Big Tech
JULY 12TH, 2016 — POST 190
The hottest company in Silicon Valley is in hot water. As Russell Brandom and Andrew Hawkins of The Verge reported yesterday, it looks like Uber — specifically under the instruction of Travis Kalanick and company head of Global Threat Intelligence (you know, just next to HR) Mathew Henley — looked to dig dirt on lawyer Andrew Schmidt after he filed a suit against the ride-sharing giant late last year.
Using corporate law firm Ergo as a secret intermediary, a series of encrypted emails suggest higher-ups at Uber pursued Schmidt and his client, Spencer Meyer, searching for weaknesses that Uber would be able to exploit in mounting a legal defence — or perhaps even getting Meyer to back down. In a report Ergo prepared for Uber on Schmidt and Meyer, they noted that Meyer “may be particularly sensitive to any actions that tarnish his professional reputation”.
For a company valued at $62.5bil — and one that is unlikely to go public in the foreseeable future — Uber’s just about as big, and free from shareholder accountability, as they come. Where a decade ago, Apple was the standard by which innovation in the tech sector was measured, this status is now Uber’s own. “The Uber for coffee”, “the Uber for vintage clothes”, “the Uber for private investigators” — all echoes of what have surely been pitches for one startup or another.
But more than that, they’re hyper consumer-facing, like Apple was. They’re not just economically or technically important, not some B2B megalodon like Salesforce. Uber is a cultural force, their name a shorthand for disruption, for the “gig economy”, for tech’s tenacity — all understood by regular people. So why, especially when the company is currently embroiled in 70 different federal lawsuits, are they fighting like they’re the underdog?
We’re witnessing a moment in which tech is usurping the incumbent institutions. We know this. If you just follow the “the Uber of insert noun here” formula, you quickly see just how many industries are ripe for the kind of disruption tech can provide. But for the most part — from commerce with Amazon, consumer electronics with Apple, advertising with Google, news media with Facebook, entertainment media with Netflix — the world is already changed. Tech is no longer the cocky entrepreneur and the crunchy genius in their garage — the suit and the beard of Silicon Valley mythology — fighting the naysayers and changing the world. Tech is the world. Tech’s won.
Where we’ve long understood the notions of Big Tobacco, of Big Pharma, of Big Oil — the mammoth companies that run the world through their specific stranglehold on incredibly lucrative industries — Big Tech is being set up. Except those involved seemed not to have noticed. The bazooka-to-a-knife-fight response of Peter Thiel to Gawker is a perfect condensation of the “head lag” present in Big Tech. Justifying his litigious crushing of Gawker through stealth support of Hulk Hogan as in the interest of deterring Gawker’s “bullying”, Thiel was clearly sore from being outed by a piece published on the online news outlet in 2007 with the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”. The Silicon Valley billionaire, who currently sits on the board at Facebook amongst other things, fought back against a school bully who pulled his pants down by having his dad buy the school and expel the bully.
And this Uber thing feels the same. These guys aren’t the underdogs, their position is very well secured and seemingly very easily defensible. A single lawsuit is incredibly unlikely to sink a $62.5bil company and yet Uber’s tactics imply a paranoia, like they’re manning a glass canon instead of the cultural, technological, and economic monolith they are. They’re proud. They’re aggressive. They’re Usain Bolt cutting power shapes and screaming in triumph after outpacing a child in a wheelchair.
They need to chill. They’re good.
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