Silicon States

by Lucie Greene

  Bill Gates was perhaps one of the earliest proponents of Silicon Valley’s dual approach to philanthropy: that social good could also be entrepreneurial. “In the next fifteen years, digital banking will give the poor more control over their assets and help them transform their lives,” Gates has since said. “By 2030, two billion people who don’t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payments with their phones. And by then, mobile money providers will be offering the full range of financial services, from interest-bearing savings accounts to credit to insurance.”

  He pointed to the high penetration of mobile phone users in economies like Africa and the opportunity for micro-lending and banking for “unbanked” consumers through money transfer services such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa in Kenya. M-Pesa essentially turns the cellphone into a portable bank account, allowing users to deposit and transfer money via SMS text message to other people, and redeem money, too. It’s been praised for allowing millions of people without bank accounts to be part of a formal financial system.

  Facebook’s Internet.org is the next incarnation of this mission of entrepreneurism mixed with philanthropy. And in Africa, it’s welcomed. It was first rolled out in Zambia in July of 2014. In 2016 Myanmar became the eighteenth nation to sign up. By November of that year, forty million people (0.5 percent of the world population) were estimated to be using the service. The company was also in talks in late 2016 with the U.S. government to bring the Free Basics program to the United States. The latter could be a significant move as net neutrality laws, put in place by the Obama administration, are rolled back in the United States, allowing Free Basics–type models to operate in home territory.

  Will low-income U.S. citizens become the next banana republic for Silicon Valley?

  “The United Fruit Company was the original, evil, global multinational corporation that destroyed governments in developing countries for profits. That’s what Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Visa, and MasterCard look like to developing countries now,” says Jane K. Winn. “It’s like the newest chapter in imperialism. First, it was colonialism, second it was global multinational companies, now it’s these platforms.”

  But there is a key difference. Where older colonial markets exploited local labor to extract or produce commodities that would then be exported, the new colonial model is based on providing services to emerging markets. Or as Winn describes it, “The fundamental architecture is consumer empowerment.”

  In other words, ironically, digital media platforms are actually creating a way for people to question the motives of the tech giants that provide them. “The calculus of how these platforms are going to play out is going to be very different. The citizens are now consumers and participants in an active way that they weren’t a hundred years ago or fifty years ago. So this time when the story is told, there’s hope that it’s going to turn out to be less exploitive and more transparent and fair,” Winn says.

  India’s backlash is a forerunner example of what Winn is describing—a market mediated and regulated by digitally informed local audiences and businesses. In 2015, the government of India launched Digital India, a nationwide project to connect rural areas with broadband internet. Microsoft pledged to provide broadband connectivity to 500,000 villages in the country. Amazon pledged to invest $5 billion in the country, while homegrown e-commerce company Flipkart is determined not to cede territory to the global behemoths. Alibaba is signing up Indian partners including Kotak Mahindra Bank, IDFC Bank, DHL, and Aditya Birla Finance, according to a report from online news publication Quartz. Stakes are high: India’s potentially lucrative B2B e-commerce market is expected to grow by two and a half times through 2020.

  “The Indian government is thinking in an extremely farsighted and shrewd way about having open technology environments, but the government controls the fundamental infrastructure because they paid for it with taxpayer dollars as public goods,” explains Winn. “The government of India is building an open, interoperable architecture so that all consumer payments run through the government-controlled architecture, and the payment-services providers compete head-on and give consumers better services. But there’s never the possibility that the infrastructure is being controlled by a private company.”

  A key revelation for India is that financial inclusion is paramount for the next ten, twenty years in terms of economic development. “They’re absolutely paranoid about global multinational corporations encroaching on government control. So they have bitten the bullet and they have built the infrastructure,” says Winn. “The Reserve Bank of India created a research and development institute in Hyderabad in 1996 precisely so they could start doing things like this.”

  The reason it works is that “it maximizes consumer welfare, it promotes innovation, and it completely eliminates the possibility of walking into a proprietary system. The Indians figured out an innovation ecosystem which is compatible with Indian social values.” And therefore, they’ve retained control.

  So where next? Governments are proving sticky. Foreign cultures, history, and nuance are at times unintelligible. Virgin territory, free from controls, criticism, and limitations is much more alluring. And it doesn’t get more expansive, or ungoverned, than outer space.

  5

  Moonshots

  It could easily be the opener of a Steven Spielberg movie. But that, perhaps, is the point. High production values meet high drama as the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System rocket appears in the frame, emitting bursts of steam, almost like it’s alive. It launches into space accompanied by majestic classical music. Moments later, in a dramatic sequence, the ship approaches Mars. Suited astronauts open the spacecraft’s doors revealing a glowing, utopic Martian landscape. The brave new world.

  “What I really want to try to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it’s something we can do in our lifetimes.” Elon Musk, moments before, is speaking onstage to an enraptured audience at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, September 2016. It’s part celebration of the endeavor to inhabit Mars, and part pitch for investment.

  “History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I don’t have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually history suggests there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multiplanetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”

  The whole presentation is theatrical. Musk, standing on a stage, has a planet Mars spinning behind him. There are sleek CAD drawings of complex designs combined with evocative visions of life on Mars—at one point, a rendering, like some teen fantasy, shows a silhouetted Lara Croft–type figure against a glass biodome with a glowing Mars backdrop.

  For someone describing the astounding feat of actually colonizing a new planet, Musk’s tone is markedly blasé. The selection of Mars over other planets was logical—you know, because Venus is an acid bath. Mercury is too close to the sun. Musk makes it sound like picking a summer house . . . but affordably. Life on Mars will eventually be achievable under the $100,000 mark, he says, and because so few people will go in the beginning, it will be really easy to get a job.

  “The main reason I’m personally accumulating assets is in order to fund this,” Musk says in conclusion. “I really don’t have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary.” It’s his gift to humanity. He’s continued to project his future visions of life in space at subsequent conferences and events, culminating perhaps in one of the most widely watched launches; in February 2018 Musk successfully rocketed a Tesla into space toward Mars and beyond, propelled by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The launch was a global media sensation and described by CNN as a symbol of a “new space age”—one in which Elon Musk, celebrity and visionary, is at the forefront (even
if he is backed by government grants and tax breaks). Over two million viewers tuned in to watch the event livestream, which was further brought to life by a video camera inside the car, showing a dummy pilot in the driving seat (and with David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” playing in the background). The affair reportedly cost $90 million. For many Musk fans, and for the media in general, it was a wet dream, propelled further by humorous Twitter exchanges with rival space visionary Jeff Bezos wishing him luck. (Musk returned with a kiss emoji.)

  Strange to think that not long before Musk set his sights on conquering space, his entrepreneurial vision was as prosaic as facilitating online payments. But such grand ambitions are increasingly prevalent in the tech world.

  With growing fortunes, and a strong sense of manifest destiny, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem determined to leap beyond industry and business to transforming the universe, life as we know it, and our future. They are doing so with an egocentric lens on their legacy, but also with an eye to long-term, potentially lucrative markets. In being the ones to lead the charge, they are also driving an important cultural shift, at least optically—one in which Silicon Valley, not government, is the architect of the future.

  Musk isn’t the only one with his sights on space. “We need a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space, just as I’ve witnessed over the last twenty years on the internet—thousands of companies and tens of thousands of startups doing interesting things online,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told the BBC in September 2017. Bezos has also founded Blue Origin, a private spaceflight services company that has promised to take tourists into space by April 2019. Meanwhile, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic received a $1 billion investment from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to make a reality of its dreams to create “the next generation of human spaceflight.”

  The glamour (and potential imminence) of space travel is also capturing the popular imagination, paving the way for on-the-ground experiences inspired by space. Future Valley, a space-themed park in Hangzhou in China, is developing a balloon tour to take passengers on a comfortable near-space experience fifteen miles above the Earth’s surface.

  Silicon Valley’s move into space travel is emblematic of a wider expansion in the scope of their ambition. Moonshots, as they have become known, are synonymous with Silicon Valley—defined as incredible feats, experiments, and attempts to change the world or solve an insurmountable problem. And moonshots are now being explored everywhere. Silicon Valley’s center of expertise has expanded to all specialties of invention and research from material science, to biochemistry, to robotics, medicine, genetics, data science, blood testing, engineering, machine learning, and DNA sequencing. And beyond. And they are all intersecting in new ways to create new, daring products. Often these are in such unchartered territory, or moving so quickly, that the potential ethical quandaries are an afterthought or not yet understood from a regulatory point of view. But they could change our world, fast. Or, in the case of outer space, give Silicon Valley leaders control of a vast new territory, becoming architects of how human exploration works.

  With these innovations, they are taking on audacious challenges—space exploration, flying cars, new pneumatic transport systems—and approaching them with a long-term vision and unprecedented resources, including government backing. If it’s not Mars, then it’s the Moon, and certainly orbit. Such is their belief in their abilities, with no limit to self-aggrandizing statements, and not much public scrutiny either. They’re building the future! Stepping in to solve humanitarian crises and shaping scientific advances! A tweet from Musk generates breathless headlines from tech and business press. Jeff Bezos joining Instagram was breaking news. His subsequent posts sharing favorite inspirational novels, shipping supplies (in an Amazon Prime airplane, no less) to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and developments at Blue Origin are widely followed. Musk sent solar panels to the island. Both moves to aid Puerto Rico were notably outside of government efforts. These men, with previously unseen wealth and influence, don’t need government. Bezos’s net worth is now more than $105 billion, making him the richest person in the world.

  Silicon Valley leaders are theorizing about the future of civilization with the rhetoric befitting of prophets (Musk has stated that he thinks it’s likely we’re all, unbeknownst to us, living in a computer simulation—this in addition to predicting doomsday extinction of the planet). Or they’re building apocalypse bunkers for when society, impoverished by automation from robotic devices and artificial intelligence, turns against them. With experiments in applying everything from biotech to AI to extend our lifespans, augment our bodies, or replicate them with technology, they are also hacking humanity with a degree of irreverence reserved for people who believe they are clearly above it, and nature itself. Or believe our civilization is merely another system, something that can be disrupted (repeatedly referencing works of historians and philosophers, perhaps they see themselves within a greater arch of history now).

  It started with figures such as Peter Thiel, famous for his interest in longevity research, and futurist and singularity theorist Ray Kurzweil reportedly ingesting record numbers of dietary supplements in a bid to “solve” aging. Martine Rothblatt is cloning human minds virtually, in an attempt to make us immortal. Meanwhile, a latent human cyborg movement is giving us entirely new senses, embedding our human flesh with connection to the internet.

  All this started out on the fringes, an indulgence for billionaires, or as the topic of SXSW Interactive fireside chat. But changing humanity is becoming an industry. Consider Alphabet’s portfolio. Consult the project list of Verily, its life sciences company, and it’s pure science fiction. There are clever contact lenses that can detect changes in glucose levels. There’s Galvani Bioelectronics, creating bioelectronic medicines with GlaxoSmithKline to tackle chronic disease. “Bioelectronic medicines will be designed to treat disease by modulating electrical signals in peripheral nerves using miniature, implanted devices. They may provide an entirely new toolkit for control and reversal of disease, and could complement pharmaceutical and other therapies,” says Verily.

  There’s also Debug, a program to combat disease-spreading mosquitos by releasing sterile ones to eliminate them.

  “Our team is developing new technologies that combine sensors, algorithms, and novel engineering to raise millions of these sterile mosquitoes and quickly and accurately sort them for release in the wild. We’re also building software and monitoring tools to guide mosquito releases and new sensors, traps, and software to better determine which areas need to be treated and re-treated.” Verily isn’t Alphabet’s only venture. Calico, a biotech company, is trying to solve diseases associated with aging. There’s DeepMind, a London-founded company applying artificial intelligence to solve a variety of problems, particularly in health. A recent project includes using machine learning to enhance mammography screening for breast cancer.

  Theirs is a world of unbridled enthusiasm for the future, but one—in its lust for the virgin territory of pastures new, and correction of all of nature’s seeming “inefficiencies”—that is also revealing of their outlook.

  “There is a creator phenomenon,” says Puneet Kaur Ahira, a former executive in Google’s Moonshots division. Indeed. Much like the tech missionaries civilizing Africa with internet, Silicon Valley is planting new seeds, envisioning its own futuristic utopias in space—ones that run much more efficiently because of their holistic control. “We’re in such a rush to go to Mars; I think that’s fascinating. Why are we in such a rush to go to Mars? Why are we pouring billions of dollars to get ourselves there?” asks Ahira.

  In part it’s that Mars is a tantalizingly blank canvas. On Earth, Silicon Valley technologies have to grapple with messy things like cities, older infrastructure, and the law. So while getting to Mars is undoubtedly a great scientific achievement, setting up completely new communities from scratch is remarkably more simple than grappling with integrating into today’s fabric. They can de
sign the universe in their image without having to adapt to anything, unlike Earth where there are towns, infrastructure, and societal norms that simply will not vanish. To hark back to Obama’s Pittsburgh address: Government is “hard and it’s messy, and we’re building off legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.” In space, they can build a new cradle of civilization from the ground up. But will their futuristic vision, unfettered by the constraints of cumbersome existing systems, be the perfection they envisage?

  Silicon Valley’s ideal version of life is at odds with the “mess” of life on Earth, which is only going to become more imposing as inequality, globalization, and technological innovation grow more advanced. But the problems on Earth don’t involve Lara Croft in a jumpsuit.

  “Maybe in our pursuit of an off-planet future, we’ll discover the panacea to our on-planet complexites; but maybe not,” echoes Ahira. “And then what? So much of all this is a matter of attention span and the messy process of figuring out how to work together in a coherent way.”

  Nevertheless, it seems a missed opportunity for an industry that draws incredible talent, incredible minds from the highest caliber universities around the world, not to mention dreamers, thinkers, and seemingly limitless pools of money, and not focus that on the toughest problems on the ground. Still, perhaps these innovations developed in space could be repurposed later on Earth.

  Income inequality continues to grow. In America, one of the richest countries in the world, 41 million citizens struggle with hunger according to Feeding America, a food bank charity. Mass unemployment is on the horizon thanks to the widespread application of robots and AI in everything from retail shop floors to offices. Opioid addiction is a nationwide crisis. There are gigantic problems facing us, at home and abroad. To be fair, many of Silicon Valley’s moonshot endeavors are aimed at creating products that help honorable significant causes, such as affordable sustainable energy and more efficient health care, but they’re usually attached to a degree of commercial motivation (more valuable consumer data). They’re tech-based. Or they’re extreme, headline-driven, loud, and un-nuanced. They’re about only the great feats, not the small ones, or even the medium ones. And they seem to distinctly avoid issues relating to poor people in their own backyard. Which raises the question: Why is Mars a priority in the first place? For all the rhetoric about civic action, Silicon Valley’s world-bending endeavors can feel more about hubris than humanitarianism.