In 2015, academic and tech scholar Shoshana Zuboff posited a fourth fiction for the age of Big Tech—that reality itself was undergoing the same kind of metamorphosis. “Data about the behaviors of bodies, minds, and things take their place in a universal real-time dynamic index of smart objects within an infinite global domain of wired things. This new phenomenon produces the possibility of modifying the behaviors of persons and things for profit and control.”64 Today, we live in that world, governed by our Big Tech overlords.
Feeding Our Addiction: The Cognitive Power of Big Tech
One of the reasons that we haven’t yet figured out ways to curb the power of Big Tech—despite all the evidence of how it’s tearing at the fabric of our society—is simply that we are too busy being distracted by the bright and shiny products and services they make. It’s a cruel irony: We’re all too addicted to our gadgets and apps and Facebook pages to address the problems of technology. That gets to the most invasive part of Big Tech’s power: the power to manipulate our thoughts, actions, and even our brains. My son knows all about that one, but to be fair, so do most of us. According to one 2016 study, we touch our cellphones around 2,617 times a day.65 Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within fifteen minutes of waking up. One-third of Americans say they’d rather give up sex than lose their cellphone.66
I remember one Christmas Eve a few years back when I dropped my company-issued cellphone into a puddle of ice water and broke it. I tried calling corporate IT, but they had already decamped for the break. No new phone until January 2. What followed was an uncomfortably itchy detox from the 24/7 distraction of digital data. On the subway, I would find myself absentmindedly digging through my pocket for my phone. Five-minute waits in the grocery line with nothing to scroll through, click on, respond to, or “like” seemed interminable. I tried mini-meditations to distract myself during my commute. But despite all the deep breathing and visualization of stones dropping in water, my mind would quickly wander to how many emails were piling up. Melancholy set in. Without something in my hands and in my brain at all times, who was I?
There is no question about it: Our devices and the things we do on them are just as addictive as nicotine, food, drugs, or alcohol, and there is a trove of research that proves it. According to a Goldman Sachs report looking at this effect, the average user spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook, 30 minutes on Snapchat, and 21 minutes on Instagram. Add that up, and think about the effects on productivity and human relationships.
Of course, for Facebook—and the apps it hosts on its platform—this is no happy accident. It has all been carefully strategized and executed. The attention merchants want us to remain plugged in, so that they can collect more data about us and our online habits. In other words, these and many other platforms are designed to prolong consumption, making it seamless to go from one place of media to another—“an endless playlist on Spotify, a continuous stream of news articles on Quartz, automatic transition to the next episode on Netflix, video autoplay on Facebook…remove friction and consumption goes up,” as the Goldman report put it. 67
Meanwhile, sanity, of course, goes down. The American Psychological Association concluded in a recent study that “constant checkers”—those who check email, texts, and social media frequently—are more prone to stress than those who do not. Last year, a University of Pittsburgh study determined that the more that young adults use social media, the more likely they are to be depressed. I’ve spoken to neuroscientists who fear that the usage of mobile apps and games may lead to widespread cognitive decline or even mass early onset dementia.68 And in China, there has been a spate of recent incidents involving obsessive online gaming, including the death of a teenager who had a stroke after gaming for forty hours straight. (The maker of the game, Tencent, subsequently instituted time limits for minors and immediately suffered a stock setback.) More troubling still, Big Tech seems to have no qualms about exploiting the mental anguish to which they contribute. Facebook, for example, has knowingly used persuasive technologies to target depressed teenagers in Australia with ads for various products and services.69
Given all this, it’s no wonder that the backlash is starting to set in, beginning with a growing number of people who are unplugging by choice. A recent report from Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s broadcast and telecoms regulator, showed that 34 percent of survey respondents had purposefully gone on a digital detox, 16 percent of respondents had purposefully gone on holiday to a destination with no Internet access, and 12 percent had chosen to leave their phones at home while they did.70 In the United States, books on topics like “digital minimalism” and distraction-free work line the business and self-help shelves, and, interestingly, a growing wave of start-ups are working on solutions to help people resist the lure of their shiny devices. There are a number of activists and even some investors lobbying for the government to create a kind of Food and Drug Administration–style regulatory body for highly manipulative, highly addictive technology. And to be fair, some companies, including Apple and, more recently, Google, are trying to get out in front of such efforts, by making tweaks to their own devices and systems that make it easier for people to track and limit their own technology usage.
In 2018, in a speech to EU officials, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that there was, and is, a serious dark side to the Big Tech revolution. “We shouldn’t sugar-coat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data only serve to enrich the companies that collect them.” Earlier that year, he admitted that he himself—like many Apple users—was spending way too much time on his phone, and that this was a problem. “I think it’s become clear to all of us that some of us are spending too much time on our devices,” said Cook at a 2018 event in San Francisco, “and we’ve tried to think through pretty deeply about how we can help that. Honestly, we’ve never wanted people to overuse our products.”71
The outcry over what technology is doing to our brains can be heard increasingly throughout Silicon Valley, where a number of prominent tech industry insiders have finally begun calling foul. Sean Parker, the thirty-nine-year-old founding president of Facebook, recently admitted that the social network actively manipulated users’ brain chemistry to keep them coming back, again and again, salivating just like 1950s psychologist B. F. Skinner’s famous dogs, who were trained to expect dinner at the ring of a bell. From the beginning, he admits, “the thought process was: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ ”
To achieve this goal, Facebook’s architects exploited a “vulnerability in human psychology” to create something addictive to users. Whenever someone likes or comments on a post or photograph, he said, “we…give you a little dopamine hit.” Like most tech titans, Parker claims that he didn’t really understand the implications of it all, pointing to “unintended consequences” that arise when a network grows to have more than two billion users. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.72
Tristan Harris, too, spends a lot of time worrying about the cognitive effects of today’s technology, particularly on children’s not-yet-fully-developed brains. Harris is a former Googler and graduate of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, where he learned to engineer the kind of behavior modification software that keeps people swiping on everything from Candy Crush to potential Tinder dates to fake news. He went on to start three companies and work at Google, before going through an existential crisis about the growing power of Big Tech and founding a nonprofit that aims to curb the nefarious effects of tech addiction. As he once put it to me, “There’s an entire army of engineers at all these firms working to get you to spend more time and money online. Their goals are not your goals.”
The story of Big Tech is still unfurling, and each week brings as ma
ny questions as it does answers. But in my mind, the more critical question is the simplest of them all: What will we do about it?
Where Do We Go from Here?
The headwinds against solving the problems of monopoly power, addictive technology, and the political populism wrought by the largest tech firms are great. The data-driven economy is now a fact of life; companies of all stripes are counting on it to fuel their growth in the coming years. Meanwhile, Big Tech is already finding ways around whatever regulation might be coming, doing whatever it takes to continue to monetize the only product that matters—us.
It’s possible that we are at a tipping point. As I write this, a number of Big Tech companies are under federal and European investigation, a topic I’ll look at carefully in chapters to come. But I don’t think of the tech executives as criminals. I think of them as antiheroes whose outsized ambitions were tinged with folly, greed, and naïveté.
Much of what we resent about Big Tech should not be a surprise to anyone, least of all to its founders. The perils were all implicit in the technology we find entrancing. When Google advised its employees not to be evil, it did so because it knew full well that evil was more than a powerful temptation. Evil was baked into the business plan.
CHAPTER 2
The Valley of the Kings
There was a time when, having returned to the United States from many years as a foreign correspondent in Europe just in time for the subprime meltdown, I seriously considered going to work for Google. The 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath had been tough for many industries, but it was particularly tough for those of us in publishing and the media. Advertising had fallen off a cliff, as traditional sources of ad revenue such as the automotive industry, pharmaceutical companies, and even luxury brands tightened their marketing budgets. Newsmagazines, where I’d spent most of my career, suddenly felt like a dicey proposition. Yet I was also wary of start-ups, having had a bad experience at one in the months leading up to the first big dot-com bust. But Google, by this point, could hardly be described as a “start-up,” so at the behest of a friend who’d worked for the company, I went to interview for a high-level communications job at their New York office.
The first clue that this might not be the place for me was at the front desk. As part of the automated sign-in process, I was required to agree to an NDA, or “nondisclosure agreement,” in order to get a badge that would simply grant me entry to the offices. I’m a journalist, and this immediately rubbed me the wrong way. There was a lot of fine print, all of it amounting to agreeing that I couldn’t speak about or write about anything I might see upstairs. I didn’t even know what the job entailed, let alone what I might see—though rest assured that should I have happened to catch a glimpse of top-secret code on some careless engineer’s monitor, it would have been all ones and zeros to me. Still, I decided to decline the NDA, which meant that I didn’t make it farther than the company cafeteria.1
The famed Google canteen, it turned out, wasn’t a bad place to get a feel for the corporate culture. It was filled with the predictably cheery hordes of well-groomed and affluent-looking millennials choosing from a variety of freshly made gourmet meals, all free, which were served to them by a catering staff who made sure they received no more or less than the predetermined serving size designed to minimize waste and maximize health. (You could go back for more, of course, but I was struck by the fact that Google’s metric-driven ethos applied even to lunch.) The spread wasn’t quite as impressive as it was at the California headquarters, where you would stumble on gourmet smoothie stations and juice bars between the beach volleyball courts and the outdoor chamber music ensemble spaces, but the mountain of fresh blueberries at the fresh fruit station seemed to have been picked minutes ago, and all in all the food was better than anything I’d ever seen in a corporate canteen. There was, of course, the requisite gourmet coffee station to cap off the meal and refuel the troops, who, between the food, the massages, the complimentary dry-cleaning pickups, and the evening entertainment sessions of lectures and cocktail mixers, seemed to have no reason to leave the office other than to catch a few hours of sleep.
I’ve always been skeptical of such corporate perks, which seem designed to blur the boundaries between work and life in a way that always seems to benefit the corporation more than the worker. But many people, most of whom work at the Big Tech firms, would disagree with me. As I learned from the brief conversations I struck up in line at the dessert bar, to be a Googler was more than a full-time job to many who worked there—it was a calling, one with seemingly few boundaries in terms of time or job description. The people I spoke to were rightfully proud of the company’s growth trajectory and power, but to me, they also had that Circle-like quality (to reference the dark Silicon Valley satire by novelist Dave Eggers) of having drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. The company was good. It was kind. It wanted the best for its people and society. The fact that it was a sharp-elbowed money-making machine with what was then a 92 percent market share in search engines and an increasingly aggressive Washington lobbying presence was something the folks I spoke to didn’t quite seem to have landed on.2
Yet the very nature of the job that I was interviewing for was indicative of a culture that was already in some disarray. It turned out that the company wanted to assign a number of experienced media or PR operatives to a handful of Google C-suiters, almost like executive body men: to follow them around, collect their thinking, and then communicate it to other executives and the company at large. It was an entirely internal PR job. I wouldn’t be helping disseminate Google’s message to the outside world, but rather within Google itself.
It struck me as odd, and worrisome, that the top brass running the company would have such a hard time communicating with their troops—wasn’t openness and lack of hierarchy part of the Silicon Valley ethos? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was indicative of an organization that was struggling to make the shift, culturally, from behaving like a scrappy start-up to being what it really was—a large, sprawling corporate behemoth that was still basically run by about five people at the top. Google thought that all it needed to do in order to successfully navigate this transition was make the wishes of these people a bit clearer internally. In fact, it needed an entirely different approach to management, one that was truly inclusive and open to criticism. While Google leadership liked to think of the company as being nonhierarchical, it seemed clear to me that power was, in fact, extremely concentrated. And even more worrisome, the Googlers were woefully lacking in both self-awareness and awareness of how they might be perceived in the outside world.
This is typical of not just Google, but a host of Silicon Valley companies that have become big and powerful yet still want to act like they are small. It’s an issue that is most pronounced in the tech sector, where the most successful start-ups are the ones that grew very quickly. One symptom of such companies is often too much power concentrated at the top. Facebook founder, chief executive, and chairman Mark Zuckerberg, for example, still controls 60 percent of his company’s voting rights. Recent reports suggest that he and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg represent a tiny funnel through which decisions have to flow: a management structure more characteristic of a start-up than one of the world’s most profitable public companies. Elon Musk had a similar stranglehold on power at Tesla until the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission forced him to relinquish the chairmanship as part of a fraud settlement. Google has the problem, too; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt still own the largest chunks of the company and have tremendous influence.3
I turned down the job, needless to say, and made my peace with the fact that I was, at heart, a journalist and not a corporate flack. It was clear to me that unless the people at the top decided the culture was to change, it wouldn’t.
When Heroes Rise
To really understand the unparalleled heights of market power that S
ilicon Valley holds today, you have to go back to the beginning of this passion play, one that follows the tragic arc described by Aristotle centuries ago: the rise and fall of a flawed hero, blinded by his own hubris. The rise is clear enough, as it starts with the moment these dynamic firms are first conceived (usually in a garage or dorm room, as the mythology goes) and climbs to the moment when they go public. That’s often the point at which things change—it’s when companies cease to be as much about innovation as they are about share price, when their ideals take a back seat to the pursuit of as much market share as they can build up. The very best FAANG through which to illustrate this arc is the one that is most ubiquitous: Google. The story of this omniscient behemoth that functions as an auxiliary brain for so many of us today is in many ways the story of the digital revolution itself: a window into the economic, political, and social forces that explain how we got here, and where we may be going. And so, let us begin at the beginning—with Larry and Sergey.
As central as Google is to our daily lives, few people understand how the company evolved from the scrappy, cheerful, and idealistic enterprise of its early years to the vast and more ethically questionable corporate entity it is today. When I first came to the Valley as a young financial reporter in 1995, it was not to cover Google, as it didn’t yet exist, beyond just a vague notion rattling around in the brains of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I was there to see David Filo, the head of Yahoo, which had recently emerged as the Valley start-up to watch. Skinny and clad in flip-flops, he had the wide-eyed look of an Alice who’d just dropped down the rabbit hole as he showed me around the company’s big open-plan Wonderland. Yahoo, which Filo had founded with his friend and Stanford classmate Jerry Yang, had been born as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”—it was a coder’s hobby, a way to procrastinate and avoid writing their PhD thesis. But by the time I met the pair, their whimsical—if ambitious—project to pull up the world’s largest collection of baseball stats had evolved into a real business, and Filo seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the whole thing.4
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