The Internet Is Not the Answer (29 page)

Rather than the answer to our contemporary problems, the Internet, that human-computer symbiosis that J. C. R. Licklider believed “would save humanity,” is actually diminishing most aspects of our lives. Instead of creating more transparency, we have devices that make the invisible visible. Instead of a globally connected online citizen, we now have the selfie. Instead of the village pub, we have the Battery. Instead of a cultural cornucopia, we have a post–“Golden Mile of Vinyl” Berwick Street. Instead of a thriving economy, we have downtown Rochester, New York.

The Ministry of Truth is back in business. In Silicon Valley, everything is the opposite of what is claimed. The sharing economy is really the selfish economy; social media is, fact, antisocial; the “long tail” of cultural democracy is actually a long tale; “free” content is turning out to be shatteringly expensive; and the success of the Internet is, in truth, a huge failure.

Epic. Fucking. Fail.

At the FailCon cocktail party, I shared a drink with the two disheveled guys who’d been sitting next to me during Kalanick’s speech. “So, the Internet, is it working?” I asked them about the intergalactic computer network created by J. C. R. Licklider, Paul Baran, Bob Kahn, and Vint Cerf. “Has it been an unqualified success?”

“A
success
?” one of them of them repeated, glancing at me as if I’d just been whisked down to earth by an UberCHOPPER.

In a sense, perhaps, I had. It was a question so taken for granted at evangelical events like FailCon that, amid this technology crowd, I might as well have been speaking Sanskrit or Swahili. In Silicon Valley, everyone knows the answer. Their answer is an unregulated, hyperefficient platform like Airbnb for buyers and sellers. Their answer is the distributed system of capitalism being built, unregulated cab by cab, by Travis Kalanick. Their answer is a “lean startup” like WhatsApp that employs fifty-five people and sells for $19 billion. Their answer is data factories that turn us all into human billboards. Their answer is the Internet.

“It’s obviously been a success for all of us,” I explained, sweeping my hand around the room packed with fabulously wealthy failures. “But is the network the answer for everyone else? Is it making the world a better place?”

My question triggered a couple of lies that, while not quite in the same league as the FAILURE IS SUCCESS whopper, could still have been coined at the Ministry of Truth. Yes, they both affirmed, nodding their heads vigorously, the Internet
is
the answer.

“The Net gives power to the people,” one said, smiling broadly. “For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say, or buy anything.”

“Yeah, it’s the platform for equality,” the other added. “It allows everyone an equal share in our new abundance.”

The Internet gives
power
to the people? The Internet is the platform for
equality
? Neither of these disheveled guys knew anything about “the people” or “the platforms” outside Silicon Valley. They were the very kind of twenty-year-olds with cash in hand for whom Uber’s expensive private black limousine service was designed. Both had recently graduated from Stanford. Both worked at big data startups with insatiable appetites for collecting other people’s private information. Both were engineers of an increasingly
unequal
future, in which ordinary people will experience a scarcity, rather than an abundance of economic, political, and cultural power.

“That’s not true,” I said. “The Internet is a winner-take-all economy. It’s creating a two-tiered society.”

“Where’s the evidence?” one engineer responded. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Yeah, I’d like to see your data,” the other chimed in.

“Open your eyes,” I said, pointing at the bustling San Francisco street outside the hotel window. “There’s your
data
.”

The Alien Overlord Spaceships

Outside the San Francisco hotel, the future had arrived and, to paraphrase William Gibson, it was distributed most unequally. Uber limousines lined up outside the club to whisk Silicon Valley’s successful young failures around town. Cars from rival transportation networks hovered hopefully around the hotel, too—companies like Lyft, Sidecar, and the fleet of me-too mobile-ride-hailing startups trying to out-Uber Travis Kalanick’s $18 billion market leader. Some of the people scrambling for a living as networked drivers were themselves aspiring entrepreneurs with billion-dollar startup ideas of their own.
²⁷
So even in these unlicensed cabs, it was impossible to get away from the pitches for the next WhatsApp, Airbnb, or Uber, which pitches, sadly, were mostly just a glorified form of begging. “San Francisco,” as one observer about the digital gold rush dryly noted, is “full of people walking around with 1.2% of nothing.”
²⁸

The streets of San Francisco were also full of buses. Some were open-topped, red double-deckers filled with tourists snapping their Instagram moments of what appeared, to the naked eye, at least, to be a city with splendidly panoramic views of the Bay. A less romantic but equally vital feature of San Francisco was its public buses. These were the traditional municipal vehicles, with bright orange Muni logos painted on their sides, a service financed by San Francisco’s transit authority, which, for a small fee, allows anyone to ride on them. Their windows were entirely transparent. These Muni buses are what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors would probably dismiss as “legacy products.” They now seem like a relic of mass labor’s “golden age,” a halcyon time when paid workers traveled to their jobs on publicly subsidized vehicles.

“I don’t know why old people ride Muni. If I were old, I’d just take Uber,” the
Los Angeles Times
reports one San Francisco techie saying to his friends after reluctantly giving up his seat to an old lady on a Muni bus.
²⁹
Perhaps old ladies take Muni, I would have explained, because they can afford the $0.75 senior’s fare, whereas Travis Kalanick’s Uber service, with its surge pricing, could cost them $94 for a two-mile ride.

And then there’s what the San Francisco–based writer Rebecca Solnit dubs, collectively, “the Google Bus.”
³⁰
These are sleeker and more powerful buses, menacingly anonymous in their absence of any identifying marks, with the same kind of opaque, tinted windows that masked the Battery from the prying eyes of the outside world. Unlike the Muni’s legacy buses, the Google Bus isn’t for everyone. It is a private bus designed to transport tech workers from their expensive San Francisco homes down to the offices of Google, Facebook, and Apple. Google alone runs more than one hundred of these daily buses, which make 380 trips to its Googleplex office in Mountain View.
³¹
These luxurious, Wi-Fi-enabled private buses—which, in total, make around four thousand daily scheduled pickups at public Bay Area bus stops—have been superimposed on top of San Francisco’s public transit grid by tech companies that have even begun to employ private security guards to protect their worker-passengers from irate local residents.
³²

The Google Bus has sparked such animosity from locals that, in December 2013, protesters in West Oakland attacked one of them, smashing a rear window and so outraging Tom Perkins that he compared the glass breaking to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.
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And, as if to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, 2014 is the year that these demonstrations have become more politically organized and coherent. They are even spreading outside the Bay Area, with antigentrification protests taking place in February 2014 in Seattle against private Microsoft buses.
³⁴

Kristallnacht it certainly isn’t. Rather than racial genocide, the Bay Area’s problem is the ever-widening economic inequality between tech workers and everyone else. In many ways, failure is as endemic here as it is in Rochester. “After decades in which the country has become less and less equal,” mourns the Palo Alto–born-and-bred George Packer, “Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places on earth.”
³⁵
Figures from the Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin suggest that the Valley has actually hemorrhaged jobs since the dot-com crash of 2000, losing some forty thousand jobs over the last twelve years.
³⁶
A 2013 report by Joint Venture Silicon Valley confirms Kotkin’s findings, adding that homelessness in Silicon Valley has increased by 20% between 2011 and 2013 and reliance on food stamps has reached a ten-year high.
³⁷
In Santa Clara County, the geographical heart of Silicon Valley, the poverty rate shot up from 8% in 2001 to 14% in 2013, with the food stamp population jumping from 25,000 in 2001 to 125,000 in 2013.

Even those lucky enough to get jobs at tech startups are likely to lose them again very quickly. According to research by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracked changes in employment between 2012 and 2013, new companies fired 25% of their staff in their first year. This contrasts with an average annual rate of 6.6% at established companies.
³⁸
This cult of the so-called lean startup
³⁹
created by the FailCon speaker Eric Ries, with its brutal churn of employees, makes it particularly risky for older people with kids to feed and mortgages to pay to work in such a casino-style economy. No wonder, then, that Silicon Valley’s demographic is radically different from the rest of America. In a US economy where, according again to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall median age of workers is 42.3 years old, the median age of workers is 28 at Facebook and 29 at Google.
⁴⁰
And even at supposedly “mature” technology companies like Oracle or Hewlett-Packard, the average age of workers is significantly less than the US average.

Just as Silicon Valley is biased against older workers, it also discriminates against women. “Women are no longer welcome on the Internet,” the feminist writer Amanda Hess says. And they certainly don’t seem to be welcome, either, in the offices of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. Even though, as the entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa reminds us, female-founded startups are more capital-efficient than those founded by men and have lower failure rates and higher annual revenues, women are still radically underrepresented in Silicon Valley.
⁴¹
The numbers on this are disturbing. Fewer than one in ten venture-funded startups in Silicon Valley are led by women, with only 3% of that venture money going to all-female teams.
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An estimated 2–4% of engineers at tech companies are women,
⁴³
and, according to Measure of America, these Silicon Valley women earn less than half of what Silicon Valley men do.
⁴⁴
Equally troubling, there is a persistent sexist culture among many of the young male programmers, the so-called tech bros, who openly treat women as sexual objects and unashamedly develop pornographic products such as the “Titshare” app introduced at the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt show in San Francisco,
⁴⁵
designed to humiliate their female colleagues. This misogynistic culture extends throughout the Valley, with bias claims surging in 2013 against the male-dominated tech industry
⁴⁶
and even a blue-chip venture capital firm like John Doerr and Tom Perkins’s KPCB becoming embroiled in a discrimination suit with a former female investment partner.
⁴⁷

The Internet hasn’t really benefited most San Franciscans, either. Wave after wave of speculative tech booms have made San Francisco almost as exclusive a private club as Michael and Xochi Birch’s Battery, with the city ranking as one of America’s four most unequal cities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
⁴⁸
It’s a view of the city that the snap-happy tourists on top of those red double-decker buses never get to see. In 2013, San Francisco’s median house price of $900,000 and monthly rent of $3,250 had made the city unaffordable to 86% of its residents.
⁴⁹
Evictions are up, too, an overall 38% increase between 2011 and 2013, in large part due to the 1985 Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict renters and leave the rental housing business. These evictions are up by 170% over the same period.
⁵⁰
The Internet’s so-called sharing economy has compounded the problem, with the increasing profitability of unregulated Airbnb rentals being one reason for the surge in Ellis Act evictions.
⁵¹
One San Francisco tenant even sued his Russian Hill landlords for “unjust eviction” in 2014 because, rather than moving into the apartment themselves, they rented his $1,840-a-month apartment out on Airbnb for up to $145 a night.
⁵²

“Warning: Two-Tier System.” Protesters in San Francisco’s Mission District waved such a construction-style sign outside the Google buses.
⁵³
“Public $$$$$$$$$ Private Gains,” another sign said.
⁵⁴
Others were less polite about these mysterious buses’ whisking their expensive cargo of privileged, mostly young white male workers down to Silicon Valley. “Fuck off Google,” came the message from West Oakland.
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