The Internet Is Not the Answer (31 page)

Google’s determination to reinvent reality can be seen in its plans to create a new Googleplex office, a medieval-style walled city called “Bay View”—featuring entirely self-enclosed offices, restaurants, gyms, laundries, crèches, even dormitories—that will, in good feudal fashion, cut off its privileged workers from everything around them. According to
Vanity Fair
, the 1.1-million-square-foot offices will be organized on strict algorithmic principles so that no Google worker will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk from any other Googler.
⁷⁹
Funded, of course, by all of our free labor, the creepy Bay View will be made up of nine identical four-story buildings designed to engineer serendipity by maximizing “casual collisions of the workforce.”

While the proposed Bay View office might not quite have the breathtaking panoramas offered from the top of San Francisco’s tourist buses, it nonetheless should offer sufficiently good views to allow all the Google workers to see the new high-speed catamarans hired by their company to ferry them around the Bay.
⁸⁰
On a clear day, they might even catch sight of a four-story Google barge about the size of the Battery, which the company operates as a floating classroom to educate workers as they travel around the Bay.
⁸¹

Boat, barge, airplane, and bus travel are all being reinvented by Google so that its employees can commute to Bay View on fast, luxurious, and exclusively private vehicles that will run on publicly funded highways and seaways. Perhaps Google will even open its own Bay View airport so that it can house a squadron of Dassault jets to repel invaders from Mars or Washington, D.C.

Google is far from alone among tech leviathans in turning contemporary reality into a feudal landscape replete with high-tech castles, moats, and towers. Silicon Valley is transforming itself into a medieval tableau—a jarring landscape of dreadfully impoverished and high-crime communities like East Palo Alto, littered with unemployed people on food stamps, interspersed with fantastically wealthy and entirely self-reliant tech-cities designed by world-famous architects such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry.

Apple, a company that has been accused of cheating the US government out of $44 billion in tax revenue between 2009 and 2012,
⁸²
is building a Norman Foster–designed $5 billion Silicon Valley headquarters that will feature a 2.8-million-square-foot circular, four-story building containing a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 3,000-seat café, and office space for 13,000 employees.
⁸³
Before he died, Steve Jobs described Foster’s design for the new building as looking a “little like a spaceship.” Elon Musk should take note. After all, what’s the point of colonizing Mars when Martian architecture is already colonizing the Bay Area?

And then there’s “the largest open office space in the world,”
⁸⁴
which Mark Zuckerberg has hired Frank Gehry to build for Facebook’s 3,400 employees. Zuckerberg’s new office resembles Facebook itself: an intensely opaque, secretive company that has built its multibillion-dollar brand upon the lies of transparency and openness. This building might be internally “open,” but—like the new Google or Apple corporate city-states dotting the Silicon Valley landscape—it will be firmly shut off from the outside world. Indeed, Zuckerberg, the high priest of everybody else’s personal transparency, revealed his own personal commitment to “openness” and “collaboration” when, in October 2013, he spent more than $30 million buying the four houses surrounding his Palo Alto house to guarantee his absolute privacy from the outside world.
⁸⁵

As in the medieval world, Google, Apple, and Facebook have detached themselves from the physical reality of the increasingly impoverished communities around them. These companies provide so many free services to their employees—from gourmet meals, babysitting, and gyms, to dry cleaning, medical services, and even living spaces—that they are destroying businesses that have traditionally relied on the business patronage of local workers. The same is even happening in San Francisco. Twitter’s new downtown offices feature an in-house dining area called “The Commons,” where gourmet meals are always available. But, as the
New York Times
’ Allison Arieff notes, Twitter’s free food service, while uncommonly good for Twitter employees, has destroyed the business of local restaurants and cafés.
⁸⁶
So once again, the end result is more distance, literally and otherwise, in what the
Weekly Standard
’s Charlotte Allen called the new “Silicon chasm” in the Bay Area, between digital billionaires and analog beggars.
⁸⁷

“It’s the opposite of gentrification,”
⁸⁸
one local critic noted. Yes. And the opposite of gentrification is the impoverishment of communities that have the misfortune of being located next to buildings that resemble spaceships or artificial algorithms. Forget about regional declarations of independence. Internet companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter have actually declared independence—architecturally or otherwise—from everything around them. The digital overlords have seceded from the analog peasants. It’s the ultimate exit.

CONCLUSION
THE ANSWER

The Fancy-Dress Affair

I first met Michael Birch, the owner of the Battery social club, at a party in Marin County, the exclusive suburb over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge where Tom Perkins has one of his trophy mansions. It was one of those rather tiresome sixties nostalgia affairs at which everyone squeezes into the bell-bottomed trousers, Mary Quant miniskirts, and psychedelic shirts of the fifty-year-old counterculture. As a cultural event, it was about as historically authentic as the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. But the slightly built, bespectacled Birch, with his long blond flowing hair, already resembled a hippie, with or without the tight purple shirt and matching headband he was wearing for the party. There was a strangely ethereal quality to the Anglo-American entrepreneur. As if he’d just stepped out of an alien spaceship.

We talked beside the hot tub, which, in good Marin County tradition, was already full of revelers. “Hey brother,” I asked, trying, without much success, to capture the party’s vibe. “What’s goin’ on?”

What was going on with Michael Birch was the Battery. As we stood together in the warm California evening, he pitched me his vision for the unclub. He explained how he wanted to bring a diverse community together. “Different-thinking people” is how Birch, in the oddly detached language of a Web programmer, put it. He spoke dispassionately about his “social project,” which, he told me, would build community and understanding in San Francisco. With his half-British accent and eccentric air, he might have been Jeremy Bentham detailing, with mathematical precision, the social utility of his greatest happiness principle.

“How do you become a member?” I asked.

“We want diversity. Anyone original will be welcome,” he explained in a mid-Atlantic drawl. “Especially people who think outside their traditional silos.”

“Sounds like the Internet,” I said. “Or a village pub.”

“Exactly,” he said, without smiling.

“So could I join?”

The social engineer peered at me suspiciously, unconvinced, I suspect, by my ability to think outside any
silo
. “You have to be nominated by a member,” he mumbled.

He did, however, invite me to visit the Battery. “Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll come for lunch.”

“Cool,” he said.

But
cool
,
once the aesthetic of genuine rebellion, is no longer cool. The rebellious, disruptive culture of “cool” has instead become the orthodoxy of our networked age. Thomas Friedman describes the social forces of global upheaval, the so-called new Davos Men, as the “Square People”
¹
—but the
real
square
people of our networked age are those who see themselves as uniquely disruptive. “If you need to inform the world that you are original,” notes the
Financial Times
’ Edward Luce dryly, “chances are you are not.”
²
Beware “Silicon Valley’s cool capitalism,” warns the
Observer
’s Nick Cohen about alien overlords like Birch, Kevin Systrom, and Sean Parker, who’ve become the slickly marketed icons of what Cohen calls networked capitalism’s “borderless future.” This libertarian worship of the unregulated network and disdain for government destroys jobs “without creating new ones,” Cohen explains, and it compounds “the already dizzying chasm between the rich and the rest.”
³

The origins of this infinitely disruptive libertarianism, of the only rule being the absence of rules, can be traced back to the 1960s. According to the Stanford University historian Fred Turner, the Internet’s borderless idealism, and its ahistorical disdain for hierarchy and authority, especially the traditional role of government, were inherited from the countercultural ideas of Internet pioneers like WELL founder Stewart Brand and the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” author John Perry Barlow.
⁴
Silicon Valley, Turner says, has become an extension of the fancy-dress affair in Marin County where I met Michael Birch. It’s a sixties nostalgia fantasy hosted by space cadets like Birch who appear to have seceded from both time and space.

To borrow some of Apple’s most familiar marketing language, everybody now is supposed to “think different.” Unorthodoxy is the new orthodoxy in a world where the supposedly most
different
kind of thinkers—those who have escaped their traditional silo—are branded as the new rock stars. The only convention is to be unconventional and work for uncompanies, join unclubs, or attend unconferences. But today’s technology hipsters aren’t quite as cool as they imagine. Steve Jobs, the founding father of Silicon Valley’s “reality distortion field” and the original tech hipster, who idolized Bob Dylan and spent a summer in an ashram, also outsourced the manufacturing of Apple products in Foxconn’s notorious 430,000-person Shenzhen factory.
⁵
And Jobs ran an astonishingly profitable company that, according to the US senator Carl Levin, has been cleverly avoiding paying the American government a million dollars of tax revenue
per hour
.
⁶
Rather than “Think Different,” “Think Irresponsibly” might have been the mantra of the Apple accountants who organized this unethical and possibly even illegal scheme to avoid paying American tax.

So how can we really think
differently
about the crisis? What’s the most innovative strategy for disrupting the disruptors?

Disrupting the Disruptors

Just as there are many questions about today’s networked society, so everyone—from activists to writers to entrepreneurs to academics to governments—has their own answer to the Internet’s failure to realize most of its much-trumpeted promise. Some of these answers are more coherent and viable than others. But they all are understandable responses to the wrenching economic and social dislocation of networked society.

For the outraged, the knee-jerk answer is smashing the windows of Google buses and calling for the “dismantling of techno-industrial society.”
⁷
For the more contemplative, the answer is switching off the network through “digital detoxes,”
⁸
technology Sabbaths, or joining the “slow Web” movement.
⁹
For idealistic Web pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, the answer is an online “Magna Carta,” a digital Bill of Rights that protects the Web’s neutrality and openness against both governments and Internet corporations.
¹⁰
For other publicly spirited technologists, the answer is developing anti-Google or anti-Facebook products like the “no tracking” search engine DuckDuckGo, the open-source and nonprofit social network Diaspora, and even an ambitiously decentralized project called Bitcloud that aims to create a new Internet.
¹¹
For curated websites like
Popular Science
, which have tired of the inanity of most user-generated content, the answer is banning anonymous comments.
¹²
For Germany, the answer is in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2014 proposal to build a European network where data wouldn’t pass through the United States.
¹³
The answer for the German government may even lie—irony of ironies—in reverting to the technology of the Stasi and using analog typewriters for secret communications, in an effort to protect itself from foreign snoops.
¹⁴

For cultural theorists like Jaron Lanier, the answer is in reinventing the business model of online content to “multitudinous, diverse, tiny flows of royalties.”
¹⁵
For political critics like the technology scholar Tim Wu and the
Financial Times
columnist John Gapper, the answer lies in Internet entrepreneurs growing out of their “obsessive adolescence” and taking adult responsibility for disruptions like Bitcoin.
¹⁶
For humanists like Nicholas Carr, the answer lies in us shaping our networked tools before they shape us. For Internet skeptics like Talking Heads founder and lyricist David Byrne, the answer is that there isn’t an answer. “What will life be like after the Internet?” Byrne asks, with his characteristic dark humor. “I mean nothing lasts forever, right?”
¹⁷