An introduction to “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus”
To avoid the value-extracting consequences of the digital economy, we must challenge its underlying assumption that companies must grow at all cost.
I came across Douglas Rushkoff when one of my colleagues posted a link to an article he wrote for The Guardian. I bought his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and as I read it I’ll (try to) write summaries of the main points he makes throughout its chapters. Here’s my take on the Introduction:
The outstanding growth of technological giants and their impact on society and the environment have sparked considerable concern over the last few years. Gentrification, privacy invasions, under- and unemployment driven by the gig economy and job automation, and the pollution of the environment and depletion of natural resources required to manufacture consumer electronics are a few of the issues that have earned companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Uber more than a few enemies.
Who is to blame? The answer is not as easy as it seems. The employees of these companies are just doing their best to stay above the floating line of an increasingly competitive job market, and often work under huge pressure only to barely afford housing, healthcare and education for their children. Even the top executives and investors are just practicing the brand of capitalism they learned, and are as stuck as everyone else in a never-ending winner-takes-all race for growth. Companies must grow to be the biggest digital behemoth in the market, and so they must become as intrusive, exploitative, job-killing and manipulative as the next one.
The underlying assumption that we never question when we criticize tech giants is the need for growth above all else, or, as Rushkoff puts it, the growth trap we’re stuck in. In optimizing our platforms for growth rather than people or value, instead of getting more time and richer varieties of human expression, as the Internet once promised, we have less time and more market-friendly predictability and automation.
The digital economy, which is simply a digitally accelerated version of industrial capitalism, states that companies are free to disrupt any industry they want –music, journalism, transportation– as long as they don’t question the underlying economic operating system, and the premises of the stock market and venture capitalism: that everything must grow at all cost.
Take Twitter as an example: its IPO meant its creators had sacrificed a platform that revolutionized journalism and communication to the singular pursuit of growth. Although it arguably didn’t need billions of dollars to function, it now had to deliver more that it had received. Since a net profit of $43 million (not bad for a company that runs entirely on 140-character messages) was not enough to justify the investment, Twitter had to find new ways to make money, leading them to degrade the quality of the service by injecting more advertisements and the integrity of its community by mining user data for marketing.
This is the hallmark of the digital economy: there is a huge disparity between capital and value. Time, cash, labor, and human production are extracted from the real marketplace and turned into frozen capital for the single purpose of growth.
There are other ways of achieving prosperity in the digital world. If we challenge the underlying principles of our economic operating system, we can find alternatives that lead to an economy in which money flow is encouraged, and people are rewarded for creating value rather than extracting it. If we get over our need for growth we can achieve ongoing, sustainable and distributed prosperity.
This post was originally published in my blog, where I write about technology, music, and interesting stuff I read.
