The drumbeat of concern about the perils of our digital economy just got a lot louder. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Facebook cofounder and Mark Zuckerberg college roommate Chris Hughes is now urging that Facebook be broken up. He follows early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg mentor Roger McNamee in seeing the company as a “catastrophe.”
What is to be done? Can tech be regulated?
Zuckerberg himself has been calling for regulation from lawmakers and has recently insisted, along with Google chief Sundar Pichai, that privacy must be the watchword for their businesses as they go forward.
But at some level we all know perfectly well that privacy of the sort we had before personal computers is impossible unless one unplugs from the grid entirely. There is a reason Harvard Business School professor Shoshanna Zuboff 's term “surveillance capitalism” has caught on: this is how the business model works.
Yet there’s more to it than the digital observation of everything we do online. There is, as Hughes notes, “the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention.” While attention deficit disorder may be a fairly recent discovery, we are now faced with a new phenomenon – what might be termed "attention-distraction disorder."
We face a constant struggle over our attention: How much time did you waste last night scrolling through Facebook, posting ephemera on Instagram (also a Facebook platform), and watching animal videos? The platforms are designed to collect data about your online behavior in such a way that you will stay glued to the screen.
Of course, this is at one level only an extension of television’s effort to “rent eyeballs” for advertisers. But Nielsen’s crude data-gathering methods could not hold a candle to the artificial intelligence-driven methods deployed by the social platforms to monopolize our attention.
Hughes argues that Zuckerberg’s power goes “far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government” and that we have the tools to regulate Facebook and create accountability for the awesome power it exercises over speech. The regulatory tools Hughes speaks of are the traditional ones of antitrust and anti-monopoly law, which he argues have fallen into disuse.
But those kinds of laws were created for analog industries that combined vertically or horizontally to dominate particular segments of the economy--railroads, steel, telephone service. It’s not at all clear that these tools will work in regard to new technologies that form a whole new way of life. For that’s what our personal devices and the apps that we use on them have created: an entirely new mode of existence. People want to use their devices because they make life easier, more interesting, more entertaining. The devices capture our attention, and do their damnedest not to let go.
Breaking up Facebook, as Elizabeth Warren has proposed, would be a valuable test case. It uniquely dominates the social networking space. In the meantime, however, we may have to give up the idea that all these internet platforms are “free.” Who will be willing to pay to use platforms in order to regain control over their information?
Hughes confirms what anybody who has been paying attention would have suspected: Zuckerberg has been inviting regulation because he fears that lawmakers will go further and break up his empire. And there is no doubt that anger at Facebook has been building since at least the revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Meanwhile, workers at the big tech firms have been mobilizing. Google workers walked out to express their anger about sexual misconduct at the company. Uber and Lyft workers struck recently to convey their unhappiness about pay and working conditions, just as IPOs are making the company’s founders very rich.
In sum, these businesses—once the technological wunderkinder that wowed us into submission—are facing their comeuppance. Big tech has come of age; as it has come to dominate a growing share of the economy, it is increasingly being held responsible for the problems and risks of that economy.
And some of the creators of this new world look in regret and shame at what they have created. The whole spectacle is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s reaction to the detonation of the first atomic bomb: that it recalled the words from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Now the question is whether the tech firms can truly be held accountable. After all, that $5 billion fine confronting Facebook is really just an irritant, a cost of doing business. Truly reining in these companies is going to take a whole lot more than fines.
