The Internet Is Not the Answer (2 page)

Had Churchill joined the Birches’ social experiment, he certainly would have found himself among some of the world’s richest and best-connected people. The club opened in October 2013 with an exclusive list of founding members that reads like a who’s who of what
Vanity Fair
calls the “New Establishment,” including the CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom; former Facebook president Sean Parker; and the serial Internet entrepreneur Trevor Traina, the owner of the most expensive house in San Francisco, a $35 million mansion on “Billionaire’s Row.”
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It’s all too easy, of course, to ridicule the Birches’ unclub and their failed social experiment in downtown San Francisco. But unfortunately, it isn’t all that funny. “The bigger issue at hand,” as the
New Yorker
’s Anisse Gross reminds us about the Battery, is that “San Francisco itself is turning into a private, exclusive club”
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for wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Like its secret poker room, the Battery is a private, exclusive club within a private, exclusive club. It encapsulates what the
New York Times
’ Timothy Egan describes as the “dystopia by the Bay”—a San Francisco that is “a one-dimensional town for the 1 percent” and “an allegory of how the rich have changed America for the worse.”
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The Birches’ one-dimensional club is a 58,000-square-foot allegory for the increasingly sharp economic inequities in San Francisco. But there’s an even
bigger issue
at stake here than the invisible wall in San Francisco separating the few “haves” from the many “have-nots,” including the city’s more than five thousand homeless people. The Battery may be San Francisco’s biggest experiment, but there’s a much bolder social and economic experiment going on in the world outside the club’s tinted windows.

This experiment is the creation of a networked society. “The most significant revolution of the 21st century so far is not political. It is the information technology revolution,” explains the Cambridge University political scientist David Runciman.
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We are the brink of a foreign land—a data-saturated place that the British writer John Lanchester calls a “new kind of human society.”
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“The single most important trend in the world today is the fact that globalization and the information technology revolution have gone to a whole new level,” adds the
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman. Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones, Friedman says, “the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected.”
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Runciman, Lanchester, and Friedman are all describing the same great economic, cultural, and, above all, intellectual transformation. “The Internet,” Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, notes, “is not a technology; it’s a belief system.”
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Everything and everyone are being connected in a network revolution that is radically disrupting every aspect of today’s world. Education, transportation, health care, finance, retail, and manufacturing are now being reinvented by Internet-based products such as self-driving cars, wearable computing devices, 3-D printers, personal health monitors, massive open online courses (MOOCs), peer-to-peer services like Airbnb and Uber, and currencies like Bitcoin. Revolutionary entrepreneurs like Sean Parker and Kevin Systrom are building this networked society on our behalf. They haven’t asked our permission, of course. But then the idea of consent is foreign, even immoral, to many of these architects of what the Columbia University historian Mark Lilla calls our “libertarian age.”

“The libertarian dogma of our time,” Lilla says, “is turning our polities, economies and cultures upside down.”
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Yes. But the real dogma of our libertarian age lies in glamorizing the turning of things
upside down
, in rejecting the very idea of “permission,” in establishing a cult of disruption. Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, the self-described “front page of the Internet,” which, in 2013, amassed 56 billion page views from the 40 million pages of unedited content created by 3 million users,
¹⁶
even wrote a manifesto against permission. In
Without Their Permission
,
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Ohanian boasts that the twenty-first century will be “made,” not “managed” by entrepreneurs like himself who use the disruptive qualities of the Internet for the benefit of the public good. But like so much of Internet’s mob-produced, user-generated content, Reddit’s value to this public good is debatable. The site’s most popular series of posts in 2013, for example, concerned its unauthorized misidentification of the Boston Marathon bomber, a public disservice that the
Atlantic
termed a “misinformation disaster.”
¹⁸

Like Michael and Xochi Birch’s San Francisco unclub, the Internet is presented to us by naïve entrepreneurs as a diverse, transparent, and egalitarian place—a place that eschews tradition and democratizes social and economic opportunity. This view of the Internet encapsulates what Mark Lilla calls the “new kind of hubris” of our libertarian age, with its trinitarian faith in democracy, the free market, and individualism.
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Such a distorted view of the Internet is common in Silicon Valley, where doing good and becoming rich are seen as indistinguishable and where disruptive companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber are celebrated for their supposedly public-spirited destruction of archaic rules and institutions. Google, for example, still prides itself as being an “uncompany,” a corporation without the traditional structures of power—even though the $400 billion leviathan is, as of June 2014, the world’s second most valuable corporation. It’s active and in some cases brutally powerful in industries as varied as online search, advertising, publishing, artificial intelligence, news, mobile operating systems, wearable computing, Internet browsers, video, and even—with its fledgling self-driving cars—the automobile industry.

In the digital world, everyone wants to be an unbusiness. Amazon, the largest online store in the world and a notorious bully of small publishing companies, still thinks of itself as the scrappy “unstore.” Internet companies like the Amazon-owned shoe store Zappos, and Medium, an online magazine founded by billionaire Twitter founder Ev Williams, are run on so-called holacratic principles—a Silicon Valley version of communism where there are no hierarchies, except, of course, when it comes to wages and stock ownership. Then there are the so-called unconferences of Web publishing magnate Tim O’Reilly—exclusive retreats called the Friends of O’Reilly (FOO) Camp—where nobody is formally in charge and the agenda is set by its carefully curated group of wealthy, young, white, and male technologists. But, like the Birches’ club with its 3,000-bottle wine cellar boasting a ceiling constructed from old bottles, massively powerful and wealthy multinationals like Google and Amazon, and exclusively “open” events for the new elite like FOO Camp, aren’t quite as revolutionary as they’d have us believe. The new wine in Silicon Valley may be digital, but—when it comes to power and wealth—we’ve tasted this kind of blatant hypocrisy many times before in history.

“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” the science fiction writer William Gibson once said. That unevenly distributed future is networked society. In today’s digital experiment, the world is being transformed into a winner-take-all, upstairs-downstairs kind of society. This networked future is characterized by an astonishingly unequal distribution of economic value and power in almost every industry that the Internet is disrupting. According to the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, this inequality is “one of the biggest shifts in power between people and big institutions, perhaps the biggest one yet of the twenty-first century.
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Like the Battery, it is marketed in the Birches’ feel-good language of inclusion, transparency, and openness; but, like the five-storied pleasure palace, this new world is actually exclusive, opaque, and inegalitarian. Rather than a “public service,” Silicon Valley’s architects of the future are building a privatized networked economy, a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except its powerful, wealthy owners. Like the Battery, the Internet, with its empty promise of making the world a fairer place with more opportunity for more people, has had the unintended consequence of actually making the world less equal and reducing rather than increasing employment and general economic well-being.

Of course, the Internet is not all bad. It has done a tremendous amount of good for society and for individuals, particularly in terms of connecting families, friends, and work colleagues around the world. As a 2014 Pew Report showed, 90% of Americans think that the Web has been good for them personally—with 76% believing it has been good for society.
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It is true that most of the personal lives of the estimated 3 billion Internet users (more than 40% of the world’s population) have been radically transformed by the incredible convenience of email, social media, e-commerce, and mobile apps. Yes, we all rely on and even love our ever-shrinking and increasingly powerful mobile communications devices. It is true that the Internet has played an important and generally positive role in popular political movements around the world—such as the Occupy movement in the United States, or the network-driven reform movements in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and Brazil. Yes, the Internet—from Wikipedia to Twitter to Google to the excellent websites of professionally curated newspapers like the
New York Times
and the
Guardian—
can, if used critically, be a source of great enlightenment. And I certainly couldn’t have written this book without the miracles of email and the Web. And yes, the mobile Web has enormous potential to radically transform the lives of the two and a half billion new Internet users who, according to the Swedish mobile operator Ericsson, will be on the network by 2018. Indeed, the app economy is already beginning to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pervasive problems on the planet—such as mapping clean water stations in Kenya and providing access to credit for entrepreneurs in India.
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But, as this book will show, the hidden negatives outweigh the self-evident positives and those 76% of Americans who believe that the Internet has been good for society may not be seeing the bigger picture. Take, for example, the issue of network privacy, the most persistently corrosive aspect of the “big data” world that the Internet is inventing. If San Francisco is “dystopia by the Bay,” then the Internet is rapidly becoming dystopia on the network.

“We are fans of the village pub where everyone knows everyone,” Michael Birch says. But our networked society—envisioned by Marshall McLuhan as a “global village” in which we return to the oral tradition of the preliterate age—has already become that claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community where there are no longer either secrets or anonymity. Everyone, from the National Security Agency to Silicon Valley data companies, does indeed seem to
know
everything about us already. Internet companies like Google and Facebook know us particularly well—even more intimately, so they boast, than we know ourselves.

No wonder Xochi Birch offers her privileged, wealthy members “privacy” from the data-infested world outside the Battery. In an “Internet of Everything” shadowed by the constant surveillance of an increasingly intelligent network—in a future of smart cars, smart clothing, smart cities, and smart intelligence networks—I’m afraid that the Battery members may be the only people who will be able to afford to escape living in a brightly lit village where nothing is ever hidden or forgotten and where, as data expert Julia Angwin argues, online privacy is already becoming a “luxury good.”
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Winston Churchill was right. We do indeed shape our buildings and thereafter they have the power to shape us. Marshall McLuhan put it slightly differently, but with even more relevance to our networked age. Riffing off Churchill’s 1944 speech, the Canadian media visionary said that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
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McLuhan died in 1980, nine years before a young English physicist named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. But McLuhan correctly predicted that electronic communication tools would change things as profoundly as Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized the fifteenth-century world. These electronic tools, McLuhan predicted, will replace the top-down, linear technology of industrial society with a distributed electronic network shaped by continuous feedback loops of information. “We become what we behold,”
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he predicted. And these networked tools, McLuhan warned, will rewire us so completely that we might be in danger of becoming their unwitting slave rather than their master.

Today, as the Internet reinvents society, the writing is on the wall for us all. Those words on that black marble slab outside the Battery are a chilling preface to the biggest social and economic experiment of our age. None of us—from university professors, photographers, corporate lawyers, and factory laborers to taxi drivers, fashion designers, hoteliers, musicians, and retailers—is immune to the havoc wreaked by this network upheaval. It changes everything.