous to the NASDAQ stock market on the fly, with Sarah being the product that is traded and where every decision maker, buyer or seller on all sides was a machine. ‘Big tech players the world over invested heavily in AI projects. They not only had the resources but also had access to big data – massive amounts of information that was the most valuable ingredient needed to teach the machines. But they were not the only ones investing. AI was not as resource intensive as classical programming was.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification
by Peter Moskowitz
Published 7 Mar 2017

The city doesn’t need to keep attracting rich people; it was not in economic crisis before the tech wave crashed on its shores. The city’s budget was already relatively balanced before the tech boom. Yet city administrators keep zoning for more condos and more high-rise office buildings and handing out tax breaks to companies; its mayor keeps courting the big tech players at conferences and in corporate boardrooms as if San Francisco were desperate for their money, even though the city is expected, at least by one estimate, to have a $10 billion budget surplus by 2017. This is the city as growth machine. By now, we’ve come to expect that economic growth, at all costs, governs most industries and businesses in America, from finance to oil to real estate.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 10 Sep 2018

During the 2016 campaign, Facebook made a negligible profit from accepting paid political ads from groups associated with the Russian government and the alt-right. American democracy, and the global community that Zuckerberg says he is committed to building, suffered a devastating loss. * * * There is another community that has suffered devastating losses since Facebook and other big tech companies began setting up shop in the Bay Area: poor, working-class, and middle-class residents of the region, who have been steadily priced and crowded out. Gentrification hardly seems like a strong enough word to describe what’s happened in the Bay Area during the historic tech boom. Housing costs in San Francisco are so outrageously high that few members of the middle class can afford to live there.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

Gates also commented on the lack of women in AI research: “When you look in the labs at who’s working on AI, you can find one woman here, and one woman there. You’re not even finding three or four in labs together.”8 Outside of the lab, the gender balance in leadership positions at tech firms is better—but not good. According to 2015 diversity figures compiled by the Wall Street Journal, LinkedIn is the big tech firm with the greatest percentage of women in leadership roles, with a measly 30 percent. Amazon, Facebook, and Google lag with 24, 23, and 22 percent, respectively. In general, statistics on leadership positions tend to be increased by women who rise to the top in marketing and human resources.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It.
by James Silver
Published 15 Nov 2018

Think early about employer brand One thing a smart Head of Talent will push for, besides role-by role hiring, is to focus hard and focus early on defining and promoting your employer/talent brand. That starts to tie in as well with how you think about company culture and values. Why would people want to join your startup as opposed to A N Other, or going to work for one of the big tech companies? How are you going to convince them that this is the place they should be? You’ve got to communicate what’s distinct about your company, your mission and your culture. To some extent it’s selling your vision, as you do to VCs and customers, but it’s also tweaking that from the point of view of a potential candidate or employee. 3.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 9 Sep 2019

At the press conference announcing the new partnership between Sidewalk Labs and Toronto, Schmidt thanked Canada for allowing Google in, saying that his company’s long-held dream had come true: for “someone to give us a city and put us in charge.”32 Writing in the Globe and Mail a year later, Jim Balsillie, the former chairman and co-CEO of Research In Motion, a company that commercializes intellectual property in more than 150 countries, summed up the significance of this first trial run in creating a privatized smart city that so excited Schmidt. Balsillie pointed out that “‘smart cities’ are the new battlefront for big tech because they serve as the most promising hotbed for additional intangible assets that hold the next trillion dollars to add to their market capitalizations.” The real commercial value, according to Balsillie, is that “‘smart cities’ rely on IP and data to make the vast array of city sensors more functionally valuable, and when under the control of private interests, an enormous new profit pool.”33 In the year since the official announcement, it has become even clearer that Sidewalk Labs wants Toronto’s blessing, but it does not relish the city’s active involvement and oversight in the build-out and management of the smart neighborhood on the waterfront.

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It
by Huib Modderkolk
Published 1 Sep 2021

Delivery services dropping off dinner in the evenings. And lots of secretive talk about something they called ‘Project Victor’. Some eighty to a hundred workers had been holed up like this on the building’s top floor for days, many of them engineers and technicians from KPN and researchers from Fox-IT. Ronald Prins, boss of the big tech company, was there, too. It had all started with a message from someone called Combasca in South Korea. Combasca said he’d been chatting with a guy calling himself YUI who claimed to have hacked KPN. And he had evidence. After letting YUI boast about what he’d done, Combasca turned around and contacted KPN.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals
by Oliver Bullough
Published 10 Mar 2022

In June 2019 it fined Gamesys £1.2 million for allowing customers to gamble with stolen money. In October 2019 it fined Petfre £322,000 for money-laundering failures. These may look like significant sums of money, but compared to annual profits measured in the billions, they vanish like single coins fed into a slot machine. ‘The online gambling industry is the apotheosis of Big Tech, in terms of its algorithms, its flow of capital, its rootlessness, its addictiveness, its marketing techniques, its ability to permeate into the essential elements of our economic, social and cultural lives,’ wrote James Noyes, a former adviser to the deputy leader of the Labour Party and author of a study of the gambling industry, in 2020.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity
by Currid
Published 9 Nov 2010

Think about the dent in employment and tax revenue for these locales if all the stars packed up and headed to Missouri.7 Similarly, the structure of the mechanism by which the celebrity industry produces stars isn’t much different from the financial industry and its assemblage of analysts, market researchers, publicists, and lawyers orbiting a central CEO. And just like in Silicon Valley, where big tech companies find smaller firms to help them build microprocessors or semiconductors, a lot of one’s star power is outsourced to experts able to maximize base talent and cultivate media interest.8 There are five tiers that make up the celebrity industry.9 The first rung is the celebrities and aspiring stars.

The Manager’s Path
by Camille Fournier
Published 7 Mar 2017

I can only speculate, but there were some pretty big differences between our companies. My company was very diverse in terms of background. I had a team that was mostly pulled from small companies and startups, with a handful of people like myself who had worked at big finance companies and only a couple who had mostly worked for big tech companies. We had no real shared cultural habits to pull from because of this diverse set of work experiences. My friend, on the other hand, managed a team that had a very large, strong core of people who had all worked for the same large tech company, so there was a lot more shared understanding that didn’t need to be made so explicit.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

This would effectively be a return to the days of large, Bell Labs-style investments. It may even be that some of the same underlying dynamics encourage them: just as the public-good research of Bell Labs was in some ways a quid pro quo for the US government’s willingness to tolerate AT&T’s telecoms monopoly, perhaps big tech companies of the future that enjoy effective monopolies due to networks will be encouraged to invest in R&D and other intangibles as part of their license to operate. But, on the whole, this seems unlikely: the relationship between government and business in most developed countries has changed so much since the 1960s and 1970s that it is hard to imagine this kind of corporatism being re-created on a significant scale, and it is hard to imagine that it would not have other negative effects that would lower productivity.2 (A smaller scale version of this might emerge, however, if more companies follow the pattern of Microsoft, which generated great personal wealth for its founders, who then went on to fund intangible investments for the public good.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

But while the hype raged, a more important project was under way: the construction of the hardware and software infrastructure of America’s information technology networks, which would persist long after pets.com and its peers had gone belly up. It was firms such as Cisco and Oracle that truly represented the heart of the technology boom. What was not obvious at the time was just which groups of people would be the big beneficiaries of the technology mania. Would it be big tech investors? The customers using the new technologies? Or the swashbuckling entrepreneurs behind the boom? The answer, as it turned out, was none of the above. The big gains of the era flowed elsewhere; they were captured by participants in the boom in shorter supply than investors, or founders, or customers.

Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Feb 1995

They're the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973. 5) One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are better for the long-term stability of the company. 6) Start-up companies beware: kids fresh out of school invariably bail out after a few years and join the big tech monocultures in search of stability. 7) People are most ripe for pilfering from tech monocultures in their mid- to late 20s. 8) The upper age limit of people with instincts for this business is about 40. People who were over 30 at the beginning of the late 1970s PC revolution missed the boat; anyone older is like a Delco AM car radio.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022

They’d be working at Facebook, or Google, or Amazon. And while the rudimentary flowcharts and columns they used to apply theoretical systems like the Prisoner’s Dilemma look facile today, those were the same instincts—to find algorithms that could capture, predict, and even shape human behavior—that created AI, social media, and Big Tech. They just didn’t have the horsepower or the fuel supply we do today. “No rule, whether of logic or probability theory or rational choice theory, mechanically applied, is likely to be able to handle the gamut of political choices,” Erickson and coauthors wrote with some frustration, and on this we agree.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

If you are travelling to see the world, make sure you go for a long time, have new experiences and meet people who see, think and live differently from those you have been surrounded by at home. Do virtual meetings save energy and carbon? At the moment, no. They are slightly more likely to trigger a flight than to save one. They make a low carbon world more possible, but they do not, in themselves, help to bring it about. I have done a lot of work for a big tech companies that are tempted to argue that video conferencing technology reduces flights and thereby saves millions of tonnes of carbon throughout the world. But if you’ve read the book so far you will already have guessed that the rebound effect undoes this argument. To illustrate the point, here’s how I came to make quite a few flights between England and California.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

“One of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs. decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands.… But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies and governments using technology to watch their citizens, many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.” Ironic, how fast technology could turn on its head, how a revolution could suddenly become what it was supposed to be fighting against—the Establishment—a centralized monopoly, a data cartel, holding the world’s data hostage.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything
by Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran
Published 14 Jul 2021

, DNB Working Paper (www.dnb.nl/en/binaries/Working%20paper%20No%2E%20671_tcm47-387219.pdf) For figures on Open Banking in the UK, see: www.openbanking.org.uk Chapter 21 For more on Lana Swartz, see: http://llaannaa.com For the plot of the movie The Circle, see: www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320/ For ING Bank’s attempts to use customer data for marketing, see: https://fd.nl/frontpage/ondernemen/10864/ing-geeft-adverteerder-inzicht-in-klantgedrag and www.finextra.com/newsarticle/34092/dutch-banks-told-to-stop-using-payments-data-for-personalised-marketing For more on the UK Competition Market Authority and Open Banking, see: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/885537/Notice_of_proposed_changes_to_the_open_banking_roadmap_-_web_publication_-_cma_gov_uk_—_May_2020_-.pdf For the story on hedge funds using data from screen scrapers, see: www.politico.com/news/2020/02/07/banks-fintech-startups-clash-over-the-new-oil-your-data-112188 For a scientific article arguing that Big Tech may want to own banking subsidiaries, see: M. Brunnermeier, H. James and J.-P. Landau (2019). ‘The digitalization of money’, Working paper 26300, National Bureau of Economic Research. For The Economist article, go to: www.economist.com/leaders/2020/10/22/how-to-deal-with-free-speech-on-social-media Chapter 22 For the plot of the movie The Big Short, see: www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/ Quote on mining as striking gold in a sandbox from: https://greatestideaever.wordpress.com/category/tales-from-the-crypto/ Figures on market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies are for 15 June 2020, taken from CoinMarketCap.com For illicit activity on Bitcoin, see: S.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

I build on but also deviate from earlier work from the field of ‘agnotology,’ a word that entered public consciousness about 15 years ago, popularized in important research by the historians Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger. Defined as the academic study of the deliberate production of ignorance, agnotology is a powerful lens for conceptualizing the wilful manipulation of facts and evidence that are evident in sectors such as big tobacco, not to mention big pharma, big oil, big tech, big agriculture and big food.12 Take pharmaceutical sales and marketing. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable sectors in the world – and in some cases those profits are defensible. Scientific innovation takes a lot of work and money, and this heavily state-funded industry helps keep many people alive.

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
by Siddharth Kara
Published 30 Jan 2023

Considering that it was just one of the many industrial mining sites in which artisanal mining was the dominant mode of production, two facts seemed indisputable: 1) the artisanal contribution of total cobalt production in the Congo could easily exceed even the highest estimates of 30 percent, and 2) the massive amount of artisanal production from the Congo had to flow into the formal supply chains of big tech and EV companies. Where else could 180,000 tons per year of cobalt ore possibly go? Shabara was just the beginning. There were several more industrial mines in Lualaba Province where artisanal production was the norm. Although Shabara was the only one I managed to investigate directly, I took testimonies from dozens of people who worked at the others.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

But time and again, we have seen that the corporations that create the most wealth in the long run are those that develop the capacity to think beyond the next ninety days. One way companies can to do this is by explicitly rejecting the tyranny of the markets, as Paul Polman did at Unilever, and as some big tech companies have done with dual-class share structures and a patient approach that sometimes results in years of meager profits. Companies should also embrace a more judicious approach to mergers and acquisitions, looking for takeover targets that they can grow and expand, rather than strip for parts and mine for cash.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Why the Washington Post?” Amazon has interests before the administration, ranging from its federal contracts to its structure as a global giant. The disclosures about Russian manipulation of Facebook through bots and planting fake news stories in users’ feeds heightened Washington’s concerns about how the big tech companies used their reams of customer data. There was talk of efforts to regulate this, and hearings were held, but Facebook took most of the heat. Even more threatening to Bezos, there was, for the first time, serious discussion about trying to break up the four tech giants by using the nation’s antitrust laws.

…

Downie, Leonard, and Robert G. Kaiser. The News about the News: American Journalism in Peril. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Fahrenthold, David A. Uncovering Trump: The Truth Behind Donald Trump’s Charitable Giving. New York: Diversion Books, 2017. Foer, Franklin. World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. New York: The Penguin Press, 2017. Gelb, Arthur. City Room. New York: Putnam, 2003. Graham, Katharine. Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Greenhouse, Linda. Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between. The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

PATENT TROLLING AND HOOVERING In the USA, the monopoly rents gained from patents have spawned a lucrative industry of ‘patent trolls’: firms that produce nothing themselves but buy up unexploited or undervalued patents with the sole intention of tracking down supposed patent violators and demanding they pay licence fees for use of the patent or face court action. On being threatened by trolls, many corporations pay up simply to avoid lengthy and expensive legal procedures. Nevertheless, there were over 5,000 US lawsuits in 2014, driven by multiple filings by patent trolls, frequently aimed at big tech companies. Apple claimed in 2014 to have been the subject of nearly 100 patent lawsuits in the preceding three years. Trolling has given additional impetus to the drive by Apple, Google and other powerful multinational corporations to build up huge patent portfolios, strings of patents acquired from individuals or start-up companies, to prevent rivals from entering the market and to entrench their monopoly status.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Marc Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (Routledge, 1999). 6. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?. 7. Julien Mailland & Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (MIT Press, 2017). 8. Franklin Foer, The World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (Penguin, 2017). 9. Richard J. Gilbert & Michael L. Katz, An Economist’s Guide to U.S. v. Microsoft, 15 Journal of Economic Perspectives 25 (2001). 10. Sergey Brin & Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 30 Computer Network & ISDN Systems 107 (1998). 11. Richard Thaler, Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice, 1 Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 39 (1980). 12.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
by Scott Kupor
Published 3 Jun 2019

I live in Silicon Valley, not Tennessee, so the best I can do is wear cowboy boots to work and play the guitar in my spare time. Both of which I do, as often as possible. Let me give you a little bit of context about what the tech and investment world was like when I was getting started in in the 1990s. Some of the big tech names back then were E.piphany, NetIQ, VA Linux, Commerce One, Razorfish, and Ask.com. It’s possible you haven’t heard of any of these companies, but they—like me—were products of the 1999–2000 tech bubble that produced roughly nine hundred initial public offerings of venture-backed tech companies.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners,” BlockGeeks, July 2017. www.blockgeeks.com. “It offers a way for people”: The Economist Staff, “The Great Chain of Being Sure About Things,” The Economist, October 31, 2015. In a Guardian poll in 2017: Olivia Solon: “Americans ‘Evenly Split’ Over Need to Regulate Facebook and Other Big Tech,” The Guardian, November 1, 2017. “People were promised that the currents”: Geoff Mulgan, “Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis: A Constructive Direction for Politics and Policy After Brexit and Trump,” Nesta, February 17, 2017. The “visceral” difference: British Election Study team, “Brexit Britain: British Election Study Insights from the Post-EU Referendum Wave of the BES Internet Panel,” British Election Study, June 10, 2016.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Published 6 May 2019

Data such as top search-query terms, popular song choices, and mouse cursor movements can be harvested to fuel product development. If customer data is the new oil, the people doing ghost work operate the rigs. The biggest difference between MTurk and tech companies’ internal platforms, like UHRS, is that MTurk recruits and sells labor as well as the platform work site itself, while, on big tech companies’ platforms, a third party—a vendor management system (VMS)—recruits and supplies ghost work labor. All of this is to say that vendor management systems create yet another layer of opaqueness, acting as a broker finding people willing to do ghost work on contract, under nondisclosure agreements.21 For example, Google used vendor management systems to populate its enigmatic ghost work platform, EWOQ.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

Roads have speed limits for a reason: to slow things down for the safety of people. A pharmaceutical lab or an aerospace company cannot bring new innovations to market without first passing safety and efficacy standards, so why should digital systems be released without any scrutiny? Why should we allow Big Tech to conduct scaled human experiments, only to realize that they become too big a problem to manage? We have seen radicalization, mass shootings, ethnic cleansing, eating disorders, changes in sleep patterns, and scaled assaults on our democracy, all directly influenced by social media. These may be intangible ecosystems, but the harms are not intangible for victims.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

But the amount of money raised was also a reflection of an intensely anticipated project led by a teenager hailed as a genius coder, building the next-generation blockchain. A whole new financing model had been tested. One where a ragtag group of feuding hackers with no business plan and no live product, let alone users or revenue, could raise millions of dollars from thousands of people from all over the world. Before, anyone who wanted to buy stock in big tech firms like Facebook or Google would need a US bank account; things got even more complicated for those who wanted to invest in startups that hadn’t gone to the public markets to raise funds. Now anyone could be an investor in one of the most cutting-edge technology companies out there. All they needed was an internet connection and at least 0.01 bitcoin.

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon
by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Published 9 Feb 2021

We listened to a number of speakers, one of whom was Larry Kenswil, a senior executive at Universal Music, who spoke about the current state of the digital music business. At the time, it was divided into two camps: in one were services like Napster that facilitated free file sharing; in the other, by itself, was Apple, selling songs to load onto the iPod for 99 cents each. Larry was eager for more big tech companies to enter the business, as that would mean more revenue for Universal Music. He obviously knew that we were in the audience, because he made a few comments pointed directly at Jeff, effectively dissing Amazon for not being in the digital music space and prodding us to jump in fast. One of the decisions we had to make in that first year was whether to build a business or to buy a company already operating in that space.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

“You can’t say data is valuable”: Adele Peters, “This Health Startup Lets You Monetize Your DNA,” Fast Company, December 13, 2018. “nudge”: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2009). In 2018, insights: Steve Lohr, “Calls Mount to Ease Big Tech’s Grip on Your Data,” New York Times, July 25, 2019. If you want a sense of what companies know about you, see Thorin Klosowski, “Big Companies Harvest Our Data. This Is Who They Think I Am,” New York Times, May 28, 2020. “surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

“And because there were over a million of them following on our Facebook page that we depended on for clicks, the readers got their way. Critical or ‘snarky’ coverage of the tech world was deemed ‘uncurious’ (their word), as our metrics showed that our Musk-loving readers responded better to positive stories about big tech.” Crosbie, who was laid off from the site in 2017, eventually ended up at Splinter, part of the Gawker network of websites that tech billionaire Peter Thiel semi-successfully sued out of existence in 2016, the culmination of a Count of Monte Cristo–style revenge plan that apparently stemmed from his deep-seated grudge over the site’s critical coverage of his business ventures.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

The villain targets our happy way of life and figures he’s going to disrupt it with a calamity. Magically, in the middle of the dustup, 007’s small handheld technology proves essential in defeating the plot to remake the world order with megascale technology. The films aren’t antitechnology; rather, they’re populist. In the Bond bible, big tech is synonymous with evil; small tech is cool. But I’d like to see a Bond villain who wasn’t out to change the world. I’d like to see a Bond villain who realized the greatest power and damage is caused by preventing the world from changing. Now, that might give the Bond series a tinge of Rod Serling–era Twilight Zone, but that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross
Published 13 Sep 2021

Just how much does this intellectual property offshoring cost the world’s governments? Fair Tax Mark estimated that between 2010 and 2019, the big American technology platforms used transfer pricing and other strategies to collectively shave between $100 billion and $155 billion off their international tax bills. Though the big tech companies get a lot of attention for their low tax bills, they are far from the only perpetrators of international tax avoidance. In large part, they are simply putting their own spin on the strategies that other multinationals have used for decades. In 2017, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that nearly three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies operated at least one subsidiary in an offshore tax haven.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

Maybe all the academics and analysts scrambling to get a handle on these issues are like the proverbial blind men touching different parts of an elephant and describing what they feel as a snake or a tree trunk? The elephant in this case is the sheer size and growth of the indexing industry’s giants. Bigness itself, above all, is the broader inchoate but central, thorny issue. This is relevant to virtually every industry—especially “Big Tech” is under fire these days. But what is unique about index funds is that size is indisputably an advantage. Traditional active funds typically see their performance atrophy as they grow big, yet index funds are entirely commoditized. The larger they are, the cheaper they are to run. That allows fees to be lower, and investor flows will follow.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

He describes how internet platforms exploited a legal safe harbor to take over American culture, in the process causing serious damage to democracy. Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) explains the history of persuasion for profit from tabloid newspapers through social media. It is essential reading. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, by Franklin Foer (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), sharpens the argument against unconstrained capitalism on the internet. Both Taplin and Foer pine for the past in media, when everything was more genteel and the public square remained vibrant, but that does not prevent them from contributing to the critical discussion about what needs to be done.

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War
by Fred Kaplan
Published 1 Mar 2016

They knew when the big computer companies threw out hardware (a few of them worked for these companies under their real names); they’d go to the dumpster that day, retrieve the gear, and refurbish it. The collective had started, Clarke learned, in the early 1990s, mainly as a place where its members could store their computers and play online games. In 1994, they made a business of it, testing the big tech firms’ new software programs and publishing a bulletin that detailed the security gaps. They also designed, and sold for cheap, their own software, including L0phtCrack, a popular program that let buyers crack most passwords stored on Microsoft Windows. Some executives complained, but others were thankful: someone was going to find those flaws; at least the L0pht was doing it in the open, so the companies could fix them.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

Large firms in the US spend a lot more on lobbying than large firms in the EU, and this explains the large differences that we observe in the aggregate. Do Lobbyists Succeed? Our final question is also the most difficult to answer for the reasons explained earlier: the decision to lobby is highly endogenous. The big tech companies beefed up their lobbying efforts precisely when they started to hear complaints about their size and behavior, which meant they were more likely to be investigated precisely when they began to lobby more. Most of the existing research on lobbying has focused on legislative outcomes: either votes or the composition of committees.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

After the holidays, Joe gave Nate a call and they met for a drink. “So here we are in January 2008, with an idea and no engineer,” Joe said, “and I tell him about this weekend experiment with these three guests, and he loved the idea.” Eventually, the three of them decided that the perfect time to re­launch Airbedandbreakfast.com would be at the next big tech conference, which happened to be South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, in March. By the time they came to this strategic decision, the conference was less than a month away. The turnaround would be tight, but the opportunity was ideal. “It’s the place where some of the tech greats had launched before us.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

Virality could improve after a critical mass of users had experienced the product.” On the other hand, friends who were entrepreneurs or VCs told Nagaraj, “with varying degrees of diplomacy, that Triangulate was not going to hit the bar for raising Series A.” Nagaraj got close to selling Triangulate to a big tech company but never received an offer. In March 2011, he saw the writing on the wall. He shut the company down, paid his employees severance, helped all of them get new jobs, and returned $120,000 of the $750,000 seed round to his investors. Triangulate’s team had completed three big product pivots in two years but never found a market.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot
by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy
Published 14 Apr 2020

UNESCO and EQUALS Skills Coalition, I’d Blush If I Could. 117. Ellen Broad, Made by Humans: The AI Condition (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018). 118. Sam Levin, “‘Bias Deep inside the Code’: The Problem with AI ‘Ethics’ in Silicon Valley,” Guardian, March 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/28/big-tech-ai-ethics-boards-prejudice. 119. Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” Astounding Science Fiction 29.1 (1942): 94–103. 120. “Do We Need Asimov’s Laws?,” MIT Technology Review, May 16, 2014, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/527336/do-we-need-asimovs-laws/. 121. “Principles of Robotics,” Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, accessed December 3, 2019, https://epsrc.ukri.org/research/ourportfolio/themes/engineering/activities/principlesofrobotics/; Michael Szollosy, “EPSRC Principles of Robotics: Defending an Obsolete Human(ism)?

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

In 2021, when I’d ask crypto promoters for examples of crypto being used in the real world, many pointed to the Philippines. They called Axie Infinity a new form of employment and a potential panacea for global poverty. It was the most prominent demonstration of what some had taken to calling Web3: an internet in which users own their data and it’s tracked on blockchains, rather than controlled by big tech companies like Facebook. Some even told me that one day, we might all own our social media profiles on the blockchain and earn money from them, just like Filipinos did with those little Axie blobs. But after the price of Smooth Love Potions crashed, I stopped hearing about Axie Infinity. I started to wonder what was going on in the Philippines.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023

Jonah posted the voicemail to BuzzFeed, made Page Six, and got more than twenty thousand views on the website, triggering Johanesen’s bright red “viral” arrow. The small team on Canal Street basked in the recognition. Johanesen, the designer, felt kind of bad for the site’s tiny editorial team. They were doing good work, training a system to create and spread viral content. But users were getting good at making their own viral content too. The big tech companies Jonah admired, like Facebook and Twitter, didn’t employ editors. The best case for Johanesen, Jonah, and their investors was to become a tech platform like Facebook, not a media company. That’s where you got the billion-dollar valuations and the effortless scale. For now BuzzFeed was somewhere between being a content company and a platform, but at some point, Johanesen speculated, Jonah would have to break the news to his editorial staff that their services were no longer required.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

Like much of California, Silicon Valley has been trending Democratic for years, and a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Santa Clara County—which covers much of the valley—since 1984. Obama won 70 percent of the votes in the county in 2008, while Kerry won 64 percent. These margins are as high as nearly anywhere in the country. And big tech money is flowing to Democrats, too. For most of the 1990s, Democratic politicians didn’t bother much with Silicon Valley, which donated only modestly at election time. For example, the tech industry gave only $5.2 million in campaign contributions in 1992— nearly a third less than the amount Hollywood gave.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

, NBER Working Paper No. w24622 Lukianoff, Greg, and Haidt, Jonathan (2018), The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, London: Allen Lane Maçães, Bruno (2021), ‘After Covid, get ready for the Great Acceleration’, Spectator, accessed 15 March 2021, available at https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/after-covid-get-ready-for-the-great-acceleration Maddox, John (1999), What Remains to Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race, New York: Touchstone Madrigal, Alexis C. (2020), ‘Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World’, The Atlantic, accessed 21 January 2020, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/why-silicon-valley-and-big-tech-dont-innovate-anymore/604969/ Mahbubani, Kishore (2018), Has The West Lost It?: A Provocation, London: Allen Lane Mahon, Basil (2004), The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, Chichester: Wiley Mallapaty, Smriti (2018), ‘Paper authorship goes hyper’, Nature Index, accessed 19 October 2018, available at https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/paper-authorship-goes-hyper Malone, Thomas W. (2018), Superminds: How Hyperconnectivity is Changing the Way We Solve Problems, London: Oneworld Marcus, Jon (2018), ‘With enrollment sliding, liberal arts colleges struggle to make a case for themselves’, The Hechinger Report, accessed 9 January 2021, available at https://hechingerreport.org/with-enrollment-sliding-liberal-arts-colleges-struggle-to-make-a-case-for-themselves/ Martin, Richard (2015), ‘Weighing the Cost of Big Science’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 6 March 2019, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/22/166155/weighing-the-cost-of-big-science/ Martinis, John, and Boixo, Sergio (2019), ‘Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor’, Google Blog, accessed 11 April 2020, available at https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/quantum-supremacy-using-programmable.html?

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor
Published 27 May 2019

In the past, patents and trade secrets rarely crossed paths; inventors chose between patenting and relying on trade secrecy law depending on the nature of the invention, the costs, and the likelihood of obtaining a patent. The advent of big data, however, has created conditions for a new and powerful mix of patents plus trade secrets—and this is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry. Google’s success story, for example, parallels that of Myriad in interesting ways. It is often said that Google and other big tech companies don’t use patents. They seem to be able to do without the coercive powers of the state when it comes to protecting their most valuable asset: data about us. That story, however, is at best incomplete. The search technology Google has deployed to build its data empire was patented. Stanford University owned, but Google held the exclusive license to PageRank (which has since expired).

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

The ‘creative class’ is the human equivalent of the ‘Bilbao effect’, developing a place where small start-ups and multinational companies can share the same car park, attracting talent from around the world. Silicon Roundabout Such schemes can be tremendously successful. Within a year of Cameron’s announcement, Tech City had attracted huge attention from global companies. The high-profile push has raised the international standing of the project. For big-tech companies looking for a place to site their European office, the publicity drive has worked, as confirmed by Georg Ell, European general manager of US company Yammer: ‘The Tech City initiative was the catalyst for our move to east London. It provides a nucleus which drives momentum, opportunities to share and learn from others.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol
Published 1 Jan 2019

In the past, the process would have taken up to four hours.”51 The head of England’s Understanding Patient Data, Nicole Perrin, was quite supportive of the project: “I think it is very important that we don’t get so hung up on the concerns and the risks that we miss some of the potential opportunities of having a company with such amazing expertise and resources wanting to be involved in health care.”52 Joe Ledsam of DeepMind AI’s team added his perspective: “We should be more mindful of the risks and safety of models, not less.” The DeepMind case study brings out so many relevant medical privacy issues of Big Data: not obtaining proper consent, not being transparent, and the “techlash” that we’ll see more and more with the oligopoly of big tech titans (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft) now all fully committed to healthcare. Even though it resulted in an important product that helped clinicians and patients, there were valuable lessons learned.53 One other example of deep learning’s potential to invade privacy is an effort described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.54 By combining 50 million Google Street View images of 22 million cars, in two hundred cities, with publicly available data, researchers at Stanford University’s AI lab and their collaborators were able to accurately estimate public voting patterns, race, education, and income by zip code or precinct.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

The similarly sized William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is involved in supporting global development and the performing arts, as well as environmental and educational issues. “By making philanthropy of some kind an almost mandatory next career step for high-tech tycoons,” Malone argues, Hewlett and Packard have inspired others to give “ten times” more than the sums they have personally donated. These others included two of the men behind the next big tech firm to emerge in Silicon Valley, chip maker Intel. In 2001, the firm’s cofounder Gordon Moore established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has grown to a similar scale as the Hewlett and Packard foundations and focuses on environmental conservation and science, as well as projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, such as nursing and land preservation.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response
by Tony Connelly
Published 4 Oct 2017

The New Zealand Grudge Match Any external observer of the recent economic history of Ireland could not have avoided a particular narrative: the economic boom had come about because Ireland was an open, flexible, skilled, low-tax, English-speaking economy right at the gates of the single market, prolific at securing hi-tech, highly skilled, world-beating multinationals. They had fuelled the boom, and the recovery. But the sector that would come to dominate the Brexit debate had nothing to do with Big Tech or Big Pharma or the Double Irish. That sector was food. The food produced in Ireland, whether animal or vegetable, by-product or finished product, will go to the very heart of how the nation will cope with, or recover from, Brexit. Food – whether living, free-range, slaughtered, processed, powdered, mass-produced into individually wrapped slices, converted into microwaveable dinners, scooped up from the sea, frozen and shipped to tables around the planet – will be at the centre of the worst problems Ireland faces when Britain formally leaves and works out its new relationship with the EU.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

Yet he was fully embraced—not just by Trump, but by every element of the American establishment (to his credit, not by Obama). He arrived to puff pieces from leading American columnists about how he was a reformer and a modernizer. Here he was at the New York Stock Exchange or having coffee with Mike Bloomberg. There he was meeting with bipartisan leaders in Congress. Here he was meeting with Big Tech executives in Silicon Valley. There he was meeting with the heads of Hollywood studios. He may have been a brutal dictator, but he had bottomless cash and supported the War on Terror. Those were America’s preeminent interests. It’s no wonder he felt a sense of impunity. A few months later, Jamal Khashoggi—an outspoken critic of Mohamed bin Salman and a journalist for The Washington Post—would be chopped up at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth
by Dan McCrum
Published 15 Jun 2022

There were grand events in a castle thrown by his friend Alexander Schütz, a Viennese money manager who oversaw the Atlas supporting Germany’s financial system, Deutsche Bank, as a member of its supervisory board. In this crowd, the impression flourished that Braun had a second fortune salted away because he understood technology and so was early into the big tech stocks like Apple and Google. He threw a little money at politics, backing the centre-right Austrian People’s Party, whose government was propped up by the far-right FPÖ. In the summer of 2017, Braun appeared at a campaign event with Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and he travelled in influential circles as a member of a think tank linked to the party and as a captain of industry, invited to intimate private dinners with the Austrian premier and his wife.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

It was clear that cloud computing had a chance to be a big part of Amazon’s future, and that to realize its potential AWS needed executives who knew how to help an organization find and retain the right people. Williams joined Amazon in the fall of 2014 as a vice president focused on staffing for AWS. She quickly learned that Amazon didn’t operate like the other big tech firms she was familiar with. For one thing, the technology to support back-office functions like staffing wasn’t as mature. As she recalls, I got in there and I was like, how the hell does this place run? I was responsible for a monthly report on our progress in hiring all the people we needed at AWS.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

67 In the proprietary world, each empire wants to be as self-contained as possible and draw consumers into its world, where it will offer them an array of services and products and gather extensive data in its cloud to be mined for prospective advertisers. “The biggest tech companies are no longer content simply to enhance part of your day,” the New York Times reported. “They want to erase the boundaries, do what the other big tech companies are doing and own every waking moment. The new strategy is to build a device, sell it to consumers and then sell them content to play on it. And maybe some ads too.”68 The boundary between hardware and software has been obliterated by the likes of Apple, and Amazon and the others are racing to follow.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

Above ground, Songdo looks like a leafy, wavy version of the Plan Voisin; its towers are surrounded by parks, as in Shanghai, though this new landscape is softer, lushly planted and generously spread out. Originally, Anthony Townsend writes, Songdo was conceived as ‘a weapon for fighting trade wars’; the idea was ‘to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo … with lower taxes and less regulation’. Tech entered the picture, Greenfield says, when big tech was added to make the city more attractive. Companies like Cisco and Software AG bid for work, and the results were to make the environment ever more regulated technologically, even as they boasted less regulated markets.26, 27 The control centre for the smart city of Songdo is an eerily calm place.

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System
by Chet Haase
Published 12 Aug 2021

In this case, the endian assumptions for code on BeBox (using big-endian) were not correct when that same code was run on an x86 PC (which uses little-endian representation). 43 Successful acquisitions and IPOs are highly unusual for startups. Everyone hears far more about the few people who strike it rich than the multitudes who just have regular jobs at these places as they continue to not get acquired by the big tech firms, not to mention the many companies that go bust chasing the dream, and the engineers that then go chasing the new jobs for necessary paychecks. 44 Tracey was Andy’s admin until he left the Android team in March of 2013. 45 Andy McFadden will also be known as Fadden in this book, to make it easier to distinguish Andy McFadden from Andy Rubin.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell
Published 2 May 2022

Shit happens. No grudges. Life’s too short. I deeply, genuinely wish them well. Chapter 6.4 Fuck Massages Beware of too many perks. Taking care of employees is 100 percent your responsibility. Distracting and coddling them is not. The cold war of ever-escalating perks between startups and modern big tech has convinced many companies that they need to serve three gourmet meals a day and offer free haircuts to attract employees. They do not. And they should not. Keep in mind there’s a difference between benefits and perks: Benefit: Things like a 401(k), health insurance, dental insurance, employee savings plans, maternity and paternity leave—the things that really matter and can make a substantive impact on your employees’ lives.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

Web app for, 239–40 Botanicalls, 134–35, 140 Bo Xilai, 273 brain drain, as “brain circulation,” 172 Brand, Paul, 177 Brasilia, urban design for, 7 Brazil, 67, 90–92 paternalistic governance in, 90 rapid-transit in, 11 squatter cities (favelas) in, 2, 91–92 urban development plans of, 30 Brazil, 258 Bristol, 205 Broadacre City, 26 broadband, 127, 171, 178, 180, 194–99, 286 community owning of, 288–89 public infrastructure for, 287–89 Broadcom, 272 Broad Institute, 254 Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (BPRC), 131 “Building a Science of Cities” (Batty), 85 building automation, 22–24, 26–27 Burnham, Daniel, 94 Burns, Red, 115–18, 120, 164–67, 303 Buro Happold, 290–91 Bush, Vannevar, 75–76 cable technology, 115–19 cable television, 115, 117 CabSense, 232–33 Cairo, in Arab Spring, 12, 300 Calhoun, George, 52 California, University of, at Berkeley, 41 Calvino, Italo, 305 Cameron, William Bruce, 316–17 Campanella, Tom, 72, 98, 101, 104, 106 Camper, Brett, 202 Canberra, urban design for, 7 carbon dioxide emissions, 278–79 Caro, Robert, 7, 102–3 Carrier IQ, 271, 274–75 “car wars,” 98–107 Case Foundation, 238 Casson, Herbert, 5 cellular networks, 52–53, 262–64 for global Wi-Fi roaming, 55 hurricane and tsunami damage to, 262–63 industry for, 55 population density as threat to, 263 Census, U.S., 5, 57–61, 294 Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, 85 Centrino processor, 132 Cerdà, Ildefons, 43–44, 93 Cerf, Vint, 303 Chambers, John, 24 Chattanooga, Tenn., 287–88 Chernobyl, 257 Chicago, Ill., 36, 94, 207–11, 292, 307 Chicago Shovels in, 208 industrialization of, 5 Neighborhood Health Index for, 209–10 Snow Corps of, 208 China: growth of smartphones in, 4 migration into cities in, 47–48 pace of building design in, 112 Pearl River Delta in, 112, 141 special economic zones in, 24 as threat to high-tech industry, 26 “tofu buildings” in, 257 urban development plans of, 2, 30 urban surveillance projects in, 273–74, 276 Chisinau, 168, 171 Chongqing, 273 “Peaceful Chongqing” surveillance in, 273 Cisco Systems, 8, 34, 38, 39, 44, 55, 249, 273, 290 Bangalore Globalisation Centre East of, 45 planners of new data networks by, 44–46 as planners of Songdo’s technology, 24, 26–28 as promoter of smart cities, 31–32 at Shanghai Expo 2010, 48, 172 videoconferencing through, 46–49 vision of future by, 47–49 Cities From the Sky (Campanella), 72 Cities in Evolution (Geddes), 97 CityMart, 246–47 City-search, 121 Civic Commons, 158–59 civic hackers: advantages over big tech companies of, 162–63 alternative visions of, 9 institutionalized techniques of, 239 problems with, 165–66, 224–25 Claris Networks, 288 Clark, David, 109 Clarke, Arthur C., 6 climate change, 112 Clinton, Bill, 248 cloud computing, 263–65, 289, 294 CNN, 116 Coast, Steve, 187 CoDeck, 233–34 Code for America, 237–43, 291 Brigade of, 243 Cold War, 79, 277 Collier’s, 56 Collins, John, 77, 84 Colorado, 197–98 Comer, Andrew, 290–91 Cometa Networks, 130 Community Access, 175 community antennas (CAs), 116 community media, 133, 154 Compass systems, 265 “computational leadership networks,” 242 computer modeling, 77–79, 81, 85 Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, 62 Congress, U.S., 57–58 Connected Cities (Haselmayer), 245 Constitution, U.S., 57 “control revolution,” 59, 64, 316 Convensia Convention Center, 23–24 Cook, Justin, 83–85, 298 Corbett, Peter, 200 Costa Rica, 176 Council on Foreign Relations, U.S., 63 Coward, Andrew, 274 Cowen, Tyler, 107–9 crowd-sourcing, 121, 151, 155, 166, 192, 203, 214–15, 308–9 traffic apps through, 157, 202 Crowley, Dennis, 121–26, 134, 144–52 Crystal Palace (London), 19–21 Convensia evoked in, 23 Cuartielles, David, 137 Cummings, E.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

He once went on an Internet bulletin board devoted to Cisco stock talk and asked, “At what price would you guys say Cisco would be overvalued?” One enthusiast wrote, “If it fell 40%, I’d be out of here.” IT WAS IN MARCH 2000 that Cisco’s share price and the market in general peaked. That month, Jeremy Siegel inoculated himself from future Irving Fisher comparisons with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the big tech stocks had become so expensive that they were “a sucker bet.”23 The Roger Babson of the 1990s boom, Siegel’s friend Bob Shiller, did him one better. That very month saw the publication of the book that Siegel had been urging him to write for years: Irrational Exuberance, a guide for lay readers to the market’s penchant for overenthusiasm.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

Republicans were in fact slightly less calcified: the GOP had passed a rule in the 1990s that placed term limits on committee chairmanships, so younger Republicans had more opportunities for advancement within the party, which helped young conservatives like Paul Ryan become Speaker of the House at forty-five. The oldsters in Washington weren’t just bad on climate change—they were fundamentally out of touch with the ways American society had changed since the twentieth century. This became most obvious when lawmakers who had grown up before the invention of the handheld calculator tried to regulate big tech. In April 2018, when thirty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary Committees about Facebook’s handling of personal data and the Russian attempts to influence US elections, the lawmakers at the hearing were an average age of sixty-two, and most of the chairs and ranking members were over seventy.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

Periodic Report: Update on Outstanding Lending Facilities Authorized by the Board Under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act September 7, 2020, www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/pdcf-mmlf-cpff-pmccf-smccf-talf-mlf-ppplf-msnlf-mself-mslpf-nonlf-noelf-9-8-20.pdf#page=3. 82. D. Scigliuzzo, S. Bakewell, and G. Gurumurthy, “Carnival Boosts Bond Sale After 12% Yield Attracts $17 Billion,” Bloomberg, April 1, 2020. 83. N. Randewich, “Big Tech Drives S&P 500 to Record High in Coronavirus Rally,” Reuters, August 18, 2020. 84. M. Rubinstein, “The Stock Market as Entertainment,” Net Interest, June 5, 2020. 85. M. Fitzgerald, “Many Americans Used Part of Their Coronavirus Stimulus Check to Trade Stocks,” CNBC, May 21, 2020. 86.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

The American view of the internet—and by extension Silicon Valley—performed a 180-degree reversal in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Facebook, Google, and Twitter went from being the nation’s darlings to being castigated as enablers of Russian subversion of American democracy. It is striking that both Franklin Foer in World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017) and Jonathan Taplin in Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (2017) open their jeremiads with profiles of Brand as a harbinger of an emergent cyberculture that originally promised digital freedom and instead has brought a post-Orwellian state of soft control and concentration of power.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

They earned $150,000 in average compensation: Robert McCartney and Patricia Sullivan, “Amazon Says It Will Avoid a Housing Crunch with HQ2 by Planning Better Than It Did in Seattle,” The Washington Post, May 3, 2019. The company accounted for 30 percent of all jobs added in Seattle: Mike Rosenberg, “Will Amazon’s HQ2 Sink Seattle’s Housing Market?,” The Seattle Times, November 12, 2018. a swath of land … called South Lake Union: Noah Buhayar and Dina Bass, “How Big Tech Swallowed Seattle,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 30, 2018. “high-tech ghetto”: Keith Harris, “Making Room for the Extraeconomic,” City 23, no. 6 (November 2019): 751–773. “Alexa … Open the Spheres”: Jena McGregor, “Why Amazon Built Its Workers a Mini Rain Forest Inside Three Domes in Downtown Seattle,” The Washington Post, January 29, 2018. 2.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

If the United States government was serious about cracking down on those trying to harm Americans, they would invade the Food & Drug Administration’s office and arrest the senior executives for fraud, corruption, and assault. Instead, they have kept up a fake reign of terror, printing trillions of dollars to feed the collusion of the Military Cabal, Big Pharma and Big Tech, and their ever- faithful propaganda pet, called Mainstream Media. The Military-Information-Terror Complex It should be clear to those with an understanding of American foreign policy that the War on Terror is based on a fake premise. Because America always needs an enemy, those in charge of foreign policy decisions made the call to manufacture the Islamic State to fill the role of the amorphous terrorist that is not tied to a particular country, but rather a general region, and has connections to one of the most popular religions on Earth, making this an enemy that could be just about anyone and located almost anywhere.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022

For Greenpeace’s report, see Oil in the Cloud: How Tech Companies are Helping Big Oil Profit from Climate Destruction, Greenpeace, 19 May 2020; https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/oil-in-the-cloud/. For Google’s response, see Sam Shead, ‘Google Plans to Stop Making A.I. Tools for Oil and Gas Firms’, CNBC, 20 May 2020; https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/google-ai-greenpeace-oil-gas.html. 7. Matt O’Brien, ‘Employee Activism Isn’t Stopping Big Tech’s Pursuit of Big Oil’, USA Today, 2 October 2019; https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/10/02/microsoft-amazon-google-oil-gas-partnerships/3839379002/. 8. Jordan Novet and Annie Palmer, ‘Amazon salesperson’s pitch to oil and gas: “Remember that we actually consume your products!”’, CNBC, 20 May 2020; https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/aws-salesman-pitch-to-oil-and-gas-we-actually-consume-your-products.html. 9.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

The company called off human reviewers, who couldn’t move fast enough. YouTube turned its filter dials up and handed over control to its machines. Part IV CHAPTER 32 Roomba In May of 2019 a billboard went up in San Francisco, near the freeway many Googlers used to commute to work. The billboard declaimed break up big tech. Presidential contender Elizabeth Warren had purchased the ad, but the sentiment crossed political lines. That summer Trump’s Justice Department would open a monumental case accusing Google of being a monopolist. Senators devoted a panel to the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence in social media.

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

“We were taking shots at them for their culture and not having many women around,” Judge says. “When you’re making fun of something, if anything, you exaggerate it.” Over time, as the series grew into a hit, the tech industry grew more guarded and self-conscious around Judge and his staff. Judge recalls that during a second visit to one of California’s big tech giants, his crew received a much different reception. Casually observing brogrammers in the wild was no longer going to be such a breeze. “They put us in a room with nothing but female engineers,” Judge recalls. While Elon Musk was simmering down, HBO had another headstrong tycoon to worry about.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

The government cracks down on the ties when too much money is being made and corruption stories spread. Then, these companies are cut loose to become more truly private, more independent and, often, more successful. What happens next is illustrated by a dinner I attended not too long ago in Shanghai when, sitting with the CEO of a big tech company and talking about an upcoming set of meetings in Beijing, he said, ‘Why do you bother even to see those old men anymore? We are the future of power in China.’” PERMANENT WAR’S BOTTOM LINE: A COUNTRY AND AN ALLIANCE BEYOND ALL OTHERS Even in the face of China’s rise and its recent increases in defense spending, and despite the hue and cry in the West about the threat this represents, the PRC still has a long way to go to catch up with the undisputed leader in global defense spending: the United States.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

I’d later learn that Sara Morishige, the wife of the founder and CEO of Twitter, Ev Williams, was behind the company’s very consistent design aesthetic. The bro-y dump of many tech companies this was certainly not. Twitter numbered something like four hundred employees at this point, so it was relatively small by “big” tech-company standards. Despite that, and the fact Twitter’s revenue at this point was de minimis, the café churned out fashionably healthy food, from the “comfort” variety (house-brined pastrami sandwiches) to the fancier (seared tuna on designer greens). I grabbed whatever was closest and found a seat.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Published 4 Apr 2016

The net effect of all these independent optimizations was gigantic. If you’ve used the Internet basically at all over the past decade, then you’ve been a part of someone else’s explore/exploit problem. Companies want to discover the things that make them the most money while simultaneously making as much of it as they can—explore, exploit. Big tech firms such as Amazon and Google began carrying out live A/B tests on their users starting in about 2000, and over the following years the Internet has become the world’s largest controlled experiment. What are these companies exploring and exploiting? In a word, you: whatever it is that makes you move your mouse and open your wallet.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State
by Barton Gellman
Published 20 May 2020

I imagined that Microsoft must have confronted the U.S. government about MUSCULAR, demanded an explanation. Two weeks later, I asked Smith how the NSA had responded. “I haven’t asked, because I don’t want to know,” Smith told me. “Because if I’m told, then I’m going to be told the information is classified. And it may restrict my ability to speak.” There were all kinds of things Big Tech did not know or did not want to know about the NSA’s use of American corporate infrastructure abroad. Twelve Triple Three, the Reagan-era executive order, gave legal cover to a multitude of intrusions. Ashkan and I shifted our attention entirely to operations of this kind, the ones that happened overseas but touched Americans at home.

Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling
Published 14 Sep 2020

What is clear is that a modern-day antitrust law enforcement that promotes economic dignity should be structured at each turn to see where the modern essential bridges and railroads are being created, and to ensure market structures do not tolerate economic domination based on who controls the bridge or railroad, as opposed to who has the better product or service. I will briefly note that this risk of economic concentration facilitating brute force is not just a problem with Big Tech. We see this kind of domination in the exploitation of the small farmers and ranchers in the agricultural sector who supply everything from the beans that go into canned goods to hogs sold to massive processing firms. Predictably, as industry concentration has increased, big companies have increasingly exploited their market power to dominate suppliers and squeeze their margins.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

In a recent experiment in Pakistan, providing a bit more flexibility to the procurement officers of hospitals and schools by giving them some free cash to spend on basic supplies greatly improved their ability to negotiate low prices, leading to big savings for the government.26 Putting too many constraints on government officials and government contracts can discourage talent when it is the most needed. Despite the fact that the United States is the world leader in computing, none of the big tech firms chose to bid on contracts to set up the computer system supporting Obamacare. The reason was apparently that there were so many boxes to check off to be a government contractor that very few firms were willing to do it. The Federal Acquisition Regulation has eighteen hundred pages. So, in order to win a government contract, it is more important to be good at paperwork than to be able to do the job.27 In the development world, the contractors that systematically bid for and win the USAID contracts are known as “Beltway bandits.”

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

“I fully support the message if it comes from you.” My wife, Jessica, had been darting back and forth to New York, where she was finishing her work as a lawyer for Goldman Sachs. By the end of the summer of 2001, we moved the last of our things to California and settled into a rental house in nearby Hillsborough. Citi’s big tech conference was in Manhattan during the first week of September 2001. I remember walking around depressed because New York felt like one of those places that, once you left, you never moved back, and I loved New York. The streets that week were filled with happy people enjoying spectacular weather after the oppressive August heat.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

They’ve also been at the center of the biggest social, cultural, and political controversies of our age, including bitter fights over free speech, financial regulation, privacy in technology, income inequality, the efficacy of cryptocurrency, and discrimination in Silicon Valley. For its admirers, PayPal’s founders are a force to be emulated. For its critics, the group represents everything wrong with big tech—putting historically unprecedented power into the hands of a small clutch of techno-utopian libertarians. Indeed, it is hard to find a lukewarm opinion about PayPal’s founders—they are either heroes or heathens, depending on who offers the judgment. * * * And yet, despite all that, the PayPal days themselves are usually glossed over.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

Many of my school friends didn’t bother with the job placement scheme because of the lack of options. In the United States, private-sector interventions could easily assist public-sector efforts at the local and state level in establishing larger internships and job placement schemes for schools. Big tech companies could help bridge the digital divide for schools in rural communities to access information about programs as well as online programming. Based on my family’s experience with the Durham Miners’ Association, labor unions and workers’ collectives have a role to play alongside private companies.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

“If we’re taking on education or income disparity as a group of business leaders, we want to be able to break some eggs.” That’s different from what happens in most other cities, said Mr. Mortenson, who earlier this year took over M. A. Mortenson, a nationwide construction firm founded by his grandfather. In Seattle, where Mr. Mortenson lived for nine years before moving back to Minneapolis in 2012, “most of the big tech companies viewed the city as a convenient location to house some of its workers,” he said. “They didn’t engage unless it affected their business … “Tech leaders are very philanthropic,” he added, “but they disconnect it from their business.” The story concluded by quoting James R. Campbell, a local banker who served in top positions at Norwest banks and Wells Fargo before retiring in 2002, as asking and answering: Could Itasca be repeated elsewhere?

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

NICK BOSTROM: DeepMind is certainly among the leaders, but there are many places where there is exciting work being done on machine learning or work that might eventually contribute to achieving artificial general intelligence. Google itself has another world-class AI research group in the form of Google Brain. Other big tech companies now have their own AI labs: Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft have quite a lot of research in AI going on. In academia, there are a number of excellent places. Canada has Montreal and Toronto, both of which are world-leading deep learning universities, and the likes of Berkeley, Oxford, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon also have a lot of researchers in the field.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

It will be the same, just a bit worse,’ a pessimistic Houellebecq announced on French radio. It was true that Covid aggravated existing ills. In the financial world shutdowns were accompanied by more money-printing, more debt and even lower interest rates. Big Business thrived while small businesses were shuttered. Big Tech’s monopoly profits were fattened by enforced screentime. The super-rich became even richer and took to their super-yachts and flew rocket trips into space. The old continued to benefit at the expense of the young. Housing became less affordable. Governments ran bigger deficits – as President Trump put it with customary frankness, ‘Who cares about the budget?’

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

to quote Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, who, in the mid-1970s, started calling for the creation of space colonies to overcome the earth’s resource limits. Interestingly, one of O’Neill’s most devoted disciples was Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, who spent a good chunk of the 1970s arguing that the U.S. government should build space colonies; today he is one of the most vocal proponents of Big Tech fixes to climate change, whether nuclear power or geoengineering.59 And he’s not the only prominent geoengineering booster nurturing the ultimate escape fantasy. Lowell Wood, co-inventor of the hose-to-the-sky, is an evangelical proponent of terraforming Mars: there is “a 50/50 chance that young children now alive will walk on Martian meadows . . . will swim in Martian lakes,” he told an Aspen audience in 2007, describing the technological expertise for making this happen as “kid’s stuff.”60 And then there is Richard Branson, Mr.

A Man in Full: A Novel
by Tom Wolfe
Published 31 Mar 2010

That was what he had noticed, once she reached her forties, he guessed it was. Martha had always been a big girl, a big, sunny, lovely girl, but as she got older, she got thicker. Her midsection got thicker, and her skin got thicker, and her shoulders and her upper back began to round over a little bit and get thicker. One night at a big Tech reunion at the Hyatt Regency, she was wearing some kind of bare-shouldered dress, and he happened to come up behind her from a certain angle, and Jesus Christ, she had shoulders like a middle linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, his wife did. He couldn't get that image out of his mind. Like a middle linebacker—and how often could you get aroused by a forty-some-year-old woman with that much beef in her neck and her shoulders and her upper back?