The Most Important Word Silicon Valley Doesn’t Know
Everyone knows something’s wrong — they just can’t agree on what it is.
If you were looking for a one-sentence summary on the state of the tech giants in 2019 — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple — you could do far worse than the above.
Everyone knows something’s wrong. Mark Zuckerberg knows. Elizabeth Warren knows. Top GDPR enforcer Margrethe Vestager knows. So do Selena Gomez, Shoshana Zuboff and Roger McNamee.
It would be hard not to notice something’s wrong. In a wide-ranging survey of public attitudes towards the major tech giants by Pew Research Center last year, a supermajority of Americans (72%) stated that they believed the tech companies could be trusted to do the right thing either only “some of the time,” or “hardly ever.” (The number who believed the major tech companies could always be trusted was 3 percent. For reference, the U.S. approval rating of Congress consistently hovers around 18 percent.)
The first step of any recovery program is admitting you have a problem. Silicon Valley would have that licked, if only it would agree on what the problem is.
So what is the problem? Is it that tech giants have just plain gotten too damn big? Is it that tech workers aren’t empowered to…
