In the misty-eyed eternally hopeful days of early Internet in the mid 90’s through early 2000’s, it was a peer to peer. It was coined the world wide web, and every time you logged on to you had to accept a waiver that you “will only use this internet connection for research and not commercial purposes”. Everything on the web looked or felt like Wikipedia does today.

every time you logged on to the internet you had to accept a waiver that you “will only use this internet connection for research and not commercial purposes”. Everything on the web looked or felt like Wikipedia does today.

Information and sharing was democratised, and mission ruled, exemplified by Google founders Page and Brin, who swore to their personal moral values, to avoid an IPO if at all possible.

After big money started to pile into the 1000’s of new speculative innovation startups trying to exploit the “new media” boom corner of the market, a bust happened in 2000.

The Colonisation of Founders by the Market

In post-boom 2001 my heart sank as corporate vultures took over the internet and some of the dying and dead startup carcasses. While Google was still unlisted they sold their souls to demands of their VC/IPO masters in order to keep their dream alive in a dried up funding environment.

From a founders dream, Google transformed to inhabit (our) living nightmares.

Page, Bryn and now Eric Schmidt transformed Google’s business model towards today’s unauthorised personal behavioural data extraction — Gmail, Google Drive, Maps, Calendar, Youtube (this is why it’s hard to collectively take these things out of our lives — it’s a dictatorship of no alternatives). Then they moved to population-scale behaviour modification experiments in the real world: Pokemon Go. And government handing over communities like Toronto, for the creation of the Google City dystopia.

With its Google parentage, and ex-CIA venture history, Pokemon Go was a trojan horse exploring ways to capture ever more data for Google — a superbly innovative stealth response to public protests of violations of privacy by Google cars roaming suburbs with 360 cameras and wifi sniffers. As a novel by-product Pokemon also mass-herded people towards paying-advertisers venues, such as cafes and fast food outlets who paid on ‘footfall’ via GPS tracking.

Facebook and Amazon are another article altogether, but with striking similarities. Sheryl Sandberg migrated from Google to Facebook and leaned in hard to replicate what she learned at the new company. The misdirection and passive “ignorance of harm” and “say something without actually saying anything” tactics of its founder Zuckerberg in front of media and lawmakers bear striking resemblance to the worst leaders of 20th century industrial capitalism. Remember Zuckerberg founded his company with the creed “A lot of people are focused on taking over the world..getting the most users. There doesn’t have to be more” (Zuckerberg). How old school VC changed this 20 year old kid in 15 years.

Young People — Our Digital Natives Are Canaries in the Coalmine

The new “behavioural action-economy” risks turning anyone born after 1996 into an automaton in a digital totalitarian state. In 2019 if you’re not a budding ‘influencer’ or vlogger hoping for crumbs from the table of giants, you’re a dopamine addicted, anxious young person who has surrendered their eyes to the phone, along with any notion of privacy. These kids do not know life without Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, check their smartphone 150 times a day and can’t go without it for 24 hours without suffering well researched Anxiety. Stress. Depression. Social Isolation.

As a member of post-1996 member of Gen Z, 24-hours abstaining from the poker-machine algorithmed devices and platforms resulted in well studied and sobering responses like “I felt so lonely. I couldn’t sleep well without sharing or connecting to others..I feel like there’s a problem with me”

I reflect on our inter generational shift..

1. In the last half of the 20th century: unregulated big oil/ag having the highest market capitalisation in the 90’s, destroying the environment, to
2. In the first half of the 21st century: big tech’s lawless and masterful avoidance of all attempts at government regulation, with misdirection and platitudes of “we’ll do better” leading to unobstructed domination of market capitalisation, (and soon the financial system through crypto) while democratic institutions sleep.

There is an Upside and Out of this Cycle

This is all utterly depressing. However there is an upside and out of this cycle.

It’s in the shift of public opinion, naming what has happened, truth-telling, outrage that we have allowed it to happen silently, and then change. We are not China where social engineering doesn’t matter because it’s an authoritarian state. We are a democracy.

The author Professor Shoshana Zuboff in her new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism asks about this unprecedented division of knowledge and asymmetry of power in 2019 society “Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides?”

The answer, in a democracy, is us. Team human, not team machine, team automation, team big data or AI. None of us want this situation. But we are the only change that’s coming. We can make personal changes as consumers (I fully replaced everything Google gave me with a bit of searching and hard work). We can also spread the word about the wrongs, and we can force change to regulation and anti-trust laws.

The companies in the 1997–2017 video graph timeline in the opening are valuable on whose definition exactly? Certainly not the value of social justice, not on the values of equality. Not on personal or national sovereignty. And totally undermining of human agency.

It is only now that we recognise 20th century capitalism and its exclusive shareholder-value focus as the cause of destruction of two thirds of nature on earth in the name of shareholder capital.

Will it take another 50 years and the destruction of our ‘human nature’, for our children to look back upon what their parents ‘allowed’ big tech to take from them including peace of mind, trust, private spaces, ambiguity, sanctuary, sovereignty and democracy?

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footnote: to friends in the tech-innovation-startup scene who argue that digital technology is inevitable and we’d be living in the dark ages without risk takers — its not the people or the startups that I see the problem. It’s the risk-takers economic model, and the value-extraction surveillance model it necessitates. Its very easy to imagine a world with the digital technology but without this model. It’s impossible to have the model without the surveillance and value extraction. To the demand for job creation: General Motors employed more people at the height of the Great Depression than Google or Facebook do now at the height of their market capitalisation — less than 100,000 people combined.

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Books and readings on this subject (least dense to most dense):

1. Zucked — Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe (Roger Macnamee, early Facebook investor and Zuck mentor)
2. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Prof. Douglas Rushkoff)
3. Present Shock (Prof. Douglas Rushkoff)
4. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Prof. Shoshana Zuboff)