Messy plots, starring Big Tech and Big Business
📱Tension is building around our digital lives.
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The Worldwise View
Big Tech—the major companies most of us rely on to run our digital lives—tends to be the protagonist of modern-day stories about corporate power.
This isn’t to say that stories starring the more traditional suspects have disappeared.
But whoever the actor, it’s no longer that easy to tell apart the heroes from the baddies.
The same company that undermines democracy is a major funder of journalism. The company that produces life-saving medicine will also be guilty of misleading advertising with deadly consequences. Governments tasked with protecting privacy spy on their citizens, or use technology as a political weapon. Citizens who decry the power of big tech rely on social media to broadcast their message.
The plot is messy, and tension is building. Scroll down for the latest stories from my inbox.
They go beyond tech, covering more familiar stories such as big business causing environmental damage.
And because it sometimes—no, often—feels like we’re on a treadmill, running over the same ground and going nowhere, the post ends with a bit of reading about making change, and making it last.
New tech, same-old societies
You’ve probably heard that the Trump administration recently issued executive orders banning apps TikTok and WeChat, which are owned by Chinese firms. An insightful analysis by Will Oremus, senior writer at Medium’s OneZero publication, sees in this a bigger trend towards what he calls digital nationalism.
"It’s now clear that, to the extent the internet represents real life, it eventually becomes subject to the same forces and power struggles that govern everything else,” Oremus writes in The Dream of a Global Internet is Dead.
Incidentally, harassment on social media comes to mind here: not unlike an online version of mob justice.
Back to the bigger picture—it seems that we as citizens are caught between a rock and a hard place: Big Tech undermining democracy on one hand, and on the other governments seizing on those concerns, and on technology more broadly, for surveillance, protectionism and to score political points.
About a month ago, I wrote in this post about technology being used as a weapon in the border clash between India and China. Around that time, Nature reported on concerns about China collecting its people’s DNA. In late July Egypt handed a jail sentence to five women influencers over TikTok posts the authorities deemed inappropriate. Even Rwanda, often seen as a role model in development circles and for its success in tackling Covid-19, is reportedly using new technologies for mass surveillance.
The power tussles know no borders. A recent court ruling over how EU citizens' data is handled in the United States was said to be a win for privacy but a strain on trade relations between the US and the EU (BBC + WSJ). The UK’s ban of new Huawei 5G equipment after December 2020 isn’t just about technology. Despite the short-term political gain, it’s seen by some experts as a reactionary attitude that contrasts with China’s technological vision, which includes the Belt & Road Initiative.
So far, so much about governments. But there were developments on the Big Tech front too, and for that I’ll go back to another Medium piece by Will Oremus.
This is his insightful analysis of the parallels between Big Tobacco and Big Tech—a parallel made by the New York Times in a story about the recent US congressional hearing with CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, who are under investigation on accusations that they stifled rivals and harmed consumers.
Oremus starts by recounting scenes from a 1994 congressional hearing involving seven CEOs that represented big American tobacco firms. He explains how this became a turning point in the history of that industry, before going on to dissect the similarities—and the differences—with how the story of Big Tech's dominance might evolve.
Spoiler: it’s not going to be history repeated any time soon.
Other pieces that caught my eye
How new tech raises the risk of nuclear war - Axios
Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power - Nature
Why ‘scaling’ technology is problematic - Rest of World
Same-old business, new accusations
Tucked away in this WorldWise post from early July was a news item about the mining company Rio Tinto detonating explosives at a sacred Aboriginal site in Western Australia to expand an iron ore mine. This was done legally.
But the company has now admitted the blast wasn’t even a necessity—it was a choice.
The site was a cave in Juukan Gorge, the only inland site in Australia with signs of continual human occupation through the last Ice Age.
The next story isn’t quite as remote. The livestock industry is in the spotlight after an investigation by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism traced the supply chain of JBS, a company which accounts for a massive global beef market, to cattle from a deforested part of the Amazon. The Bureau also revealed, in early July, that international development banks are funding industrial livestock farms around the world.
You know why this matters: climate change, animal rights, and yes, emerging diseases. It’s all connected, and our consumption habits are part of the story—for more details read my story on Ensia.
Finally, let’s not forget Big Food. The Bureau is on the case here too, revealing how Nestlé and Danone are using social media to essentially turn Indonesian consumers into unpaid and under-regulated advertisers during the pandemic.
And the Guardian reports that Kenyan tea workers have filed a complaint to the UN against Unilever, accusing the company over its lack of support for employees during ethnic violence in 2007.
Making change ain’t easy
Have you heard of “grasstops advocacy”? That's right—grasstops, not grassroots. It is, apparently, a term to describe the policy of planting op-eds from ‘independent’ third parties into newspapers—common practice for Big Tech, according to this piece in Medium One Zero.
“Their aim is to persuade lawmakers and regulators that the people they purportedly hurt prefer the status quo,” writes Alex Kantrowitz.
But what about shifting that status quo?
We can latch onto a couple of positive signs: a growing interest in funding social movements is one; the new phenomenon of 'greencon' alliances between conservatives and climate activists is another.
But fundamentally, it’s far from an easy question to answer. And it’s one that often preoccupies Duncan Green over at Oxfam’s From Poverty to Power blog. This recent post looked at what makes a moment of change last by focusing on the “emotional chemistry of rebellions” (great line).
This one looked at how—and why—to cultivate long-term or 'cathedral’ thinking, and become a good ancestor to those who inhabit this world in the future. It’s a book review, and it comes with an animated summary 👇
Worldwise is written by Anita Makri.
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