Big Tech is watching you

In 2017, the author received a $900 bill from the Apple App Store. It had been racked up by her 10-year-son who had bought a virtual football team. Some pages later, she mentions an interaction with Larry Page of Google, at Davos. While discussing the crucifixion of traditional media owing to Google, she pointed out that loss of access to news as newspapers shut down would also have an impact on democracy. He responded, “Yes, we’ve got a bunch of people looking into that.”

Incidents like these formed the wellspring for the genesis of this book. Big Tech has terrific upsides. But this book, by one of the most perceptive columnists of the Financial Times,  is all about the downsides.

Ms Faroohar looks at how BT has taken over our lives, and the manipulative and malign aspects of its influence on society. Ironically, the title is borrowed from Google’s original mission statement.

Big Tech owns us all in a way no industry has ever owned populations at large. There is an undeniable upside. The 21st century individual has access to unimaginable information, and an unparalleled ability to connect distantly with people and places. Work from Home paradigms during the current lockdowns would have been impossible without BT, for example. It has literally saved many lives.

Don’t be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech 

Author: Rana Faroohar Publisher: Allen Lane

Pages: 368

Price: Rs 799

 

BT also offers us the ability to seamlessly perform extremely complex financial transactions. It handles the logistics of household shopping as easily as it manages transnational supply chains. It allows us to locate ourselves in time and space, and to transit from point A to Point B with accuracy, and zero fuss. It makes our fridges, microwaves, washing machines, home theatres, security systems and vehicles smarter and more autonomous.

The downside is that it owns us, heart, soul and wallet. It leverages our data for profit. It flags routines 24x7. It can be deployed for targeted assassinations. It can maintain and update social credit scores that a totalitarian government uses to keep citizens tractable. It can place activists under relentless surveillance.

It can target and manipulate political choices, as easily as consumer choices, which represents an unprecedented, nearly bloodless threat to democracy. BT has literally created and offered platforms to monsters. It is not coincidental that the 21st century has seen the rise to power of many bigots and authoritarian leaders. They have all used BT to grab power by subverting democratic processes.

Like many others, Ms Faroohar sounds a warning about the inability of political systems to cope with this threat. She also looks at the more dubious economic outcomes of BT. BT has enabled extreme disparities in income and wealth generation, with the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the middle class hollowed-out. The disruptions it has caused have eliminated many jobs and we haven’t yet figured out how to create compensating opportunities. Even more jobs will be eliminated as the Internet of Things takes hold, alongside autonomous vehicles and so on.

We have also learnt the hard way that BT creates natural monopolies. There is only one Facebook, one Google, one Twitter, one Amazon – network effects ensure there will be no competition. Where these specific corporations have been prevented from operating, there is only one AliBaba, one Weibo, one Tencent.  Market concentration is another area of concern for Ms Faroohar. It isn’t obvious how policy-makers can ameliorate it.  

BT has also led to extreme disparities in privilege. A child with access to mobile broadband internet is enormously advantaged over a child without. This will probably lead to even more extreme disparity a generation later.

Ms Faroohar makes the strong argument that BT has also managed an extraordinary form of international regulatory capture.  So much so that she says it was nearly impossible to find people who were not, at some level, affected by conflicts of interest when she was researching the book.

By tom-tomming unquestionable efficiencies, the sector has won large concessions in taxes in practically every jurisdiction. The largest and most profitable corporations that ever existed have successfully avoided paying more than minimal taxes. BT also funds powerful lobbies that influence policy decisions in every major government and it funds supra-national influential NGOs too.

So where do we go? How does society deal with this monopolistic, all-pervasive and utterly indispensable beast of a sector? To add to the policy complexity, the business models of all the big monopolistic corporates is different.

Self-regulation is not really an option – it breaks down when profits are involved. Google dropped its motto as it started leveraging user-data and manipulating search results; Facebook will not fact-check Donald Trump’s mendacious ads; Apple doesn’t protect the privacy of Chinese iPhone users. Moreover, as Ms Faroohar says, engineers have a tendency to view people as data-generation algorithms. That’s not the best place to start self-regulation.  

Ms Faroohar is not a conspiracy theorist, nor does she appear to possess extreme political biases. She hasn’t touted a single outlandish hypothesis. The tone remains level-headed during this comprehensive analysis of the dark side.

Her policy suggestions include educational reform to reskill populations for jobs that can’t be done by AI; tax reform to ensure BT pays its dues; better legal protection for data to allow individuals to control and monetise what they give away for free. A must-read for everyone.