A Public Path for Big Tech
By: A. Khaled
Tags: Tech, Business, Politics, Government, Public Policy

On the heels of a devastating pandemic to small businesses and entire sectors of the global economy, Big Tech stands taller and stronger than ever before. It’s moments of crisis that usually test an industry’s mettle, and to say that tech companies have emerged triumphant would be an understatement — with everyone cooped up at home, legacy service industries suffered a major blow as their plea for survival was answered by tech companies, putting them at the mercy of their every nefarious profit-maximizing procedure. The great damage done to their subservients has yet to be properly assessed but if anything, this exposed the need for public alternatives — or better yet replacements — in the absence of any real accountability measures taken against Big Tech.

Take Amazon for example — there’s been already a shift towards online shopping prior to the pandemic, but its arrival has seemingly flipped the script on its head. With ever-greater reliance on the services of Jeff Bezos’ behemoth, the warts of its exploitative warehouse infrastructure became harder to ignore; and despite concerted effort from labor rights advocates and disparate attempts to shore up resistance from the inside, they’ve all eventually met their defeat at the hands of the company’s sophisticated surveillance scheme. If America were to indeed recognize the lucrative opportunity that lies in posing a direct threat to Amazon’s business model while not having as great a profit desire to satiate, workers and consumers would be much better off, and Amazon’s callous treatment of its labor force could’ve perhaps been avoided altogether.

Another fixture that springs to mind is Airbnb — what the company essentially does is give individuals the possibility to assign their suitable-for-habitation spare real-estate a profit-generation function, and as it has been revealed in the past, entire business structures have been built to capitalize on the company’s earlier reticence to enact stricter verification policies. If the state were to think of homelessness as a problem in dire need of remediation, they’d blow past the pretense of excess ownership and go straight for the jugular — give every individual lacking a house at least a momentary relief, and not designate them parking spaces to sleep on as the bustling city aside has hotel rooms plentiful to accommodate them with ease.

One would be remiss to not mention Uber, which has recently earned its spot in the bad graces of the labor movement by codifying an exploitative piece of legislation in California, soon-to-be repackaged and sold as new for the rest of America to embrace. The company hedged its bets on milking drivers for their every penny, and fought successfully a legislation that was supposed to recognize them as employees — with all the boons that carries — rather than contractors. This would surprisingly be easier to remedy as taxis need merely a technological uplift to their normal mode of operation — with Uber’s efforts of creating a self-driving fleet turning out catastrophic, the state has an opening to create a ride-hailing alternative that’s both better-paying for workers, and cheaper for consumers all-the-same. If Big Tech keeps weaseling itself out of legislation supposed to keep its power in check, short of subsuming all of its assets into the public sector — which may very well be an option — the above suggested might be an effective recourse.

As calls for boycotting Facebook — and the lot of social media platforms — mount, there’s similarly the need to consider why hasn’t the state made its entry with a less conflict-stoking alternative, freed from the shackles of the ad revenue model. Currently, social media platforms have to keep users as engaged as possible so that they may continue to scroll past an unending stream of advertisement material — what this inadvertently promoted is an environment where constructive discourse rarely thrives, leaving a vacuum where dis-and-misinformation can easily take hold. All had assumed until very recently that the problem was merely of content moderation scale, but as Facebook has shown in its handling of the Trump vs Biden extravaganza, it is possible to put authoritative sources to the fore and not let the usual suspects of right-wing media propaganda run away with the most popular posts every single week. With the company opting to disable such measures as the worst of the election cycle has already come to pass, one might seriously consider doing away with Mark Zuckerberg’s empire of unfettered chaos altogether and just let the state take helm of an alternative with communication options aplenty, as well as a feed that doesn’t thrive on users’ worst instincts.

All of that of course would miserably fail if the state infrastructure isn’t set up to fight the sure-to-be-immediate backlash of such an ambitious endeavor. We’ve seen it before from the IRS being beaten down to a pulp by services seeking to make something as easy as filing your taxes not free, to the USPS struggling to make ends meet as logistics enmesh themselves in American life ever-deeper — the execution needs to be all but half-assed for all of this to work. If the state were to embark on the project of supplanting Big Tech — and potentially making them obsolete — its focus can’t be turned away by self-interested lobbyists or the plethora of libertarian think tanks ready to revile its proposals with the boogeyman of “big government”. The companies we’ve surrendered our livelihoods to are as strong — if not stronger — than the governments that the freedom-inclined are so eager to make the villain of every public enterprise failure story — to explore alternatives seems now the only recourse to much harm done.

When confronting issues of grave consequence oft-precipitated by the impotence of the private sector in facing its own failures, I’m reminded of communications professor Vicktor Pickard’s words on the declining media sector, and how every attempt to right its course failed for its unconditional surrender to profit for sustenance and growth. If Big Tech so wishes to remain in the good graces of our collective memory, it has to start treating seriously the huge responsibility it’s come to shoulder in the wake of a radical restructuring of our global economy — if it can’t, simmering animosity from populace and governance will inevitably lead them to lose much of the power they’ve accrued. Whether that effort is led from the bottom-up or otherwise is irrelevant as long as the results deliver — the ball is firmly in the American government’s court to see whether they’d like to remain a power most-supreme and plot a path for the rest to follow, or just give up and relegate their duties to entities completely disinterested by and unaccountable to the will of the people.