by Daniel Greenfield
How Big Tech’s obsession with control is tearing us apart.
Of the 10 wealthiest men and women in America, 8 of them made their
money in the tech industry. Of these, only 3 made their fortunes from
companies that predated the internet era. The rest made it the
'new-fashioned' way, by developing and deploying internet platforms.
The great disruption of the internet made college dropouts into the
wealthiest men in America, made the West Coast, for the first time, the
equal of the East, and transformed the economy from manufacturing
tangible items to reselling access to data and outsourcing
manufacturing.
The men of the great disruption were libertarians, if not
necessarily by politics then by cultural inclination. The original
disrupters had been engineers and hackers who didn’t fit into conformist
environments like IBM and were chasing the dream of doing their own
thing. They set up shop in garages and basements, in small California,
Oregon, and Washington towns, and a few cities, dressed casually,
watched Star Trek, dreamed utopian ideals, and were bad at business.
The new disrupters were less interested in hardware or software
applications than in using the power of the network to suck up the data
of our interactions and turn it into a service. Their insights, building
a search engine around link popularity, or a college face book by
grabbing pictures of women, might be trivial, but were part of an
emergent vision of the new data order.
The original disruptors had been concerned with empowering the end
user to command the system, but the new disrupters were reversing the
process that had taken users from terminals to personal computers,
instead reducing a multitude of devices to terminals leaking data that
made them easier to profitably manipulate. The early internet was
empowering, but the internet of the Google, Amazon, and Facebook era is
disempowering by design. It works by limiting your options and then
using what it knows about you to push you in the direction it wants you
to go.
Early computers had practically demanded programming skills. The new setup programs you.
As companies went public and college kids became billionaires, they
stopped being disrupters and became concerned with maintaining the new
order that they were building.
Every revolution ends with a pledge to make sure that no other revolution will happen again.
Google, whose empire was built on search because Yahoo, Netscape,
Microsoft, and an array of other companies that allowed it to disrupt
its way to power had failed to account for the importance of search, has
spent a generation working its way from inside out, by building a
browser and then an OS and devices, so that no upstart can do to it what
it did to the industry.
The Google vision of its devices running its operating systems with
its browser and search boxes built in is not disruptive: it’s the
creation of a monopoly built to prevent another Google. Search, the core
of Google’s business, is its worst maintained because having
monopolized it, its focus is on expanding its hegemony outward to the
farthest limits of the data economy.
The same is true of other Big Tech titans who exploited a niche,
disrupted the existing setup, and then transformed their companies into
the very thing they had been struggling against.
The Big Tech challenge was to manage the essential disruptiveness of
the industry, stabilizing their power base, while finding other
vulnerable points in the country to disrupt. And when there were fewer
economic vulnerabilities to disrupt, they turned to the cultural and the
political ones.
Like every past ruling class, the new one set out to remake the
country in its own image by disrupting other sectors of society, some,
such as politics, consciously, while others, such as culture,
unconsciously, out of noblesse oblige, lust for power, and a sense of
insecurity.
Every previous national transformation had come from ever narrower
areas of the country and the great disruption had been the narrowest
yet. The old visionary ideas of computer literacy, long since an
outdated term, had given way to ‘learn to code’ as an obsolescence
taunt. Most Americans would not be included in the revolution, not
because they couldn’t be, but because the revolution was far too small
to encompass more than a fraction of the population.
The economic momentum of the new disrupters was built on stock booms
that were powered by the conviction of investors that these new titans
would keep on growing until they took it all over. If investors thought
otherwise, there would be 5 or 8 other wealthiest men in the United
States. The vast frontiers of the computer revolution had passed through
the range war stage and were gated off by giant monopolies using
investor cash to strangle each other and their industry.
Compared to the challenge of disrupting the old economy, disrupting
politics appeared simple, but the problem was that, unlike computers,
the disrupters were also the thing they were disrupting. Society had no
artificially neat separations between man and machine, code and flesh,
and the disrupters were amplifying a cycle of disruption that was also
disrupting them.
Big Tech had worked to exercise political power to stave off the very reaction it was inciting.
The disrupters turned leftward because from the commanding heights
of the economy they tended to see society as a machine that was broken
and needed fixing. Having few political ideas of their own, they adopted
the leftist politics of their surrounding environment. Its reduction of
society to a machine and men as moving parts in need of balancing out
appealed to them.
The old disrupters had seen men and women on their own terms,
struggling to reach their dreams, but that perspective, from the ground
level of the world, had been lost to them.
The new disrupters could only envision their kind of world, diverse,
urban, and with a mostly useless population whose grievances and
inability to contribute to the new world order would have to be met with
welfare checks and patient lessons on the dangers of intolerance.
And, most of all, control.
The original computer revolution had been built on freedom, but the
titanic internet platforms depended on control. The control was meant to
be unseen. The user would be manipulated into thinking it was his idea
to click on that link, watch that show, search for that keyword, and buy
that product by a series of invisible constraints and prompts to
maintain the illusion of control.
The illusion of control, the myth of user agency, was at the heart
of the new internet of platforms. The end user had never had less
control over his virtual environment, even as it assured him that he
could do anything he wanted. Once the user rebelled against the
algorithm, the illusion of freedom collapsed leaving a choice between
obedience or loss of access.
The system seemed to work as Big Tech amassed vast amounts of wealth
and power, but on a social level, it was a disaster, albeit one that
was invisible to the manipulators. In the tech industry, the engineers
often don’t understand the end users. And vice versa. And the old
conflict over system design was now playing out on the vast scale of
human civilization.
The disrupters had broken the economy and the social system, and
began trying to put it back together on their terms, buying up the media
and elections, censoring the platforms they had built, bringing to an
end the last of the open information frontier, and building a new order
oriented around the technocratic imperatives of managing a global
society. But the more they tried to control the human element, the more
the societies began to fall apart and turn on them.
Greater control did not lead to greater trust, but an almost
incoherent mistrust in which conspiracy theories became the one thing
that everyone was coming to believe. The theories were mostly wrong, but
in their own inchoate way, they were right because there was a loss of
freedoms, because most of what the media broadcast was a lie, and there
was an agenda, and though many of the conclusions were wrong, they were
reacting to a real loss of agency.
Conspiracy theories thrive when people lose control over their
lives, but can’t localize the blame. Big Tech built the conspiracy
theories that it keeps trying to rein in by conspiring to control the
public without understanding, as most tyrannies don’t, that it is the
cause of its own problems.
The disrupters envision a society of useless people with few
functions except binging Netflix originals and commenting on photos on
Facebook to be subsidized with welfare checks so they can pay their
subscription fees, click on ads, and buy Chinese junk from Amazon. But a
welfare state is a signal that there is no future and it’s time to
fight over the scraps that can be seized.
There’s no better formula for racial tensions, street violence, and
bitter multicultural infighting than the combination of a welfare state
and diversity. American diversity worked to the extent that there was
upward mobility. When social mobility stalled, as it occasionally did in
cities, brutal violence soon followed by people who had nowhere to go
and nothing to live for.
The disrupters had wanted to find a middle ground short of full
Marxism, but instead they were propelling the conditions for both
leftist radicalism and a rightward reaction, while striving to hold on
to their power and remake the world along the lines that they thought
were best.
Their disruption of politics, childishly simple for men and women
with enormous wealth and data insights, who could find a dozen ways to
hack a system, didn’t move the country their way, but oscillated it back
and forth between the extremes that were breaking it. Trying to control
the country, they were crashing it instead, because organic life
reacts, instead of waiting for input.
Unlike computers, organic life isn’t passive. And people are the least passive of all creatures.
The men and women who had been disrupters wanted a predictable world
they could control, but were instead bringing into being an
uncontrollable world that was reacting to their efforts, as society
often does, the way that a body’s immune system reacts to a viral
infection. Society was responding to Big Tech’s efforts at control by
raising the temperature to kill the controlling virus.
And in the process it was wreaking the kind of havoc on society that a fever wreaks on the body.
The great disruption had interconnected the world in unprecedented
ways. This vast interconnection had made the world more efficient in
some ways, at the expense of becoming more interdependent and more
vulnerable to disruptions. The internet had been built, in its earliest
days, to allow the command and control functions of the military to
survive a nuclear war. But the extension of the internet into everything
made society less likely to survive.
What had been a means to an end had become its own end. Being online
had become its own purpose. Big Tech companies existed to furnish that
world with convenient services. The old hacker dream of a digital polis
had become real and in its realization had killed the dream. A wired
society wasn’t utopia, but a dystopia throbbing with the raw nerves of a
lost frontier.
The disrupter elite were the first to leave their own digital
prison, keeping their kids away from the services that had made them
billionaires, and trying to disconnect from their connections. They took
up eastern philosophies, hiked, bought homes in the woods in different
states, and tried to get in touch with something real only to find that
they carried the unreality inside.
Power is a practical and a philosophical problem. The old disrupters
had mastered machines and then come to think of the world as a big
machine. The new disrupters had layered machiavellian interfaces over
that old heresy, making a collectivist machine with a human face. But
the human face was stuck in the uncanny valley, both real and unreal,
and so were they.
The new disrupters had reduced all of society to interfaces,
external visual inputs that had originally been meant to allow the user
to manipulate the world within the machine, but that had been reversed
and were being used by the machine to manipulate the user. And in doing
so, they had made the world an unreal place and raised generations of
users to feel manipulated by an illusory world, lashing out with the one
thing that no machine could cope with, unreason.
The great disruption of machines was meeting at last the great
disruption of man. And society was shattering in the collision between
the real and the unreal. It is no coincidence that the acolytes of the
disrupters have adopted science as their slogan. They often claim to
follow the science or the data, as if these were oracles instead of
ideas only as valid as their proofs.
Human beings need to believe in things and commit to things, in
order to feel real. And the men and women who built an unreal world had
come to believe in that world as its own moral order. The world of the
disrupters is not a world of science, no more than a warlord with a gun
is an engineer because his power comes from a mechanical device, but it
is a faith in the source of their power. And that power is disruption.
It can in the end, like a gun, only disrupt.
The unreal disrupters of the real strive for control, but their
control is, like everything about the unreal world they made, an
illusion. They can disrupt what is real, but like all the disrupters of
ideas who came before them, all that they replace it with is an
unreality that does not stand. The revolutions collapse and what comes
after them is not the future, but the return of the past.
Photo: Marketwatch
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/great-disruption-daniel-greenfield/
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