The statistics Hawley presents on the mental health disaster among young people are stark, with anxiety, loneliness and isolation, depression, self-harm and suicide all going skyward among young people, particularly adolescent girls. We cannot resist the shining portal in our pockets, checking and re-checking to see how our social status in what Mark Dooley calls “Cyberia” is ascending or declining, claiming it connects us while it divides us from each other and ourselves. In 2017 one engineer called this algorithm “a long-term addiction machine.” Indeed, Hawley cites the Google Brain team, responsible for artificial intelligence research, which developed a new algorithm called “Reinforce” for its YouTube video site. Hawley writes that “Big Tech seeks to create a global system of automatic rent extraction from the real economy,” with the division between we who provide the data and those who exploit it representing “the modern equivalent of the Gilded Age division between corporate management and labor.” According to Hawley, those who work in the physical world are the new proletariat and those who work in the digital world the new aristocracy-Michael Lind’s “ Overclass”-for the new Gilded Age.įurther on, Hawley presents a range of studies and data that demonstrate what we intuit but can’t always prove: Big Tech has actively fostered our addiction to the devices and services they so generously provide. This rent seeking does little to enable the true liberty of self-government in community and actively works to eliminate both. The new economy, as Lanier points out, is one where the Big Tech giants extract “much of the productivity of ordinary people” from an “informal economy of barter and reputation, while concentrating the extracted old-fashioned wealth for themselves.” Our attention equals their data, which makes them their money. He affirms Jaron Lanier’s argument that “large, highly automated businesses can’t help but present some of the problems of monopolies.” These behemoths thrive off the monopolisation and monetisation of our undivided and, arguably, addicted attention. Much of Hawley’s book concentrates on the negative effects of this hegemonic economic position. It’s partly because of this that Joel Kotkin has argued that we are headed into neo-feudalism. What we in the wider West are facing are corporations at a scale that dwarfs most national governments. The market capitalisation of Apple, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft is equal to the GDP of France, the seventh-largest economy on the planet. As well as controlling the infrastructure through which we lead our lives, in the US Amazon has “126 million subscribers to its Amazon Prime subscription service, amounting to more than one-third of the nation.” Furthermore, in 2020 “Amazon also controlled at least 40 percent of all online sales in America.” It has caused huge upheaval across the retail sector, both on and offline, and has driven local businesses to the wall, or as near as. Amazon has greater and greater control of the access to the means of cultural production: this includes communication and the media systems we use to comprehend the world. Its Android mobile platform “represents 85 percent of smartphone market share worldwide.” Google Maps is massive, “controlling 67 percent of the smartphone map market.”Īmazon increasingly controls the data and hosting infrastructure by which our modern economy and society are conducted. The user base is “so big the company can and has single-handedly reshaped the flow of information in the United States.” Google, meanwhile, “holds 68 percent of the global desktop market share and 63 percent of the market for mobile browsing” through its internet browser, Chrome. As Hawley lays out: Apple and its iPhone empire along with the App Store gives the giant “a share in approximately $500 billion in annual app commerce–along with the ability to influence the design, marketing, and operation of every app offered up for sale on an iPhone.” Meanwhile, “of adults in America who use social media, 99 percent use Facebook.” Of course, Facebook also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Messenger app. Despite these foolish actions, the book and the man are, as Ross Douthat has argued, worth paying attention to.įirst, let’s look at the scale of the challenge in front of us. Hawley’s fist pump at the yelling crowd on Januand vote against the election of Joe Biden are ignored. Even so, it was a slight irritation to read his Preface about being cancelled by Simon & Schuster and subsequently published by Regnery. This is more than a political screed, and Hawley has written, on the whole, an enjoyable book, employing an uncluttered style without surrendering to the trend towards dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
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