Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (whose company owns Facebook and Instagram) got into an uncomfortable exchange with President Donald Trump at the White House during a Thursday evening event at the Rose Garden.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg — who was seated next to the president — was asked a question about free speech laws in the United Kingdom in response to complaints about social media censorship. The reporter initially sought Trump's response, but also posed the question to Zuckerberg, who appeared to be caught off-guard.
"Sorry, I wasn't paying attention," Zuckerberg said.
"The British government seems to be cracking down on social media posts, people being arrested for tweets, social posts. Just wondering how concerning that is for you, Mr. President, and Mr. Zuckerberg," the reporter said.
"This is the beginning of your political career," Trump said to the Meta CEO.
"No it's not," Zuckerberg quickly responded, before refusing to answer the reporter's question.
The Journal further reported that the meeting was rife with flattery from CEOs, including from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who praised Trump as a "pro-business, pro-innovation president" and that he looked forward to "a long period of leading the world." Apple CEO Tim Cook also heaped compliments on the president, telling Trump that he appreciated his "leadership and focus on innovation" while reminding him of a commitment to invest $600 billion in American manufacturing. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — who garnered controversy earlier this year for his Department of Government Efficiency — was noticeably absent from the gathering, despite his companies having multibillion-dollar federal contracts.
President-elect Donald Trump ended up siding with billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk in their feud with MAGA activists over a contentious immigration issue. But Trump's anti-immigrant base isn't planning to give up easily.
That's according to a Friday report in Politico, which delved into the still-raging fight over H-1B visas for migrant workers. Both Musk and billionaire pharmaceutical investor Vivek Ramaswamy took public stances in favor of increasing H-1B visas despite pro-Trump influencers like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon (Trump's former chief White House strategist) calling on Trump to curb new H-1B admissions.
In late December, Musk defended his position by saying foreign-born workers brought in through the H-1B visa program were more preferable to the tech industry than American workers, saying Americans lacked the proper education and training needed to work for companies like Tesla and SpaceX. He added that the anti-migrant MAGA base were "contemptible fools" who needed to be "removed from the Republican Party, root and stem."
One advocate who has consistently pressed Trump to curb illegal immigration is Mark Krikorian, who leads the far-right think tank Center for Immigration Studies. He acknowledged that while he personally disagrees with Trump's endorsement of Musk's point of view, he understood it as necessary political bargaining.
"You’ve got to understand, even if you’re the most MAGA of MAGA people, these guys helped Trump get elected, and he owes them," Krikorian said. He added, however, that "tech people do not understand the politics of this issue" and that "over Christmas week, they got a lesson."
Gay Henson – the secretary-treasurer of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents tens of thousands of people in the engineering profession — is accusing Trump of flip-flopping on the issue. Henson told Politico he met with Trump in 2020, and that the president told him that "Americans need American jobs first."
"And what’s confusing to me is it sounds like now he’s listening to tech billionaires and tech employers on how the visa program ought to work, and saying the opposite of what he was thinking then," Henson said.
The boom witnessed in the U.S. equity market over the past few years has begun to echo the latter stages of the high tech bubble of the early 2000s, right down to the investor interest ultimately gravitating toward five stocks that have posted substantial gains, and obtained an almost cult-like status among their respective devotees. In 2002, it was Lucent, Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, and Intel. Today, it’s Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. They’ve even got an acronym among their followers: FAANG. Taken in aggregate, these five stocks account for approximately one-quarter of the NASDAQ’s total market capitalization. In fact, just three months ago, Apple alone became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization. But just as the Big 5 of the last high tech boom ultimately came unstuck, so too, one by one, today’s tech titans are gradually being “de-FAANG-ed,” as investors have come to reassess their growth prospects on the grounds of anti-competitive/anti-trust considerations, abuse of privacy, and deteriorating top-line growth. Apple is the most recent example, but it tells a much bigger tale, which speaks to a longstanding disease infecting the overall U.S. economy: namely, financialization.
“Financialization”—which denotes “the increasing importance of financial markets, institutions and motives in the world economy”—manifests itself clearly in the case of Apple. It is becoming another example of an American company that is increasingly valuing financial engineering over real engineering, as its core businesses get hollowed out amid product saturation and declining global sales.
Like General Electric some 25 years under Jack Welch, Apple under current CEO Tim Cook increasingly represents a microcosm of the changing role of U.S. markets as they have become less a vehicle for capital provision, more akin to a wealth recycling machine in which cash piles are used less for investment/research and development, more for share buybacks (which are tied to executive compensation, elevating the incentive for, at a minimum, quarterly short-termism and, at worst, fraud and corporate looting). All in the interests of that flawed concept of “maximizing shareholder value,” in which the company’s stock price, rather than its product line, drives corporate decisions, determines senior management compensation, and becomes the ultimate measuring stick of success.
Usually, when this trend becomes ascendant, it doesn’t end well. Perhaps the adverse reaction to Apple’s recently reported earnings is the first warning of what could follow.
To be sure, this is not the first rough patch for Apple since its resurrection under Steve Jobs when he returned to the company in 1997. In the early 2000s, the company came under scrutiny for the manner in which it improperly backdated stock options and didn’t report this to the SEC. As a result, Apple was found to be systematically understating its profits and defrauding its shareholders (stock options were classified as “non-expense expense,” which allowed them to be omitted from the profit and loss account, thereby artificially bolstering reported earnings). Having already obtained iconic status in Silicon Valley, then-CEO Steve Jobs got off lightly. Likewise when Jobs was directly implicated in a wage-fixing cartel with Google, among others. More recently, Apple’s aggressive tax avoidance strategies have come under scrutiny.
The backlash has hitherto been comparatively muted, however, because many of the foregoing practices came at a time when Apple was producing one hit product after another, inspiring a cult-like devotion among consumers, and generating investor enthusiasm on Wall Street. Unfortunately for the iPhone manufacturer today, the “hit parade” of new, earth-shattering products appears to have dried up, and the global market is increasingly being saturated with comparable products, creating prices pressures and declining market share.
Apple is increasingly deploying its substantial cash pile, not for investment/innovation, but for share buybacks (which refers to the repurchasing of shares of stock by the company that issued them). Buying back shares helps to support the share price both by reducing overall supply and also by inducing “herding behavior” by institutions, encouraged by the vote of confidence conferred by management insiders (who presumably understand the company’s prospects better than most). Additionally, by reducing the number of shares outstanding, this practice is accretive to earnings per share, which helps dress up the financial statements further. As a “growth stock,” Apple’s investors generally evince a preference for earning momentum, as opposed to a heavy stream of dividend payments (which is generally preferred by “income”-oriented investors).
For all of the theoretical reasons why share buybacks are supposedly a good thing, the dirty little secret is that the real reason for them is that they help to enrich senior management directly, because their compensation (via extensive grants of stock options) is increasingly tied less to the performance of the company, more to the company’s share price. Like so many other major listed companies, Apple has been starting to embrace this trend with more gusto. As Eric Reguly of the Globe and Mail wrote earlier this year: “In May, Apple announced that it would vacuum up another $100 billion of its own stock, taking the total buyback since the end of the Jobs era to roughly $300 billion.”
To be fair to Apple, it is hardly unique. As early as 2010, market analyst Rob Parenteau noted that company managements, “ostensibly under the guise of maximizing shareholder value, would much rather pay themselves handsome bonuses, or pay out special dividends to their shareholders, or play casino games with all sorts of financial engineering thrown into obfuscate the nature of their financial speculation, than fulfill the traditional roles of capitalist, which is to use profits as both a signal to invest in expanding the productive capital stock, as well as a source of financing the widening and upgrading of productive plant and equipment.” Likewise, Professor William Lazonick noted in his work, “Profits Without Prosperity,” that the 449 companies that were publicly listed between 2003 and 2012 “used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market.”
Share buybacks were effectively illegal under SEC rules until 1982, in the midst of the Reagan deregulation wave, when SEC Rule 10b-18 was introduced. Until that time, buybacks had been considered a form of stock manipulation. As early as the mid-1980s, more and more companies have resorted to them, and the practice has grown exponentially.
But as the title of Lazonick’s paper makes clear, the buybacks created a lot of prosperity for the corporate executives and shareholders, but did little for the underlying profitability for the companies themselves, largely because cash piles were diverted away from productive uses such as R&D and capital investment. “Maximizing shareholder value” provides a fancy and bogus rationale for blatant stock manipulation, this time tied to executive compensation. The arguments for the tight restriction of buybacks pre-1982 are, if anything, even stronger today, given the scale and the corresponding degradation of corporate balance sheets as a consequence of the practice. Like the pigs at the trough making one last grab for cash before the bubble finally bursts, it creates enormous incentives for “control fraud.”
Apple has not fully crossed over to the dark side, but it is probably more than coincidental that their share buybacks have accelerated just as their explosive rate of growth appears to have stalled. Wall Street analysts seldom give outright sell recommendations on hitherto beloved stocks (the corollary also applies, which can amplify booms and busts). But there was enough in the last Apple earnings result to provide some cause for concern.
This presents a classic chicken and egg problem: Is Apple now using its cash to buy back stock because it is failing to produce new earth-shattering products like the iPhone or iPod (or, earlier, the Macbook), or is it the case that a lack of innovation a direct outgrowth of deploying the cash largely to buy back stock?
Either way, there is no exciting new epoch-changing product in the pipeline that would drive unit sales. The new Apple Watch certainly hasn’t been a game-changer. And, as Reguly argues, “Every dollar devoted to buybacks is a dollar not devoted to uses such as research and development, employee training, acquisitions and community giving.”
Tellingly, what Apple isn’t going to do in the future hints at bigger problems ahead. In addition to projecting weaker-than-expected holiday sales, the company surprised investors when it indicated that the company would no longer break out how many iPhones it sold each quarter. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that is because Apple will soon have to rely on price, not volume of unit sales, to keep the show going. Which likely means more stock buybacks to support the share price.
Unfortunately, that’s not a particularly healthy scenario, coming at a time when smartphone sales are coming under pressure globally, which is being reflected in major product price cuts across the entire industry. Consider Samsung’s Galaxy S8, which can be purchased on Amazon.com for anywhere from 30 to 50 percent below the original launch price (depending on phone company). That’s significant because Apple has been losing global market share to companies like Samsung for something like five years now. And if Samsung is experiencing these kinds of pressures, then Apple’s strategy of trying to offset the loss of market share by raising prices (or resorting to tricks in which Apple uses software updates to intentionally slow down the iPhone and deliberately impair the battery life) is likely to prove problematic.
Much like Microsoft after its first phase of growth, Apple is morphing into a slower-growing cash cow. It’s hard to sustain a $1 trillion market cap under those operating conditions. Increased functionality in a smartphone can only go so far; there are only so many ways to improve taking a selfie or enhancing facial recognition for security protocols. And those kinds of marginal improvements are likely insufficient to create a huge new wave of global sales. The smartphone has evolved considerably over the past decade, but at this stage of its product development, the incremental improvements are marginal. So the cash pile will continue to go toward buybacks, an increasingly destructive strategy during a time of falling markets and declining sales, when the cash should be husbanded as a defensive measure, not dissipated and replaced with debt.
Apple is neither the first nor the last company to find itself in this position. Slowing product growth and the inexorable pull of untold wealth that could be derived from a stock market bubble is a deadly combination that has infected companies well beyond the hitherto beloved creation of Steve Jobs. The misallocation of capital via share buybacks (at a cost of sacrificing innovation, research and development) is yet another example of the fantasy of efficient financial markets and the notion that markets are always the optimal means of intelligently allocating capital. We see the development of a bogus theory of “maximizing shareholder value” used increasingly to mask blatant stock manipulation. The practice appears particularly perverse when one sees companies’ core businesses dissipate against a backdrop of balance sheet deterioration (as the cash is replaced with debt). As financialization increasingly hollows out Apple’s core, it provides a broader symptom of everything that is wrong with America’s bubble-ized capitalism today.
Do grim environmental projections and government inaction have you feeling blue? Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard feels your pain. “If you’ve been paying attention, you'll know that things aren't going very well for the planet,” he said in a recent video. “It’s pretty easy to get depressed about it. I’ve always known that the cure for depression is action.”
Earlier this year, the outdoor gear label launched a digital platform to connect its fans and customers with grassroots environmental groups across the U.S. It’s one of several new tech tools designed to make it easier for average Americans to positively impact the environment with their day-to-day choices. If you're looking to cut your own footprint down to size, you may want to bookmark these.
1. Patagonia Action Works
Patagonia began donating a portion of its revenue to grassroots environmental organizations more than four decades ago. Over the years, the outdoor gear brand connected with hundreds of community-based groups and helped convince 1,200 corporate peers to donate some of their cash, too. Now, through its new digital platform, Patagonia wants to bring its vast network of customers and fans together with these vetted green groups to maximize collective impact.
"The biggest question I get from our community and customers is, 'What can I do to save the planet?'" Patagonia president and CEO Rose Marcario said in a statement. "This platform makes it easy to connect with organizations in your neighborhood who are working every day on local issues."
Through Patagonia Action Works, users simply enter their city and select a cause of interest—such as biodiversity or climate change—and they'll get a list of organizations and events in their communities. The platform also highlights relevant petitions, fundraising drives, skills-based volunteering opportunities and other ways to get active. "We have decades of experience with these groups, and our collective grassroots actions can add up to the change we need to make a better world," Marcario said. "With the threats we face, we need everyone in this fight."
After President Donald Trump announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, more people started asking Conservation International what they could do in the face of government failure. In response, the nonprofit launched a revamped carbon calculator to help people understand—and offset—their carbon footprints. Simply answer a few questions about your lifestyle, and the calculator churns out your footprint alongside the U.S. average. It also suggests simple ways to cut back and tells you how much it would cost to offset the remainder through verifiable projects that fight deforestation.
"We've tied this calculator to a type of solution that oftentimes gets ignored, and that’s nature," Shyla Raghav, climate change lead at Conservation International, told Fast Company. The nonprofit says that nature-based solutions can significantly contribute to the fight against climate change, yet they receive only around 2 percent of climate finance. "We really see this as a missed opportunity for all of us in the climate conversation," Raghav told FastCo. "We wanted to feature and to demonstrate the link between climate change and data."
Even as Americans become more concerned about the carbon emissions, deforestation and human rights abuses associated with their retirement plans, alternatives remain largely dominated by the wealthy—with minimum investments in the millions. Fortunately, that's beginning to change.
Launched last year, online investment platform Swell is out to bring sustainable and socially conscious investing to the masses. For as little as $50, users can back a combination of six themed portfolios related to pressing global challenges—including renewable energy, zero waste, clean water and disease eradication. To be included, companies must pass Swell’s social and environmental performance assessments and demonstrate high financial potential, CEO and founder Dave Fanger told Fast Company.
"We hope to have an impact both in the short term and the long term," Fanger told FastCo. "In the short term, we hope to see a world in which every investor is interested in, informed and empowered to invest in impact. And along the way, we hope to play a role in surfacing our most pressing global challenges so that everyone is more aware of the issues at hand—as well as the work being done to solve them."
4. The Guest-Imator
Americans send around 40 percent of our edible food supply to landfills in a given year. That means we pump billions of gallons of water and use millions of hectares of land to produce food that’s never eaten, even as an estimated 40 million of us go hungry. Consumers are responsible for nearly half of this tragic waste total—more than even restaurants or grocery stores. And considering the average family of four trashes at least $1,500 worth of food every year, making smarter choices about how we buy, store and cook our food can help us as well as the environment. Enter the Guest-imator, a meal-planning tool designed to power smarter shopping trips and empty trash bins.
Simply answer a few questions about the type of meal you’re planning, the number of guests you expect and the amount of leftovers you want, and the Guest-imator uses a prioprietary algorithm to calculate the exact quantity of each ingredient you'll need—meaning no more wasted food, money or resources. Created by SapientRazorfish, it's the latest waste-cutting effort from Save the Food, an ongoing campaign by the Ad Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which also created that tear-jerking strawberry commercial.
"Consumers want to cut back on food waste, but they aren’t always sure how to do that," Peter Wagoner, associate creative director at SapientRazorfish, told Sustainable Brands. "That's why we zeroed in on meal planning." Launched in advance of last year’s Thanksgiving holiday, the platform is perfect for planning big gatherings and dinner parties, but it can also be used for everyday dinners and even meals for one. It’s available online, on mobile and via Amazon's Alexa.
The environmental impact of raising animals for food is featured more often in the news these days—and for good reason. Animal agriculture now uses over a third of the earth’s landmass and is the No. 1 driver of climate change. As bleak as those stats sound, it’s tough for people to picture how their diets impact animals and the environment, but a new web tool is here to lend a hand. Created by educational website BlitzResults, the aptly-named Meat-Calculator turns dietary habits into compelling graphics to help people visualize the broader footprint of their choices.
"Sure, everyone knows that animals are bred and slaughtered for meat production, but a steak on the grill doesn't tell you its story. You just don't see the negative environmental impact and side effects," said Tim Lilling, a researcher with BlitzResults. “The Meat-Calculator makes the use of resources and the negative consequences for the environment tangible.”
As AlterNet's Robin Scher explains, the tool taps data from the USDA to show lifelong meat-eaters how choosing vegetarian meals more often can benefit the planet—from water, CO2 and antibiotic reductions to animals saved from slaughter. “It comes down to shifting perspectives," Scher wrote. "Using the averages of the calculator, I committed to a 60 percent reduction over the next decade. By crunching the numbers, the calculator revealed the full impact my dietary decision could have on both my own wellbeing as well as the environment and animals."
Do you use an online or mobile app to help reduce your environmental impact? Share it in the comments.
Silicon Valley has a reputation for being male-dominated, evenhostile to women. Yet one wonders if the industry would be where it is today — wounded by sexist reckonings and privacy breaches — if women had been at the helm of the big tech companies instead of men. I’m not the only one asking these questions: Emily Chang, anchor and executive producer for Bloomberg Technology, grabbed my attention with an unsettling article in Vanity Fair, titled “'Oh my god, this is so f--ed up': Inside Silicon Valley’s secretive, orgiastic dark side." (That article was itself adapted from her book “Brotopia,” published in February.) In it, Chang describes regularly scheduled drug-fueled sex parties for the Valley’s elite, parties in which women often serve as window dressing.
Indeed, this is partly what Chang's book is about: imbalance of power, how much harder it is for female entrepreneurs to succeed, and why the future of the Valley depends on the industry’s willingness to unabashedly let women lead. It’s also less about the why, and more about the how; it turns out that Silicon Valley’s male-dominated state originated long before the Web 2.0 days.
In our interview, Chang talked about #MeToo, Peter Thiel, and what happens when good intentions to “change the world” aren’t good enough.
In “Brotopia,” you explain how women were pushed out of the tech industry from its early days. Though we can’t go back in time, have you ever wondered how the tech industry might be different today if that weren't the case?
I think it is fascinating to think about how the world would be different if women had been present at the founding of so many of these companies or had gotten a chance to start the next Facebook or Google or Apple. I think because the companies that exist today have created such incredible wealth, and incredible innovation, that we just assume that this is the best way it could possibly be, and it's hard to imagine how the world might be different.
I interviewed people like Ev Williams, who is a co-founder of Twitter, who told me he thinks if women had been on the founding team of Twitter, that maybe online harassment and trolling wouldn't be such a problem. Maybe video games wouldn't be so violent. Maybe porn wouldn't be so ubiquitous. There are so many ways that the world could be different if women had been there from the beginning. It's certainly impossible to prove "what if" — we'll never definitively know, but I think about all the women who never got a chance to start the next Facebook or the next Google, or the next Apple, simply because they didn’t look the part.
When people think of tech entrepreneurs, people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates might spring to mind. Who are some women in the industry who you believe have been underrepresented in the industry, but are just as important to the tech world?
There are so many women who haven't gotten the respect and recognition that they deserve. Since you mentioned Steve Jobs, I think of Susan Kare, who designed all of the graphical interfaces on the Macintosh and was a key player in making the Mac accessible and interesting to a wider group of users. She's the reason that [people] like my mom bought Apple computers in the ‘80s. It opened up a whole new market for Apple and the technology industry, all because she made computers accessible and understandable to real people.
Another woman I think about is Margaret Hamilton, who is a computer scientist who worked at NASA, and was really important in building the software that brought Apollo to the moon.
Another woman I think about is Diane Greene, who was the founder of VMware, which is an enterprise company that is worth tens of billions of dollars today. She's now running Google Cloud, but she doesn't seek the spotlight. She has an incredible story to tell, but unfortunately it just hasn’t been told enough.
In your book, you talk about Peter Thiel and how his focus on meritocracy during the early PayPal days likely influenced Silicon Valley’s culture today. It’s interesting because I think meritocracy is what draws a lot of talent to Silicon Valley. It creates a foundation where people don’t have to play by the traditional rules, an easier route to success, which has been an appeal for many to startup tech jobs. What, in your opinion, happens when that’s stripped away from the Valley’s culture?
Silicon Valley loves to trumpet the idea that it's a meritocracy where anyone with a good idea can succeed, but the reality is meritocracy is impossible to achieve because we all come to the plate with our own privileges and backgrounds, and at no stage of the game is everyone on a level playing field. The escalator to success is far faster for some than it is for others. I think when you strip away the fantasy that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, you realize that it in fact has rewarded a lot of people who look the same, and a lot of men who fit the preconceived idea of what a computer programmer or an entrepreneur is supposed to look like.
Investors are looking for people who look like Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates. That shuts out 50 percent of the population if not more. I talked to so many women who were going to pitch meetings, wearing black and gray, with their hair in a ponytail, they don’t wear jewelry, and they don’t get their nails done.
Qualities that are seen as positive in men are seen as negative in women. So if a man is young, he's considered high potential, if a woman is young she is considered inexperienced. If a man is cautious, that's considered a good thing. If a woman is cautious it's considered a red flag.
Since we were on the topic of Peter Thiel, I’m curious what your thoughts are about him leaving the Valley?
I think Peter Thiel made a lot of enemies in Silicon Valley when he supported Donald Trump within a week of the Access Hollywood tape being released of the president bragging about groping women without permission. This is a very fact-clinging community. It sounds like Peter has sounded increasingly inhospitable to his more contrarian ideals. Peter Thiel has made some incredible contributions to technology, and he is always pushing the boundaries. However, I don’t think that he's done nearly enough to address the issues of women and underrepresented minorities in tech.
How has Silicon Valley dealt with the #MeToo movement? Has it affected how tech companies handle sexual harassment and assault?
So, my biggest fear of that is this isn’t a movement but a moment and that people, you know, ultimately will just go back to average and tolerate some of the behavior that we’ve been seeing. But my biggest hope is that this really is a movement and I do see some people really working hard to change the status quo.
Do you think the way Silicon Valley “thinks differently” has resulted in lesser consequences for those who have been accused of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of the #MeToo movement (compared to, say, Hollywood)?
It happened in a very short period of time, and so I think that could come without the same sort of social evasion that would happen over the course of a long career. It could lead to arrogance and quite frankly, hypocrisy. There are so many people who truly believe that they are changing the world. It’s been used as a sort of justification or cover for a lot of that behavior to be overlooked, and some people who work here have had a hard time admitting that the industry has really failed women.
If Silicon Valley is really changing the world, they would be doing something about this, and I hope they do. There are some good people out there who are trying really hard and doing some really important work to change the ratio, but we need to see a lot more action and a lot less talk.
Will women finally be able to save the tech industry from suffering from another disastrous bubble burst?
I certainly think they can. I think it is a fascinating idea to look at the dot-com bust and consider what happened there. If women have had more decision-making roles, would that have happened? I would argue it wouldn’t have happened. Men and women have completely different risk profiles, but in general, when you have people of all different backgrounds and all sort of personalities, that creates balance in an organization. I think having concerting and complementary points of view are really important when you’re building an executive team.
I think it would be a huge benefit to companies today to think about that when they’re building their leadership team. Like, if you look at Facebook, for example, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have one of the strongest business partnerships in the world and he made as much space for her in that partnership as she did for him and she not only built an incredible business with Google, she turned Facebook into Google’s biggest competitor in the online ad business. And so, hiring women is not just a right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do. There’s countless research that shows this but unfortunately some of the data has been overlooked.
Finally, let’s talk about sex and the Valley. Do you think the current climate in the Valley will shift the frivolity and novelty of the infamous tech sex parties you described in your book? Are they a symptom of the Valley or of the San Francisco Bay Area?
The Bay Area has long been a place of sort of sexual exploration and sexual liberation, and that’s been going on for decades, so I don’t think that is going to change. I don’t necessarily think it should. I think that what needs to be examined is how some of these events are just another way to prey on women.
I think too much business in Silicon Valley happens outside the office. Some of these events are much more about power than sex and that is what needs to change.
Last night I promised myself I would go to bed early. While my body was under the covers at 11pm, my mind was not. Instead of reading a book, as I had planned, I was scrolling through Twitter, getting increasingly nervous about assault rifles, the 2018 midterm elections and neo-Nazis in our midst. An hour later I was anxious, I had a headache, and worse, I was no closer to sleep than when I started. I needed an intervention. I needed, as Catherine Price's new book suggests, to break up with my phone.
In How to Break Up With Your Phone, Price isn't suggesting we all throw our phones into a river and move to an alpaca farm. She's not even advocating, as HuffPost founder-turned-sleep mogul Arianna Huffington does, that we all tuck our phones into their own miniature beds at night. Instead, she recommends a reset. The book is both an explanation of the addictive psychology of smartphones and a practical guide to reduce dependence, to ensure that your phone is merely a communication device, not a third arm.
Price knows that in the age of Trump, the politically engaged and news obsessed among us often use our phones to keep up with the latest and communicate with fellow activists. Would the digital sabbath she recommends mean missing an important protest or action? According to Price, with some advance planning (warnings to friends, family and colleagues about when and how you interact with your phone) you might find yourself, in addition to being more alert, less stressed and better rested, in a better frame of mind to deal with both the news of the day and the demands of activism.
Earlier this week, Price gave AlterNet some tips on how to start a phone breakup, how to talk to your boss about it, and the first step to conquering any addiction: admitting to yourself that you have a problem.
Ilana Novick: Why do Americans need to break up with their phones?
Catherine Price: According to Moment, which is an app that tracks screen time (with more than 4.8 million users), the average person is spending four hours a day on their phone—that's a quarter of our waking hours/a sixth of our time alive. We're prioritizing our phones over our children, our partners and our friends. They're the first thing we look at in the morning, and the last thing we touch before bed. We check our phones while we're driving, despite the fact that we know that it's dangerous, both to ourselves and to others. We've allowed these inanimate objects to control us, and I believe we need to start paying attention to our relationships with them and take back control.
IN: In the age of Trump and the 24-hour news cycle, it can be hard to stay away from the news, especially the push alerts on our phones. How do you stay informed, without going insane?
CP: First, recognize that, regardless of your political affiliation, you have an unhealthy relationship with Donald Trump. No one who's not a family member or dear friend should be monopolizing that much of your attention. My personal solution was to delete news apps from my phone. (You can't get sucked into a news spiral if you don't have access to the news.) That's not to say I don't stay on top of things; I just make a point of checking from my desktop computer. And in order to prevent that from getting out of control, I use Freedom, which is an app/website blocker that lets you block yourself from problematic sites and apps when you're trying to focus.
IN: Have you broken up with your phone?
CP: Heck, yeah. My relationship isn't perfect (email is my personal biggest issue), but that's okay: No relationship will ever be perfect. I'm constantly working on making sure it's as healthy as it can be, and feel that, for the most part, I'm succeeding.
IN: Where did the inspiration for the book come from?
CP: A couple places. First, just the observation that everywhere I looked, people were staring at their phones. Second, my experience as a new mother—I had had a baby, and had several moments in which I noticed that she was looking up at me, as I looked down at my phone. That was not the first impression I wanted to give her of what a human relationship should be.
Also, I wanted to spend less time on my phone and more on my life—and this book was a way to make sure that I made that happen! (Actually, ironically, I had to write it on such a tight deadline that I gave myself eyestrain from staring at my computer screen/mild carpal tunnel, but that's a different story. I'm back on track now!)
IN: What's the first step in a phone breakup?
CP: If I had to suggest a place to start, it would be to track the time you're actually spending on your phone using an app such as Moment (iOS) and Quality Time (Android). (Also, ask a loved one what they think of your relationship with your phone—you may think you're fine, but your kid/spouse/best friend may see it very differently.)
Next, begin to try to catch yourself while you're using your phone, and pay attention to how it's actually making you feel. Are you calm? Focused? Present? Or are you anxious and distracted? Do you actually feel good while you use it/after you're done? Just paying attention to the way you feel when you use your phone can be a powerful tool for behavior change. You can also put a rubber band around it as a physical prompt to jolt yourself out of autopilot, or change your lock screen image to one of the ones I've got on my site that say things like, "What do you want to pay attention to?" and "Do you really want to pick me up right now?"
I'd also recommend signing up for the online Phone Breakup Challenge, which is a timed series of emails designed to accompany you as you go through the book (there are 20 emails in total). That's a great way to keep yourself on track.
It's also useful to keep in mind that one of the biggest issues surrounding phones is that we've never stopped to think about what we want our relationships with them to be. So just by reading this article—in other words, just by beginning to pay attention—you're already making a change.
IN: How do you set boundaries with supervisors who expect you to be looking at email constantly?
CP: First of all, I think we need to have a lot more conversations about the impact that constant connectivity has on people's productivity. If I were a boss, I would make a point of clearly establishing guidelines for how often I expected people to check their phones, email, etc., and create some sort of reward for NOT doing so constantly. It's a huge waste of time.
I also think that we tend to overestimate our own importance. If you check your email once every few hours, what's the worst that can happen—especially if you have an autoresponder that says how often you're checking and provides an alternative means of contact for people who really need to get in touch?
Also, take advantage of some of the options that are already provided—for example, set a VIP list of contacts and adjust your notifications so that only their emails/phone calls/texts come through to interrupt you. Set up a text autoresponder (you can do this through "do not disturb while driving" mode in iOS and with the lilspace app on Android). Establish boundaries for yourself, explain the reason for those boundaries (focus and productivity) and then provide people with alternate emergency ways to reach you.
Also, stop kidding yourself: how much of this is actually about pissing off your boss, and how much of it is about your own anxiety when you don't have access to your phone? And how much of the time you spend on your phone is REALLY for work-related purposes, versus checking your work email and then drifting off to Instagram? We're all guilty of this!
Two of the largest investors in Apple are urging the iPhone maker to take action against smartphone addiction among children over growing concerns about the effects of technology and social media on the youth.
In an open letter to Apple on Monday, New York-based Jana Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) said the firm must do more to help children fight addiction on its devices.
“There is a developing consensus around the world including Silicon Valley that the potential long-term consequences of new technologies need to be factored in at the outset, and no company can outsource that responsibility,” said the investors, who collectively control $2bn of Apple stock.
“Apple can play a defining role in signalling to the industry that paying special attention to the health and development of the next generation is both good business and the right thing to do.”
The group urged Apple to offer tools to help children avoid addiction and give parents more options to protect their children’s health through monitoring usage. Apple’s iOS already offers limited parental controls, including restrictions on apps, use of features such as location sharing and access to certain kinds of content.
But the investors said that Apple should allow parents to be able set the age of the user of the phone on setup, and implement limits on screen time, hours of the day the phone can be used and block social media services.
They also proposed that Apple should establish an expert committee including child development specialists, which should produce annual reports, and offer Apple’s vast information to researchers on the issue.
The investors cited several studies on the negative effects on children’s mental and physical health caused by heavy usage of smartphones and social media. These range from distractions in the classroom and issues around focus on educational tasks to higher risks of suicide and depression.
The open letter reflects growing concerns on the long-term impact of technology such as smartphones and social media on children. Technology firms are yet to publicly acknowledge the issues around children and their company’s creations, but even Silicon Valley heads have started to raise the alarm. Former Facebook president Sean Parker described the site as made to exploit human vulnerability, saying: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
“I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit,” said Palihapitiya.
With many apps, sites and devices being designed to be as addictive as possible to grow user numbers and maintain eyeballs on screens, children are increasingly being either seen as collateral damage or specifically targeted as the next generation of users.
One source of angst came close to being 2017’s signature subject: how the internet and the tiny handful of companies that dominate it are affecting both individual minds and the present and future of the planet. The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring, and is in retreat.
If you want a sense of how much has changed, picture the president of the US tweeting his latest provocation in the small hours, and consider an array of words and phrases now freighted with meaning: Russia, bots, troll farms, online abuse, fake news, dark money.
Another sign of how much things have shifted is a volte-face by Silicon Valley’s most powerful man. Barely more than a year ago the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, seemed still to be rejoicing in his company’s imperial phase, blithely dismissing the idea that fabricated news carried by his platform had affected the outcome of the 2016 US election as a “pretty crazy idea”. Now scarcely a week goes by without some Facebook pronouncement or other, either updating the wider world about its latest quest to put its operations beyond criticism or assuring us that its belief in an eternally upbeat, fuzzily liberal ethos is as fervent as ever.
The company has reached a fascinating point in its evolution; it is as replete with importance and interest as any political party. Facebook is at once massively powerful and also suddenly defensive. Its deeply questionable tax affairs are being altered; 1,000 new employees have been hired to monitor its advertising. At the same time, it still seems unable to provide any answers to worries about its effects on the world beyond more and more Facebook. A pre-Christmas statement claimed that although “passive” use of social media could harm users, “actively interacting with people” online was linked not just to “improvements in wellbeing”, but to “joy”. In short, if Facebook does your head in, the solution is apparently not to switch off, but more Facebook.
While Zuckerberg and his colleagues do ethical somersaults, there is rising noise from a group of people who made headlines towards the year’s end: the former insiders at tech giants who now loudly worry about what their innovations are doing to us. The former Facebook president Sean Parker warned in November that its platform “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
At around the same time, the former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya held a public interview at Stanford University in which he did not exactly mince his words. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he said. “No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth … So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion.” (Strangely, around a week later he seemed to recant, claiming he had only meant to “start an important conversation”, and that Facebook was still a company he “loved”.)
Then there is Tristan Harris, a former high-up at Google who is now hailed as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Under the banner of a self-styled “movement” called Time Well Spent, he and his allies are urging software developers to tone down the compulsive elements of their inventions, and the millions who find themselves hooked to change their behaviour.
What they are up against, meanwhile, is apparently personified by Nir Eyal, a Stanford lecturer and tech consultant who could be a character from the brilliant HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. In 2013 he published Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products. His inspiration for the book is the behaviourist psychology pioneered by BF Skinner. Among his pearls of wisdom is one both simple and chilling: “For new behaviours to really take hold, they must occur often.” But on close inspection, even he sounds somewhat ambivalent: last April, at something called the Habit Summit, he told his audience that at home he had installed a device that cut off the internet at a set time every day.
Good for him. The reality for millions of other people is a constant experience that all but buries the online world’s liberating possibilities in a mess of alerts, likes, messages, retweets and internet use so pathologically needy and frantic that it inevitably makes far too many people vulnerable to pernicious nonsense and real dangers.
Thanks to manipulative ephemera, WhatsApp users anxiously await the ticks that confirm whether a message has been read by a receiver; and, a turbocharged version of the addictive dots that flash on an iPhone when a friend is replying to you, Snapchat now alerts its users when a friend starts typing a message to them. And we all know what lies around the corner: a world of Sensurround virtual reality, and an internet wired into just about every object we interact with. As the repentant Facebookers say: if we’re not careful, we will soon be at risk of being locked into mindless behavioural loops, craving distraction even from other distractions.
There is a possible way out of this, of course. It resides not in some luddite fantasy of an army of people carrying old Nokia phones and writing each other letters, but the possibility of a culture that actually embraces the idea of navigating the internet with a discriminating sensibility and an emphasis on basic moderation. We now know – don’t we? – that the person who begins most social encounters by putting their phone on the table is either an addict or an idiot.
There is also a mounting understanding that one of the single most important aspects of modern parenting is to be all too aware of how much social media can mess with people’s minds, and to limit our children’s screen time. This, after all, is what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did, as evidenced by one of the latter’s most pithy statements. In 2010 he was asked about his children’s opinion of the iPad. “They haven’t used it,” he said. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Two billion people actively use Facebook; at least 3.5 billion are now reckoned to be online. Their shared habits, compulsions and susceptibilities will clearly have a huge influence on the world’s progress, or lack of it. So we ought to listen to Tristan Harris and his campaign. “Religions and governments don’t have that much influence over people’s daily thoughts,” he recently told Wired magazine. “But we have three technology companies” – he meant Facebook, Google and Apple – “who have this system that frankly they don’t even have control over … Right now, 2 billion people’s minds are already jacked in to this automated system, and it’s steering people’s thoughts toward either personalised paid advertising or misinformation or conspiracy theories. And it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it.”
And then came the kicker. “This isn’t some kind of philosophical conversation. This is an urgent concern happening right now.” Amid an ocean of corporate sophistry and doublethink, those words have the distinct ring of truth.
In the early 1990s, transnational corporations (TNCs) in the agriculture, services, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing sectors each got agreements as part of the WTO to lock in rights for those companies to participate in markets under favorable conditions, while limiting the ability of governments to regulate and shape their economies. The topics corresponded to the corporate agenda at the time.
Today, the biggest corporations are also seeking to lock in rights and handcuff public interest regulation through trade agreements, including the WTO. But today, the five biggest corporations are all from one sector: technology; and are all from one country: the United States. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, with support from other companies and the governments of Japan, Canada, and the EU, are seeking to rewrite the rules of the digital economy of the future by obtaining within the WTO a mandate to negotiate binding rules under the guise of “e-commerce.”
However, the rules they are seeking go far beyond what most of us think of as “e-commerce.” Their top agenda is to ensure free ― for them ― access to the world’s most valuable resource ― the new oil, which is data. They want to be able to capture the billions of data points that we as digitally-connected humans produce on a daily basis, transfer the data wherever they want, and store them on servers in the United States. This would endanger privacy and data protections around the world, given the lack of legal protections on data in the US.
Then they can process data into intelligence, which can be packaged and sold to third parties for large profits, akin to monopoly rents. It is also the raw material for artificial intelligence, which is based on the massive accumulation of data in order to “train” algorithms to make decisions. In the economy of the future, whoever owns the data will dominate the market. These companies are already being widely criticized for their monopolistic and oligopolistic behaviors, which would be consolidated under these proposals.
Think about Google, which has become the largest collector of advertising revenue thanks to its ability to analyze and repackage our data. And think about Uber: it is the biggest transportation company in the world, yet it does not own cars and it does not employ drivers. Its main asset is the massive amount of data it has on how people move around cities. And with that “first mover” advantage, and with its army of lawyers and its massive scale, it can outcompete or simply buy up competitors around the world. The disruption Uber has caused in the transportation sector will shortly be seen in just about every sector you can imagine. The implications for jobs and workers are difficult to overestimate.
Another key rule these corporations are seeking would allow digital services corporations to operate and profit within a country without having to maintain any type of physical or legal presence. But if a financial services firm goes bankrupt, how can depositors seek redress? If a worker (or contractor) for the company’s rights are violated, or a consumer is defrauded, how can they get justice? And if the company does not have a domestic presence, how can it be properly taxed, so that it is on a level playing field with domestic businesses? Most countries require foreign services suppliers to maintain a commercial, physical presence in the country to operate for just these reasons; but Big Tech just sees it as a barrier to trade (and unaccountable profit). Public interest regulations would be seriously undermined.
But that’s not all. Big Tech also does not want to be required to benefit the local economies in which they profit. There are a series of policies that most countries employ to ensure that the local economy benefits from the presence of TNCs: requiring technology transfer, so they can grow their own startups; requiring local inputs, to help boost local businesses; and requiring the hiring of local people, to promote employment. But although every developed country used these strategies in order to develop, they seek to “kick the ladder away” so that developing countries cannot do the same, exacerbating inequality between countries.
The business model of many of these companies is predicated on three strategies with serious negative social impacts: deregulation; increasing precarification of work; and tax optimization, which most would consider akin to evasion of taxes. All of these downward trends would be accelerated and locked in were the proposed rules on “e-commerce” to be agreed in the WTO.
Since proponents of “e-commerce” rules in the WTO first tabled proposals last year, they have sought to convert an existing mandate to “discuss” e-commerce into a mandate to “negotiate binding rules” on e-commerce in the WTO. They have justified their proposals on the basis that e-commerce will promote development and benefit micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) ― as if promoting e-commerce and having binding rules written by TNCs are the same thing. But developing countries have focused their demands on increasing infrastructure, access to finance, closing the digital divide (obtaining affordable access), increasing regulatory capacity, and other concerns that will not be addressed by new rules on e-commerce in the WTO.
Meanwhile, MSMEs are able to participate in e-commerce now; but they are less likely to reap the benefits of scale, historic subsidies, strong state-sponsored infrastructure, tax avoidance strategies, and a system of trade rules written for them and by their lawyers if e-commerce rules in the WTO were to be adopted. What MSMEs need are platforms to facilitate customs clearance and international payments, but this is not what has been proposed in the WTO.
At this point, proponents have scaled back their ambitions due to massive resistance from the African bloc and some Asian and Latin American members. Now they are proposing more seemingly technical issues, such as e-payments, e-signatures, and spam. But these issues actually belong in other fora, such as the UN Conference on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) or the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) where legal and technical experts rather than only commercial interests were long ago able to help governments establish better rules.
Perhaps as a Plan B, proponents are claiming that “technological neutrality” already exists in the WTO. This would mean that if a country “committed” financial services in the WTO ― meaning that it agreed to have financial services subject to rules limiting regulation in that sector ― then cross-border online banking ― with all of the potential cybersecurity threats of hacking, or unstable financial flows wreaking havoc on local banking systems ― would already be committed. But this is a preposterous idea, and WTO members have not agreed to it, despite the intent of some countries that it is an accepted principle.
Proponents are also pushing to renew a waiver on tariffs on electronically delivered products, but there is no economic rationale as to why digitally traded products should not have to contribute to the national tax base while those that are traditionally traded usually do. But Big Tech may actually obtain this waiver, since it is often “traded” for a waiver that helps stabilize the generic pharmaceuticals market in developing countries, which helps guarantee access to life-saving medicines for millions of people.
The outcome in Buenos Aires will depend on strong resistance by developing country members to this new corporate Big Tech agenda. They should be aided by a strong civil society resistance to further imposition of procorporate rules that encroach on our daily lives.
Over the past year, I stopped responding to customer surveys, providing user feedback or, mostly, contributing product reviews. Sometimes I feel obligated – even eager – to provide this information. Who doesn’t like being asked their opinion? But, in researching media technologies as an anthropologist, I see these requests as part of a broader trend making home life bureaucratic.
Consumer technologies – whether user reviews and recommendations, social media or health care portals – involve logistical effort that means more administrative work at home. As economic anthropologist David Graeberobserves, “All the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities [has] turned us into part- or full-time administrators.” Companies may benefit when customers create content, provide feedback and do busywork once done by paid employees, but what about the customers themselves – all of us?
Many researchers recognize professional workplaces are becoming more bureaucratic, managing workers through documentation and quantification. But fewer acknowledge the expansion of this logic into private life. It might not feel like a burden to update your Facebook profile, review a business or log in to a web portal to message your doctor. But when you lose time answering customer surveys, setting privacy rules, resetting a password, wading through licensing agreements or updating firmware, it becomes clear how digital technologies increase managerial work at home. In my forthcoming book, I explore this phenomenon, which I call logistical labor.
Digitizing daily life
Here’s a typical example of how this happens at home. I recently received an email from my auto insurance requesting I call. Fair enough; I might not answer if the company called me. But instead of reaching a person familiar with the query, my call fed into an automated system where a synthesized voice asked what I was calling about.
“You told me to call!” I replied.
The automated system was confused: “Sorry, what was that again? You can say auto ‘policy,’ ‘claims’ or ‘tell me my options.’”
Eventually I reached a human, who didn’t know why I’d been asked to call either. “I don’t know,” I told her, “That’s what I’m calling about…” Finally, we figured out what was going on and resolved the issue. Then she asked whether I would stay on the line for a customer service survey. I refused.
Rather than calling or emailing me with specific details, the company made me work through all that automated confusion. Requiring that I call in effectively gave me work previously done by paid employees. And then the insurance company asked for yet more of my time to reflect on how well – or not – my work solved the problem the company had. At what point should I expect to be paid for my work?
Bureaucracy – a term coined in the 18th century to mean “rule by writing desk” – refers to the organization of modern government, desk-bound and hierarchical. Max Weber, a founding theorist of social science, viewed bureaucratic organization as fundamental to modern society. He decried its rigidity as an “iron cage” of rationalization in which social life is managed quantitatively. Since at least the 1970s, bureaucratic management has become common in corporate workplaces.
Sociologist Robert Jackall termed this shift the “bureaucratization of the economy,” in which rigid hierarchy and constant documentation takes over business places, including “administrative hierarchies, standardized work procedures, regularized timetables, uniform policies, and centralized control.” More bureaucracy means relentlessly tracking metrics and performances in the name of productivity – and internalizing the idea that a person’s value can be quantified.
In the academic world, anthropologists like Marilyn Strathern have described the push to quantify and document university work as “audit culture.” More broadly, this expansion of administrative work, aided by digital technologies, is transforming how American companies operate. For many companies, shifting administrative labor to consumers and “gig-economy” contractors offers a newly “disruptive” business model. As tech companies replace live customer service with online support “topics,” for example, users must spend additional time wading through these articles, or face endless phone trees when they do find a phone number.
New technologies can generate more pointless work, and not just in professional settings. The logic of tracking and monitoring, for example, threatens to take over American home life as well, from fitness and wearable tech to smart homes that assess when you need toilet paper or milk.
But spending time on new tech platforms doesn’t always seem like work. Young Europeans I have studied, for example, enjoy spending time on social networking sites and describe them warmly. But Facebook, Yelp, Instagram and the rest profit from the posts, photos, reviews and links people create, because they incite the “engagement” that drives ad revenue. As with consumer surveys or user feedback, these firms are harnessing user-generated content to convert people’s leisure time into corporate profit.
As new social network sites are created and become popular, each person spends more time keeping profiles up to date, checking on connections’ activities or chasing down forgotten passwords. Managing these accounts isn’t just time-consuming; it can be mentally taxing. Inspired by Chandra Mukerji’s research on the logistical power of water in civil engineering projects, I consider this cognitive effort “logistical labor.” Logistical labor is in this sense the work consumers do to manage tech platforms, often as companies outsource content creation and streamline their operations.
A new digital divide
The scope of this uncompensated digital busywork – from which companies profit – goes well beyond social media maintenance and taking consumer surveys. Even setting up a home printer requires exploring settings and configurations and troubleshooting, which can be daunting without the right tech know-how. People who are unwilling or unable to do that miss out on some of technology’s benefits.
In my research, for example, one young person in Berlin balked at purchasing a new mobile phone, overwhelmed by the task of sorting through service plans. Another shared wireless internet service with a friend across the street, resigning herself to spotty connections and limited online activity rather than wrestle with choosing, ordering and configuring her own service. Others were concerned about data privacy but were stymied by Facebook’s privacy options.
The scale of these problems is not only about quality of life – but about life itself.
Handling health care
Expecting consumers to be deeply involved expert users is especially concerning when it comes to managing health care. The dysfunctional U.S. health care system is already a Byzantine system of preauthorizations, insurance codes and impersonal treatment. Digitization alone isn’t to blame, but tech platforms like online portals increase administrative work for patients.
Patients, for example, often encounter multiple online portals in the process of paying bills or obtaining prescriptions. Although these systems save time in some ways, they require patients do more legwork like setting up user accounts. This problem is made worse as doctors leave private practice for hospital groups, which often use unwieldy online platforms and automated phone systems that make it difficult to reach a doctor directly.
Although the health care industry touts such portals as better for business – and in theory, for coordinating care – little attention has been paid to the additional work they create for patients, or the barriers to accessing their doctors.
Inequality at home
In all these examples, managing information on computer systems – for health care, insurance coverage or social media interaction – requires a new level of logistical effort, even with access to computers and the internet. This logistical labor adds to the mental work of managing a household.
In most homes, this additional effort, sometimes called “cognitive load,” falls disproportionately to women, who keep track of their families’ needs. For working women, the “second shift” isn’t just about housework or child care, but the cumulative fatigue of planning, delegating and worrying. It’s not a coincidence that many “smart home” technologies effectively replace the care work of mothers. This invisible labor typically goes unpaid, further devaluing responsibilities traditionally associated with women.
Do smart technologies tend to focus on gender-biased tasks?
Similarly, the logistical labor of managing new technologies entails a cognitive load that can overtake daily life. Of course, I still follow social media, read consumer reviews and sign up for paperless billing. But I’m more aware of how easily my time and labor become new sources of profit, through an unseen exploitation that places the onus on individuals to manage complex systems in the guise of optimizing user “experience.” This broader trend, however, makes individuals complicit in their own exploitation.
The House and Senate intelligence committees probed legal representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter this week over their role in Russian hacking of the 2016 election. While the three corporate reps played along, claiming ignorance of the extent of the Russian involvement and outrage over it happening, their behavior during the testimony revealed a deep and underlying rot within their companies — one we all could have seen coming since we first discovered these companies were spying on us.
The Google, Facebook, and Twitter congressional hearings this week confirmed that the Russian infiltration of the American election wasn't just a problem of oversight on behalf of those companies. It also revealed that the companies have, to some extent, abandoned their fundamental mission.
Of the three that gave testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday, Facebook is under the most heat at the moment. In September, Facebook admitted that Russian accounts had spent $100,000 on 3,000 ads during the election, and claimed the ads reached just 10 million people. On Monday, Facebook revealed that the Russian ads reached a far greater number of Facebook users than it had previously predicted: 126 million American users. It topped that number again on Wednesday when it announced 146 million Facebook users saw the ads. It’s highly likely that the ads held more sway over the voters they reached than any other political propaganda during the election. CNN reporter Dylan Byers captured the Facebook backtracking well.
While Google's technology is much further-reaching than Facebook's, the company claims it hasn’t facilitated the same kind of political damage Facebook probably has through its Russian ads, though Russian agents also bought ads on Google platforms like YouTube.
“We did observe that links to these videos were frequently posted to other social media platforms,” said Richard Salgado, Google’s representative at the hearing, deferring blame to Facebook and Twitter. “Google’s products also don’t lend themselves to the kind of targeting or viral dissemination these actors seem to prefer.”
Both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are bringing their agendas into the hearings, though it’s easy to see which side is using truth and fact to make their case. Republicans urged the tech companies to confirm that Russia only sought to sow discord among Americans through its political ads, whereas Democrats reminded the audience that the ads were intended to bolster Trump’s election, a fact confirmed by multiple intelligence agencies.
“During the election, they were trying to create discord between Americans, most of it directed against Clinton,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said to Facebook representative Colin Stretch. “After the election, you saw Russian-tied groups and organizations trying to undermine President Trump’s legitimacy. Is that what you saw on Facebook?”
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, echoed a similar line.
“Russia does not have loyalty to a political party in the United States,” he said in blatant dismissal of the facts. “Their goal is to divide us and discredit our democracy.”
The ads themselves, it was revealed in the hearings, are highly emotional in nature and clearly skewed toward targeting right-wing voters (some, for example, depict Hillary Clinton as a friend to Satan and an enemy of the American military).
For what it’s worth, the tech titans have been relatively cooperative. Twitter announced last week that it would ban all ads from RT and Sputnik, two news sites with ties to the Russian government. And all three built sympathetic lines into their testimony on Capitol Hill.
“The foreign interference we saw was reprehensible,” Facebook’s Stretch told senators. But their promises are weak-willed. As Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University, told the New York Times, “I like that they are contrite, but these issues are existential and they aren’t taking any structural changes. These are Band-Aids.”
Therein lies the key issue: only structural changes—in particular, to the way these companies make vast sums of ad revenue—will stop political interference like what we saw boil over in the 2016 election. It would take a complete structural overhaul to stop this kind of infiltration. Both large- and small-scale advertisers have been flocking to Google and Facebook ads for years. The advertising process is automated and difficult to monitor. And boosting the visibility of viral content is built into the very heart of the companies' business models: on Facebook, you’re more likely to see ads your friends “liked.” Google rewards websites that adhere to its vast and ever-changing SEO rules (and arbitrarily punishes independent voices like AlterNet at a whim), and on Google Ads, a competitive marketplace for advertisers, companies need only bid a few dollars higher than their competitors in order to push their ads to the top of a search result page.
Google and Facebook were supposed to help people make connections and access information, but as they scaled, they employed technology and attracted advertisers that undercut this mission. The backbone of Facebook’s technology is a machine learning-fueled algorithm, which feeds users content they’re more likely to respond to based on its popularity and similarity to posts they’ve engaged with before. It’s a creation of genius that advertisers love: the longer you spend on Facebook, scanning through photos and articles and posts that fit into the bubble the algorithm thinks you live in, the more targeted ads it is likely to feed you. It’s made the company billions of dollars, so why would it stop now just because of a few million possibly influenced American voters and one measly presidential election?
As Michael Carpenter, a former policy adviser for Joe Biden, wrote in the Hill, these companies have consistently downplayed the impact Russian bots had on the 2016 election, and disappointingly, they continued in this vein on Capitol Hill this week. It’s a dangerous underestimation of how far Russia will go, and for how long, to infiltrate and weaken American democracy. The companies claim to democratize the internet—that’s the whole basis behind boosting certain popular posts or rewarding well-done SEO. It’s supposed to create an internet for the everyman. They claim to want to forge friendships and make it easier to find answers to questions, but the Russian interference shows that their business model is, in many ways, doing just the opposite. Scaling up has endangered the missions of these companies, as automated ads and the massive scale at which Facebook and Google have grown made their best-laid plans unmanageable. Now, instead of being transparent about their problems, they’re issuing lie after lie in the hopes of skirting punitive legislation, and refusing to do anything concrete about their Russia problem until the government forces them to.
It's somewhat ironic that Russia took advantage of a classic capitalist problem: when a company with the best of intentions is successful and scales up, in the process of trying to crush all competition, it sacrifices its soul and exacerbates the societal problems it sought to solve in the first place. Lindsey Graham summed up the situation accurately this week when he said, “It’s Russia today; it could be Iran and North Korea tomorrow. What we need to do is sit down and find ways to bring some of the controls we have on over-the-air broadcast to social media to protect the consumer.”
But it’s been a long time since Facebook, Google or Twitter cared about their consumers, or their missions to better the world. As long as ad revenue allows these companies to increase their reach at such fast scales, it will be up to government legislation to rein in their influence, which will require a deep restructuring of the way these companies make their money. If this week’s hearing showed anything, they’re not likely to hand over that power quietly.
Similarly, the logistical labor of managing new technologies entails a cognitive load that can overtake daily life. Of course, I still follow social media, read consumer reviews and sign up for paperless billing. But I’m more aware of how easily my time and labor become new sources of profit, through an unseen exploitation that places the onus on individuals to manage complex systems in the guise of optimizing user “experience.” This broader trend, however, makes individuals complicit in their own exploitation.