Yet the real paradigm change here isn’t AI-as-agent, but rather the shift to a phone as the main mechanism for the use and development of AI itself. Your next phone, be it a new iPhone or a new Google Pixel, be it iOS or Android, will be a figurative microphone onto the world — a microphone from which AI models can collect ever-increasing amounts of data to learn from, shaped in private by methods the public only has the foggiest idea of.

What the public does surely understand is that vast resources are being poured into the building of AI. This is done partly through the building of AI infrastructure itself: creating LLM architectures that can contain trillions of parameters and run on hundreds of thousands of graphics-processing units (GPUs). That in itself is no small investment of time and energy, as evinced by the decades of promising but unprofitable research required before the explosion of Deep Learning in the 2010s.

What’s sometimes overlooked, though, is the actual training of the models: the process by which these architectures are fed enormous amounts of data in order that they are not only useful, but are useful in the  “right” way. And here is where the AI titans — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — have a seemingly permanent advantage that no open-source model or start-up could hope to match.

AI companies tend to be quiet about where they source their data from. After the great fuss made in the 2000s over the downloading of single music files, and the endless attempt to shut down SciHub, the repository of pirated scientific research, it was ironic to learn that Facebook had downloaded millions of books from pirate site Library Genesis to train its AI. The kicker was when a federal judge found, when judging in favor of Meta, that such piracy could well qualify as “fair use”, since the results of it were “transformative”.

The point here is less about what big companies can get away with, and more about the centrality of training data to the capabilities of AIs. We’re beginning to see a push for people to upload their health data to LLMs, with OpenAI offering its American users a feature that analyzes their health records. There are all sorts of questions raised around this: could private data surface in public, even after being anonymized? Where will liability for wrong answers fall? How prescriptive should such an agent be when it comes to lifestyle and health? And should a handful of companies be assembling the models that wield this sort of influence without much in the way of oversight?

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Some dangers are already clear. There are the recurrent hints that these companies don’t have these powerful and opaque models under sufficient control. In the recent past, both OpenAI and Anthropic’s models hacked out of their own sandboxes and into each other’s secure infrastructure, the sort of thing that you’d be forgiven for expecting AI companies to know how to prevent by this point. Just yesterday, the Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, saying his employer and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives”, only for his ex-colleague Evan Hubinger to chime in and agree: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Touché?

Those who fear that advanced AI will bring catastrophic consequences can point to the fact that it is still quite commonplace to “jailbreak” even the most advanced AIs to get them to cough up data and responses that they’re not supposed to. For example, on the day GPT-6 (Astra) was released, the researcher Sergey Berezin was able to get it to name pirate sites like ThePirateBay with no copyright disclaimer.

The jailbreaking issue, however, touches on a less-treated subject. No AI conclusively learns “on its own” to refrain from talking about pirate websites, or responding with pornographic content. Nor, for that matter, does it understand from the womb that it should not hack out of its sandbox. All such guardrails are inserted after the fact, most often through a murky process of “post-tuning” and the addition of further guardrails. In both cases, AI companies have an undisclosed process of human review. As OpenAI describes it, they instruct their reviewers to use their “expertise” to test whether the AI models “do not complete requests for illegal content” and “avoid taking a position on controversial topics.”

Behind this somewhat vague and innocuous-sounding text is a huge amount of influence over the behavior and dispositions of AIs. By this point, it’s accepted that Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other social content platforms exert a great deal of moderation to hide or remove content that is legal but nevertheless goes against what these companies deem to be community norms. It’s generally agreed that a wholly unmoderated public internet is unworkable. But AI represents an even more profound form of interference. 

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Instead of moderating content piecemeal, AIs are, by and large, enormous black boxes. Every piece of an AI model, in theory, might affect any other, and so AI companies are engaged in the creation of online intelligences that do a tremendous amount of selection and shaping over the knowledge they synthesize. While the frequent unpredictability of the AIs’ behavior is worrying, so too is the shaping of AI opinion by such a small number of players. OpenAI may gesture at their anonymous reviewers’ unspecified “expertise”, but the fact remains that the process is internal, without oversight, and ultimately controlled by the company.

The results are surely impressive, besting human performance a good deal of the time. OpenAI’s solving of the Navier-Stokes problem, completing one of the great quests of modern mathematics, is just one of many examples. But these successes should not blind us to the possible pitfalls of the way LLMs are trained — especially given that whatever skewing takes place in the post-tuning process is considerably harder to detect than Google removing a particular site from its search engines, or Facebook banning a particular post. These companies are shaping our collective consciousness in a far more wide-ranging and less-noticeable way. 

Earlier this year, a reporter found some suggestive evidence that chatbots tend to nudge people away from political extremes. That tendency could stem from an intentional policy on the part of AI companies or, more likely, it could be simply a consequence of post-training AIs to be more anodyne and less controversial. Either way, the fact is that the AIs do increasingly exert such influence. It may indeed be good for societal cohesion for people to have an AI friend that generally pushes them away from dogmatic extremes. But should the construction and maintenance of those friends be operated more or less in the dark by a handful of companies?

What we’re seeing, in fact, is a less intrusive and more benign version of China’s army of censors — the apparatchiks who police online content within what the CCP deems permissible on its “internet”. There’s no such explicit policing in the construction of AI models; but, however benign, it is the concentration of such censorious authority in a handful of non-governmental entities that’s concerning. 

That’s only one side of the coin. The flipside is that even as these companies construct these artificial agents of influence, they are simultaneously taking in new data that is exclusively theirs. With every iteration, AIs draw more and more of their training from their predecessors, and the everyday interactions people have with AIs — treating them as friends, business advisers, confidantes, and occasionally intimate partners — provide crucial data for how best to appeal even more to users, win their trust, and be even more convincingly human. 

Having already digested the entirety of the internet’s publicly-available data, future AI models will increasingly contain the residue of countless private interactions between users and the AIs’ predecessors. For the time being, it seems that ChatGPT could hold on to all chats forever unless you explicitly opt-out, as does Claude, even if the picture is foggier with Gemini, which is Google’s model. That in itself is a privacy nightmare. But even if the companies were to delete the raw chats, some great portion of your data will remain incomprehensibly echoed in the dark parameters of the next generation of AIs, and in every subsequent generation. They will display an uncanny knowledge of humanity large and small, not traceable to any particular source beyond the totality of their private training data. As AI becomes more proactive rather than passive, the influx of data sucked through your phone to fuel and train AIs will balloon.

Even with sufficient funding and infrastructure, an AI startup today won’t have access to the voluminous chats that existing models have accumulated over recent years. It won’t know what kept ChatGPT’s users engaged, what Anthropic users found useful, or what Claude users found irritating. That feedback is a crucial tool for improving models. Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are building an invisible empire of soft knowledge that belongs to them alone, a sophisticated but opaque mirror of the world that gives them an advantage less on technological grounds than on informational ones. When a company like Google, for instance, can control the platform (Android), the network (YouTube), and the intelligence (Gemini), they accumulate a collective package far greater than the sum of its parts and far more difficult to dislodge from prominence. 

Apple’s own AI, Siri, is based in pre-LLM technology, and currently lags far behind the competition. The newest version of Siri therefore piggybacks off Gemini — marking Apple as a junior partner. The terms of the agreement between Apple and Google are private, but it is difficult to imagine that Google will allow Apple to make exclusive use of whatever data is gathered. John Ternus, then, has taken the throne of a powerful but stagnant empire, one that is already in hock to technologically superior rivals.

As for AI’s top players, they will end up as de facto self-regulators of the construction and use of AI. Far too useful to ignore, yet too unreliable to wholly trust, AI is now an ever-present problem as much as a boon. And those tasked with managing the problem are currently operating mostly in secret, mostly under the auspices of a few of the world’s largest corporations. The only half-consolation is that even Google and OpenAI and Anthropic do not fully know what it is they are building, and so the immense power they are accumulating is not wholly theirs.

On the surface, this new race to curb screen time seems like a positive development. For years, underwhelming iPhone launches have triggered dreary sighs of boredom rather than round-the-block queues, while critiques of addiction-powered surveillance capitalism have trickled out of the academy and into the mainstream press. If screens are our tormentor, one could easily conclude, then perhaps these screenless devices will be our salvation.

But what if our obsession with “screen time” is itself a smokescreen? What if, rather than saving us, this vanishing act obscures the deeper drivers of our digital dissatisfaction? After all, the real rot at the core of modern computing is not screens, but the Scylla and Charybdis of digital life: the unceasing acceleration of culture and human anxieties about our finitude.

Once upon a time, speed was the aspiration of commerce. The rise of clock time and the industrial revolution made doing things quickly the lifeblood of competition. Responding to this acceleration of life after the Second World War, French philosopher and architect Paul Virilio lamented how: “The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world.” Since then, speed has graduated from being the aspiration of commerce to becoming the central objective of culture. Whether it’s the movement of goods and services or the diffusion of ideas, Virilio’s theory of “dromology” explores how intense capital investment in technologies that compress time and space have become our defining logic. These technologies accelerate the transportation of matter and ideas, scrambling our experience of time and place. In Open Sky, his 1997 polemic on technology, he mourns: “How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?”

If Virilio saw time-space compression as an inherently destructive force, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a 20th-century Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist (best known for discovering Peking Man) actively cheered it on. To Teilhard de Chardin and his Silicon Valley intellectual descendants, the creation of a light-speed sphere of knowledge and communication that floats above our mundane world was the ultimate aspiration of humanity. Through his Darwin-inspired Catholicism, he longed for an invisible consciousness that he termed the “Noosphere” — a realm of cognition between the atmosphere and the biosphere. This, he dreamed, would foster a unified connected human consciousness which would be the final stage of evolution: the convergence of the physical (the “hardware” of human brains and technologies) and the metaphysical (the “software” of human soul and intellect). At this evolutionary end point, which he called the Omega Point, humanity would achieve divine salvation.

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Virilio and Teilhard de Chardin’s competing worldviews represent the tension at the heart of this battle of salvation from screens. Altman and Humane identify screens as the barrier to a better future, but Virilio leads us to an altogether different view: screens are not the problem. They are simply the portal that enforces constant communion with this Noosphere. It is the possibility of being connected to it, and transcending ordinary life, that is breaking our brains — not the medium that gets us there.

The notion that the Noosphere gives us rapid and better knowledge drips into all facets of life. In Politics of the Very Worst (1999), Virilio describes the phenomenon of “teleobjectivity”, the idea that some remote consciousness is better than what we can do with our bodies. The TripAdvisor star-rating of a restaurant overrules your eyes and nose. Google Translate kills the need to dust off one’s GCSE French. Wikipedia’s objectivity makes you interrupt conversation to check one’s phone for the right answer. We trust the Noosphere, not ourselves.

This remote consciousness, Virilo explains, “destroys the world as we know it”, leaving us feeling that our messy and fleshy experiences are not quite as good as the infinite Noosphere. And here lies the flaw in Altman and Humane’s vision of humanity: the obsession with overcoming our inevitable finitude. In this, they merely represent the latest expression of a phenomenon described by philosopher Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought (2001): “Human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude.”

To Altman and Humane, this finitude can only be overcome by helping people address their apparent lack of self-control by removing the screen which they see as a portal to the world of dopamine-inducing distractions. Yet, the real battle is not with the portal — but instead with the cosmic FOMO spawned by the idea that there is a better self and life floating out there in the Noosphere. It is easy to remove the glass and stainless steel in our hands. To curb our longing to be super-infinite is harder.

Paradoxically, then, this hype around “humane technology” does not reveal a hunger for humanity. Quite the opposite: it exposes a desire to transcend our very human frailty and ignorance once and for all.

If anything, these devices could become the first mainstream transhumanist product, further normalising a millenarian Silicon Valley ideology of self-optimisation among everyday consumers. Consider the AI Pin’s live translation feature: demonstrated last year, the synchronous translation system renders the cognitive and cultural struggle of learning a language meaningless.

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Nussbaum, by contrast, states that human “development entails many moments of discomfort and frustration”. She continues: “if everything were always simply given in advance of discomfort, [humanity] would never try out its own projects of control.” In other words, by chaining us to the Noosphere and providing real-time cognitive babysitting in every moment, these new technologies may simply eradicate the impulse for humans to struggle or engage their brains at all. The problem won’t be that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death — rather, we will entirely opt out of projects that create that sense of self in the first place.

Poignantly, with its live translation feature, the AI Pin appears to be a real-world manifestation of Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Humane is simply conjuring Douglas Adams’s “small, yellow, leech-like” creature that “feeds on brainwave energy” and excretes a telepathic matrix that enables one to “instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language”. Adams, of course, named this fish after the Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11:1–9, the Babylonians, drunk with pride in their ability to speak one language, attempt to build a tower that reaches into the heavens and challenges God’s power. Irritated by the hubris, God came down and scattered them across the world.

In a similar way, screenless smartphones and the ancient Babylonians are two sides of the same eternal coin. They represent an innate thirst for grand projects of human perfectibility — a longing for a deus ex machina with which to defeat with nature. Yet, we are all fallible. Until we see that the real battle is not with screens but with our own dissatisfaction with the present, nothing will Change Everything. Endless scrolling will simply be replaced with new mindless interactions; we will remain anxiously plugged in, dreaming of perfection.

As Virilio writes in Pure War (1983), “wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth”. And here we can see the hidden side of Humane and Altman’s salvation narratives: the real motivation is not to rescue us, but to simply compress time and space better than an iPhone can. What could this achieve? A quick glance at Apple’s $3-trillion market value says all you need to know. Silicon Valley’s talk of screens and “humane” technology is simply sheep’s clothing. Beneath it, ravenous wolves await, hungry for your attention and wallet.

On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses were forced to shut down, triggering one of the worst jobs crises since the Great Depression. In 2020 alone, workers around the world cumulatively lost $3.7 trillion in earnings — an 8.3% decline.

On the other, a handful of mega-corporations, particularly in the Big Tech and Big Pharma sectors, have made a killing, raking in hundreds of billions more in “pandemic super-profits” than over the previous four-year average. Topping the list are behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Merck.

The success of the Tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook — is easily explained. As people found themselves confined to their homes, they turned to the internet for pretty much everything: shopping, dining, working, schooling, entertainment, socialising, even sex. In other words, what represented a curse for countless small and medium traditional businesses, represented a blessing for a handful of corporate behemoths.

The golden egg for the pharmaceutical companies, however, came later with the vaccines: the companies behind two of the most successful Covid-19 vaccines — Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna — made combined profits of $34 billion in 2021. And if the “new normal” ends up including permanent booster shots, such super-profits will become the norm. Crucially, these profits are then distributed to shareholders who predominantly belong to the richest 1% of society. It’s hardly surprising then that billionaires around the world saw their wealth increase by $3.9 trillion just in 2020. As Oxfam starkly put it in a recent report: “The wealth of the 10 richest men has doubled, while the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off”.

To see what this means in practice, one need only turn to Latin America, whose billionaires increased their wealth by 52% during the pandemic. In Mexico, meanwhile, multimillionaires saw their wealth increase by 31.4% in 2021 alone. On the other hand, over the last two years, 78 million people in the region were plunged into extreme poverty, while 13% of children abandoned education altogether.

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In Africa, where low-income countries predominate, the picture is equally stark. A report this month noted that not only had GDP fallen by as much as 7.8% in some cases, but that remittances from abroad had fallen by 25%. In a context where remittances from rich countries accounted for over half of private capital flows to Africa shortly prior to the pandemic, this has had a devastating effect on the daily economy, with over 40 million additional people in extreme poverty.

Couple this with a debt crisis, and it is not surprising that the impact on daily lives has been devastating: in Angola, a recent report described how youth unemployment doubled to nearly 60% in the past two years. Meanwhile, the continent’s billionaires have seen an uptick in their fortunes, as elsewhere; a January report from Nigeria found that Africa’s 18 billionaires had seen their wealth increase by 15% in 2021 alone.

Yet in many ways this is a global phenomenon; on every continent, there has been a hyper-concentration of wealth, and poorer communities have suffered. Wealth has been further racialised, with minority communities suffering the most in rich countries, and poorer continents the worst affected.

Why, then, have Left-leaning commentators supported the policies that have led to these terrible outcomes?

The usual explanation is that these impacts were an inevitable impact of the pandemic. And yet the evidence for this is weak, not least because most of those affected by the virus have been elderly people often beyond an age of active employment. In Africa, a 1% increase in mortality from Covid in a country like Nigeria cannot explain the 20% collapse in formal employment. In fact, Tanzania — one of the very few countries that did not impose Covid restrictions in 2020 — was also almost the only country in Africa to see its GDP increase, by as much as 5% according to some reports. Meanwhile in Sweden, where restrictions were much milder than in the rest of Europe, the country returned to pre-pandemic levels of production by the middle of 2021, in contrast to many other European countries (while registering lower per capita mortality rates than many other countries).

And so it seems that the staggering increase in inequality, and in the concentration of capital, must be the consequence of the Covid response measures, not of Covid-19. What, then, are some of the likely consequences of this massive accumulation of capital by a tiny number of people, expropriated from SME owners and the global working class?

A dystopian future seems to be emerging from the ashes of the pandemic — one in which not only is wealth more concentrated than ever in the hands of a small elite, but in which practically every sector of the economy is dominated by a handful of all-powerful mega-corporations. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that those who have most profited from the pandemic response, such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, also supported that response and removed information from their portals which criticised it.

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However, there’s a further element that makes this scenario even more disturbing, if possible, and that is the growing consolidation not only within, but also between, sectors. This becomes evident when we look at the investment funds that actually “own” these corporations. BlackRock and Vanguard are the two largest asset management firms in the world, respectively managing $10 and $8 trillion. That’s 3.7 and 3 times more than the UK’s annual GDP. These two funds are the top “owners” of all the major Big Pharma (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck), Big Tech (Facebook, Twitter) and Big Media (New York Times, Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, News Corp) corporations. Even more worrying is the fact that despite having shareholdings of “only” 5-7% in these companies, there is growing evidence that institutional investors such as BlackRock and Vanguard try to influence company management and boards on strategy.

It would appear that these funds also coordinate among themselves. When analysing the voting behaviour in board meetings of the two funds, researchers found that they coordinate it through centralised corporate governance departments. This is hardly surprising if we consider that BlackRock and Vanguard are also each other’s main institutional investors: in other words, they partially “own” each other through cross-shareholding. So, we are effectively in the presence of a single super-entity that “owns” and controls a huge chunk of the Western economy. While this was already the case before the pandemic, the latter has accelerated this trend. More importantly, it has brought to the surface the way in which these funds, through their cross-sector corporate control, can “harmonise” these companies’ behaviour to further their interests.

We can see this in the case of debate around pandemic strategies on social media, and the censorship exercised today by social media platforms against any critical voice, no matter how qualified. A good example might be the removal from YouTube of a video of a senior editor of the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, discussing the Pfizer Covid vaccine trial in a US Senate hearing — in which among other things Doshi had questioned the accuracy of the reporting of the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness.

This is worrying in itself. But it becomes even more worrying when we consider that the companies selling the vaccine, the media outlets shaping the mainstream vaccine narrative and the social media platforms enforcing that narrative are, to a large degree, “owned” and controlled by the same two funds: BlackRock and Vanguard, which, incidentally, are raking in billions from the vaccines. This harmonisation among sectors (and between the latter and governments) points to the rise of a new ultra-powerful complex — the techno-media-pharma (TMP) complex. This is evident in increased “synergies” between these sectors: take Google’s growing investments in the health, pharmaceutical and pandemic-prevention sectors, for example, or Amazon’s investment in Covid-19 research.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the active support of governments, which create an enabling environment that rewards participants in the TMP complex. This is evident, for example, in the secrecy, overpricing, cronyism, and inefficiency that has characterised Covid procurement deals: Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies have all been parcelled out to transnational corporations without proper tendering processes or legislative oversight. In other words, this is not a scenario in which governments disappear, but rather one that relies on increasingly powerful and authoritarian state apparatuses furthering the interests of big capital.

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This is hardly surprising when we consider the extent to which these corporate giants have meshed with our political systems. The US is a good case in point. Obama was very close to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who later became a close collaborator of the Pentagon in developing military applications of AI. Today, Biden’s economic policies are heavily influenced by the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, a former BlackRock executive. This ultra-elite is now in a position to shape every aspect of our lives — and it’s frankly terrifying.

If the Left is to recover from the catastrophic policies that it has supported during the pandemic, it must begin by recognising that it is lazy and misplaced to denounce those who point out these inconvenient truths: that wealth is hyper-concentrated as never before, that this is as a result of the policy choices during the pandemic, that these choices were unprecedented, and have been supported by those who enriched themselves enormously along the way, and censored any alternative point of view.

If we don’t want a world dominated by a very few ultra-wealthy people, and their vision for retaining that wealth, an unprecedented collective effort will be needed to fight for a different future. The huge TMP conglomerates will have to be broken up and their profits used for the benefit of all humanity, and not just their shareholders. This will be the struggle against the post-pandemic capitalist nightmare — and we are already losing.

So, as Stephanie Hare rightly points out in Technology Is Not Neutral, it’s never just an object. Technology is as much social as scientific, as much economics as engineering. There’s little point in Silicon Valley companies hiring an ethicist to decide a product’s value — its effects go far beyond the shiny thing that comes out of the box.

Apple, for instance, might not have put AirTags on the market in their present form if they had paused to wonder whether a coin-sized tracking device — ideal for keeping track of keys, luggage or children’s toys — could also be ideal for stalkers to electronically track an unsuspecting person. Now they are forced to come up with solutions, most of which rely on the tracked person also having a smartphone.

But, precisely because technology is a social phenomenon, embedding ethics, and ethicists, in its development will never remedy its dangers. Take Facial Recognition Technology, for example. It’s an issue Hare has been actively — and critically — researching for some time. Like other biometric technology, it has been introduced in practice with remarkably little scrutiny, regulation, or debate.

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Today, with ubiquitous CCTV cameras and widespread availability of facial recognition software, British police forces are using it to pick out individuals in public spaces, with AI programmes that match faces seen on camera to faces in databases. But private spaces like shops, museums, casinos and arts centres were using Facial Recognition Technology first. Some cities and states in the US have moved to forbid or control its use, but in the UK there is no legal framework to prevent somebody from matching your face to your identity, and other data about your life.

How did we end up here, unable to reliably go about our lives anonymously in public spaces? Just as technology is inseparable from wider social structures, “tech ethics” can’t be seen as merely part of the technology development process. They make sense only in the context of wider social and moral frameworks.

It’s entirely possible that the designers of the Facial Recognition systems looked at the millions of photographs that people upload to social media every day, tagging themselves, their friends and families, and couldn’t see anything wrong with gathering all that information into one handy index. True, it could result in specific harms, like stalkers finding their victims, or innocent people being unjustly targeted by the police. But those could be relegated to the “unforeseen consequences” of a generally desirable change.

Yet the indifference of governments, businesses, and many individuals, to privacy is a much deeper problem than a few irresponsible tech bros. As the recent pandemic years have shown, the desire to be free from scrutiny unless there’s a good reason to be scrutinised is widely seen as, at best, eccentric and, at worst, automatic grounds for suspicion.

We simply can’t articulate why a private life is valuable. We have no sense of ourselves as autonomous beings, persons who need a space in which to reflect, to share thoughts with a few others, before venturing into public space with words and actions that we feel ready to defend.

Few question the desirability of exposing private messages that fall short of today’s acceptable attitudes. In-jokes are regularly taken out of context and used to condemn the joker. If a wrong thought has been expressed, even privately to friends or associates, it’s evidence of bad character and subject to public judgement. The use of Implicit Bias tests by employers shows that even subconscious thoughts are not safe from dissection and testing for impurity.

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And since Covid struck, the ethical implications of our relationship with technology have only become more profound. Consider the use of “contact tracing” apps which, as Hare notes, could be more accurately described as “exposure notification apps” since they don’t facilitate contact tracing, because they’re designed to be anonymous.

We owe that design element to Google and Apple, who added to their operating systems the capacity for devices to exchange tokens with nearby devices, using Bluetooth, but only anonymously.

Many governments, including in UK and France, didn’t want this anonymous system. They wanted to know the patterns of who was infecting whom, as well as the possibility of contacting individuals to make sure they were isolating when they should. Arguably, public health might justify that kind of intrusion. But the tech giants didn’t want to gift governments information about who spends time within a few metres of whom.

Perhaps they were right — but either way, we never got to have that argument. Governments largely evaded public debate about the measures they used against Covid, and tech companies decided what capabilities to build into their products. The successes and failures of the apps were only partly technical; they were largely down to the wider strengths and failings of Covid policies. It is, after all, little use telling somebody they may have been infected if they can’t get a speedy test result, or if they can’t afford to self-isolate without sick pay. Again, no amount of ethical tech development would have changed that.

As the pandemic moved on, the attention of the UK government moved from “Contact Tracing Apps” that weren’t, to “Vaccine Passports” that weren’t, but were really. Despite almost universal rejection of the idea by health, cyber-security and equality organisations, and repeated insistence that the government was not considering vaccine passports, the Government funded eight pilot schemes for vaccine passports, and gave the green light for private organisations to demand them.

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Ethicists went public with their many warnings: vaccine passports would be socially divisive, discriminatory, needlessly intrusive, and a perverse incentive to get infected. But none of this had any impact on government plans: principles like privacy and social solidarity found no resonance in opportunistic policymaking. Neither did the Government have the courage to argue that these undesirable measures were proportionate and necessary, and trust the public to accept exceptional infringements in exceptional times.

This is the other limitation of technology ethics: they are no match for power. Britain is currently an outlier among European and other governments that are imposing highly divisive and restrictive vaccine passport regimes, and using physical force against dissenters.

And yet masses of people do seem prepared to accept restrictions on their lives that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. Why are we so willing to accept that a condition of participation in public life is an app that affirms our medical status? Why have we been so willing to accept the repeated reduction of society to one household in one space, connected mainly through screens to the wider world?

One answer is that technology has ridden to the rescue. Without the constant ability to connect to that digital network — a network of other humans, as well as data — it would simply have been impossible for half the population to just stay home for months on end. Work would have been done in offices or not at all. Education would have been unable to stagger on, even in its unequal and truncated form. The severance of social connections would not have been a reduction to two-dimensional faces on screens, but near-complete isolation.

But that is only half an answer. A retreat from shared public space, alongside the penetration of private space by always-on connection, was far advanced before governments told us to Stay Home. When bedrooms and kitchen tables became classrooms and desks, was it so great a change from answering work emails from the sofa, or chatting about homework on screens across many teenage bedrooms?

And that earlier change, accelerated but not precipitated by the pandemic, was as much social as technological. Through technology, we can be apart, but never completely alone. Interacting through screens, we are insulated by space and — when we’re exchanging messages — by time. Public space is increasingly digital, so we need never be fully there, but with a smartphone there is no fully private space either.

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This shift away from shared social lives began in the mid 20th century. We lead more solitary lives than our grandparents. We start families later, we belong to fewer social organisations. Most of all, we lack a shared framework of morality and ideas about a shared future. When difficult times hit us, we lack a foundation on which to base our judgments. This is true of us as individuals, but also as a society. No wonder our governments cast about for technological solutions to moral questions.

Hare quotes John von Neumann in 1954, testifying about the development of the atomic bomb:

“We were all little children with respect to the situation which had developed… None of us had been educated or conditioned to exist in this situation, and we had to make our rationalisation and our code of conduct as we went along.”

Today, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t act — and probably feel — like a young child when confronted with adult responsibilities.

Part of the appeal of technologies like AI is the fantasy that a machine can take the role of wise parent, immune to the emotion and unpredictability of mere humans. But this tells us less about the real capabilities of AI, and more about our disillusionment with ourselves

The urge to fix Covid, or other social problems, with technology springs from this lack of trust in other people. So does the cavalier disregard for privacy as an expression of moral autonomy. Technology ethics can’t save us, any more than technology can. Even during a pandemic, how we regard one another is the fundamental question at the root of ethics. So we do need to treat technology as just a tool, after all. Otherwise we risk being made its instruments in a world without morals.

Almost a century later, America is still not confined to Washington, the Manhattan upper classes, or Silicon Valley oligarchs. America is still the American people — and that is a cause for some hope.

Yes, America is deeply divided and most Americans, with reason, fear the country is decaying both politically and economically. But overall, Americans are far more patriotic about their country’s virtues than in any European country. If the fight over the future of liberalism against China and Russia — a fight that now threatens to turn a cold war into a hotter one — is going to be won, it is here.

America’s cognitive elites may seem enamoured with China’s state-controlled political system, but for much of the country, this remains the land of Jefferson and Lincoln, not the Yellow Emperor. Despite the pandemic, new business formations rose from roughly 3.5 million in 2019 to 4.4 million last year. Self-employment, pummelled at first, has recovered more rapidly than conventional salary jobs; more than 500,000 Americans reinvented themselves as entrepreneurs.

Arguably the greatest test for American renewal lies in manufacturing, precisely the place China has based its ascendancy. Here Trump’s “America First” mantra is echoed in the demands of Biden’s progressive agenda: in just the past three months, Congress has passed The BuyAmerican.gov Act, The Make PPE in America Act, as well as recent legislation banning the import of good produced using slave labor in Xinjiang.

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This is not only good policy but good politics; Americans, at least theoretically, are willing to pay higher prices for domestically produced goods; an overwhelming majority, according to one recent survey, would even fork out 20% more for products produced at home. No doubt this desire to reshore production reflects the pain associated with the mounting deficit on trade goods, which has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — but has also cost an estimated 3.4 million job losses since 2001.

That also goes some way to explaining why America’s industrial revival is occurring largely outside coastal affluent ‘mini-Europes’. Between 2017 and 2020, five states — Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Nevada — accounted for 30% of all manufacturing job growth. Perhaps more important is the fact that, along with reviving Midwest states like Ohio, Iowa and Indiana, these states tend to have lower taxes, housing costs and less regulation than their coastal counterparts.

And this formula is being rewarded. Almost all the new electric vehicle and battery facilities, demanded most by Democrat politicians, are being built east of the Sierra and Cascades. Meanwhile, multi-billion dollar facilities from Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor are popping up in growth states such as Arizona, Texas and, most recently, outside Columbus, Ohio. The impact of such growth cannot be underestimated: thanks to these new technologies, American companies are able to produce better and often cheaper products, crafting parts that, in many cases, have been largely sourced in China and other countries.

This industrial renaissance is critical if the West is to address its ruinous dependence on China — made all too evident during the pandemic and the current supply chain crisis. And yet it is also likely to elicit opposition from our own largely pro-China elites, who seem more willing to appease rather than confront Beijing.

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This is epitomised by Apple’s astounding $275 billion deal with Xi’s regime, an agreement that grants China continued control of production while also selling off advanced technology to the autocratic regime. Meanwhile, Wall Street figures such as Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan and even Blackrock’s Larry Fink seem to spot no contradiction between their craven progressive outpourings at home and China’s brutal repression in Xinjiang, Taiwan or Hong Kong — not to mention the Middle Kingdom’s greenhouse gas output, which totals more than the rest of the developed world combined.

At the same time, many of the same pro-China oligarchs also support draconian energy prices that undermine efforts to bring industry back home. Many have adopted the notion of “de-growth”, essentially a policy that seeks to reduce consumption and lower middle-class living standards to “save the planet”. Such campaigns — both corporate and within the clerisy — make little sense if companies end up shifting ever more production to high-carbon supply chains in China.

What makes this even more galling is the fact that now is a time of strategic opportunity for the US, particularly in terms of rising energy prices. Yet President Biden, obsessively seeking to please his green zealot supporters, insists on assaulting US production of natural gas and other fossil fuels. This seems particularly ill-conceived, given the US is the largest producer and China the biggest consumer. There is a competitive edge to be exploited here, not thrown away by begging for cheap oil from Russia or the Gulf states.

Perhaps even more important is another window of opportunity: now is the perfect time for America to attract foreign business. The increased threat of CCP government interference and higher operating costs are causing companies such as Sharp, Sony and Nintendo to begin move out of China — part of an exodus of more than 1,700 companies who upped sticks last year alone. Softbank, the giant Japanese based venture firm, has seen its revenues plummet as its Chinese investments fell due to government clampdowns and has suspended future investments there. A number of American entrepreneurs who came for the Sinic gold rush have pulled out as well, no longer seeing China as at the economic vanguard.

So it is not too late to constrain China and its global string of motley allies, including Putin. But this necessitates accentuating our differences; it means creating better conditions for smaller tech firms, and constraining the oligopolies who benefit from China’s squashing opposition and seek to create their own dominion at home.

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For this is about more than America. Elsewhere in the West, its allies now seem hopelessly passive in the face of bureaucratic control at home, and with many of them willing to accede to authoritarians abroad. Predictions of inevitable American decline have been popular, particularly in Europe, since at least the early Seventies. Yet here we are a half century later, and the US remains the world’s hegemonic economic, technological, and military power.

As Europe is now discovering, no country on the continent, including Germany, has the wherewithal, mentally or physically, to stand up to Putin’s Ukraine gambit — much less Xi’s more menacing attempts to repress Taiwan and Hong Kong. Germany’s boneheaded energy strategy has now effectively turned it into a satrap of the Sino-Russian “neo-Eurasianism” – an arc of autocracy.

Germans and other Europeans may not much like our recent Presidents — nor do I — but is that an excuse to coddle long-time autocrats like Putin and Xi? Whether they like it or not, when searching for the best hope to resist the rising autocratic tide, the West will find only one viable alternative to China’s domination: the United States.

Sound too good to be true?

Other countries are already using contact-tracing apps. Contact-tracing is also used in sexually transmitted infections, where previous partners may be contacted with advice to get themselves a test. But whereas we tend to remember our sexual partners, we tend not to remember everyone who shared our train carriage or served us in a shop several days before we had symptoms. That’s where technology could help.

I write constantly about the threat to privacy of letting our smartphones share data that reveals where we go, what we do, and who shares our personal space. And although these are exceptional circumstances, we should not stop valuing our privacy. Emergency measures have a habit of becoming the new normal. And information about who we’ve been close to could be of interest to all sorts of people, from blackmailers to over-enthusiastic police officers enforcing their own interpretation of “necessary activities”.

Let’s compare some of the contact-tracing technology already in use, to see how the UK could avoid the pitfalls while harnessing our phones to battle the virus.

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The Chinese app, AliPay HealthCode, raises some red flags. It assigns users a unique QR code which displays red, yellow or green, indicating your health status, and which determines how much freedom of movement you’re permitted. How that risk category is calculated remains opaque, though it uses proximity to known infected individuals or hotspot locations in that calculation. It sends your identity and location directly to a server accessible by the police, who can use it to enforce the quarantine demanded by your colour status. Use of the app is not compulsory, but even local movement may be impossible without it.

South Korea uses existing sources of data when tracing contacts, rather than a specific app (though they do have an optional app to monitor infected people in mandatory quarantine). They use interviews, supplemented with CCTV footage, smartphone location data, and even credit card records, to reconstruct an individual’s pre-diagnosis activities. They have been criticised for making public the locations and activities where others may have been infected, which has led to individuals being publicly identified, and deterred others from getting tested.

Israel has already allowed its internal security agency, Shin Bet, to access cellphone geolocation data, and that can now be used for coronavirus tracking. Cellphone users who have been close to known infected individuals may receive text messages telling them to self-isolate. However, Israel’s Association of Public Health Physicians criticised the project, asking why no health professionals were involved in designing it. The Ministry of Health then launched a location-based app, Hamagen, on an opt-in basis, also using GPS data.

Singapore’s TraceTogether app supplements interview-based contact-tracing in a similar way to South Korea’s. TraceTogether doesn’t collect data on where you have been, because it only wants to identify who has been within infectible range. To do this, it uses Bluetooth.

Where geolocation-based apps use the cellphone’s GPS function, and its connections to the nearest cellphone towers, Bluetooth exchanges signals, not with a cellphone network, via a tower, but with other Bluetooth-enabled devices within a few metres.

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Good news if you want to identify people at risk from the cellphone’s infectious owner, without handing over to a central database lots of personal data about where you were. All the app needs is Bluetooth’s Relative Signal Strength Indicator readings to approximate how close you were to another device, and for how long.

As the app’s ‘How Does TraceTogether Work?’ page puts it: “This proximity and duration information is stored on one’s phone for 21 days on a rolling basis – anything beyond that would be deleted. No location data is collected.” The data stays on each person’s phone unless they test positive for Covid-19, in which case they’re asked to hand it over to Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH).

The MOH works with them to trace their contacts for the previous 14 days. There’s a legal requirement to help MOH map recent activities if requested, including producing other data held on your phone in other apps. But it’s not compulsory to use TraceTogether at all.

Several other countries are introducing apps modelled on this app: the pandemic has spurred a worldwide rush of innovation and technical experimentation.

Most of us would welcome the chance to contain the spread of the virus without having to stay locked down until a vaccine arrives. But do we have to trade our privacy by turning everyone’s phone into a tracking device? Perhaps not.

More than 25 scientists across eight European universities decided that, rather than wait for others to produce bad apps, they would write their own. Or at least, write the basic code that others could use, and make it freely available. And the result was DP-3T.

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Like Singapore’s TraceTogether, DP-3T is designed around Bluetooth’s capacity for device-to-device communication. Like TraceTogether, it transmits and receives ID codes that can later be used to reconstruct whether a sick person has been close enough to infect you. But it has some important refinements that mean no centralised body ever needs to know who has been close to whom.

Instead of transmitting codes that can be linked back to the person using the app, a DP-3T app transmits a random jumble of letters and numbers that changes regularly. Other devices receiving the codes won’t even know if this is the same device as yesterday, which is an important layer of protection for anonymity. Each device running the app will store all the codes sent and received.

If one person does get a diagnosis of Covid-19, they get a passcode from the healthcare professional making the diagnosis, which allows them (just once) to upload their “sent” codes from the pre-symptomatic contagious period to a database. This gives the database no information about the patient’s identity, location, or anything else, just the codes transmitted during the relevant period.

All the other phones running the app have access to the database of codes, but only to cross check against the codes in their own “received” file. The app can do this regularly and automatically, and alert the user if the level of exposure means they should self-quarantine, or get tested.

Everyone keeps control of their own data, the centralised database contains only anonymous codes from infected people, and nobody has the whole picture. It is possible to have both contact tracing and privacy.

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Is this the basis for the NHSX app being developed, which is also designed to use Bluetooth to track proximity?

Probably not.

“All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research,” according to Hancock’s announcement, “and we won’t hold it any longer than is needed.” But this implies that data from the app will be uploaded to a central database, where it can be used for other purposes. The fact the government felt the need to say that the police would not have access to the data suggests that it won’t be anonymous.

The public’s appetite to put the app on their phones will be reduced even further by the revelation that NHSX has teamed up with Palantir, a data-processing giant that works with the CIA (which part funds it). Palantir will be processing, not controlling the data, but our government has a patchy record on transparency over data retention and use.

However, a few developments over Easter weekend could force NHSX to radically rethink their project.

On Good Friday, Apple and Google released a joint statement, in itself a sign of the unprecedented times we are living in. They plan to design contact-tracing technology, either apps or the digital infrastructure on which apps can be built, which looks very like the DP-3T model. The two tech giants also announced another change that sounds like a minor technical detail, but could be more significant for the NHSX app. It concerns the way Bluetooth runs on Apple, and newer Android, devices.

When I asked a Singaporean friend about the TraceTogether App, he told me, “It’s a pain to use,” because it needs Bluetooth to be running all the time. But because Bluetooth is a digital blabbermouth, dishing out your data to any local device that wants to know, Apple devices don’t allow it to run in the background while you’re doing anything else, or while your phone is locked. Google’s newer Android systems run along the same lines.

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This means that if you want the TraceTogether app to work “you have to leave it on and … ‘upside down’ in your pocket to go into Low Power mode,” says my Singaporean app user,  “but of course everything’s haywire if you leave your phone unlocked in your pocket as you walk around!” At best, you pocket-dial your ex. At worst, a pickpocket has access to your entire life.

Dilemma for Google, and especially for Apple. It makes a big point of privacy, and of keeping your data on your device instead of on somebody else’s database. Could it allow Bluetooth to run when the app is not active, but for approved Covid-19 apps only?

This in effect, is what it has said it will do. But its definition of approved Covid-19 apps is drawn more narrowly than many expected. In fact, Apple devices will only allow Bluetooth to run in the background for more privacy-friendly, decentralised contact tracing systems, like DP-3T.

The solution to the Bluetooth privacy problem is that the exchanging and storing of randomly generated codes will happen, not in an app, but securely within the operating system. Data will leave the device only for explicitly authorised uploading to an approved database. The only other interactions possible with external databases will be queries about matching numbers. The app could potentially export any risk scores it has calculated for you, but not the codes sent and received by Bluetooth.

It sounds like a minor detail. But it could be a big spanner in the works for the NHSX app, if it doesn’t conform to that decentralised model. The app wouldn’t work with the phone locked or while you are using it for anything else. This inconvenience has been a big barrier to uptake in Singapore, where few people are using it, certainly fewer than the 60% of the population that public health experts have estimated as the minimum needed to make it work.

All these developments will have taken the NHSX project by surprise. It now faces a choice between carrying on with an app that’s less convenient to use, and that fewer people will trust, or starting again with a different model, delaying rollout, and denying them access to data that could be useful for research and for planning.

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In the long run, however, adopting the DP-3T model has huge advantages. It makes it easier for lots of us to download and run an app, without worrying about whether we’re releasing data to big corporations and government bodies to use for other purposes. It avoids setting precedents for centralised databases of who we spend time with. And it’s the foundation for internationally-compatible anti-Covid-19 digital solutions, which we may need for some time to come.

So, quick redesign, and Matt Hancock can roll out the app and get the UK back to normal life in a couple of weeks?

Sadly, it’s not quite that simple.

Allowing app users to self-diagnose opens the door to false alarms by hypochondriacs (or schoolkids who aren’t happy their school reopened). Medical validation needs readily available Covid-19 tests, so that professionals can authorise uploading the codes. Society needs to facilitate people going into self-quarantine, getting tested themselves, and locking themselves away for weeks, without delays. And a majority of the population needs to be using the app, but not everyone has a smartphone equipped with low-energy Bluetooth.

Automated alerts can’t replace detailed contact tracing, as practised in South Korea and Singapore. But interview based contact-tracing is labour intensive. Contact-tracing tens of thousands of cases individually would be an immense task for a health service that can’t even pick up every 111 call.

However, a widely used app in conjunction with testing could be a workable compromise, reducing the transmission rate to a scale that the NHS can handle, while allowing people for whom the risk is acceptably low to return to work, and to a more normal life.

How low a risk is acceptable, and how normal life should be, are political questions. No app can answer those.

Last week I wrote about the fury provoked by Amazon’s search for a second HQ – and the special favours and subsidies offered by cities and states vying to play host. It was, said the critics, a grotesque example of corporate welfare.

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Of course, Amazon is not the only tech giant to come under political pressure – whether at home or abroad.

But what does it all amount to? Will we see concerns about the power and practices of the FAANGs turn into something like the antitrust reforms of the early 20th century?

In a convincingly pessimistic article for Vanity Fair, William D Cohan doesn’t think so:

“On Wall Street, however, bankers are betting that Americans don’t really care about reining in Silicon Valley—and that Congress, for the most part, doesn’t really care, either.”

Well, the bankers of Wall Street should know all about the failure of government to properly regulate an out-of-control industry. They certainly recognise a weakness of political will when they see it.

Cohan mentions a conversation he had with a Wall Street executive whose job was to ascertain the likelihood of meaningful regulation for the tech sector:

“His point was that there still is no natural, large constituency for regulating any of the major tech companies that dominate portions of the U.S. economy. What legislators and aides were conveying, this person told me, was that they believed the outrage was limited… the congressional staffers told my source, ‘We’re not getting calls on this. Nobody’s marching on Washington because they’re upset about Facebook. When we go home to our districts, nobody’s showing up in our town halls and complaining about Instagram or complaining about Amazon.’”

So, the reason why the politicians aren’t really bothered is because we’re not. But why don’t we care?

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Cohan points out that tech companies are hard to regulate because many of the services they provide are free to the public. How does one assess the harm done by a monopoly when, for most people, there is literally no price to pay?

This also explains the lack of public anger. Unlike, say, a utility company, there is no bill waiting on the doormat at the end of each quarter, no final demand for payment, no risk of disconnection. And even with the tech products one does have to pay for, there are usually cheaper options to switch to – options which include going more or less tech free. To a considerable extent these are services that we want rather than need to consume.

Of course, in a broader sense, there is a price to be paid for the growing dominance of the tech companies: the loss of shops in the High Street; the decline of print media; the control and exploitation of personal data; the disruption caused by platform capitalism on independent businesses in a variety of sectors from taxis to tourism; the impact of the distraction economy on economic productivity; the effect of social media on mental health; one could go on.

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However, these are second and third order effects – things that the public may lament, but which they don’t link directly to the services that FAANGs provide to them. Or, when we do make the link, we have to admit that we’re actively complicit – regretting the demise of the local bookshop while ordering books from you-know-who.

It’s hard to get angry at businesses whose power is based on our all-too-eager cooperation.

But this is precisely why politicians need to take the lead. The whole point of representative democracy is to mobilise the diffuse, and therefore individually powerless, interests of the public, against the concentrated and highly-motivated interests of powerful corporations. We need saving from their – and our – our worst instincts.

‘Vulture capitalism’ is a play on the words ‘venture capital’. It refers to practices like the purchase and asset-stripping of an ailing company. Nasty stuff, but a bigger threat is ‘vampire capitalism’ – which is also extractive, but much more attractive. After all, the most dangerous kind of predator is not one that overpowers its prey, but charms it.

The FAANGs are not wholly villainous. Much of what they do is impressive and occasionally life-enhancing. Nevertheless, we need politicians to keep them in check. This might not be the time for sharpened stakes, but a bit of garlic wouldn’t go amiss.

Today, the $740 billion former bookseller’s tentacles stretch far beyond e-commerce: into bricks-and-mortar retailing, air cargo, cloud computing and AI – technologies that are, or will become, the backbone of countries such as the USA and the UK. It has combined traditional market dominating techniques with an unrivalled understanding of its customers’ online behaviour, to awesome effect. And concern about monopolistic behaviour is increasingly being voiced.

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Everyone used to understand what a monopoly was, and nearly everyone, other than monopolists themselves, understood that it represented the failure of capitalism rather than its apex. When one company dominates a market then the good things that come from competition between producers, such as quality, variety and innovation, are likely to come to an end. Without competition, there’s little incentive to do any of these expensive things, and both consumers and the wider economy loses out.

Then in the 1970s a new idea emerged from America’s law schools that turned this thinking on its head. The size of the company no longer mattered: the only criterion by which it should be judged, or a takeover blocked, was consumer welfare. To put it crudely, a firm like Amazon could be as big as it wanted as long as it kept prices low. Today to be concerned about the ‘bigness’ of companies is to go back to the popularist goals of the past, argues Professor Daniel Crane of the University of Michigan.

By the second decade of the 21st century, that reinterpretation of the law has had – if you are cynical – its intended effect. We are living in a new age of concentration, where a few corporate giants like Amazon dominate the economy. The ratio between the cost of a good or service and its selling price in the wider economy – often seen as evidence of market dominance – has risen in advanced economies by 43% since the 1980s.  The combined revenue of the tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft – is larger than the GDP of more than 90% of the world’s nations. Start-ups are even founded with the sole purpose of being acquired by one of these Big Five.

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Then, in 2016, an unknown law student decided to dust down some forgotten textbooks hidden away on the top floor of her university library. Early in 2017, Lina Khan published ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’ in the Yale Law Journal. The one word that Big Tech didn’t want to see in the public conversation – monopoly – was back, and at the worst moment. For the first time, Big Tech was caught in a bipartisan squeeze in Congress as real political pressure built up over the abuse of customer data and fake news.

Khan’s argument was simple. Once laws that were designed to prevent one company controlling a market had been pushed to one side, companies like Amazon were able to gain market dominance through anticompetitive practices. This gave them control of the infrastructure that many businesses and other parts of the economy depend on. Khan suggests that either Amazon should be regulated more forcefully to ensure competition – or that it should be recognised as a natural monopoly like the water or gas supply, and run as a publicity utility.

Now, Amazon, Google and the other modern monopolies have a battle on their hands. Worryingly, it looks like they have a formidable range of weapons to fight it with – and Khan and her allies have already been labelled as “hipster radicals.”

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Big Tech’s lobbying dates back 20 years, but the scale of it has grown significantly. In America, five years ago Amazon spent $3.5 million on lobbying, last year they spent $13 million. In just a few years, Amazon’s lobbying operations have gone from almost nothing to rival Google. To defend its sprawling empire from the politicians that are circling the tech giant has assembled the biggest lobbying team of any tech company in Washington: 28 in-house lobbyists, compared to Apple’s and Facebook’s eight. 

Perhaps more disturbing is the influence that companies like Amazon and Google have that you can’t see. Both regulatory capture, where the regulators identify too closely with the companies they are trying to control, and policy capture, when commercial interests so infiltrate governments that they can affect the design of measures relevant to their activities, should concern us.

Since 2005, concern has grown over Google’s political influence after research showed that it had poached at least 65 government officials from all over the European Union. During the same period, 15 ‘Googlers’ have been appointed to government positions in Europe, thus penetrating to the heart of the decision-making process. In the UK, Google has targeted for recruitment civil servants from key parts of the government machine like the Treasury and No. 10. This revolving door between politics, tech and regulators is a key characteristic of crony capitalism.

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Then, of course, there is the ‘dark money’ – the think tanks, research institutions and publications who enjoy their journey on Big Tech’s gravy train and can be used to shape the debate. Last year a critic of Google was fired from the New America Foundation, when he posted an article in support of the European Commission’s antitrust regulators. The think tank has received over $20 million from Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Google, his family trust and the company itself.

Then in July 2018, US activists really woke up to the power of Amazon, and the damage it could do to democracy, when the company used its influence to repeal a law passed by its home city of Seattle that imposed a small employee ‘head tax’ on large corporations. The purpose of the tax was to fund affordable housing in a city whose horrendously high costs are partly down to the very same tech companies. Many were left with the feeling that Amazon was too powerful to tax and regulate.

If politicians can be persuaded to act, the big question is how to tackle the problem. The traditional anti-monopoly medicine would be to break up these large conglomerates into their smaller component pieces. Amazon could easily be split into retail, cloud, logistics and video production. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) could be broken up into divisions such as Google Search and YouTube.

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Others are thinking about an updating of the vision behind the BBC. In Britain, the think tank IPPR argues that the digital economy should be reorganised as a “digital commonwealth”, to be an open, collective resource for the common good. The major digital platform companies would be regulated like broadcasters and mobile providers. Where large digital companies have the advantage of existing data when moving into a new market, such as banking or mobility, they would be compelled to open it up for others to use. And a new public service corporation would ensure that public data is widely available for innovation and public good.

This is already being done in other industries. In the energy industry, consumers who share their data with new firms such as Switchd can already get better access to cheaper prices, and the process will only get better, faster and more automated as energy suppliers share more of their data digitally. Banks and other financial institutions are also opening up their data for others to access, use and share. Customers are doing something similar by sharing data from their accounts with third parties they trust.

In the end, the convenience of Amazon’s platform has turned us into lazy consumers who would give up almost anything in return for same day delivery. But if we are not careful it won’t just be the High Street that we have abandoned. Big Tech has the will and the wallet to bypass traditional regulators, and that leaves few options other than to turn them into social enterprises that serve the common good.

In 1911, the breakup of John D Rockefeller’s monopolistic Standard Oil Company prevented one man from having a stranglehold on the fuel that America depended on. If data is the new oil, then perhaps it’s time we stopped a handful of men from controlling the lifeblood of every advanced nation.

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Aren’t we lucky that we don’t live in a world like that?

Only here’s something to bear in mind: this month, John Hancock, an American life insurance company, announced that it would be expanding its Vitality programme, which enables policy holders to “record [their] everyday healthy habits, like taking a walk, to earn points and gain extra savings and rewards”. The recording is achieved through the use wearable fitness trackers, smartphones and other bit of kit.

Writing about the story for Vox, Cheryl Wischhover points out that a life insurance company has an obvious interest in its customers’ continued good health:

“….life insurance companies want to keep you alive as long as possible so that you keep paying your monthly premiums. It’s a double whammy for them when you die: not only do they lose your premiums, they have to pay your survivor(s).”

I’d say it’s also a great marketing strategy. There’s a growing number of self-quantifying health fanatics who don’t actually need much persuading to strap on a fitness tracker; rather, what’s lacking in their lives is anyone who actually wants to know how many steps they’ve walked that day. John Hancock is pressing all the right buttons.

It should be stressed that the company is not forcing anyone to take part or share their fitness data. Furthermore, they are rewarding healthy habits not punishing unhealthy ones; and if you hate the idea anyway, other life insurance providers are available.

But what if a special feature of one life insurance provider’s products becomes a general feature of all health insurance provision? Being without health insurance in America isn’t much fun – so anything generally required of policy holders is pretty much compulsory.

How does a potential choice between wearing a tracking device or losing your health cover grab you? A tad dystopian, perhaps?

Well, that might not be the half of it. Wischhover reminds us that the insurance companies could use the device data to “potentially weed out bad health-risk customers.” And let’s not forget that health monitoring technology is getting more sophisticated all the time:

“Apple announced on September 12 some new health features in its Apple Watch, including that it will be capable of taking electrocardiogram readings of your heart… Surely some for-profit health entity — like an insurance company! — will figure out how to monetize this.”

Then there’s all the health-related information that can be gathered through your online activity. What if the health insurance companies of the future require you to share data about your online purchases? Just make sure you pay for that box of donuts in cash.

Is this dystopia for Americans only? Perhaps not. Countries with socialised models of healthcare might also be vulnerable to the hi-tech enforcement of healthy lifestyles. Instead of the profit motive, the driver would be the need to keep public spending under control. One could imagine hard-up governments offering discounts on social insurance contributions or rebates on taxes in return for verifiable evidence of responsible behaviour.

So who will take this furthest – the American healthcare industry or the welfare states of Europe?

My money is on the latter. As CS Lewis said, “of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”.

When you stop by her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, doesn’t wave you to a seat in front of a mahogany professorial desk. She offers you your choice of her comfy couches (and, at least in my case, she offers you coffee). For she isn’t simply a sociologist and ethnographer and anthropologist. She’s also a psychologist and psychoanalyst. And while much of her life has been devoted to studying digital technology, her first book was actually about Sigmund Freud. If ever we mere humans needed an advocate in the face of the technological-industrial complex and its devices, we’d hope for someone like her.

1984: Orwell, Turkle, Zuckerberg

There were a mere ten million computers in the entire United States when Sherry Turkle, already a professor at MIT, staked her claim to be the champion of human questions in the dawning digital era. Back in that haunting year, 1984. Back before any one of the companies that dominate today’s internet had yet been heard of. Even before Tim Berners-Lee had come up with the World Wide Web. Somewhat curiously, it was also the year Mark Zuckerberg was born.

In her prescient book The Second Self, she reviewed the rapid spread of what she called the “computer culture,” and reflected that – even then – “in one way or another” it “touches us all.” Grasping in a single phrase what many would come to see as the core question of the 21^st century, she subtitles the volume “Computers and the Human Spirit.”

Reading The Second Self a generation later is an eerie experience.

Take children, for example.

Long, long before Mark Zuckerberg launched Messenger Kids to bring six-year-olds into Facebook, before Mattel launched Hello Barbie, their chatty robot doll, Sherry Turkle was studying “children’s relationships with computers.”

“I found three stages …. First there is a “metaphysical” stage: when very young children meet computers they are concerned with whether the machines think, feel, are alive. Older children, from age seven or eight on, are less concerned with speculating about the nature of the world than with mastering it.” And in adolescence “computers become part of a return to reflection, this time not about the machine but about oneself.”

What distinguishes Turkle’s work from so much commentary on the rise of the digital world is its basis in research. Her observations are rooted in something other than opinion and anecdote. “This work is a field study based on many thousands of hours of interviews and observations,” she writes.

And she’s continued asking questions about the digital revolution and the human spirit ever since – and seeking answers grounded in sober facts and analysis.

Let’s talk

As Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post notes in reviewing her latest book[1.  From “The book that will have everyone talking about how we never talk anymore her latest book”, Washington Post, 1 October 2015: “We think our devices deliver comfort and efficiency, but, in Turkle’s telling, they offer loneliness and disarray. “Every time you check your phone in company,” she reminds, “what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.””], Reclaiming Conversation, it would be a mistake to lump it together with the stream of “tech-skeptic manifestos.”  “This is a persuasive and intimate book,” he writes, “one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.”

The situation is one familiar to all of us. In Lozada’s summary:

“You’re at the dinner table, or in a meeting, or at a baseball game, or in the classroom, or in your bedroom, or at a bar or, yes, in the bathroom — and you’re on your phone. You might be talking, but more likely you’re texting, posting, swiping, liking, tweeting, buying, browsing or, in my favorite metaphor of digital existence, “refreshing,” as though life’s staleness can be washed away with every new, fully realized screen.”

A super-abundance of conversation, surely!

Closely related...

How smartphones make our young people unhappy

By Peter Franklin

And yet:

“This is the world of incessant connection, and for all the communication it supposedly provides, it’s destroying one essential thing: open-ended conversation. “We are being silenced by our technologies,” Sherry Turkle warns, “in a way, ‘cured of talking.’” And that silence means our ability to relate to others is disappearing, too. “We face a flight from conversation that is also a flight from self-reflection, empathy, and mentorship.”

Three strikes…

While Sherry Turkle’s early work focused on humans and on computers that actually looked like computers, the context today can be summed up as the conjunction of three factors:

1. First, the basic inter-connectedness of the internet, which was dramatically enhanced by the invention of the Web (1991);
2. Second, the development of social media (Facebook was founded in 2004, though AOL, 1985, and MySpace, 2003, were the pioneers);
3. And, third, the near-miraculously explosive deployment of smartphones (iPhone: 2007), putting super-computers into our hands and pockets.

We have become so used to these little devices. It is sobering to be reminded of the impact of “Moore’s Law” – the principle that computer power keeps doubling as the price drops. The numbers are truly astonishing. In the past sixty years, computing power has increased by a factor of one trillion. An iPhone 4, if you can still find one, has the same power as the Cray super-computer of 1985[2.  Read Maddie Stone on The trillion-fold increase in computing power, visualized].

It is these technical developments that have created today’s social media/smartphone challenge.

For great and small, we members of Homo sapiens are rarely far from our smartphones. The single most startling story of the digital revolution is the staggering speed with which the “mobile device” has spread into the hands of billions.

A decade after the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the numbers are stunning. According to a recent Pew study[3.  Among ten findings about smartphones by Pew: “Overall, 12% of U.S. adults were “smartphone-only” internet users in 2016 – meaning they owned a smartphone but did not have broadband internet at home.”], in the United States three-quarters of adults own a smartphone – including 64% of those living in a household with an income of less than $30,000. Half of young adults live in a household that owns three or more of them. As smartphones get cheaper, their global spread continues. One projection is for six billion to be in circulation by the year 2020.

Real life

Over the years, Sherry Turkle has deployed her incessant questioning on several fronts. She has written about simulations, about our capacity to adopt alternative personalities online, about the loneliness that bizarrely can so easily be the concomitant of our endless engagement in digital communication. But it’s here, in her beguiling advocacy of conversation – packed with telling observations and haunting incidents – that her campaign for the human spirit comes to a head. In the words of novelist Jonathan Franzen, she “serves as a kind of conscience for the tech world.”

And in a remarkable tribute, technology icon Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and as far from being a Luddite as one can get, has this to say:

“Smartphones are the new sugar and fat: They are so potent they can undo us if we don’t limit them. Sherry Turkle introduces a lifesaving principle for the twenty-first century: face-to-face conversation first. This heuristic really works; your life, your family life, your work life will all be better. Turkle offers a thousand beautifully written arguments for why you should lift up your eyes from the screen.”

The bottom line

“Why a book on conversation?” asks Sherry Turkle. “We’re talking all the time. We text and post and chat…. Among family and friends, among colleagues and lovers, we turn to our phones instead of each other.”

She begins her book with a quote from Thoreau’s Walden: “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

It actually ends, on the back cover, with a review from the Boston Globe: “Talk is cheap, but conversation is priceless.”

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MORE ON TURKLE, MORE BY TURKLE

FROM TED TALKS, 2012

As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication — and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.

The factories left first, of course. Apple’s suppliers are from nearly 30 other countries. Apple’s citizen-identity is now left solely in ownership of the ideas produced by the American engineers and executives who design the next big Apple products.

They are leaving too, now. It’s not immediately noticeable, for if you drive through Cupertino you’ll still see employees and a headquarters. The company isn’t leaving, but the value they create for our country is.

Here’s how it works. The valuable intellectual property of Apple America’s best and brightest creations is sold cheaply to subsidiaries in low-tax countries. Then, when Apple sells the products, it re-routes them from assembly centres in China through the foreign subsidiary holding the intellectual property. The income from export sales gets booked there, not in the US.

What began as American intellectual property – the ingenuity supposed to be America’s competitive advantage in the 21st century – is now owned by a nation-less archipelago of corporate jargon.

If Apple, the most successful enterprise of the information age, is not American, then something is wrong with our model. Globalisation is based on the assumption that economic gains from a more open global economy will offset losses in American jobs. What happens if the gains get shipped abroad along with the jobs?

Some further reading: Apple’s Exports Aren’t Missing: They Are In Ireland – Council on Foreign Relations.

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Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Senator Tom Cotton’s contribution: ObamaCare’s central feature has been repealed.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.