2019 was a year we talked – a lot – about big tech. Alas, the much-expected “techlash” has not materialized: Silicon Valley still stands unscathed.
This might, of course, change in 2020, especially under a president like Elizabeth Warren. It’s easy to mistake her populist stance – let’s just break up the tech giants! – for some kind of leftism; it isn’t. Hers is a mere repetition of the (neo)liberal creed that well-policed, competitive markets will yield prosperity.
A Warren-style critique of big tech accepts, as a matter of fact, that some “smaller tech” is on the horizon. This populist account rests on a powerful myth of domestic politics gone wrong. It presents the rise of big tech as a series of policy errors by distracted or corrupt technocratic regulators, not the result of careful policy planning by a different set of Washington elites, keen to use every tool in their arsenal to consolidate America’s power globally.
Focused almost entirely on domestic affairs, the Warren-style account rarely situates big tech alongside big money – Saudi Arabia, SoftBank and JP Morgan – and big state – the Pentagon, with its massive contracting orders, and the NSA, with its massive spying apparatus. Positioned properly inside this troika, big tech emerges as an almost inevitable consequence of global financialized and militarized capitalism.
Not surprisingly, this account remains blind to the real reason American big tech is not smaller: big money and the big state need it to remain big. The former to make sure Wall Street can recoup its loss-making investments, the latter to ensure that America’s defense and intelligence needs are met swiftly, efficiently and on the cheap.
Making big tech smaller, thus, can only be accomplished by trying to rein in the powers of Wall Street and the Pentagon and accepting that America should play a humble role in the global order. None of this is likely to happen, especially given American anxieties about China’s global ascent in all three dimensions – technology, finance and military might.
A smaller tech means America losing its ability to project its power geopolitically; the odds that the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley – let alone the “America first” Trump administration – would agree to this are nil. They will probably remain nil even if someone like Warren – whose foreign policy views are rather conventional, even by Washington standards – gets elected.
The powers of the nefarious troika of the big tech, big money, and big state could – and should be – contested. But this has to be done directly – by explicitly invoking and contesting the links between the financial, military, and technology dimensions of US power – and not indirectly, by discussing natural tendencies towards monopolization in digital capitalism.
The first approach lends itself to a properly progressive political agenda; the second only to the utopian expectations that the new generation of smarter technocrats could resolve the contradictions of global capitalism.
In the absence of such a program, what should leftists do? They should ditch the “big tech v small tech” dichotomy and speak of corporate v non-corporate tech instead. Whether such tech is small or big is often besides the point; bigness, especially when it comes to the provision of networked public goods like artificial intelligence, is no sign of reaction.
The ownership – not just of companies but also of sensors, networks, data and services – is more important than the size of the key players. But this doesn’t mean that we should follow the likes of Warren in treating them as utilities; to do so would be to impose a ban on the kind of institutional imagination that the rise of digital technologies should have provoked – but still hasn’t – on the left.
The utilities model is problematic for many reasons, the chief of which is that data – the intimate residue of our intellectual, social and political life – is definitely not like water, gas and electricity (let alone oil) in one key respect: suffused with meaning, data lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations and action plans.
How this total ensemble of meanings and actions get assembled, by whom, and with what rationale is not a question that can be answered, with any certainty, in advance. This data ensemble can work to empower the advertising industry or feed the electrical disinformation campaigns or help banks extend more loans – ie ensure that the wheels of capitalism roll smoothly.
This, however, cannot be the project of those whose heart is on the left. Surely, this ensemble, properly arranged and stimulated, can also seed more non-market behaviors, grounded in solidarity and mutual respect? Couldn’t it do to the knowledge society what the welfare state did for the industrial society, ie create the durable foundations for human flourishing at a time when capitalism has penetrated the most intimate facets of human existence?
In pigeonholing the solutions to the problem of big tech into the institutional straitjacket of the older utilities model, are we not giving up the opportunity to create a radically new institutional landscape – one which will de-commodify everyday life the same way the welfare state de-commodified working life almost a century earlier?
This genuinely leftwing agenda doesn’t provide a simplistic, clean, but ultimately utopian answer along the lines of “small” or “humane” tech. But in calling out big tech as a function of American corporate power it at least gets the diagnosis right.
