OP-ED: THE LORDS OF SILICON VALLEY

This is the era where grifters become kings. Consider Silicon Valley. One struggles to think of a time in history when so many useless inventions were gathered in one place. There’s the trafficky tunnel with no fire suppression exclusively for cars known to combust into difficult-to-quench chemical fires. There’s the mysterious new era of the web that will supposedly integrate cyberspace with an extremely slow, fraud-prone technology best known for hosting ten thousand “ unique ” drawings of the same derivative ape. And there is, of course, “the metaverse. ” Instead of solving real problems, the technology barons have turned their eye to labour exploitation. Silicon Valley’s embrace of the absurd and authoritarian germinated a resistance: Now, it is time to fight back.

Amazon disallowed peeing (1). In the past six years, Silicon Valley has been riven with labour scandals, most notably, the revelation that Amazon did not let drivers take breaks to pee in tandem with the increased prominence of outspokenly anti-rich politicians (2). This revealed to the American public that Silicon Valley takes labour relations cues from the Pinkertons. The industry has now been forced to repress worker rights quietly. There is the Amazon tactic, interfering with the union vote to force a second vote that is more difficult for the union to win3; the Google tactic, covertly firing engineers who lead union pushes (4); and the Microsoft tactic, buying competitors to suck the energy out of their union pushes before the virus can spread.

The union push in Silicon Valley is a result of the failure of tech’ s utopian vision. Companies, like Google, that used to encourage dissent among employees with weekly executive question and answer sessions have had their visions of benevolent capitalism dashed against the reality that in order to succeed in an evil world, not being evil isn't always an option (5). Companies that were founded to solve specific problems, like Tesla, have rapidly devolved into grift factories because their innovations do not work. Teslas in tunnels are not going to solve the climate crisis. The Lords of Silicon Valley fell for their own hype, and union busting is a tantrum after realizing they aren’t special.

This tantrum has unintended consequences: as technological monetization creeps deeper into the lives of citizens outside the tech sector, the plight of tech sector workers has become politically emblematic of the industry’s danger. Now, even citizens not employed by the industry feel threatened by its growing power (6). Scandals around political misinformation and voter suppression, like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, have thrown the political role of internet platforms into the spotlight. The public’s growing awareness about the role of the internet in politics has forced the platforms to grapple with their own role in politics (7).

The technology sector now owns public space. Politicians disseminate information through official Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers talk politics, and voter manipulation happens on Facebook. Public space, the site of political interaction, has shifted almost entirely online, to social media ecosystems controlled by terrifyingly large corporations. It’s an adage that the news is socially constructed—out of all the world’s events, journalists and editors select ones that go on to become news. Social media companies have not only the power to construct the news, they also have the power to construct reactions to the news. Facebook and its ‘family of apps ’ have begun to censor content on their platforms. This has largely been far-right content, but the companies also have censored left-wing content they deem ‘ extreme, ’ like criticism of Zionism (8). This is Facebook thinking like a state: it has created a monopoly on discourse (9), and uses that monopoly to allow and disallow kinds of politics. Platforms like Facebook do this in a way that is completely unaccountable: If Twitter thinks you’re too extreme, you have no recourse for being banned. It's a private platform.

This is the antithesis of democracy. In a democracy, citizens enjoy rough political equality through which rule by the people means one person, one vote, and one voice (10). In this new "private commons," Zuckerberg controls who gets to have a voice. If Facebook or Twitter don’t like what you’re saying, you don’t get to say it. Facebook and Twitter have set themselves up as feudal lords, ruling over patches of public space and demanding personal data as fealty (11).

The economy has never been democratically controlled, and the rise of tech barons is simply the latest grotesquerie of markets running wild. Politicians, like Senator Bernie Sanders, who have called for breaking up Facebook are missing the point. The problem isn 't that one company controls public space, the problem is that the public does not control it. These platforms should be expropriated and brought under democratic control where basic protections, like free speech, apply, and citizens have a voice if they don ’t like the governance of the platform. Our democracies are flawed, but they are leagues better than having no accountability at all (12).

1. British Broadcasting Corporation. (2021, April 4).

“Amazon Apologizes for wrongly denying employees need to urinate in bottles. ” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada56628745

2 The paradigmatic example is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt).

3 Selyukh, Alina. (2022, February 4).

“Amazon workers in Alabama begin second union vote. Here ’ s how it happened. ” National Public Radio https://www.npr.org/2022/02/04/1078358112/amazonworkers-in-alabama-vote-for-a-2nd-time on-whether-theywant-a-union

4. British Broadcasting Corporation. (2020, December 3). “Google fired employees for union activity, says US agency. ” https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55173063

5. Tiku, Nitasha. (2019, August 13).

“Three Years of Misery inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech. ” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-yearsmisery-happiest-company-tech/ 7 Facebook’ s 2018 hiring of Nick Clegg, and his 2022 promotion is an excellent example. See also LeGuin, Ursula K. (1968). A Wizard of Earthsea. Parnassus. pp. 83-84.

8 Biddle, Sam. (2021, May 14).

“Facebook’ s Secret Rules About the Word ‘Zionist’ Impede Criticism of Israel. ” The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2021/05/14/facebook-israel-zionistmoderation/

9. The parallel is with the State ’ s monopoly on violence. See

critically Weber, Max. (1919). “Politics as a Vocation.

” Munich, https://open.oregonstate.education/sociologicaltheory/chapter /politics-as-a-vocation/, and Dunleavy, Patrick and O’Leary, Vincent. (1987). Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy. MacMillan. pp.138, 143, 148- 152.

10 Dewey, John. (1939).

“Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us. ” https://www.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/studium/ das _ fach/warum _phil _ ueberhaupt/dewey_ creative _

democrac y.pdf. See also Coppedge et al. (2011). “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach. ” Perspectives on Politics, 9(2), 247-267.

11 For an elucidation of this dynamic, see critically Zuboff, Shoshana. (2015). “Big Other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospect of an information civilization. ” Journal of Information Technology, 30, 75-89.

12 See generally Dewey, John. (1927). The Public and Its Problems. Holt.