Deep Truths
Why isn’t the tech industry regulated? And other things you've always wanted to know.
You might have never dared (or thought of) asking—she did. I picked up Kara Swisher’s book this week and took a trip down memory lane. She’s direct, and you may not like what she has to say about tech founders.
But that’s more of a reason to pick it up and read. The entire Labor Day weekend is ahead, after all. Consider it a primer on Silicon Valley culture—those boys (and the occasional girl) run much of the infrastructure of the ‘Net.
Why isn’t the tech industry regulated? How did it get to where we are? I liked Steve Jobs a little better after I read a few snippets about him. And there are some people in tech who are ‘better.’
I warn you, she’s opinionated.1 But so am I. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to find out how Silicon Valley found religion. Because the rest of us is affected by it in one way or another.
On Value in Culture is a guide to the role of narrative, language, and art in how we organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. To support my work, take out a paid subscription.
There might be nothing new in the book, but a few nuggets stand out.
For example, I didn’t know Peter Thiel2 is ‘famously gay,’ given the very conservative agenda he bankrolls (the same people who’d like to send women back to the stone age.)
Al Gore did (sort of) invent the Internet.
“During my service in the Unites States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” He was senator from Tennessee when he pushed through the ‘High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991’—the ‘Gore Bill.’
The bill funded the Mosaic browser. The browser was how co-author Marc Andreessen went on to co-found Netscape, where he made money. Did Swisher’s ‘entanglement with Silicon Valley cloud her judgment’?
If you’re interested in the beginnings, I blogged about the live interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Then Apple’s Jobs did tell the stories much better than then Microsoft’s Gates.
The honeymoon is over. It’s become fashionable to poo-poo all over Silicon Valley Royalty now. And with good reason. However, Swisher had access because she was ‘it’ when it came to tech news.
If the boys ‘moved fast and broke things,’ she moved fast and broke news.
The early Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/Netflix to Open AI story is interesting. I followed some of it while it happened, but not all of it. In the early days, social media were ‘social networks,’ which made sense because what we wanted was to connect.
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no more.
E.M. Foster, Howards End
What’s left after the gold rush is mere fragments. The quote is in the book, and so apt to the aftermath in culture and society. Some of us knew all along. “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading,” wrote Lao Tzu.
Tech companies turned social networks into ‘media’ because they had no idea how to harness the value of socially useful energy concentrated there.
I said that.
It happened gradually, but now we’re smack in the middle of it. I don’t know about you, but I spend less time in online streams these days. I try to follow the right people—those I know/met and trust—and not glance at much of the rest.
The citation from Steve Jobs Stanford University Commencement Speech (2005) is quite appropriate.
“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
Well, we need to change the Internet. Technology, by itself, doesn’t bring progress—for that, we need persons and decisions. Are Millenials and Gen Z just too plugged in to be able to appreciate that it’s possible to live without so much tech?
I do wonder. Psychologists will say that ‘for durable and systemic social change, breaking and then transforming the status quo requires both people who make things and people who break things, and lots of people in between.’
Are you a person who breaks, or one who makes? Can we guide or plan a culture?
Once you have changes in technology, they’re out there and they create culture. Take for example when they invented cars. Our culture became automobile culture—this is especially true in North America, where the almighty car rules transportation.
Europe, the Soviet Block, and Japan all had very different policies and therefore different results in terms of transportation—but you cannot have human settlements (almost) anywhere without accommodating cars. Parking, bigger roads, etc.
We need laws, policies, regulations, education, the media, and trade connections to bring about change. Culture steers the institutions that generate those out of their inertia. But the relationship between institutions and culture is complex.
Maybe tech titans will pick fights with each other, maybe politicians will jump in (they alrteady fight each other)—then we’ll have some changes.
The recent arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram’s CEO,3 could be an early indication that tech companies executives should be held accountable for the abuse of organized criminals (or corrupt politicians) on a platform they operate.
Tech companies are valued at the highest levels—in market terms—right up there with Saudi Aramco, LVMH, and now Berkshire Hathaway.4 However, if we valued these companies based on social energy, community support, mental health, their contribution to culture would plummet. Their role is in fact bearish in those dynamics.
Swisher says there are good ‘marks’ among tech entrepreneurs—Mark Cuban and Mark Benioff. I met the latter at the very beginning, when Salesforce was in its infancy. According to Swisher, Cuban, Benioff and few others learn from their mistakes.
Benioff was a protege of Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and CEO from 1977-2014. I’ve had the chance to see his version of ‘mansion’ in Newport, RI where he’s about the only homeowner planting trees—he’s had a park planted to span 2-3 properties.
High marks also go to Sundar Pichai (Alphabet) and Satya Nadella (Microsoft.) They both tackled the challenges of being at the top of mature companies, by industry standards.
As for the young cohort, she lists Snap’s CEO/co-founder Evan Spiegel, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, and Kevin Systrom, former co-founder and CEO at Instagram. I just wish Chesky’s company innovated, and Systrom had not sold out. I liked Instragram.
Though I’ve used Airbnb in Europe, we now mix it up with B&Bs, which have been competitive price-wise, and cleaner. Boutique hotels can also work better in some places. The Airbnb fees—to the company and for cleaning—may not reflect value.
There are more good people in tech—as makers and investors—but the evil and toxic tend to ruin it for everyone.
I also take umbrage over lack of regulations in America—no privacy protections, no updated antitrust laws, no algorithmic transparency requirement, no attention to addiction and mental health.
Lest we forget, the Internet was bought and paid for by us (tax money.) Its wealth was built by us—what we now call ‘content,’ but it was really people’s ideas and dreams (before it was people trying to beat the algorithm and AI is scraping it all.)
The truth is we do care. And technology has gotten worse. Search is terrible, our phones are just new, hardly improved, software is bloated, apps spy on us, and the tech industry eats itself—nobody pays for research into actual new stuff.
We have all this tech, and yet it’s still very much up to persons to discover, read, enjoy, and recommend anything. We should question what we read, and Swisher raises more questions than it answers. Then again, it’s a memoir.
The book tells us how we got where we are. I did find some parts interesting. Maybe you will as well.
In 1967, the Beatles said ‘All you Need is Love.’
“If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?”
Lily Tomlin
But let’s not forget that ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’ was on the B-side—a combination of two unfinished Lennon-McCartney song fragments. They used that song in the film, The Social Network.
We’ll talk more about films and their value in culture next week. To receive the full essay, become a supporter.
I also have an article for a historic perspective on humans, one that goes outside the main social streams.
References:
Swisher, Kara, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Swisher’s book is part-memoir, so the personal anecdotes are many. She’s scant on evidence, but she does spin an entertaining yarn, especially in the latter chapters.
He’s also famously against women voting. Which is short-sighted, regardless of the ideology—how do you exclude more than half the world’s population from what happens to society?
France released the 12 charges against Pavel Durov:
1. Complicity for illegal transactions by organized crime groups
2. Refusal to provide the authorities with information or documents necessary for criminal investigations
3. Complicity—Dissemination of porn featuring minors
4. Complicity—Making it possible for organized groups to share porn featuring minors
5. Complicity—Acquisition, transport, possession and sale of narcotics
6. Complicity—Providing tools for cyber attacks
7. Complicity—Organized fraud
8. Association of criminals with the intent to commit a crime punishable by 5 years
9. Money laundering
10. Providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration
11. Providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration
12. Importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.
Informative