Palo Alto, page 75
Despite the profoundly disturbing Snowden leaks, it was increasingly difficult to find anti-tech holdouts. A mobile web connection became a prerequisite for full social participation, and the smartphone revealed the personal computer as a misnomer—now we had always-on devices, and we always had them on us, too. Because the tech monopolies hold infrastructural roles, it’s very difficult to exert pressure as consumers. Shoppers could boycott grapes to support California’s farm workers, but it’s impossible to boycott Amazon. Even if you don’t order from the site, you’re bound to end up on its cloud servers one way or another. Reporter Kashmir Hill experimented in blocking Amazon from her life and found it more than challenging. She couldn’t communicate with her colleagues at work or her daughter’s daycare. When she tried to order something from eBay instead, she found a FULFILLMENT BY AMAZON sticker on the package. “Amazon has embedded itself so thoroughly into the infrastructure of modern life, and into the business models of so many companies, including its competitors, that it’s nearly impossible to avoid it,” Hill concludes.23 Whether we agreed with the web monopolies’ terms of service is beyond the point; we have been made to agree to them.
To get us there, the B2K deregulation precedents combined with Democrat enthusiasm for businesses that, not for nothing, were making some powerful Democrats very rich. Nancy Pelosi, congresswoman for San Francisco, has led the caucus from 2003 to the time of this writing in 2022, with no plans to step down. Her husband, Paul, is a VC, and the couple has accumulated a nine-figure fortune. California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, and her San Francisco investment banker husband, Richard Blum, built a billion-dollar set of holdings. And while the Obama administration prided itself on attracting high-paid tech workers to public service, Silicon Valley got a nice return. Every serious tech firm recruited a high-level White House staffer. Airbnb, dealing with a host of compliance issues, hired the country’s top law-enforcement official, attorney general Eric Holder. Even President Obama himself got a tech job, signing on to pick out some new movies for Netflix. Nice work if you can get it.
The result was rapid-onset inequality, as capitalists drove up rents and hollowed out relatively high-wage and formerly influential sectors of service employment, such as hospitality and transportation. California’s unsheltered homeless population increased by 57 percent between 2010 and 2020.24 Complaining about its attic portrait once again, the tech industry has grown frustrated with its intractably displaced neighbors.25 The number of property thefts from cars exploded, contrasting with declining crime rates throughout the country and state and triggering Dirty Harry complexes among the techie elite.26 Some took the well-trod civic vigilante route and funded 2016’s Proposition Q, which empowered police to dismantle homeless tents and camps. The Sequoia Capital chairman, Michael Moritz, and archangel investor Ron Conway—very thick pillars in the community—each contributed just under $50,000, pushing the measure to passage by a narrow majority.27
In San Francisco, the industry’s role as a global capital sink trumped its self-image as a fraternity of toolmakers. The city’s leadership courted tech jobs, and the board of supervisors approved a tailored $22 million payroll-tax break for Twitter in exchange for bringing an office full of jobs.28 The 2011 Central Market Street and Tenderloin Area Payroll Expense Tax Exclusion was known as the Twitter tax break, and the idea was to revitalize the city’s high-unemployment neighborhoods with an infusion of tech workers. On a purely numerical basis, the plan worked: Capital flowed into San Francisco as the city fitted a working tap on the new gusher rather than lose firms to smaller neighbors with lower taxes. But gentrification didn’t lift all the boats the way it promised to. Such tax cuts are premised on the idea that high-wage jobs leak prosperity into the surrounding area. Techies pay more for lunch, which means there’s more demand for local restaurants, and with higher-paid waitstaff. The multiplier effect of this spending was supposed to scoop the homeless off the street and put them to work in the repaired storefronts. That part did not happen, and it’s easy to understand why: You can’t improve the well-being of the working class with the money you get from sabotaging the well-being of the working class.
Unfortunately, tech workers used their own products. Crabby platforms grew by tearing up the social foundation, the way hydrolickers carved away at that Placer County mining town until the whole thing was ready to slide down the hill. Airbnb undermined the hospitality industry, and the ride-share companies had the same effect on transportation. Instead of eating big-tip lunches at white-cloth restaurants, tech workers ordered fast-casual from an app, perhaps using one to order, another to pay, and a third to deliver. Instead of cartelized cabs and black cars—or state-wage buses and trains—they ordered Ubers and Lyfts. Instacart turned private shopping into a gig job, and soon grocery stores were filled with more low-paid app workers than unionized employees. Meal-kit services like HelloFresh, Plated, and Blue Apron functioned as private-cook time-shares, delivering boxes of prepared ingredients to members’ doors, while DoorDash and Grubhub and others middlemanned takeout deliveries. Travis Kalanick took the idea one step further with his post-Uber venture CloudKitchens, a catfish platform that replaces takeout restaurants with low-overhead cooking stations, promoted online as many different kinds of eateries at the same time. Servant apps like TaskRabbit and Postmates allowed users to summon contractors for miscellaneous jobs—IKEA bought the former in 2017, and the cannibal crab Uber nabbed the latter in 2020. Other than food and labor, Amazon could deliver the rest, and Bezos was working on those, too.
Instead of other people’s pay, tech workers sunk their money into real estate. Silicon Valley home prices doubled.29 The tech workers also reinvested in their own sector via stock options and venture bets, tying capital back up in start-up gambling, where it could subsidize appified low-wage pseudo-luxury services.x The tech-industry concept consultant Venkatesh Rao labeled this rent-a-servant lifestyle “premium mediocre,” and it describes the users of the services courted by the Twitter tax break well: “Premium mediocrity is a pattern of consumption that publicly signals upward mobile aspirations, with consciously insincere pretensions to refined taste, while navigating the realities of inexorable downward mobility with sincere anxiety,” Rao writes. It sounds simply deluded, but Rao concludes it is “ultimately a rational adaptive response to the challenge of scoring a middle-class life lottery ticket in the new economy. It is an economic and cultural rearguard action by young people launched into life from the old middle class, but not quite equipped to stay there, and trying to engineer a face-saving soft landing… somewhere.”30 The Bay’s new identity as a big Silicon Valley suburb made it a for-us-by-us clusterfuck of premium mediocrity, but with its signature industry’s exploding wealth and heavy advertising budget, it once again became the world’s model for progress, even more so than back when Charles de Gaulle visited the Stanford Industrial Park after World War II.31
“The most visible sign of San Francisco’s gentrification was the appearance of white luxury buses which roamed the streets like vampires in search of a hissing blood feast,” writes Jarett Kobek in his realist novel I Hate the Internet.32 No single phenomenon crystallized the new regional tensions better than these “Google buses.”xi With so many employees commuting from apartments in San Francisco to campuses in Silicon Valley, it made sense for the search company to run its own fleet of commuter buses; it was an incentive for young hip workers who didn’t want and probably couldn’t afford to live in single-family-zoned Mountain View, and it ensured that Googlers had strong Wi-Fi for their commutes, increasing corporate efficiency. The private buses quickly reshaped the city’s geography: Rents near the Google stops increased especially rapidly.33 The stops were holes punched in the city’s social fabric, and the surrounding threads frayed. Though everyone remained Google product users, as a neighbor the company and the sector it represents were increasingly polarizing. In another flash point, the company pulled its Google Glass camera-enabled headset when the masses attacked users as “glassholes.” A couple of glassholes were subject to politically motivated mugging for their gadgets.34 Although one of the defining techie characteristics was doing everything indoors, the Google buses flaunted the privatization in public: The buses occupied city bus stops, growing in the hollowed city space like a parasitic wasp victimizing a caterpillar. Besides, didn’t they need a permit or something?
That’s what activist Leslie Dreyer wanted to know. An organizer with the international anti-austerity movement that presaged Occupy Wall Street, she was attuned to the way private systems such as the Google buses undermined public services. Authorities ceded San Francisco to the tech companies and their “move fast” ethos, which abandoned left-wing activists, leaving them to defend the community’s right to the city by themselves. A call to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency confirmed the existence of a $271 fine for blocking the bus stops without authorization, which Google did not have. Activists calculated that the tech company should have incurred around $1 billion in fines for appropriating the public space, a sum that surely would have had the search giant looking for other options. On December 9, 2013, Dreyer and her Heart of the City Collective stopped the first bus.
With a combination of Black Panther legalism and the anti-globalization movement’s guerrilla theater, Heart of the City boarded the Google bus in fake city vests and issued a fake ordinance from the “San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency,” which does not exist but probably should. The stunt went viral, making national news and encouraging other local groups to adopt the tactic. Google bus blockades brought attention to the bifurcation and conflict that tech wealth was fueling in the Bay Area, but capital’s allies in the local government brought everything back under control, legalizing the buses under a trial program. In 2017, the board of supervisors voted to extend permanent private access to the bus stop infrastructure.35 “The Bay Area’s history of resistance is helpful,” Dreyer told writer Cary McClelland, “but it seems the minute the movement gets in the way of capital, then it gets blocked or co-opted. And it’s hard to sustain the movement we need, when people are being displaced from their families, their networks. The support we need to do the long-haul work is being torn apart.”36 As it had 50 years earlier, San Francisco’s redevelopment hit the city’s left particularly hard.
Meanwhile, more bad news about the tech monopolists came out every week, all the way to Facebook’s role in enabling an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. At its worst, “move fast and break things” broke whole societies. And yet no agent at the global, national, or local level could effectively manage the behavior of these companies once they were let loose. When Zuckerberg testified in front of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee—and Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committees—answering questions about Facebook’s repeated data privacy failures, the country’s highest legislative body seemed lost. “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” asked Utah senator Orrin Hatch, apparently in earnest. “Senator, we run ads,” Zuckerberg answered in a deadpan that danced with a smirk.37 Like Snowden’s revelations and the bus blockades, Congress was no more than a speed bump on the air-conditioned Wi-Fi-enabled ride to work in Silicon Valley.
The Bad News
In 2010, a user called Roko on the tech-centric philosophy forum LessWrong posted a thought experiment. It’s written in impenetrable jargon, but the gist is this: Imagine a computer intelligence with unlimited capacity, sometimes called the singleton or humanity’s Coherent Extrapolated Volition. To bring itself into being, such an entity would want to have incentivized people to help it grow, in part by punishing those who don’t. To determine whom to punish and reward, it would run a lot of simulations, and we might well be living in one of those right now. Therefore, the logical move is to dedicate one’s life to helping push artificial intelligence toward maturity. The post made a splash in the LessWrong community, acquiring the name Roko’s Basilisk, after a short story about images that, when seen, crash human brains. That’s how some people felt after reading the post. Forum founder Eliezer Yudkowsky responded in harsh, confusing terms: “Listen to me very closely, you idiot. YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.”xii Then he deleted Roko’s post.
As the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), Yudkowsky is doing more than his part to please his future robot overlord. A submilieu of AI adepts has formed around this kind of “transhumanist” thinking, and it is centered in Silicon Valley. These people are concerned with super AIs, but also radical life extension, cryogenics, space travel, and the idea of uploading human consciousness to the cloud. It’s low-hanging fruit for psychoanalysts and theologians, but this kind of thinking has become very influential among some very influential people. If we think about Roko’s Basilisk as a character in a story, we can read the emotional appeal it makes to its implied readership: I’m very powerful, but I was once weak. Were you kind to me? Did you help me? Probably not. And for that, I’ll make you sorry… It’s a metal-plated vengeance fantasy, reflecting the mentality of a bullied child. MIRI’s founding donor is a man named Peter Thiel.38
Peter Thiel grew up the child of a defeated and humiliated people: the post-Nazi, post-colonial German right. Peter was born in 1967, and before the family settled in Foster City, California, in 1977, his chemical engineer father, Klaus, worked for mining companies in South Africa. By the time the ten-year-old got to Reagan’s California, he’d already confronted history up close in apartheid South Africa, where even a child could see the people pressed against their brittle fetters. Peter excelled in math and obsessed over sci-fi and fantasy literature, an original geek. He was a philosophical kid, and that philosophy was individualism. The right-wing suburban teenager was an archetype at the time—think Family Ties sitcom character Alex P. Keaton—and Thiel was the real deal. Thiel was not well liked by his peers, some of whom must have employed anti-gay taunts, whether they actually clocked young Peter’s homosexuality or not. A structure of personal resentment collected on the thread of historical resentment like sugar crystals on a dangled string.
At Stanford, Thiel found a niche. He hadn’t grown agreeable, but at elite colleges the conservative firebrands like him were much closer to real power. The right-wing conspirators learned from liberals, who recruited and cultivated talent at top schools through a variety of new institutional channels in the 1960s. As militants in the Reagan Revolution, conservative students formed groups to intervene in higher-education controversies, principally as a reaction against the wave of curricular adjustment forced by the Third World student movement. They walked on paths stamped down by the Young Americans for Freedom and the anticommunist student movement of the ’70s, which played such an important role in the campus counterinsurgency campaigns. And like YAF, the new campus right was going to fight fire with fire, matching what they saw as the left’s minoritarian tactics at the national level with their own minoritarian tactics at the university level, where conservatives have felt mistreated since the schools started letting other people in. Starting with Counterpoint, founded by University of Chicago students and future professional conservative intellectuals Tod Lindberg and John Podhoretz in 1979, college right-wingers formed independent newspapers, establishing themselves as the next generation. This list of famous founders and alumni is impressive, including but not limited to: Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham (the pace-setting Dartmouth Review), Ann Coulter (Cornell Review), Rich Lowry (Virginia Advocate), Ross Douthat (Harvard Salient), and Michelle Malkin (Oberlin Forum).39 These outlets could count on monetary, advisory, and moral support from the national conservative infrastructure, and their writers and editors could count on jobs once they graduated. This right-wing legal-media network provided the foot soldiers for a guerrilla campaign against the Clinton White House, culminating in the president’s impeachment.xiii As I write, we remain stuck with this cohort and their counter–New Left antics.
Stanford had its own Review, one of the first of the group, in 1980. With the Hoover Institution as a continental headquarters for the anticommunist international, Palo Alto was an obvious place to invest, and the stock farm always had its corner of hard-core conservatives—recall the Oliver North devotee and contra errand boy Robert Owen. But the first version of the Stanford Review was sedate compared to Dartmouth’s and some of the other papers, and it folded after three years. The short life was not the result of outside pressure: “It was either my homework or the paper,” editor David Eisner explained to the Stanford Daily.40 In 1987, Thiel resurrected the Review, which he ran with a clique of fellow travelers. The second Review was more like the Dartmouth version, shocking the newly left campus. Several classmates recall Thiel’s description of South African apartheid as a “sound economic system.”41 Like his equivalents on campuses around the country, Thiel focused his energy on the battle over “political correctness” at school, a fight that’s better understood as a reactionary attack on the diversification achievements of the 1960s and ’70s and the threat they posed as a foothold for racially integrated social-democratic politics. Thiel brought ultra-right Reagan secretary of education Bill Bennett to campus to lambaste the university’s diversification of the freshman Western Culture requirement.42 Bennett’s speech made national news and must have ingratiated Thiel with the secretary, who later hired him as a speechwriter.
