Category: Digital Culture

Is an old conservative message working with new progressives?

As American progressives, especially New Yorkers, honor the passing this week of Mario Cuomo, editorials and eulogies in various forms will cite the former governor’s famous keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention.  In this speech, Cuomo challenged President Reagan’s statement that America is “a shining city on a hill,”  which comes from Matthew 5:14; and it is a phrase that has been synonymous with America’s unique capacity for divinely presumed exceptionalism since John Winthrop first invoked the words in advance of founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  (All credit to historian Sarah Vowell for making these connections in her book The Wordy Shipmates.)

Cuomo addressed Reagan directly, accusing the president of living in an ivory tower from which “the city” may indeed look shiny to him and his wealthy friends, but down on street level, where people work, struggle, and endure deprivations like homelessness, the American city is neither shiny nor on a hill.  Progressives like me didn’t think much of Reagan’s rhetoric that often glossed over real challenges (like energy and climate issues) that we are only now beginning to take seriously.  And we didn’t buy into supply-side economics or the deregulatory agenda that helped foster a culture of “conspicuous consumption,” which continues to distort the principles of responsible capitalism to the extent that contemporary progressives seem to have broken faith with the idea that the system remains a rational, economic model for a free society.

This understandable frustration, combined with an equal measure of distrust in government, appears to be leading many social progressives toward economic libertarianism that, ironically enough, champions the same deregulatory paradigm long-cherished by the trickle-down, supply-side conservatives.  What’s different this time is that it isn’t financial services, extraction industries, or the manufacturing sector promising the “market will solve everything if government gets off our backs,” it’s the high-tech industry, the disruptors of Silicon Valley.  Many of us democrats and progressives marveled at Reagan’s ability to teach the conservative, working-class base to vote against its own self-interests, and now the technocrats appear to be teaching progressives to do the same thing.

In an article that appeared yesterday in The Washington Post, writer Larry Downes offers old-school, industry-serving declarations dressed up in the new lingo used by the tech industry elite. Touting what he calls “Big Bang Disruptions,” Downes is not only promoting a new book, he is serving up classic, conservative rhetoric, sprinkled with a dash of Schumpeter, and folded into byte-sized hors d’oeuvres that smell tasty and fresh, but are really just pigs in a blanket again.  It’s just another business sector saying, “Get out of the way, and technology (i.e. the market) will meet all challenges and bring about prosperity.” And the reason I think this GOP stand-by is now playing among progressives is the aforementioned disenchantment with government in general and the nature of the Internet, which many see as an antidote to or substitute for government.  I honestly think we’re at a baby-with-the-bathwater moment when faith in both private and public systems is so low, that even traditional progressives are susceptible to messages like this one from Downes:

“We see . . . the FDA’s growing discomfort with new technologies, such as the DNA testing service 23andMe, that are being translated into new products and services circling the moribund health care industry, giving patients access to information about their own bodies that have long been the exclusive fiefdom of medical professionals.”

Of course such populist ebullience must be tempered in light of this piece by Sarah Zhang, which appeared Tuesday on Gizmodo; it reports that the supposedly self-empowering 23andMe is entering into deals with large biotech firms to sell the DNA data people have been voluntarily providing to the company through its app.  Not that I don’t hand it to guys who figured out how to make billions from spit, but Downes’s implication that their business model is going to solve the underlying flaws in American healthcare by disrupting the “fiefdom of medical professionals” is farcical.  Of course, nobody should be surprised that selling user data is where the money is, not only for these high-tech expectorant collectors, but for most of the companies Downes is assuring us will “build the future” if the damned regulators will just stay out of the way.

And I have little doubt they will build the future, but on the chance that it starts to look like a future we don’t like, on the chance we don’t want to allow our genetic data to be sold like bundled securities, I have to ask my fellow progressives precisely what hedge against this kind of corporate practice might they propose other than government?  We could argue about it on Facebook and Twitter, I suppose, but because Silicon Valley is interconnected by an incestuously small pool of venture capital, this “representation” through social media only makes more money for the new elite in their new towers. And from up there, America really does look a lot like a shiny city on a hill, doesn’t it?

It is also worth noting that some of the most successful Silicon Valley firms don’t have a particularly good track record for abiding by rules and regulations in the first place.  In their own words, they like to “break things” and “get big fast” and “apologize later,” meaning they’ll settle lawsuits and pay fines after  a few million dollars is a mere drop in their over-valued buckets.  As such, I think a little skepticism is warranted in response to the assertion that a shiny future is somehow being delayed by the prospect of regulatory oversight.

Rules are ignored, broken, and fought against daily by these companies, so where is the unfettered prosperity?  The economy is certainly healthier than it was when we were on the brink of disaster, but is the gap closing or widening between the ultra-rich and everyone else?  One need only look in Silicon Valley’s own neighborhood to see that not much trickles down from those particular hills to the streets below. And if an industry is not closing that gap through legitimate creative destruction, but is potentially widening that gap with with destructive destruction, then it has no right to say to the public, “Back off. We got this.”

“The Internet is Not the Answer” with Andrew Keen (podcast)

Keen-Internet book jacket

Andrew Keen’s new book, The Internet is Not the Answer (Atlantic Monthly Press), goes on sale today.  This is the third book Keen has written about the Internet and digital-age culture. A native of London, Keen first became an Internet entrepreneur in the US with the founding of Audiocafe.com in 1995, and this new book cites his own personal conversion from early evangelist of techno-utopian ideas to an observer with a more critical view of how and why the evolution of the Web is failing to fulfill many of its founding ideals.  Through first-hand accounts and solid research, Keen describes how some of the most influential technology leaders abandoned the egalitarian and democratizing goals of the Internet in favor of business strategies that have produced, and will continue to produce, a winner-take-all-economy that only serves to exacerbate wealth stratification throughout the market.   While economics are the central theme of this new book, Keen also discusses culture, sociology, and in particular privacy, saying that we are voluntarily creating a surveillance state that would be the envy of the East German Stasi.

Keen believes, as I do, that government must play a role — that if we naively think the Internet obviates the role of regulation and law enforcement through representative government, that we are only empowering an oligarchy and not ourselves.  The Internet is Not the Answer is an approachable read for anyone with no prior knowledge of digital-age issues, and for all its seriousness and dire warnings, Keen’s writing is lighthearted, personal, at times very funny, and is ultimately optimistic.

For more information about Andrew, visit www.ajkeen.com.

The Internet is Not the Answer is reviewed here by Michael Harris for The Washington Post.

Orlowski Details Google’s Silencing Miss. AG

As a follow-up to my last post about Google churning the Sony hack into SOPA suds, I wanted to call attention to this detailed article by Andrew Orlowski in The Register.  In that last piece, I refrained from enumerating Google’s conflicts with the laws of several countries, including our own.  I am not an investigative journalist and don’t maintain a detailed diary of those accounts, though I certainly read about many of them.  I also refrained from speculation as to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s rationale for “taking a break” in his investigation since Google has filed suit against his office; but as Orlowski points out, we should not overlook the fact that the search giant is worth more than Hood’s entire state or that the suit itself looks like a neatly-coordinated PR move.

“The innuendo this time was clear: state AGs were colluding to “break the internet” all over again. It ignited the same persecution fantasy that had fuelled [sic] the SOPA protests (“Let’s get rid of this legislation so we can start enjoying culture again,” wrote one Berkman scholar during the anti-SOPA campaign, somehow implying he couldn’t play music, go to the theatre or watch a movie).

Then, after the stories had circulated, quite coincidentally Google dug into its pockets and launched a highly unusual lawsuit against the attorney general of America’s poorest state.”

Most importantly, Orlowski emphasizes that Hood’s interest in Google hardly begins or ends with the company’s role in copyright infringement of properties belonging to Hollywood studios.

“What Hood wants to know is how Google is complying with a legally-binding settlement. And he’s curious to know whether advertisers are being skimmed – as whistleblowers have long alleged. This is certainly of interest to small businesses, typically “mom and pop” shops, that use Google’s Adsense. That’s the only area where one can argue Hood “opens up a new front” against Google – and he’s seeking more than compliance. And, given the economic interests of poor Missippians and the fact the USA is reluctant to apply fraud or consumer protection laws against Google, it’s hard to see why he shouldn’t.”

If anything, the copyright holders’ interests are among the lower priority concerns for authorities that have been investigating Google, appropriately taking a back seat to fraud, illegal drug trafficking, and human trafficking.

“Have a look how, and where, copyright figures in his 79-page Google subpoena. Just three press releases, none of which relate to copyright infringements, are on the Mississippi website. It’s the very last item on the list. It’s a sub point.”

And in case you don’t read the article, I have to quote Orlowski’s summation in which he makes the most important point:

“My puzzle is, why do intelligent progressives unthinkingly sign up to this agenda? The consequences of Google’s success in silencing Jim Hood are that corporate power cannot be restricted by one of democracy’s main mechanisms for reining it in. Google and Facebook are increasingly resembling “suprastates” to whom national – and perhaps international – law doesn’t apply. But if you think that replacing laws with a free-for-all leads to anything other than the strong crushing the weak, then I have a bridge to sell you.”

See Andrew Orlowski’s full article here.