[The real point of this blog post is just to encourage you to read George Packer's article (ungated version here. But c'mon, subscribe to the New Yorker already). It's the best thing you'll read this month.]
I read a lot of technology criticism. I write a bit of it as well. George Packer’s article in this week’s New Yorker, (“Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans — and its money — to politics“) is just sublime, the finest I’ve ever seen. It might be the end of technology criticism as we know it. Shut it down. Nothing left to say here. Packer’s already covered that.
What’s interesting about Packer’s article is just how much ground he covers in such a relatively small space. Consider the following three passages from Packer’s article, compared to three of the most recent books in the tech-criticism genre:
(1)
“When financiers say that they’re doing God’s work by providing cheap credit, and oilmen claim to be patriots who are making the country energy-independent, no one takes them too seriously – it’s a given that their motivation is profit. But when technology entrepreneurs describe their lofty goals there’s no smirk or wink. “Many see their social responsibility fulfilled by their businesses, not by social or political action,” one young entrepreneur said of his colleagues. “It’s remarkably convenient that they can achieve their goals just by doing their start-up.” He added, “They actually think that Facebook is going to be the panacea for many of the world’s problems. It isn’t cynicism – it’s arrogance and ignorance.”
This passage is an elegant version of the “solutionism” critique in Evgeny Morozov’s new book, To Save Everything, Click Here. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can have a habit of seeing technology as the solution to all the world’s problems. Everywhere some look, they see disruption. Evgeny makes a few very smart points, but his book is a little uneven. At times while reading it, I wondered whether he was making too much of the lofty language that appears in investment pitches, pursuing his targets with a bit too much zeal. If you wanted to boil the strongest parts of Morozov’s book down to their essence, you’d be left with passages like this one from Packer.
(2)
“In the past few years, San Francisco’s political leaders have grown close to the technology companies. Corey Cook, a political scientist at the University of San Francisco, who focuses on local politics, said, “The dominant narrative of the city is ‘What’s good for the tech industry is good for San Francisco.’” Historically, he said, what was good for General Motors wasn’t always good for the country: there was conflict between business and labor, which was resolved by insuring that factories offered middle-class jobs. He added, “Now there’s no conflict, but there are no middle-class jobs.”
Jaron Lanier is probably the alpha-individual in tech criticism circles. The godfather of virtual reality, he has now written two books of humanist criticism against his technologist peers. Personally, I’ve never been a fan. Lanier’s calling card is his life story, rather than his writing ability. His arguments tend to be provocative but unedited stream-of-consciousness and poorly researched. His latest book, Who Owns the Future was described by Morozov as an “eccentric but unconvincing meditation on how the middle classes could survive the menace of digitization.”
It isn’t that Lanier doesn’t have a point to make, it’s that he lacks the drive, prose, and determination to make it artfully. His new book is focused on the relationship between social inequality and digital technologies. That’s an important topic, but it’s hard to pluck through the odd tangents to reach the serious ideas. Packer offers the same insight, but without the sloppy limitations.
(3)
A favorite word in tech circles is “frictionless.” It captures the pleasures of an app so beautifully designed that using it is intuitive, and it evokes a fantasy in which all inefficiencies, annoyances, and grievances have been smoothed out of existence—that is, an apolitical world. Dave Morin, who worked at Apple and Facebook, is the founder of a company called Path—a social network limited to one’s fifty closest friends. In his office, which has a panoramic view of south San Francisco, he said that one of his company’s goals is to make technology increasingly seamless with real life. He described San Francisco as a place where people already live in the future. They can hang out with their friends even when they’re alone. They inhabit a “sharing economy”: they can book a weeklong stay in a cool apartment through Airbnb, which has disrupted the hotel industry, or hire a luxury car anywhere in the city through the mobile app Uber, which has disrupted the taxi industry. “San Francisco is a place where we can go downstairs and get in an Uber and go to dinner at a place that I got a restaurant reservation for halfway there,” Morin said. “And, if not, we could go to my place, and on the way there I could order takeout food from my favorite restaurant on Postmates, and a bike messenger will go and pick it up for me. We’ll watch it happen on the phone. These things are crazy ideas.”
It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.
My favorite part of Nicco Mele’s new book, The End of Big, is the attention he pays to the biases of the geek-class. Disruption is happening in a lot of industries. It is not always a good thing (and it is not happening everywhere all at once). This isn’t leveling the social playing field, though. It’s empowering a new elite — software engineers.
Now, if we’re going to empower some group of people as a privileged elite, I prefer technologists over many of the other alternatives. There’s more of a rough meritocracy in code-writing than there is in the old power elite. But we at least ought to examine what biases the new technologist class will bring to bear. Mele, at his best, offers a provocative argument for thinking long and hard about our newly crowned technology leaders.
Packer reaches the same end, but he does so in paragraphs rather than pages.
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That’s three books of technology criticism, all published in the last three months — over 1,050 pages in all. George Packer in 10,000 vivid words accomplishes more than all three. Bravo. That’s one hell of an article.