By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Everybody hates Amazon. It’s kind of weird.
Donald Trump, as a candidate, threatened to bring
antitrust actions against Amazon and accused the Internet retailer of dodging
taxes, and as president Trump has taken a special interest in the company’s
CEO, Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington
Post, which offends Trump by reporting on his antics from time to time.
“Believe me, if I become president, oh, do they have problems,” he said. “They
are going to have such problems.” Farhad Manjoo, writing in the New York Times, said Amazon’s behavior
during its dispute with book publisher Hachette “is confirming its critics’
worst fears and it is an ugly spectacle to behold.” Tony Schwartz blasted Bezos
for having an overly aggressive management style marked by periodic angry
outbursts. (Tony Schwartz is the man who actually wrote Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal.) Paul Krugman insists
Amazon “has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America.”
Krugman also suggested that Amazon was scheming to help Republicans’ electoral
chances. The company has been the target of boycotts since the 1990s, and it
has been criticized for its handling of taxes, for selling and not selling
certain items, and for — incredibly enough — not making enough of a profit.
Junie Hoang, an actress you’ve never heard of (Hood Rats 2: Hoodrat Warriors), once sued the company for revealing
her age on IMDb, which Amazon owns. Whole Foods shoppers, who tend to be as
crunchy in their political preferences as in their produce preferences, have
lamented Amazon’s acquisition of the high-end grocery chain, perhaps unaware
that Bezos’s politics are well to the left of those of Whole Foods’s
libertarian founder, John Mackey. Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers
pronounced himself “disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility” for kicking
WikiLeaks off of its Web-hosting service.
There was some eye-rolling in the nation’s capital when
Bezos acquired two large Kalorama properties — a 27,000-square-foot museum
complex, in fact — which he is converting into what will be Washington’s largest
private residence, just around the corner from the Obamas and the Kushners and
surrounded by embassies. “The home is expected to be an East Coast pied-à-terre
for the family,” the Washington Post
daintily reported, “allowing him to avoid hotel bills.” As though Jeff Bezos,
net worth $81 billion, a man who for the sake of convenience just bought the
estate next to his estate in Beverly Hills — where he does not live, his main
home being in the suburbs of Seattle — would worry about paying for a couple of
rooms at the Holiday Inn.
If Donald Trump had Jeff Bezos’s money, he’d die of
priapism.
Everybody hates Amazon — except its customers: Its sales
have more than doubled just since 2012, and its gross income has more than
trebled during the same period. With the company being oriented toward
long-term expansion rather than near-term profit, Amazon’s net income is famously low, and it was losing money on paper as
late as 2014; in 2016 its net income was $2.4 billion. But the shareholders
aren’t complaining: Shares that were trading for around $250 in 2013 are
approaching $1,000 today. Depending on what the market is doing at any given
closing bell, Jeff Bezos is either the world’s wealthiest man or near the top
of the list. Millions of consumers are delighted by what Amazon does and how it
does it — same-day delivery! Alexa! video streaming! — and are looking forward
to further innovations.
There are a few holdouts: New York City’s Sandinista
mayor, Bill de Blasio, a Luddite and an anti-capitalist, has never used the
site. “I believe in bricks and mortar,” he told the New York Daily News. “I personally just like the experience of
going into the store, choosing something myself, having the physical
opportunity to see what the thing looks like.”
De Blasio is at the moment working very diligently to
convince Amazon to choose New York City as the site of its new headquarters.
***
It isn’t just Amazon that brings out the fear and loathing.
The quadrumvirate of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple — GAFA, as they are
collectively known — is a source of broad anxiety felt from the anti-capitalist
Left, which fears that the corporations that dominate commerce will come to
dominate culture and politics, to the libertarian Right, which has concerns
about privacy and fears that freedom of expression may be threatened by
progressive-leaning corporate bosses who seek to smother conservative content
and repress conservative views on social-media platforms. Franklin Foer, the
former editor of The New Republic,
has just published an anti-GAFA jeremiad titled “World without Mind: The
Existential Threat of Big Tech.”
Existential threat?
Foer is entirely
serious about that. He believes that firms such as Facebook and Google are
jockeying not just for market share but for mind share, that their ambition is
nothing less than to redefine — and in the process deform — what it means to be
human. Foer’s argument is at times fascinating, though what scandalizes him
most isn’t the ruthlessness of highly competitive technology companies but
their ambition: “Where do these companies begin and end?” he asks.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded
Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too
narrow. Google now aims to build driverless cars, manufacture phones, and
conquer death. Amazon was once content being “the everything store,” but now
produces television shows, designs drones, and powers the cloud. The most
ambitious tech companies — throw Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple into the mix —
are in a race to become our “personal assistant.” . . . More than any previous
coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their
desired image of it. They believe that they have the opportunity to complete
the long merger between man and machine — to redirect the trajectory of human
evolution.
Critics are right to detect a strong whiff of
get-off-my-grass-ism in Foer’s argument, and of course his personal experience
as editor of The New Republic, which
was acquired, and ruined, by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, is a splinter in
his mind. He began his journalism career as a Microsoft employee and now writes
for The Atlantic, the venerable
magazine founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and recently acquired by Laurene
Powell, the widow of the late Steve Jobs, who was the very archetype of the
hippie-capitalist-utopian tech guru whose machinations keep Foer up at night.
While there is much in World without Mind that is over-the-top and some that is ill
considered, Foer is right to look west: The most interesting and consequential
conversations being had in the United States in 2017 are not happening in
Washington — they are happening in California, which extends beyond its formal
borders to include parts of Washington State, a sliver of Austin, and about
five blocks in New York City.
Part of the anxiety that Very High Tech induces in Foer
and others is simply the mind-boggling scale of its reach and the capital it
can command. Of course Google is getting into a dozen businesses almost
entirely unrelated to search, its core business. What the heck else is Google
going to do with all that money? Of course men such as Jeff Bezos will acquire
high-prestige/low-return businesses such as the Washington Post — owning a newspaper (if you can afford it!) is a
lot more fun than playing golf or collecting old sports cars.
No doubt Bezos dreams of ever larger and more shockingly
ambitious things for Amazon, but does anybody really think he is scheming to
make himself, personally, another $1 billion or another $5 billion or another
$10 billion? The quality-of-life returns on net worth exceeding the first
couple of billion diminish rapidly. (“The first million is the hardest,” the
rapper Drake once boasted on Twitter, only to be answered by oilman T. Boone
Pickens: “The first billion is a helluva lot harder.” That’s why Twitter
exists.) Like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs was known as demanding, competitive, and
prone to angry outbursts, but the genuine pleasure — the thrill — he enjoyed
from midwifing cool stuff into existence was impossible to miss. That joy is a
big part of the magic that makes Apple Apple, and that watch-me-go exhilaration
is what exnihilated Google and Facebook into existence. Billionaires don’t work
80 hours a week because they are driven by mere greed. They are driven by
something far more powerful. Franklin Foer thinks that this force is hubris,
the desire to ascend, godlike, to remake man in their own image. There is
hubris in the mix, but there is something else there, too: love.
***
Foer traces the culture of today’s Silicon Valley back to
Stewart Brand, the hippie impresario who founded the Whole Earth Catalog and brought a bit of discipline and business
sense to Ken Kesey’s psychedelic doings with the Merry Pranksters. Brand’s mix
of LSD-inspired spaciness, Native American mysticism, and countercultural
distaste for men in gray flannel suits made him perfectly suited to be the poet
of the computer age. “Engineers across Silicon Valley revered Brand for
explaining the profound potential of their work in ways they couldn’t always
see or articulate,” Foer writes. Whereas many of those 1960s rebels saw the
computer as a symbol of bureaucracy and control, a product of the ultimate
gray-flannel-suit corporation, IBM, Brand saw the computer’s potential as an
instrument of liberation — and transformation. Foer quotes from an early issue
of the Whole Earth Catalog:
We are as gods and might as well
get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big
business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross
defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a
realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to
conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment,
and share his adventure with whoever is interested.
The Whole Earth
Catalog, Brand said, had as its mission to advertise the tools and
instruments that would make that liberation possible. And the technology
industry has in a real sense more than lived up to the hype of the early days
of the World Wide Web. Individuals have been radically empowered: You really
can be your own publisher — and, as Dan Rather learned, your own media critic,
bypassing the usual gatekeepers and ombudsmen in the pursuit of direct and
immediate accountability. You can sit in on the best university lectures, enjoy
the best music and film immediately, communicate without friction, and, in many
occupations, do the work of 20 or 100 men. Wikipedia, which sounds like a
terrible idea on paper, has proved invaluable. Technology has amplified the
individual beyond the dreams of 1950s science fiction. The actual limitation of
the moment isn’t a question of the technology but of its users: Most people, as
it turns out, don’t want to investigate human-rights abuses in Burma or audit
computer-science lectures at MIT: They like porn and celebrity news and arguing
about dumb things with dumb people on Twitter. The human being is and has
always been the brake on the utopian tendency. It is not the structure of the
technology industry or the character of its executives that has the
homogenizing effect that many GAFA critics fret about — it’s the consumers
themselves.
But some people are more ambitious than others, and the
technology that has amplified the private citizen also amplifies the corporate
executive, the tech-savvy oppressor, and the billionaire dilettante with
political aspirations. Stewart Brand was not the first to come along with the
offer that “you shall be as gods.” That was the promise of Prometheus, of
course, and, most prominently, of the Serpent.
***
The backlash against GAFA is partly the usual lamentation
of the nouveau riche by certain envious people, usually writers and academics,
who think they’d do better things with all that money. There is the usual fear
of change, the nationalist suspicion of those whom Stalinists and Trumpkins
sneer at as “rootless cosmopolitans,” and the traditional lefty paranoia about
corporate power. Never mind that the big winner from Amazon’s success has been
consumers while the big loser has been Walmart, which was the Left’s favorite
boogeyman until the day before yesterday — new concentrations of private power
are always a terror to the Left. Foer refers to Google and Facebook as
“knowledge monopolies,” which he characterizes as “a new style of firm.” But
that’s not quite right. The nature of the firm has not changed all that much, and
the radical ways in which corporations are changing (diminishing corporate
lifespans, outsourcing of secondary business processes, etc.) are if anything
more relevant to non-GAFA companies than to the technology titans that command
Foer’s attention. What’s changing isn’t the character of the corporation but the character of the market.
The traditional case against monopolies is that they are
bad for consumers. But some technology companies, especially social-media
concerns such as Facebook, complicate that, because they become more valuable
to consumers the more they dominate the market. Facebook is like the telephone.
One telephone user finds it not valuable at all — there’s nobody to call. Two
telephone users find it of limited usefulness. A network of billions of users
makes the telephone immeasurably more useful. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal
and an early investor in Facebook (who has written in these pages), says that
he likes to invest in monopolies, but Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are
not monopolies in the traditional sense, leveraging their market power to
squeeze more out of consumers via higher prices. They mainly do the opposite.
“We measure an antitrust violation by looking at consumer harm — not harm to
competitors,” Penn law professor Herbert Hovenkamp told PolitiFact. That’s one
reason the Trump administration, in spite of the president’s big talk, probably
won’t move against Amazon: There isn’t a case. When consumers begin to feel the
bite, conventional economic theory goes, then competition will step in and set
things right.
But what if the bite isn’t felt? We don’t write a check
to Facebook or Google once a month. We compensate them in other ways —
attention must be paid and privacy surrendered and personal data sliced and
repackaged and traded like a subprime mortgage. The censors of the Catholic
Church helpfully published the Index
Librorum Prohibitorum, bringing some much-needed transparency to the
process of suppressing thought: The list of banned books was plain as day.
Amazon can just disappear a book if it so chooses or, if it’s in a devious
mood, as it was during the Hachette dispute, it can monkey with prices, product
placement, and delivery times to quietly hobble a work — or an idea. Many
unreflective people cheered when the nation’s Web-hosting companies decided to
dump a number of neo-Nazi websites, effectively removing their material from
the online public square (which is the public square that matters). A lot of
conservatives were a little queasy, though: The same people who support banning
neo-Nazi communications also believe that everybody to the right of Hillary
Rodham Clinton is a neo-Nazi, that criticism of transgender-rights efforts is
“hate speech” that should be prohibited, that sermons endorsing the traditional
view of marriage should be — and could be — a crime.
But that’s an old problem, too. Corporate groupthink and
institutional closed-mindedness are not products of technology’s effect on
culture, and neither is the “social-justice warrior” mob mentality behind
efforts to exclude certain kinds of ideas and voices from the public square. If
anything, those habits are worse in the physical world — especially on college
campuses — than they are in the online space. Of course social media, mobile
phones, and other technologies make it easier to organize a riot in Berkeley,
but riots have been around for a long time. Political violence is as old as
politics itself (older, probably). The illiberal impulse has always been
strong, even among academics, corporate leaders, and other highly educated
people of whom one might expect the opposite. The conservative movement was
obliged to build an entire intellectual infrastructure from the middle of the
20th century onward because the suffocating progressive consensus of the time
dismissed rightward thinking as nothing more than “irritable mental gestures,”
as Lionel Trilling put it. While the unmediated mobs of Twitter and Facebook
have surely contributed to the lowering of our public discourse in important
ways, people trafficking in genuinely unpopular ideas have, thanks to the very
technology platforms that so concern Foer and others, never been in a stronger
or more secure position. The headwinds against free speech are mainly cultural
rather than technological. Unhappily, the illiberal culture of the college
campuses and the utterly confident
ignorance associated with it has found a place in Silicon Valley, too.
Some gods are more equal than others.
No comments:
Post a Comment