The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [70]
Google tends to be more explicitly moral in its public aspirations; its motto is “Don’t be evil,” while Facebook’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be lame.” Nevertheless, Google’s founders also sometimes play a get-out-of-jail-free card. “Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan,” says Sergey Brin. “But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine. People come to Google because they choose to. We don’t trick them.”
Of course, Brin has a point: No one is forced to use Google, just as no one is forced to eat at McDonald’s. But there’s also something troubling about this argument, which minimizes the responsibility he might have to the billions of users who rely on the service Google provides and in turn drive the company’s billions in advertising revenue.
To further muddle the picture, when the social repercussions of their work are troubling, the chief architects of the online world often fall back on the manifest-destiny rhetoric of technodeterminism. Technologists, Siva Vaidyanathan points out, rarely say something “could” or “should” happen—they say it “will” happen. “The search engines of the future will be personalized,” says Google Vice President Marissa Mayer, using the passive tense.
Just as some Marxists believed that the economic conditions of a society would inevitably propel it through capitalism and toward a world socialist regime, it’s easy to find engineers and technodeterminist pundits who believe that technology is on a set course. Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and rogue early president of Facebook, tells Vanity Fair that he’s drawn to hacking because it’s about “re-architecting society. It’s technology, not business or government, that’s the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.”
Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote perhaps the boldest book articulating the technodeterminist view, What Technology Wants, in which he posits that technology is a “seventh kingdom of life,” a kind of meta-organism with desires and tendencies of its own. Kelly believes that the technium, as he calls it, is more powerful than any of us mere humans. Ultimately, technology—a force that “wants” to eat power and expand choice—will get what it wants whether we want it to or not.
Technodeterminism is alluring and convenient for newly powerful entrepreneurs because it absolves them of responsibility for what they do. Like priests at the altar, they’re mere vessels of a much larger force that it would be futile to resist. They need not concern themselves with the effects of the systems they’ve created. But technology doesn’t solve every problem of its own accord. If it did, we wouldn’t have millions of people starving to death in a world with an oversupply of food.
It shouldn’t be surprising that software entrepreneurs are incoherent about their social and political responsibilities. A great deal of this tension undoubtedly comes from the fact that the nature of online business is to scale up as quickly as possible. Once you’re on the road to mass success and riches—often as a very young coder—there simply isn’t much time to fully think all of this through. And the pressure of the venture capitalists breathing down your neck to “monetize” doesn’t always offer much space for rumination on social responsibility.
The $50 Billion Sand Castle
Once a year, the Y Combinator start-up incubator hosts a daylong conference called Startup School, where successful tech entrepreneurs pass wisdom on to the aspiring audience of bright-eyed Y Combinator investees. The agenda typically includes many of the top CEOs in Silicon Valley,