Daniel Greenfield December 05, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Of
the 10 wealthiest men and women in America, 8 of them made their money
in the tech industry. Of these, only 3 made their fortunes from
companies that predated the internet era. The rest made it the
'new-fashioned' way, by developing and deploying internet platforms.
The
great disruption of the internet made college dropouts into the
wealthiest men in America, made the West Coast, for the first time, the
equal of the East, and transformed the economy from manufacturing
tangible items to reselling access to data and outsourcing
manufacturing.
The
men of the great disruption were libertarians, if not necessarily by
politics then by cultural inclination. The original disrupters had been
engineers and hackers who didn’t fit into conformist environments like
IBM and were chasing the dream of doing their own thing. They set up
shop in garages and basements, in small California, Oregon, and
Washington towns, and a few cities, dressed casually, watched Star Trek,
dreamed utopian ideals, and were bad at business.
The new
disrupters were less interested in hardware or software applications
than in using the power of the network to suck up the data of our
interactions and turn it into a service. Their insights, building a
search engine around link popularity, or a college face book by grabbing
pictures of women, might be trivial, but were part of an emergent
vision of the new data order.
The original disruptors had been
concerned with empowering the end user to command the system, but the
new disrupters were reversing the process that had taken users from
terminals to personal computers, instead reducing a multitude of devices
to terminals leaking data that made them easier to profitably
manipulate. The early internet was empowering, but the internet of the
Google, Amazon, and Facebook era is disempowering by design. It works by
limiting your options and then using what it knows about you to push
you in the direction it wants you to go.
Early computers had practically demanded programming skills. The new setup programs you.
As
companies went public and college kids became billionaires, they
stopped being disrupters and became concerned with maintaining the new
order that they were building.
Every revolution ends with a pledge to make sure that no other revolution will happen again.
Google,
whose empire was built on search because Yahoo, Netscape, Microsoft,
and an array of other companies that allowed it to disrupt its way to
power had failed to account for the importance of search, has spent a
generation working its way from inside out, by building a browser and
then an OS and devices, so that no upstart can do to it what it did to
the industry.
The Google vision of its devices running its
operating systems with its browser and search boxes built in is not
disruptive: it’s the creation of a monopoly built to prevent another
Google. Search, the core of Google’s business, is its worst maintained
because having monopolized it, its focus is on expanding its hegemony
outward to the farthest limits of the data economy.
The same is
true of other Big Tech titans who exploited a niche, disrupted the
existing setup, and then transformed their companies into the very thing
they had been struggling against.
The Big Tech challenge was to
manage the essential disruptiveness of the industry, stabilizing their
power base, while finding other vulnerable points in the country to
disrupt. And when there were fewer economic vulnerabilities to disrupt,
they turned to the cultural and the political ones.
Like every
past ruling class, the new one set out to remake the country in its own
image by disrupting other sectors of society, some, such as politics,
consciously, while others, such as culture, unconsciously, out of
noblesse oblige, lust for power, and a sense of insecurity.
Every
previous national transformation had come from ever narrower areas of
the country and the great disruption had been the narrowest yet. The old
visionary ideas of computer literacy, long since an outdated term, had
given way to ‘learn to code’ as an obsolescence taunt. Most Americans
would not be included in the revolution, not because they couldn’t be,
but because the revolution was far too small to encompass more than a
fraction of the population.
The economic momentum of the new
disrupters was built on stock booms that were powered by the conviction
of investors that these new titans would keep on growing until they took
it all over. If investors thought otherwise, there would be 5 or 8
other wealthiest men in the United States. The vast frontiers of the
computer revolution had passed through the range war stage and were
gated off by giant monopolies using investor cash to strangle each other
and their industry.
Compared to the challenge of disrupting the
old economy, disrupting politics appeared simple, but the problem was
that, unlike computers, the disrupters were also the thing they were
disrupting. Society had no artificially neat separations between man and
machine, code and flesh, and the disrupters were amplifying a cycle of
disruption that was also disrupting them.
Big Tech had worked to exercise political power to stave off the very reaction it was inciting.
The
disrupters turned leftward because from the commanding heights of the
economy they tended to see society as a machine that was broken and
needed fixing. Having few political ideas of their own, they adopted the
leftist politics of their surrounding environment. Its reduction of
society to a machine and men as moving parts in need of balancing out
appealed to them.
The old disrupters had seen men and women on
their own terms, struggling to reach their dreams, but that perspective,
from the ground level of the world, had been lost to them.
The
new disrupters could only envision their kind of world, diverse, urban,
and with a mostly useless population whose grievances and inability to
contribute to the new world order would have to be met with welfare
checks and patient lessons on the dangers of intolerance.
And, most of all, control.
The
original computer revolution had been built on freedom, but the titanic
internet platforms depended on control. The control was meant to be
unseen. The user would be manipulated into thinking it was his idea to
click on that link, watch that show, search for that keyword, and buy
that product by a series of invisible constraints and prompts to
maintain the illusion of control.
The illusion of control, the
myth of user agency, was at the heart of the new internet of platforms.
The end user had never had less control over his virtual environment,
even as it assured him that he could do anything he wanted. Once the
user rebelled against the algorithm, the illusion of freedom collapsed
leaving a choice between obedience or loss of access.
The system
seemed to work as Big Tech amassed vast amounts of wealth and power, but
on a social level, it was a disaster, albeit one that was invisible to
the manipulators. In the tech industry, the engineers often don’t
understand the end users. And vice versa. And the old conflict over
system design was now playing out on the vast scale of human
civilization.
The disrupters had broken the economy and the
social system, and began trying to put it back together on their terms,
buying up the media and elections, censoring the platforms they had
built, bringing to an end the last of the open information frontier, and
building a new order oriented around the technocratic imperatives of
managing a global society. But the more they tried to control the human
element, the more the societies began to fall apart and turn on them.
Greater
control did not lead to greater trust, but an almost incoherent
mistrust in which conspiracy theories became the one thing that everyone
was coming to believe. The theories were mostly wrong, but in their own
inchoate way, they were right because there was a loss of freedoms,
because most of what the media broadcast was a lie, and there was an
agenda, and though many of the conclusions were wrong, they were
reacting to a real loss of agency.
Conspiracy theories thrive
when people lose control over their lives, but can’t localize the blame.
Big Tech built the conspiracy theories that it keeps trying to rein in
by conspiring to control the public without understanding, as most
tyrannies don’t, that it is the cause of its own problems.
The
disrupters envision a society of useless people with few functions
except binging Netflix originals and commenting on photos on Facebook to
be subsidized with welfare checks so they can pay their subscription
fees, click on ads, and buy Chinese junk from Amazon. But a welfare
state is a signal that there is no future and it’s time to fight over
the scraps that can be seized.
There’s no better formula for
racial tensions, street violence, and bitter multicultural infighting
than the combination of a welfare state and diversity. American
diversity worked to the extent that there was upward mobility. When
social mobility stalled, as it occasionally did in cities, brutal
violence soon followed by people who had nowhere to go and nothing to
live for.
The disrupters had wanted to find a middle ground short
of full Marxism, but instead they were propelling the conditions for
both leftist radicalism and a rightward reaction, while striving to hold
on to their power and remake the world along the lines that they
thought were best.
Their disruption of politics, childishly
simple for men and women with enormous wealth and data insights, who
could find a dozen ways to hack a system, didn’t move the country their
way, but oscillated it back and forth between the extremes that were
breaking it. Trying to control the country, they were crashing it
instead, because organic life reacts, instead of waiting for input.
Unlike computers, organic life isn’t passive. And people are the least passive of all creatures.
The
men and women who had been disrupters wanted a predictable world they
could control, but were instead bringing into being an uncontrollable
world that was reacting to their efforts, as society often does, the way
that a body’s immune system reacts to a viral infection. Society was
responding to Big Tech’s efforts at control by raising the temperature
to kill the controlling virus.
And in the process it was wreaking the kind of havoc on society that a fever wreaks on the body.
The
great disruption had interconnected the world in unprecedented ways.
This vast interconnection had made the world more efficient in some
ways, at the expense of becoming more interdependent and more vulnerable
to disruptions. The internet had been built, in its earliest days, to
allow the command and control functions of the military to survive a
nuclear war. But the extension of the internet into everything made
society less likely to survive.
What had been a means to an end
had become its own end. Being online had become its own purpose. Big
Tech companies existed to furnish that world with convenient services.
The old hacker dream of a digital polis had become real and in its
realization had killed the dream. A wired society wasn’t utopia, but a
dystopia throbbing with the raw nerves of a lost frontier.
The
disrupter elite were the first to leave their own digital prison,
keeping their kids away from the services that had made them
billionaires, and trying to disconnect from their connections. They took
up eastern philosophies, hiked, bought homes in the woods in different
states, and tried to get in touch with something real only to find that
they carried the unreality inside.
Power is a practical and a
philosophical problem. The old disrupters had mastered machines and then
come to think of the world as a big machine. The new disrupters had
layered machiavellian interfaces over that old heresy, making a
collectivist machine with a human face. But the human face was stuck in
the uncanny valley, both real and unreal, and so were they.
The
new disrupters had reduced all of society to interfaces, external visual
inputs that had originally been meant to allow the user to manipulate
the world within the machine, but that had been reversed and were being
used by the machine to manipulate the user. And in doing so, they had
made the world an unreal place and raised generations of users to feel
manipulated by an illusory world, lashing out with the one thing that no
machine could cope with, unreason.
The great disruption of
machines was meeting at last the great disruption of man. And society
was shattering in the collision between the real and the unreal. It is
no coincidence that the acolytes of the disrupters have adopted science
as their slogan. They often claim to follow the science or the data, as
if these were oracles instead of ideas only as valid as their proofs.
Human
beings need to believe in things and commit to things, in order to feel
real. And the men and women who built an unreal world had come to
believe in that world as its own moral order. The world of the
disrupters is not a world of science, no more than a warlord with a gun
is an engineer because his power comes from a mechanical device, but it
is a faith in the source of their power. And that power is disruption.
It can in the end, like a gun, only disrupt.
The unreal
disrupters of the real strive for control, but their control is, like
everything about the unreal world they made, an illusion. They can
disrupt what is real, but like all the disrupters of ideas who came
before them, all that they replace it with is an unreality that does not
stand. The revolutions collapse and what comes after them is not the
future, but the return of the past.
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Tags:
Big Tech,
future of the west,
recent
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
“For more than a decade, Chinese biotech pioneers WuXi AppTec and
BGI Group have forged close scientific and financial relationships
developed by US drugmakers, research scientists, and start-ups around
Philadelphia and across the United States,” The Philadelphia Inquirer
reported April 16. “Now, Congress is threatening to cut off federal
funding to companies that do business with WuXi and BGI, citing links to
the Chinese military that some US officials say makes it hard for such
companies to keep the data of their US customers private and therefore
creates a national-security risk.”
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