Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
In fact I suspect even now the Techlash is overstated. Elizabeth Warren spent the month of October going after Zuckerberg and meanwhile lost her front-runner status in the polls. Anti-Big-Tech talking points may be red meat for journalists, but average Americans don't care all that much. (Based on this survey, Tech is still the most trusted industry sector: https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer)
PS. An article about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...
It seems to me like most people support Warren's anti-big-tech stance in principle or they don't much care. Not many outside of the bubble seem to be genuinely opposed to it and it's a quite esoteric argument as to why it would make things worse (maybe a true, valid and legitimate argument, - but not the sort of thing that takes on support organically without a bit of push - can we see that push?).
Then there's the obscenely large amounts spent by big tech on lobbying in washington and PR in the media and in places like right here.
Do any of us really believe big tech isn't paying for PR here at hacker news? Whether the PR is working is a different question. Whether there is a lot of pro-big tech opinion, much of which I share, here organically is a different question - and yes there is. The only thing that would prevent paid PR here is if hacker news has no impact and paid PR could not influence and this was known, as far as I can see.
Separate to the venture capitalist owners interests being served by mods, which of course happens and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, either.
I think the reason Warren could lose ground talking about Big Tech is pretty straightforward - it's a way less generally compelling, personally-broadly-relevant message than her other key issues, and so a distraction. Less a pure negative, but an opportunity-cost net negative.
That said, Tulsi is right, most of the party are a bunch of neocons (aside from Sanders and maybe Warren).
Yes, there is a problem with google and Facebook controlling what people see (algorithmic rather than organic) as well as soft and hard censorship, but I’m not sure the hammer of breakup is necessarily the first tool to go for in addressing the issue.
Joe is more pragmatic, but he’s also just skating. Tulsi is more of what Washington needs. No more foreign interventions. Let them fight it out. We’re always in the middle and always get flak and everyone else just sits there and does nothing. Only get in if it’s meaningful to us.
Any data here? I would have thought compared to other industries, tech hasn’t spend nearly enough! Few people occasionally tweet our Google or Facebook having donated $2700 to one republican superpact or another. This has to be peanuts compared to any real money involved.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/facebook-and-amazon-lead-tec...
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders
There is no database of PR spending, but it’s telling that a study conducted by Edelman, the worlds largest PR firm, found Tech to be the most trustworthy sector. A cynic might say they are pandering to an important client base.
Survey showing that people trust tech is evidence that tech is corrupting our politics. Jeez, talk about confirmation bias. A PR firm could also use a negative trust score to sell a firm on how they need more PR.
Maybe for liberals, but a lot of people on the right don’t care much for government intervention in industries without a compelling reason.
Besides this the reasons for regulation are pretty damn compelling. Clear cut case of market failure. You cannot take your business elsewhere to deal with the failings of big tech. It is an industry with a long run decreasing average total cost curve and has network externalities. (Hence why there aren't 27 similar magnitude businesses competiung in the facebook space, for example).
Indeed even if you have no facebook account and have taken your business elsewhere they have a shadow profile of you from your firends and from web trackers and so on. Google have your mail and analyze it even if you run your own server and have no google account. The list goes on from there. The case for regulation is overwhelming, what many of those of us of a libertarian bent want is /sensible/ regulation rather than the idiotic variety that is so prevalent. There aren't many on the right who think you should be able to poison the water or, switch off the taps and increase prices by a factor of 100. There aren't many on the right who think national defence payment should be "opt in"
Anyway these are also esoteric arguments just as their counterarguments are and unlikely to get a groundswell of support either way without a splashy push. The election of Donald Trump was that push for a large number of people on all sides of politics. The counter to that push? Where is that?
If you take a look at something like disinformation campaigns, that’s something that big tech companies can handle MUCH better than smaller ones.
And if we did break up FB, network effects will just lead us back to the same situation in a few more years anyways.
"trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to one cent a barrel, it would not right the wrong done to people of this country by the trusts which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprise"
— 51st congress
Every single ad on facebook (and every single other social media business) should be in a searchable database along with the targeting purchased and all the statistics on the number of times seen and all demographic information available to aid the targeting.
It's a regulation. Is it a good one? The idea behind it is so that lies cannot be /broadcast/ in secret. That the Nazi party could broadcast inflamitory lies targeted at the mentally infirm by paying social media companies, ie facebook, to do it, in secret, while remaining anonymous is a problem.
Facebook's own policies as the dominant player are offering zero part of any solution other than to increase their share of the advertising spend. Really. Total focus of all their policy is just that. At the expense of, well who exactly?
Television is regulated. Newspapers are regulated. Radio is regulated. Secret facebook broadcasts are not. This is better because it makes facebook more money and worse in every other way we can imagine and some we haven't yet.
Good to see everybody declaring their interests in this thread though!
That's not market failure, it's normal market functioning today. It used to be that the limits of scaling kept companies in most industries from becoming monopolies. The industries with really strong network effects, railroads, communications, and banking, were highly regulated.
Now, more industries have strong network effects. The negative effects of scale, big companies unable to get out of their own way, seem to have been conquered. Planetary-scale companies such as Walmart and McDonalds work quite well, and they're not even "tech" companies. And US antitrust enforcement has been out to lunch for 30 years now.
The European Union has a study, which I've cited before, that price competition seems to require, in practice, at least four major players. There's an implicit collusion effect that makes it more profitable to not compete on price where the number of players is small.
This /is/ market failure by the normal definition of market failure in the academic discipline of economics. It's not poetry. National Defence is an example of market failure. Any monopoly, eg, drinking water distribution, is an example of market failure. There is no economy anywhere on earth at any time through history up until now that has not had market failure as a feature of that economy. Not the only feature. I would say not even the major feature of the well functioning ones at least but everyone has it and tries to deal with. Is the cure worse than the disease? Is there a better cure, maybe even no cure. Most actual policy discussion in any newspaper is a discussion of just that.
Market failure is a very normal thing. What /I/ don't want is intervention where there is no market failure. What I don't want is regulation for the sake of regulation (or the sake of regulatory capture by the incumbant(s), or the sake of empire building by some public servant(s) or some witch hunt to win politcal favor at the ballot or whatever else on those lines). Regulation is the only sane response to market failure and has been since literally forever. See national defence.
Even more cynically we could say that an awful lot of people at an awful lot of tech companies want to do exactly that, and “responding to pressure” just gives them a perfect excuse.
Devils advocate: Is there a chance this amounts to willful ignorance? Seems to me like once you are 'hooked on something': Amazon 1-click ordering, A social network, your phone - it's not easy to admit that you have 'a problem', let alone condemn a whole industry.
Beyond that: If 'they' actually know everything about us - I desperately want to trust them with that information.
edit: formatting.
Generally the foundation of political support builds as sensible opposition while the other team is in power. Then that opposition team gets elected, and its politicians go to work "compromising" with the gatekeeping lobbyists - neutering any hard hitting reforms and transmuting that grassroots desire for reform into regulatory capture.
A lot of media people seem to spend ~8 hours tweeting almost everyday, which is obviously unhealthy but not indicative of how most people use "big tech".
Always worth a mention when speculating as to why journalists tend to be so anti-tech nowadays.
For years News has been the least downloaded segment in the Appstore/Playstore[1], there was a chance to revive RSS when the social media got into trouble for fake news, but even that opportunity is lost as Google/Apple has repositioned themselves in the News segment.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/270291/popular-categorie...
If a Dem wins, the media/etc will praise tech/social media like they did after Obama won. Remember in 2008 when the media hailed Obama as the first "social media president". It's amazing how a single election shifted the narrative on an entire industry wholesale. It's like someone flipped a switch and the narrative went from positive to negative overnight.
How many remember Obama's Q&A at google?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nnj7r1wCD4
What would have been the narrative had Hillary won? Would tech be credited with helping her win rather than attacked relentlessly by the media? The real question that isn't why the news industry was so upset? Isn't the news supposed to be objective and fair?
It might even be the difference between 2008 and a decade later. Sometimes opinions shift over time, as new information comes to light.
In protest of the Iraq War and other policies during the George W. Bush Administration, he refused to cut his hair. When President Obama was inaugurated, he celebrated with a trip to the barber.
Kudos for being right about Iraq before it was cool, but we're still in Iraq, aren't we? Just to be safe, let's don't get a hair appointment immediately on Michelle's inauguration...
I think Obama is much more bad ass than Bush.
I think your timeline is a bit scrambled. Obama got the Nobel Peace (or rather, Not-GW-Bush-Jr) prize in the first year of his presidency, before any foreign interventions that could be realistically ascribed to his policy.
And that's to say nothing of social media, which is causing society to cannibalize itself
Source: went to see him speak at Stanford. Asked him myself during live Q&A, if Facebook is so evil and must be stopped, why doesn’t he call out Zuck for terrible leadership given that Facebook culture and business practice comes straight from the top? His answer, direct quote: “well, he and I are friends.”
If this is our big defector, we’ve got serious problems.
To your point: being anti-Zuck in public is a transparent ploy for attention if you're not anti-Zuck in private.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/roger-mcnamee-facebook...
Hasn’t Mark said in public that he didn’t remember McNamee, that he was barely invested early on in Facebook and left when they switched business model?
(The whole “You know what’s cool, a billion dollars?” and refusing Yahoo!’s offer was actually a big internal shift that ostracised a lot of early employees and investors.)
I don’t know, has he? Citing a source would be constructive as I’m not aware of Zuck saying anything publicly about McNamee ever since his PR stunt kicked off.
What about the parts of the article where McNamee is, according to the Brian Barth, persuading powerful people to rally against every surveillance capitalist.
I don't see that it would be necessary to include him in this profile of someone else, this is less about the Palantir sort of "surveillance tech" than the Facebook sort.
This is nothing more than that -- through that lens, you can understand and predict all that mainstream "journalists" will advocate and push for with regards to tech.
Edit -- the larger panic that is afflicting "journalists" is that BigTech enables the masses to finally speak out. The pushback is against this actual cacophony of voices and opinions, finally set free from the old-school guardians of thought and society.
If tech companies can map out your behavior for the rest of your life with >95% accuracy, what does that do to the world?
Wether is the atomic bom or Facebook, I am sure they would have existed without their conscientious defectors. There is something much stronger at play, be it nuclear fusion in physics or information asymmetry in economics.
I share in the concern of McNamee and Oppenheimer, but Technological Humanism often leaves us with impossible technology and bad business.
You may have written about bill of materials enough that BOM is in your autocorrect.