Is Silicon Valley the New Welfare State?
Evgeny Morozov on how tech companies promise us a seemingly genuine path towards social mobility… in exchange for our data
Author and essayist, Evgeny Morozov, one of the most brilliant and respected commentators on the Internet, discusses one of the most important issues today: how technology companies promise us a seemingly genuine path towards social mobility by providing the public with free services… in exchange for our data.
But what are the moral, political, and social consequences of accepting this free bargain? And why are our governments so eager to go along with Silicon Valley’s plans?
So let me walk you through the argument as I have been developing over the last few years, as it’s still in formation.
If you look at one field that this industry has developed really well — information and knowledge provision — you clearly see that in this area Silicon Valley does function as a kind of proto-welfare state already in that much of our access to information and communication is free or is otherwise heavily subsidised. Few of us are paying for the kinds of communication services that we would have previously expected from the state.
If you look at how we email each other, search for information, identify basic data that we need in our daily research, you would see that it’s not us, the taxpayers, who are paying the bill, nor is it the state. Much of that is subsidised and provided in a very different way and a very different model whereby the data that is collected in the process of us using many of those services and platforms is analysed and eventually sold in some form, but those services come to us more or less free. They come to us more or less free because many of those companies have found a way in which to run almost a real-time auction system where the buyers of certain attention can easily find the sellers, make an instantaneous deal, make a bid on our attention, make money off of it, and everyone ends up more or less happy.
Citizens end up with some rudimentary infrastructure which they can use for communication, states end up happy because they no longer have to pay for the expensive infrastructure that they previously had to finance out of their own pocket — the likes of Post Offices — nor in the future, if this model advances, would they need to pay for libraries, they can just afford to have technology companies step in, organise it, and find a way to provide some of the services for free while making money off it.
Of course you can see the differences with the old way of providing those services. Even if you just look at communication information, clearly if Silicon Valley was put in charge of running Post Offices 60 or 70 years ago, their way to run them would be very different. Their way to run it would be to say, ‘Well, you’re sending letters to each other, why don’t we let you send those letters for free? All you need to do is to let us have a robot look inside your letter, understand what it’s about, and then forward it on, and that would then pay for the cost of the mailing that you’d no longer need to buy stamps’.
You can clearly see how immoral that revolves around this ability to buy and sell attention in real time based on the content of the service, allows for new ways to pay for many of their services.
What I would argue is happening is that this model is slowly spreading to other domains. If you look at health for example, the model by which Silicon Valley would like to offer us this new kind of health is somewhat similar. It basically involves a lot of real time monitoring of what it is that we do, so that all sorts of key indicators, and all sorts of key parts of our health data can be identified, analysed in real time and then all sorts of early symptoms can be detected so that we can be informed how to adjust our lifestyle.
You can clearly see how that works with all sorts of smart gadgets that you carry in your phones and your pockets, you can clearly see how the same model would work with all sorts of additional sensors that they’d like to put on us with wearables and smart glasses and all sorts of other devices which can basically capture a certain aspect of our everyday living and then make sense of it with medicine or healthcare in mind and then tell us to adjust our behaviour accordingly.
Clearly there are a lot of buyers and sellers for the data. You have a lot of pharmaceutical companies who would be more than happy to buy a lot of the data about our everyday living, because there is quite a lot of value in the data for them when it comes to developing and marketing your drugs. There are a lot of other players who would be very happy to take that data and profit from it.
“Clearly there are a lot of buyers and sellers for the data. You have a lot of pharmaceutical companies who would be more than happy to buy a lot of the data about our everyday living, because there is a lot of value in the data for them when it comes to developing and marketing your drugs.”
Google itself — which I take to be the company that is probably most representative of this new wave of welfare start-ups or corporations — has also a lot of uses for this data. For Google the idea and the strategy is very simple. They would like to integrate themselves into as many slices and chunks of our everyday living as possible, try to get as much data about what we do as possible — whether it’ll be coming from some kind of smart watch, or smart thermostat which they also operate, or smart car, or smart e-mail, doesn’t really matter — the goal is to be as comprehensive as possible and then be some kind of very smart nanny/assistant/big mother to us that can more or less help us navigate this extremely complex world with problems hitting us from all sides.
Whether it’s climate change, or obesity, or basically any kind of problem that previously required a socialised collective solution, now can be addressed by individuals in a very resilient manner just by surrounding themselves with the most advanced technology and additional skills, like learning how to code.
So if you look at that from a basic political, ideological respect, you can also see that this new welfare model produces many of the problems and tackles them in a very particular way. They are no longer tackled through collective efforts through of individual societies and institutions, they are tackled mostly by delegating the problems to the citizens themselves who are being told that basically now the technology is so powerful and is everywhere-present in your pocket, you can actually fight the problem early on on your own. So you better arm yourself with as much gadgetry and weaponry as possible, monitor as much of your life as you can, and try to address those problems in a way that would actually put you outside of any other collective efforts to tackle it.
To look at another angle of this problem, you could look at connectivity, which you can sort of think through the first lens of information and communication. But I think connectivity, particularly in the developing world, really shows you how — for Silicon Valley — it is convenient to position themselves as ultimately being in the welfare business.
So if you look at Facebook — but the same applies to Google — as doing ‘internet at work’ project. Those of you who don’t know, Free Basics is a partnership between Facebook the company and various mobile network operators in various countries — mostly in Africa, South-East Asia, Latin America, mostly in the developing world. What Facebook promises there is to provide completely free internet access to users of the Facebook app through internet at work.
What that free access means in practise is that access is free only to a handful of sites, including Facebook, Wikipedia, basic weather services, while everything else has to be paid for. So you actually have to go and pay by traffic for every additional website you would like to visit. For a lot of people in the developing world this is probably better than nothing — and this is the argument that Facebook is making — but that argument in itself is only possible if you can conceive of no other alternatives to actually promote socio-political change.
If you have completely abandoned any alternative narrative to the one that the market is the only provider of solutions, then of course you will think that Facebook offers you better than nothing. But I’m not sure we should be accepting the nothing part so easily.
“Facebook’s Free Basics promises to provide completely free internet access to users of the Facebook app through internet at work. What that free access means in practise is that access is free only to a handful of sites, including Facebook, Wikipedia, basic weather services, while everything else has to be paid for.”
That aside, the effect that is has not just on the users — who will end up with a limited conception of what the internet is and what it does — but also the effect that it has on content providers are rather drastic. If you think about any company that would like to reach users in Latin America or Africa who might be browsing using internet at work. For them it means that they basically have to channel their apps and services through Facebook itself, because that way nobody will have to pay for them. So it basically creates a distortion whereby a lot of services and apps that would have otherwise reached these people on their own, now have to be channelled through additional platform where a lot of data’s being collected about what these people actually doing on that platform.
So if you are university that wants to reach students in Africa, you would be far better off channelling those courses through Facebook, because in that case people would be able to download and watch them for free, rather than putting them on your own website. It also means that students learning something would require an intermediary like Facebook which will be collecting all the data, what will the students do.
So this shows you another way in which some kind of basic welfare is provided, but it’s provided on terms that themselves may be rather injust and would seem acceptable only we have already abandoned any alternative model or narrative to the ones the corporations run the show both selling the products but then also doing all this goods to then make up for whatever consequences their primary activity may be causing.
So Google, I would argue, presents an even more interesting model. The model behind Google is to integrate all kinds of data about us, and as they manage to integrate all kinds of data about us, they become so essential to the provision of many services, that it will be really hard to actually disrupt them.
Partly it means that by integrating all these different streams of data, and by having some kind of data coming from cars, houses, smart devices, phones, email, search engine and so forth, Google does have the ability to have fantastic predictive capacity. They have understood that the real promise to individual users, the best thing they can offer, is time.
“Google does have the ability to have fantastic predictive capacity. They have understood that the real promise to individual users, the best thing they can offer, is time.”
This is why it’s really important to understand that the real business that Google is in right now is finding time for its users, and creating the kinds of emancipatory moves and steps that previous movements like trade unions used to undertake in order to liberate the working time off workers.
What makes Google so powerful and able to predict and generate time, it’s not the algorithm, it’s the data that they have already accumulated over the course of the more than 10/15 years that they have been in operation. To be able to make the kind of predictions that they make, you will not be able to do it with an algorithm because it’s not the algorithm that makes the prediction so good, it’s the surrounding data. Unless we manage to open the conversation about what role this data will play, those in the digital economy — because there are clearly a lot of under-competitive aspects here — are basically under-innovating.
The first thing to contest is, ‘Why is it that we assume that this data belongs to companies and not to citizens that generate it?’. We have to find a way in which data can actually serve the benefits of players other than corporations. In this case it’s not even corporations, it’s just two or three monopolies that have managed to grab all of it, because not only do they operate the data centres, they also operate the sensors and the platforms through which this data is being aggregated.
Coming back to the question of welfare, I think the situation as Google, Uber and the rest of Silicon Valley imagines it’s quite simple. Their pitch is that, ‘Let us monitor you, give us your data, we’ll provide you with a service that will be probably much leaner and much more effective than the service provided by the state’. The problem is there is some kind of neoliberal victims’ syndrome that we have whereby we know that our own public services have been shrunk and defunded quite significantly over the last 30/40/50 years. And we know that probably the kind of care that you would receive in a hospital today, would not be the kind of care that you might have received 30/40 years ago. The problem that we have now is if you look at things like senior care, clearly they’re not the best because the caretakers are overworked and they cannot really take care of so many seniors. The same problem exists with obesity.
The problem we have right now is that we operate under this kind of false consciousness where we look at this rather mediocre and completely privatised and shrunk welfare state that we have now, and then we compare it to this extremely lean, perfectly efficiently run model of Silicon Valley, and we can hardly find arguments why we should stick with the old model. It’s very hard to articulate how an alternatively run system of public services can be provided that will not involve Google, Facebook, IBM intermediaries of the service provision.
“It’s hard to articulate how an alternatively run system of public services can be provided that will not involve Google, Facebook, IBM intermediaries of the service provision.”
There are steps that are being made elsewhere that we might not like for geopolitical, and a lot of other, reasons, but at this point, if you are really trying to contest the Silicon Valley model, you have to understand that you’re also contesting a certain political and economic paradigm. There is a reason why when you read the leaked texts — the TTIP or TTP agreements that have been the contentious point of debate within Europe and America and also Asia and America — you’ll see that all of them are adamant about promoting free flow of data transatlantically.
There is a certain geopolitical climate right now into which Silicon Valley fits. There needs to be an analysis overall that all this data generation does play in the transatlantic economy — there needs to be an analysis of what role Silicon Valley plays in enabling surveillance for NSA.
These links between monopoly, surveillance, capitalism, neoliberalism have to be understood and they can only be understood if we step outside from the usual technology talk that Silicon Valley would like us to remain in.
I would argue that if we continue on the path on which we are right now, where a lot of social institutions start customising their offerings to match our particular profile, it becomes very hard to argue as to why those of us who are better off should somehow subsidise the living of those who are not as enthusiastic about exercise or eating healthy food or being a physically fit person. And you see that it’s easy to sell this vision of the world who are successful and eat fancy food and exercise enough and have the time to do all of that. A lot of the middle classes would be happy with that vision because it would also take the burden off their shoulders.
But you can see that implicit in this model is the denial of history and historicity of our social experience. A lot of the problems that we face do have a historical dimension, and they do have causes that are not just the result of our own individual misbehaviour or failings. This is where the denial that there are certain social class political economic factors that shape our behaviours, and those factors are consistent throughout history, the denial of that basic truth and the encouragement for us to only focus on our own indicators in itself leads to the disillusion of the kind of solidarity that bound the previous generation of welfare state together. I’m not sure whether we can actually be thinking about collective solidarity-based institutions when our own individual behaviour is transparent and visible, while the misbehaviour of other players of the system — corporations or governments or lobbies or think tanks — becomes less and less so.
It’s this epistemic asymmetry that itself is very troubling because it’s true that there’s more and more data about me than the original citizen that’s being collected, analysed and being used for predictions. But the data about corporations, governments, lobbies, investment banks and so forth is harder and harder to find, despite all the celebration of open data, which mostly results in releases of data that is very useful to provision of certain services, but does not really tell you very much about how power actually operates and why certain problems do exist.
If you look at all these transatlantic treaties are being negotiated, we wouldn’t have known much about the content if the drafts had not been leaked to WikiLeaks and if we didn’t have this guy sitting at the embassy — protected by the government of Ecuador — putting those documents online. We wouldn’t even know what our governments are negotiating on our behalf.
While it’s true that there’s more information and more transparency and more and more data available, it’s very biased data. It’s data about a very particular set of actors which are mostly us, while the rest of the system becomes more and more invisible and harder and harder to trace.
The basic point I’m trying to make here is that it’s not true that we suddenly are losing a kind of narrative about what’s happening — there are plenty of narratives — it’s just that those narratives happen to be very simplistic, shallow, and, I would argue, stupid. The argument about social change, obesity, climate change, energy, that is being put forward by these companies is so simplistic that you would like to laugh at it. The problem is that we cannot laugh because there is no technological alternative through which we can actually build an alternative future.
“The argument about social change, obesity, climate change, energy, that is being put forward by these companies is so simplistic that you would like to laugh at it. The problem is that we cannot laugh because there is no technological alternative through which we can actually build an alternative future.”
The situation as I see it does look quite hopeless, unfortunately, at least in Europe, but this is not just the result of technology and Silicon Valley, it’s in that that the situation’s a bit more optimistic. There is no way to make sense of how this company’s the subject of data and the subject of technology and automation fit within the current state of the world without coming up with a more sophisticated, historical and political analysis that would be asking questions about the power of America — because these companies are American — who would be asking questions about the role of the market, that will be asking questions about why suddenly all our infrastructure has been privatised, and why we allow these companies to privatise our data by default.
That debate has not even happened — at least we’ve had some basic debate about who should run the trains — nobody has had any debate about who should run the data, it just ended up in those servers because those companies were the first to offer their services. Unless all of those digital questions are reframed and retold as part of a bigger narrative that can be contesting capitalism, neoliberalism, there will not be much progress. The only good news that I can find when I look at the world now, is that there are movements that are trying to contest that model.
They are not necessarily up to date and up to speed — even in Britain you see with the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn there are different issues that are at least being talked about, regardless of what effect it will have over national politics itself — unless those digital issues are reframed as part of a broader political and properly geopolitical narrative, I don’t think much will be achieved because we’re not talking here about technology optimists or technology pessimists, which is the traditional framework.
Outside of the employment questions which are very important, I do think that we need a very different model for a lot of the services, including healthcare, education, you name it. The problem is that we will never be able to articulate this alternative logic if any critique of Silicon Valley and its political economic impact is immediately dismissed as technological pessimism. Because what I am here pessimistic about in its model is not at all the fact that they’re using sensors, big data or algorithms, it’s the fact that there are certain interests of people behind them — it’s clearly not the fact that they’re using some technologies and they’re not using humans.
Unfortunately, our debate about technology has developed in such a bizarre manner over the last 30/40 years, that it’s so easy for them to dismiss any critics who try to point all of this political economic dimensions. Here, the only solution I can see is for people who are critical of what Silicon Valley is now doing, is to try to build bridges with those who are now fighting or trying to fight similar fights in Europe. Unless those bridges are built, I think the anti-technology and anti-Silicon Valley critique will come to nothing, and we will probably remain with a very different and surely leaner and more effective version of the welfare state, which will put the entire burden on the individual and will no longer socialise it.
Evgeny Morozov is a writer and essayist. He’s the author of The Net Delusion (2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013) and a syndicated columnist, with his monthly column appearing in The Observer, Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, El Pais, Internazionale, and other papers. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and London Review of Books. Previously a fellow at Georgetown and Stanford universities, he’s currently working on a book about the history of the Internet.
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