From the Los Angeles Review of Books, November 29:
How might Google’s present-day mode of profit making fulfill its
own founders’ late-90s fears of insidious advertising-funded search
engines? How might Amazon’s multi-layered market dominance most resemble
that of 19th-century railroad robber barons? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Rana Foroohar.
This present conversation focuses on Foroohar’s book Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles—and All of Us.
Foroohar is global business columnist and associate editor for the Financial Times, and CNN’s global economic analyst. Her previous book, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street, was shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey
Business Book of the Year award. For her technology and policy writing,
Foroohar was named best large-publication columnist of 2019 by the
Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She is also the 2019
winner of the Arthur Ross Award, given by the American Academy of
Diplomacy for foreign-affairs writing.
¤
ANDY FITCH: Today we all might recognize the ways in which
making information and media “free” online perhaps most benefits not
content creators or consumers, but tech platforms — allowing them to
attract users, harvest user data, and generate micro-targeted ad-driven
revenue. But even in Don’t Be Evil’s meticulous account, it
sometimes gets hard to pinpoint precisely when Google begins to grasp
just how profitable its pioneering mode of surveillance capitalism
eventually will become. So to start, could you walk us through Google
coming to realize the theoretical/technological implications, the
commercial applications, and the legal/political ramifications that
ultimately prompt your own book to explore how this firm “evolved from
the scrappy, cheerful, and idealistic enterprise of its early years to
the vast and more ethically questionable corporate entity it is today”?
RANA FOROOHAR: In a way, that question covers the
whole scope of this book. We need that whole span of more than 20 years
to ask: how does Silicon Valley go from being this kind of utopia (an
idyllic space for kids in garages to come up with great new
innovations), to today’s dystopia? I’d start that story in the mid-90s,
and probably pinpoint, as the first big shift, when Google’s founders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote (as Stanford students) their famous
first paper on search. And I just called this paper “famous,” but it
actually shocks me that you don’t see more people discussing its
implications.
This 1998 paper basically sketches out Google as we know it today. It
gives a detailed preview of how Google’s large-scale search engine will
operate. It outlines how you make that search engine, and how it
functions. But if you read all the way to the very, very end of the
paper, you reach an appendix. This appendix discusses advertising, and
the problems with advertising as a business model to support a search
engine. Page and Brin actually say quite openly: “We expect that
advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the
advertisers and away from the needs of consumers. Since it is very
difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine
bias is particularly insidious.” They predict this whole possible misuse
by companies or other entities. Then they even go on to say that,
because of these dangers, it might be in the public interest to design
some kind of open or academic or nonprofit-type search engine, so that
we can avoid these problems.
So at that point, in the 90s, we still have this kind of idealism.
Most people building the Internet back then, including the Google
founders, were these utopian types who wanted to connect the world by
putting all of its information online. But the broader possibility for
negative ramifications, in some cases ramifications that might outweigh
the positive — I just don’t think that entered their minds. And we
should remember that these folks, who tend towards the socially liberal
side, also have this libertarian streak. They certainly believe in
unfettered capitalism. They likewise believe in the ability of companies
(particularly high-minded digital companies) to fly 35 thousand feet
above the problems of the nation-state.
You can see this right now in the public battle between Mark
Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Warren. To me, that represents this much bigger
battle between the apex of neoliberalism and globalization as we’ve
known them, and some new kind of politics in which we get (guess what)
concerns about the nation, concerns about everyday American citizens and
American voters. And of course these companies crossing borders and
doing whatever they like, and offshoring taxes to wherever they want,
might someday soon have to face up to the fact that so many of their
most profitable innovations come directly out of taxpayer-funded
research and development of the Internet, of GPS, of touchscreen
technology — but without having that resulting wealth enrich the larger
ecosystem. Instead it just enriches a handful of companies.
On a parallel historical timeline, could we also start
tracing the original ideals, and then the more crass contemporary
practice, of Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab-inspired “captology”:
with Facebook “likes,” for example, flattering us and simultaneously
training us to become Pavlovian dogs, with multi-sensory smartphone
notifications evoking our own portable slot machines, with our resulting
attachments to intermittent variable rewards leaving us obsessed,
stressed, anxious, sick?
Right, just today, on the subway, in every direction I turned,
literally no one was looking up from their phones. Our entire
interactions in public spaces have changed. That, I would say, really
began coming about around 2007. First, in the early 2000s, this field of
captology started getting further developed at Stanford. And that
brought together all of these various persuasion strategies — some of
them just old-fashioned casino gaming techniques, and others more
cutting-edge behavioral-psychology scientific findings. We’d had of
course those 20th-century experiments with dogs salivating from clicker
sounds and that sort of thing. But when the smartphone really reached
the market in 2007, then everybody was off to the races.
By now, that entire scientific and psychological and technological
field of persuasion has been elegantly compressed into this little
device literally in your hands most of the day. Suddenly, you’ve got a
slot machine in your pocket. That all adds up to us finding ourselves so
glued (in some cases addicted) to our phones....
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MUCH MORE
