techlash

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Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

While some involved new revelations—as journalists and politicians began, for the first time, investigating online malls in earnest—others centered on normal industry practices that were hiding in plain sight. What was once business as usual now became the basis of Capitol Hill hearings. The “techlash” had arrived. As the years have passed, the techlash has persisted. Its imprint appears to be permanent. The spectacle of the tech industry behaving badly has become routine, even cliché—a spectacle ritually enacted in the periodic testimony of its executives before Congress. Meanwhile, polling suggests that public opinion has taken a turn: in 2019, only 50 percent of Americans said that tech companies have a positive effect on the United States, compared with 71 percent in 2015.

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Kaplan’s interventions: Hao, “How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation”; Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook’s Lonely Conservative Takes on a Power Position,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2018; Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020. 9. Toward the Forest 148, The soundtrack to the privatization … “The Teflon industry”: Rana Foroohar, “Year in a Word: Techlash,” Financial Times, December 16, 2018. 148, At some point … The Financial Times called “techlash” one of 2018’s words of the year; it was also a runner-up for the Oxford Dictionary’s 2018 word of the year. Google Trends, a tool that displays the popularity of search queries over time, confirms that the word first caught on in 2018. 149, As the years have passed … Polling: Carroll Doherty and Jocelyn Kiley, “Americans Have Become Much Less Positive about Tech Companies’ Impact on the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, July 29, 2019. 149, This doesn’t mean … Priorities largely set by corporations and the rich: Martin Gilens and Benjamin I.

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They worry about fake news, surveillance, censorship, racism, and several other things. They worry that the connectivity furnished by MAREA and the other glass strands encircling the Earth is not only making the world smaller but making it worse. Since 2016, a mood of distrust has congealed around the large tech companies that dominate the internet. Often called the “techlash,” it has become a fixture of US media and politics. The belief that the internet is broken has become a new common sense. The brokenness of the internet is the subject of congressional hearings and New York Times investigations, executive orders and popular documentaries. It is something that, in a fractured partisan landscape, nearly everyone can agree on.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Lachlan Markay, “The Venture Corporatists,” Federalist, http://thefederalist.com/2013/10/02/the-venture-corporatists. 27. James Freeman, “How Washington Really Redistributes Income,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2012. 28. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Silicon Valley” (by Michael Aaron Dennis), http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/544409/Silicon-Valley; Adrian Wooldridge, “The Coming Tech-lash,” Economist, November 18, 2013. 29. G. William Domhoff, Fat Cats and Democrats: The Role of the Big Rich in the Party of the Common Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972), pp. 16, 35–73. 30. Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today (New York: Bantam, 1968), pp. 105–12; David Shribman, “The Democratic Coalition Is Breaking Up: More Blue-Collar Workers Identify as Republicans,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 22, 2012; John Dunbar, “Top 10 Donors Make up a Third of Donations to Super PACs,” The Center for Public Integrity, http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/04/26/8753/top-10-donors-make-third-donations-super-pacs. 31.

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Jessica Guynn, “Silicon Valley Staff-Poaching Suit Is Granted Class-Action Status,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2013; Dean Baker, “Silicon Valley Billionaires Believe in the Free Market, as Long as They Benefit,” Guardian, February 3, 2014; David Streitfeld, “Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, February 28, 2014; Angela Moscaritolo, “Suit Reveals Alleged Silicon Valley Anti-Poaching Scheme,” PCMag, January 30, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399555,00.asp. 66. Wooldridge, “The Coming Tech-lash”; PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, “PwC’s M&A Outlook Reveals Dealmakers’ Increasing Focus on Quality Execution in Competitive M&A Market,” press release, July 23, 2013, http://www.pwc.com/us/en/press-releases/2013/2013-deals-mid-year-ma-forecast-press-release.jhtml; Chris Morran, “Google Settles With FTC, Agrees To Change Anticompetitive Business Practices,” Consumerist, January 3, 2013, http://consumerist.com/2013/01/03/google-settles-with-ftc-agrees-to-change-anticompetitive-business-practices; Alisa Melekhina, “Are Social Media Sites Engaging in Anti-Competitive Conduct?”

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

It’s fertile ground for Luddism, if inadequate in its current remit, the hosts think. “It wasn’t long ago since tech was covered breathlessly,” Sadowski said, “but Silicon Valley has co-opted the techlash—” “But the apocalyptic language remains,” Ongweso chimed in. “The recommendations are ass, like, ‘We should have a government watchdog.’ If you think this is a threat to human life and democracy, then what is a watchdog going to do?” “Luddism is more like the techlash that we need, and the techlash that people were hoping for and wanted,” Sadowski said. “Not for a nicer Silicon Valley. No, Silicon Valley is rotten to the core. The problem is structural.

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“There is this straight line that can be drawn from Luddites to organizing around gig labor—and that is, both [groups of] people are being exploited, pushed on by capital, and sold as progress—if you get crunched up in the gears of progress, well, that’s the price of it!” They contend that the so-called techlash—the backlash against major tech companies that cropped up in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, growing concerns over Google and Amazon’s monopoly power, and so on—demonstrates a deep-seated anger at the domination of Big Tech, but that it has already been co-opted by the industry. Techlash was shortlisted for Oxford English Dictionary’s 2018 word of the year. It was defined by the OED as “a strong and widespread negative reaction to the growing power and influence of large technology companies, particularly those based in Silicon Valley.”

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The science-fiction author Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow, “Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature,” Locus, January 3, 2022; also mentioned in a post on Medium, November 15, 2021, https://doctorow.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature-e454bf5a5076. 3. The tech worker and author Wendy Liu, Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism (London: Repeater, 2020). 4. Techlash was shortlisted “Word of the Year 2018: Shortlist,” Oxford Languages, https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2018-shortlist/. As of 2023, the OED Online defines techlash as: “Originally: opposition to digital or computer technology. In later use: spec. a strong and widespread negative reaction to the far-reaching power and influence of large technology companies, esp. in relation to their control of personal data, social media, regulation of online access and content, etc.” 5.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication Theory, 12(4), 446–468. “The shares of America’s five biggest technology firms have been on an astonishing bull run”: Economist. (2020, February 21). So much for the techlash? Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/02/21/so-much-for-the-techlash Facebook’s stock jumped close to 2 percent: Jee, C. (2019, July 15). Facebook is actually worth more thanks to news of the FTC’s $5 billion fine. Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/15/134196/facebook-is-actually-richer-thanks-to-news-of-the-ftcs-5-billion-fine/ Facebook’s $5.7 billion investment in India’s Jio: Pham, S. (2020, May 7).

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In combination, they can feel profoundly overwhelming, like a tectonic force that cannot be reversed. In part, that is why these truths are “painful.” Examining each of their pathologies completely and unreservedly, understanding and appreciating their scope and scale, can leave one feeling exhausted and resigned. Perhaps that is why social media continue to grow in popularity in spite of the “techlash.” Perhaps this explains why so many of us choose to remain in a state of blissful ignorance, never untethered for too long from our precious devices. But, as with the challenges of the climate crisis, fateful resignation to social media’s disorders will only invite looming disaster. While the personal, social, political, and ecological implications of social media are profoundly disturbing, not doing anything to mitigate them will be far worse.

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It won’t be something that we can fix with a single policy, let alone a newfangled app. What we are experiencing, collectively, is a function of a linked set of deeply entrenched and mutually supportive social forces. Untangling these will be exceedingly difficult — a topic we’ll address in more detail in the final chapter. * * * In 2018, a new term circulated widely: “techlash” — not only a growing irritation with social media’s ill effects but a major pushback against the entire roster of technology platforms. Let’s face it: people are fed up with social media. Just about everyone has some kind of complaint, not just about the applications or the platforms, but also about the billionaire executives who run it all, people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

The word “community” is used to describe Facebook employees, Facebook customers, and Facebook users, and therefore “assigns responsibility to everybody.” Facebook values do not scale. It colonizes, but it does not homogenize. What it calls a “global community” is global user gridlock. Following Trump’s election, when Facebook’s influence came into question, a consonant but mistaken narrative began to take shape in the media. This was a “techlash,” journalists explained. According to this narrative, users were once very happy to share their lives on Facebook. The company was believed to be a net positive and a social good before election night of 2016, and only in recent years have users felt betrayed by the platform—believing it to be harmful to themselves as individuals, and harmful to society.

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Tech reporters act like Facebook’s “Loyal Opposition,” as the writer and academic M. R. Sauter has put it: bantering over its problems, expecting it will always be there, attempting to lock horns—while they are ants in proportion to its size. After all, who benefits when the story is that the crisis of Facebook is a new one? This problem is not a “techlash,” as new-tech journalists and tech pundits positioned it. The “tech beat” scarcely existed four years ago, although Facebook and other poisonous platforms had cursed beginnings in the aughts. The legacy media analogue to virality—a news peg, an angle, decisions over what is newsworthy—is a factor in how commercial platforms gobbled up so many industries, including the very same news business that largely ignored Silicon Valley’s ascent.

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I fear that the media’s delayed—and often misplaced—concerns about technology has fostered an endless ping-pong of surface changes and tactics, rather than focus on structural changes like decommodification and decentralization to enact a better internet. Worse still, Silicon Valley—handed this truncated timeline of its ills—is already working to co-opt and neutralize the “techlash,” similar to how it weakly responded to the matter of diversity just a few years before. Calls for “ethics” are coming from inside the big tech houses, and with an agenda that favors optics over solutions. When tech executives appoint themselves as the stewards of the industry cleanup, they carry on with the same spirit of contempt for outsiders—and users—that unleashed the problems in the first place.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Maud Daudon, the former CEO of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, said that Seattle was “inevitably caught a bit flat-footed as a community” by Amazon’s rise. “It was just so transformational.” The same dynamic was playing out eight hundred miles south in Silicon Valley, where the recoil from longtime residents to the changes wrought by companies like Google and Facebook came to be known colloquially as the “techlash.” In Seattle, it was very specifically an “Amazonlash.” Absorbed with the mechanics of its relentless growth, Amazon executives and employees were easy to vilify. Unlike its older peers Microsoft and Boeing, the company donated almost nothing to local philanthropies like the county chapter of the United Way, and didn’t even match the charitable contributions of its workers.

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Bezos and other Amazon executives saw only a city council captured by leftist legislators hostile to business. They didn’t seem to recognize or care that shifting public sentiment in Seattle also represented something broader: resistance to tech companies and to the dizzying changes they were bringing to their communities. That was the so-called techlash, unfolding outside the visible spectrum of Amazon’s well-compensated senior leadership. Their failure to recognize these forces was about to have serious repercussions. In addition to identifying Bellevue as an immediate alternative for headcount growth, some Amazon executives concluded that HQ2 would now have to be bigger than previously planned and most likely ramp up faster than initially expected.

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“It’s not personal, it’s kind of what we as a society want to have happen.” He sounded almost resigned toward whatever outcome might result: “We are so inventive that whatever regulations are promulgated or however it works, that will not stop us from serving customers.” In private though, Bezos prepared to take a less accommodating approach toward the intensifying techlash. In the fall of 2019, the S-team and Amazon’s board of directors read The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, by the economic historian Marc Levinson. The book traces the rise and fall of the first American grocery chain of the twentieth century, as well as its strategic drift after the death of its founders and the decades-long crusade against it by populist politicians and determined trustbusters.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Faced with autocratic adversaries who commandeer homegrown companies for their governments’ own ends, the mutual antipathy between coasts—between the American platforms on which the Gray War is being fought and the U.S. government and military officials fighting that war—has opened a gaping hole in our national defense. China has civil-military fusion. The United States has techgovernment confusion. And while our two coasts battle each other, the authoritarians are taking aim at democracy. Techlash Hard as it may be to imagine today, the marriage was once a happy one. Historian Margaret O’Mara calls the U.S. government “the Valley’s first, and perhaps its greatest, venture capitalist.”9 During World War II, the University of California at Berkeley was the second-largest recipient of funding from the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

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Another claims, “We’re making the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols.”32 Watching the show with my husband, Keith, we’d sometimes exchange knowing glances about which real-life CEO or industry mishap was being parodied. As the predominant media narrative fell out of love with tech, so did the country’s elected representatives. By 2016, the Hill and the Valley confronted what celebrity breakups typically term “irreconcilable differences.” America entered a full-fledged techlash. Democrats were furious that Moscow had manipulated social media to facilitate Donald Trump’s election—and even angrier that the industry seemed so blasé about it all. Civil rights groups blasted social media platforms for discrimination in advertising and hiring, and for allowing ugly, allegedly racist comments to proliferate.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

., interpersonal problems caused by intensive Facebook use)”. 27.For the impact of smartphones on children, see Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017). 28.Eve Smith, “The Techlash against Amazon, Facebook and Google—and What They Can Do,” Economist, January 20, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/01/20/the-techlash-against-amazon-facebook-and-google-and-what-they-can-do. 29.Haley Sweetland Edwards, “The Masters of Mind Control,” Time, April 23, 2018, 30–37, https://www.scribd.com/article/376290832/The-Masters-of-Mind-Control. 30.Tristan Harris, “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds—from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist,” May 19, 2016, http://www.tristanharris.com/essays/; Edwards, “The Masters of Mind Control.” 31.Edwards, “The Masters of Mind Control.” 32.Jonas Abromaitis, interview with Startup Lithuania, October 18, 2016, https://www.startuplithuania.com/news/tiny-lab-productions-subscription-model-sounds-promising/ (Tiny Lab CEO noting the difficulty to maintain the children’s “attention and encourage their loyalty to our games”). 33.Google, “Rewarded Ads: A Win for Users, Developers, and Advertisers,” accessed April 30, 2019, https://admob.google.com/home/resources/rewarded-ads-win-for-everyone/. 34.ACCC Preliminary Report, 4. 35.Betsy Morris, “The New Tech Avengers,” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-tech-avengers-1530285064; Levi Sumagaysay, “Former Google, Facebook Employees Step Up Battle against Tech Addiction,” Mercury News (San Jose), February 5, 2018, http://bayareane.ws/2EIqLTB; Nellie Bowles, “Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built,” New York Times, February 4, 2018, https://nyti.ms/2GJoKHg; Tia Ghose, “What Facebook Addiction Looks Like in the Brain,” Live Science, January 27, 2015, https://www.livescience.com/49585-facebook-addiction-viewed-brain.html. 36.NM AG Complaint ¶¶ 150–60 (identifying Google among the software development kit defendants). 37.NM AG Complaint ¶ 153. 38.NM AG Complaint ¶ 151, citing 60 Minutes, Brain Hacking, April 9, 2017, https://youtu.be/awAMTQZmvPE; Nicholas Kardaras, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance (New York: St.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

He launched Block Together just before Gamergate broke open, and the tool became popular among the women being targeted. Innovative engineering, it seems, could indeed help mitigate the problems that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube had stumbled into. The social networks just needed to make it a priority. By the middle of 2018, the bloom was off the rose. The big social networks had been stung by a “techlash” of public criticism. Their top executives had all been dragged into Congress and berated over how Russian actors had used their systems to meddle in the 2016 election. The scandal over Cambridge Analytica had broken open, showing how the firm had scraped and used personal info on millions of Facebook users to target political ads.

…

“I can report things that say, like, you fucking cunt, and it doesn’t get banned,” said the historian Marie Hicks. It would not be surprising if the human moderators, which Twitter pays to adjudicate reported tweets, are overwhelmed. The same goes for Facebook and for Google. Those companies also responded to the techlash by announcing they were hiring ever more human moderators, whose job it would be to examine reported posts, pictures, and videos. It was a lot of moderators: Facebook promised to hire 10,000 by the end of 2018, and Google in 2017 said it was hiring 10,000 to scour YouTube videos. These moderator jobs are among the most terrible, thankless occupations in cyberspace.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Basically, Cook didn’t seem to trust Zuckerberg as a partner, and didn’t go out of his way to hide it. Complicating matters was the dramatic pivot of the press and government, and to some degree the public, against the giant tech companies that suddenly seemed to dominate everyday life. Insiders referred to it as the “Techlash.” Of the West Coast behemoths being lashed against, Facebook was the biggest source of scorn and concern, with Zuckerberg seen as the guy who helped lose the halo that once hovered over the tech world. Just as leaders of great national powers would summit despite their hostilities, Zuckerberg and Cook would generally set aside time to talk at the annual Herb Allen summer gathering.

…

third-party app, 160 Super Wall third-party app, 160 Swisher, Kara, 185, 271 Swope, Allison, 440 Synapse-ai, 33, 38–41, 44, 47, 58 Systrom, Kevin and advertising on Instagram, 508 background of, 299–300 and control asserted by Zuckerberg, 509–10, 512, 513 departure of, 491, 512, 513 and Dorsey, 302, 303, 304–5 and FB’s acquisition of Instagram, 305, 325 FB’s attempt to recruit, 106–7 on independence of Instagram, 489–91 and Instagram TV, 510 and messaging service, 509 and origins of Instagram, 300–303 and social media critics, 473 and Stories feature, 497–99 and success of Instagram, 304 Tayler, Alexander, 419 Taylor, Bret, 203, 205, 284, 286 Techlash, 482 Terms of Service agreements, 265, 369, 407, 414 terrorist content, 455 Thiel, Peter and car for Zuckerberg, 97 on FB’s board of directors, 102, 133, 288 and growth of FB, 94 party thrown by, 95, 275 and RapLeaf (data broker), 269 “seed round” funding from, 88–89, 90, 100, 101, 178 on shares and vesting schedule, 96 and Trump campaign, 494 and Yahoo!’

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Many of the journalists covering the tech beat failed to dig into the histories of the industries that companies were claiming to disrupt, and did not do their due diligence on whether they were really doing what they claimed. Instead, there was an incentive to break new stories quickly, get in the good graces of the industry’s ascendent firms and founders, and to believe the claims they were making.6 Years later, even after a series of scandals among major tech firms kicked off a “techlash” that forced the mainstream press to adopt a slightly more critical perspective on the industry and its claims, companies like Uber could still get away with misrepresenting their earnings and even financial journalists would uncritically repeat them. The media’s representations of Uber and the wider gig economy served to mislead the public, politicians, and regulators about what effects they might have on society.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

“LEGO Teams Up with Cary’s Epic Games to Help Build a Kid-Safe Virtual World | WRAL TechWire,” April 7, 2022, wraltechwire.com/2022/04/07/lego-teams-up-with-carys-epic-games-to-help-build-a-kid-safe-virtual-world.   4.  Fairplay, “Designing_for_disorder.Pdf,” April, 2022, fairplayforkids .org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/designing_for_disorder.pdf.   5.  Emma Goldberg, “‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses,” New York Times, January 11, 2020.   6.  Colleen Mcclain, “How Parents’ Views of Their Kids’ Screen Time, Social Media Use Changed During COVID-19,” Pew Research Center (blog), www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/28/how-parents-views-of-their-kids-screen-time-social-media-use-changed-during-covid-19.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

In the past, the process would have taken up to four hours.”51 The head of England’s Understanding Patient Data, Nicole Perrin, was quite supportive of the project: “I think it is very important that we don’t get so hung up on the concerns and the risks that we miss some of the potential opportunities of having a company with such amazing expertise and resources wanting to be involved in health care.”52 Joe Ledsam of DeepMind AI’s team added his perspective: “We should be more mindful of the risks and safety of models, not less.” The DeepMind case study brings out so many relevant medical privacy issues of Big Data: not obtaining proper consent, not being transparent, and the “techlash” that we’ll see more and more with the oligopoly of big tech titans (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft) now all fully committed to healthcare. Even though it resulted in an important product that helped clinicians and patients, there were valuable lessons learned.53 One other example of deep learning’s potential to invade privacy is an effort described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.54 By combining 50 million Google Street View images of 22 million cars, in two hundred cities, with publicly available data, researchers at Stanford University’s AI lab and their collaborators were able to accurately estimate public voting patterns, race, education, and income by zip code or precinct.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

It was as though a side deal by Facebook with independent data prospectors had accidentally left open a hole in the ground that allowed the general public, for the first time, to see clearly into an underground anteroom. There, in that anteroom, visible for all to see, was the entrance to social media’s real data mine, although few understood exactly what lay behind that subterranean door in Facebook’s exclusive domain, let alone the planetary scope of capitalism’s data mining. The long-anticipated “techlash” had begun but, as yet, without a map of the wider pattern of exploitation, whose traces had suddenly become visible. The concept of data colonialism helps us draw that map. In this chapter, we unpack further what this term involves and outline its relation to capitalism and to the new social order that is stabilizing in and through capitalism.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

I should know, I was stuck in it for too long. In the years since we founded DeepMind and since those presentations, the discourse has changed—to some extent. The job automation debate has been rehearsed countless times. A global pandemic showcased both the risks and the potency of synthetic biology. A “techlash” of sorts emerged, with critics railing against tech and tech companies in op-eds and books, in the regulatory capitals of Washington, Brussels, and Beijing. Previously niche fears around technology exploded into the mainstream, public skepticism of technology increased, and criticisms from academia, civil society, and politics sharpened.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Not only were they spending, but there was also a sense that these were the last organisations, with their labs and moonshots, willing to tackle grand challenges with a can-do mindset and fresh thinking; the last hopes for Bell Labs 2.0. Now tech faces significant (and arguably self-inflicted) obstacles: accused of violating social norms, monopolising sectors and fomenting a series of populisms, companies face a ‘techlash’, both among users and in the regulatory capitals of Washington and Brussels. Outsourcing radical innovation and thinking to a handful of West Coast businesses with lots of money was always unwise – and yet it is the unthinking strategy for much of the Western world. If economic conditions warp the ecosystem of innovation, social pressures have a similar impact on the ecosystem of abstract ideas.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

In short, our professional and personal lives, our economy and intimate relationships, and even our health would have been far worse without the internet and our familiar addictive devices. As we exit the COVID-19 pandemic and enter a new political moment, the window is finally opening for a mature consideration of technology, one that avoids both the technoboosterism that accompanied its early decades and the “techlash” that has followed. Sure, there remain plenty of criticisms to be made of Facebook, the privacy policies of Zoom, the acceleration of automation in an age of smart machines without regard for job displacement, and the toxic misinformation and disinformation flowing through social media platforms.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Amazon sales—on everything from cloth bandanas to 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles—spiked so dramatically that the company had to triage its shipping times. Companies scrambled to sign up for Slack, and we joked about having “finished” Netflix. Online social networks might be a proxy for a real social life, but suddenly they were all we had. “The techlash is over,” Srinivasan gloated on Twitter. The tech surge was a financial phenomenon as well as a cultural one. After dropping precipitously following the lockdowns in March, the S&P 500 index recovered and was actually up for the year by July. Almost all of those gains were due to the handful of big tech companies that now dominated the index.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

He was my friend and I loved him; but, being a man, he couldn’t really know what it was like to be a woman on a dating app—or what it was like to be me, having been cyberbullied by one of the biggest dating sites in the world. The guys at Tinder weren’t used to encountering criticism when my story on dating apps came out in 2015. Ever since Tinder had launched, three years before, the media had been publishing glowing reports of how the wonder boys of Tinder were “revolutionizing dating.” This was a few years before “techlash” had set in, with people finally questioning the notion that tech was an unmitigated good. It was before the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 showed how a social media platform, Facebook, could sway an election and threaten democracy; before Google faced worldwide protests from its employees, in 2018, over its handling of sexual harassment cases; before some of the heads of Big Tech appeared before Congress via videoconference in 2020 and were grilled about everything from antitrust issues to hate speech on their sites.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

A rival service would face an enormous task to catch up. Google, meanwhile, has become synonymous with “internet search” and thus can make money by selling advertised links. And Amazon’s sheer scale means that it can undercut rival retailers, on price and on delivery. However, the monopoly power that these companies have attained has caused a “techlash”. People have started to worry about the Faustian bargain involved in giving personal information to corporate giants; as the saying goes, if you are being given a free service, that is because you are the product. Inevitably, the internet has been used to promote offensive views and hateful threats, and the tech companies have been accused of doing too little to prevent this.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Techno-optimist narratives surrounding high technology and the public good—ones that assume technology is somehow inherently progressive—rely on historical fictions and blind spots that tend to overlook how large technological systems perpetuate structures of dominance and power already in place.9 As the United States finds itself in the midst of a “techlash” or backlash against high tech’s broken promises, the history of computing offers us a chance to reflect critically on the roots of these developments and the potential dangers that lie ahead. Because Silicon Valley seems to be pointing the way to our national and even global future, it is difficult to critique it and to imagine alternatives.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

The U.S. government, by contrast, has taken a more laissez-faire approach to regulating technology, allowing the growth of “surveillance capitalism” in which big tech companies collect and store massive amounts of personal data. (Although political winds in Washington are starting to shift with a growing “techlash” against big tech firms.) China represents the starkest difference, with the Chinese Communist Party building an intrusive and expansive techno-authoritarian surveillance apparatus, which is imperfect and fragmented for now but will become increasingly capable over time. Yet China’s data advantage, which has been espoused both by proponents of China’s AI development and those who fear it, is overstated.