Tech's Fall from Political Grace

Through the late 1990s, the “tech” industry—which includes the companies that give us computer hardware, software, and Internet services—was the toast of Washington. It symbolized a sparkling future and could do no wrong. Tech would bring growth, opportunity, and freedom. Everyone in the world of policy and politics wanted to be onboard that train, and most feared doing anything that might stunt the growth of the Internet and all that drove, touched, or sprung from it.

Two decades later, things have changed, as evidenced in recent months by the tense standoff between policymakers and the tech community over thorny questions about encryption and the whys and hows of government access to private data for law enforcement and national security purposes. Indeed, tech is now seen as the instigator of a host of annoying wrongs and egregious injustices: the loss of personal privacy and security, the growth of digital-age monopolies, the evisceration of secure jobs, the rise of inequality, and even the expansion of oppressive dictatorships. This is a worrisome trend, not because the criticisms are valid—in fact, they are generally overblown or flat wrong—but because a false narrative is fueling political opposition that could actually halt the march of innovation, growth, and progress.

So what’s behind tech’s fall from grace? The short answer is that as tech grew to be a major part of the global economy, a large target also appeared on its back. Let’s start with the wide array of “public interest” organizations that now attack tech as a routine part of their missions. In the 1990s, if they railed about loss of privacy or corporate greed in tech, they would have been ignored. Today, they find such issues to be fertile territory for advocacy campaigns. Indeed, scores of privacy groups and other organizations now see criticizing tech and the business of tech as their raison d’être, whether its attacking electronic medical records, smart meters, broadband innovation, big data, or the sharing economy. After all, if they weren’t here to protect us from the aforementioned parade of tech horribles, then who is?

On top of this, an array of state, federal, and foreign regulators jump into this treasure trove of attention: much better to propose regulating and prosecuting tech—and thereby generate exciting press releases—than go after prosaic and boring industries like shady payday lenders, fraudulent mail order scams, and other fraudsters.

In the 1990s, anyone who wanted to write a book about how tech was a malevolent force in our lives would be hard pressed to find a publisher; they would have been laughed at as if they were wearing a tinfoil hat. But after the Harvard Business Review published Nicholas Carr’s anti-tech treatise “IT Doesn’t Matter” in May 2003, the floodgates opened. Now, in fact, IT not only doesn’t seem to matter, it’s not even good. Carr followed up with five books about how tech makes us stupid, controlled, and shallow. Then came tech critics like Erik Brynjolfsson, Susan Crawford, Martin Ford, Jared Lanier, Larry Lessig, Robert McChesney, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Zitrain, who variously argue that tech is a threat to our personal freedom, our pocketbook, our jobs, and our democracy. Ignonvy Morosov, a leading critic in his own right, describes the avocation this way: “to be a technology critic in America now is to oppose that bastion of vulgar disruption, Silicon Valley.” But even that description now seems quaint, as tech critics like Nick Bostrom, James Barrat, and Calum Chase go beyond complaining about minor irritations such as the end of freedom to warn that tech will mean the end of humanity because Skynet is bound to take over and kills us all. Read these books and you’ll wonder why Congress is not holding hearings to investigate why the Department of Defense created this awful and nefarious thing called the Internet in the first place. I guess books with titles like The Internet is Great: Spurring Innovation, Powering Productivity, and Expanding Consumer Choice just wouldn’t sell.

Let’s not forget that in achieving much of its promise, tech did exactly what it said it would do, and what most consumers hoped it would do: disrupt industries—for the better. But now the Empire—established industries and professions from hotel chains and taxi drivers—is striking back by banding together to elicit sympathy from the public and a helping hand from lawmakers and regulators with the power to throw sand in tech’s gears. People want other things to be disrupted, not themselves, and who can blame them? I might even start to doubt tech if it disrupted the think tank industry (actually, I wouldn’t, but I would want to). But that doesn’t make it right.

You’d think most U.S. elites would remain on the side of supportive and light-touch policymaking when it comes to tech. But alas, many of them have become doubters, deeply unsure about whether tech is a progressive force or not. Claiming, incorrectly, that tech is responsible for widespread job loss, worker insecurity, and income inequality, many elites have become what you might call “Luddite Light.” The unfortunate part is that without the economic devastation of the Great Recession—an event that tech had no part in causing—the elites would likely be more supportive. But with that devastation they have to find someone or something to blame, and it’s easier to fall back on the tech-causes-inequality-and-kills-jobs meme, even if it isn’t true.

Of course, the tech industry is not blameless in its fall from grace. It was too quick to offshore some jobs that might have been kept in the United States. Its willingness to use the global tax system to reduce its tax burden, while legal and understandable, especially given the high corporate tax rates in the United States, furthers the view that tech companies are only interested in profits. Moreover, many see the corporate valuations of some startups and personal wealth of some tech titans as obscene. And while many tech companies have robust corporate social responsibility programs, and many tech titans have either given or made commitments to give large amounts to social causes, some have not. It doesn’t help that Silicon Valley often radiates arrogance, as when techies scoff “they just don’t get it” when people or organizations take positions that are different from theirs. Nor does the disdainful view among some in the Valley (though not, to be fair, most established tech companies) that Washington is the problem and anything it does is tainted with corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude. All in all, this is not a good way to win friends and influence people.

Nevertheless, the mainstreaming of tech criticism has been deeply troubling, because the truth is tech innovation is and will remain the single most important driver of human progress, whether in education, health care, city management, or economic dynamism and growth. Doubting tech and forcing it to constantly run through a gauntlet of funhouse scrutiny will mean less technological innovation and progress and reduced U.S. technology-based global competitiveness. Only its professional critics will be happy with that.