To borrow a phrase from a mentor of mine, Sen. Josh Hawley is a man with big ideas who has spent little time thinking about them.
The Republican’s attempts to legislate and regulate reform in Silicon Valley reek of inexperience and folly. Still, Hawley has managed to bring to light one of the 21’s century’s defining problems: the cultural cost of technological innovation and monetization.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Hawley argued, “What passes for innovation by Big Tech today isn’t fundamentally new products or new services, but ever more sophisticated exploitation of people.” He has a point. Big Tech’s supposed customers — or rather their data — are actually its product. Google, Apple, and the rest use private information to develop precise marketing strategies, and they justify doing so by pointing to the lengthy terms & conditions users must agree to.
But the lack of clear guidelines has led to an invasion of privacy in many cases. Take, for example, Siri, Apple’s revolutionary voice assistant. A report by The Guardian earlier this year found that Apple contractors can listen to private conversations and overhear confidential information if Siri is accidentally activated. iPhone users have certainly not consented to this kind of intrusion. Alas, try telling that to our tech overlords.
Hawley also points to the social woes that have accompanied technology’s rise — higher teen suicide rates, the lack of human relationships, the divergence between online and real life. All of these problems are very real and getting worse. But this is where Hawley gets it wrong: legislation won’t guarantee cultural change. It can, perhaps, inspire it. But real, lasting change must come from the bottom up.
The freshman from Missouri has introduced multiple bills to ban the “dark patterns” that feed tech addiction and force Big Tech to respect users’ privacy. Unsurprisingly, they’ve gained little traction, because, as many critics have pointed out, such measures would be unproductive at best and unconstitutional at worst.
But you don’t have to agree with Hawley’s attempted reforms to recognize that a cultural problem does indeed sit in the heart of Silicon Valley. Hawley describes it as “stagnation,” and perhaps he’s right. But Big Tech’s lapse in innovation and judgment have less to do with its attempts to monetize and more to do with its social justice obsession. Take, for example, Google, which has spent the last decade — and hundreds of millions of dollars — attempting to “create an inclusive culture,” with little to show for it.
Google has traded in technological innovation for radical social innovation. The company has bought into the politically correct doctrine the cultural Left sells, and as long as it does so, it will be more focused on its role as a cultural actor than as a technological creator. Hence the stagnation. Again, though, this is a problem that no amount of congressional effort can fix. Even if it could, I doubt Big Tech would listen.
