Silicon Valley's Chips off the Old Block
Silicon Valley long has been hailed as an exemplar of the American culture of opportunity, openness and entrepreneurship. Increasingly, however, the tech community is morphing into a ruling class with the potential for assuming unprecedented power over both our personal and political lives.
Rather than the plucky entrepreneurs of legend, America’s rising tech oligarchy constitutes a narrow emerging elite. They are primarily beneficiaries of the limited pools of risk capital – nearly half of which is concentrated in Silicon Valley. They also have access to a highly incestuous club of skilled professional managers, lawyers, PR mavens and accountants that counterparts elsewhere are unlikely to enjoy.
In contrast to the intense competitive environment that defined industries such as semiconductors, disc drives and personal computers in the 1980s, today’s “lords of cyberspace,” as author Katherine MacKinnon describes them, enjoy oligopolistic market shares that would thrill the likes of John D. Rockefeller. Google, for example, accounts for more than two-thirds of the market for Internet search. The fantastic wealth amassed by Bill Gates, like that of the other oligarchs, stems in large part from these kinds of “monopoly” rent; in his case, for consistently mediocre but dominant software.
Of course, these oligarchs, like feudal lords or rival gangs, sometimes fight among themselves, say, Google versus Apple over operating systems or, increasingly, over hardware segments of the industry. Yet, this struggle between oligarchs is far from a competitive free for all: Together, these two firms provide almost 90 percent of the operating systems for smartphones.
Faux Progressivism
Normally, progressives would be expected to decry such concentrations of wealth and power. But Silicon Valley has largely insulated itself from such criticism by taking “progressive” policy stances, notably on climate change, and by cultivating both a “hip” image and close ties to the Obama administration. When Steve Jobs died in 2011 during the Occupy Wall Street movement, the passing of this brilliant, but often ruthless, 0.00001 percenter was openly mourned as if he was a counterculture hero.
But this should not mask the fact that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have turned out to be every bit as cutthroat – and odious to the individual – as any industrial group in modern American history. As technologist and author Jaron Lanier has suggested, the current oligarchical ascendency rests not on improving productivity or sparking broad-based growth, but mining the private lives of every consumer in order to reap riches from advertisers.
Google, while a prime offender, is hardly alone in pursuing violations of privacy. Consumer Reports has detailed Facebook’s pervasive, and often deepening, privacy breaches. Ironically, as one blogger noted, even as Facebook has been loosening privacy restrictions for teenage users of its site, company founder Mark Zuckerberg acquired property around his Palo Alto estate to better-protect his privacy.
Once seen as a liberating force, the social media firms are morphing into an overweening Big Brother. Apple’s new devices, the tech publication Wired recently noted, are aimed at “building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping.” The ambition for control is remarkable. As Google’s Eric Schmidt put it: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can, more or less, know what you’re thinking about.”...MORE
