Ours is a world where a handful of technology companies – along with a considerably higher number of their billionaire owners – are heading towards power that will border on the absolute, uncontested not just by politics but also by the media of any kind.
Two seemingly unrelated recent news stories make it quite clear. First, a report from Moody’s Investors Service suggests that just five US tech firms – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle – hold $504bn (£345bn) in spare cash, a third of total reserves by all US corporations (excluding financial companies). It is the first time that all of the top five spots have gone to companies in the tech sector.
A recent raid by the French police on Google’s Paris office – part of a €1.6bn (£1.2bn) tax probe – hints at the origins of that wealth. And that spare cash rests on – and produces – political power. Google’s lobbying expenses, for example, are some of the highest in the business world; its lobbyists have visited the White House, on average, more than once a week in the period between Barack Obama’s election and October 2015.
The second news story has to do with Peter Thiel, the unconventional investor who made his name as a co-founder of PayPal, and who went on to make his fortune as a venture capitalist, backing companies including Facebook in their early days. Thiel, it turns out, has bankrolled the controversial lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, the celebrity wrestler, against Gawker, the gossip site. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, sued for invasion of privacy after Gawker published an excerpt of a leaked sex tape in 2012. He has been awarded $115m by the courts; Gawker’s future is uncertain.
Thiel did not offer to help Hogan because he likes wrestling. In 2007 Gawker outed him, writing that “Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay” (“more power to him,” it added). The story about his own sexuality was one of many that Thiel describes as having “ruined people’s lives for no reason”, and drove him, he says, to help fund “victims” of the site in mounting legal cases against Gawker.
Thiel, who poured $10m into the Hogan case – “one of my greater philanthropic things” – told the New York Times: “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.” He doesn’t want the likes of Gawker to continue “getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest”.
Now, let us hope that Gawker is not the future of brave investigative journalism that we have all been waiting for. It thrives on gossip and traffics private, occasionally salacious, details of the lives of celebrities, CEOs and politicians. It has published a lot of material that it shouldn’t have done – which it periodically acknowledges itself.
Gawker’s relationship with Silicon Valley, though, is more complicated for the sole reason that, when it comes to the behaviour of its own executives, the personal is also the political. Gawker has been producing coverage of the tech industry that is as lurid as it is important, subjecting the likes of Thiel to the scrutiny that they no longer receive elsewhere.
Consider what Gawker’s readers might have learned over the years. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, tells us that if we have something to hide, maybe we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place; he himself prefers to live in a luxury building without a doorman – so that no one can see him come and go. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants us to practise openness and radical transparency; he himself purchases neighbouring houses to get as much privacy as possible. Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky likes to boast that he is a typical Airbnb host; well, perhaps too typical – for a while, he was renting his house without obtaining the necessary legal permit.
Silicon Valley’s elites hate such intrusion into their personal lives. Had they worked for any other industry, their concerns would be justified. But they work for an industry that tries to convince us that privacy does not matter and that transparency and deregulation are the way to go. Since they do not lead by example, why shouldn’t their hypocrisy be exposed?
If tech elites are so concerned about privacy, they can start backing initiatives such as the right to be forgotten. Why can’t Thiel – a backer of the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of the world’s dissidents where the Human Rights Foundation awards the Václav Havel international prize for creative dissent – help us to make sure that embarrassing content, taken out of context and now enjoying worldwide circulation thanks to social networks and search engines, is easier to manage?
This won’t happen, as the right to be forgotten undermines the very business model – grab whatever data is available – on which the untaxed riches of Silicon Valley are built. In Thiel’s ideal world, our data flows freely and the tech companies can hoover it up as they see fit. Should someone else pry into our lives, disclosing intimate details and making money out of it, then it suddenly becomes a crime against humanity.
A world where the tech elites have all the privacy that they want while the rest of us have to either accept living in public or invest in market solutions like online reputation systems is a world that rests on foundations that are so hypocritical and so ridiculous that they must be exposed.
Why do the tech elites have it so easy, given how much power they have amassed and how hard it is to square what they say with what they do? First, because traditional media find themselves in an odd relationship with Silicon Valley. Their future depends upon tech firms and their CEOs (who are rich enough to buy them out, as Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, did with the Washington Post). At the same time, they are becoming aware that these very tech firms are draining them of their advertising revenue and their customer data.
But there is another reason why Gawker, for all its flaws – including the fact that its own defence is funded by Viktor Vekselberg, a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch, whose investment firm owns a minor stake in it – threatens Silicon Valley. The tech press in America, but increasingly elsewhere, is timid. It is nothing more than a temporary job for people in search of more lucrative careers as investors, publicists and conference organisers – all to be eventually employed in the very same tech industry they are covering.
Most tech blogs just recycle press releases from startups and established technology firms. Consider this note, appended to a recent article about Uber, the taxi app, published on Motherboard, a popular technology blog of Vice magazine: “Motherboard is running a week of stories about Uber. We asked the company’s public relations department what stories it thought the media should be writing about, and this story was one of the things Uber pitched.”
Now that the tech media do not even bother concealing they are just a PR appendage to Silicon Valley, you have to worry how the accumulation of so much power and cash in one industry – combined with aggressive legal campaigns targeting the few who, for whatever reason, are still critical of it – is happening at a time when there is no one to keep our new elites on their toes. It is sad and pathetic that this public function has to be performed by the likes of Gawker but it would be even more pathetic if it were not performed by anyone.
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