Complaints about tech ignore the vast majority of people who make their livelihood, however mediately, from tech. Why? Because these people are not involved with the platform. Because they do not set the parameters by which other people create, share, or market themselves. This is not actually common sense: when people describe the size of the car industry, or of a bank, they include the people who serve the food at the company that makes the rubber for the insulation of the Chevy Tahoe. Being a “tech worker” is somehow more exclusive. Because the platform, and work on it, is more central, more real, than customer relations, or content moderation, or just keeping employees happy.
Toward the end of 2018, a new billboard appeared along Interstate 80 in downtown San Francisco. Put up by a company called Snowflake (according to its Twitter bio, the company offers “a data warehouse built for the cloud”; I have no idea what that means and no intention of finding out), it exhorted you to be the “boss” of 2019. The tagline? GRAB 2019 BY THE DATA. The reference seemed clear: Donald Trump’s infamous “Grab ’em by the pussy” remark in the Access Hollywood tape. People online debated whether this trivialized sexual assault, but the bigger Freudian slip committed by the billboard’s ham-fisted joke went largely unremarked-upon: the strange and pernicious equations on which a joke like this is built. There is the idea that running a company resembles being a sexual predator. But there is also the idea that data—resistant, squirrelly, but ultimately compliant—is a feminine resource to be seized, to be made to yield by a masculine force.
To grab data, to dispose of it, to make oneself its “boss”—the constant onslaught of highly publicized data breaches may well be a downstream effect of this kind of thinking. There isn’t very much of a care ethic when it comes to our data on the internet or in the cloud. Companies accumulate data and then withdraw from it, acting as though they have no responsibility for it—until the moment an evil hacker threatens said data. Which sounds, in other words, not too different from the heavily gendered imagery relied on by Snowflake. There is no sense of stewardship or responsibility for the data that you have “grabbed,” and the platform stays at a cool remove from the creaturely things that folks get up to when they go online and, wittingly or unwittingly, generate data.
At the same time, withdrawing from content limits your responsibility. Both legally and morally, content is risky; the platform is not. The tech industry famously has very limited legal exposure when it comes to what they put online—pardon, for what they let others put online. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act stipulates that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Another way to put this: a platform is different from a publisher. The latter is editorially responsible for its content; the former is responsible to a much lesser degree.
WordPress is not liable for your blog in the way The Washington Post is for your ill-advised editorial. Standing at an Olympian remove from the content, platforms get to claim a neutrality they possess legally but not in actual practice: go on YouTube in private mode and see what the algorithm recommends for you—white supremacist videos, flat-earth conspiracy videos, wild rants about global warming being a hoax. Yet YouTube has convinced not just legislators and lawyers but even its own users that it somehow has less to do with its videos than traditional media companies have to do with their content.
And so, in a strange way, Silicon Valley seems to have learned exactly the lesson it wanted to learn from McLuhan. McLuhan opens Understanding Media by saying that the medium is also socially the message, meaning that media remake the way groups and classes of people interact, and thus bear enormous responsibility for our discourse, our politics, our commonweal. On the one hand, Silicon Valley has internalized this idea: the means by which information is conveyed does more to our sense of self, to our very personhood, than the information itself. But on the other, the Valley has closed itself to the awesome responsibility that McLuhan imputes to media. In 2019, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, explained in an interview with Rolling Stone that the true reason his platform was crawling with Nazi trolls was that users—his customers—were derelict in their duties. “They see things,” he complained, “but it’s easier to tweet ‘get rid of the Nazis’ than to report it.”
Twitter was happy to take responsibility for Tahrir Square, it seems, but Nazis are someone else’s problem. The promotional materials the companies put out claim revolutionary potential for their platforms, but in the end, the tech giants are always happy to get out of jail free by pointing out that they are not responsible for the content on those platforms. There is a tendency in Silicon Valley to want to be revolutionary without, you know, revolutionizing anything.
.3.Genius
The philosophy of Ayn Rand has long been in league with a certain kind of adolescence. Not adolescence as such, mind you. But an affinity between opinionated youth and Rand’s ideas has been something of a
