Big Tech had its chance
2020 and beyond will require creators, democracy and independent media to hold tech executives accountable.
Big Tech's legacy of the past decade is how it perverted the social internet with a handful of huge companies that enjoyed unchecked monopoly power over our economy, politics and media.
These companies won by blurring the lines between the social internet and social media. As Cal Newport wrote in his best-seller Deep Work: Rules For Focused Work in a Distracted World, the former "enables connection, learning and expression" while the latter "describes the attempt of a small number of large companies to monetize these capabilities inside walled-garden monopoly platforms."
They've been successful in reshaping the internet into a hyperactive universe of distraction engineered to exploit our time, attention and human experience because they've convinced popular culture that the benefits of the internet can only be enjoyed if they're the gatekeepers. "To criticize social media," Newport wrote, "therefore, [is] to criticize the internet's general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression."
The new economy was supposed to unleash creativity and produce jobs of historic proportions. But by the time most millennials entered the post-recession job market, it was obvious the American Dream we were promised turned out to be a living nightmare. If you're a frequent reader of the Daily Reader, you're familiar with these numbers that are worth repeating:
Healthcare, housing and higher education are five times more expensive for us than they were for our parents.
Steady, stable jobs have been relatively flat for nearly four decades.
White millennials are five times more likely to receive an inheritance than non-white millennials even though millennials of colors make up 45 percent of the millennial population, which suggests wealth inequality stands to get worse before it gets better.
Big Tech didn't necessarily create economic and social inequality, but its intervention has made it worse: There were twice as many start-ups launching every day in the Carter administration than there are now. To be clear, not all creators should be entrepreneurs. But even if you wanted to start your own business, good luck — considering the fastest-growing parts of our economy are controlled by monopolies or duopolies.
And while it's true the post-recession economy slashed the unemployment rate and added jobs every month since 2010, the share of the working population has yet to fully recover ten-plus years after the end of the recession due to rising inequality, inadequate labor demand and sluggish wages for working- and middle-class workers. This reality has compelled millennials to pursue one of three unfulfilling paths:
Working several uncoordinated gigs to make ends meet, often without reliable benefits or access to a safety net
Suppressing their creativity in non-creative jobs in exchange for reliable benefits or access to a safety net
Selling their identity — and the social approval (likes, retweets, followers, comments, clicks, etc.) it generates — to brands for access to the trust and attention of their fans and followers
If we're to solve the crises of our time and improve our work and life quality, then we'll need an equitable internet that enables creators to earn an independent living from the content, technology and ideas they produce and consumers to experience digital products without algorithms, outrage and digital illiteracy dictating their behaviors.
And in the upcoming year, this space will be dedicated to mobilizing public opinion and obvious and uncomfortable ways to create the changes that will serve us well in 2020 and beyond. My work will report and analyze the people, products, companies and ideas shaping how we make, brand, market and sell our work in the new economy.
In the meantime, it's worthwhile to heed two of the biggest lessons from the previous decade so we're aware of how we got here as we go forward.
The first is to ignore what tech executives say and watch what they do. At face value, these folks seem earnest and their products appear to be forces for good. But beneath the altruistic veneer are engineers and marketers by trade who are adept at making money from how we move and groove across the internet and through the world, which leads us to lesson two.
When given the chance, tech executives will always default to their capitalist instincts to create as much shareholder value as possible — even when they clash with the well-being of the content creators and consumers they rely on to fill, browse and moderate their platforms’ newsfeeds. For proof, look no further than their business models, where they spend their money and treat their frontline employees.
A business model born out of desperation
On October 29, 2015, I’d just filed my weekly “Ask Michael” style column in my role as digital style editor at Lucky, a shopping magazine owned by Condé Nast that represented the dreamiest of dream jobs. Before I moved on to my next story on an emerging Los Angeles-based sustainable basics brand, I checked our Slack and got news of a last-minute conference call with the big bosses in less than an hour.
Spoiler alert: I never finished that story. We were all laid off during the conference call. It wasn’t because we did poor journalism. It was because our ad-supported business had been cannibalized by Google and Facebook and we ran out of money before we discovered another long-term revenue stream.
My story isn’t unique. Find any journalist, and they’ll share a similar fate. In fact, between layoffs, cuts and buyouts, 7,800 media professionals lost their jobs in 2019. According to Bloomberg:
The level of attrition is the highest since 2009, when the industry saw 7,914 job cuts in the first five months of that year in the wake of the financial crisis, according to data compiled by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., an outplacement and executive coaching firm.
The cuts have made an already-tough-to-crack industry even more competitive “where the number of out-of-work journalists often exceeds the number of openings.”
As critical as I am of Google and Facebook for commoditizing our work, I’m equally disappointed that an industry I went to college to study and relocated thousands of miles to work in got smooth-talked into a race to the bottom where once-revered institutions gave their best work to these companies for a nickel while they sold it against ads for a dollar.
What’s even more frustrating is the fact that Google’s ad-supported business model was actually born out of desperation.
During the dot-com crash in 2000, Google needed to monetize its search engine to assuage its investors who were threatening to pull out. The company discovered the breakthrough to rapid monetization was to repackage the surplus of unused data as prediction products available for purchase by companies interested in what consumers will do now, soon and later. From 2000 to 2004, Google’s revenue increased by 3,500 percent.
By 2008, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook had hired Sheryl Sandberg from Google as COO to make the company profitable through “discreetly presented” advertising. 85 percent of Facebook’s money is generated from ads — in 2017 alone, the company raked in $39.9 billion from advertising revenue.
Ironically, Google’s founders assumed this outcome in their 1998 paper on how a Google search engine would function: “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users … We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”
Facebook has attempted to course-correct by paying publishers directly for their work through a News tab the company launched in October. From Campbell Brown, Facebook’s Vice President of Global News Partnerships:
Journalism plays a critical role in our democracy. When news is deeply-reported and well-sourced it gives people information they can rely on. When it’s not, we lose an essential tool for making good decisions.
People want and benefit from personalized experiences on Facebook, but we know there is reporting that transcends individual experience. We want to support both.
When we started talking to news organizations about building Facebook News earlier this year, they emphasized that original reporting is more expensive to produce and better recognized by seasoned journalists than by algorithms. So to help reward this kind of work, we formed a curation team to manage the Today’s Stories section of Facebook News. The team will have editorial independence and will select stories based on publicly available guidelines.
But the damage has already been done — unless you’re a shareholder or advertiser. Google and Facebook devalued and cashed in on creative work by turning it into low-hanging fruit to run ads against instead of content that served the pleasure and progress of other people.
Politics as usual
The windfalls from Big Tech’s ad-supported and data-driven business models have enabled enormous political influence. Get this: Big Tech spends as much on lobbying the federal government as Wall Street and Big Pharma. In 2018, Google, Facebook and Amazon spent a combined $48 million to lobby against antitrust regulation and laws that could constrain their ability to collect data, which according to Future Majority, will be worth $197.7 billion by 2022.
As recently as last November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting “informal talks and small off-the-record dinners with conservative journalists, commentators and at least one Republican lawmakers” to “talk about issues like free speech and discuss partnerships.”
As Politico reported at the time:
Zuckerberg is trying to appease the White House and stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. The president threatened to sue Facebook and Google in June and has in the past pressured the Justice Department to take action against his perceived foes.
“The discussion in Silicon Valley is that Zuckerberg is very concerned about the Justice Department, under Bill Barr, bringing an enforcement action to break up the company,” said one cybersecurity researcher and former government official based in Silicon Valley. “So the fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.”
When asked about the gatherings, a senior Trump administration official said “the White House is looking for meaningful steps from Facebook on a number of fronts,” including “competition, free speech for everybody including conservatives, and privacy.”
Oh, okay. 👀
It’s not just Republicans or conservatives that tech executives attempt to influence. As hard as I rock with Barack Obama, it pains me to say that his administration’s hands aren’t entirely clean either. From a 2016 article by David Dayen published on The Intercept:
Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects.
Precisely how much influence this buys Google isn’t always clear. But consider that over in the European Union, Google is now facing two major antitrust charges for abusing its dominance in mobile operating systems and search. By contrast, in the U.S., a strong case to sanction Google was quashed by a presidentially appointed commission.
Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.
No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government. According to an analysis of White House data, the Google lobbyist with the most White House visits, Johanna Shelton, visited 128 times, far more often than lead representatives of the other top-lobbying companies — and more than twice as often, for instance, as Microsoft’s Fred Humphries or Comcast’s David Cohen.
Meanwhile, according to a 2016 report from the Google Transparency Project:
The scope of the company’s influence within the White House isn’t confined to the company’s core search business. For example, the company appears to have met with the White House over its side bets, and those of its top executives.
Representatives of Google’s venture capital arm, Google Ventures, met with White House officials five times, while representatives from Google’s “moon shot” program, Google[X], have also been to the White House.
Employees of Eric Schmidt’s private venture capital fund, Tomorrow Ventures, logged 14 White House visits. Another company in which Schmidt is the sole investor, Civis Analytics, met with White House officials at least 51 times. The company, started by former data “whiz-kids” from Obama’s 2012 Obama re-election campaign, was instrumental in fixing the bungled launch of the HealthCare.gov website in 2013, alongside several Google software engineers.
In addition to their lobbying power, these companies enable politicians to advertise unverified messages that are microtargeted to a very small number of people, which allows tailor their messaging to resonate with the people who already align with the promoted ideologies and gives Big Tech significant power over political discourse without public accountability or scrutiny.
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former security officer, explained the dangers of microtargeting in an article quoted in this Daily Reader:
[It] “allows political actors — that’s campaigns, PACs, parties — to have messages that are extremely finely targeted to a very small number of people. Therefore they can be somebody different to everybody. So to 100 people in northern Michigan, they can look different to 200 women in Manhattan, and look different to 100 African American voters in Atlanta. We don’t want our politicians to be different people to everybody.”
And when Facebook isn’t using its influence for politics, it’s simply charging more for ads targeted at politician’s rival party. According to Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post:
The researchers spent more than $13,000 on a set of advertising campaigns designed to test how Facebook promotes political messaging. The partisan skew appeared in their experiment, the authors stress, even though all ads were run from the same account and at the same time. The ads all focused on the same audiences and used the same “goal, bidding strategy, and budget.”
By slotting liberal ads to liberal users and conservative ads to conservative users, the study warns, Facebook is “wielding significant power over political discourse through its ad delivery algorithms without public accountability or scrutiny.”
As I wrote last month, “Under these circumstances, politicians have little to no social or economic motivation to moderate their messaging for the broader electorate. Extreme political speech is not only cheaper but more effective when they’re tailored to resonate with the people who already align with the promoted ideologies.”
Technology’s core competency
80 percent of all of our country’s corporate wealth goes to 10 percent of companies. However, these companies create fewer jobs, pay little to no taxes, hire fewer diverse candidates and siphon their supply chain’s raw material for free, while users pay in data — instead of dollars — for access to these platforms, which exacerbates economic inequality. Imagine the profit margins for an auto company if it didn’t have to pay for steel to build its cars. Our data is a tech company’s steel.
Another tech-company workaround: Classifying workers as contractors instead of employees and/or giving them overwhelming performance goals. A quote from NYU professor and author Scott Galloway comes to mind: “Technology’s core competency has become the exploitation of workers.”
In November, I picked up reporting from The Atlantic that revealed the rate of serious injuries for Amazon facilities was more than twice the national warehousing industry average. Here’s an employee’s account, as told by Will Evans, who reported the story in partnership with The Atlantic:
“[H]er job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse, and fill an unending parade of merchandise racks. Another worker, known as a “water spider,” would bring her boxes upon boxes of goods—jars of protein powder, inflatable unicorn pool floats, laptops, makeup, Himalayan sea salt, vibrators, plastic toy cars. She’d grab each item out of a box, scan it, lift it onto the rack, and scan its new location. She’d use a stepladder to put things on the top of the rack. For heavy items—she remembers the cases of pet food in particular—she’d have to squat down to hoist them in, then pop back up to grab the next item. As soon as she’d filled a rack, she’d press a button, and one robot would zip it away while another robot would bring a new one to fill.
The moment an Amazon customer clicked “place your order,” a robot would haul one of those racks to a picker, who would grab the right item for the order and send it on a series of long conveyors to a packer, who would stuff it in one of those familiar, smiling cardboard boxes.
The clock was always ticking on Amazon’s promised delivery time. Dixon had to scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit her quota, she said, and Amazon always knew when she didn’t.
At the time, I wrote:
Besides Amazon’s speed, the company, like almost all online retailers, benefits from the “out of sight, out of mind” factor — most people are unaware of what occurs between their order is placed and when it’s delivered. Getting that $8 rose petal witch hazel toner or $21 mini smart plug sent to your doorstep in one day is all fun and games until you find out that the human who stowed, picked and packed it probably had to pee in a water bottle because they were afraid to miss their 300-item-per-hour scan-rate quota by taking a bathroom break.
In a statement to This Should Help, a company spokesperson for Amazon said:
We believe so strongly in the environment provided for fulfillment center employees, including our safety culture, that we offer public tours where anyone can come see for themselves one of our sites and its working conditions first-hand.
Last month, The Verge published an investigation by Casey Newton into Google and YouTube’s content moderation practices:
With its large number of internet services, some of which have attracted user bases with more than a billion people, Google requires an army of moderators. Much of the content submitted for review is benign and even tedious: cleansing spam from Google’s ad platform, for example, or removing fraudulent listings from Google Maps. But disturbing content can be found nearly everywhere Google allows users to upload it. In October, the company reported that, in the past year, it had removed 160,000 pieces of content for containing violent extremism from Blogger, Google Photos, and Google Drive alone — about 438 per day.
Even on YouTube, much of the content reviewed by moderators is benign. When no videos are reported in their queues, moderators often sit idle. One Finnish-language moderator told me she had gone two months at her job with nothing at all to do during the day. At most, she might be asked to review a few videos and comments over an eight-hour span. She spent most of her workday browsing the internet, she told me, before quitting last month out of boredom.
Other moderators’ experiences varied widely based on their locations, their assignments, and the relative empathy of their managers. Several of them told me they mostly enjoy their work, either because they find the task of removing violent and disturbing videos from Google search and YouTube rewarding or because the assigned tasks are simple and allow them ample time during the day to watch videos or relax.
Contract content moderators are cheap, making just a little over minimum wage in the United States. By contrast, full-time employees who work on content moderation for Google search could make $90,000 or more after being promoted, not including bonuses and stock grants. Temporary workers, contractors, and vendors — the workers who Googlers refer to internally as TVCs — now make up 54 percent of the company’s workforce.
Then there’s Pinterest who slashed contractor pay this past holiday season. According to Newton:
Like lots of companies, Pinterest gives employees the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day off while paying them as if they had worked. Unlike lots of companies, Pinterest has traditionally extended that benefit to the contractors who work on the company’s culinary and maintenance staff, which the company calls HosPin.
This year, Pinterest decided to claw back that benefit. Contractors will still get their days off — they just won’t be paid for them, except for Christmas and New Year’s Day. The company will pay contractors a nominal holiday bonus, but the money will fall well short of a week’s pay. Instead, Pinterest is offering the workers extra shifts during the shutdown week that they previously spent with their families.
The move will likely make life more difficult for contractors who once relied on that money to buy Christmas presents, pay rent, and purchase other necessities. And meanwhile, the full-time employees who might not even blink at the loss of four days’ pay will be paid to do nothing over the break just as they always have.
States like California have worked to level the playing field for contractors. In September Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 5, a controversial bill that requires businesses to hire workers as employees, not independent contractors, with some exceptions. Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell wrote at the time:
The new law will crack down on a business model championed and cherished by Silicon Valley — a striking turn of events for the celebrated tech industry. Uber, Lyft, and other app-based gig companies rely on hundreds of thousands of independent contractors to give rides, deliver food, and complete other tasks.
Reclassifying them as employees would change everything.
Gig workers would get labor protections and benefits that all employees get, such as unemployment insurance, health care subsidies, paid parental leave, overtime pay, workers’ compensation, paid rest breaks, and a guaranteed $12 minimum hourly wage. And, perhaps more importantly, they could unionize.
Uber argues that since they’re a “technology company” drivers’ work is outside the usual course of Uber’s business and therefore they shouldn’t be considered as employees. (Oh, okay. 👀) Gig companies like Lyft and Doordash have made similar claims in opposition of AB 5.
I've heard the argument that it's up to the companies — not consumers and the government — to clean up the messes they've made. I'd agree if I believed they were up to the task. But if the past decade or two has taught us anything, it’s that Big Tech executives proved themselves to be in over their heads.
As Cathy O’Neil, a mathematician and author of Weapons of Math Destructionwrote for Bloomberg in 2018 about “Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook [and] all those Google Nerds”:
The way I see it, these guys — and they are mostly guys — were arbitrarily chosen. They started with some good ideas, some luck, great timing, got lots of people to believe in their rosy vision, and they won the unicorn lottery. Little did they know or care what problems they were creating. And now, they’re being asked to solve — or acknowledge, or something — some really big issues, such as what to do about people who use their platforms to meddle in elections or spread lies, paranoia, bigotry and straight-up hate.
The world expects great things of them because they’re supposed to be geniuses. Problem is, they’re not. There’s nothing they can do except apologize, turn off their big machines and walk away. I doubt they’ll do that. Instead, they’re manufacturing baloney explanations about how they’ll use more technology, or maybe more people, to handle the civic duties they had hoped to avoid.
My money’s on independent creators, democracy and mindful consumers over Big Tech all day every day. Yours should be too.