Fall 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Welcome to the Big Tech and Artificial Intelligence series. Segment 1 is the beginning of the Big Tech section of the series and focuses on Big Tech’s dream and its actions to date.
My Takeaways:
What I have learned from reading the six books utilized in this section of the series and that are relative to segment one includes:
Next: The next segment digs a little deeper into the monopolistic allegations surrounding Big Tech, including how we got to this point, some associated consequences, and what might be done about it.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Welcome to the Big Tech and Artificial Intelligence series. Segment 1 is the beginning of the Big Tech section of the series and focuses on Big Tech’s dream and its actions to date.
My Takeaways:
What I have learned from reading the six books utilized in this section of the series and that are relative to segment one includes:
- The dream is an ultraistic one: One Global Village – a global community united by technology.
- In the dream’s quest, Big Tech has amassed incredible and unprecedented power.
- They have used that power to crush all semblances of competition, to control the media, select the news we read, and suggest the goods we buy.
- In the process they have compromised our privacy.
- They are today monopolistic in every sense of the word.
- Instead of uniting us, as is reflected in the dream, Big Tech has polarized us as never before into ideological gangs who smother dissent.
Next: The next segment digs a little deeper into the monopolistic allegations surrounding Big Tech, including how we got to this point, some associated consequences, and what might be done about it.
Happy Learning,
Harley
BIG TECH & AI – SEGMENT 1
BIG TECH ACTIONS & DREAM – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: The tech industry provides the starkest illustration of the rise in monopolistic power in the world today. Ninety percent of the searches conducted everywhere on the planet are performed on a single search engine: Google. Ninety-five percent of all Internet-using adults under the age of 30 are on Facebook. Millennials spend twice as much time on You Tube as they do on all other video streaming services combined. Google and Facebook together receive around 90% of the world’s new ad spending, and Google’s and Apple’s operating systems run on all but 1% of all cellphones globally. Apple and Microsoft supply 95% of the world’s desktop operating systems. Amazon takes half of all U.S. e-commerce sales. The list goes on and on. Everything in Big Tech goes big or it doesn’t go at all – and the bigger it gets, the more likely it is to go bigger still.
Big Tech firms have used their size to crush or absorb competitors, to commandeer the personal data of their users, and to leverage it for their own benefit, in the form of highly targeted advertising. Big Tech firms have also offshored the most savings, $600 billion sitting in overseas accounts – circumventing the laws and regulations by which ordinary citizens must abide.
Over the past 20 years, Silicon Valley has given us amazing things from search to social media to portable devices with astounding computing power. And yet, these modern conveniences have come at a steep price: twitchy technology addiction that saps our time and productivity, the spread of misinformation and hate speech, predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable, a total loss of personal privacy, and the accumulation of more and more of the country’s wealth by a smaller and smaller subset of society. There was a single, inescapable problem: a business model based largely on keeping people online as long as possible and monetizing their attention. We don’t pay for most digital services in dollars – but we do pay dearly, with our data and attention. People are the resource that’s being monetized. We think we are the consumers. In fact, we are the product.
Source: Don’t Be Evil by Rana Foroohar (2021)
The monopolization of America is not some esoteric issue. Silicon Valley wields vast control over both our civic and our individual lives. Facebook has the power to determine which newspapers thrive and which go bankrupt; when Mark Zuckerberg changes his mind, he changes what we read and even how we think. Google has gained power so vast as to be nearly invisible; we accept the power of Google almost the way we accept the weather. Google can make or break any company or idea according to where it appears on a search engine.
Source: Break’em Up by Zephyr Teachout (2020)
It’s their algorithms that suggest the news we read, the goods we buy, the path we travel, the friends we invite into our circle. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our own role in determining the human path. Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read. The biggest tech companies are, among other things, the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to sort the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market. Such dominance endows these companies with the ability to remake the markets they control. Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news through social media, and most of it via Facebook. This has place media in a state of abject financial dependence on tech companies. To survive, the media lost track of their values.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (2017)
You should be deeply concerned about corporations being able to shut down political opposition. The democratic process has evolved over centuries to stop politicians from imposing their policies without public debate, judicial review, or other checks and balances. By turning to corporations to do their bidding, politicians aim to bypass that time-honored process.
When tech giants control the means of competition, we no longer have a free market. We have an oligopoly economy, dominated by a few giant companies. We’re not talking about a telephone or railroad monopoly. The tech monopolies of today are far more dangerous. The product over which they have a monopoly is nothing as mundane as railroads or telephones – its us. It’s our personal information, our political viewpoints, our attention, and our content. A grim truth: the age of digital tyranny is here.
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari (2020)
Big tech wants to transform America, that’s clear; it wants to remake our society in its image. Up until a century ago, most Americans regarded monopoly and corporate concentration with profound distrust. The founders associated it with aristocracy, and they believed aristocracy was a death sentence for republics.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (2021)
ECONOMIC GLOBALISM – A NEW WORLD ORDER: In Big Tech, liberal globalism found its ultimate champions. These were companies based in the U.S. but avowedly multinational in character. They competed in the American market but saw it as secondary to global business. They produced almost nothing, paid next to nothing in U.S. taxes, made virtually no significant capital investments relative to their profits, and extracted nearly all their value as economic rents from a customer base held hostage to their monopoly control. And then there was their anti-competitive conduct, their years-long, billion-dollar efforts to buy out competitors, throttle innovation, take what wasn’t theirs, and profit off of other people’s work.
What made the platforms work was not a physical product, but the closely guarded algorithms. And those needed data. They needed information on a mass scale, millions and billions of data points. The more data, the better the algorithm; the better the algorithm, the more profitable the advertising and sales. And obviously the bigger and more global the audience the better. Tech’s digital nature meant it could expand into more and more markets without needing to build costly factories or hire costly workers. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. This was progress, globalization style. In the 2000s and 2010s. Facebook, Google, and Apple all desperately sought access to China’s domestic market. Apple had the most success. This was the globalized corporate liberal economy at full throttle, selling our American production, compromising American data, censoring on behalf of Communists, and courting dictators, all for market domination. And then there was what Big Tech was willing to do to maintain the market power it already had.
Google wanted all search on the Internet, for any product or service to run through its search platform. Google wanted total control, so it targeted small, recalcitrant little platforms for elimination and then cut a few corners. In 2017, the European Union fined Google 2.42 billion euro for its anticompetitive conduct. In 2018, the European Commission fined Google another whopping 4.34 billion euro for anti-competition violations related to its Android phone and operating systems. The European Union eventually fined Google for its advertising misbehavior to the tune of 1.5 billion euro, concluding the company’s conduct was, once again, anti-competitive and contrary to law. Based on this evidence the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation of Google in 2019, along with all fifty state attorney generals.
Google may have been the most flagrant miscreant, but Facebook was no slouch. The titan of social media achieved market dominance by promising users something it later systematically denied them, privacy, and it maintained that dominance by purchasing would-be competitors. Facebook became adept at doing just the opposite of what it promised its users. It became an expert in surveillance. Indeed, in 2012 Facebook agreed to settle a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into multiple privacy violations, including allegations that the company had changed privacy settings for users without their consent, allowed applications more access to user information than Facebook has disclosed, misled users about the degree to which the customer privacy controls actually limited Facebook’s access to data, and shared personal data with advertisers after telling users it wouldn’t. Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion in fines for violating the earlier consent decree. Privacy had been a key component of Facebook’s competitive strategy, but it had been a lie.
Amazon was already notorious for forcing its sellers to agree never to offer lower prices at other outlet or on other platforms. Amazon was known to employ ruthless tactics to stamp out online start-ups, especially those offering staple items.
In practice, the Big Tech led age of economic globalism has weakened democracy rather than strengthened it. It has done so by eroding the standing of those Americans once thought central to the republic – working-and middle-class Americans. It exported many of their jobs, limited their future prospects, and left their towns and neighborhoods to wither. The laboring class would no longer control the economy, no longer define the interests of the nation, no longer practice self-government in any meaningful sense. No, the corporate elite would manage it all now, control it all – and look after America’s (former) workers as their wards.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (2021).
BIG TECH’S DREAM: The business plans of the most spectacularly successful firms in history, Google and Facebook, are all about wiring the world into one big network – a network where individuals work together, in a spirit of altruism, to share information. In the end the technologists’ disdain for authority was really just a stance, an emotionally gratifying one, and it wasn’t the meat of the vision. The more important thing was the wholeness, one global village.
The type of dream: the network – the global community united by technology – would begin to melt the difference that separate us. Facebook puts it this way: “By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.”
But we know this is an illusion. Facebook leads us to a destination that is the precise opposite of its proclaimed idea. Facebook’s algorithms supply us with the material that we like to read and will feel moved to share. The algorithms unwittingly supply readers with texts and videos that merely confirm deeply felt beliefs and biases; the algorithms suppress contrary opinions that might agitate a user. Liberals are deluged with liberal opinions; vegetarians are presented with endless vegetarian agitprop; the alt-right is fed alt-right garbage; and so on. Facebook shields us from the sort of challenging disagreement that might change our minds or help us to better understand the views of our fellow citizens.
This sort of consensus deadens disagreement and strangles originality. This is true of our politics. Our era is defined by polarization, warring ideological gangs that yield no ground. Division, however, isn’t the root cause of our unworkable system. There are many causes, but a primary problem is conformism. A hive mind is an intellectually incapacitated one, with diminished ability to sort fact from fiction, with a bias toward evidence that confirms the party line. Facebook has managed to achieve consensus, but not quite as promised. Instead of drawing the world together, the power of its network has helped tear it apart. Say all the ill things that can be said about our ideas of genius and originality – none are worse than this.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat by Franklin Foer (2017).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
BIG TECH ACTIONS & DREAM – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: The tech industry provides the starkest illustration of the rise in monopolistic power in the world today. Ninety percent of the searches conducted everywhere on the planet are performed on a single search engine: Google. Ninety-five percent of all Internet-using adults under the age of 30 are on Facebook. Millennials spend twice as much time on You Tube as they do on all other video streaming services combined. Google and Facebook together receive around 90% of the world’s new ad spending, and Google’s and Apple’s operating systems run on all but 1% of all cellphones globally. Apple and Microsoft supply 95% of the world’s desktop operating systems. Amazon takes half of all U.S. e-commerce sales. The list goes on and on. Everything in Big Tech goes big or it doesn’t go at all – and the bigger it gets, the more likely it is to go bigger still.
Big Tech firms have used their size to crush or absorb competitors, to commandeer the personal data of their users, and to leverage it for their own benefit, in the form of highly targeted advertising. Big Tech firms have also offshored the most savings, $600 billion sitting in overseas accounts – circumventing the laws and regulations by which ordinary citizens must abide.
Over the past 20 years, Silicon Valley has given us amazing things from search to social media to portable devices with astounding computing power. And yet, these modern conveniences have come at a steep price: twitchy technology addiction that saps our time and productivity, the spread of misinformation and hate speech, predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable, a total loss of personal privacy, and the accumulation of more and more of the country’s wealth by a smaller and smaller subset of society. There was a single, inescapable problem: a business model based largely on keeping people online as long as possible and monetizing their attention. We don’t pay for most digital services in dollars – but we do pay dearly, with our data and attention. People are the resource that’s being monetized. We think we are the consumers. In fact, we are the product.
Source: Don’t Be Evil by Rana Foroohar (2021)
The monopolization of America is not some esoteric issue. Silicon Valley wields vast control over both our civic and our individual lives. Facebook has the power to determine which newspapers thrive and which go bankrupt; when Mark Zuckerberg changes his mind, he changes what we read and even how we think. Google has gained power so vast as to be nearly invisible; we accept the power of Google almost the way we accept the weather. Google can make or break any company or idea according to where it appears on a search engine.
Source: Break’em Up by Zephyr Teachout (2020)
It’s their algorithms that suggest the news we read, the goods we buy, the path we travel, the friends we invite into our circle. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our own role in determining the human path. Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read. The biggest tech companies are, among other things, the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to sort the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market. Such dominance endows these companies with the ability to remake the markets they control. Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news through social media, and most of it via Facebook. This has place media in a state of abject financial dependence on tech companies. To survive, the media lost track of their values.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (2017)
You should be deeply concerned about corporations being able to shut down political opposition. The democratic process has evolved over centuries to stop politicians from imposing their policies without public debate, judicial review, or other checks and balances. By turning to corporations to do their bidding, politicians aim to bypass that time-honored process.
When tech giants control the means of competition, we no longer have a free market. We have an oligopoly economy, dominated by a few giant companies. We’re not talking about a telephone or railroad monopoly. The tech monopolies of today are far more dangerous. The product over which they have a monopoly is nothing as mundane as railroads or telephones – its us. It’s our personal information, our political viewpoints, our attention, and our content. A grim truth: the age of digital tyranny is here.
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari (2020)
Big tech wants to transform America, that’s clear; it wants to remake our society in its image. Up until a century ago, most Americans regarded monopoly and corporate concentration with profound distrust. The founders associated it with aristocracy, and they believed aristocracy was a death sentence for republics.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (2021)
ECONOMIC GLOBALISM – A NEW WORLD ORDER: In Big Tech, liberal globalism found its ultimate champions. These were companies based in the U.S. but avowedly multinational in character. They competed in the American market but saw it as secondary to global business. They produced almost nothing, paid next to nothing in U.S. taxes, made virtually no significant capital investments relative to their profits, and extracted nearly all their value as economic rents from a customer base held hostage to their monopoly control. And then there was their anti-competitive conduct, their years-long, billion-dollar efforts to buy out competitors, throttle innovation, take what wasn’t theirs, and profit off of other people’s work.
What made the platforms work was not a physical product, but the closely guarded algorithms. And those needed data. They needed information on a mass scale, millions and billions of data points. The more data, the better the algorithm; the better the algorithm, the more profitable the advertising and sales. And obviously the bigger and more global the audience the better. Tech’s digital nature meant it could expand into more and more markets without needing to build costly factories or hire costly workers. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. This was progress, globalization style. In the 2000s and 2010s. Facebook, Google, and Apple all desperately sought access to China’s domestic market. Apple had the most success. This was the globalized corporate liberal economy at full throttle, selling our American production, compromising American data, censoring on behalf of Communists, and courting dictators, all for market domination. And then there was what Big Tech was willing to do to maintain the market power it already had.
Google wanted all search on the Internet, for any product or service to run through its search platform. Google wanted total control, so it targeted small, recalcitrant little platforms for elimination and then cut a few corners. In 2017, the European Union fined Google 2.42 billion euro for its anticompetitive conduct. In 2018, the European Commission fined Google another whopping 4.34 billion euro for anti-competition violations related to its Android phone and operating systems. The European Union eventually fined Google for its advertising misbehavior to the tune of 1.5 billion euro, concluding the company’s conduct was, once again, anti-competitive and contrary to law. Based on this evidence the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation of Google in 2019, along with all fifty state attorney generals.
Google may have been the most flagrant miscreant, but Facebook was no slouch. The titan of social media achieved market dominance by promising users something it later systematically denied them, privacy, and it maintained that dominance by purchasing would-be competitors. Facebook became adept at doing just the opposite of what it promised its users. It became an expert in surveillance. Indeed, in 2012 Facebook agreed to settle a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into multiple privacy violations, including allegations that the company had changed privacy settings for users without their consent, allowed applications more access to user information than Facebook has disclosed, misled users about the degree to which the customer privacy controls actually limited Facebook’s access to data, and shared personal data with advertisers after telling users it wouldn’t. Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion in fines for violating the earlier consent decree. Privacy had been a key component of Facebook’s competitive strategy, but it had been a lie.
Amazon was already notorious for forcing its sellers to agree never to offer lower prices at other outlet or on other platforms. Amazon was known to employ ruthless tactics to stamp out online start-ups, especially those offering staple items.
In practice, the Big Tech led age of economic globalism has weakened democracy rather than strengthened it. It has done so by eroding the standing of those Americans once thought central to the republic – working-and middle-class Americans. It exported many of their jobs, limited their future prospects, and left their towns and neighborhoods to wither. The laboring class would no longer control the economy, no longer define the interests of the nation, no longer practice self-government in any meaningful sense. No, the corporate elite would manage it all now, control it all – and look after America’s (former) workers as their wards.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (2021).
BIG TECH’S DREAM: The business plans of the most spectacularly successful firms in history, Google and Facebook, are all about wiring the world into one big network – a network where individuals work together, in a spirit of altruism, to share information. In the end the technologists’ disdain for authority was really just a stance, an emotionally gratifying one, and it wasn’t the meat of the vision. The more important thing was the wholeness, one global village.
The type of dream: the network – the global community united by technology – would begin to melt the difference that separate us. Facebook puts it this way: “By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.”
But we know this is an illusion. Facebook leads us to a destination that is the precise opposite of its proclaimed idea. Facebook’s algorithms supply us with the material that we like to read and will feel moved to share. The algorithms unwittingly supply readers with texts and videos that merely confirm deeply felt beliefs and biases; the algorithms suppress contrary opinions that might agitate a user. Liberals are deluged with liberal opinions; vegetarians are presented with endless vegetarian agitprop; the alt-right is fed alt-right garbage; and so on. Facebook shields us from the sort of challenging disagreement that might change our minds or help us to better understand the views of our fellow citizens.
This sort of consensus deadens disagreement and strangles originality. This is true of our politics. Our era is defined by polarization, warring ideological gangs that yield no ground. Division, however, isn’t the root cause of our unworkable system. There are many causes, but a primary problem is conformism. A hive mind is an intellectually incapacitated one, with diminished ability to sort fact from fiction, with a bias toward evidence that confirms the party line. Facebook has managed to achieve consensus, but not quite as promised. Instead of drawing the world together, the power of its network has helped tear it apart. Say all the ill things that can be said about our ideas of genius and originality – none are worse than this.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat by Franklin Foer (2017).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 1l_big_tech_actions_and_dream_--_segment_1.pdf |