Why Big Tech has lost its compass
“Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” — Dick Costelo
All around the world people realise that things are different now and we aren’t going back to the way they were. Post modernism is with us folks, in all its fullness. The once unassailable cultural narratives that guided the way we understood our lives and the way the world operates are being rejected, modified and recreated.
It’s taken awhile for business people, particular tech business people to get the message — hell, “we just create code and algorithms, not culture”, right?
A huge debate among tech’s elite on Twitter over the past few weeks has revealed a chronic dissonance of views on the matter.
It began when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published a post telling employees to stay out of social activism and banning at-work discussions about politics and societal issues. If you don’t like it, he said, we’ll pay you up to six months severance to quit.
Then, Dick Costelo, Former CEO of Twitter reacted, tweeting: “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.”
His position has been dissected and debated, with some, including current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, challenging the premise that a company, especially a crypto platform, can ignore social issues that deeply affect customers.
In a further ironical spat, Twitter blocked web links to an unverified political story about US presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family that appeared in the New York Post. The Post’s Twitter account was frozen, which then prompted widespread criticism of censorship. Now The US Senate Judiciary Committee plans to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as Republican senators call on Dorsey to testify on October 23rd, calling his decision “election interference.”
In between all this, Facebook is feuding with Netflix, describing the ‘The Social Dilemma’ documentary released earlier this year on the streaming platform as sensationalist.
“It gives a distorted view of how social media platforms work to create a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex societal problems Facebook said in seven-point rebuttal to film that explored the dangerous side of social media. “The film’s creators do not include insights from those currently working at the companies or any experts that take a different view to the narrative put forward by the documentary
Confused yet?
Many would agree with Armstrong’s that a business has a mission that is distinct from individual social and political causes. But the postmodern condition makes that impossible because the technologies that have fractured mainstream culture into a million subgroups are doing the same inside their source companies.
This is particularly the case in tech companies, for two reasons. First, people who work in tech are users of technology that vent, disseminate and organise efficiently online, making the spread of networked alternative subcultures easy. And secondly, with few exceptions, consumer tech companies are directly embroiled in major polarizing social issues based on the effects of their products or simply by reason of their outsize power.
Culture — which I think of as “why you make decisions” — is important in any business. For tech companies, it is essential. Tech companies have always relied for years on internal culture to recruit tech stars away from a well-funded rival. Tech companies (like all organisations) are their talent, and culture is how they compete for it. Now, everywhere you look, CEOs — especially in the tech industry — are straining to redefine their cultures for external critics. And clearly they’re not doing very well.
Why? The Omnidyar Network puts it plainly:
“In a world more interconnected and globalised than ever, and also more unequal and volatile, citizens are clinging to those identities they feel most inherently define them, and make them feel seen. This feeds the rise of tribalism, and in turn social unrest, we see manifesting globally”.
Google and Facebook are trying to maintain some cohesion by restricting certain types of employee conversations. Late last year, Google ended its long tradition of weekly companywide meetings with its CEO. Facebook recently restricted how employees can express opinions about controversial social topics on internal company software.
But it doesn’t appear to be working. Every week brings more media leaks from internal meetings where employees are frustrated and dissatisfied. Even with major antitrust battles looming and a global pandemic, employee cohesion is a top management distraction.
Finding Their Tribe
A decade or so ago, it was much easier for tech companies to define their cultures. They were cocky upstarts competing against incumbents and each other. Their cultures were largely ones of intense competition where tech optimism ruled supreme.
But as these businesses grew and started to influence all aspects of society, it became harder for leaders to articulate what their companies stood for. You saw some major flare-ups over this in 2018 when Google employees protested its sale of image recognition software to the US Defense Department. Google said it would not renew the contract and left open a big question: Will Google sell its software to just anyone, or only to organizations that align with certain values? And who determines what those values should be?
Jacinta Adern angrily reacts to question about whether women should tell their employers if they plan to get pregnant before starting a new job. Source: The Guardian http://bit.ly/3jcCGvz
Google CEO Sundar Pichai and others have continued to wrestle with this issue, as have hundreds of other tech companies faced with similar choices.
Over at Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is perpetually plagued by content moderation issues and employees irate over where the company chooses to draw the line.
Yet no matter where leaders do draw that line, every few months employee and public pressure forces them to draw it again.
While CEOs, and perhaps even the majority of employees, are looking for a consistent corporate culture, some are not. They are perfectly happy, in fact perhaps happier, to find their tribe within a company and to provoke any established corporate culture, often using the very technologies they helped build. That’s a trend no memo can reverse.
Exploding regulation
Technology is becoming a highly regulated industry but that that regulation will not only be determined by the USA. Other countries and blocs like the EU, have their own laws, cultures and constitutions, and so we are entering a period of increasing regulatory expansion, overlap and competition from different jurisdictions, from the EU and UK to Singapore or China.
For example, Facebook Ireland FB, which operates Instagram in the U.K., has committed to modifying its platform after intervention from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has been investigating social media influencers since 2018.
Hidden advertising is illegal in the U.K. The regulator said clear labelling of incentivized posts was required under consumer protection law, so that people weren’t misled.
Consider the way that the US government is trying to address the Tiktok issue this year. It has acted as though this is a one-off, rather than understanding that this is the new normal — there will be hundreds more of these.
A systematic, repeatable approach is required. The more different rules we have in different places, the more fragmented and complicated things get.
As I have argued in another publication, entitled The future of networks, network theory has long recognised that networks feed upon themselves and have inbuilt interdependence — often simplistically referred to in pitch decks as scaling. Hence the impact on TikTok users and social media influencers generally.
We are all using one or the other ICT that isn’t created in our country by people who don’t necessarily share our values. Increasingly, those values belong to somewhere else.
As Benedict Evans https://bit.ly/30HLXW1 argues, you can’t ask to know the culture and national affiliation of the shareholders in every popular app — you need rules that apply to everyone.
If you were wondering what happened to the historic US tech CEO hearings in July this year, suggesting the breakup of monolithic tech companies, the answer lie in a 449-page mammoth report published by the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. A 16-month long investigation, the report examines the dominance of the four companies whose CEOs testified virtually.
“As they exist today, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy. In recent years, each company has expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David N. Cicilline. “Our investigation leaves no doubt that there is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation, and safeguards our democracy.
Given all of the above, we might consider the proposition of cultural critic H.L. Mencken.
“The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always sceptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”
#Networks #Twitter #Coinbase #BigTech #Tech Monopolies #Google #Facebook #Influencers #Tech Regulation
Gary is interested in all things digital and works with fledgling startups.
See what he is all about here: http://bit.ly/31mzRC9