A couple of months ago, I contributed a piece on technology for the Anti-Capitalist Meetup.
In short, we all share in the benefits of technology in our daily lives. In the meantime, a few people grow extremely wealthy while most have suffered or stagnated economically.
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A key point is that the direction won’t change until we make it change.
From there, I added with questions about how to proceed, questions that will remain until history is written. There are many possibilities, effective strategies remain to be determined. Part of deciding on a path is understanding the terrain. Here, I will examine the economic and political terrain we are traversing in technology. Spoiler, it’s not new.
In the comments, and since then, I have offered to follow up with a piece on libertarian influences on technology development, corporate culture and industry investment. Incidentally, I will, at time, follow the convention of generalizing about technology in referring to a center of technological innovation, Silicon Valley. However, neither the innovation nor culture is geographically limited. Pardon my inaccurate shorthand, and apologies to Silicon Valley progressives.
There is a well-known libertarian element in Silicon Valley. I believe that it is powerful, and has impacted developments in the industry. They have their rights too. We don’t need to dehumanize them and publicly ask whether you are or have ever been a member of the Libertarian party. That would be foolish, cruel and counterproductive. Still, we can talk about it and oppose libertarianism. I, for one, do not see deregulation and free markets providing for disrupted industries and the masses of pauperized technology users. As far as I can tell, libertarianism will lead to increasing inequality and suffering. That is why I oppose it.
Be that as it may, I have come to think that there is more to Silicon Valley disruption than libertarianism. There are many problems in the technology sector that can’t simply be written off as libertarian failings.
As in other industries, women are not treated equally. In tech companies, women are paid less for equivalent work, and are underrepresented in the work force, particularly in board positions. To be fair, acknowledging this is a small step. Companies appear to be trying to add more women. Google disputes that it is really that unfair, and Apple now reports equal pay.
Beyond that unfairness lie scandals that further add to the reputation of sexism and misogyny in Silicon Valley. These scandals suggest a sexist culture at multiple companies, including powerful venture capitalists.
This behavior is associated with tech companies that are disrupting one industry after another. While continuing the disruption of the music industry and destroying the livelihoods for middle class artists and technicians, they are in the midst of working over transportation and hospitality, and have their sights on health care and education. Nobody claims that these industries were perfect or that innovation is not warranted. One problem is that entire sectors are undercut by investors pouring money into companies that are often unprofitable for many years. We do not know how profitable these companies might be in the future, but the capital investment drives out existing competition that has provided wages for decades. Plus, this competition has unfairly taken advantage of regulations and taxes to outcompete existing companies while cheating on local revenue collection and regulations
But, that is not all. Tech companies are notorious for mining user data. They have unprecedented access to nearly every aspect of our lives, and they commodify that information. They buy and sell our personal data like it is any other good sold by companies in the past. Of course, data collection is not new, but today these efforts go well beyond anything seen in the past. Since personal information is their commodity, it remains to be seen how much privacy we are allowed in the future. Tech companies can now sell protecting our privacy, but how profitable can they be with increased limitations in their access to our personal information?
On final issue with tech companies, is that, like any hot business sector, it attracts unscrupulous types willing to live by fraud, as well as, assholes interested mostly in the money.
That was more than I expected to write about problems in tech company paradise. The point is that these problems can not all be attributed to libertarianism. Furthermore, while libertarians are certainly present in Silicon Valley, they are far from dominant. Over the last presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton received her share of tech support, and many workers in the tech sector also supported Sanders. Plus, libertarians might be toning down their fantasies a bit. Making statements about libertarian Silicon Valley is simplistic and likely covers only a fraction of the issues raised in this dominant and growing sector.
To make my points about how these issues are embedded far more deeply than Silicon Valley, we need to look back at history.
First, here are some quotes on the California gold rush.
Historian H.W. Brands
"California presented to people a new model for the American dream—one where the emphasis was on the ability to take risks, the willingness to gamble on the future."
Historian Richard White
"'Genocide' is a word I hesitate to use, but what happens in California is very close to genocide."
Patrick DeWitt
"This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of.”
Author Pete Hamill
“Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s."
Also, there are analogies between what is happening now, and the industrial revolution. That is too much to cover, but here is one excellent piece from DanRiker. One point is that just as government research and investment spur development of the internet, so too did the government catalyze the industrial revolution with assistance to railroad companies.
By the start of the 20th Century, American industry was dominated by mining, meatpacking, textiles, lumber, steel, oil, railroads, and heavy equipment manufacturing.
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But it was not the workers, immigrants from Europe, who benefited so much from the economic explosion as it was the company owners who grew fabulously wealthy while paying starvation wages. These “robber barons” were intent on maintaining their positions of great power and wealth.
And, there was disruption too. Here is one example.
This "mass production" had a devastating effect on the small local economy, hugely undercutting prices, watering down the quality of product and forcing the traditional Village Blacksmith as a worker in Iron, with his own shop in the village, to all but disappear.
In short, there are many parallels between the current tech revolution and previous economic disruptions. Technology presents new problems in areas such as privacy, but the underlying motivations seem to be historical. The pursuit of riches leads to disregard of those whose lives are being disrupted. Progress is good, but can we use some of the increased wealth to provide for the less fortunate. Of course, we have made tremendous progress in providing for the disadvantaged. Free markets need to be tempered with social welfare.
Libertarianism is not the solution, nor is it the root of Silicon Valley’s problems. At this point, it might be easy to blame human nature and make it seem intractable. However, we have made progress, and will continue to do so as long as we are free to discuss our problems, whether old or emerging.
To this end, we must acknowledge the possibility that the fundamentals of our economic system stimulate poor behavior. In other words, we should consider how capitalism is impacting the tech revolution and corporate cultures in Silicon Valley.
Is capitalism truly driving technological process, or is it causing more problems than it is solving by driving our entrepreneurs to act in greed and with insufficient regard to those they are hurting? Pursuit of profits and riches should not be the primary motivator of technological innovation. Slick commercials tell us how much the companies value people and our welfare, but the boards and shareholders often say the opposite.